The superior rectus muscles of marlin, swordfish, sailfish, and spearfish are modified for generating heat rather than force. This study focuses on the sarcoplasmic reticulum calcium-adenosinetriphosphatase (SR Ca(2+)-ATPase) to gain further insight into the muscle fiber type origin of the billfish "heater cell." Direct sequencing and immunolocalization demonstrated that marlin and swordfish epaxial swimming muscles express two forms of the SR Ca(2+)-ATPase in a fiber type-specific manner; red slow-twitch skeletal and cardiac muscles express the same SERCA2 message, whereas white fast-twitch skeletal muscles express a SERCA1 message. Thus the expression pattern of the SR Ca2+ pump is similar in both billfish and tetrapod muscles. Molecular and immunological studies revealed that billfish heater tissue and superior rectus muscle express both fast and slow SR Ca2+ pump isoforms. Immunohistochemical results suggest that heater cells and most extraocular muscle fibers express the fast SR Ca2+ pump. Expression of the fast SR Ca(2+)-ATPase by heater cells has implications for heater cell origin and thermogenic control.


This issues paper is concerned with ensuring the integrity of Australia's e-court processes through the development of information protection standards and protocols. The integrity of the court process is important to the national interest because businesses and citizens depend on the certainty of court decisions, naturally assuming that their information and privacy is protected. This paper is a catalyst for future research leading to the creation of an information protection framework, including policies and standards enabling courts to define the use of courtroom technologies, thus ensuring that their design and application is grounded within established information protection principles. Without substantiation of the quality of technological structures and processes used by e-courts, the system of certainty upon which the courts and law are based has the potential to become inherently uncertain.


The Association of Polar Early Career Scientists (APECS) is a multidisciplinary, international organization dedicated to maintaining a network of early career researchers (ECRs) and professionals (ECPs) to share ideas, develop collaborative research directions, provide opportunities for career development, and promote education and outreach as an integral component of Polar research. Science outreach is one of APECS' key objectives and we have found that online media is a powerful tool for STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Mathematics) knowledge transfer. We introduce the use of online presentations as a platform for communication, education, and networking. APECS' Online Conference, virtual posters, and webinar series provide case studies to examine how online technology bridges geographic and disciplinary boundaries.

APECS' Online Conference allows ECRs and ECPs to present their research to an interactive, online room of viewers. The third iteration of this annual event (March 2017) appealed to science communicators with the theme: "Outside the Box: encouraging alternative solutions for undertaking and communicating polar research". Virtual poster sessions have allowed members to share work on an array of topics, from whaling and tourism to showcasing studies affiliated with specific national research programs. Webinars have covered a variety of skills-based and scientific topics, with invited speakers addressing everything from writing grant proposals to eco-cultural communication. Each presentation is recorded and saved on APECS' website as a free resource.

ECRs, ECPs, and APECS mentors from around the world attend our events, promoting diversity in networking and helping steer the Arctic community in positive directions. We will provide examples of connections fostered by and benefits of online events, including easier dissemination of ideas across geographically distant regions and minimal cost. While this presentation focuses on APECS' experiences, we will highlight how innovative communication promotes international cooperation and offer suggestions on how to incorporate similar elements into other outreach programs.


SUMMARY The development of LC music headings is traced by reviewing the contributions and practices of the LC Music Division, the NYPL Music Division, and individual members of the Music Library Association. Cooperative efforts between LC and the Music Library Association are a hallmark of this development. Prospects for continuing and expanding this partnership continue today in the foundation provided by the Music Thesaurus Project.


There are in science three fundamentally different kinds of reasoning, Deduction (called by Aristotle {synagögé} or {anagögé}), Induction (Aristotle's and Plato's {epagögé}) and Retroduction (Aristotle's {apagögé}, but misunderstood because of corrupt text, and as misunderstood usually translated abduction). Besides these three, Analogy (Aristotle's {paradeigma}) combines the characters of Induction and Retroduction.


In this paper we describe the conditions of electrochemical synthesis of a homogeneous and highly adherent pink film of poly(Rhodamine B) (PRhB) on a conducting glass substrate, which facilitates and enables its optical characterization. The electrosynthesis was performed by cyclic voltammetry, galvanostatic and potentiostatic techniques in 0.1 M KCl as supporting electrolytes and 1 mM Rhodamine B (RhB) as monomer on fluorine doped tin oxide (FTO) samples. The anodic peak associated with the RhB oxidation appears at 0.977 V during the first scan and shifts to 1.059 V in the following cycles, indicating the increase in the electrical resistance of the polymer coating until it reaches the overpotential to overcome the resistance. Chronopotentiometry and chronoamperometry show that the PRhB is obtained at applied current densities and potentials higher than 10 μA cm-2 and 0.8 V, respectively and the polymer coating become thicker and darken with increasing the applied current and potential. Electrochemical methods show that the polymer growth is controlled by the maximum oxidation potential applied. The physico-chemical properties of generated PRhB film has been characterized by different microscopic and spectroscopic techniques such as scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and UV–visible spectrophotometry (UV-vis). The produced modified electrode would offer a promising candidate for future applications such as sensors and dye synthesized solar cell.


The nature of strain hardening in glassy polymers is investigated by studying the mechanical response of oriented polycarbonate in uniaxial extension and compression. The yield stress in extension is observed to increase strongly with predeformation, whereas it slightly decreases in compression (the so-called Bauschinger effect). Moreover, oriented specimens tend to display increased strain hardening in extension, whereas this nearly vanishes in compression. It is shown that these observations can be captured by the introduction of a viscous contribution to strain hardening in terms of a deformation dependence of the flow stress. This can originate either from a deformation-induced change in activation volume, as observed for isotactic polypropylene, or from a deformation-induced change of the rate constant, as observed for polycarbonate, which causes the room temperature yield kinetics of this material to shift from the α into the (α+β) regime. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Polym Sci Part B: Polym Phys 48: 1483–1491, 2010


OBJECTIVE
To describe the clinical features of lichen sclerosus affecting the genitalia of three unrelated prepubertal girls in whom concerns of sexual abuse had been raised.

CLINICAL FEATURES
three girls ranging from 4 to 9 years of age presented with similar genital and anal findings. Their labial skin was atrophic with pale opalescent patches and a variable amount of labial bruising, haemorrhagic blistering and bleeding. In two, the perianal skin was involved in a similar fashion. In each case the hymen was normal with no sign of acute or chronic trauma.

CONCLUSIONS
Lichen sclerosus affecting the genitalia of prepubertal females is an uncommon condition that may be mistaken for trauma associated with sexual abuse. An awareness of its clinical features is essential not only for those doctors who examine children for physical signs of sexual abuse but also for primary care doctors who may be confronted with an apparently abused child. Early recognition of this disease should, in the absence of other concerns, prevent unnecessary intervention by police and child protection workers.


Introduction: Nowadays cardiovascular disease is a major problem in the world which is known as a leading cause of morbidity and morality. Since, physical activity and exercise training have beneficial role in prevention and treatment of cardiovascular disease; so, cardiac rehabilitation units on the basis of exercise training were established in 1960. Therefore, with attention to scientific evidence, researchers want to review the effects of various exercise training during cardiac rehabilitation program to facilitate return to an active lifestyle in patients with coronary heart disease. Materials and Methods: Comprehensive cardiac rehabilitation consists of medical measurement, exercise prescription, cardiac risk factors modification, education and consultation with the purpose of primary and secondary prevention. Conclusion: These interventions have been designed to limit the progression of cardiac diseases and their related symptoms, to improve psychological status, to increase functional capacity and above all, to reduce cardiovascular mortality. Also, exercise training which has been identified as an integral component of cardiac rehabilitation has useful effects on cardiac disease by decreasing cardiac work load, reduction oxygen in use, improvement myocardial function and endothelial vessels flexibility and increasing maximum oxygen consumption. Keywords: Cardiac rehabilitation, Cardiovascular disease, Exercise training


We introduce a new type of aperiodic hexagonal monotile; a prototile that admits infinitely many tilings of the plane, but any such tiling lacks any translational symmetry. Adding a copy of our monotile to a patch of tiles must satisfy two rules that apply only to adjacent tiles. The first is inspired by the Socolar–Taylor monotile, but can be realised by shape alone. The second is a dendrite rule; a direct isometry of our monotile can be added to any patch of tiles provided that a tree on the monotile connects continuously with a tree on one of its neighbouring tiles. This condition forces tilings to grow along dendrites, which ultimately results in nonperiodic tilings. Our dendrite rule initiates a new method to produce tilings of the plane.


In an extreme event or major disaster, very often there are both alternative actions that might be considered and far more requests for actions than can be executed immediately. The relative desirability of each option for action could be a collaborative expression of a significant number of emergency managers and experts trying to manage the most desirable alternatives at any given time, in real time. Delphi characteristics can satisfy these needs given that anyone can vote or change their vote on any two options, and voting and scaling are used to promote a group understanding. Further utilized with Thurstone's Law of Comparative Judgment, a group decision or the range of acceptability a group is willing to consent to, can be calculated and utilized as a means of producing the best decision. A ubiquitous system for expeditious real-time decision making by large virtual teams in emergency response environments is described.


This paper aralyses and discusses the problems existing in curriculum teaching and practicing of watchkeeping collision avoidance. Hence put forward suggestions to reform this curriculum.


Health promotion aims to increase individuals' decision making toward their own health and help them control their quality of life through personal strategies. Seniors benefit from this process, says the author, who describes a collaborative health promotion and information program at the Ottawa-Carleton Regional Health Department--a program that involves seniors, professionals and volunteers. The needs of the seniors were identified, involvement of relevant organizations requested, then the program was tested with the help of pilot groups. After the program was successfully launched, seniors were also involved in its evaluation and revision.


