The training of the cavalrymen called Scythian in the 6 th book of Ps.-Maurice's Strategikon consists in the circular movement of the cavalrymen, "when … the right wing is outside, and the left inside". The main purpose of this movement of cavalrymen is "to enclose an appropri-ate space" where the supposed enemy stands. But quite strange is the fact that the cavalrymen ride around the enemy in a clockwise direction: in this type of encirclement, the riders will turn to the enemy their right side not protected by the shield. There is a parallel locus in the 3rd book which is a condensed summary of the 'Scythian' chapter. There is another similar text in the 12th book, but this time with tactically correct movement of the cavalry, which is counter-clockwise. At the end of the description of this manoeuvre it is written that this manoeuvre is in use among the Scythians. To explain this following construction is proposed: the 'Scythian' chapter was first copied to XII D (Phase 1); at that time, perhaps, was the text of the 'Scythian' chapter with the yet tactically-correct movement of the cavalry; words ἐσώτερον — were changed by their places as a result of the mental error of the copyist (Phase 2a); words τουτέστιν … διῃρημένα and καὶ οὐκέτι … διαιρεῖν were added perhaps as marginalia (Phase 2b); the newly revised text of the 'Scythian' chapter became source for III. 5 (Phase 3).


Bulb yield and storability of onions (cv. N-2-4-1) was studied against deficit irrigation approach during rabi season of 2012 and 2013 at Instructional Farm of the Department of Irrigation and Drainage Engineering, Dr. Annasaheb Shinde College of Agricultural Engineering, Mahatma Phule Krishi Vidyapeeth, Rahuri. Experiment was carried out in Randomized Block Design (RBD) with 27 treatments and two replications based on different combinations of the quantity of water stress during different crop growth stages. Water applied per irrigation and soil moisture contents before and after irrigation was monitored throughout the season, while onion bulbs were harvested at the end of season and weighed. Yields and storage losses are higher with less water stress and reduced with increase in water stress. The highest yield of onion was obtained with a no stress treatment (T1) and it was at par with treatment (T4) which is 20% stress at bulb development stage. Losses due to rotting, sprouting, and physiological weight loss were found higher in irrigated treatments. After six months of storage (from 1st week of May to 1st week of October), the maximum cumulative weight loss (49.09%) was recorded in onions irrigated at maximum stress treatment (T27), while the minimum (38.21%) was recorded in T4 treatment which is 20% stress during bulb development stage.


Evolutionary algorithms are popular algorithms for multiobjective optimisation (also called Pareto optimisation) as they use a population to store trade-offs between different objectives. Despite their popularity, the theoretical foundation of multiobjective evolutionary optimisation (EMO) is still in its early development. Fundamental questions such as the benefits of the crossover operator are still not fully understood.

We provide a theoretical analysis of well-known EMO algorithms GSEMO and NSGA-II to showcase the possible advantages of crossover. We propose a class of problems on which these EMO algorithms using crossover find the Pareto set in expected polynomial time. In sharp contrast, they and many other EMO algorithms without crossover require exponential time to even find a single Pareto-optimal point. This is the first example of an exponential performance gap through the use of crossover for the widely used NSGA-II algorithm.


Leader election is a fundamental problem in distributed computing and it has been studied assuming various computation models and network topologies. This paper analyzes the algorithms for leader election in complete networks using asynchronous communication channels. We present a novel algorithm that reduces the information necessary to select a leader compared with other leader election algorithms for complete networks. In this paper, the algorithm works without sense of direction. And, it does not require to know the number of nodes in the system. Our proposal requires O(n) messages and O(n) time, where n is the number of nodes in the system, to elect a leader.


A new architecture for network on chip (NOC) called Mesh-Tree and its deterministic algorithm has been presented. In this paper, we present an adaptive deadlock-free router. A Mesh-Tree is a multilayered, 3D, pyramidal architecture. Each layer is a mesh and trees are used to connect adjacent layers. This architecture is good for broadcasting and high speed communications. The simulation results show that the adaptive deadlock-free routing algorithm has a higher performance/cost ratio than the deterministic algorithm and the West-first algorithm used in the mesh architecture.


This study is to research of various kinds of variables of regional festival``s service quality which effects on regional image improvement and development. The service quality of festival influence on satisfaction of festival service ,regional image and development. especially, variable of software. First, the service quality affect to satisfaction of festival, regional image improvement and development. Second, satisfaction of festival influence on regional image improvement. Third, the satisfaction of festival and regional image affect on regional development.


Human erythropoietin (Hu-Epo) is a glycoprotein growth factor that involved in regulation of blood erythrocytes population. Besides of erythropoiesis, variety of studies have shown that Hu-Epo and its receptor (Hu-EpoR) are expressed in central nervous system(CNS). The protective properties of recombinant form of Hu-Epo (r-Hu-Epo) in different neural cell cultures have been established previously. These protective effects of r-Hu-Epo could play an important role in therapeutic strategies of neurodegenerative disease such as Huntington, Parkinson and Alzheimer's disease. Pathological studies indicate that neurodegenerative diseases link to astrocyte cell death in addition to neural degeneration. Recently, astrocytes-specific pathology in neuro degeneration has been clarified. Therefore, protecting astrocyte cells from emergent toxins is important. In present study, we investigated the protective effects of erythropoietin in monomer (r-Hu-Epo) and dimer (r-Hu-Epo)2 formson Amyloid-25–35 induced astrocytes toxification in 2D and 3D culture. 3D culture of astrocytes cell led us to investigate a realistic behavior model of natural tissue and a reliable cell response under the toxic conditions. Cell vitality and cytotoxicity in2D and 3D cultures were studied by conventional MTT and LDH assays. Results showed dissimilar response of amyloid--induced 2D and 3D cultures through protective effect of r-Hu-Epo and (r-Hu-Epo)2. Both r-Hu-Epo and (r-Hu-Epo)2 increased cell vitality and decreased cell death by 11±3% in 2D cultures compared to 40±5%in 3D cultures. Analysis of cell vitality and toxicity in treated and untreated cells after 24, 48 and 72 hours proposed that elimination of amyloid-25-35from medium could be considered as possible protection mechanism of these proteins. Interaction of r-Hu-Epo with amyloid-25–35was studied in vitro. Structural changes and formation of amyloid fibrils in presence of r-Hu-Epo and (r-Hu-Epo)2 were measured by circular dichroism and fluorescence. Results showed that dimer form of rHu-Epo interacted more than monomer with amyloid- aggregates.


We prove convergence results for 'increasing' sequences of sectorial forms. We treat both the case of closed forms and the case of non-closable forms.


Decision making can be regarded as the outcome of cognitive processes leading to the selection of a course of action among several alternatives. Borrowing a central measurement from information theory, Shannon entropy, we quantified the uncertainties produced by decisions of participants within an economic decision task under different configurations of reward probability and time. These descriptors were used to obtain blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal correlates of uncertainty and two clusters codifying the Shannon entropy of task configurations were identified: a large cluster including parts of the right middle cingulate cortex (MCC) and left and right pre-supplementary motor areas (pre-SMA) and a small cluster at the left anterior thalamus. Subsequent functional connectivity analyses using the psycho-physiological interactions model identified areas involved in the functional integration of uncertainty. Results indicate that clusters mostly located at frontal and temporal cortices experienced an increased connectivity with the right MCC and left and right pre-SMA as the uncertainty was higher. Furthermore, pre-SMA was also functionally connected to a rich set of areas, most of them associative areas located at occipital and parietal lobes. This study provides a map of the human brain segregation and integration (i.e., neural substrate and functional connectivity respectively) of the uncertainty associated to an economic decision making paradigm.


Deir el-Bachit is the largest known Coptic monastery complex in Thebes-West. It dates to the Late Antiquity period between the 6th and the beginning of the 10th century AD. So far, at least 26 individuals from the site were analysed anthropologically. 22 of them were excavated directly at the necropolis, the other 4 are special burials that were found at other locations nearby. Most individuals from the necropolis are male adults. There are two categories of human remains: "mummified" and "skeletonised". The differences are probably due to social stratification. A substance similar to bitumen was found at the mummies. At that time, resin containing oils and bitumen were normally not used any more. One of the special burials was an approximately three years old child which was found enclosed within a wall. Another special burial was a juvenile or young adult female who was found in the vault of an abandoned granary. The female was most likely pregnant and fell victim to a violent crime. This is indicated by the bones of a six months old foetus and an intravital skull fracture. She was no contemporary from the time the monastery was cultivated but was later deposited in this area.


The amounts of inorganic and organic carbon in Miocene–Pleistocene sediments from Ocean Drilling Program Sites 1081, 1082, 1084, 1085, and 1087 and Deep Sea Drilling Project Site 532 on the margin of southwest Africa are summarized. Concentrations of CaCO3 are consistently ~75 wt% at Sites 1085 and 1087 in the Cape Basin but drop below 25 wt% near the Pliocene/Pleistocene boundary at Sites 532, 1081, 1082, and 1084 in Walvis Basin and on Walvis Ridge because of greater opal production during this period. Total organic carbon concentrations range between 0.1 and 18 wt% and are highest in sediments deposited at Site 1084 in Walvis Basin. Organic matter is predominantly marine in origin at all locations, as indicated by a combination of RockEval and C/N measurements. Both the production and preservation of organic matter appear to have fluctuated regularly during the evolution of this upwelling system.


