I introduce a general equilibrium model with active investors and indexers. Indexing causes market segmentation, and the degree of segmentation is a function of the relative wealth of indexers in the economy. Shocks to this relative wealth induce correlated shocks to discount rates of index stocks. The wealthier indexers are, the greater the resulting comovement is. I confirm empirically that S&P 500 stocks comove more with other index stocks and less with non-index stocks, and that changes in passive holdings of S&P 500 stocks predict changes in comovement of index stocks.


Three temperature-induced phase transitions at T=T1, TM/TA, and TC, related to the ferromagnetic order of the martensitic phase (FMMP), martensitic (structural) transitions (MT), and the ferromagnetic order of the austenitic phase (FMAP), respectively, have been observed in the off-stoichiometric Heusler alloys, Ni50-xCoxMn35In15 (x=1, 2.5) and Ni45Co5Mn37In13. The phase transitions temperatures are found to be depended on alloy composition. A kinetic arrest of the AP was observed for Ni47.5Co2.5Mn35In15 in the magnetization measurements during field-cooling cycle (FCC) at 50 kOe. Depending upon the cooling protocols, ZFC and FCC (at H = 50 kOe), two different ground states of the alloys can be found in Ni47.5Co2.5Mn35In15 and Ni45Co5Mn37In13 alloys. The ground states (T=4.2 K and external field H=0) of the alloys was found to be characterized by three main line: two, partially overlapping, at higher frequencies (300-450 MHz), most likely corresponding of manganese resonance lines and one at lower frequency at about 200 MHz. A significant shift in the spectrum of Ni45Co5Mn37In13 by about 100 MHz to higher frequencies was observed. The correlation of magnetizations obtained from magnetic moment and NMR studies is discussed.


Feedback on game performance can be provided in many ways (e.g., cumulative points on game achievements, points on selected aspects of game play, biofeedback, brief statements offered during gameplay on choices made, verbal feedback at end of gameplay on overall performance, etc.). Feedback could be used motivationally to maintain player interest and involvement, informationally to guide the player in more effective choices, to build player confidence, and for a variety of other purposes. Although diverse feedback types and purposes are possible, some are more likely to be useful and effective. We have contacted several accomplished game designers and game researchers to obtain their insights into issues in feedback in Games for Health Journal.


The objective of this study was to evaluate the effects of supplementing xylanase on production performance, nutrient digestibility, and milk fatty acid profile in high-producing dairy cows consuming corn silage- or sorghum silage-based diets. Conventional corn (80,000 seeds/ha) and brown midrib forage sorghum (250,000 seeds/ha) were planted, harvested [34 and 32% of dry matter (DM), respectively], and ensiled for more than 10 mo. Four primiparous and 20 multiparous Holstein cows were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 diets in a replicated 4 × 4 Latin square design with a 2 × 2 factorial arrangement of treatments and 19-d periods. Treatment diets consisted of (1) corn silage-based diet without xylanase, (2) corn silage-based diet with xylanase, (3) sorghum silage-based diet without xylanase, and (4) sorghum silage-based diet with xylanase. The xylanase product was supplemented at a rate of 1.5 g of product/kg of total DM. Corn silage had higher concentrations of starch (31.2 vs. 29.2%), slightly higher concentrations of crude protein (7.1 vs. 6.8%) and fat (3.7 vs. 3.2%), and lower concentrations of neutral detergent fiber (36.4 vs. 49.0%) and lignin (2.1 vs. 5.7%) than sorghum silage. Xylanase supplementation did not affect DM intake, milk yield, milk fat percentage and yield, milk protein percentage and yield, lactose percentage and yield, and 3.5% fat-corrected milk yield. Cows consuming corn silage-based diets consumed 13% more DM (28.8 vs. 25.5 kg/d) and produced 5% more milk (51.6 vs. 48.9 kg/d) than cows consuming sorghum silage-based diets. Milk from cows consuming sorghum silage-based diets had 16% greater fat concentrations (3.84 and 3.30%) than milk from cows consuming corn silage-based diets. This resulted in 8% greater fat yields (1.81 vs. 1.68 kg/d). Silage type did not affect milk protein and lactose concentrations. Xylanase supplementation did not affect nutrient digestibility. Cows consuming corn silage-based diets showed greater DM (77.3 vs. 73.5%), crude protein (78.0 vs. 72.4), and starch (99.2 vs. 96.5%) digestibilities than cows consuming sorghum silage-based diets. In conclusion, xylanase supplementation did not improve production performance when high-producing dairy cows were fed corn silage- or sorghum silage-based diets. In addition, production performance can be sustained by feeding sorghum silage in replacement of corn silage.


Two women with polycythemia vera and heterozygosity (GdB/GdA) at the X-chromosome-linked locus for glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase were studied to determine the nature of the cellular origin of their polycythemia. In contrast to unaffected tissue, such as skin fibroblasts, which consisted of both B and A types, the glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase of the patients' erythrocytes, granulocytes and platelets was only of Type A. These results provide direct evidence for the stem-cell nature of polycythemia vera and strongly imply a clonal origin for this disease. The fact that no descendants of the presumed normal stem cells were found in circulation suggests that bone-marrow proliferation in this disorder is influenced by local (intramarrow) regulatory factors.


ABSTRACT
 Long-lived, benthic macroinvertebrate taxa are often poorly represented in intermittent streams because the periodic lack of water eliminates colonization habitat for those invertebrates, especially among those for which burrowing is not part of their life history. In the western United States, elmid beetles, which do not burrow, have a multiple-year life cycle, and multiple species are often found coexisting, even in intermittent streams. The elmid beetle communities of 21 sites on eight streams in northern Nevada were examined to determine patterns of occurrence and their relation to water permanence in those streams. Samples were collected in June 2006, May 2007, September 2010, and July 2011. In two streams, no elmid beetles were collected, probably due to the habitat not being conducive to elmid beetle presence (mucky substrate). Among the perennial stream sites, one or two species were consistently dominant, and the relative abundances of species were similar throughout all years. In contrast, elmid beetles were often, but not always, absent from intermittent streams even when water was present, and species dominance was usually different among the years when elmid beetles were present in those streams. These data suggest a strong role of opportunistic colonization in intermittent headwater streams, with more stable communities fostered by perennial streams. Collection records are presented for Optioservus castaneipennis (Fall), new state record, which heretofore had not been reported from Nevada.


Abstract There are only two drugs for the treatment of Chagas disease, namely, nifurtimox and benznidazole, that can cause several adverse effects. Despite the effectiveness of these drugs in the disease's acute phase, they are not recognized as curative in the chronic phase, establishing the need for more effective treatment in all stages of the disease. Cruzain is an enzyme that plays a vital role in the life cycle of the etiologic agent, the protozoan Trypanosoma cruzi, being relevant as a therapeutic target in the planning of new drugs. Using molecular docking and dynamics simulations, we have investigated the structural and dynamic factors that can be involved in the enzyme inhibition process at the atomic-molecular level by benzimidazole compounds that are potent cruzain inhibitors with in vitro trypanocidal activity. The study suggests that these inhibitors bind cruzain through steric and hydrogen bonding interactions without altering its secondary structure content and protein compaction. Besides, we observed that these inhibitors decrease the correlation of movements between Cα-atoms of cruzain, increasing the number of atomic communities, mainly in the α-helix that presents the catalytic Cys25 residue. As expected, we also observed a correlation between the inhibitory activity of each inhibitor and their respective binding-free energies, reinforcing that the affinity of the complexes seems to be a relevant factor for enzymatic inhibition. Hence, the results presented in this work contribute to a better understanding of the cruzain enzyme inhibition mechanism through competitive and non-covalent inhibitors. Communicated by Ramaswamy H. Sarma


Nowadays, more and more manufacturing enterprises are working hard to improve the environmental performance of their products. Pollution may be generated through the life cycle of a product. To maximally improve a product's overall environmental performance and reduce potential environmental impacts, Design for the Environment can be used as early as the design stage for the product. For electromechanical products, modular design is a widely used design method. While traditional modularity analysis pays little attention to environmental factors, this research aims at including comprehensive environmentally conscious criteria into modularity analysis. This paper presents a semi-quantitative environmentally conscious modular analysis model in order to reduce pollution. Eight criteria are identified to capture most of potential environmental impacts of modular products, some of which are fuzzy criteria. Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process is used to rank these environmental criteria, and fuzzy numbers are used to map some uncertain judgments of decision makers with crisp numbers. Structure of a product is represented as a fuzzy graph. The proposed modularity analysis includes similarity analysis and independence analysis. In the end, an example is given to illustrate the developed methodology.


Contemporary hotel business should take the profitality into account in the process of determining its proper scale and area allocation. This study aims at providing practical date for decision makings in this process. Object hotel buildings analyzed are 40 main ones in Seoul, and Multiple Regression method is executed for the analysis.


This paper examines the methods to detect the nature of the urban growth processes. It seems that cointegration testing enables to disentangle two versions of Gibrat's law: a first one with growth shocks that are iid across time and cities (implying convergence of the city-size distribution towards Zipf's law), and an alternative one with growth shocks that are only iid over time (implying conservation of the initial structure of the city size distribution).


This article offers interpretive perspectives on play as a cultural activity during middle childhood by contrasting two communities targeted for aid by external sport and play programs: a Chicago public housing community and a community of Angolan refugee camps. Ethnographic anecdotes, along with some survey results, demonstrate that aside from any organized programs, informal sport and play activities in each community were popular and culturally adaptive. In the Chicago community, where childhood was conceptualized as part of linear development toward adulthood, play was characterized by seriousness, competitiveness and individualism. In the Angolan community, where childhood was conceptualized as a discrete segment of the life course, play was characterized by an emphasis on inclusion and social roles. Contrasting observations from these two contexts serve to illustrate how sport and play can be a culturally valued part of childhood in distinctly local ways.