It is shown that the conventional Smith dead-time compensator can be modified in a fashion which leads to significant improvements in its regulatory capabilities for measurable disturbances or inputs. The proposed modification utilizes effectively the existing prediction capabilities of the conventional dead-time compensator and eliminates the need for a separate feedforward controller in many circumstances under which it is normally employed. The modified dead-time compensator possesses simultaneous feedforward and feedback actions. An additional tuning parameter which controls the degree of dead-time cancellation allows the designer to shape the response according to requirements. Illustrative examples show the advantages of the modified scheme.


The Scotland Bill contains proposals based on the Calman Report to remedy the major financial weakness of the 1997 devolution settlement – namely its limited tax-raising powers. The new funding model will combine Block Grant with new tax revenues from a Scottish Income Tax, a Scottish Land Transaction Tax and a Scottish Landfill Tax. However, it has been heavily criticised by the Scottish Government for having a "long-term deflationary bias". This is a strong attack on a model intended to maintain stability and promote accountability in devolution finance. The current approach is embedded in the UK fiscal framework, in which the UK Government has responsibility for the planning and control of the public finances, and resource allocation to UK Departments and Devolved Administrations. The Scottish Budget therefore benefits from "an automatic macroeconomic stabilisation level and a public expenditure per capita substantially above the UK average". The UK Budget process provides a high degree of stability. It operates through incremental change, in which the major part of the new budget is the existing baseline, and decisions are made around the margins of this budget base. In the case of the Scottish Budget, incremental adjustments are made through the Barnett Formula which delivers the same per capita increase/decrease as comparable UK programmes, and has delivered "stability and predictability" since devolution.


Diffusion controlled processes play a crucial role in the degradation of technical materials. At low temperatures the most significant of them is the diffusion along grain boundaries. In thin film geometry one of the best methods for determining the grain boundary (GB) diffusion coefficient of an impurity element is the Hwang-Balluffi method, in which a surface sensitive technique is used to follow the surface accumulation kinetics. Results of grain boundary diffusion measurements, carried out in our laboratory by this method in three different materials systems (Ag/Pd, Ag/Cu and Au/Ni) are reviewed. In case of Ag diffusion along Pd GBs the surface accumulation was followed by AES method. The data points can be well fitted by an Arrhenius function with an activation energy Q=0.99eV


Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder of an ever-increasing aging population with various pathological features such as β-amyloid (Aβ) aggregation, oxidative stress, an impaired cholinergic system, and neuroinflammation. Several therapeutic drugs have been introduced to slow the progression of AD by targeting the above-mentioned pathways. In addition, emerging evidence suggests that naturally occurring compounds have the potential to serve as adjuvant therapies to alleviate AD symptoms. Carotenoids, a group of natural pigments with antioxidative and anti-inflammatory properties, are proposed to be implicated in neuroprotection. To obtain a comprehensive picture of the effect of carotenoids on AD prevention and development, we critically reviewed and discussed recent evidence from in silico, in vitro, in vivo, and human studies in databases including PubMed, Web of Science, Google Scholar, and Cochrane (CENTRAL). After analyzing the existing evidence, we found that high-quality randomized controlled trials (RCTs) are lacking to explore the neuroprotective role of carotenoids in AD pathogenesis and symptoms, especially carotenoids with solid preclinical evidence such as astaxanthin, fucoxanthin, macular carotenoids, and crocin, in order to develop effective preventive dietary supplements for AD patients to ameliorate the symptoms. This review points out directions for future studies to advance the knowledge in this field.


Since Zuckerkandl and Pauling (1962, 1965) proposed the molecular clock, many studies seem to have supported their prediction that rates of molecular and morphological evolution generally will be decoupled. Most of these studies were aimed at taxa in which rates of morphological evolution were thought to vary greatly a priori. For the current survey eight diverse taxa were systematically chosen from published studies without regard to prior expectations about rates. Two approaches showed that rates of molecular and morphological evolution may usually be coupled. First, correlations in the total number of changes accumulated in terminal taxa suggest that some mechanism alters the rates of both morphological and molecular evolution in concert. Second, node‐density effects were removed statistically, and average corrected base‐to‐tip totals were compared among sister clades. Across all taxa 50 of 72 of these corrected contrasts support the hypothesis that rates of molecular and morphological evolution are correlated; this finding is highly significant by a binomial test. Furthermore, there were positive correlations between inferred molecular and morphological branch lengths in seven of eight cases, which is also significant. These branch length correlations are consistent with the rate correlations, and suggest that amounts of molecular and morphological evolution often are correlated also. This study supports the assumptions of several phylogenetic methods, and highlights a need for new inquiries into many aspects of both molecular and morphological evolution.


We present a general paradigm for dynamic 3D reconstruction from multiple independent and uncontrolled image sources having arbitrary temporal sampling density and distribution. Our graph-theoretic formulation models the spatio-temporal relationships among our observations in terms of the joint estimation of their 3D geometry and its discrete Laplace operator. Towards this end, we define a tri-convex optimization framework that leverages the geometric properties and dependencies found among a Euclidean shape-space and the discrete Laplace operator describing its local and global topology. We present a reconstructability analysis, experiments on motion capture data and multi-view image datasets, as well as explore applications to geometry-based event segmentation and data association.


We introduce a general class of higher order parameter-dependent Whitney elements, unlike previous approaches that resulted in specific element definitions. All elements of this kind provide the same solution, but their convergence properties may be significantly different. The most essential fact, though, is the introduction of an optimization procedure, which reveals the existence of an optimal, with respect to convergence, element. The produced second order elements are tested in both two-dimensional (2-D) and three-dimensional (3-D) microwave simulations.


We propose a new design of quantum cascade lasers integrated with resonant intersubband nonlinearities, in which the laser is divided into two separately contacted and biased sections along the cavity length. One section operates as a laser active medium while another section serves as a nonlinear element. We show that such schemes turn out to be surprisingly flexible and efficient in implementing various resonant optical nonlinearities.


In this paper an analysis of the influence of polymer concrete sample shape and dimensions on ultrasonic wave propagation is carried out. Compositions of tested fly ash polymer concretes were determined using a material optimization approach. The tests were carried out on the samples of three shapes: cubes, beams, and plates. The ultrasonic testing was done by a direct method (transmission method) using a digital ultrasonic flow detector and piezoelectric transducers of 100 kHz central frequency. Propagation of the ultrasonic wave was characterized by pulse velocity. Frequency spectra and time-frequency spectrograms obtained using Fourier transform and Fourier-based synchrosqueezing transform were also presented. The correlation analysis showed that neither the path length nor the lateral dimension to the direction of wave propagation are not statistically significant for the UPV variability. However, a general trend of decrease in the UPV with increasing the path length was noticed. The analysis of the signal in time-frequency domain seemed to be useful in the analysis of particulate composites properties, especially when UPV changes are not clear enough, since it revealed greater differences in relation to changes in sample geometry than frequency spectra analysis.


The objective of the paper is to provide an analytical perspective on the importance of South African (SA) civil aircraft firms building technological capabilities so as to develop technological competence and competitiveness in the global markets. The paper emphasises the role of government and the national technological assets in shaping national technological capabilities and competencies through various support mechanisms that could facilitate firm-level productivity and sustainable growth. It also indicates the importance of technological knowledge, learning and absorptive capacity in contributing towards shaping the nation's capability building within firms. Factors found to have impacted on the technology capability building process of the SA civil aircraft industry are discussed. The paper proposes interventions needed for the successful building of technological capabilities and national technological competencies that could lead to growth and globalisation.


Competing definitions and limited empirical research are impediments to the emerging field of social entrepreneurship. Our study provides a systematic review of the literature and empirical materials used. A standardized search of academic databases and citation analyses revealed trends in the literature. Content analysis was applied to a total of 567 unique articles from 1987 to 2008 revealing patterns in the research. A total of 274 unique case studies or examples were cited in 123 articles, and we analysed their characteristics. Generally, we found very little empirical data on the topic, confirming the need for more rigorous empirical research.


The magnetoimpedance effect has been measured in as-received and current annealed Fe71Cr7Si9B13 amorphous wires under torsional stress varied up to 1.2 rad/cm. It was found that the torsional stress dependence of impedance of as-received amorphous wire has a non-monotonous shape with first an increase of the impedance and then a decrease. On the other hand, the impedance of current annealed wire directly starts to decrease with increasing torsional stress. The current annealing of wire results in a large variation in the magnitude of torsional stress impedance effect, (ΔZ/Z)ξ(%), up to 150%. Also, a simple mathematical model based on the magnetic moment rotation to explain torsional stress versus impedance data was developed and the results were partly discussed on the basis of this model. (© 2004 WILEY-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)


With recent advances in virtual computing and the revelation that compute-intensive tasks run well on system virtual machines (VMs), the ability to develop, deploy, and manage distributed systems has been ameliorated. This paper explores the design space of VM-based sandboxes where the following techniques that facilitate the deployment of secure nodes in wide-area overlays of virtual workstations (WOWs) are employed: DHCP-based virtual IP address allocation, self-configuring virtual networks supporting peer-to-peer NAT traversal, stacked file systems, and IPsec-based host authentication and end-to-end encryption of communication channels. Experiments with implementations of single-image VM sandboxes, which incorporate the above features and are easily deployable on hosted I/O VMMs, show execution time overheads of 10.6% or less for a batch- oriented CPU-intensive benchmark.


Although promising for many electronic applications, further understanding of carbon nanotubes systems are required for practical designs. A difficulty currently hindering further development in this field is the considerable degradation of transport properties in a single-wall carbon nanotube (SWCNT) when it is subjected to ambient conditions or functionalized. Double-wall carbon nanotubes (DWCNT) could solve this problem, by allowing the outer tube to be functionalized while the inner tube would retain a pristine structure and it's promising electronic properties. However, our understanding of interactions between the tubes and their consequences on the system's electronic properties is still incomplete. In this presentation, we investigate those interactions using density-functional theory (DFT) calculations. In particular, we investigate separately the effects of structural deformations, Fermi energy realignment and electronic orbital overlap on the band structure of DWCNT. The effects of functionalization will also be addressed.


