This paper presents an overview of the road and traffic sign detection and recognition. It describes the characteristics of the road signs, the requirements and difficulties behind road signs detection and recognition, how to deal with outdoor images, and the different techniques used in the image segmentation based on the colour analysis, shape analysis. It shows also the techniques used for the recognition and classification of the road signs. Although image processing plays a central role in the road signs recognition, especially in colour analysis, but the paper points to many problems regarding the stability of the received information of colours, variations of these colours with respect to the daylight conditions, and absence of a colour model that can led to a good solution. This means that there is a lot of work to be done in the field, and a lot of improvement can be achieved. Neural networks were widely used in the detection and the recognition of the road signs. The majority of the authors used neural networks as a recognizer, and as classifier. Some other techniques such as template matching or classical classifiers were also used. New techniques should be involved to increase the robustness, and to get faster systems for real-time applications.


Quadrupeds exhibit versatile and adaptive running by exploiting the flying phase during the stride cycle. Various interlimb coordination mechanisms focusing on mechanical loads during the stance phase have been proposed to understand the underlying control mechanism, and various gait patterns have been reproduced. However, the essential control mechanism required to achieve both steady running patterns and non-steady behaviours, such as jumping and landing, remains unclear. Therefore, we focus on the vertical motions of the body parts and propose a new decentralized interlimb coordination mechanism. The simulation results demonstrate that the robot can generate efficient and various running patterns in response to the morphology of the body. Furthermore, the proposed model allows the robot to smoothly change its behaviour between steady running and non-steady landing depending on the situation. These results suggest that the steady and non-steady behaviours in quadruped adaptive running may share a common simple control mechanism based on the mechanical loads and vertical velocities of the body parts.


Magnetic field dependence of magnetization reversal in Co/Pt multilayers has been quantitatively investigated. Serial samples of Co/Pt multilayers have been prepared by dc magnetron sputtering under various Ar pressures. Magnetization reversal was monitored by magnetization viscosity measurement and direct domain observation using a magneto-optical microscope system. The wall-motion speed V and the nucleation rate R were determined using a domain reversal model based on time-resolved domain reversal patterns. Both V and R were found to be exponentially dependent on the reversing applied field. From the exponential dependence, the activation volumes of the wall-motion and nucleation could be determined based on a thermally activated relaxation model. The wall-motion activation volume was revealed to be slightly larger than the nucleation activation volume.


Abstract Probabilistic forecasts were given for temperature and precipitation for 2 and 5-day periods. They were evaluated by a scoring rule and the scores were given as feedback to the participants together with the actual outcomes. On the average the forecasts did not improve on forecasts based on climatology, and the study indicates some explanations for this. It also shows how the meteorologists' knowledge could be used to produce probabilistic forecasts that are better than climatology. The study also covers empirical evaluation of different scoring rules and of techniques for aggregating sets of forecasts.