Widal and Javal1recently called attention to the inability of many nephritics to eliminate sodium chlorid in a normal manner. The salt retained in the tissues required a certain amount of water to maintain it in the proper molecular concentration, thus leading to edema; they offer this as the probable cause of dropsy in nephritis. This chlorid retention was found chiefly in acute and chronic parenchymatous nephritis, and especially in patients who were edematous. This retention was not found in the interstitial form, and we know that when edema develops in these cases it is usually of cardiac origin. They, furthermore, decided that the impermeability of the kidney to urea and salts did not necessarily go hand in hand, as in the terminal period of Bright's disease there may be marked retention of chlorids, but none of urea, phosphates or sulphates. They report a case of uremia, with daily


OBJECTIVE
Glutathione(GSH) maintains an optimum cellular redox potential. Elevated levels of GSH render some types of cancer cells resistant against anti-cancer drugs. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of a thiol-depleting agent, diethylmaleate (DEM), on the sensitivity of human breast cancer cells to ADM.

METHODS
The ADM-resistant human breast cancer MCF-7/ADM cell lines and ADM-sensitive MCF-7/S cell lines were treated by thiol-depleting agent DEM for 3 h respectively. The changes of sensitivity to ADM were then measured by MTT assay. The intracellular GSH contents were examined by fluorescent-spectrophotometry and the correlation between the changes of sensitivity to ADM and the intracellular GSH content was analyzed.

RESULTS
Treatment of MCF-7/ADM and MCF-7/S cells by 0.1 micromol/L DEM for 3 h decreased 37.4% and 29.7% of the intracellular GSH content respectively (P < 0.01). ADM also decreased intracellular GSH content in a ADM-concentration-dependent manner. The combined use of DEM and ADM depleted the intracellular GSH content in both cells significantly more than the sum of single use of ADM and DEM alone. The sensitivity of both cells to ADM increased with the decline of intracellular GSH content.

CONCLUSION
The depletion effect of DEM on the intracellular GSH could be enhanced by ADM and such depletion may be involved in the changes of the sensitivity of MCF/7 cells to ADM.


This two-group, repeated-measures experimental study assessed the efficacy of a nurse practitioner-facilitated chronic kidney disease (CKD) group visit (GV) model versus usual nephrology care for patients with Stage 4 CKD. The study enrolled patients from two sites of an outpatient nephrology practice (n = 30) and randomized subjects to usual care (n = 14) or to the GV model (n = 16). Data regarding CKD knowledge, self-efficacy/disease self-management, and physiologic measures were collected at baseline, 6 months, and 9 months. Satisfaction was obtained at 6 months and 9 months. Usual nephrology office visit components were maintained during six monthly GVs, with group discussions of CKD-related topies. Results indicated a statistical improvement in CKD knowledge for both groups (F[1.498, 34.446] = 6.363, p = 0.008). An upward trend in mean scores for self-management subscales and self-efficacy scores was demonstrated in the GV patients, with no improvement found in the usual care group. Twenty-six of 30 patients completed the study, with 92% attendance in the GV group. GV satisfaction was high.


Abstract In my ethnographic fieldwork in the contemporary dance scene in Brussels, I followed closely which struggles Moya Michael had to overcome as a South African maker in the European contemporary dance sector trying to sell her work. As a female artist of color, she cannot escape the fetishistic gaze emphasizing her exoticized body, a body imagined as exotic vis-à-vis institutional whiteness. This article examines how the work environment in the continental European contemporary dance sector forms a breeding ground for the fetishization of Afrodiasporic artists. After unpacking the general issues related to identity in the European contemporary dance sector, this article continues to discuss the dance solo Khoiswan, which Michael created in 2018 as the first part of an ongoing series called Coloured Swans. In this choreographic work, Michael centers and explores her multilayered identity on her own terms.


The segmentation of a complex scene, such as a sample of muscle fibre types, is notoriously difficult and in most published studies on quantitative muscle fibre analysis it was performed manually. We propose a semi-automatic segmentation method which gives good results, similar to those obtained by manual segmentation, but significantly reduces the time necessary for user interaction. Instead of manually tracing each fibre boundary we build a Voronoi diagram based on the set of points which represent the muscle fibre centroids. The edge of each Voronoi polygon is used as the initial position of a snake which is reshaped by an energy minimization process. The final position and shape of snakes closely resemble actual fiber boundaries.


This paper reports on the design, construction, Instrumentation and preliminary testing performed on the high-lift wing of the MARVELETTE aircraft in a two-dimensional wind tunnel. The wind tunnel,12 feet high and 2 feet 9 inches wide,was fitted over a section of the aircraft wing to the shrouded propeller at the rear of the vehicle. When operating with this arrangement, wind tunnel velocities up to 60 miles per hour were obtainable in the test section. The tunnel provided more data in a few weeks of operation than would have been obtained in a number of months using a flight program with a considerable number of flights close to minimum flight speeds.


In the process of accurate manufacture and measurement, it is necessarily required to isolate external or internal vibration due to external disturbance and internal actuators. The higher vibration isolation system gets damping around resonance, the better it is generally. This paper analyzes the performance of an existing passive air-spring for vibration isolation table by using experiment and simulation. Optimal design for a passive air spring can be obtained by tuning the size of the orifice. Also design for an active isolation system is carried out by applying PID controller and considering non-linearity of pneumatic characteristics with help of look-up table. We have developed the active vibration isolation table with the better isolation performance.


It was found that psoralen derivative could perform a Friedel-Crafts acylation smoothly with acetic anhydride to give 5'-acetylpsoralen in a 73% yield. In the presence of boron trifluoride etherate, 5'-acetylpsoralen reacted with both aromatic amines and aliphatic amine smoothly to afford 5'-Schiff-base group substituted psoralen derivatives in 72%-92% yields. The novel synthetic method has the advantages of cheap materials, mild reaction conditions, good yields and high regioselectivity in the Friedel-Crafts acylation. Cell viability assay by MTT demonstrates that some of the psoralen derivatives 6 have antiproliferative activities.


Aim: Biochemical parameters in gingival crevicular fluid (GCF) are affected by some systemic diseases and poor oral hygiene. The aim of this study was to evaluate the total amounts of Interleukin-1β (IL-1β) and vascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) in GCF in children with epilepsy. Material and methods: 80 children with epilepsy in free seizure period (Test group) and 80 healthy children (Control group) were evaluated. Gingival index (GI), plaque index (PI), probing depth (PD), clinical attachment level (CAL) was measured. GCF was collected and its volume was measured. The total amounts of IL-1β and VEGF in GCF were analyzed in Biochemistry Laboratory. Results: The biochemical (IL-1β and VEGF) and clinic parameters (GI, PI, PD and GCF volume) were significantly higher in the children with epilepsy compared with healthy children (p<0.0001). When the epilepsy patients were divided into groups according to the drug used in this study, there were no significant differences in GCF levels of IL-1β and VEGF among the drug groups. Conclusion: According to these results it may be suggested that patients need an optimal oral care in epilepsy.


In this paper, we present a novel visual design for information dense summaries of patient data with applications in biofeedback rehabilitation. The problem is important in review of large medical datasets where the clinicians require that both summary and all the performance details be shown at the same time. There are two main ideas (a) Summarizing data along the conceptual facets (accuracy / flow / openness) and the temporal facets (session / set / trial) in the biofeedback therapy. The conceptual facets represent key information needed by the experts to review patient performance. (b) Effectively present the data trends and the details in context of the entire performance. The summary incorporates ideas from graphic design and reveals the performance data at two time scales. Our preliminary user study is promising with some significant results. They indicate that our visual summaries are useful, functional and promote inquiry.


Abstract: Experimental and theoretical 13C kinetic isotope effects are utilized to obtain atomistic insight into the catalytic mechanism of the Pd(PPh3)4 catalyzed Suzuki-Miyaura reaction of aryl halides and aryl boronic acids. Under catalytic conditions, we establish that oxidative addition of aryl bromides occurs to a 12-electron monoligated palladium complex (Pd(PPh3)). For aryl iodides, the first irreversible step in the catalytic cycle precedes oxidative addition and is shown to be binding of the iodoarene to Pd(PPh3). Our results suggest that the commonly proposed oxidative addition to the 14-electron Pd(PPh3)2 complex can occur only in the presence of excess added ligand or under stoichiometric conditions. The transmetalation step, under catalytic conditions, is shown to proceed via a tetracoordinate boronate (8B4) intermediate with a Pd-O-B linkage.


AIM
Development of test system for the evaluation of sensitivity of Trichomonas vaginalis to preparations of the 5-nitroimidazole and 5-nitrofuran groups.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Determination of minimal cidic concentration (MCC) of antiprotozoal preparations was carried out by cultivating laboratory T. vaginalis strains in wells of plates with nutrient medium containing varying concentrations of these preparations. Evaluation of vitality of the agent was determined by using trypan blue vital stain and bysubsequent growth ability in nutrient medium without antiprotozoal preparations. Construction of the test system was carried out by selecting conditions for the fixation of preparations in the plate wells and control of activity retention after the fixation. 109 isolates from patients with confirmed trichomoniasis diagnosis were used for the approbation of the test system.

RESULTS
Cultivation of 10 strains showed that MCC of investigated preparations had the following values: metronidazole 5, tinidazole 1.25; secnidazole 2.5; nimorazole 1.25; ornidazole 2.5; clotrimazole 15; nifuratel 1.25 microg/ml. Studies of clinical material revealed single-type sensitivity of strains isolated during acute trichomoniasis, and varying--during chronic, while one strain had multidrug resistance.

CONCLUSION
A simple test system available for routine laboratory work for the evaluation of sensitivity of T. vaginalis to preparations of the 5-nitroimidazole and 5-nitrofuran groups was developed. The efficacy of the test ensures high sensitivity, reproducibility and shorter procedure time as compared with classical method, thus allowing the selection of preparation for therapy with the highest probability.