The aim of this contribution is to explore how the recent internationalization and the increasing importance of 'cosmopolitan capital' has impacted on the structure and character of the field of the Swiss business elite. For this purpose we will develop the notion of cosmopolitan capital and comparatively investigate the field of the Swiss business elite in 1980, 2000 and 2010 with multiple correspondence analysis. We can show that in this period international managers with transnational careers and networks not only grow in number, but come to conquer the apex of the biggest and highest capitalized Swiss firms. At the same time, national forms of capital decline in importance and Swiss managers themselves are differentiated increasingly into national and international fractions.


Patient: Male, 66-year-old Final Diagnosis: Colon adenocarcinoma • ventricular arrhythmia Symptoms: Cardiac arrest • syncope Medication: — Clinical Procedure: Cardiac catheterization • Cardiac Electronic Implantable Device (CEID) Specialty: Cardiology • General and Internal Medicine • Oncology Objective: Unusual clinical course Background: 5-Fluorouracil (5-FU) is a widely used intravenous chemotherapy agent that is highly effective in the treatment of a variety of solid malignancies. Cardiotoxicity related to 5-FU is a complex clinical entity associated with significant morbidity and mortality. Whether a patient who experienced a major cardiac side effect from 5-FU can be safely rechallenged with this drug is a clinical dilemma. Case Report: We present the case of a patient with stage III colorectal adenocarcinoma who experienced ventricular fibrillation during the first cycle of FOLFOX (5-FU, folinic acid, and oxaliplatin) regimen in the adjuvant setting. Post-resuscitation electrocardiogram revealed ST-elevation in the inferior leads with reciprocal changes. Coronary angiogram revealed no obstructive coronary artery disease. Cardiac workup led to the conclusion of probable fluorouracil-induced vasospasm as the cause of his cardiac arrest. He received implantable cardioverter defibrillator. The decision was made to hold 5-FU. At 3-month follow-up, there was evidence of progressive metastasis. After comprehensive risk-benefit discussions, the decision was made for palliative chemotherapy using 5-FU/leucovorin. A pre-treatment regimen including isosorbide dinitrate, diltiazem, and metoprolol was used. The patient tolerated 5-FU rechallenge without recurrent cardiovascular complication. Conclusions: The cardiotoxicity profile of 5-FU can range from anginal chest pain to sudden cardiac death. When considering 5-FU rechallenge, clinicians should adopt a multidisciplinary approach, favor using prophylactic antianginal therapy, change to bolus dosing, and use continuous telemetry monitoring. Screening patients for dihydropyrimidine dehydrogenase deficiency prior to 5-FU administration may facilitate an individualized strategy for optimal dosing and safety.


Allergic rhinitis is one of the most common allergic disorders throughout the world. The conventional therapies are effective in alleviating symptoms but the efficacy is limited and not persistent. Many of the indigenous herbal preparations used by the tribes are little known to the public due to lack of scientific evaluation. The aqueous ethanol extracts of various traditional herbs like Adhatoda vasica, Acorus calamus, Glyzyrrhiza glabra, Ocimum sanctum, Tylophora asthmatica, Piper longum and Solanum xanthocarpum was evaluated for its antihistaminic activity by the inhibition of histamine induced contractions on the guinea pig ileum. The results showed that the formulated cough syrup inhibited histamine induced contractions of guinea pig ileum at 2.5 to 25 µg/ml concentrations in a dose dependent manner (p < 0.01, p < 0.05) and also significantly (p < 0.05) inhibited degranulation of mast cells. All the results were well comparable with the standard benadryl cough syrup (diphenhydramine).

 Key words: Antihistaminic syrup, formulation, asthma, siddha, ayurveda.


It is frequently stated that the status and working conditions of nurses are low because nursing is a female profession dominated by male physicians. This paper contends that the current situation is primarily the result of the nursing education and service systems which discourage independent thinking and initiative.

In Israel, men constitute less than 10% of the nursing manpower pool, but the percent is slowly increasing. The percentage of male applicants admitted to schools of nursing is lower than that of women. However, after graduation the men have greater work retention and achieve higher positions than their female colleagues.

Nursing requires more and better candidates. Academization of nursing could, it is believed, attract both male and female applicants of stature. Graduates of such programmes should be qualified to raise the status, material and other rewards for nursing.


In this study, the effect of utilizing different type of signatures on plant detection success is evaluated on hyperspectral aerial images. Plant regions are tried to detect using spectral signatures of leaf, stem and tassel belonging to the plant separately and the plant representative signature created by averaging of signatures of selected region on the aerial images. The signatures used for detection are generated from hyperspectral images taken from 10m distance to target plant. The Spectral Angle Mapper(SAM) and Generalized Likelihood Ratio Test(GLRT) algorithms is used to target detection. Performance evaluation are made using on Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves. When the results were evaluated, the performance of the detection is higher with the use of plant representative signature.


This report describes the design of a vision system which is used to control a pair of cameras to move in a way like humans move their eyes. An existing algorithm has been used to give a value of 'interestingness' to each region in the image. This algorithm was extended to work in a moving-camera setup. It has been used to control the cameras to attend interesting targets in its environment in a human-looking way. A stereo matching algorithm has been designed to let the two cameras converge such that the attended target is in the center of both camera images, enabling target depth estimation. These two algorithms have been combined resulting in a setup that scans its environment for salient targets and determines their distance.


The availability of latex microspheres, compact television cameras and electronic calculators make it possible to perform an experiment on Brownian movement in one laboratory period. A more accurate value of N can be determined by other methods. However, the experiment described above has several valuable pedagogical outcomes. Undergraduate students get experience with several experimental techniques: (i) recording a `random walk' of a microphere; (ii) plotting a histogram of displacements; (iii) fitting a Gaussian curve to the histogram; (iv) checking the goodness of fit analytically or with probability graph paper; (v) calibrating screen displacements with a diffraction grating; (vi) calculating Avogadro's number from the experimental data; (vii) verifying data validity with the Einstein - Smoluchowski Law. The experiment also provides valuable practice in unit conversion and error analysis. Another instructive feature: the experiment makes the students aware of Einstein's work other than relativity. The students' reactions to the experiment were positive: `interesting', `challenging', `fun'.


This paper researches on the effects of Reynolds number and mass flow ratio on the film cooling characteristics at high turbulence intensity (Tu = 15%). The experiment adopted an actual three-dimensional twisted vane and presents the film cooling characteristics on full-coverage film surface in a two-passage, linear cascade. The cooling effectiveness and heat transfer coefficient of the vane's whole surface were obtained by using transient liquid crystal measurement technique. The transient liquid crystal is SPN/R35C1W, whose bandwidth is 2°C. There are fifteen rows of film cooling holes which have different diameter, injection angle and yaw angle. The secondary flow was supplied by two cavities. The front cavity supplied the secondary flow to thirteen rows of film cooling holes that were arranged in the suction surface, the leading edge and the front half of the pressure surface. The rear cavity supplied the secondary flow to the rear half of pressure surface which included two rows of film cooling holes. The investigated parameters are Reynolds number of 1 × 105, 1.3 × 105 and 1.6 × 105 and the mass flow ratio of MFR = 5.5%∼12.5% (6 cases). The data recorded in the experiment was analyzed with MATLAB.
 Results show that the combined effects of mass flow ratio and channel vortex are the maintain reasons that influence the distribution of cooling effectiveness in the contour. Increasing the mass flow ratio can improve the film cooling effectiveness on leading edge and pressure surface, while that presents complex rule on suction surface. Increasing the Reynolds number can improve the heat transfer coefficient at the same mass flow ratio. When increasing the mass flow ratio, the heat transfer coefficient increases on leading edge and pressure surface at Re = 1.6 × 105. However, the decreases at film hole outlet region on the suction side, and not obviously changes at the film hole downstream region.


Introduction: Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) is a functional gastrointestinal disorder and requires early diagnosis due to its negative impacts on the quality of life. According to the lifestyle pattern of medical students, IBS has a significant prevalence in these individuals. Objectives: The present study aims to investigate the prevalence and factors associated with IBS in medical students. Patients and Methods: This cross-sectional study has been conducted on 100 medical students studying at Isfahan University of Medical Sciences in 2019-2020. The Rome IV diagnostic criteria were administered to diagnose IBS and individuals were divided into four groups of constipation-dominant (IBS-C), diarrhea-dominant (IBS-D), mixed type (IBS-M) and unspecified (IBS-U). The association of studying grade, gender and residence with IBS was evaluated. Results: The mean age of the students was 23.2±4.8 years, including 68 (68%) women. According to Rome -IV criteria, 24 (24%) ones were diagnosed with IBS. The IBS cases were dominantly in IBS-C group (54.16%). IBS was not associated with gender (P=0.498), educational grade (P=0.661) and type of residence (P=0.562) in the studied medical students. Conclusion: According to the present study, the prevalence of IBS was 24% among medical students, which was higher among women. Most patients had IBS-C, but IBS did not show a statistically significant relationship with gender, educational grade and type of residence.


Rapid production in the monkey of a pathological condition resembling acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, marked by demyelination, can be achieved by the use of adjuvants added to rabbit brain emulsions.


Forty-one patients on our chronic hemodialysis program were assessed for the degree of progression of bone disease over an average period of 46 months. Seven patients were using a fluoridated dialysate. Four of these seven patients developed a marked increase in osteoid as judged by bone biopsy, while in the nonfluoridated group the amount of osteoid remained within normal limits.In the absence of fluoride, although osteitis fibrosa occurred, it was reversible in 10 out of 12 cases by dihydrotachysterol treatment, and overall there was no evidence of progression of bone disease at the end of the study period.


Abstract A case study of a developing cyclone is used to show that the three-dimensional distribution of height change during development can be strongly sensitive to temperature changes which occur in the lower stratosphere in association with an evolving tropopause undulation. Quantitative analysis of the storm with a geopotential height tendency equation indicates that a synergistic process developed between the stratosphere and troposphere, whereby the vertical motion pattern maintained and intensified the upper-level temperature anomalies while the subsequent upper-level temperature advection led to an enhanced vertical circulation. Using the results of this diagnostic study, a conceptual model is constructed. The conceptual model is based on the hydrostatic and wind-field adjustments that occur as tropopause undulations propagate over favored regions of tropospheric warm advection and less stable air.