A multipeptide vaccine containing 6 melanoma-associated peptides to stimulate helper T cells (6MHP) is safe and immunogenic and has clinical activity. A phase I/II trial was designed to evaluate safety and immunogenicity of 6MHP vaccines plus PD1 blockade.Participants with measurable advanced melanoma, age ≥ 18 years, and ECOG performance status 0–1 were administered 6MHP vaccine intradermally and subcutaneously in an incomplete Freund's adjuvant on days (D) 1, 8, 15, 43, 64, and 85. Pembrolizumab 200 mg was administered intravenously every 3 weeks for up to two years. Biopsies of accessible tumors at baseline and D22 were analyzed by multiparameter immunofluorescence histology. Primary endpoints were safety (CTCAE 4.03) and immunogenicity (ex vivo IFNγ ELIspot assay). Secondary and exploratory endpoints included changes in the tumor microenvironment (TME), and clinical outcomes.Twenty-two eligible participants were enrolled and treated, including 6 naïve to PD-1 Ab and 16 anti-PD-1 Ab-experienced. Median follow-up was 20 months. Treatment-related adverse events (any grade) experienced by >20% were injection site reactions, fatigue, anemia, nausea, fever, bruising, and rash. Treatment-related dose limiting toxicities (grade 3 elevated AST, skin ulcer, or uveitis) were observed in 3 (14%), which did not cross the study safety bound. Objective clinical responses were observed in 23% (1 CR, 4 PR), including 4/6 anti-PD-1 Ab-naive (67%) and one 1/16 anti-PD1 Ab-experienced (6%). Four participants (18%) had SD as best radiographic response (18%), all in the Ab-experienced cohort. T cell responses to 6MHP were detected in seven participants (32%) by week 13 and were associated with clinical response (CR/PR 80% vs. SD/PD 18%; p = 0.01). Overall survival was prolonged for anti-PD-1 Ab naïve vs experienced (p = 0.0048), for those with T cell response (p = 0.045, landmark analysis after week 13), and for those with objective response (p = 0.0148). TME evaluation in 12 participants revealed significant increases by D22 in the densities (per mm2) of CD8+ T cells (p = 0.0186), CD20+ B cells (P = 0.002), and Tbet+ cells (p = 0.034).In patients with advanced melanoma, combined treatment with the 6MHP vaccine plus pembrolizumab was safe, increased intratumoral T and B cells, as well as Th1 (Tbet+) cells, and induced T cell responses that were associated with objective response and with overall survival. The promising objective response rate and overall survival in patients naive to PD1 blockade supports consideration of a larger study to assess definitive benefit in that clinical setting.We acknowledge the support of Merck for providing pembrolizumab at no charge, and the University of Virginia Cancer Center Support grant P30 CA044579 for support of shared resource facilities.The clinical trial Mel64 (PATHVACS) is registered with Clinicaltrials.gov (NCT02515227).The clinical trial Mel64 (PATHVACS) was performed with IRB (#18174) and FDA approval (IND #10825) and is registered with Clinicaltrials.gov (NCT02515227). Written informed consent was obtained from each participant prior to participation in the study.


This study explores the effects of foaming on three selected bituminous binders: 50/70 paving grade bitumen, 45/80-55 polymer modified bitumen and 45/80-80 HiMA binder. The first part of the investigations included the evaluation of the foaming performance in terms of foaming temperature and foaming water content with the utilization of desirability functions and based on the equality of maximum expansion ratio and bitumen foam half-life. The second part of the study investigated the effects of foaming on the chemical structure of the binders using Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy. The results of the spectroscopic measurements permitted calculation of structural indices specific to functional groups associated with bitumen oxidation, as well as those indicative of elastomeric modification. The results have shown that the different types of bitumen exhibited different foaming characteristics, which was most evident in bitumen foam half-lives, with the HiMA binder performing the best. The spectrometric measurements did not show any significant effects of foaming on the chemical structure of the evaluated binders related to oxidative stress, neither were any major changes in the PmB-specific regions found.


This paper provides a systematic study of fundamental combinatorial properties of one-dimensional, two-sided infinite simple Toeplitz subshifts. Explicit formulas for the complexity function, the palindrome complexity function and the repetitivity function are proved. Moreover, a complete description of the de Bruijn graphs of the subshifts is given. Finally, the Boshernitzan condition is characterized in terms of combinatorial quantities, based on a recent result of Liu and Qu [Uniform convergence of Schrödinger cocycles over simple Toeplitz subshift. Ann. Henri Poincaré12(1) (2011), 153–172]. Particular simple characterizations are provided for simple Toeplitz subshifts that correspond to the orbital Schreier graphs of the family of Grigorchuk's groups, a class of subshifts that serves as the main example throughout the paper.