The fin and tube type heat exchangers widely used in air conditioners have been developed to improve on the heat transfer performance and compactness. This study presents the new type of tube for the heat exchanger to improve the heat transfer performance by increasing the heat transfer area per unit volume in the air-conditioner heat exchanger. The new type tube can be used for mechanical expansion facility, due to the two-port copper tube. Numerical calculation shows that the heat exchanger using the two-port copper tube outperforms the conventional heat-exchanger using a circular copper tube, in terms of the increased heat transfer coefficient and higher pressure drop. The calculation results were experimentally validated and are in agreement with the experimental results. Compared to the heat exchanger using a conventional circular tube, the heat exchanger with a two-port tube increased the heat transfer coefficient up to 21%, and the pressure dropped up to 16%.


Fibre type composition, activities of enzymes such as citrate synthase (CS), 3-hydroxyacyl coenzyme A dehydrogenase (HAD), lactate dehydrogenase (LDH), as well as glycogen, lactate and pH levels were analysed in muscle biopsies (m. gluteus medius) obtained after bullfighting from 10 young and 10 old bulls. No changes were seen in fibre type composition between groups, but the older bulls had higher HAD and LDH activities. Low glycogen concentrations and low pH values were found in both groups, but the lactate concentration after bullfighting was higher in the older group of bulls. The histochemical stain for glycogen revealed that type IIB fibres in both young and old bulls contained more glycogen than seen in type IIA and type I fibres. These results show that young and old bulls have similar muscle fibre type composition, but the metabolic capacity differs, with a higher glycolytic capacity and lactate production in older bulls. Furthermore, it seems that the physical and emotional stress in connection with a bullfight causes a marked depletion of glycogen, especially of type I and IIA fibres.


OBJECTIVE
Induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) have emerged as a promising tool for treating incurable diseases. The current challenges are to avoid potential xenopathogenic transmission and immune rejection potentially caused by exposure of iPSCs to animal-derived products. In addition, an efficient feeder cell-free culture condition will be required for minimizing batch-to-batch variation and facilitating scale-up. Therefore, establishing an efficient extracellular matrix (ECM) culture system is considered as a prerequisite for the future clinical application of iPSC-based cell therapies. In this study, we evaluated the feasibility of culturing iPSCs in ECM derived from human dental pulp cells (hDCP).

MATERIALS AND METHODS
iPSCs growing in Matrigel were transferred to ECM or Matrigel and cultured in mTeSRTM1 medium.

RESULTS
The number of adherent cells in the ECM group was higher than that in the Matrigel group after incubation for 8, 12, and 24 h, indicating that the ECM could enhance cell adherence. The adhesion of cells to ECM not only depends on simple physical attachment with ECM, but also mediated by fibronectin in the ECM. The hDPC-iPSCs showed orderly growth in the ECM, suggesting that the ECM could promote the growth and proliferation of hDPC-iPSCs. We also observed that stem cells growed along to avoid contact inhibition.

CONCLUSIONS
The iPSCs maintained undifferentiated state when cultured in ECM when the iPSCs and ECM are of the same cell origin. ECM and mTeSRTM1, can both be used as new culture medium for iPSCs that facilitates the clinical application of iPSC-based cell therapies in the future.


Diabetes is the disease caused due to deficiency of insulin. Antidiabetic drug Gliclazide decreases blood glucose level by inducing insulin. Frequent administration of Gliclazide decreases patient compliance. The present study was aimed to formulate a sustained release formulation of Gliclazide, liposomes. Due to the sustained release property of liposomes it increases patient compliance. Ethanolic injection method without sonication was used to prepare Gliclazide liposomes. Various parameters such as drug encapsulation efficiency, morphological study by optical microscope, SEM and TEM, vesicle size and zeta potential determination, In -vitro drug release & kinetic study and stability studies were evaluated. FT-IR spectral studies and differential scanning calorimetry studieswere used to perform drug excipient compatability study. Liposomes were prepared by using varying concentration of cholesterol in ethanol injection method. The results proved The formulations fulfilled all official requirements. The drug release was slow and sustained for >12 hrs. The formulations followed first order kinetics and release mechanism was non-fickian diffusion.


Pasteurization is an important issue to keep from fruit decay due to microbes for fruit preservation. Conventional heat sterilization is based on thermal process. However, the flavor and nutrition components can be changed by heat damage. In this study, an apparatus was designed to produce non-thermal plasma (NTP), which can be applied in fruit sterilization. NTP can be generated through electric discharge in gaseous chamber. A simple NTP reactor may consist of two electrodes with a chamber and connected to a high-voltage power supply. The new technique of NTP was applied to keep fruit fresh. After the tomatoes were treated by NTP, the volatile flavor components were analyzed by GC–MS and were compared to heat treatment and non-treatment. The results showed that the quality of fresh tomato fruit was unaffected by plasma disinfection treatment, and the contents of trans-2-hexenal and n-hexanal were significantly higher than that by heat processes. NTP has less effect on volatile chemical com-positions of tomato juice. NTP technology is a promising method for food pasteurization in the future.


In his work David Link generates (apparently) interactive projects, at the interface between art, science, and technology. For LoveLetters_1.0, Link reconstructed a functional replica of one of the earliest programmable computers, the Ferranti Mark I, and an equally early program, invented in 1952 by Christopher Strachey at the University of Manchester. To produce computer-generated love letters, written using a built-in random generator. Anonymously addressed to "Darling Love" or "Jewel Duck," the letters talk to the reader in a surprisingly human and tender way. In his introduction, Geoff Cox highlights the question, already suggested by the apparently contradictory title of this notebook, Machine Heart, of whether the human capacity for thinking and feeling has been captured by machines. David Link (*1971) is an artist and media archaeologist; he lives and works in Cologne.David Link (*1971) is an artist and media archaeologist; he lives and works in Cologne.Geoff Cox is currently a Researcher at the Digital Urban Living Research Center, Aarhus University, Denmark.


Ever since computer technologies were accessible to second language learners and teachers, various types of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) have been harnessed in the service of teaching languages. Most recently, the advent of online technologies has sparked CALL practitioners to integrate this powerful form of teaching and learning into language education. This paper synthesizes the extant research on these online language education activities and the state of current understanding regarding the potential of Internet-based teaching and learning second languages. The results of analyzing extensive studies of Internet-based second language learning reveals that Internet-based technology has been widely used in second language learning. In addition, Internet-based technologies are effective instructional tools for second language learning and teaching.


Feedback is important to learning because, if used appropriately, it facilitates learning. There are at least three levels of functional significance of feedback, namely, motivational, evaluative, and learning. This paper presents an investigation into the types of feedback school teachers use and how they relate to the three different levels functional significance of feedback. Two studies were conducted with the first one aiming at gaining some preliminary understanding of the types of feedback teachers used more frequently for their everyday teaching. Questionnaire survey was used as the sole research method for this first study, involving 591 school teachers in Hong Kong. The second study used two research methods - teacher interviews and lesson observation. Forty-seven teachers were interviewed to draw upon their use of feedback for teaching. Amongst these teachers, 27 were observed in class with the purpose of achieving a deeper understanding of how feedback was used in classroom situations. It was found that teachers did use feedback to help students learn and that teachers tended to use feedback more for motivational function.


Research libraries have a mission to build collections that will meet the research needs of their user communities over time, to curate these collections to ensure perpetual access, and to facilitate intellectual and physical access to these collections as effectively as possible. Recent mass digitization projects as well as financial pressures and limited space to store print collections have created a new environment and new challenges for large research libraries. This paper will describe one approach to these challenges: HathiTrust, a shared digital repository owned and operated by a partnership of more than forty major libraries. ********** The activities of research libraries in the next five to 10 years will define the role of libraries in the digital age. The library community must now ensure that these collections not only retain their research value in a digital platform, but also realize their potential as users adjust their information needs and expectations. --HathiTrust FAQ, July 2010 (www.hathitrust.org/faq) In an era of mass digitization of library collections, research libraries are confronting an array of new challenges to continuing their traditional role as stewards of library collections. How will libraries ensure perpetual preservation of these sometimes massive new digital library collections, a promise Google does not make? How will libraries provide wide access to their digital collections in an appropriate manner, unbeholden to commercial interests and in support of the activities of scholars? What new possibilities for services are opened up by digital formats, and how can libraries bring those new services to their user communities? How do these new large digital collections relate to print collections, and what opportunities are available for libraries to coordinate collection management between print and digital materials? This paper will consider these challenges and then describe how HathiTrust, a shared digital repository owned and operated by a partnership of more than forty major research libraries, offers answers to some of these questions and an opportunity for libraries to collectively explore this new territory. Literature Review Simultaneous with lively reporting and debate in prominent popular news sources and magazines regarding Google Books and the outcomes of mass digitization projects, researchers have explored the implications of mass digitization for libraries and the collaborative possibilities for addressing the challenges of digital preservation, access, support for scholarly research, and collection management in light of new, massive digital collections. (1) The specter of commercial hosting of research library content by Google juxtaposed with the responsibility of libraries to uphold their users' right to access information, as well as their mission to preserve it, is a theme addressed by a number of researchers and library leaders. Hahn concluded that "it may be foolish to expect that commercial companies will share librarians' values and commitment to digitized material preservation" and that "research libraries alone will be held accountable for fulfilling that vital preservation mission." (2) In 2008, Brantley, then executive director of the Digital Library Federation, urged libraries to "trade for our owl account" because libraries "stand for what no other organization in this world can: the fundamental right of access to information, and the compulsion to preserve it for future generations." (3) Leetaru made a case that the output of mass digitization is "access digitization" rather than "preservation digitization." (4) He acknowledged that placing responsibility for long-term storage with libraries "is a legitimate argument, especially in light of Microsoft's recent withdrawal from book digitization," but concluded that the academic community has so far failed to provide good access service for mass digitized books. …


-With developing of computer networks and digital techniques, the electronic image are easily created, edited, reproduced and distributed. Unfortunately, illegal copy and malicious tamper are also facilitated. At present, fragile watermark is researched greatly to authenticate the veracity and integrity of electronic contents. In this paper, a chaotic watermarking scheme for authentication of popular JPEG images is proposed. The quantized DCT ( Discrete Cosine Transform ) coefficients after entropy decoding are mapped to the initial values of the chaotic system, then the generated watermark information by chaotic iteration is embedded into JPEG compressed domain. Thanks to the high sensitivity on initial values of the chaotic mapping, the very accurate localization is realized for the malicious tampers to JPEG images. Because we directly modify the DCT coefficients after quantization for embedding the watermark, the proposed method can prevent the invalidation of tamper detection by JPEG re-quantization. Furthermore, because the proposed scheme avoids a large of computation on full decoding and re-encoding process, the low complexity and a high extracting speed are obtained. Simulation results show the proposed scheme can directly localize the tampers happened on the watermarked JPEG images. Furthermore, the ability of tamper localization is very sensitivity. So the proposed scheme is very fit for the integrity authentication of the electronic image in Internet.