AIM
Assessment of the smoking cessation programme "Just be smoke free".

METHOD
Follow-up data assessment of the participants who registered for the programme between April 2002 and March 2003.

INTERVENTION
"Just be smoke free" is a smoking cessation programme targeting adolescents and young adults. Target groups are not only smokers, but also non- and ex-smokers. Moreover the project takes into account the different stages smokers undergo with regard to their motivation to stop smoking. Smokers who are not prepared to quit smoking are offered an individualised "smoker's profile" in order to sensitise them to their smoking behaviour, motives and risk situations. Smokers who are prepared to give up, are provided with a self-help cessation manual. As an incentive, on four occasions per year, participants can win cash prizes of up to 1,000 Euro.

RESULTS
From April 2002 to March 2003, 1,417 smokers registered for the programme, of which 1,265 wanted to quit and 152 were interested in a "smoker's profile". The mean age of the participants was 21.5 years and 56.7 % were female. In addition, 2,132 used the internet page for the programme. 408 smokers took part in the follow-up measurement (retention rate 32.3 %). Of these, 46.1 % (N = 188) reported to have ceased to smoke. In a projected analysis considering those who did not take part in the follow-up measurement as smokers - the quit rate was 14.9 %.

CONCLUSIONS
A large number of smoking adolescents and young adults were covered by the programme. The quit rate can be considered as good, also in comparison to international smoking cessation studies.


Unsupervised anomaly detection (UAD) attracts a lot of research interest and drives widespread applications, where only anomaly-free samples are available for training. Some UAD applications intend to further locate the anomalous regions without any anomaly information. Although the absence of anomalous samples and annotations deteriorates the UAD performance, an inconspicuous yet powerful statistics model, the normalizing flows, is appropriate for anomaly detection and localization in an unsupervised fashion. The flow-based probabilistic models, only trained on anomaly-free data, can efficiently distinguish unpredictable anomalies by assigning them much lower likelihoods than normal data. Nevertheless, the size variation of unpredictable anomalies introduces another inconvenience to the flow-based methods for high-precision anomaly detection and localization. To generalize the anomaly size variation, we propose a novel Multi-Scale Flow-based framework dubbed MSFlow composed of asymmetrical parallel flows followed by a fusion flow to exchange multi-scale perceptions. Moreover, different multi-scale aggregation strategies are adopted for image-wise anomaly detection and pixel-wise anomaly localization according to the discrepancy between them. The proposed MSFlow is evaluated on three anomaly detection datasets, significantly outperforming existing methods. Notably, on the challenging MVTec AD benchmark, our MSFlow achieves a new state-of-the-art with a detection AUORC score of up to 99.7%, localization AUCROC score of 98.8%, and PRO score of 97.1%. The reproducible code is available at https://github.com/cool-xuan/msflow.


We directly measure the three-dimensional movement of intrinsic point defects driven by applied electric fields inside ZnO nano- and micro-wire metal-semiconductor-metal device structures. Using depth- and spatially resolved cathodoluminescence spectroscopy (CLS) in situ to map the spatial distributions of local defect densities with increasing applied bias, we drive the reversible conversion of metal-ZnO contacts from rectifying to Ohmic and back. These results demonstrate how defect movements systematically determine Ohmic and Schottky barriers to ZnO nano- and microwires and how they can account for the widely reported instability in nanowire transport. Exceeding a characteristic threshold voltage, in situ CLS reveals a current-induced thermal runaway that drives the radial diffusion of defects toward the nanowire free surface, causing VO defects to accumulate at the metal-semiconductor interfaces. In situ post- vs pre-breakdown CLS reveal micrometer-scale wire asperities, which X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) finds to have highly oxygen-deficient surface layers that can be attributed to the migration of preexisting VO species. These findings show the importance of in-operando intrinsic point-defect migration during nanoscale electric field measurements in general. This work also demonstrates a novel method for ZnO nanowire refinement and processing.


The policy goal of merger remedies is to facilitate mergers' potential contribution to dynamic and productive efficiencies while preserving pre-merger consumer surplus. But recent empirical scholarship shows that most remedies fail to achieve this goal. I propose an incentive contract, inspired by the theory of incentive-based regulation in general and price-cap regulation in particular, that can serve as a conduct remedy and that has strong theoretical and practical advantages relative to standard divestiture and conduct remedies. The remedy requires the merged firm to contract with a private third party to whom it makes cash payments whenever it raises price or lowers quantity or quality relative to pre-merger levels, where the payments are at least as large as the revenue gain from such actions. To cope with adverse demand shocks, the contract lets the firm sell a lower than pre-merger quantity so long as price is no higher and quality no lower than pre-merger. To cope with adverse supply shocks, the pre-merger price threshold that the contract does not allow the firm's post-merger price to exceed can be adjusted by an index of input cost inflation. To cope with variations in product quality, the contract lets the firm vary quality so long as the post-merger product is weakly revealed-preferred by its customers to the pre-merger product. The payout structure effectively imposes a contractual obligation on the firm to preserve pre-merger consumer surplus, while giving the firm a residual claim on all merger-induced cost savings thereby eliminating moral hazard.The firm's payouts to its contractual counterparty are contingent on the same three variables — price, quantity, and quality — that are the central terms in the firm's own sales contracts with its customers. The same market forces, contract laws, and external auditing mechanisms that ensure adequate observability of these variables to the firm's customers therefore ensure their observability to the counterparty. The contract does not require information on economic costs or the demand curve. In contrast to divestitures, my remedy does not require the merging firm to shed parts potentially critical to its efficiency.Standard conduct remedies suffer from risks of asymmetric information, incomplete specification, countervailing incentives, irrelevance in face of market dynamics, and agency inappropriateness for regulatory roles. In contrast, my contract conditions on variables less vulnerable to problems of asymmetric information and incomplete specification. It shapes incentives only to the minimal extent necessary to preserve consumer surplus, only as much as any other contract does, and in a way that induces the firm to find the least cost way of preserving consumer surplus. It addresses market dynamics arising from adverse demand and supply shocks and product innovation. It absolves the agencies of the fraught responsibilities of predicting merger effects and post-merger regulation. It relies on contract- and market-based mechanisms for securing the policy goals of the merger regime. It is more sensitive, specific, and implementable than standard remedies. It is potentially the most light-handed of remedies since a merged firm committed to fulfilling its part of the policy bargain will find none of its constraints binding.


Structural equation modelling has become widespread in the marketing research domain due to the possibility of creating and investigating latent constructs. Today, several estimation methods are available, each with strengths and drawbacks. This study investigates how the established estimation methods of partial-least-squares (PLS), maximum likelihood (ML) and full-information maximum likelihood (FIML) perform with an increasing percentage of missing values (MVs). The research was conducted by investigating an adapted model of the European customer satisfaction index (ECSI). MVs were randomly generated with an algorithm. The performance of PLS, ML and FIML was tested with eight data sets that contained between 2.22% and 27.78% randomly generated MVs. It was shown that ML performs relatively poorly if the percentage of MVs exceeds 7%, while PLS performs satisfactorily if the percentage of MVs does not exceed 9%. FIML was shown to be mostly stable up to 17% MVs.


This chapter is concerned with first-best marginal cost pricing (MCP) in a stochastic network with both supply and travel demand uncertainty and perception errors within the travelers' route choice decision processes. To account for the travelers' perception error, moment analysis is adopted in this chapter to derive the mean and variance of total perceived travel time of the network. We then developed a Perceived Risk-Based Stochastic Network Marginal Cost Pricing (PRSN-MCP) model. Furthermore, in order to illustrate the effect of incorporating both stochastic supply and demand into the PRSN-MCP model, the calculation of the PRSN-MCP model is divided up into four scenarios under different simplifications of network uncertainties. Numerical examples are also provided to demonstrate the importance and properties of the proposed model. The main finding is that ignoring the effect of stochastic travel demand, capacity degradation, and travelers' perception error may significantly reduce the performance of the first-best MCP tolls, especially under high traveler's confidence and network congestion levels.


Sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl) is widely used as a disinfectant agent for water treatment and surface cleaning. A straightforward way to produce NaOCl is by the electrolysis of an aqueous sodium chloride (NaCl) solution. This process presents several side reactions decreasing its efficiency with hypochlorite reduction on the cathode surface being one of the main detrimental reactions. In this work, we have studied carbon-based electrodes modified with cerium oxide (CeO2), fluorine, and platinum nanoparticles as cathodes for hypochlorite production. Fluorination was carried out electrochemically; the polyol method was used to synthesize platinum nanoparticles; and the hydrothermal process was applied to form a CeO2 layer. Scanning electron microscopy, FTIR, and inductively coupled plasma (ICP) indicated the presence of cerium oxide as a film, fluorine groups on the substrate, and a load of 3.2 mg/cm2 of platinum nanoparticles and 2.7 mg/cm2 of CeO2. From electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, it was possible to demonstrate that incorporating platinum and fluorine decreases the charge transfer resistance by 16% and 28%, respectively. Linear sweep voltammetry showed a significant decrease in hypochlorite reduction when the substrate was doped with fluorine from −16.6 mA/cm2 at −0.6 V to −9.64 mA/cm2 that further reduced to −8.78 mA/cm2 with cerium oxide covered fluorinated electrodes. The performance of the cathode materials during hypochlorite production improved by 80% compared with pristine activated carbon cloth (ACC) electrodes. The improvement toward hindering NaOCl reduction is probably caused by the incorporation of a partial negative charge upon doping with fluorine.