Informed consent is one of the foundational ethical and legal requirements of research with human subjects. The Nuremberg Code, the Helsinki Declaration, the Belmont Report, the Common Rule and many other laws and codes require that research subjects (or the subject's legal representative) make a voluntary, informed choice to participate in research.1 2 3 4 5 Informed consent is based on the moral principle of respect for autonomy, which holds that rational individuals have a right to make decisions and take actions that reflect their values and preferences.6 Whereas most guidelines and codes also require that informed consent be properly documented, informed consent is much more than signing a piece of paper: It is a continuous process of communication between the investigator and the research subject.7 Because the body of knowledge impacting a study frequently changes, subjects should receive information from investigators after they have enrolled in a study, such as significant new findings that may affect their decision to participate in research or clinically useful tests results.8 9 10 In large studies, some investigators use newsletters to update subjects on the progress of research and other developments.11

Most of the ongoing communications between investigators and subjects (or their representatives) involve little more than information sharing, without revisiting the decision to participate in research or signing any additional documents. Sometimes, however, it may be necessary for subjects to reaffirm their decision to participate, to re-consent, or to sign or re-sign a document.8 Re-consent can be defined as an action in which a subject (or representative) makes the decision to participate in research once again. Re-consent is different from reaffirming a commitment to participate in a study, because in re-consent one actually reconsiders the information necessary to make decision, whereas in reaffirmation one simply expresses …


Feature clustering is a feature reduction method that reduces the dimensionality of feature vectors for text classification. In this paper an incremental feature clustering approach is proposed that uses Semantic similarity to cluster the features. Pointwise Mutual Information (PMI) is widely used word similarity measure, which finds Semantic similarity between two words and is an alternative for distributional similarity. PMI computation requires simple statistics about two words for similarity measure, that is number of co- occurrences or correlations between two concepts of fixed size are computed. Once the words from preprocessed documents are fed, clusters are formed and one feature (head word) is identified for each cluster which are used for indexing the document. PMI assumes that a word have single sense, but clustering can be optimized further if polysemies of words are considered. Hence PMI may be combined with PMImax, which estimates correlation between the closest senses of two words also, thereby better feature reduction and execution time compared with other approaches.


This paper by James Kittelson from The Ohio State University was presented at the Bethany Lutheran Reformation Lectures in 1990.


Contemporary curriculum guidelines for nurse education advocate the development of a broader European or international perspective. This is enhanced by curriculum changes which now enable student nurses to undertake clinical experience overseas, either for observation or direct participation in health care. Such initiatives are to be welcomed, given the implications of the Maastricht Treaty and the transition to a single European market. Furthermore, changes within Europe and further afield may have an impact on nursing practice at a time when those involved in health care may be facing similar challenges in the UK in terms of diminishing health resources and demographic trends. If nurses are to adapt to these socio-economic challenges and develop pro-active nursing practice they need to be tolerant of cultural issues, and have an understanding of health care in the wider European and international context. The aim of this paper is to discuss the evidence for incorporating a European dimension into nurse education, before examining the benefits for nurses with reference to activities within one department of nursing.


Nowadays, the automation of factory floors is necessary for extensive manufacturing processes to meet the ever-increasing competitiveness of current markets. The technological advances applied to the digital platforms have led many businesses to automate their manufacturing processes, introducing robotic manipulators collaborating with human operators to achieve new productivity, manufacturing quality, and safety levels. However, regardless of the amount of optimization implemented, some quality problems may be introduced in production lines with many products being designed and produced. This project proposes a solution for feature extraction that can be applied to automatic shape- and position-detection using a 2-dimension (2D) industrial laser to extract 3-dimension (3D) data where the movement of the item adds the third dimension through the laser's beam. The main goal is data acquisition and analysis. This analysis will later lead to the generation of trajectories for a robotic manipulator. The results of this application proved reliable given their small measurement error values of a maximum of 2 mm.


The article aims to present the concept of the urban revitalization in relation with the new information technologies. The actuality of the topic relates from the importance of information tools in all processes of human activity, including the administrative and participatory one. The urban revitalization is presented as a dimension of the decisional local autonomy of public authorities of the cities/municipalities. The paper is based on the on-going activities of the bilateral Polish - Moldavian "Revitalization Project". The e-tools become a new dimension of the classical "renewal" concept, transforming in this way the revitalization process in a modern one and upgrading it to a higher level. Because of the rapid development of the information society, the revitalization processes undergo changes and gains new meaning. The expectations of citizens as well as the activities of local public authorities imply new standards, especially in terms of information technologies.