This book offers a significant, original and timely contribution to the study of one of the most important and notorious Latin American authors of the twentieth century: Reinaldo Arenas. The text engages with the many extraordinary intersections created between Arenas' writing, the autobiographical construction of the literary subject and the exilic condition. Through focusing on texts written on the island of Cuba and in exile, the author analyses the ways in which Arenas' writing emblemises a complex process of identification with, and rejection of, his homeland – always an imagined place and which is, as the place of his origins, intrinsically related to the maternal. She examines how the maternal and the motherland are conflated and how the narrator-protagonists' identification is always in relation to, and dependent upon, this dominant motif. The book also explores the extent to which Arenas' writing is a tortuous attempt to escape from this dominance and to free himself and his writing from the ties that bind him to the mother and the motherland, and shows that Arenas suffered the exilic condition long before his move to the United States in 1980 as part of the Mariel exodus.


In the ongoing debate in the area of critical leadership studies, the nature of leader–follower relationships is a thorny issue. The nature of followership has been questioned, especially whether followers can display resistance behaviours while maintaining their follower position. Addressing this issue requires a dialectical approach in which followers and leaders alike are primary elements in leadership co-production. Followers who face destructive leaders are of special interest when leadership is studied as a co-creational process. This context favours the emergence of a full range of behavioural profiles in which passives and colluders will illustrate the destructive leadership co-production process, and those who resist demonstrate that followers may not follow the leader and still keep a followership purpose. A two-step data analysis procedure was conducted based on the behaviour descriptions of 123 followers having a destructive leader. A qualitative analysis (i.e. content analysis) showed a set of behaviours and their antecedents that suggest three main groups of followers: resisters, obedient and mixed behaviour. Treating these data quantitatively (i.e. latent class analysis), six followers' profiles emerged: active resistance, passive resistance, passive obedience, conflict avoidance, support and mixed. Our findings provide evidence that followers who resist may do it for the sake of the organisation. We discuss our findings in light of followership theory, whereby joining role-based and constructionist approaches allows us to argue that followers may still be followers even when they do not invariably follow their leader.


Opinions or points of view expressed are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official position or policies of the U.S. Abstract: Elder abuse forensic centers (EAFCs) use a multidisciplinary team approach to address complex elder abuse cases. To date, no evaluation has assessed the cost for EAFCs to achieve their outcomes. This study evaluates the cost effectiveness of the Los Angeles County EAFC. We analyzed case files for 41 randomly selected cases seen at the Los Angeles County EAFC and 39 propensity-matched APS usual care cases obtain data on time spent processing cases and achieving outcomes. Salaries were obtained from publicly available sources and used to estimate case processing costs. Mean case processing costs are $1,101.80 for the EAFC model and $153.30 for usual care. The proportion of cases submitted to the public guardian is 39% for EAFC and 8% for usual care, which generates an ICOR of $3,059.68. The ICOR indicates that an additional EAFC case submitted to the public guardian costs an additional $3,059.68 over the cost of usual care. The proportion of cases that are granted conservatorship is 24% for EAFC and 3% for usual care, with an ICOR of $4,516.67. The proportion of cases successfully prosecuted is 17% for EAFC and 0.2% for usual care, with an ICOR of $5,645.83. There were no differences in recurrence rates within one year of case closure. These results indicate the EAFC model incurs greater case processing costs but yields large incremental differences in outcomes compared to usual care. This information can inform the sustainability of the model and the feasibility of replication across the U.S.


We introduce the notion of a regular integrable connection on a smooth log scheme over $\mathbf{C}$ and construct an equivalence between the category of such connections and the category of integrable connections on its analytification, compatible with de Rham cohomology. This extends the work of Deligne (when the log structure is trivial), and combined with the work of Ogus yields a topological description of the category of regular connections in terms of certain constructible sheaves on the Kato--Nakayama space. The key ingredients are the notion of a canonical extension in this context and the existence of good compactifications of log schemes obtained recently by W{\l}odarczyk.


Mixing of two liquids in a new multifunctional channel reactor developed by AlfaLaval has been studied both experimentally and through computational fluid dynamics (CFD). As the channels are quite narrow the Reynolds numbers are low and the bulk of the channel is within the turbulent boundary layer. This makes accurate a priori predictions of the flowfield difficult and experimental validation necessary. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) was used to measure the flowfield, whereas planar laser-induced fluorescence was used for a scalar concentration field. CFD simulations were performed with the commercial software Fluent 5.5. Different turbulence models were tested and compared with PIV. The best predictions were obtained with a low Reynolds boundary layer k-e turbulence model. Mixing of a passive tracer, including mean concentration and concentration variance, was calculated with the turbulent mixer model of Baldyga. A reactive system with diazo coupling between 1-naphthols, 2-naphthols and diazotized sulphanilic acid was studied both experimentally and theoretically due to its sensitivity to mixing conditions. The interpolation model of Baldyga was used to predict the evolution of the species. Good agreement was found between simulations and experiments for both the flow field and the reactive system.


Grid-tied PV energy smoothing was implemented by using a valve regulated lead-acid (VRLA) battery as a temporary energy storage device to both charge and discharge as required to smooth the inverter energy output from the PV array. Inverter output was controlled by the average solar irradiance over the previous 1h time interval. On a clear day the solar irradiance power curve is offset by about 1h, while on a variable cloudy day the inverter output power curve will be smoothed based on the average solar irradiance. Test results demonstrate that this smoothing algorithm works very well. Battery state of charge was more difficult to manage because of the variable system inefficiencies. Testing continued for 30-days and established consistent operational performance for extended periods of time under a wide variety of resource conditions. Both battery technologies from Exide (Absolyte) and East Penn (Advanced Valve Regulated Lead-Acid) proved to cycle well at a partial state of charge over the time interval tested.


Purpose
The purpose of this study was to compare the evolution of the scientific production of Costa Rica and Panama, from Central America and Paraguay and Uruguay, from South America in the period 2000–2018. To achieve this, first, a bibliometric mapping was performed using the Web of Science (WoS) database. Second, the triple helix model was used to determine whether there are similar patterns or marked differences in the distribution of this type of publications in the helices of government, academia and industry.

Design/methodology/approach
The steps followed in this study were as follows: design and application of an algorithm to perform WoS downloads; download the publications using the country descriptor; process data using R and VOSviewer; design of a profile of the selected countries based on indicators; and use of the triple helix model to determine the weight of the scientific production.

Findings
The data found corroborate that the small technoscientific worlds examined do not have the minimum Science & Technology personnel nor the capabilities in infrastructure and technological equipment, and that expenditure in this area is minimal and for these reasons, the production in the WoS is low.

Originality/value
Studying the small technoscientific worlds from a bibliometric perspective allows generating inputs to diagnose the state of these countries in this area, as no evidence of similar studies in these countries was found in Scopus or the WoS. Likewise, examining scientific production from the triple helix model makes it possible to identify the weaknesses of each actor, and the results can contribute to the design of better public policies.


The charge transfer properties of the mono-, di-, and tricationic derivatives of bis(ferrocenyl)benzodithiophene and tris(ferrocenyl)benzotrithiophene were investigated. The cations were generated by chemical oxidation using ferrocenium(BF4) and acetylferrocenium(BF4) as the oxidative agents and monitored in the visible and NIR regions. By changing the supporting electrolyte from [nBu4N][PF6] to [nBu4][B(C6F5)4], we were able to selectively generate the monocationic species of bis- and triferrocenyl complexes. The redox and optical properties of the cationic derivatives were rationalized by an in-depth electrochemical and optical study. The comparison with the results previously obtained for the structurally related bis(ferrocenyl)-s-indacene and tris(ferrocenyl)-trindene allowed for the evaluation of the huge influence of thiolation on the metal–metal electronic coupling.


Summary.
1. The flagellum is an active unit in so far that it generates at least a part of its own energy irrespective of the attached cell.

2. In all cases so far examined the impulses or waves start at the base of the flagellum and not at the tip.

3. As a wave passes along a flagellum there is always a certain amount of rotation of the tip of the flagellum.

4. A method for determining both the rate of swimming of the organism and the rate of beat of the flagellum is described.

5. The rate of transmission of an impulse along a flagellum has been measured. In Euglena viridis it was found to be of the order of 810 μ per sec. or well under a foot per minute, which is almost infinitely slow compared with the rate at which an impulse passes along a nerve.

6. The term "Tractellum" is discussed and its use should be discontinued. Tractella are simply ordinary flagella attached to the front end of the organism, the impulse starting at the base and not at the tip.