New investigations on a Late Devonian outcrop near Esfahan (Chahriseh section) revealed new data about the Polygnathus bouckareti, Polygnathus communis group and genus Clydagnathus. The feature differentiation related to the recovered species shows the exigency of a few changes in the age and variety of morphotypes of P. communis group. Some identified species in this paper are: Polygnathus communis communis, P. communis mugodzharicus, P. bouckaerti, P. pomeranicus, P. lanceolus, P. inconcinnus, Icriodus alternatus alternatus and I. cornutus. By considering the conodont associations, changes in the age of P. bouckaerti and P. communis mugodzharicus are the other results. In addition, two morphotypes of P. communis mugodzharicus and more detailed explanation of P. communis group are presented.


Trifluoroacylated, trimethylsilylated and methylated mesocarb (3-(1-methyl-2-phenylethyl)-5-[[(phenylamino) carbonyl]amino]-1,2, 3-oxadiazolium) were analyzed by gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS). In trifluoroacylation, N-trifluoroacylated sydnophen (SP-NTFA), where the exocyclic nitrogen atom of the sydnonimine ring attacks N-methylbis(trifluoroacetamide), was identified by GC/MS. However, in trimethylsilylation, C-trimethylsilylated sydnophen (SP-CTMS), where the C-4 atom of the sydnonimine ring attacks N-methyl-N-trimethylsilyltrifluoroacetamide, was detected. SP-NTFA and SP-CTMS are intermediates of mesocarb in pyrolysis, and retain an intact sydnonimine ring. In methylation, a ketene form of mesocarb reacts as a nucleophile with methyl iodide to produce methylated N-nitroso-N-cyanomethylamphetamine. Thus, depending on the reaction substituents, the intermediate of mesocarb in pyrolysis was identified to be either an intact sydnonimine ring skeleton or an open-ring compound using GC/MS. Copyright 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Background: There is growing evidence that the HER2/neu-status of distant metastases or minimal residual disease in blood and bone marrow may differ from the primary tumor in patients with breast cancer. The HER2/neu-status of CTCs was prospectively evaluated in patients with HER2/neu negative primary breast cancer randomized into the German multicenter SUCCESS C study. Methods: The SUCCESS C trial is a randomized Phase III study comparing FEC-Docetaxel (FEC-Doc) vs. Docetaxel-Cyclophosphamid (DC) as well as 2 years of a lifestyle-intervention in patients with early, HER2/neu negative, node positive or high-risk node negative primary breast cancer. As part of the translational research program, 23ml peripheral blood were drawn after adjuvant chemotherapy. In 505 samples, the prevalence of CTCs and their HER2/neu-status were assessed using the CellSearch System (Veridex, USA). After immunomagnetic enrichment with an anti-Epcam-antibody, cells were labelled with anti-CK8/18/19 and anti-CD45 antibodies. A fluorescein conjugate antibody with anti-CK-Fluorescein Isothiocyanate (FITC) was used for HER2/neu phenotyping. The cut-off for CTC-positivity was ≥ 1 CTC and for HER2/neu ≥ 1 CTC with strong HER2/neu-staining (+++). Results: 26,9% of pts (n = 136) were positive for CTCs (mean 1.78; range 1–7; median = 1). The number of detected CTC was distributed as follows: 1 CTC (n = 76; 55.9%), 2 CTCs (n = 35; 25.7%), 3 CTCs (n = 13; 9.6%), 4 CTCs (n = 7; 5.2%) and ≥ 5 CTCs (n = 5; 3.7%). HER2/neu staning of CTCs was not detectable or weak in 26.5% (n = 36) and 4.4% (n = 6) of CTC positive patients respectively and therefore categorized as HER2/neu negative. In 32.4% of the CTC-positive patients (n = 44), we detected moderate and in 36.8% (n = 50) strong HER2/neu-staining of ≥ 1 CTC per sample. No association was found between CTCs or the HER2/neu-status of CTCs with tumor size, histopathological grading, hormone receptor status or axillary lymph node involvement. Conclusions: The data of this trial confirm previous findings that patients with HER2/neu negative primary breast cancer can show HER2/neu positive minimal residual disease. These results underline the importance of frequent HER2/neu determination during follow up and disease progression. Survival data within the Success C trial will give further insight into the tumor biology of HER2/neu negative disease. Citation Information: Cancer Res 2012;72(24 Suppl):Abstract nr P2-01-02.


Colorectal cancer has become one of the most common malignant tumors that affects Chinese's health. Recurrence and metastasis are main reasons for death of colorectal cancer patients. Making up individualized and comprehensive therapeutic strategy according to patients' specific matters is the developmental direction of diagnosis and treatment for colorectal cancer. Only if standardize clinical pathway, perfect postoperative follow-up system, and accelerate research development on biomarkers, individualized therapy of colorectal cancer can be accomplished.


Temperature is a critical property of smart systems, due to its impact on reliability and to its inter-dependence with power consumption. Unfortunately, the current design flows evaluate thermal evolution ex-post on offline power traces. This does not allow to consider temperature as a dimension in the design loop, and it misses all the complex inter-dependencies with design choices and power evolution. In this article, by adopting the functional language SystemC-AMS (Analog Mixed Signal), we propose a method to enable thermal/power/functional co-simulation. The system thermal model is built by using state-of-the-art circuit equivalent models, by exploiting the support for electrical linear networks intrinsic of SystemC-AMS. The experimental results will show that the choice of SystemC-AMS is a winning strategy for building a simultaneous simulation of multiple functional and extra-functional properties of a system. The generated code exposes an accuracy comparable to that of the reference thermal simulator HotSpot. Additionally, the initial overhead due to the general purpose nature of SystemC-AMS is compensated by the surprisingly high performance of transient simulation, with speedups as high as two orders of magnitude.


Electrofishing injury studies in Arizona and Alaska revealed spinal injury rates of over 50% among large (>300 mm long) rainbow trout Oncorhynchus mykiss captured by electrofishing with pulsed direct current (PDC). My goal was to identify an alternative waveform that would efficiently capture large rainbow trout with injury rates less than 15%. Experiments in homogeneous and heterogeneous electrical fields tested six waveforms; lower injury rates resulted with DC (17%), C P S TM (8%), and 20-Hz PDC at 75% duty cycle (25%). In field experiments with these three waveforms, PDC and DC gave higher capture rates than CPSTM. However, injury rate was 60% with 20-Hz PDC and highly variable (0-47%) with DC. Long-term mortality of rainbow trout shocked with 60-Hz PDC at 50% duty cycle was 35% after 203 days. I recommend DC as an alternative to PDC waveforms for relatively safe and efficient capture of large rainbow trout.


Bovine placental lactogen (bPL) is capable of binding and transducing biological activity via somatogenic and lactogenic receptors. To modify this capability, three analogs, bPL(K73D), bPL(K73F) and bPL(K73A), mutated at position 73, and corresponding to R64 in human GH (hGH), were produced in Escherichia coli. Circular dichroic spectrum analyses indicated proper refolding in all cases. Biological activity of these analogs was tested in vitro. In a lactogenic-receptor-mediated Nb2 rat lymphoma cell bioassay, bPL and its analogs acted similarly. In another lactogenic bioassay that measures beta-casein synthesis by HC-11 mouse mammary-gland cells, the analogs were 30-40% as potent as bPL. In contrast, somatogenic receptor-mediated bioactivity in FDC-P1 cells transfected with either rabbit (rb) or hGH receptor (R) was almost completely abolished in these analogs. In receptor binding assays, the effect was more conspicuous and the mutations affected not only somatogenic but also lactogenic binding. Binding to rat (r) and rabbit PRL receptor extracellular domains (ECDs) or membrane-embedded receptors was only slightly changed, except for bPL (K73D), which displayed very low affinity. In somatogenic binding assays to intact IM-9 human lymphocytes, hGHR-ECD or bovine liver membranes, bPL (K73D) did not bind at all, and bPL(K73F) or bPL(K73A) binding was drastically reduced. Binding experiments performed in real time using a BIAcore apparatus revealed that the decreased binding could be mainly attributed to increased k(off) rather than decreased k(on) values. The complex with hGHR-ECD revealed a 2:1 stoichiometry with bPL, bPL(K73F) and bPL(K73A), although the complex with these analogs was less stable than with bPL, whereas bPL(K73D) scarcely assembled a 1:1 complex. In contrast, bPL and the three analogs formed stable 1:2 complexes with rPRL-ECD. These results suggest that position 73 in bPL is more important for somatogenic than lactogenic properties and concurs with results from other groups, which have shown that R64, the analogous amino acid in hGH holds the same differential importance with respect to somatogenic binding.


The intensity of unfavourable phenomena occurring in the nanofiltration process of fermentation solutions, and the possibility of cleaning the membranes after this process were studied. The experiment was carried out using a tubular module equipped with the AFC-30 membrane. The filtration process was carried out at a transmembrane pressure of 2.0 MPa, linear velocity of the feed of 3.4 m/s and the temperature of the feed equal to 20 C. Hydraulic performance of the membrane was tested both during the filtration of model and real solutions. The conditions for efficient cleaning of fouled surfaces of the membranes by using different chemical reagents were determined. It was also attempted to rinse the membrane with clean water. A preliminary study was performed to determine the transport and separation characteristics of the AFC-30 membrane for deionized water and salt solutions of NaCl and MgSO4 representing monoand divalent ions, respectively. In this case, the membrane was tested under varying transmembrane pressure in the range of 1.0 to 2.0 MPa.


The Achilles heel of plain old balloon angioplasty (POBA) is neointimal hyperplasia (NIH) and restenosis, caused from the barotrauma of ballooning. Drug-coated balloons using a paclitaxel-based platform (PCB) have been shown to retard the restenotic process, using the anti-proliferative effects of paclitaxel, and give longer vessel patency. This is important in the setting of chronic limb threatening ischemia (CLTI) and for the protracted wound healing process in these frail patients. However, during PCB application, more than 50% of the drug is lost downstream, a phenomenon termed particulate embolization. This is thought to account for the slow- or no-flow phenomenon encountered after PCB use. Recent data suggest that slow-flow phenomenon was associated with a lower target lesion revascularisation rate and worse amputation free survival (AFS). The use of sirolimus coated balloons (SCB) to impede the NIH cascade has been less well studied but recent data suggested excellent short-term efficacy and found no slow flow phenomenon with their use in the tibial arteries in CLTI patients. Aim of this case series is to highlight the difference in flow phenomena using PCB and SCB elution in the setting of CLTI. We evaluated the use of parametric colour coding and time attenuation curves (TAC) as a quantitative measure of blood flow. SCB may have an advantage over PCB use in the peripheral vasculature because of a reduced incidence of slow flow phenomenon following drug elution.