Discriminating between good and faulty chips is often not enough during IC manufacturing phases, where a complete understanding about failure mechanisms is required to ramp up production yield. When considering embedded memories, information about the whole set of faults needs to be extracted from the IC and processed: this asks for solutions supporting high data volume transfer. We propose an embedded architecture allowing efficient diagnosis of SoCs containing several BISTed memory cores, which minimizes ATE memory requirements for pattern storage and drastically speeds up the complete diagnostic procedure. Experimental results highlight the convenience of the approach with respect to alternative ATE driven procedures, while resorting to negligible area overhead.


In the second half of the sixteenth century, experiences and narratives of English travel to distant places first began to matter enough to be collected and published. Tracing early accounts of West Africa and Muscovy through the several collections of Richard Eden (1553, 1555) and Richard Hakluyt (1589, 1600) allows for comparison of how different editors handled the same materials at different moments. The evidence suggests that both editors differentiated between the African and Russian materials according to perceptions of these materials' value, or meaning, for their own collecting and publishing projects. Looking at how this was so, and considering why it was so, provides a closer and more detailed look at how travel writing acquired value in the context of print; it also offers an an approach to the larger question of how Englishmen "read" the places and cultures they encountered, actually or virtually, outside of Europe.


Problem definition: Suppliers are increasingly involved in innovation activities that contribute to a firm's product quality and introduce risks to firms' quality control, leading to quality failures and recalls. This quality trade-off suggests the possibility of a nonlinear relationship between supplier innovation and product recalls, which is the focus of this research. Recall literature focuses on firms' internal drivers of recalls, whereas anecdotal evidence increasingly points to the role of external drivers, such as suppliers. We contribute to the literature by examining supplier innovation as an external driver leading to recalls via quality and risk spillovers. Methodology/results: We collect and assemble a unique panel data set of consumer product recalls from firms and their supply bases (i.e., first tier suppliers). We estimate econometric models to examine the nonlinear relationship between supply base innovation, measured by research and development (R&D) intensity of the supply bases, and the likelihood of product recalls. We find a quadratic (i.e., U-shaped) relationship between the probability of recalls and supply base R&D intensity. We also find that this nonlinear relationship is critically related to three specific sources of risk: radicalness of supplier innovation, technological distance between firms and their suppliers, and complexity of supply base. Managerial implications: Our findings suggest that firms should be mindful of the quality trade-offs in encouraging supplier innovation to reduce product recalls. Further, to minimize recall risks, firms should better evaluate and manage the risks associated with external supplier knowledge that is novel and different and closely work with global suppliers to reduce coordination challenges in knowledge transfer and integration. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2023.1213 .


Theoretical analysis of the phase-jitter problem for a vestigial sideband (VSB) or single sideband (SSB) high-speed data transmission system is discussed in detail in this paper. Particular attention is paid to the effect of the phase shift introduced to the phase-jitter sideband components by various circuits in the carrier recovery system. Based on this theoretical analysis, a practical carrier recovery system, which will extract the phase jitter with minimum phase shift introduced to the phase-jitter sideband components, is proposed so that the overall effect of the phase jitter on the demodulated signal will be minimized.


The performance of promising varieties was compared with already released. The varieties trail was conducted at four different sites in Punjab, it is an essential component of sugarcane research and thus provides an important basis of recommendations to growers. The objective of this paper is to evaluate promising varieties under different ecological zones. Seven sugarcane promising and two commercial clones were evaluated. These clones were tested for their performance at four locations during Feb-March-2017 in "Thal" and South Punjab viz; Karampur Mailsi, Layyah, Alipur and Khanpur. The trials were conducted at farmer's field using RCBD with three replications. The data on germination%, Tillers/Plant, number of mill able cane, cane yield t/ha and commercial cane sugar% (CCS) were recorded during the course of study. Overall, pooled mean of four locations indicate that cane yield of clone S2003-US-127 produced statistically higher significant 124.64 t/ha cane yield as compared HSF-240 that produced statistically lower yield i.e. 103.14 t/ha. The Brix% of overall mean of four locations results S2003-US-633 was statistically significant i.e. 24.47% and Brix% of overall mean of four locations results S2008-AUS-134 was statistically lower i.e. 19.38%.