At the beginning of the XXI century, fashion remains one of the main phenomena of human activity that affect all segments of society. All that is the peak of the discoveries of the XIX and XX centuries is already history, which fits into the golden fund of discoveries and achievements of the entire fashion world. Unlike previous centuries, when we can talk about haute couture as a well-established phenomenon with its clear parameters, the conversation about the fashion of the XXI century is not easy. According to researchers, the reasons for this can be formulated as follows. First is the phenomenon of "overlapping of events". In addition, the historical development and practice of fashion in the last few years at the end of the twentieth and the first decade of the twenty-first century is marked by the experience of the discoveries and philosophical doctrines of structuralism and post-structuralism. Fashion as a human activity is influenced by many sciences and different practices. It is understandable that society is looking for new images, and the widespread adoption of computer technology and computer networks based on them are increasingly embedded in the life of modern society and increasingly integrate it into an information body, which Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan define with the term "global village". Most features in this sense are the parameters of fashion – it has long become global, but now with the prefix "hyper". In order to be able to successfully represent haute couture, although it has long since found its structural principles in Charles Worth's doctrine, at the end of the twentieth century it was forced to modify them in accordance with computer-mediated communications. The showy spectacles of fashion shows take this into account, integrating all the advantages that, according to Castells, the "new information society" gives them. It can be said that the transfer and application of all that potentially contains the historical costume of the nineteenth century acquires new strength in the implication of its principles – conceptual and neo-conceptual, in the practice of prominent designers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Historical borrowing is in full swing in the new century, including the year 2000. There is no prominent designer who is not inspired and does not use the historical heritage of the nineteenth century. The moments of crisis that accompany developed societies have an impact on haute couture – its social base is narrowing. Individual orders are declining, and the competition for profit in markets and customers is intensifying. Taking into account all these factors and circumstances, the focus of this text on the implication of fashion trends in the twenty-first century becomes clear. On the other hand, such a phenomenon as fashion has long been developed by the "anti-crisis antidote", manifested even as a psychological phenomenon. When the economic crisis falls on people, their thoughts in accordance with them – the work of designers is always focused on the interpretation of patterns from some, metaphorically call it "sugar age", which serves as a kind of psychological buffer of the realities of crisis reality. After the Millennium, the contours of a general and deep economic crisis, which continues to this day, in which the leading designers turn to past epochs, are particularly well outlined. This return was accompanied by a manifestation of the revolt, again as an anti-crisis psychological measure. An example of this is the rebellious mood of Vivienne Westwood, who influenced John Galliano and his colleagues who work in the field of haute couture – Alexander McQueen, Jean Paul Gaultier and with them the transfer of such practices and moods in the fashion of the XXI century. Like any phenomenon and material human activity, it does not fall from the sky, but has its roots and protoforms. So it is with the fashion of the XXI century. That is why we have to look very briefly at these protoforms, which then successfully explain what is happening on their basis.


We propose a novel mathematical framework to examine the free damped
 transverse vibration of a nanobeam by using the nonlocal theory of Eringen
 and fractional derivative viscoelasticity. The motion equation of a nanobeam
 with arbitrary attached nanoparticle is derived by considering the nonlocal
 viscoelastic constitutive equation involving fractional order derivatives and
 using the Euler-Bernoulli beam theory. The solution is proposed by using the
 method of separation of variables. Eigenvalues and mode shapes are determined
 for three typical boundary conditions. The fractional order differential
 equation in terms of a time function is solved by using the Laplace transform
 method. Time dependent behavior is examined by observing the time function
 for different values of fractional order parameter and different ratios of
 other parameters in the model. Validation study is performed by comparing the
 obtained results for a special case of our model with corresponding molecular
 dynamics simulation results found in the literature. [Projekat Ministarstva
 nauke Republike Srbije, br. OI 174001, br. OI 174011 i br. TR 35006]


I may mention that some years ago I operated on a male patient in Bombay, and removed entire by suprapubic lithotomy a calculus weighing 17 Oz., which I sent to the King's College Museum (London). As I went on leave to England shortly afterwards, I assisted Dr. Playfair, then Curator of the museum, to unpack the box, and found to my disappointment that the stone had been broken into fragments. To the best of my belief the stone is still in the King's College Museum. W. K. HATCR, F.R.C.8., Norwich. Lieut.-Col. I.M.S. (retired).


A modification of the Morrow and the Smith, Watson and Topper (SWT) mean stress correction models is proposed to account for the mean stress effect on fatigue life. The capability and accuracy of the proposed model are compared to those of the original Morrow and the SWT model using published mean stress fatigue test data. The proposed mean stress correction model was found to be superior to both the SWT and the Morrow model in the case of the Incoloy 901 superalloy and the ASTM A723 steel. On the other hand both the proposed and the original SWT model provided equally good correlation with experimental data in the case of 7075-T561 aluminium alloy and 1045 HRC 55 steel. The Morrow model was found to give the least accurate predictions for all four materials analysed.


In India Tourism is one of the oldest and Popular form of travel and tourism Industry. Today sustainability is considered as one of the aspect of tourism development in the country. There has been dramatic growth in tourism in recent decade due to the importance of sustainability. The desire of regions and cities to distinguish themselves in a globalizing world has produces a raft of studies related to image and identity. The growth of tourism as an area of consumption and experiences has stimulated more research on sustainable tourism. As sustainability is considered as one of the important factor for growth in Indian Travel and Tourism, There is a need to tie sustainability more closely to the local in the face of global serial reproduction for bringing creativity in tourism. Therefore researcher wants to conduct the study to understand the emerging issues and opportunities in sustainability in Tourism in India.


This conference newspaper features major new research on metropolitan health and well-being, as well as intra-urban analysis of health and social indicators in Hong Kong, and qualitative research with residents of four dense neighbourhoods, together with conference partners at the University of Hong Kong. A compilation of thirty city case studies and framing papers by conference participants and collaborators focusses on the global themes of health and well-being in cities, and local examples of interventions and policy analysis from Hong Kong and fourteen cities around the world.


The maintenance of anticoagulation in adult patients undergoing cardiopulmonary bypass is dependent upon a number of factors, including heparin concentration and adequate antithrombin activity. Inadequate anticoagulation increases the risk of thrombosis and jeopardizes both vascular and extracorporeal circuit integrity. The purpose of this study was to evaluate a goal-directed approach for the use of antithrombin in patients who were resistant to heparin. Following institutional review board approval, data were obtained from quality improvement records. A goal-directed protocol for antithrombin was established based upon heparin dosing (400 IU kg−1 body weight) and achieving an activated clotting time of ⩾500 seconds prior to cardiopulmonary bypass. Two groups of patients were identified as those receiving antithrombin and those not receiving antithrombin. Outcome measures included activated clotting time values and transfusion rates. Consecutive patients (n = 140) were included in the study with 10 (7.1%) in the antithrombin group. The average antithrombin dose was 1,029.0 ± 164.5 IU and all patients had restoration to the activated clotting time levels. Patients in the antithrombin group were on preoperative heparin therapy (80.0% vs. 24.6%, p = 0.001). Prior to cardiopulmonary bypass the activated clotting time values were lower in the antithrombin group (417.7 ± 56.1 seconds vs. 581.1 ± 169.8 seconds, p = 0.003). Antithrombin patients had a lower heparin sensitivity index (0.55 ± 0.17 vs. 1.05 ± 0.44 seconds heparin−1 IU kg−1, p = 0.001), received more total heparin (961.3 ± 158.5 IU kg−1 vs. 677.5 ± 199.0 IU kg−1, p = 0.001), more cardiopulmonary bypass heparin (22,500 ± 10,300 IU vs. 12,100 ± 13,200 IU, p = 0.016), and more protamine (5.4 ± 1.2 vs. 4.1 ± 1.1 mg kg−1, p = 0.003). The intraoperative transfusion rate was higher in the antithrombin group (70.0% vs. 35.4%, p = 0.035), but no differences were seen postoperatively. Utilization of a goal-directed algorithm for the administration of antithrombin for the treatment of heparin resistance is effective in patients undergoing cardiac surgery.


This paper aims to develop a cost-effective diamond turning process to obtain nanosmooth CaF2 optics. Diamond tool wear was also carried out through a number of cutting trials. Three CaF2 specimens (diameter of 50 mm and thickness of 5 mm, crystal orientation of (111)) were diamond turned on an ultra precision lathe (Moore Nanotech 350UPL) by a number of facing cuts. In the cutting trials feed rate varied from 1 μm/rev to 10 μm/rev. White spirit mist was used as the coolant. Cutting forces were measured by a dynamometer (Kistler BA9256). Surface roughness of the CaF2 optics and tool flank wear were measured by a white light interferometer (Zygo Newview 5000) and a scanning electron microscope (FEI Quanta 3D FEG), respectively. It was found that using a feed rate of 1 μm/rev surface roughness Ra of 2 nm could be obtained. When the ratio of the normal cutting force to the tangential cutting force was lower than 1 tool wear would initiate. In diamond turning of calcium fluoride abrasive wear was the main tool wear mechanism. Using white spirit mist as thecoolant could avoid generation of thermal type brittle fracture on the machined CaF2 surfaces.


Introduction
 Monoclonal gammopathy of ocular significance (MGOS) is a rare subset of monoclonal gammopathy of clinical significance (MGCS) occurring secondary to plasma cell dyscrasia resulting in ocular manifestations. Given the rarity of these conditions, optimal management strategies are not defined; the approach is dependent upon the underlying cause of the monoclonal gammopathy and whether or not the patient's vision is affected. We report our review of 23 cases with MGOS, more specifically on paraproteinemic keratopathy (PPK) the most common form, to obtain a better understanding of the patient characteristics, diagnosis and treatments.
 Methods
 We report an international retrospective series of patients with MGOS. Data was collected on patients with MGOS:there were no other inclusion criteria besides monoclonal gammopathy with an ophthalmologic manifestation; however, this report focuses only on patients with PPK. Efficacy outcomes were the hematologic and the ocular responses in patients with PPK. Hematologic responses were reported according to the IMWG response criteria. The ophthalmologic response to treatment was assessed by each contributing physician and reported as either complete, partial or no sight recovery.
 Results
 We identified 23 patients with PPK in the setting of monoclonal gammopathy of unknown significance (MGUS), smoldering multiple myeloma (SMM), or multiple myeloma (MM) diagnosed between 2006 and 2019 in 7 countries. Table 1 summarizes the patients' characteristics. The ocular diagnosis was typically made at the same time or after the hematologic diagnosis. Eleven of 23 patients presented decreased vision. Four were treated by penetrating keratoplasty with or without systemic therapy, including chemotherapy with new generation anti-MM agents with or without autologous stem cell transplantation (ASCT). All patients with MM and 40% of those with other diagnoses such as SMM or MGUS received systemic therapy. In most cases, neither ocular nor hematologic treatment, even when ASCT was performed, afforded a durable improvement in the visual acuity despite initial responses. MGOS typically relapsed within one year of the initial response (Table 2).
 Conclusion
 To date, this is the largest retrospective study focusing on MGOS patients with monoclonal immunoglobulin deposits accumulating in the cornea and resulting in visual impairment. Further studies will be required to determine the optimal strategy to treat and prevent the relapse of ocular symptoms in patients with PPK and specifically to address the timing of keratoplasty and systemic chemotherapy and the role of maintenance therapy. Patients with corneal manifestation of unknown origin should undergo a hematologic check-up and patients with paraproteinemia should have a periodic ocular health assessment.
 Figure 1 Figure 1.