7. The rotation of the organism itself is due to the plane in which the flagellum beats. A high rate of beat of the flagellum does not necessarily imply a high rate of rotation of the organism.

8. The mechanics of the flagellum are discussed, but no attempt is made to discuss the nature of the movement within the flagellum though the slow rate of impulse is highly suggestive that it is a surface action comparable to heat conduction rather than radiation.

9. Flagella attached to the hinder end of the organism and pushing it through the water present certain mechanical difficulties and occur in nature rather seldom. The more stable mechanism is for either a single flagellum or a pair of flagella to be attached to the front end to push the organism through the water.


In this paper, we present the supervised multi-view canonical correlation analysis ensemble (SMVCCAE) and its semi-supervised version (SSMVCCAE), which are novel techniques designed to address heterogeneous domain adaptation problems, i.e., situations in which the data to be processed and recognized are collected from different heterogeneous domains. Specifically, the multi-view canonical correlation analysis scheme is utilized to extract multiple correlation subspaces that are useful for joint representations for data association across domains. This scheme makes homogeneous domain adaption algorithms suitable for heterogeneous domain adaptation problems. Additionally, inspired by fusion methods such as Ensemble Learning (EL), this work proposes a weighted voting scheme based on canonical correlation coefficients to combine classification results in multiple correlation subspaces. Finally, the semi-supervised MVCCAE extends the original procedure by incorporating multiple speed-up spectral regression kernel discriminant analysis (SRKDA). To validate the performances of the proposed supervised procedure, a single-view canonical analysis (SVCCA) with the same base classifier (Random Forests) is used. Similarly, to evaluate the performance of the semi-supervised approach, a comparison is made with other techniques such as Logistic label propagation (LLP) and the Laplacian support vector machine (LapSVM). All of the approaches are tested on two real hyperspectral images, which are considered the target domain, with a classifier trained from synthetic low-dimensional multispectral images, which are considered the original source domain. The experimental results confirm that multi-view canonical correlation can overcome the limitations of SVCCA. Both of the proposed procedures outperform the ones used in the comparison with respect to not only the classification accuracy but also the computational efficiency. Moreover, this research shows that canonical correlation weighted voting (CCWV) is a valid option with respect to other ensemble schemes and that because of their ability to balance diversity and accuracy, canonical views extracted using partially joint random view generation are more effective than those obtained by exploiting disjoint random view generation.


The length–weight relationships (LWR) are important tools for ichthyology, they are useful to demonstrate the environmental influence on growth. In this study we estimate the LWR of the Atherinella brasiliensis in the shallow areas of the São Francisco river estuary and compare the growth of this specie in different environments of the Brazilian coast. Specimens of Brazilian silverside (A. brasiliensis, n = 3483), between 2.1 and 13.6 cm in length, were caught in the shallow areas of the São Francisco River estuary between May 2017 and April 2018. The length-weight ratio of the species was represented by the equation y=0.0047x3.0913. Frequency distribution indicates that the species is present in the shallow areas of the São Francisco River estuary in all its ontogenetic stages and apparently reproduces throughout the year with constant input of recruits into the population. Von Bertalanffy's growth model and longevity were adjusted to reach asymptotic length (L∞) of 14.7 cm, growth coefficient (K) of 0.91 year-1 and longevity (A95) of 3.25 years. The analysis of variance revealed differences for the maximum total length. However, the differences found between the present study and data available in the literature appear to be caused by environmental and methodological differences.


OBJECTIVES: to determine the most prevailing causes and referral adequacy of prenatal patients from Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, metropolitan and rural areas. METHODS: 821 referrals to the High Risk Pregnancy Clinic of the Hospital Femina of the Grupo Hospitalar Conceicao, from July 1997 to July 2000 were reviewed. Referrals were classified as: confirmed, added, modified, not conclusive or not confirmed. RESULTS: 201 (24.5%) were considered inadequate. Most common causes for referring pre-natal patients were arterial hypertension and diabetes. Inadequacy was more frequent in pregnant women residing out of the metropolitan area and among the younger ones. The most frequent inadequacy causes were referrals based on bureaucratic reasons and lack of information. Kappa rates among diagnosis performed by primary care doctors and referral services were respectively 0.28 and 0.41. CONCLUSIONS: diagnosis agreement was determined to be low. There is a need for training to improve basic healthcare services specially focused on doctors working outside the metropolitan area.


E. D. Fackerell claims: 1) that Alley and Yılmaz treatment of parallel slabs in general relativity is wrong because the Yılmaz metric used is not a solution of the field equations of general relativity; 2) he also claims that the correct treatment of the parallel slab problem in general relativity must be based on the so-called Taub metric. We show below that both of Fackerell's claims are false. His first claim is based on his failure to distinguish the matter-free regions and the regions with matter. His second claim is based on his failure to recognize that for the Taub metric the left-hand side, hence also the right-hand side of the field equations, are identically zero everywhere. Thus no material systems can be treated via the Taub metric.


chemisorbed on platinum particles in L-zeolite has been investigated by static and magic angle spinning NMR spectroscopy. The representative spectra are composed of a broad asymmetric peak with a center of gravity at 230±30 ppm and a sharp symmetric peak at 124±2 ppm which is tentatively assigned to physisorbed , on inner walls of L-zeolite. Overall, the broad resonance component is similar to our previous results of highly dispersed (80-96%) CO/Pt/silica or CO/Pt/alumina samples, still showing metallic characters. The principal difference is in the first moment value. The broad peak in the spectra is assigned to CO linearly bound to Pt particles in the L-zeolites, and indicates a distribution of isotropic shifts from bonding site to bonding site. The NMR results reported here manifest that the Pt particles inside of the L-zeolites channels are not collectively the same with the ones supported on silica or alumina with similar dispersion in terms of Pt particle shape and/or ordering of Pt atoms in a particle. As a result, Pt particles of CO/Pt/L-zeolite were agglomerated accompanying CO desorption upon annealing. There were no definite changes in the NMR spectra due to differences of exchanged cations. Comparison of our observation on CO/Pt/L-zeolite with Sharma et al.'s reveals that even when the first moment, the linewidtb, and the relaxation times of the static spectra and the dispersion measured by chemisorption are similar, the properties of Pt particles can be dramatically different. Therefore, it is essential to take advantage of the strengths of several techniques together in order to interpret data reliably, especially for the highly dispersed samples.


Measurements of tropospheric integrated water vapour (IWV) made with two microwave radiometers (ASMUWARA, TP/WVP-3000), GPS, and radiosondes (SRS 400) during the Temperature, hUmidity, and Cloud (TUC) profiling campaign under mid-latitude conditions in Payerne, Switzerland, in winter 2003/2004 are compared. All methods provide robust IWV retrievals in clear sky and cloudy situations. The mean difference between radiometric and radiosonde IWV is less than 0.15 kgm −2 being not significant with respect to the standard deviation and to the theoretical accuracy. The GPS IWV measurements have a persistent significant dry bias of approx. 0.5 kgm −2 with respect to radiometers and radiosondes. The different temporal and spatial resolutions of the instruments were found to have a strong influence on the standard deviation. A characteristic diurnal cycle of the GPS and radiometric IWV was observed.


We present a new approach for fine-grained classification of retail products, which learns and exploits statistical context information about likely product arrangements on shelves, incorporates visual hierarchies across brands, and returns recognition results as "confidence sets" that are guaranteed to contain the true class at a given confidence level. Our system consists of three important components: 1) a nested hierarchy of product classes are automatically constructed based on visual similarities, 2) a confidence set predictor is trained based on class posteriors by using coarse-to-fine binary classifiers to discriminate each nested cluster of the hierarchy from the remainder of classes and a Bayesian network (BN) model that encodes the joint distribution of classifier scores with the fine-level class variable, and 3) n hidden Markov model (HMM) is trained with nested hidden states from the class hierarchy to model spatial transition across the nodes of product class hierarchy and resolve errors in the context-free confidence set results. Novel aspects of the proposed method include 1) combining confidence sets and context information via a HMM, 2) applying this concept to fine grained recognition of products arranged in retail shelves, and 3) presenting experimental results on four large datasets, collected from actual retail stores. We compare our approach with existing confidence set approaches and state-of-the-art convolutional neural networks classifiers including SENet-154, DenseNet-161, B-CNN, and Inception-Resnet-v2. Our approach performs comparably or better than state-of-the-art deep classifiers and exhibits high accuracy for relatively small confidence set sizes.


INTRODUCTION
Digital subtraction angiography (DSA) was considered the gold standard method for peripheral artery disease (PAD) evaluation. Notwithstanding, recent developments of computed tomography angiography (CTA) have improved the specificity and sensibility of this method. The main objective of this study is to characterize a cohort of patients with lower limb PAD and clarify if there are differences upon groups using different preoperative imaging methods (DSA or CTA).

METHODS
This retrospective study focused on patients with PAD that underwent surgical intervention (endovascular revascularization or open surgery). CTA group included all patients submitted to this method as their pre-operative exam, between March 2009 and April 2017. DSA group included patients submitted to DSA as their pre-operative exam within the same period. The groups were compared regarding intervention details, ankle-brachial index (ABI) variation, reintervention, major amputation and mortality rates, and hospital length of stay.

RESULTS
One hundred and two patients were included (33 CTA and 69 DSA). DSA group presented more below the knee lesions with TASC C or D classification (p=0.002), as well as runoff vessels scarcity (p=0.001). There were no differences in the endovascular/open surgery ratio (p=0.308), ABI alteration with intervention (p=0.860), reintervention rates (p=0.236), major amputation (p=0.999), mortality (p=0.574), or hospital length of stay (p=0.933).

CONCLUSION
CTA seems to achieve equivalent performance to DSA for morphological and therapeutic planning of PAD. Nevertheless, extrapolation to patients with TASC C or D distal lesions cannot be performed.