PURPOSE
The aim of this study was to compare brinzolamide with dorzolamide in regard to blurred vision after instillation. We also compared saline with two topical carbonic anhydrase inhibitor drugs.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS
The study population comprised 21 healthy volunteers whose best corrected visual acuity was 1.0 or better. Brinzolamide 1% or dorzolamide 1% was applied to one eye the contralateral eye was exposed to the other drug. At 30 sec after instillation, visual acuity was measured every 30 sec until best visual acuity was recovered. Because visual acuity can fluctuate widely with blinking, subjects blinked for 5 sec before visual acuity measurement. As control, we applied saline alone to both eyes of 14 subjects and measured the change in visual acuity in the same way. Subjective sensations in each eye were recorded after measurement.

RESULTS
Average visual acuity every 30 sec for 5 min was 0.41, 0.56, 0.68, 0.86, 0.87, 0.96, 1.04, 1.08, 1.11, and 1.12 after dorzolamide instillation, and 0.28, 0.42, 0.60, 0.69, 0.81, 0.91, 0.93, 0.99, 1.06, and 1.10 after brinzolamide instillation. In contrast, the average visual acuity after saline instillation for 2 min was 1.09, 1.13, 1.16 and 1.16. Of the 21 subjects, 15 (71.4%) felt moderate or severe irritation when dorzolamide was instilled; 2 (9.5%) felt moderate or severe irritation when brinzolamide was instilled.

CONCLUSIONS
Both brinzolamide and dorzolamide caused significantly prolonged blurring of vision, from 30 sec to 2 or 3 min after instillation, as compared with saline only. The average visual acuity after brinzolamide instillation was lower than after dorzolamide for 5 min after instillation, although there was no significant difference. Judging from the subjects' sensations, it is suggested that with dorzolamide the prolonged blurred vision was due to reflex tearing from irritation, as explained above, whereas with brinzolamide it was due to opaque tears on the ocular surface.


Summary

The amino acid contents, texture, pectin and microstructure of bamboo shoots (Dendrocalamus latiflorus) with different salt concentrations during pickling process were examined to evaluate the effects of such process on its nutrient contents and texture. The results show that the total amino acid content of fresh bamboo shoots (FBS) was 16.35 g/100 g of dry weight, whereas those of pickled bamboo shoots (PBS) with different salt concentrations (8% and 20%) were 6.89 g/100 g and 7.91 g/100 g of dry weight, respectively. The texture analysis revealed that the hardness of the two PBS decreased by 60% and 47% after 90 days of pickling process, respectively. The protopectin contents of such PBS decreased by 64% and 49%, respectively, whereas their content of water-soluble pectin exhibited an increasing tendency during the pickling process. In addition, the scanning electron microscope images of the bamboo shoots revealed that the FBS tissues presented almost isodiametric parenchyma cells with a regular shape, whereas the parenchyma cells of PBS showed a clear turgor loss, presenting degradation and shrinkage in the cell wall contours.


Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT-3 and ChatGPT, have demonstrated remarkable results in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks with in-context learning, which involves inference based on a few demonstration examples. Despite their successes in NLP tasks, no investigation has been conducted to assess the ability of LLMs to perform document information extraction (DIE) using in-context learning. Applying LLMs to DIE poses two challenges: the modality and task gap. To this end, we propose a simple but effective in-context learning framework called ICL-D3IE, which enables LLMs to perform DIE with different types of demonstration examples. Specifically, we extract the most difficult and distinct segments from hard training documents as hard demonstrations for benefiting all test instances. We design demonstrations describing relationships that enable LLMs to understand positional relationships. We introduce formatting demonstrations for easy answer extraction. Additionally, the framework improves diverse demonstrations by updating them iteratively. Our experiments on three widely used benchmark datasets demonstrate that the ICL-D3IE framework enables Davinci-003/ChatGPT to achieve superior performance when compared to previous pre-trained methods fine-tuned with full training in both the in-distribution (ID) setting and in the out-of-distribution (OOD) setting. Code is available at https://github.com/MAEHCM/ICL-D3IE.