 Garderet: Takeda: Consultancy; Sanofi: Consultancy; Amgen: Consultancy; Janssen: Consultancy; Celgene: Consultancy. Munder: Janssen: Consultancy, Honoraria; BMS: Consultancy, Honoraria; Abbvie: Consultancy; Takeda: Consultancy, Honoraria; Amgen: Honoraria; Sanofi: Consultancy; GSK: Consultancy; Incyte: Research Funding. Gozzetti: AbbVie: Honoraria; Janssen: Honoraria. Rosinol: Janssen, Celgene, Amgen and Takeda: Honoraria. Jurczyszyn: Janssen-Cilag, Amgen: Honoraria, Speakers Bureau.


The supply of food derived from aquaculture has increased significantly in recent years. The aim of this industrial sector is to produce sustainable products to meet the needs of consumers, providing food security and nutritional benefits. The development of aquaculture has faced challenges including disease outbreaks that can cause substantial economic losses. These diseases can be controlled using chemicals such as antibiotics. However, the indiscriminate use of these substances can have major negative impacts on human health and the environment with the additional risk of the emergence of resistant organisms. The present manuscript describes the use of phytotherapy in association with nanotechnology in order to obtain a more effective and less harmful system for the control of bacterial diseases in fish. Zein nanoparticles associated with eugenol and garlic essential oil were prepared through antisolvent precipitation and characterized. Zein nanoparticles are promising carrier systems as zein proteins are biodegradable and biocompatible and, in this way, good candidates for encapsulation of active ingredients. The system presented good physicochemical properties with an average particle diameter of approximately 150 nm, a polydispersity index lower than 0.2, and a zeta potential of approximately 30 mV. High encapsulation efficiency was obtained for the active compounds with values higher than 90%, and the compounds were protected against degradation during storage (90 days). The nanoparticle formulations containing the botanical compounds also showed less toxicity in the tests performed with a biomarker (Artemia salina). In addition, the systems showed bactericidal activity against the important fish pathogenic bacteria Aeromonas hydrophila, Edwardsiella tarda, and Streptococcus iniaein vitro. The present study opens new perspectives for the use of botanical compounds in combination with nanotechnology to treat fish diseases caused by bacteria, contributing to a more sustainable fish chain production.


Bismuth complexes stabilized by carbon-based donor ligands are underserved by their instability, often due to facile ligand dissociation and deleterious protonolysis. Herein, we show that the ortho-bismuthination of hexaphenylcarbodiphosphorane enables a robust framework with geometrically constrained carbone-bismuth bonding interactions, which are highly tunable by cationization. The carbodiphosphorane bismuth halides (1 and 2) are remarkably air-stable and feature unprecedented trans carboneC-Bi-X ligation, resulting in highly elongated Bi-X bonds. In contrast to known carbone-bismuth complexes, hydrolytic activation of the carbone yields well-defined organobismuth complexes, and subsequent dehydrohalogenation is feasible using potassium bis(trimethylsilyl)amide or N-heterocyclic carbenes. The redox-flexibility of this framework was evaluated in the high catalytic activity of 1 and 2 for silylation of 2,2,6,6-tetramethylpiperidin-1-oxyl (TEMPO) under mild conditions (50 °C, 24-96 h) and low catalyst loadings (5-10 mol %), which suggests the accessibility of short-lived hydridic and radical bismuth species. The reaction of 1, PhSiH3, and tris(pentafluorophenyl)borane (BCF) yields the first crystallographically characterized bismuth hydridoborate complex as an ionic species (9), presumably by BCF-mediated hydride abstraction from an unobserved [Bi]-H intermediate. All isolated compounds have been characterized by heteronuclear NMR spectroscopy and X-ray crystallography, and the bonding situation in representative complexes (1, 2, 5, and 9) were further evaluated using density functional theory.


Among the new technologies for the detection of subclinical atherosclerosis, ankle-brachial index, carotid ultrasonography, computed tomography detection of coronary calcifications and high-resolution nuclear magnetic resonance are those of greatest clinical usefulness. These explorations are especially useful for patients with an intermediate cardiovascular risk, or a 10-20% risk according to the National Cholesterol Education Program-Adult Treatment Panel III or 3-4% according to the SCORE project. This is because they allow the identification of high-risk patients who need a more intense treatment. In addition, high-sensitivity C-reactive protein concentrations may be considered as a new marker for the evaluation of cardiovascular risk. In this article, the current state of knowledge about these explorations and the guidelines of the main scientific societies are reviewed, and the practical conclusions of the working group are provided.


Abstract This article presents the results of a study of the continuing education requests of child protection social workers. The work presented is part of a larger research project realized in Lombardy (a region of Italy), conducted to gain knowledge and data about social workers' opinions, activities, and workloads. Through the participation of 300 child protection social workers engaged in fieldwork, a specific part of the research was dedicated to continuing education requests. Starting with their perceptions about the competences and abilities required for practice, social workers were invited to express their opinions about educational needs. Using an online survey constructed ad hoc, the social workers' continuing education needs were investigated first with multiple choice questions and subsequently using a priority scale. The interviewees expressed educational needs in 22 different areas. The data collected open perspectives to new child protection work and encourage the people responsible for education to support democratic and participatory approaches. The conclusions offer suggestions for social work education and practice.


Since the hepatotoxic role of toluene in exposed workers from the petroleum and petrochemical industries chronically exposed to low concentration has no been entirely dilucidated, this transversal study was undertaken in order to clarify the situation in the local industries. A group of 33 non-exposed men workers of such industries (group control, aged 33.0 +/- 4.88 years) were compared with 33 toluene-exposed men (aged 35.0 +/- 9.33 years) from the related industries, with a minimal of 6 months exposition time to toluene and without liver disease history. In addition to a complete occupational diseases medical history, each subject was tested by both a venous blood sample (to determine prothrombin, total and fractioned bilirubin, total and fractioned proteins, liver enzymes and cholesterol) and urine sample (hippuric acid). Also the environmental concentration of toluene in working areas was determined by gas chromatography, which was below the recommended standard levels in working areas. Although the analyzed parameters were in the normal range, it was observed that those workers with known alcohol ingestion and toluene exposition had several abnormalities. The results of this study confirm that toluene may have a synergistic hepatotoxic effect in toluene-exposed workers that are alcohol consumers. The alcohol in considered as a confounding factor and it is not possible to rule out in the etiology of hepatic changes detected in the study.


Gold nanoparticles of various sizes have been prepared and deposited on top of the TiO2 film in dye-sensitized solar cells (DSSCs) in order to enhance the light harvesting efficiency. The light scattering effect gradually strengthens as the size of Au nanoparticles increases from 48 to 203 nm. It is impressive that 1 μg cm−2 deposition of 203 nm gold nanoparticles on top of the TiO2 film enhances the light scattering efficiency remarkably, increasing the short-circuit photocurrent from 14.37 mA cm−2 to 17.81 mA cm−2 by 24% and the power conversion efficiency from 7.44% to 10.03% by 35%.


Some bacterial species live within the human body and its immediate environment, and have various effects on humans, such as causing illness or assisting with digestion, while others colonize a range of other ecological niches. The availability of whole genome sequences for many bacteria opens the way to a better understanding of their metabolism and interactions, provided these genome sequences can be compared. In collaboration with biologists and mathematicians, a bioinformatics team at Montpellier Laboratory of Informatics, Robotics, and Microelectronics (LIRMM) has been developing novel tools to improve bacterial genome comparisons.


Objective The model for end-stage liver disease (MELD) scoring system cannot be used to assess the deterioration of patients with liver cirrhosis caused by infection and portal hypertension. Elevated von Willebrand factor antigen (vWF-Ag) in plasma is associated with portal pressure and complications in patients with liver cirrhosis. We aimed to evaluate whether the addition of vWF-Ag can improve the risk prediction ability of the MELD scoring system. Methods A total of 228 patients with hepatitis B virus (HBV)-related liver cirrhosis were eligible for inclusion in this retrospective study. The vWF-Ag level was assessed by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). The endpoint of this study was defined as the time to liver transplantation or death. Univariate and multivariate analyses were performed to assess the risk factors associated with transplant-free mortality. Receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis was used to assess potential discriminatory variables for transplant-free mortality. Results During a median follow-up interval of 30.23 months, 124 patients (54.4%) reached the endpoint of this study. Patients who died or underwent liver transplantation had elevated levels of MELD and vWF-Ag. Moreover, vWF-Ag and MELD showed comparable predictive potential for transplant-free survival (area under the curve [AUC], vWF-Ag = 0.71; AUC, MELD = 0.73). Ultimately, vWF-Ag can significantly improve the predictive potential of MELD in determining transplant-free mortality (AUC, MELD-vWF-Ag = 0.79, P = 0.006). Conclusion An elevated vWF-Ag level was independently associated with transplant-free mortality in patients with liver cirrhosis. The inclusion of vWF-Ag in the MELD scoring system can improve mortality predictions in patients with liver cirrhosis.