Purpose of review Summarize the physiological effects of low-carbohydrate diets as they relate to weight loss, glycemic control, and metabolic health. Recent findings Low-carbohydrate diets are at least as effective for weight loss as other diets, but claims about increased energy expenditure and preferential loss of body fat are unsubstantiated. Glycemic control and hyperinsulinemia are improved by low-carbohydrate diets, but insulin sensitivity and glucose-stimulated insulin secretion may be impaired, especially in the absence of weight loss. Fasting lipid parameters are generally improved, but such improvements may depend on the quality of dietary fat and the carbohydrates they replaced. Postprandial hyperlipemia is a potential concern given the high fat content typical of low-carbohydrate diets. Summary Low-carbohydrate diets have several potential benefits for treatment of obesity and type 2 diabetes, but more research is required to better understand their long-term consequences as well as the variable effects on the endocrine control of glucose, lipids, and metabolism.


Following the failure of national prohibition, the temperance movement came to be regarded as an alien blight that had afflicted the American landscape. Richard Hofstadter spoke for many historians when he suggested that the story of prohibition seems "like a historical detour, a meaningless nuisance, an extraneous imposition upon the main course of history." Rather than being viewed as somehow integral to and indicative of developments in American society and culture, the temperance movement has more commonly been exploited as a quarry for providing colorful instances of human folly and fanaticism. The tendency is natural for, unlike other leading reform movements such as antislavery and women's suffrage, which have legacies most historians are eager to affirm, the crusade against drink seems odd and misplaced to contemporary minds. But this approach has overlooked important features of the movement, failing to show why it did not strike its many advocates as a pseudo-concern or do justice to its widespread support and distinction as the longest continuous reform movement in American history.


To assess the effects of adjunctive quetiapine for treatment of refractory symptoms of combat-related post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), charts of Vietnam veterans with war-connected PTSD who had been prescribed quetiapine were reviewed. Only patients with symptoms that had not responded to adequate therapy with two or more psychotropic medications prior to quetiapine treatment were analyzed. Addition of quetiapine to ongoing therapy resulted in further symptomatic improvements in DSM-IV PTSD criterion B (re-experiencing) for 35%, criterion C (avoidance/numbing) for 28%, and criterion D (arousal) for 65% of study subjects. Low doses of quetiapine (mean = 155 +/- 130 mg) were associated with minimal side effects. These results, although retrospective, suggest that augmentative quetiapine may benefit some refractory symptoms of PTSD in combat veterans.


Globo H is a tumor-associated carbohydrate antigen (TACA), which serves as a valuable target for antitumor vaccine or cancer immunotherapies. However, most TACAs are T-cell-independent, and they cannot induce powerful immune response due to their poor immunogenicity. To address this problem, herein, several Globo H analogues with modification on the N-acyl group were prepared through a preactivation-based glycosylation strategy from the non-reducing end to the reducing end. These modified Globo H derivatives were then conjugated with carrier protein CRM197 to form glycoconjugates as anticancer vaccine candidates, which were used in combination with adjuvant glycolipid C34 for immunological studies. The immunological effects of these synthetic vaccine candidates were evaluated on Balb/c mice. The results showed that the fluorine-modified N-acyl Globo H conjugates can induce higher titers of IgG antibodies that can recognize the naturally occurring Globo H antigen on the surface of cancer cells and can eliminate cancer cells in the presence of a complement, indicating the potential of these synthetic glycoconjugates as anticancer vaccine candidates.


Background: Nutrition is central pillar of human life and its request differ with respect to age, gender and during physiological changes such as complimentary feeding and child age. Ethiopia has a high prevalence of Acute and Chronic Malnutrition, with almost half of Ethiopian children chronically malnourished and one-in-ten children wasted. About 47% of children under-five are stunted, 11% are wasted and 38% are underweight. Acute malnutrition also known as wasting, it is characterized by a rapid deterioration in nutritional status over a short period. For children, it can be measured using the weight-for-height nutritional index or mid-upper arm circumference. There are different levels of severity of acute malnutrition: moderate acute malnutrition (MAM) and severe acute malnutrition (SAM). The recommended a revision of cut-off points to determine wasting are the following: SAM: MUAC 115 and < 125 mm Cut-Off Value Normal ?125 mm. A cross- sectional descriptive survey and measurements of MUAC was used to investigate Prevalence of wasting and Its Associated Factors among Children 6-59 Months of Age in Guto Gida District, Oromia, Ethiopia. Multistage random sampling technique was used and 359 children between 6-59 months aged were selected from 398 enrolled children to the study.  The quantitative data were analyzed using SPSS for windows version (17.0) and EPI-6. Both bivairate and multiple logistic regressions were run to assess factors that were associated with the dependent variable at p< 0.05 and to control the confounders. Objective: To determine the Prevalence of Wasting and Its Associated Factors Among 6-59 Months Age in Guto Gida District, Oromia, Ethiopia. Method: A cross-sectional survey design was used to assess the Prevalence of Wasting and Its Associated Factors Among 6-59 Months Age in Guto Gida District, Oromia, Ethiopia from March to June 2013. Results: During the study period, 398 children were enrolled and about 359 children were included in the final analysis. Associate factors taken to analyze wasting were Socio-economic status, Housing quality, Water quality, Children Healthy condition, Child characteristics, Maternal Caring and characteristics and Dietary history of child and mother. There was significant relationship between Socio-economic status, House and Water quality, Children Healthy condition, Child and caregivers characteristics, Maternal Care, dietary history of child and mother, household food intake, and public healthy practice and dependent one. Both biviarate and multivariate logistic analysis indicated that low birth weight, lack of balanced diet as of food pyramid and housing quality, water quality are some associate factors of wasting, stunting, and underweight. With respect to age categories the study result shows 11.14% wasting for among 24-59months age and children 6-23months were 12.53% were wasted .About 27.5 % of children were severe stunted, 41.78% less than 65% median for height meaning that stunted children, the proportions of severely underweight and underweight children in this study area were 28.7% and 39.6%  respectively. Conclusion: Depending on facts of the study, it can be concluded that; child wasting (acute   mal nutrition) problem is highly observed in Guto Gida District. When out puts of the result compare to that of standard the prevalence's of wasting in the study area was the same but slightly excised EDHS, 2011 report. It can be concluded professional that most households in the study area were illiterate, had low income, consumed cereals and crops, had not get quality water, had low nutritional information, majority of children did not taken Rota viral vaccine(de-worming activities). Therefore, it is a time to tickle child undernourishment, which is a silent killer of the community. Keywords: Prevalence, Wasting, associated factors, MUAC and Guto Gida District.


A review of domestic and foreign scientific literature indicates an increase in interest of researching teachers' occupational activity, their professional development and professionalization of teaching. Questions, whether teaching is profession, or are there any elements missing, for this occupation to be defined as profession, or what has been or should be changed, have also been exposed.
Medicine and law are traditionally labelled as professions; the general approach was to identify the characteristics of these professions and to compare other occupations with them. Different models of professions have been formed. An important role has also been given to the research of different factors of teachers' professional development. The researchers have been interested in how the teachers' researching and cooperating in projects, means and types of education, means of innovating, and institutional climate affect teachers' professional development. In theoretical part, we defined the teaching occupation and teachers' occupational roles. We defined the term profession, professionalism, professionalization and professional development. We presented the models of professional development and analysed the factors that affect teachers' professional development. In empirical part, we were interested in how different groups perceive teaching occupation. For the purpose of the research, we formed a questionnaire for practitioners in education (teachers, headmasters and headmistresses), parents and students. Our interest was to find out how they perceive different positions of teaching occupation (difficulty of occupation, required education, specificity and irreplaceability…). We compared views of different groups of respondents to teaching occupation and explored, if there were any statistically important differences between them. We also researched the amount of influence of different factors on teachers' professional development, according to teachers' and headmasters' opinions. The results of our research have shown that the teachers, headmasters, parents and students would classify teaching occupation as profession. Teachers and headmasters believe that internal factors affect teachers' professional development more than external factors. According to their opinion, the highest influence on professionalization of teaching occupation is teachers' high professional qualification. There have been different opinions on factors or competences, defining teaching occupation, with teachers and headmasters on one side and parents and students on the other. Within factors that affect the reputation of teaching occupation, headmasters, teachers, parents and students have completely agreed that teaching is an important social function. With our research, we wanted to discover and critically define the factors that affect teachers' occupational work and evaluate their influence on professionalization of teaching occupation. Our purpose has also been to inform primary school teachers, as well as general public, about the importance of realizing the factors that help to improve the enforcement and recognition of the profession.


We consider a network where each node has exclusive access to a local cost function. Our contribution is a communication-efficient distributed algorithm that finds a vector x* minimizing the sum of all the functions. We make the additional assumption that the functions have intersecting local domains, i.e., each function depends only on some components of the variable. Consequently, each node is interested in knowing only some components of x*, not the entire vector. This allows improving communication-efficiency. We apply our algorithm to distributed model predictive control (D-MPC) and to network flow problems and show, through experiments on large networks, that the proposed algorithm requires less communications to converge than prior state-of-the-art algorithms.


Fabrication of functionally graded materials (FGMs) by laser metal deposition (LMD) has the potential to offer solutions to key engineering problems over the traditional metal-working techniques. But the issues that need to be addressed while building FGMs are intermixing in the layers and cracking due to the residual stresses. This paper is to present the study of the effect of process parameters (laser power and travel speed) on the degree of dilution between the substrate (or, previous layer) and powder material for few metallurgical systems.