An expression is found that relates the initial and final volumes and temperatures for any adiabatic process. It is given in terms of a parameter r that smoothly interpolates between a free adiabatic expansion (r = 0) and a quasi-static one (r = 1). The parameter has to be evaluated numerically, but an approximate expression is given.


Reactive ion etching of GaAs and AlGaAs has been performed in a BCl3 –Ar discharge. Etching properties have been studied as functions of BCl3 percentage (0%–100%), total pressure (2.5–30.0 mTorr), and power density (0.06–0.22 W/cm2 ). At low pressures (2.5–12.5 mTorr) and intermediate BCl3 percentages (25%–75%), profiles exhibiting a high degree of anisotropy are achieved. Under anisotropic conditions, etch rates are about 0.05–0.1 μm/min (at power density of 0.22 W/cm2 ), somewhat lower than for other chlorine‐containing gases. Conditions for etching GaAs and AlGaAs at equal rates have been determined. There is a small lag time between ignition of the glow discharge and the start of etching. The relative concentration of Cl atoms in the plasma, as measured by optical emission actinometry, correlates well with the etch rate for various operating parameters.


Declining mortality over the Twentieth Century has altered the supply of older relatives in the kin networks of persons at all stages of life. Mortality decline has also changed the supply of kin for older persons. Using period life tables for selected years between 1900 and 2000, I calculate the proportion of persons who, at various stages of the life course, would have grandparents, parents, spouses, siblings and children still living. The results draw attention to the unprecedented potential for kinship ties involving older persons afforded by contemporary high survival rates.


We report the discovery of a new Herbig–Haro jet, HH 1165, in SOAR narrow-band imaging of the vicinity of the σ Orionis cluster. HH 1165 shows a spectacular extended and collimated spatial structure, with a projected length of 0.26 pc, a bent C-shaped morphology, multiple knots, and fragmented bow shocks at the apparent ends of the flow. The Hα image shows a bright halo with a clumpy distribution of material seen around the driving source, and curved reflection nebulosity tracing the outflow cavities. The driving source of HH 1165 is a Class I proto-brown dwarf, Mayrit 1701117 (M1701117), with a total (dust+gas) mass of ∼36 MJup and a bolometric luminosity of ∼0.1 L⊙. High-resolution VLT/UVES spectra of M1701117 show a wealth of emission lines indicative of strong outflow and accretion activity. SOAR/Goodman low-resolution spectra along the jet axis show an asymmetrical morphology for HH 1165. We find a puzzling picture wherein the northwest part exhibits a classical HH jet running into a pre-dominantly neutral medium, while the southern part resembles an externally irradiated jet. The C-shaped bending in HH 1165 may be produced by the combined effects from the massive stars in the ionization front to the east, the σ Orionis core to the west, and the close proximity to the B2-type star HR 1950. HH 1165 shows all of the signatures to be considered as a scaled-down version of parsec-length HH jets, and can be termed as the first sub-stellar analog of a protostellar HH jet system.


Perioperative cardiac complications remain a great concern during noncardiac surgeries since a large majority of patients undergoing such procedures are elderly, who have a greater prevalence of coronary artery disease. Thus, it is imperative to assess risk of perioperative cardiac complications in all patients scheduled for noncardiac surgery. The current review attempts to outline a systematic approach to assess cardiac risk for noncardiac surgery and suggest strategies to minimize these risks. This approach uses a combination of the urgency of noncardiac surgery, interval since prior revascularization to noncardiac surgery, the interval between prior evaluation of coronary artery disease, patients clinical risks for cardiac complications, and patients functional status to decide their perioperative cardiac risks. If surgery is urgent or the estimated risk for perioperative event is low, then irrespective of the risk, patients should proceed with noncardiac surgery under the influence of appropriate medical strategy to minimize risk. If patients risk of perioperative events is high, then postponing or canceling surgery and referral for invasive approach to identify and when appropriate revascularize coronary artery disease may help reduce the perioperative cardiac risk. In contrast, patients at intermediate risk for perioperative events may benefit from noninvasive assessment for coronary artery disease and referral for appropriate patients for coronary revascularization based on the results of such noninvasive testing. Medical perioperative strategy that should be part of all patients undergoing noncardiac surgery who have or are at risk for coronary artery disease, should include betablockers, adequate analgesia, monitoring fluid status, and maintaining hematocrit > 30 gm /dl. Finally, the physician-patient interaction during the hospitalization during noncardiac surgery should be recognized as an important opportunity to institute secondary prevention strategies for coronary artery disease in patients at risk for coronary atherosclerosis.