A report on the development of a model for the computer-guided administration of sufentanil throughout surgical procedures involving cardiopulmonary-bypass (CB) is presented. The authors approach the effects of hypothermia on sufentanil clearance by applying a continuous temperature correction to the ultimate elimination rate constant (the terminal eigenvalue). This correction is based primarily on the anticipated effects of temperature on the enzyme-catalyzed reactions which are essential for the elimination of the drug from the body. An algorithm for the application of the model is also presented.<<ETX>>


On March 5, 2012, the advocacy organization Invisible Children released a short 30-minute film entitled Kony2012 , on YouTube.com . Within days, the video had gone viral, gaining a mass global viewership. By December 2012, the video had received over 94 million views worldwide, attaining the unofficial status as "the most viral video of all time." While Kony2012 raised awareness about the urgency of the manhunt for Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony and his exploitation of child soldiers in Uganda, the film generated much controversy. Commentators, both from within Uganda and beyond, raised serious questions about the oversimplified Colonial-style intervention (with its especial focus on military interven- tion) that the video seemed to promote. This article explores in-depth to what extent the Kony2012 phenomenon embodies both the material and discursive legacies of colonialism. It finds that, while fostering a digital citizenship that promotes the sharing of valuable information, such online advocacy may also unintentionally reproduce and rapidly disseminate ste- reotypes, bias, and racism. Thus, Kony2012 is a case study of the ways in which online media can be both productive and limiting in addressing hate and exploitation. While the Kony2012 campaign quickly and impressively raised popular awareness of child trafficking and exploitation, it nevertheless subtly marginalized the experiences and cultural perspectives of the Ugandan people and privileged a Western-centric interventionism.


Precipitation isotope maps over mountains are critical for water resource assessment, yet isoscape modeling has been minimally investigated for complex terrain with high relief. Here we show that multiannual (2011–2015) mean precipitation isoscapes across the Japanese Alps region can be represented by simple multiple-regression models with strong goodness of fit (R2 = 0.928 for δ2H and 0.944 for δ18O). Reliability of the models was further confirmed by agreement with previously reported independent data throughout a wider range of elevation (7–3,730 m asl). Modeled precipitation isoscapes were consistent with observations of soil water (20 sites) and river water (50 sites) when considering evaporative enrichment and unclosed water balance. Uncertainties of modeled δ values for precipitation were greater in lowlands near the coast than over the mountains. Unexpectedly, spatially uniform isotopic lapse rates (–11.66‰ km–1 for δ2H and –1.724‰ km–1 for δ18O), which are divorced from continental effects, gave substantially good approximation on a regional (e.g., a few hundred kilometers) scale. This allows for convenient and reliable modeling of precipitation isoscapes over mountainous regions for hydrological/ecological/interdisciplinary applications.


Modeling the interactions between separate models contributes to building flexible hybrid simulation frameworks. In earlier work, an Algorithmic Interaction Model was proposed and developed to integrate the componentized WEAP and LEAP RESTful frameworks for modeling and simulating water and energy systems. However, this approach does not separate modeling and simulation protocol from each other. It also does not support flexible, structured model hierarchies. To overcome these limitations, the parallel DEVS formalism is used to develop an Interaction Model for use with the DEVS-Suite simulator. The resulting DEVS Interaction Model (DEVS-IM) is supported with a RESTful framework and MongoDB for storing the interaction models for the coupled water and energy models. The DEVS-IM, grounded in system theory and component-based modeling, offers strong support for the model reusability, flexibility, and maintainability traits essential for developing realistic simulations of coupled energy and water systems.


Worldwide breweries are known to use large volumes of water. Between 10 and 20m3 of water yields 1m3 of beer. This translates to over 90% of wastewater. The world produced 1.94x108m3 of beer in 2018. Of the total production 1.48x107m3 of beer were produced from Africa with Uganda contributing up to 4.1x105m3. Uganda's major producing industries being Uganda Breweries Limited and Nile Breweries Limited. Uganda's brewery sector generates between 3.69x106 to 7.79x106m3 of wastewater annually that could otherwise be of importance. This wastewater is characterized by high organic matter content with COD, BOD and TSS ranging between 2,000 to 10,000mg L-1, 1,200 to 7,000mg L-1 and 2,901 to 3,000mg L-1 respectively. Whereas little information has been published regarding the current use of wastewater in Uganda by the Key players, elsewhere in the world the wastewater has been treated for re-use using Anaerobic Sequencing Batch Reactor and membrane bioreactors, for electricity generation using microbial fuel cell and for biogas production using Veolia Bio Bed Technology. The generated sludge has successfully been used as an Organic Fertilizer and a raw material for Organic Fertilizers production in different parts of the world. The process by-products such as spent grain, spent hops and surplus yeast have been used majorly in fertilizers and animal feeds. The purpose of this review article was to explore potential uses of the wastewater in that could apply for Uganda.


The classical decision problem associated with a game is whether a given player has a winning strategy, i.e. some strategy that leads almost surely to a victory, regardless of the other players' strategies. While this problem is relevant for deterministic fully observable games, for a partially observable game the requirement of winning with probability 1 is too strong. In fact, as shown in this paper, a game might be decidable for the simple criterion of almost sure victory, whereas optimal play (even in an approximate sense) is not computable. We therefore propose another criterion, the decidability of which is equivalent to the computability of approximately optimal play. Then, we show that (i) this criterion is undecidable in the general case, even with deterministic games (no random part in the game), (ii) that it is in the jump 0', and that, even in the stochastic case, (iii) it becomes decidable if we add the requirement that the game halts almost surely whatever maybe the strategies of the players.


This study was investigated the utilization of agama lizard meat meal (Agama agama) as dietary protein source in the diets of Clarias gariepinus fingerlings (MW±SE = 33.48 g±0.13). The fingerlings were fed four Isonitrogenous and Isocaloric diets containing blends of agama lizard meal in percentages of 0 (Diet I), 10 (Diet II), 20 (Diet III) and 30% (Diet IV) respectively for 8 weeks at 5% body weight. Mean weight gain (MWG) ranged from 22.85g (Diet I) to 42.80g (Diet III) and Specific Growth Rate (SGR) ranged from 0.93% per day (Diet 1) to 1.46% per day (Diet III). Feed Conversion Ratio (FCR) was between 2.61 (Diet III) and 2.96 (Diet IV). There was however no significant differences (p>0.05) in these parameters for all the test diets. Proximate composition of carcass shows significant differences (p<0.05) in moisture and ash contents with no significant differences observed for all the other proximate composition parameters. From the foregoing, agama lizard meal can be included at any level but it is recommended that 20% inclusion level be used.


The effect of the particle size distribution of MgO and carbon on the behaviour of the MgO–C reaction was investigated by heating four kinds of MgO–C sample bricks with different size distributions, and the reaction mechanism was discussed quantitatively using an improved MgO–C reaction model in which the unreacted core model was combined with a statistical distribution function. As a result, it was found that the MgO–C reaction is promoted when the ratio of fine particles of MgO increased and finer particles of carbon were used in the brick. A kinetic model of the MgO–C reaction based on the unreacted core model was developed and improved by combining the model with the statistical distribution function. The improved model considers the effect of the particle size distribution of the refractory materials on the MgO–C reaction rate. The effect of the carbon particle size on the MgO–C reaction can be explained using this model. The effect of the MgO particle size on the reaction behaviour can also be explained by the model under conditions with a relatively large ratio of MgO aggregates. However, when the ratio of fine MgO particles was large, the calculation result was much larger than the experimental result. As a reason for this, it is predicted that the fine particles sinter with each other during heating, resulting in an increase in the apparent particle diameter of the fine MgO.


Alloys from the region of existence of the solid solution TbCo4.5SixLi0.5-x were synthesized by arc melting. Quantitative and qualitative composition of alloys and powders of electrode materials was determined by scanning electron microscopy and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy. The Tb/Co/Si ratio in the samples was confirmed by X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy. The change in cell parameters within the solid solution existence was established by the results of X-ray powder diffraction (TbCo4.5SixLi0.5-x, x = 0.1 0.4: a = 4.9518(5) 4.9324(3), c = 3.9727(4) 3.9746(3) Å). The crystal structure of the solid solution was determined by the Rietveld method (CaCu5 structure type, space group P6/mmm). Cobalt atoms are partially replaced by silicon and lithium only in 2c position. The ability of alloys to reversibly absorb hydrogen was studied by the method of electrochemical hydrogenation. Under experimental conditions the amount of deintercalated hydrogen was about 0.19 H/f.u. The change in cell parameters after hydrogenation (volume increases from 83.74(1) to 85.54(6) Å) and the stability of the electrode in the electrolyte solution was further confirmed by X-ray phase analysis. Measurements of the electrical resistivity of the samples indicated a decrease of resistivity value with a slight increase in the amount of alkali metal in samples.