The Atacama Desert of northern Chile may be the most lifeless place on Earth, yet where the desert meets the Pacific coastal range desiccation-tolerant micro-organisms are known to exist. The gradient of biodiversity and habitats in the Atacama's subregions remain unexplored and are the focus of the Life in the Atacama project. To conduct this investigation, long traverses must be made across the desert with instruments for geologic and biologic measurements. In this paper we motivate the Life in the Atacama project from both astrobiologic and robotic perspectives. We focus on some of the research challenges we are facing to enable endurance navigation, resource cognizance, and long-term survivability. We conducted our first scientific investigation and technical experiments in Chile with the mobile robot Hyperion. We describe the experiments and the results of our analysis. These results give us insight into the design of an effective robotic astrobiologist and into the methods by which we will conduct scientific investigation in the next field season.


Objective: To review the published research for reported effectiveness of telemedicine in reducing suicide ideation and behavior in patients already diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder.
Design: A thorough literature search on the PubMed, Web of Science, PsycInfo, Cochrane Library, and TRIP (Turning Research Into Practice) Medical Database was conducted. Phrases such as "telemedicine," "telehealth," "remote consultation," "mobile health," "psychiatric disorders," "suicide," "suicide, attempted or ideation," and "telepsychiatry" were employed in a variety of combinations. The primary inclusion criteria encompassed peer-reviewed articles published in the past 5 years. Secondary inclusion criteria comprised: (1) the diagnosis of any psychiatric disorder for all patients included in the study, (2) the absence or presence of use of telepsychiatry to offer consultation and communication, and (3) reported outcomes involving suicide rates or attempted suicide rates. The research publications passing inclusion criteria were assessed, and all their corresponding outcome measures were included in a meta-analysis.
Results: A total of 705 studies were identified by applying the initial search strategy to the electronic databases described. Of these, 205 passed the primary inclusion criteria. After excluding duplicates and non-English articles, 105 articles were screened using the secondary inclusion criteria. Nine articles remained, including three systematic reviews that were excluded. Finally, a total of six independent, non-overlapping studies were included in this meta-analysis, encompassing data for 576 participants.
The 18 outcome measures in this meta-analysis included five "positive" measures: perceived ability to cope with suicidal ideation, optimism, gratitude, positive affect, and the Mini Mental State Exam. The "negative" measures included: suicidal ideation intensity, hopelessness, depression, suicidality, HAMD (Hamilton Depression Rating Scale) score, HAMD score without suicide item, medical admissions, number of days of medical hospitalizations, number of psychiatric hospitalizations, number of emergency room visits, suicide ideation questionnaire (SIQ) from baseline to posttreatment, and SIQ from baseline to follow-up. Overall, this review found support for the hypothesis that telemedicine can reduce suicide ideation and behavior. There was a moderate effect size for the 18 measures analyzed. Based on the four different forest plots presented in this analysis, all average effect sizes calculated showed that the intervention of telemedicine has a small-to-moderate effect on the measures studied, which translates loosely to a small-to-moderate effect on the patient's suicide ideation and behavior.
Conclusions: Telemedicine appears to be a promising way to reduce suicidal ideation, although how this translates into reductions in self-harm and/or suicide attempts is unclear from this review alone.


We develop new schemes for deterministically updating a stored cryptographic key that provide security against an internal adversary who can control the update computation and leak bounded amounts of information to the outside world. Our schemes are much more efficient than the previous schemes for this model, due to Dziembowski, Kazana and Wichs (CRYPTO 2011). Specifically, our update operation runs in time quasilinear in the key length, rather than quadratic, while offering a similar level of leakage resilience. In order to design our scheme, we strengthen the connections between the model of Dziembowski et al. and "pebbling games", showing that random-oracle-based key evolution schemes are secure as long as the graph of the update function's calls to the oracle has appropriate combinatorial properties. This builds on a connection between pebbling and the random oracle model first established by Dwork, Naor and Wee (CRYPTO 2005). Our scheme's efficiency relies on the existence (which we show) of families of "local" bipartite expander graphs of constant degree.


The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of gamification on employee engagement and work performance among employees working in IT Multinationals in Malaysia. And to examine the mediating effect of employee engagement on the relationship between gamification and employee performance. Finally, to test the moderating effect of gamification on the relationship between employee engagement and employee performance. Data was collected using a self-rating Likert-Scale questionnaire with a rating scale from 1-5, denoting 1 is strongly disagree, and 5 denotes strongly agree. A Sample of 220 employees were selected using simple random probability sampling of those employees working in IT Multinationals. Data were analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis and structure equation modelling under bootstrapping methods via AMOS22. The result shows that gamification does not directly affect employee performance among the IT Multinational in Malaysia. However, gamification has a significant and positive effect on employee engagement. Also, the result shows that employee engagement is a full mediator and gamification has a moderating effect on the relationship between employee engagement and performance. This study is useful for Human Resource Development intervention through effective training programs to enhance gamification to boost engagement and performance. Through effective gamification with sensitivity, creativity and implemented it within the organization can cultivate highly competitive culture among the staff, resulting in high employee performance through employee engagement. This finding shows that employee engagement is very important to realize the benefit of gamification to foster employee performance. Keywords— Gamification, employee engagement, performance, Multinationals, Malaysia.


OBJECTIVE
The objective of this study was the detection of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) in metastatic breast cancer patients.

METHODS
Since only small numbers of circulating tumor cells (CTCs) are found in peripheral blood, at first we performed immunomagnetic separation as a concentration method suitable for selecting circulating tumor cells in peripheral blood. This was followed by analysis of isolated cells with the aid of laser scanning cytometry (LSC). Twenty eight patients with metastatic breast cancer were enrolled in the study and the control group consisted of 19 clinically healthy women. Six milliliters of peripheral blood was drawn for the analyses, but only in two patients the blood has been drawn twice. Blood samples were taken when no chemotherapy was administered, but hormonal therapy has been allowed.

RESULTS
The positivity for CTCs was found in 20 (50.0 %) patients with metastatic breast cancer patients, while in 6 (31.6 %) healthy controls false positive circulating epithelial-like cells were detected. Because we did not use CD45 staining, we could not distinguish these circulating epithelial-like cells from CTCs. In a majority of metastatic breast cancer patients we found a mixed population of HER-2 gene expressing CTCs. We found that HER2+ CTCs in high numbers are CK19 + CTCs, while almost all HER2-CTCs are CK19- CTCs.

CONCLUSION
The described method was found promising for estimating HER2 status on CTCs from peripheral blood in metastatic breast cancer patients.


The ability of organizations to sense and respond to changes—defined as organizational agility—is considered by senior executives among their top information technology (IT) concerns as an important ability for organizations on their quest toward sustained competitive advantage. However, every transformation toward agility also comes at a cost, requiring resource commitment and IT landscape changes. We present examples of successful and unsuccessful attempts at achieving agility while leveraging IT. Our presented cases focus on information systems development agility, customer agility, and entrepreneurial agility. Our findings suggest that agility is neither achieved easily, nor is a guarantor for success. Depending on the context and implementation of organizational agility, however, it can significantly improve process and product performance. We develop a three-pronged view consisting of a functional, temporal, and ambidextrous view to resolve these challenges. We end with three recommendations for practitioners that seek to shape their organization's journey toward agility.


NMDA receptors regulate burst firing of dopaminergic neurones in the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNc) and may contribute to excitotoxic cell death in Parkinson's disease (PD). In order to investigate the subunit composition of functional NMDA receptors in identified rat SNc dopaminergic neurones, we have analysed the properties of individual NMDA receptor channels in outside‐out patches. NMDA (100 nm) activated channels corresponding to four chord conductances of 18, 30, 41 and 54 pS. Direct transitions were observed between all conductance levels. Between 18 pS and 41 pS conductance levels, direct transitions were asymmetric, consistent with the presence of NR2D‐containing NMDA receptors. Channel activity in response to 100 nm or 200 μm NMDA was not affected by zinc or TPEN (N,N,N′,N′‐tetrakis‐[2‐pyridylmethyl]‐ethylenediamine), indicating that SNc dopaminergic neurones do not contain functional NR2A subunits. The effect of the NR2B antagonist ifenprodil was complex: 1 μm ifenprodil reduced open probability, while 10 μm reduced channel open time but had no effect on open probability of channels activated by 100 nm NMDA. When the concentration of NMDA was increased to 200 μm, ifenprodil (10 μm) produced the expected reduction in open probability. These results indicate that NR2B subunits are present in SNc dopaminergic neurones. Taken together, these findings indicate that NR2D and NR2B subunits form functional NMDA receptor channels in SNc dopaminergic neurones, and suggest that they may form a triheteromeric NMDA receptor composed of NR1/NR2B/NR2D subunits.


Background: India has a high burden of CRDs. Physicians in practice see a large number of patients daily for whom they can give little time. In this pilot study we aimed to identify the need and utility of additional skilled healthcare resource assistance for the proper management of CRD in India. Method: 1784 General Practitioners (GPs), Pulmonologists (Ps), Intensivists (Is) and Pediatricians (Peds) from our database were invited via email to participate in this observational study from across India. The study questionnaire consisted of doctor demographics, burden of CRD, time spent on each patient and questions assessing the need and utility of additional skilled assistance. 84 doctors consented and completed the study questionnaire. Simple descriptive analysis was performed. Results: Conclusion: A heavy workload of CRD patients and insufficient time and manpower necessitates a second tier of skilled healthcare providers to bridge this gap. There is a need to develop chronic respiratory disease managers in India who can contribute significantly to improving quality of patient care.