In this study, we propose a thermal frequency reconfigurable electromagnetic absorber using germanium telluride (GeTe) phase change material. Thermally-induced phase transition of GeTe from an amorphous high-resistive state to a crystalline low-resistive state by heating is used to change the resonant frequency of the absorber. For full-wave simulation, the electromagnetic properties of GeTe at 25 °C and 250 °C are characterized at 10 GHz under normal incidence for electromagnetic waves. The proposed absorber is designed based on the characterized electromagnetic parameters of GeTe. A circular unit cell is designed and GeTe is placed at a gap in the circle to maximize the switching range. The performance of the proposed electromagnetic absorber is numerically and experimentally demonstrated. Measurement results indicate that the absorption frequency changes from 10.23 GHz to 9.6 GHz when the GeTe film is altered from an amorphous state at room temperature to a crystalline state by heating the sample to 250 °C. The absorptivity in these states is determined to be 91% and 92%, respectively.


In the manual control of a dynamic system, the human controller (HC) often follows a visible and predictable reference path. Compared with a purely feedback control strategy, performance can be improved by making use of this knowledge of the reference. The operator could effectively introduce feedforward control in conjunction with a feedback path to compensate for errors, as hypothesized in literature. However, feedforward behavior has never been identified from experimental data, nor have the hypothesized models been validated. This paper investigates human control behavior in pursuit tracking of a predictable reference signal while being perturbed by a quasi-random multisine disturbance signal. An experiment was done in which the relative strength of the target and disturbance signals were systematically varied. The anticipated changes in control behavior were studied by means of an ARX model analysis and by fitting three parametric HC models: two different feedback models and a combined feedforward and feedback model. The ARX analysis shows that the experiment participants employed control action on both the error and the target signal. The control action on the target was similar to the inverse of the system dynamics. Model fits show that this behavior can be modeled best by the combined feedforward and feedback model.


Neurostimulation of the hippocampal formation has shown promising results for modulating memory but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. In particular, the effects on hippocampal theta-nested gamma oscillations and theta phase reset, which are both crucial for memory processes, are unknown. Moreover, these effects cannot be investigated using current computational models, which consider theta oscillations with a fixed amplitude and phase velocity. Here, we developed a novel computational model that includes the medial septum, represented as a set of abstract Kuramoto oscillators producing a dynamical theta rhythm with phase reset, and the hippocampal formation, composed of biophysically-realistic neurons and able to generate theta-nested gamma oscillations under theta drive. We showed that, for theta inputs just below the threshold to induce self-sustained theta-nested gamma oscillations, a single stimulation pulse could switch the network behavior from non-oscillatory to a state producing sustained oscillations. Next, we demonstrated that, for a weaker theta input, pulse train stimulation at the theta frequency could transiently restore seemingly physiological oscillations. Importantly, the presence of phase reset influenced whether these two effects depended on the phase at which stimulation onset was delivered, which has practical implications for designing neurostimulation protocols that are triggered by the phase of ongoing theta oscillations. This novel model opens new avenues for studying the effects of neurostimulation on the hippocampal formation. Furthermore, our hybrid approach that combines different levels of abstraction could be extended in future work to other neural circuits that produce dynamical brain rhythms.


Executive Summary The growth in the number of Wi-Fi devices accessing the network in concentrated areas, along with limitations in shared spectrum, requires a new approach to provide the best predictable and scalable user experience. The goal of this white paper is to provide the technical details behind Cisco's unique approach to high-density Wi-Fi design, Cisco ® High Density Experience (HDX), which offers both hardware and software innovation delivered in the Cisco Aironet ® 2700 and 3700 Series access points. With the emergence of smartphones, tablets, and laptops built for IEEE 802.11ac, which can use 80-MHz channel bandwidth, and more complex modulation and coding schemes, the challenges that result from rapidly increasing deployments of both Wi-Fi clients and Wi-Fi networks and the concurrent growing usage of shared spectrum become more acute. This paper explores the underlying factors for high-density Wi-Fi scenarios and describes Cisco HDX. It also explains how this suite establishes a foundation and growth path for addressing and overcoming both the ongoing and imminent challenges of high-density Wi-Fi. Finally, this paper also discusses recent HDX enhancements that can be used to achieve higher levels of spectrum efficiency and end user performance.


We present a voltage-mode switched-capacitor approach to the design of Field Programmable Analog Arrays (FPAA). The designed FPAA consists of uniform configurable analog blocks (CABs) which allow the implementation of different functions. The CABs are connected to each other via switched and unswitched capacitors. The internal structure of CABs and the interconnection network between them are configured by user-programmable digital control signals. The functionality of the FPAA is verified by embedding of different filters, programmable amplifiers, biquads, modulators and signal generators.


Data from the National Down Syndrome Cytogenetic Register is used to describe the cytogenetics and epidemiology of registered cases. The register comprises notifications from cytogenetics laboratories in England and Wales. This report is of 5737 cases registered between 1989 and 1993: 2169 prenatal and 3436 postnatal diagnoses, and 132 spontaneous abortions. Eighty eight registrations were from multiple pregnancies. Ninety five percent had regular trisomy 21. In 4% there was a translocation, mostly Robertsonian t(14;21) or t(21;21). One percent were mosaics with one normal cell line. Mean maternal age was raised in free trisomy 21, but not in translocations. Where families had been investigated, about a third of translocations were inherited, six to seven times more often from the mother than the father. Associations between free trisomy 21 and structural chromosomal defects in the births were no more common than expected from newborn series. The overall sex ratio was raised (male to female: 1.23 to 1), and there was an excess of associated male sex chromosomal aneuploidy. However, in mosaics with one normal cell line the male to female ratio was 0.8 to 1, and in twins discordant for trisomy 21 there was also a female excess.


A-Rāzī (Rhazes, with variants, in Medieval Latin), Abū Bakr Muhammad ibn Zakariyyā' (al-Rayy, close to modern Teherān, Irān, A.D. 865-925), is rightly considered one of the greatest medical practitioners and writers in the period between Galen and the renaissance reemergence of medicine as an empirical discipline (apart from his ranking as one of the most original and independent-minded philosophers of Islām). The following biobibliographical survey - in the format of an encyclopaedia article - will focus on those of his medical works which either had the greatest impact on posterity and/or attest most solidly to al-Rāzī's outstanding combination of textual scholarship and clinical observation, outstanding at least with reference to the horizon of his culture.


Paraquat (PQ) is the most widely used herbicide in the world and found to controlling weeds in even more than 100 varieties of various crops. But the danger associated with its use is far bigger than its beneficial aspect. It is absorbed by skin, lung and gastrointestinal tract or inhaled due to their lipophilic character. Their harmful effects are thought to be mediated via cyclic reduction and oxidation process where oxygen plays a vital role as terminal electron acceptor. Detoxification system such as antioxidant enzymes exists in the body to eliminate ultimate toxicant or prevent its formation. Polymorphonuclear leukocytes (PMNs) are the most abundant circulating blood leukocytes which provide 1st line of defense against infection. The present study was undertaken to demonstrate PQ induced alterations in antioxidant enzyme activity and changes in the level of lipid peroxidation in PMNs of rat. This study will shed some light on the pathology and biochemistry of PQ toxicity and will be of great use for the students of medical science, biochemistry and to all individuals interested in the subject.


The authors report a diachronic investigation of cultural apprenticeship, creativity, and cognitive representation in a Zinacantec Maya community of Chiapas, Mexico. Focusing on the culturally central domain of weaving, they explore the implications of an ecocultural transition from agriculture to commerce for learning and development. Their studies cover 24 years and explore the implications of historical change in two generations of Zinacantec Maya children. The first wave was studied in 1969 and 1970. The next generation was studied in 1991 and 1993; it comprised mainly daughters and sons, nieces and nephews, and godchildren of the first generation. The results show that in the space of a single generation, weaving apprenticeship moved from a more interdependent to a more independent style of learning, woven textiles changed from a small stock of defined patterns to widely varied and innovative patterns, and cognitive representation of woven patterns became less detailed and more abstract.


1697 Purpose: The Epidermal Growth Factor Receptor (EGFR) is an important target for anticancer therapy. However, not all NSCLC cells respond to treatment with EGFR inhibitors, and the mechanism of resistance to EGFR inhibitors is poorly understood. Therefore, we studied the molecular mechanism that interferes with the activities of tarceva (Erlotinib), a selective EGFR tyrosin kinase inhibitor that has shown antitumor activities in patients with NSCLC as second / third line therapy. Methods: The effects of tarceva and its combination with inhibitors of IGF-1R signaling components on proliferation and apoptosis were assessed in a subset of NSCLC cell lines in vitro and in vivo, by using the MTT assay, anchorage-independent growth assay in soft agar, clonogenic survival assay, a flow cytometry-based TUNEL assay, western blot analyses, and a NSCLC xenograft tumor model. Results: Tarceva treatment exhibited an activation of IGF-IR signaling components, such as IGF-1R, Akt, and MAPK, in the resistant NSCLC cell lines, but not in the sensitive cell lines. Dual targeting of EGFR and IGF-1R signaling pathways through combined treatment of tarceva and inhibitors of upstream and downstream of IGF-1R signaling components showed enhanced antiproliferative activities in NSCLC cells in vitro and in vivo. Conclusion: The combination of tarceva and inhibitors of IGF-1R signaling components induced enhanced antiproliferative activities in NSCLC cells via increased apoptosis in vitro and in vivo. These results suggest that activation of IGF-1R signaling pathway confer resistance to tarceva treatment in NSCLC cells, and that simultaneous treatment with inhibitors of IGF-1R and EGFR signaling pathways might be an effective therapeutic strategy against NSCLC. Supported in part by the DAMD17-01-1-0689 from the Department of Defense (to W. K. Hong); W81XWH-04-1-0142-01-VITAL from the Department of Defense (to W. K. Hong); National Institutes of Health Grants R01 CA109520-01 (to H-Y. Lee) and CA100816-01A1 (to H-Y. Lee), National American Cancer Society, RSG-04-082-01-TBE 01(to H-Y. Lee)


Two avian reoviruses, strain Reo-25 and isolate W3-492 were inoculated orally in 1-day-old chicks. Three to seven days post inoculation (dpi), the liver, spleen, pancreas, caecal tonsil and duodenum were collected, weighed and titrated in cell culture for their viral content. The different tissue homogenates collected were passaged several times in 1-day-old chicks. Reo-25 virus was passaged only at 3-day intervals and W3-492 virus was passaged at 3- and 7- or 14-day intervals. For both Reo-25 and W3-492 viruses, pathological effects and virus yields in tissues decreased with continued passages. In direct comparisons of reovirus W3-492 prior to chicken passage (PO) and after four passages at 7-day intervals (P4) using standardised amounts of virus for inoculation of chickens, no major differences in pathological effects were observed. P4 virus could be recovered from duodenal tissue at 28 dpi and from liver tissue at 14 dpi. In contrast, PO virus could be recovered from duodenal tissue at 14 dpi and from liver tissue at 10 dpi.