Adoptive cell therapies with T lymphocytes expressing engineered T cell receptors (TCRs) are one of the most promising approaches to cancer therapy.1 However, the experimentally driven development of novel TCR therapies is limited by the enormous biological variability of peptide:Human Leukocyte Antigen:TCR (pHLA:TCR) complexes. The in silico methods hold the promise to streamline the discovery of novel TCR therapies by reducing costs and time of laboratory research. In particular, the prediction of TCR binding to a target antigen, as well as the prediction of TCR off-target toxicity2 can provide useful insights supporting the development of safe therapies. We aimed at the development of an experimentally validated AI model of pHLA:TCR binding that will help to prioritize and reduce the number of in vitro assays necessary to discover novel TCRs for cancer therapies.The limiting factor of successful pHLA:TCR binding modeling is data availability and completeness of TCR characterization. To address this issue, we are building an oncological pHLA:TCR database with paired alpha and beta chain TCR sequences. We are collecting and sequencing tumor and normal samples from 100 cancer patients, as part of an observational clinical trial. Those data are then screened with the Ardigen's ArdImmune Vax platform3 4 to select immunogenic epitopes. T cells that bind those epitopes are subsequently sorted and used to generate TCR sequencing data at single-cell resolution. We use data-driven and simulation-based models to extract insights about the dynamics of a pHLA:TCR system to predict the binding probability and explain the inference made by the model.We optimized our data collection pipeline for the cost-efficient acquisition of a large oncological pHLA:TCR dataset. These data will enable us to build efficient models to streamline the development of TCR therapies against cancer.We benchmarked our modeling approach for pHLA:TCR binding against existing solutions5–7 on publicly available data. We also show how focus on model explainability facilitates the detection of model inconsistency of uncertain predictions by expert inspection. Our toxicity assessment solution2 extends the applicability of our system to the prediction of TCR safety profile.The presented work shows perspectives and limitations of AI-aided TCR therapy development. We present results for our pHLA:TCR binding model, a TCR-toxicity-screening solution, and the study design of our observational clinical trial. Our growing database of pHLA:TCR interactions will enable us to develop highly predictive pHLA:TCR binding models, in particular for oncological targets.We acknowledge funding through the project "Creating an innovative AI-based (Artificial Intelligence) IN SILICO TECHNOLOGY TCRact to launch a NEW SERVICE for designing and optimizing T-cell receptors (TCR) for use in cancer immunotherapies" cofunded by European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) as part of Smart Growth Operational Programme 2014–2020.Farkona S, Diamandis EP, Blasutig IM. Cancer immunotherapy: the beginning of the end of cancer? BMC Med 2016;14:73. PMCID: PMC4858828.Murcia Pienkowski VA, Mazzocco G, Niemiec I, Sanecka-Duin A, Krol P, Myronov O, Skoczylas P, Kaczmarczyk J, Blum A. Off-target toxicity prediction in cellular cancer immunotherapies [Internet]. Cytotherapy. 2021;S96. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/s1465324921004229.Stepniak P, Mazzocco G, Myronov A, Niemiec I, Gruba K, Skoczylas P, Sanecka-Duin A, Drwal M, Kaczmarczyk J. AI-augmented design of effective therapeutic cancer vaccines and adoptive cell therapies. Journal For Immunotherapy Of Cancer. Bmc Campus, 4 Crinan St, London N1 9xw, England; 2019.Mazzocco G, Niemiec I, Myronov A, Skoczylas P, Kaczmarczyk J, Sanecka-Duin A, Gruba K, Król P, Drwal M, Szczepanik M, Pyrc K, Stȩpniak P. AI aided design of epitope-based vaccine for the induction of cellular immune responses against SARS-CoV-2. Front Genet. 2021;12:602196. PMCID: PMC8027494.Weber A, Born J, Rodriguez Martínez M. TITAN: T-cell receptor specificity prediction with bimodal attention networks. Bioinformatics. 2021;37(Suppl_1):i237–i244. PMCID: PMC8275323.Springer I, Besser H, Tickotsky-Moskovitz N, Dvorkin S, Louzoun Y. Prediction of specific TCR-peptide binding from large dictionaries of TCR-Peptide Pairs. Front Immunol 2020;11:1803. PMCID: PMC7477042.Jurtz VI, Jessen LE, Bentzen AK, Jespersen MC, Mahajan S, Vita R, Jensen KK, Marcatili P, Hadrup SR, Peters B, Nielsen M. NetTCR: sequence-based prediction of TCR binding to peptide-MHC complexes using convolutional neural networks [Internet]. Available from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/433706


In this paper, we focus on subjective and objective Point Cloud Quality Assessment (PCQA) in an immersive environment and study the effect of geometry and texture attributes in compression distortion. Using a Head-Mounted Display (HMD) with six degrees of freedom, we establish a subjective PCQA database, named SIAT Point Cloud Quality Database (SIAT-PCQD). Our database consists of 340 distorted point clouds compressed by the MPEG point cloud encoder with the combination of 20 sequences and 17 pairs of geometry and texture quantization parameters. The impact of distorted geometry and texture attributes is further discussed in this paper. Then, we propose two projection-based objective quality evaluation methods, i.e., a weighted view projection based model and a patch projection based model. Our subjective database and findings can be used in point cloud processing, transmission, and coding, especially for virtual reality applications. The subjective datasethttps://dx.doi.org/10.21227/ad8d-7r28 http://codec.siat.ac.cn/video_download_siat-pcqd.htmlhas been released in the public repository.


Bryophytes dominate northern peatlands. Obtaining reliable measurements
of moss-growth and how it may be affected by global changes are therefore
important. Several methods have been used to measure moss-growth but it is
unclear how comparable they are in different conditions and this uncertainty
undermines comparisons among studies. In a field experiment we measured the growth
and production of Sphagnum fallax (Sphagnum) and Polytrichum strictum (Polytrichum)
using two handling methods, using cut and uncut plants, and three growth-variables,
height-growth, length-growth, and mass-growth. We aimed "benchmarking" a
combination of six methodological options against exactly the same set of
factorial experiments: atmospheric CO2 enrichment and N addition.
The two handling methods produced partly different results: in half of the
cases, one method revealed a significant treatment effect but the other one did
not: significant negative effects on growth were only observed on uncut plants
for elevated CO2 and on cut plants for N addition. Furthermore, the
correspondence between measurements made with various growth-variables depended
on the species and, to a lesser extent, treatments. Sphagnum and Polytrichum growth
was inhibited under elevated CO2, and correlated to higher ammonium
values. Sphagnum was however less
affected than Polytrichum and the
height difference between the two species decreased. N addition reduced the P/N
ratio and probably induced P-limiting conditions. Sphagnum growth was more inhibited than Polytrichum and the height difference between the two species
increased. Our data show that such a problem indeed exists between the cut and
uncut handling methods. Not only do the results differ in absolute terms by as
much as 82% but also do their comparisons and interpretations depend on the
handling method—and thus the interpretation would be biased—in half of the
cases. These results call for caution when comparing factorial studies based on
different handling methods.


Current Status Doctoral nursing education in Japan has changed rapidly over the past 20 years, resulting in the move of nursing education fully into the higher education system in Japan, with appropriate student numbers and quality. In 1988 the first establishment of doctoral nursing education occurred at St. Luke's College of Nursing Tokyo, after which the number of doctoral programs in Nursing increased to 61 by 2010. As administrators recognize the benefits for stable management of making their university attractive to applicants by providing graduate education, they start to create more graduate schools. Some graduate programs are independent as departments of nursing, whereas some are integrated in departments of medicine, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, or health sciences. The number of nursing universities has increased in every single prefecture. Undergraduate programs expanded from 11 universities in 1993 to 188 by 2010, and master's programs increased from eight in 1998 to 127 by 2010. The increase in nursing programs allows potential students who desire to pursue higher education in nursing to find a school in their communities. Students have to choose to be researchers or advanced practitioners at the master's level in Japan. Many students who choose to be practitioners attain the license of an advanced practitioner, called a Certified Nurse Specialist (CNS), who specialize in various clinical areas, including cancer nursing and psychiatric nursing. There are many graduate curricula to prepare for the completion of this postgraduate credential.


This paper presents PaDaWAn, an infrastructure written in Python to provide loosely coupled in situ capabilities to accelerate filebased simulation workflows. It provides services for in-memory data exchange between applications and a simple configuration model to switch from a file-based workflow to a loosely coupled in situ workflow. The infrastructure is currently based on CEA-DAM Hercule parallel I/O library by providing an ABI-compatible library to intercept simulation data in a transparent way and to facilitate integration into existing simulation codes and tools. PaDaWAn implements a producer-consumer pattern with buffering of data in an in-memorystaging service with automatic memory management and running on dedicated resources. We describe the key design decisions and main architectural features, and share the lessons learned from the development of the infrastructure and from setting up test runs on two production-like workflow cases. We conclude on the perspectives for our infrastructure.


This paper presents the development of an autonomous maritime navigation system for unmanned
surface vehicles (USVs). In the autonomous system various maritime navigational devices are
connected to obtain necessary navigational information but with uncertainties. To improve signal
accuracy as well as robustness, a novel multi-sensor data fusion algorithm is proposed and
developed. Then, a new predictive path planning algorithm is employed to provide an advisory
collision-free trajectory. Practical trials and computer based simulations are carried out to prove the
effectiveness of the developed system


This paper examines the uses of mobile, fixed telephone and Internet–based communication by travellers and the implications of that use for the experience of travel. For most of the respondents, continued communication with their networks of contacts back home were integral to their travel experience, allowing them to maintain an ongoing symbolic proximity or co–presence with people with whom they shared a common history. Travellers make clear distinctions between the uses, benefits and drawbacks of phones, texting and Internet–based communication. The continuation of intense communication between travellers and non–travellers suggests that people 'back home' and the travellers are involved in forms of 'virtual travel'.


Aim To determine whether rare or common species contribute most to overall patterns of spatial variation in extant species richness. Location Mexico. Methods Using data on the distribution of mammal species across Mexico at a quarter degree resolution, we ranked species from the most widespread to the most restricted (common-to-rare) within the study area, and from the most restricted to the most widespread (rare-to-common), and generated a sequence of patterns of species richness for increasing numbers of species. At each stage along both series of richness patterns, we correlated the species richness pattern for the subassemblage with that of the full assemblage. This allows comparison of subassemblages of the n most common with the n most rare species, in terms of how well they match the full assemblage richness pattern. Further analyses examined the effects on these patterns of correlation of the amount of raw information contained in the distributions of given numbers of rare and common species. Results For the mammals of Mexico the more widely distributed species contribute disproportionately to patterns of species richness compared with more restricted species, particularly for non-volant species and endemic species. This is not simply a consequence of differences in the volumes of information contained in the distributions of rare and common species, with the disproportionate contribution of common species if anything being sharpened when these differences are taken into account. The pattern is most clearly demonstrated by endemic species, suggesting that the contribution of common species is clearest when the causes of rarity and commonness are limited to those genuinely resulting in narrow and widespread geographical ranges, respectively, rather than artificial (e.g. geopolitical) boundaries to the extents of study regions. Conclusions Perhaps surprisingly, an understanding of the determinants of overall patterns of species richness may gain most from consideration of why common species occur in some areas and are absent from others, rather than consideration of the distributions of rare species.