We consider multi-hop wireless networks serving multiple flows in which only packets that meet hard end-to-end deadline constraints are useful, i.e., if a packet is not delivered to its destination node by its deadline, it is dropped from the network. We design decentralized scheduling policies for such multi-hop networks that attain the maximum throughput of useful packets. The resulting policy is decentralized in the sense that in order to make a transmission decision, a node only needs to know the "time-till-deadline" of the packets that are currently present at that node, and not the state of the entire network. The key to obtaining an easy-to-implement and highly decentralized policy is to replace the hard constraint on the number of simultaneous packet transmissions that can take place on the outgoing links of a node, by a time-average constraint on the number of transmissions. The policy thus obtained is guaranteed to provide maximum throughput. Analysis can be extended to the case of time-varying channel conditions in a straightforward manner. Simulations showing significant improvement over existing policies for deadline based scheduling, such as Earliest Deadline First, and supporting the theory, are presented.


EEG signals are widely used to study many clinical and non-clinical applications. EEG signals are very important signals to study the behavior of brain. These signals plays very important role in extraction of information. EEG signals are nonlinear and random in nature. Hence, it is very difficult to interpret the functionality by visual analysis and linear techniques. There are so many techniques are already developed by the scientists and neural engineers to study the analysis of EEG signals. In this book attempts have been made to present unique study format for both analysis and algorithms for EEG signal processing. Also in addition MATLAB programs are discussed to clear the concepts. The various techniques discussed in this book covered the topics of Generation of EEG signals to Analysis of EEG signals. Various ancient and recent techniques, algorithms are discussed.


The growth curve of a pasture consisting of short-rotation ryegrass, red clover, and white clover was determined by measuring dry matter yields at intervals over a 9-week period in the spring of 1953. To determine the effects of temporary weather variations on growth, the experiment was replicated in time as well as space. The experimental technique is described. The curves of growth for ryegrass and total herbage were sigmoid. In the second phase of growth of approximately 6 weeks when rate of growth was constant, the daily increment in total herbage approached 150 1b dry matter per acre. Total herbage yields were separated into two parts to give a growth effect for a constant (mean) climate and an irregular weather effect. This latter separation showed agreement with fluctuations in temperature and rainfall. The results are discussed in terms of pasture management practices, and the possibilities of growth rate studies for future pasture experimentation are considered.


Though it is widely believed that adverse health effects occur among farm workers who handle pesticides, few studies have been done to quantify the extent to which pesticide formulators, re-packers and store workers are affected. The present study assessed the prevalence of signs and symptoms of illness due to pesticide exposure among factory workers in Nairobi Kenya using a descriptive cross- sectional study design on consenting factory workers. A questionnaire was administered enquiring about their biodata, work practices and occurrence of signs and symptoms associated with pesticide poisoning. Data was coded, entered into MS Access database and analyzed using SPSS version 11.5. Test for significance was done using chi-square to identify key variables associated with pesticide poisoning. Workers who had been in employment for less than one year reported a higher prevalence of signs and symptoms associated to pesticide poisoning such as burning skin (P = 0.004) and dizziness (P = 0.006). Workers who handled organochlorine pesticide had higher prevalence of burning of skin (P = 0.002), convulsions (P = 0.003), twitching (P = 0.004), painful swallowing (P = 0.004), dermatitis (P = 0.019) and headache (P = 0.028) among other pesticide exposure related symptoms. Workers who had handled pesticides for a longer period of time appeared to have less signs and symptoms of pesticide poisoning probably suggesting that long term exposure to pesticides either imparted some form of acquired immunity to pesticides or that their longer experience resulted in better risk perception and management. Keywords: pesticide, organochlorine, organophospate, formulator, poisoning.