We perform for the first time high-resolution zoom-in re-simulations of individual halos in the context of the Multi-coupled Dark Energy (McDE) scenario, which is characterised by the existence of two distinct Dark Matter particle species with opposite couplings to a Dark Energy scalar field. We compare the structural properties of the simulated halos to the standard ΛCDM results. The zoomed-in initial conditions are set up using a specifically designed code called ZInCo that we publicly release along with the present paper. Our numerical results allow to investigate in detail and with unprecedented resolution the halo segregation process that characterises McDE cosmologies from its very early stages. In particular, we find that in contrast to what could be inferred from previous numerical analysis at lower resolution, the segregation process is already in place at redshifts as high as z ∼ 7. Most remarkably, we find that the subsequent evolution of the segregation leads to the formation of cored total matter density profiles with a core size that progressively increases in time. The shape of the cored profiles can be accurately predicted as the superposition of two NFW profiles with an increasing offset, thereby confirming the interpretation of the simulations results in terms of the segregation of the two dark matter components of the halo as a consequence of their different coupling to the Dark Energy field.


Objective: The arterial hypertension diagnosis is based on office blood pressure measurement, and current guidelines suggest the use of out-of-office blood pressure measurement techniques in specific cases, as suspected white-coat or masked hypertension. Home Blood Pressure Monitoring (HBPM) is recommended as a complementary method to Ambulatory Blood Pressure Monitoring (ABPM). However usually HBPM is only used for implementing blood pressure control in treated patients. We tried to identify the accuracy between HBPM and ABPM in untreated patients. (We tried to identify HBPM accuracy between to ABPM in untreated patients.) Design and method: We enrolled 83 consecutive untreated patients who performed ABPM in our Hypertension Unit and completed a short HBPM schedule (two measurements, twice daily, for four days) between November 2011 and June 2015. Patients were instructed about HBPM in accord to current hypertension guidelines and they used validated automated arm devices. We compared the accuracy between the two techniques and the HBPM ability to identify arterial hypertension in comparison with ABPM. Results: Pearson's correlation coefficient between HBPM 4-day average and day-time ABPM values was 0.59 for systolic blood pressure (SBP) and 0.77 for diastolic blood pressure (DBP). Bland-Altman analysis revealed a mean difference of -5.68 mmHg, SD 8.82 mmHg for SBP, and -4.64, SD 6.33 mmHg for DBP. ROC curves described AUC for SBP of 0.75 and for DBP of 0.877. The ABPM identify as hypertensive 54 subjects on 83 (65.1%), the HBPM 29 subjects (34.9%), p-value 0.01609. Conclusions: HBPM has a moderate correlation and a moderate accuracy in the identification of arterial hypertension compared with ABPM. Although HBPM is recommended as alternative method respect to ABPM, in untreated patients it is not reliable for arterial hypertension diagnosis and probably it is not able to identify specific hypertension patterns, in contrast with current guidelines.


In most vertebrate embryos and neonates studied to date unique antigen receptors (antibodies and T cell receptors) are expressed that possess a limited immune repertoire. We have isolated a subclass of IgM, IgM(1gj), from the nurse shark Ginglymostoma cirratum that is preferentially expressed in neonates. The variable (V) region gene encoding the heavy (H) chain underwent V-D-J rearrangement in germ cells ("germline-joined"). Such H chain V genes were discovered over 10 years ago in sharks but until now were not shown to be expressed at appreciable levels; we find expression of H(1gj) in primary and secondary lymphoid tissues early in life, but in adults only in primary lymphoid tissue, which is identified in this work as the epigonal organ. H(1gj) chain associates covalently with light (L) chains and is most similar in sequence to IgM H chains, but like mammalian IgG has three rather than the four IgM constant domains; deletion of the ancestral IgM C2 domain thus defines both IgG and IgM(1gj). Because sharks are the members of the oldest vertebrate class known to possess antibodies, unique or specialized antibodies expressed early in ontogeny in sharks and other vertebrates were likely present at the inception of the adaptive immune system.


The geography of modern agriculture in the United States has been dramatically shaped by broader changes in the agri-food system, including standardization, commodification, vertical integration, globalization, and increasing concentration in the ownership and control of farm and food production. In peri-urban areas, these sectoral forces of change are compounded by a complex array of land use pressures – including competition for land, increases in land prices, landscape fragmentation, neighbor conflicts, and other urbanization pressures. In this urbanizing context, farmers, farm households, and landowners must decide how to allocate their scarce land, labor and capital inputs to accomplish their household and business goals within this changing environment. Their decisions produce diverse agricultural trajectories, including growth, intensification, on-farm and off-farm diversification, deintensification and decline. Utilizing farmer and landowner surveys from five distinct peri-urban farming regions across the United States, we characterize the diverse trajectories of agricultural change and examine different theories of agricultural structural change. Our results provide an empirical profile of the types and geography of US peri-urban agriculture and the most common adaptive strategies employed by farmers at the urban-rural interface. We also compare these patterns to predictions of alternative agricultural geography models.


In this paper a new three phase DC link soft switching inverter is introduced. The auxiliary circuit of the proposed inverter is composed of two switches beside the DC link switch. All switches in the proposed inverter are soft switched. The proposed auxiliary circuit provides zero voltage switching condition for the main inverter switches independent of the link current direction. An analysis of this inverter topology is presented and various operating modes are explained in details. The inverter simulation is performed to validate the analysis.


Sago contains carbohydrates that are stored in the starch form. Starch is generally formed from two molecules of glucose polymer, namely amylose and amylopectin, which its composition varies for each type of starch [1]. The weakness of starch can be overcome through a modification of the functional properties of starch to expand sago starch. Chemical modification of starches can enlarge the range of certain starch physical properties of the parent starch [2] and enhance their use in a number of applications found in industrial processes and food manufacture. Chemical modification of starch can be performed by various methods such as acetylation. Generally, native starch has a low Degree of Substitution (DS) because of their limited degree or reaction on the granule surface. Increasing DS can be obtained by modification of native starch through acetylation reaction using few catalysts such as pyridine and NaOH. Several researchers have reported the effects of acetylation on many sort of starch sources such potato, corn, pea and cassava [3-5]. There are few studies about the effects of acetylation of starches with a wide range of amylose contents. We have carried out some work on effects of acetic anhydride concentration toward DS value of native and modified sago starch from Papua.


An integrated performance analysis of a vanadium-based urea-SCR system used for the reduction of exhaust emissions from a diesel engine was carried ou t. The engine was run on an AC electrical dynamometer in accordance with an 8-mode steady-state cycle. The number-size distribution of particles and carbonyls was analyzed using an electrical low pressure impactor (ELPI) and high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC), respectively. It was found that conversion and/or reduction efficiency (RE) of the SCR were highly affected by the catalyst temperature and space velocity (SV). The NOx pollutants were greatly reduced with the decrease in SV within the load modes of cyclic speeds. The SCR exhibited an RE of more than 50% for NOx emissions at 321-435 ◦ C, while the maximum RE was 80.5%. Total hydrocarbon (HC) emissions were also increased with the decrease in load for both cyclic speeds, while the RE varied from 38.7% to 71.1%. Significant increases in upstream and downstream carbon monoxide (CO) emissions were noticed with the decrease in engine load. Reluctance to reduction or a negative RE, ranging from 1.5% to 72%, was observed for CO emissions with the SCR. In addition, nanoparticles were greatly reduced, whereas particles of the size range 57-255 nm showed less reduction. The number-size distribution of particles was shifted from smaller to larger sizes with the SCR retrofit. Furthermore, a substantial conversion of up to 55.3% was obtained in the case of carbonyl emissions. The maximum RE was 58%, 67%, 50%, and 64% for formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, acrolein and acetone, and propionaldehyde, respectively.


Historically, healthcare providers have reluctantly used systemic quinolone antibiotics to treat infections in children when they have been used at all. Concerns regarding the oral or parenteral use of quinolones in children rose from research observations demonstrating cartilage and joint toxicity in juvenile animal models following the administration of this class of antibiotics to immature animals. A voluntary moratorium on the use of quinolone and fluoroquinolone antibiotics in children resulted in restricting their use to treat in infections in specific settings such as immunocompromised states due to chemotherapy, pseudomonas infections in cystic fibrosis patients, complicated urinary tract infections, and quinolone sensitive infectious disease where parenteral antibiotic administration is not available and quinolones were the only effective therapy. This article aims to review retrospective and prospective safety and efficacy data to provide a comprehensive summary of the systemic use of this class of antibiotics in children.


A method of estimating the electron affinity value of an insulator has been developed. The measurement was carried out from the simultaneous detection of thermoluminescence and thermostimulated exoelectronic emission (TSEE) curves presented by the material. This is possible when the TSEE phenomenon is governed by the thermoionic model and when the electron concentration of the considered trap becomes weaker than that of thermally disconnected traps. The application to an -alumina single crystal shows that the electron affinity can be evaluated as from the thermostimulated peak at 275 K and at from the thermostimulated peak at 440 K. The validity of the model and the signification of the results are discussed.