Biofertilizers based on processed organic manure are proven alternative to mineral fertilizers. The experiments were carried out in 2009 to 2011 on an organic farm of the Agroecological Centre at the Agricultural UniversityPlovdiv (Bulgaria). The study included pepper variety "Sofiiska Kapiya". The biofertilizers Seasol (Earthcare) and Emosan (Hemozym Bio N5) were applied as vegetative feeding on top of two basic fertilizations with the solid biofertilizers Boneprot and Lumbrical. The objectives were to investigate impact of biofertilizers on agroecological conditions for pepper growth and on biological and productive parameters of pepper under organic farming. The investigated parameters were standard yield and economic productivity of plants (i.e. average number of fruits per plant, mass of fruits and pericarp thicknesses). The present study found that treatments with biofertilizers Emosan and Seasol on the basic fertilizations ensured more nutrients in the soil comparison with the single applications of the basic fertilization. It was shown by the agrochemical status of soil, i.e. at the end of vegetation, a higher total absorbable N after application of the biofertilizer Emosan on basic fertilization with Boneprot was found. Nevertheless, the treatment with biofertilizer Boneprot lead to a higher humus and major nutrient content compared to control (non-fertilized) plants. All treatments showed 'a good level of supply' of the soil with К2O. This determines the positive impact of the biofertilization for enrichment of soil with potassium thus assuring a valuable reserve for the next crops. The optimal agroecological conditions provided by the addition of biofertilizers reflected in higher standard yield of pepper compared to the control plants. The results showed the positive effect of application of biofertilizer Emosan, regardless of the type of basic fertilization. The highest standard yields in all three experimental years were shown by the pepper plants fed with the biofertilizer Emosan on the basic fertilization Lumbrical, i.e. the average increase was 47.2 % compared to the control plants. The biofertilizers applied as single treatments or as combined treatments increased the number of fruits per plant (i.e. 1.5- 4.0 pcs) and the average pericarp thickness of fruits by 0.58 - 1.16 mm. The research findings provide grounds for suggesting the studied bioferilizers as an effective solution for maintaining soil fertility in organic production of pepper.


A majority of targeted cancer therapeutics involve the specific inhibition of a molecular target in a signal transduction pathway. It is well known that targeted therapies, such as kinase inhibitors, may have effects on pathways other than those specifically targeted, whether by non-specific interactions or by indirect pathway cross-talk effects. The simplest view of signal transduction entails a cascade of molecular events initiated by the recognition of a stimulus and culminating in the chemical alteration of an effector molecule. We have recently shown that cascades can exhibit bidirectional signal propagation without the addition of regulatory feedback connections via a phenomenon termed retroactivity. Thus, retroactivity represents another potential source of off-target effects in signaling cascades. We have extended our previous work to a computational model which allows us to characterize the significance of the upstream off-target effect via retroactivity with a series of simple signaling networks using physiologically relevant parameters values. We aim to understand the dynamics of cancer signaling by integrating systems biology based models of signaling dynamics into our experimental investigations of breast cancer with the intent of both directing experiments and making predictions. One of the signaling networks we studied takes the form of two independent signaling cascades which have no regulatory feedback connections but are activated by the same upstream kinase. Our results suggest that under physiologically relevant conditions the application of an inhibitor near the bottom of one cascade can produce a significant change in concentration of a protein in the other cascade, even without a regulatory feedback connection between the two cascades. Developing a deeper understanding of bidirectional signal propagation in signal transduction pathways will be vitally important in the effort to develop safer and more effective targeted cancer therapies. Our modeling results challenge the notion that information in cascades only flows in the cell surface-to-nucleus direction and suggests that a perturbation applied within a cascade can produce both an upstream and a downstream effect. The notion of an upstream off-target effect is completely novel and may have significant implications if the perturbation takes the form of an inhibitory therapeutic drug. Citation Format: {Authors}. {Abstract title} [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 101st Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2010 Apr 17-21; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2010;70(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 2012.


Abstract This paper deals with the problem of local sensitivity analysis in regression, i.e., how sensitive the results of a regression model (objective function, parameters, and dual variables) are to changes in the data. We use a general formula for local sensitivities in optimization problems to calculate the sensitivities in three standard regression problems (least squares, minimax, and least absolute values). Closed formulas for all sensitivities are derived. Sensitivity contours are presented to help in assessing the sensitivity of each observation in the sample. The dual problems of the minimax and least absolute values are obtained and interpreted. The proposed sensitivity measures are shown to deal more effectively with the masking problem than the existing methods. The methods are illustrated by their application to some examples and graphical illustrations are given.


The aim of this study was to examine the colonization of Streptococcus mutans and Streptococcus sanguinis in the oral cavity and the association with severe early childhood caries (S-ECC). Saliva and plaque samples were collected from 14 S-ECC children and 8 caries-free (CF) children. All S-ECC children were S. mutans positive; 100% of CF children and 93% of S-ECC children were S. sanguinis positive. The children's caries severity was positively correlated with levels of S. mutans (p < 0.001), total oral streptococci (p < 0.01), total cultivable oral bacteria (p < 0.05), and children's age (p < 0.05). Logistic regression analysis showed that the interaction of S. sanguinis with S. mutans was a significant factor associated with the caries status in children, suggesting that the relative levels of these two microorganisms in the oral cavity play an important role in caries development.


Accurate estimates of the current rate of subsidence in the Mississippi Delta (southern United States) provide a context for planning of wetland restoration and predictions of storm surge flooding. We present a comprehensive three-dimensional surface velocity field for the Mississippi Delta based on a network of 36 high-precision continuous GPS stations. We show that while the majority of the delta is relatively stable, the southern portion continues to experience high rates of subsidence (5–6 mm yr –1 ). Our data are consistent with long-term tide gauge records at Grand Isle, Louisiana, and several stations in Florida. The current rate of relative sea-level rise (combined effect of land subsidence and sea-level rise) along parts of the coastal delta is ~8–9 mm yr –1 . Most tide gauge stations have recorded sea-level-rise acceleration after A.D. 1970. These data have implications for land reclamation and wetland restoration in the region; parts of the delta may not be viable in the long term.


A case of tuberculous splenomegaly with leukopenia and anemia following miliary tuberculosis has been presented. Splenectomy was required after streptomycin failed to control the cytopenias, progressive emaciation, and splenic infection. However, following what appeared to be six weeks of marked improvement, the patient developed a fulminating tuberculous meningitis and died.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors are indebted to Dr. Byrd S. Leavell for his suggestions in the preparation of this paper.


This essay strives to find parent's role both on group lessons for youths who play guitar, in which the parents too are active students, and in the children's practice. Are there parents who are more or less involved in their child's learning process outside the lessons? In what aspect and how have the parent been involved in its child's learning process, outside the lessons? Have they been involved at all in the child's learning
process outside the lesson? Are there any differences in the childrens amount of practice-time when parents are more involved outside the lessons, than parents who are not? The study concludes that there are connections between highly involved parents that practice a lot and children who practice a lot. The essay also concludes that the
parents assist their children with cognitive support and shows other strategies for assistance and completion in their practice. The results of this study originates from data collected from a qualitative enquiry studie with the parents and semi-structured interviews with their children. These data has been analysed and processed through
Grounded Theory to form the conclusions of this essay.


Results of paternity tests carried out in our hospital between September, 1984 and December, 1993 were analysed. There were 44 cases consisting of 37 (84.1%) groups of four each: the child, the mother and the two alleged fathers, and 7 (15.9%) groups of three, including the disputed child, the mother and the alleged father. Most of the disputed victims were children under age 10 years (97.7%), the oldest 'child' in dispute was 35 years. The total cumulative paternal exclusion rate with our standard techniques was only 27.5% consisting of 15.9% for ABO blood group system, 2.3% for Rhesus-D system and 9.3% for haemoglobin electrophoresis analysis. This is far below the exclusion rate of up to 97% and 99.9% obtained with the more reliable tests such as HLA and DNA analyses, respectively. There is a need to introduce a more reliable screening package for paternity testing in our specialised hospitals in order to ease the associated medicolegal problems since all the cases but one seen were referred from law courts.


The sintering process in compacts of nickel reduction powder is investigated by positron lifetime spectroscopy. Additionally, the lifetime data obtained are compared to the data on the recovery and recrystallization after plastic deformation caused by cold rolling or pressing, and on the annealing out of vacancy clusters caused by low-temperature electron irradiation. Due to the small grain sizes inside the powder particles at lower temperature, positrons annihilate at grain boundaries, leading to vacancy-cluster-like signals. At intermediate temperature, a surface signal is detected . This is in agreement with an effective powder-particle size of estimated from scanning electron microscopy. When sintering starts, i.e. above , the only detected defect signal, besides a small surface signal, stems from large-angle grain boundaries. At the intensive-shrinkage stage, there are contributions from different shrinkage mechanisms. The experimentally observed shrinkage rates can be explained by Coble creep which seems to dominate the material transport. Nabarro-Herring and dislocation creep play only minor roles in this system.


Studies involving infusion of stable isotope labelled peptides have shown that the mammary gland has the ability to utilise peptide-derived AA for milk protein synthesis (Backwell et al., 1994a) and that peptides may be involved in the supply of phenylalanine to the mammary gland in vivo (Backwell et al., 1994b). The aim of the present experiment was to compare milk production responses to systemic (jugular vein) provision of histidine as free AA or as a peptide (glycyl-histidine) in lactating dairy goats with an induced histidine deficiency.


The cBAD competition aims at benchmarking state-of-the-art baseline detection algorithms. It is in line with previous competitions such as the ICDAR 2013 Handwriting Segmentation Contest. A new, challenging, dataset was created to test the behavior of state-of-the-art systems on real world data. Since traditional evaluation schemes are not applicable to the size and modality of this dataset, we present a new one that introduces baselines to measure performance. We received submissions from five different teams.