The most significant challenge in the development of ultrafine oxide based supercapacitors is the poor microstructure stability due to the rapid agglomeration of the fine nanoparticles (NPs). Here, we developed novel amorphous MnOx structurally confined ultrafine NiO NPs (∼2.3 nm) supported on graphene, NiO@MnOx via a simple and facile self-assembly process with the assistance of microwave sintering. NiO@MnOx with a NiO : MnOx weight ratio of 1 : 0.2 achieves a high capacitance of 966 F g−1 based on total electrode materials and 3222 F g−1 based on active materials at a discharge current density of 2 A g−1. Remarkably, the materials retain 100% capacitance after 2000 cycles at a charge and discharge current of 10 A g−1. In contrast, the durability of ultrafine NiO NPs without MnOx confinement is very poor, with 94% of the capacitance lost under identical cyclic conditions despite the initial high capacitance of 3696 F g−1. The substantially enhanced capacitance, durability and high rate capacity contribute to the formation of a nanoporous and amorphous MnOx layer on ultrafine NiO NPs, which provides the extraordinary structural confinement and enhances the mass transfer process. The results provide a new strategy to develop highly efficient and durable ultrafine nanosized electrode materials for supercapacitors.


Gamper et al. raise an important concern regarding our sample. As we noted in our limitations section, although individuals were randomly selected from the 5 districts of Botswana with the highest number of HIV infected individuals, we did not sample from the more remote districts of Botswana, limiting the generalizability of our results. It is important to note, however, that the outcome of greatest interest in our study is the one showing an association between HIV stigma and perceived access to antiretroviral therapy; if, as the letter writers suggest, HIV stigma is greater among people who live further from health services and therefore have reduced access to antiretroviral therapy, we would expect data from these remote areas to support, rather than diminish, this outcome.

The cultural context, highlighted by Gamper et al., is an important consideration when evaluating responses to questions about stigmatizing attitudes. Interestingly, in a population-based study conducted across Botswana in 2001, a majority of respondents readily admitted that they held stigmatizing attitudes toward people living with HIV/AIDS.1 This finding suggests that existing cultural barriers were inadequate to prevent the expression of stigmatizing attitudes prior to the introduction of the national treatment program. Our concern was that norms might have shifted during the rollout of the national program, increasing the risk of social desirability bias in our results. It was for this reason that we used a measure of anticipated stigma, which allowed respondents to focus explicitly on attitudes in their community rather than to put forward their own personal beliefs.

We agree with Gamper et al. that it would have been interesting to assess awareness of, and attitudes toward, the national treatment program in the general population. Nevertheless, our measure of perceived access to treatment subsumes multiple related factors, including awareness of the treatment program, its geographic penetration, and its perceived effectiveness in reducing barriers to treatment among the general population. Similarly, although qualitative methods to identify barriers to treatment access among vulnerable groups were beyond the scope of this population-based study, we did obtain qualitative data from structured interviews with a convenience sample drawn from support groups for people living with HIV/AIDS from Gaborone, Serowe, and the surrounding villages and rural areas. In these interviews, key barriers to treatment access cited by respondents included inadequate access to food and gender inequality in relationships.2

We welcome the comments from Gamper et al., which highlight the importance of further exploring the etiology and repercussions of HIV stigma in the ever-evolving African context.


We analyze Hadoop workloads from three di?erent research clusters from a user-centric perspective. The goal is to better understand data scientists' use of the system and how well the use of the system matches its design. Our analysis suggests that Hadoop usage is still in its adolescence. We see underuse of Hadoop features, extensions, and tools. We see significant diversity in resource usage and application styles, including some interactive and iterative workloads, motivating new tools in the ecosystem. We also observe significant opportunities for optimizations of these workloads. We find that job customization and configuration are used in a narrow scope, suggesting the future pursuit of automatic tuning systems. Overall, we present the first user-centered measurement study of Hadoop and find significant opportunities for improving its efficient use for data scientists.


Between 1770 and 1830, London was the world's largest and richest city, the centre of hectic social ferment and of spectacular sexual liberation. It prompted revolutionary modes of thought, novel sensibilities and constant debate about the relations between the sexes. It also stimulated outrageous behaviour, from James Boswell's copulating on WestminsterBridge to the Prince Regent's attempt to seduce a woman by pleading, sobbing and stabbing himself with a pen-knife.And nowhere was London's lewdness and iconoclasm more vividly represented than in its satire. Combining words and images to offer a brilliantly original panorama of that time, City of Laughter is a ground-breaking reappraisal of a period of seismic change and a unique account of the origins of our attitudes to sex, celebrity and satire today.


In this paper an inverse boundary problem for the fourth order Boussinesq equation with integral conditions is investigated. First of all the initial problem reduced to the equivalent problem, for which the theorem of existence and uniqueness proved. Then using these facts the existence and uniqueness of the classical solution of initial problem is proved.


This discussion provides an overview of steps in developing and assessing ESP multimedia courseware at a technical university in Taiwan. The courseware is designed to expand language skills that foster Chinese learners of English as they develop communicative skills for international business. Student evaluations of the prototype for its Trade Fair component suggests that it is useful for situating the learning process and simulating social cues, which in turn supports building the communicative skills needed for the kinds of interaction demanded by tourism, travel, hospitality, and similar areas of international business.


The authors add a new case, to the 41 already published, of arterio-venous fistula of the renal pedicle after nephrectomy, with the peculiarity of its presentation as a prolonged fever resulting from streptococcal bacterial endarteritis at the site of the fistula (3rd case in the literature). Surgical treatment in association with massive and prolonged antibiotic therapy resulted in recovery.


We propose a closed set of dynamic equations to describe turbulence. The equations are the result of systematic and heuristic elements. Specifically, the UV part of the nonlinear interactions, represented by a dynamical viscosity, is computed for a stirring force of a particular nature. However, since the results exhibit a general structure, we suggest heuristically to extend them to arbitrary flows. Because of nonrenormalizable divergences, the IR part of the nonlinear interactions has constituted a serious problem. We suggest a heuristic model, the basic ingredient of which is that the transfer of energy among eddies is mostly a local process. We show that possible adjustable parameters are actually fixed by the model itself. Because of the heuristic nature of one part of the model, its overall validity rests largely on the accumulated evidence gathered from checking its predictions against data from a wide variety of flows. The model has been tested against more than seventy turbulence statistics for homogeneous isotropic and anisotropic flows (the Kolmogorov constant is predicted to be Ko = 5/3). The overall performance is good. Here, we first extend the model to inhomogeneous flows and test the predictions using the newest laboratory and DNS data on turbulent convection at large Ra (Rayleigh number). The model reproduces both types of data quite accurately. Second, we study the problem of the so-called "sweeping effect" and derive the relation between the ω and k-spectra. Third, we show that for shear driven flows the present model reproduces well the data at large strain rates while the widely used K - ∊ model does not.


ABSTRACT Effects of the in ovo (i.o.) or subcutaneous (s.c.) method of administration (moa) of the Marek's disease (MD) vaccine and 4 or 18 h pre‐placement holding time (pht) on the processing yield of male broilers through 49 d of age (doa) were investigated. Ross 708 broiler hatching eggs (3,900) were either i.o.‐vaccinated at 18 d of incubation or chicks from eggs that were not i.o.‐vaccinated were s.c.‐vaccinated at hatch. The i.o. injections (50 &mgr;L) were delivered by a commercial multi‐egg injector and s.c. injections (200 &mgr;L) were delivered by an automatic pneumatic s.c. injector. The pht was imposed on chicks after vaccination. Sixteen birds were initially assigned to each of 15 replicate floor pens belonging to each of the moa and pht combination groups and were grown out through 48 doa. At 48 doa, 6 birds were randomly selected from each replicate pen and were weighed and fasted for 16 h before being processed. At 49 doa, whole carcass, fat pad, breast muscle, and tenders muscles weights were recorded. Whole carcass weight as a percentage of live BW, and fat pad, breast muscle, and tenders muscles weights as percentages of both live and whole carcass weights were calculated. Upon subjection of the data to a 2 × 2 factorial analysis, only a main effect due to moa was observed for tenders muscles weight as a percentage of live and whole carcass weights. Tenders muscles weight as a percentage of both live (P ≤ 0.010) and whole carcass (P ≤ 0.004) weight was higher in birds hatched from eggs that received i.o. rather than s.c. vaccinations. In conclusion, in comparison to s.c. vaccination, i.o. vaccination increased relative tenders weight yield, whether or not broilers were held for 4 or 18 h prior to placement. Therefore, with regard to broiler processing yield, i.o. and s.c. vaccinations were safe for the administration of the MD vaccine, with i.o. vaccination displaying a slight potential advantage.


The U.S. house price boom has been linked to an unsustainable easing of mortgage credit standards. However, standard time series models of US house prices omit credit constraints and perform poorly in the 2000's. We incorporate data on credit constraints for first time buyers into a model of US house prices based on the (inverted) demand for housing services. The model yields not only a stable long-run cointegrating relationship, a reasonable speed of adjustment, plausible income and price elasticities and an improved fit, but also sensible estimates of tax credit effects and the possible bottom in real house prices.


: A range of multi-sided studies, carried out in various regions of Far North (Jamalo-Nenets autonomous region, Komi republic, Sakha republic (Yakutia)) have established the leading hygienic risk factors of population health deterioration, including those characteristic of small nationalities of North. The consideration of the obtained data, including regional alimentary status peculiarities, the condition of metabolic processes and antioxidant balance of the organism, allowed establishment of effective approaches to the maintenance of notherners' health. These approaches are based upon the optimization of nutrition as an element of population health control under extremal conditions.


This thesis describes the application of 1 H- and 13 C- NMR, EPR, ST-EPR and calculational methods to study cowpea chlorotic mottle virus. This virus consists of RNA encapsidated by 180 identical protein subunits, arranged icosahedrally. The isolated coat protein of cowpea chlorotic mottle virus can be brougth into several well defined states of aggregation. This study could be carried out, because these stages can be produced in quantities sufficient to allow magnetic resonance measurements. All the results obtained are combined in the following model for the assembly proces of the virus: In this model a rigid protein core with a highly mobile, basic, N- terminal arm is invoked. This arm is the RNA binding part of the protein. The high mobility of this arm enhances the probability of interaction with the RNA and enables the protein to exhibit different modes of bonding to different local structures of the RNA. Upon binding the RNA, the N-terminal arm adopts a rigid a-helical conformation.In chapter two it is shown that virtually no mobility on a timescale faster than 10 -7 s can be observed in the virus.In chapter three an EPR and ST-EPR study is presented on spin-labelled virus, From the results it is concluded that no anisotropic subunit mobility is present in the virus on the 10 -5 -10 -7 s timescale. Also in this chapter it is suggested that many ST-EPR results on maleimide- labelled proteins, in which anisotropic protein mobility was invoked for the interpretation of the spectra, are based on artefacts.Chapter four shows that the N-terminal arm is the RNA binding part of the protein. This arm is found to be very mobile in the absence of RNA, whereas immobilization occurs upon binding RNA.Chapter five is a small excursion to other plant viruses. It is shown that brome mosaic virus and belladonna mottle virus show the same behaviour as cowpea chlorotic mottle virus, whereas cowpea mosaic virus behaves completely different.Chapter six deals with the molecular interactions during the assembly process. In this chapter it is shown that the arginine and lysine containing part of the N-terminal arm is responsible for the binding of oligo-nucleotides. It is suggested that a double stranded nucleotide conformation is required for proper interaction.In chapter 7 a secondary structure prediction of the coat protein of CCMV is presented. The results indicate that the N-terminal arm shows no structural preference when the positive charges of arginine and lysine are retained, whereas in the absence of these positive charges there is a tendency towards α-helix formation. Also it is concluded that cowpea chlorotic mottle virus possesses the same β-role topology as southern bean mosaic virus, sattelite tobacco necrosis virus and tomato bushy stunt virus.Chapter eight presents the results of an energy calculation study on the N-terminal arm. Although the method used contains too many approximations to allow detailed conclusions, the results of chapter seven are fully confirmed by these calculations.In the model for the protein-RNA interaction in CCMV which is presented in chapter five, a random coil conformation for the N-terminal protein arm is invoked. In chapter nine an extension of this part of the model is presented. It is shown that the N-terminal possesses some time-averaged secondary structure (presumably an α-helix) in the absence of RNA. A conformational exchange process is observed in the N-terminal arm, in which about half 'of the residues participate. In empty capsids not all the N-terminal arms turn out to be mobile. 20-55% of the N-terminal arms is immobile on the NMR timescale in the empty capsids of the coat protein of CCMV.


Carbazole-containing nematic liquid single crystal elastomers (LSCEs) alter their luminescence upon the application of an external mechanical force. Therefore, they are valuable flexible materials for detecting mechanical events with simple fluorescent measurements. In this work, we have focused our attention on the main principles underlying the operation of these materials and the development of novel design schemes to produce efficient elastomeric fluorescence sensors for force detection. In this context, comprehending and controlling the interactions established between the distinct components of the active material, i.e., mesogens and fluorophores, is essential to achieving force-sensitive materials with improved performances. With this purpose in mind, we have explored the role of two structural features on such phenomenon, namely, the type of connection (end-on or side-on) of the carbazole fluorophores to the elastomeric network and the length of the alkyl chain that binds them to the main polysilo...


This work develops non-asymptotic theory for estimation of the long-run variance matrix and its inverse, the so-called precision matrix, for high-dimensional Gaussian time series under general assumptions on the dependence structure including long-range dependence. The estimation involves shrinkage techniques which are thresholding and penalizing versions of the classical multivariate local Whittle estimator. The results ensure consistent estimation in a double asymptotic regime where the number of component time series is allowed to grow with the sample size as long as the true model parameters are sparse. The key technical result is a concentration inequality of the local Whittle estimator for the long-run variance matrix around the true model parameters. In particular, it handles simultaneously the estimation of the memory parameters which enter the underlying model. Novel algorithms for the considered procedures are proposed, and a simulation study and a data application are also provided.


Given clause is devoted to the analysis of debatable themes of history of medieval Russia in treatment of the ideologist of the anarchy-communism, outstanding scientist P.A. Kropotkin. It is noted, that the ideologist anarchism estimated social movements only positively as saw in them permanent struggle of people against the state. It is investigated, that he considered the period of formation of the centralized state a stage of occurrence of «government». Up to XV-XVI centuries, in his opinion, in Russia existed the period of «free cities».


Cells of the mouse L strain and the Chinese hamster CHO line were treated with 33258 Hoechst, rubidazone, and a combination of these. Recovering cell populations following the drug removal exhibited a high frequency (20--50%) of metaphases with diplochromosomes (endoreduplication), especially in the combination treatment series (up to more than 70% in the L strain). Such a procedure should be useful in probing the mechanisms of the endoreduplication process.


PURPOSE
To determine the sensitivity and specificity of computed tomographic (CT) criteria for differentiating benign from malignant stomach lesions in patients with a thickened gastric wall at CT.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
A radiology department file search revealed 36 patients with a thickened gastric wall at CT who underwent double-contrast barium suspension upper gastrointestinal tract examinations within 6 weeks before or after CT. The authors reviewed the CT images without knowledge of the final radiologic, endoscopic, or pathologic findings to determine the degree of gastric wall thickening and the symmetry, distribution, and enhancement of the thickened wall. The sensitivity and specificity of these findings for detection of malignancy were calculated.

RESULTS
Two of 36 patients had two gastric abnormalities each. The final diagnoses in the 38 cases were gastritis in 19, hiatal hernia in four, benign ulcer in three, benign (n = 3) or malignant (n = 8) gastric neoplasm in 11, and no gastric abnormality in one case. Mean wall thickness was 1.5 cm (range, 0.7-7.5 cm). The finding of gastric wall thickness of 1 cm or greater had a sensitivity of 100% but a specificity of only 42% for detection of malignant or potentially malignant stomach lesions. The finding of focal, eccentric, or enhancing wall thickening had a sensitivity of 93%, 71%, or 43%, respectively, and a specificity of 8%, 75%, or 88%, respectively, for detection of these lesions. Gastric wall thickening that was 1 cm or greater and was focal, eccentric, and enhancing had a specificity of 92% but a sensitivity of only 36% for detection of these lesions.

CONCLUSION
Gastric wall thickness of 1 cm or greater at CT had a sensitivity of 100% but a specificity of less than 50% for detection of malignant or potentially malignant stomach lesions that necessitated further diagnostic evaluation.


The article highlights some contemporary challenges local governments are facing. In particular, it argues that local governments should redirect public intervention toward "less hard public, more soft public". It shows how public management should play a key role in addressing the question of "more soft public", for example in terms of handling social mediation, governing interdependencies and public networks, and building relations and social capital. The article concludes with the idea that is the time for opening up a new conceptual and operational sphere of local public management and the role it should play.


Growth and development of plants is ultimately driven by light energy captured through photosynthesis. ATP acts as universal cellular energy cofactor fuelling all life processes, including gene expression, metabolism, and transport. Despite a mechanistic understanding of ATP biochemistry, ATP dynamics in the living plant have been largely elusive. Here we establish live MgATP2− assessment in plants using the fluorescent protein biosensor ATeam1.03-nD/nA. We generate Arabidopsis sensor lines and investigate the sensor in vitro under conditions appropriate for the plant cytosol. We establish an assay for ATP fluxes in isolated mitochondria, and demonstrate that the sensor responds rapidly and reliably to MgATP2− changes in planta. A MgATP2− map of the Arabidopsis seedling highlights different MgATP2− concentrations between tissues and in individual cell types, such as root hairs. Progression of hypoxia reveals substantial plasticity of ATP homeostasis in seedlings, demonstrating that ATP dynamics can be monitored in the living plant. One-sentence Summary Sensing of MgATP2− by fluorimetry and microscopy allows dissection of ATP fluxes of isolated organelles, and dynamics of cytosolic MgATP2− in vivo. Funding Agencies This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) through the Emmy-Noether programme (SCHW1719/1-1; M.S. and GR4251/1-1; C.G.), the Research Training Group GRK 2064 (M.S.; A.J.M.), the Priority Program SPP1710 (A.J.M.) and a grant (SCHW1719/5-1; M.S.) as part of the package PAK918. The Seed Fund grant CoSens from the Bioeconomy Science Center, NRW (A.J.M.; M.S.) is gratefully acknowledged. The scientific activities of the Bioeconomy Science Center were financially supported by the Ministry of Innovation, Science and Research within the framework of the NRW Strategieprojekt BioSC (No. 313/323-400-002 13). A.Co. received funding by the Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca through the FIRB 2010 programme (RBFR10S1LJ_001) and Piano di Sviluppo di Ateneo 2015 (Università degli Studi di Milano). M.Z. received funding by the Ministero dell'Istruzione, dell'Università e della Ricerca (Italy) through the PRIN 2010 programme (PRIN2010CSJX4F). S.W. and T.N. received travel support by the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). V.D.C. was supported by the European Social Fund, Operational Programme 2007/2013, and an Erasmus+ Traineeship grant. M.D.F was supported by The Human Frontier Science Program (RPG0053/2012), and the Leverhulme Foundation (RPG-2015-437). I.M.M. was supported by a grant from the Danish Council for Independent Research - Natural Sciences. V.C.P. was supported by the Innovation and Technology Fund (Funding Support to Partner State Key Laboratories in Hong Kong) of the HKSAR. Abbreviations AAC – ADP/ATP carrier; AK – adenylate kinase; cAT – carboxyatractyloside; CCCP – carbonyl cyanide m-chlorophenyl hydrazone; CFP – cyan fluorescent protein; CLSM – confocal laser scanning microscopy; ETC – electron transport chain; FRET – Förster Resonance Energy Transfer; LSFM – light sheet fluorescence microscopy.