Universal source separation (USS) is a fundamental research task for computational auditory scene analysis, which aims to separate mono recordings into individual source tracks. There are three potential challenges awaiting the solution to the audio source separation task. First, previous audio source separation systems mainly focus on separating one or a limited number of specific sources. There is a lack of research on building a unified system that can separate arbitrary sources via a single model. Second, most previous systems require clean source data to train a separator, while clean source data are scarce. Third, there is a lack of USS system that can automatically detect and separate active sound classes in a hierarchical level. To use large-scale weakly labeled/unlabeled audio data for audio source separation, we propose a universal audio source separation framework containing: 1) an audio tagging model trained on weakly labeled data as a query net; and 2) a conditional source separation model that takes query net outputs as conditions to separate arbitrary sound sources. We investigate various query nets, source separation models, and training strategies and propose a hierarchical USS strategy to automatically detect and separate sound classes from the AudioSet ontology. By solely leveraging the weakly labelled AudioSet, our USS system is successful in separating a wide variety of sound classes, including sound event separation, music source separation, and speech enhancement. The USS system achieves an average signal-to-distortion ratio improvement (SDRi) of 5.57 dB over 527 sound classes of AudioSet; 10.57 dB on the DCASE 2018 Task 2 dataset; 8.12 dB on the MUSDB18 dataset; an SDRi of 7.28 dB on the Slakh2100 dataset; and an SSNR of 9.00 dB on the voicebank-demand dataset. We release the source code at https://github.com/bytedance/uss


Despite years of research, Lower Triassic deposits of the epicontinental Central European Basin still lack a detailed stratigraphy that would allow regional correlation of isochronous horizons. The best chronostratigraphic results have up to now been achieved by microspore-based biostratigraphy and magnetostratigraphy. Integrated palynostratigraphic and magnetostratigraphic investigations, carried out on Buntsandstein cores from northeastern Poland representing the eastern margin of the basin, have made precise correlations with the better-explored basin centre. The Lidzbark and Malbork formations of the Bartoszyce IG 1 borehole were examined by means of palynology and palaeomagnetic studies. Further palaeomagnetic studies were applied to the Lidzbark, Malbork and Elbląg formations of the Nidzica IG 1 borehole and the Elbląg Fm. of the Paslek IG 1. Two spore-pollen assemblages were distinguished representing the Densoisporites nejburgii Subzone of the D . nejburgii Zone within the lower part of the Lidzbark Fm. and the lowermost part of the Malbork Fm. Mostly reversed polarity was detected within the lower part of the succession investigated, whereas normal polarity prevailed within its upper part. A normal polarity local zone was correlated with the undivided Tbn6–Tbn7 standard magnetozones of western Poland. The reversely polarized part of the succession corresponds most probably to the Tbr5 standard magnetozone. The base of the Tbn6–Tbn7 magnetozone can serve as a good correlation horizon for regional reconstructions.


This study examines the evidence of climate change in Kaduna State, Nigeria, from the analysis of temperature and rainfall data (1971-2016) of three meteorological stations along a geographic transect in the State. Linear regression, second order polynomial, standard deviation and Cramer's test were used to determine the changes in both the temperature and rainfall series. The result of the linear trend lines and second order polynomial revealed an increasing trend of temperature in recent years. The linear trend line revealed a mean increase in average temperature of 1.03oC for the State. The plotted standard deviation for the temperature anomalies generally showed that years of temperatures above the mean standard deviation in the last 16 years (2001-2016) were more than those below it. The Cramer's test generally revealed an increasing temperature trend in the last two decades. The linear trend line of the annual rainfall revealed a mean increase of 303.32 mm for the State. Findings also revealed that the second order polynomial generally showed a decreasing trend from 1971 to the late 1990s and an increasing trend afterwards up to 2016. The plotted standard deviation showed an increase in rainfall in recent years. The decadal analysis of rainfall in all the stations generally showed an increasing trend in the last two decades. The study recommends that awareness programs on recent changes in temperature and rainfall should be enhanced; greenhouse gases emission in the atmosphere that have warming effect should be reduced; and, government policies related to agriculture, water resources, and other related sectors should take into account the increasing nature of temperature and rainfall amount in recent years.


Pre-training over mixtured multi-task, multi-domain, and multi-modal data remains an open challenge in vision perception pre-training. In this paper, we propose GPPF, a General Perception Pre-training Framework, that pre-trains a task-level dynamic network, which is composed by knowledge"legos"in each layers, on labeled multi-task and multi-domain datasets. By inspecting humans' innate ability to learn in complex environment, we recognize and transfer three critical elements to deep networks: (1) simultaneous exposure to diverse cross-task and cross-domain information in each batch. (2) partitioned knowledge storage in separate lego units driven by knowledge sharing. (3) sparse activation of a subset of lego units for both pre-training and downstream tasks. Noteworthy, the joint training of disparate vision tasks is non-trivial due to their differences in input shapes, loss functions, output formats, data distributions, etc. Therefore, we innovatively develop a plug-and-play multi-task training algorithm, which supports Single Iteration Multiple Tasks (SIMT) concurrently training. SIMT lays the foundation of pre-training with large-scale multi-task multi-domain datasets and is proved essential for stable training in our GPPF experiments. Excitingly, the exhaustive experiments show that, our GPPF-R50 model achieves significant improvements of 2.5-5.8 over a strong baseline of the 8 pre-training tasks in GPPF-15M and harvests a range of SOTAs over the 22 downstream tasks with similar computation budgets. We also validate the generalization ability of GPPF to SOTA vision transformers with consistent improvements. These solid experimental results fully prove the effective knowledge learning, storing, sharing, and transfer provided by our novel GPPF framework.


In the development of individual security concepts, risk-based information security management systems (ISMS)according to ISO 27001 have established themselves in addition to policies in the field of IT infrastructures. Particularly in the field of critical infrastructures, however, it has been shown that despite functioning security concepts, the Stuxnet virus was able to spread through industrial systems (infection). Nevertheless -- the existing security concepts are not useless, but rarely take e ffect in behavioral risk. In this paper, we use the Trust/Investor game of the Game Theory to analyze the infection path. In general, the infection path is one game in a complex multi layer game. As a result, based on a Nash equilibrium, a cooperative solution is proposed to arm the existing IT security concepts against such infections.


Abstract : As the United States Army winds down from over a decade of contingency operations, the Army s demand for spare parts is expected to decrease. However, the amount of the decrease is uncertain, as are the parts and vendors that will be most affected. Army Materiel Command (AMC) executives are concerned that a decrease in orders to suppliers could raise the risk that either the suppliers will fail or shift production, potentially disrupting the Army s supply chain. AMC is currently implementing a Strategic Sourcing and Supplier Relationship Management initiative, to help the Army reduce supply chain costs by identifying strategic suppliers and working closely with them to improve performance. The Strategic Sourcing initiative is focused on active suppliers producing parts to maintain ground and air weapon systems and communications equipment. As part of the Strategic Sourcing initiative, AMC asked RAND Arroyo Center to determine the supply chain risk by supplier and the supply chain risk factors that are critical to AMC. This report documents a process and tool that allow AMC to assess supply chain risk by supplier, part, and weapon system. Starting with 9,300 NIINs provided by AMC, we assembled information from multiple data sources to create a database that can be used to analyze risk by NIIN. We then linked the NIIN to the Commercial and Government Entity (CAGE) code to identify the supplier. For each NIIN, we calculated a heuristic score for (1) the likelihood that a vendor could fail to supply the NIIN, and (2) a heuristic score for the consequent impact on Army weapons systems. We are most concerned with the cases where there is a high likelihood of supply chain failure and a high impact on the Army. We concluded that only a few hundred of the 9,300 NIINs have much risk, mainly because of the large inventory still on hand. This does not imply that there is no risk, but rather, that the Army has time to address the risk.


We consider suspensions of rigid bodies in a two‐dimensional viscous fluid. Even with high‐fidelity numerical methods, unphysical contact between particles occurs because of spatial and temporal discretization errors. We extend a time stepping method that avoids overlap by imposing a minimum separation distance between all pairs of bodies. In its original form, the method discretizes interactions between different particles explicitly. Therefore, to avoid stiffness, a large minimum separation distance is used. In this paper, we introduce a new implicit time stepping method that is able to simulate dense suspensions with large time step sizes and a small minimum separation distance. The method is tested on various unbounded and bounded flows, and rheological properties of the resulting suspensions are computed.


OBJECTIVE
Functional MRI (fMRI) was measured in responses to stimulations of different frequencies to investigate dominant hemisphere and tonotopic organization in primary and secondary auditory cortex.

METHODS
25 healthy subjects with normal hearing were examined using tones of 0.5, 2 or 4 kHz that were amplitude modulated (AM) sinusoidally at 8 Hz. The AM signals were presented at 96 dB SPL Event-related design was combined with a sparse clustered volume acquisitioning paradigm for data collection in the attempt to reduce the influence of acoustic scanner noise. SPM2 software was used for offline data analyzing.

RESULTS
Data from 9 subjects were discarded due to a large head movement during recording. In the rest of 16 subjects, activation was found mainly in the primary auditory cortex. In most of these cases, the activation area and intensity by BOLD were find to be decreased with increasing signal frequency. In a great portion of cases (6 left and 7 right hemispheres), a lateral-medial preference for low-to-high frequency response shift was clearly demonstrated in the primary auditory cortex. However, this was not clear in all other cases. No significant rule could be found in secondary auditory cortex activation.

CONCLUSION
The responses to AM signals showed a clear lateralization to left cerebral hemisphere. The activated area and response intensity decreased with increasing frequency of stimulation. The activation is related to the signal frequency with high frequency AM activating more medially.


The results achieved with three different operative methods for the treatment of chronic anterior instabilities of the knee joint are presented. In 23 patients Trillat's modification of the O'Donoghue procedure was performed to reconstruct the medial collateral ligaments and the posterior capsule. Thirteen patients underwent reconstruction of the cruciate ligament with a free graft of the patellar ligament according to the Brückner method. In 37 patients the Brückner method was used for cruciate ligament replacement combined with lateral repair according to Ellison, and in some of these patients the posteromedial portion of the capsule was also reconstructed. Seventy-three patients (87.9% of all operated cases) were followed-up. The average observation period was 2.9 years and the mean age at the time of operation was 33.1 years. Major meniscal lesions were noted in 42 patients (57.5% of the cases). Twenty patients presented with combined instabilities or anteromedial grade II instabilities preoperatively. The majority of cases (53 patients) exhibited complex instabilities or anteromedial grade III instabilities preoperatively. At follow-up the Lachmann test was negative or trace-positive in 11 patients (48%) of group I, in 9 patients (69%) of group II, and in 34 patients (92%) of group III. Other stability tests, such as the pivot shift test and the drawer test, confirmed the superiority of group III. The overall results--considering both objective and subjective factors--showed good to excellent results in 12 patients of group I (52%), in 8 patients of group II (62%), and in 31 patients of group III (84%). We therefore conclude that combined and complex instabilities are indications for surgery.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)


Introduction: Atrial fibrillation (AF) is the most common sustained cardiac rhythm disturbance, increasing in prevalence with age. It is often associated with structural heart disease, although a substantial proportion of patients with AF have no detectable heart disease. Hemodynamic impairment and thromboembolic events related to AF result in significant morbidity, mortality, and cost. Several factors are associated with the prescription of oral anticoagulants. This review predicts the overall factors that are associated with oral anticoagulant utilization in patients with AF.
Methods: Literatures that analyze the predictors of oral anticoagulant utilization in atrial fibrillation were searched using PubMed and Google Scholar published in journals from 2003 to 2019. Eligibility, data extraction and quality assessment were followed by a narrative synthesis of data. An extensive search of recent literature was performed.
Results: Older age, comorbidities like hypertension, diabetes, heart failure, coronary artery disease, peripheral artery disease, moderate to severe kidney disease, polypharmacy, higher stroke and bleeding risk, history of smoking and alcohol or substance abuse, and lower cost are predictors of warfarin utilization. Similarly, younger age, better kidney function with creatinine clearance at least 30 mL/min, no or lower risk of stroke and hemorrhage, no polypharmacy, less comorbidities, prescriptions by neurologists and cardiologist, people residing in countries with lower poverty rates, and high cost are potential predictors of non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulants utilization.
Conclusion: Our study suggests that knowing the predictors for anticoagulation utilization can improve medication appropriateness in arterial fibrillation patients.


The effect of the liquid junction potential produced by various salt bridges on blood pH determination was estimated using a new salt bridge consisting of the equilibrium diffusate of human plasma. Such a salt bridge should produce a state of ionic equitransference at the junction between itself and plasma and, except for a Donnan potential, no liquid junction potential should arise at this boundary. A mean pH of 7.41±0.01 was obtained with the pH cell incorporating an equitransferent liquid-liquid junction. This value was not significantly different from the mean pH of 7.42±0.01 obtained with the cell incorporating a KCl 3M salt bridge. However, a pH cell with NaCl 0.9% salt bridge yielded a mean pH of 7.30±0.01, a value significantly different from the other two cells. These results probably suggest that there is a significant liquid junction potential at the isotonic NaCl-blood boundary, and that concentrated KCl bridge electrolyte probably minimizes the liquid junction potential against blood.


The prevalence of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS) is steadily increasing among American children. The dental needs of these patients are significant. This study evaluated the oral health of forty children being treated for HIV-infection at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Eight of twenty-two patients in primary dentition (36 percent) had baby bottle tooth decay (BBTD). These cases required extensive dental restoration usually under general anesthesia. Tooth development was delayed in 31 percent of patients. Candidiasis was the most common soft tissue abnormality, found in 35 percent of children. Preventive and therapeutic dental programs should be instituted to meet the special needs of pediatric AIDS patients.


The unsteady magnetohydromagnetic Couette flow of an electrically conducting incompressible non-Newtonian viscoelastic fluid between two parallel horizontal non- conducting porous plates is studied with heat transfer. A sudden uniform and a constant pressure gradient, an external uniform magnetic field that is perpendicular to the plates and uniform suction and injection through the surface of the plates are applied. The two plates are kept at different but constant temperatures while the Joule and viscous dissipations are taken into consideration. Numerical solutions for the governing momentum and energy equations are obtained using finite difference approximations. The effect of the magnetic field, the parameter describing the non-Newtonian behavior, and the velocity of suction and injection on both the velocity and temperature distributions is examined.


The mean-variance model proposed by Markowitz has received greatly acceptance as a practical methodology to manage portfolio selection, and has been widely extended in a variety of literatures. The aim of this paper is to extend the mean-variance model in uncertain decision systems. We present a new mean-TVaR model for portfolio selection when the returns of securities are described as uncertain variables. When the returns of the securities are characterized as some special uncertain variables such as linear uncertain variables, zigzag uncertain variables and normal uncertain variables, we employ the formulas of mean and TVaR to turn the mean-TVaR model to its equivalent problem. Since the crisp equivalent model is a linear programming, it can be solved by some convenient optimization algorithms such as interior point algorithm and simplex algorithm, or directly by some optimization software. Finally, we present a portfolio selection problem of fermenting foods to demonstrate the modeling idea and the eectiveness of the method.


The incremental validity of a short holistically scored expository essay for predicting freshman grade point average was explored in two samples. In one of the samples the essay was administered to incoming freshmen at state colleges as part of a basic skills assessment battery. In the second sample the essay was part of an achievement test that is one of the admissions tests used by highly selective colleges. In both samples, the essay added essentially nothing to what could be predicted from high school grade point average, Scholastic Aptitude Test scores, and a multiple-choice test of writing-related skills.


This paper describes the participation of the Charles University in Cleaneval 2007, the shared task and competitive evaluation of automatic systems for cleaning arbitrary web pages with the goal of preparing web data for use as a corpus in the area of computational linguistics and natural language processing. We try to solve this task as a sequence-labeling problem and our experimental system is based on Conditional Random Fields exploiting a set of features extracted from textual content and HTML structure of analyzed web pages for each block of text. Labels assigned to these blocks then discriminate between different types of content blocks containing useful material that should be preserved in the document and noisy blocks of no linguistics interest that should be eliminated.


Global communication costs in future single-chipmultiprocessors will increase linearly with distance. In this paper,we revisit the issues of locality and load balance in order totake advantage of these new costs. We present a technique whichsimultaneously migrates data and threads based on vectors specifyinglocality and resource usage. This technique improves performanceon applications with distinguishable locality and imbalancedresource usage. 64% of the ideal reduction in execution timewas achieved on an application with these traits while no improvementwas obtained on a balanced application with little locality.


Detecting the source of activities in buildings is of interest to enable the potentials for Smart Buildings in industrial facilities, public infrastructure, hospitals, and commercial or residential buildings. This problem has been addressed using intrusive techniques, including vision-based methods. Recent studies have instead demonstrated that unobtrusive approaches could provide comparable results to the intrusive methods. These methods have the capability to identify and classify atypical floor vibration signals to specific sources, e.g., human fall detection or rotary machines fault detection. Most successful applications of vibration-based monitoring use traditional feature learning methods. These methods extract the temporal and spectral features from the vibration signals, and human experts are involved in selecting the features for classification. However, they typically require a labor-intensive process, which may add uncertainty and bias to the results. Several promising alternatives to these approaches have recently been proposed which take advantage of the time-dependent frequency spectrum of the vibration signals (i.e., spectogram). These representations are then fed into a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) architecture for image-like classification, training an accurate model. However, activty source detection in buildings requires the identification of numerous possible sources (classes), which may lead to low accuracy and confidence in the results. Thus, in this study, we incorporate prior knowledge of a target application, called a hierarchical structure of activity sources (classes). We develop a hierarchical CNN-based technique, which has a relatively easy setup, is modifiable, and has an extendable structure, to use floor vibration signatures to detect the source of activities in a building. We validate the method on a recently released benchmark dataset for human activity identification by implementing a flat numerous-class CNN-based approach, and the proposed hierarchical CNN-based approach. The results indicate that the hierarchical CNN-based approach outperforms other methods.


The need for a diagnosis today, becomes a necessity for variable speed AC
drives in several industrial applications. An important research axis is oriented towards monitoring
the state of the converter supplying the electric motor. Indeed, the voltage source inverter is likely to
have switching faults. Therefore, an emergency stop of the motor drive must be done.

After reviewing related patents and works, the objective of this paper is to identify the
feasibility of fault detection and diagnosis in a three-phase inverter feeding an induction motor.

The proposed approach is a simple threshold fault classification method applied to fault
diagnosis of a Direct Torque Control (DTC) induction motor drive using the stator Concordia mean
current vector. With a fault occurrence, a localization domain consisting of seven patterns is constructed.

Simulated results on 1.5-kW induction motor drive show the effectiveness of the proposed
approach with a good classification performance.

The classification performance of our simple diagnosis system is acceptable for one
fault occurrence compared to other methods. Faulty switch detection and identification is completed
within a few periods of current. Using intelligent technique should improve classification performances
for multiple faults occurrence.


Amniotic membrane (AM) is commonly used for cell culture and transplantation onto the ocular surface. AM serves the dual purpose of culture substrate and scaffold thus reducing cell manipulation. Crucially AM is believed to promote the retention of stem cell phenotypes essential for the long term restoration of functional tissue. As potential cellular therapies for corneal regeneration are being developed many of them continue to use AM. Its widespread usage in ophthalmology and extensive list of wound healing attributes has made AM a popular choice. Amniotic membrane is being used as a carrier for innovative research into the transplantation of non-corneal cell types onto ocular surface burn models including mesenchymal stem cells and oral mucosal epithelium. A lack of standardisation in the preparation of amniotic membrane can cause considerable variation and some methods of preparation may reduce or enhance certain attributes. Various methods of processing including cross-linking, denuding and freeze drying have sought to enhance amniotic membrane for tissue engineering purposes with varied levels of success.