The grouting methodology in Sweden is developing towards a more extensive use of low water/cement-ratios. The main reason for this development is the better stability of the lower w/c-ratio grouts meaning that the water separation is less than for higher w/c-ratios. However, grouting in low permeable rock or in clay-filled fractures often is performed with high w/c-grouts with better sealing efficiency. Another method that involves high w/c-ratio grouting is "grout thickening" where the grouting starts with a high w/c-ratio and successively lower w/c-ratio is used.

In this study the penetration and the stop mechanisms of suspension grouts have been investigated. The study started with a literature survey, from which hypothesis are formed and tested in the laboratory. The laboratory method used was sand column tests. The column, height 1 m and diameter 0.1 m, was filled with 0.9 m sand which was characterised by hydraulic measurements. The grouting was performed with Myanit, a suspension consisting of crushed dolomite with similar rheological characteristics as cement. The main advantage of using Mynait is that it is an inert material. This implies that it will keep it characteristics throughout the grouting and it will not harden with time. In order to obtain different relationships between grout grain size and theoretical aperture and hence groutability, different ratios between water and the solids were used as well as different sand grain distribution.

Generally, the conclusions are that the penetration increased with higher water/solid-ratios and the penetration stops due to three different mechanisms. In apertures that are too small for the grout to enter, the sealing occurs due to blocking of the entrance. At the limit on what is possible to penetrate, a higher w/s-ratio leads to a further penetration compared to a grout with lower w/s-ratio. The suspension is not moving as a united front, rather it is a more dilute grout in the front, which leads to sealing by single suspensions grains that blocks the pathway. In larger aperture, the grout penetrates more united and the penetration stops due to equilibrium between driving forces and friction forces.

The results implies that the use of "grout thickening" in the field will lead to that the initial higher w/c-ratio grout will penetrate a larger area of the fracture plane and suspension grains will successively plug the constrictions. The thicker grout will then penetrate the larger openings and the combined effect will give decreased permeability compared to only use one w/c-ratio.


The times of origin of neurons immunoreactive for somatostatin (SRIF), cholecystokinin (CCK), and vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP) were determined using a combined immunohistochemical-autoradiographic technique. 3H-thymidine (3H-dT) was injected into pregnant rats on gestational day 13 (G13), G15, G17, G19, or G21. Animals were killed on postnatal day 30, that is, after the completion of neuronal migration. Sections of the brain including posterior cingulate cortex (area 29), visual cortex (area 17), and somatosensory cortex (area 3) were processed serially for peptide immunoreactivity and autoradiographically for labeling with 3H-dT. SRIF- and CCK-immunoreactive neurons were cogenerated and comigrated according to an inside-to-outside sequence. Accordingly, neurons in layer VI were born on G13, neurons in intermediate layers were born on G15-G17, and neurons in layer II/III were born on G19-G21. In contrast, VIP-positive neurons did not follow such a sequence. Neurons in all layers of cortex were generated at relatively constant rates between G13 and G21. VIP-immunoreactive neurons were the only known subpopulation of neurons that did not migrate into cortex by an inside-to-outside sequence. Thus, the migration of local circuit neurons to cingulate cortex follows patterns that are similar to those discerned in more differentiated cortical areas.


When adaptive traffic control systems are deployed in the field, agencies install them for one of two reasons: (i) to cope with day-to-day traffic fluctuations and/or (ii) to address frequent but sudden cases with special traffic (incidents, inclement weather etc.). There is an ongoing debate among researchers in which of these two cases adaptive systems are more effective. Yet, no previous studies have examined this issue with enough rigour and attention. This study compares InSync adaptive traffic control system to three conventional time-of-day (TOD) signal timing plans in a microsimulation environment to address aforementioned research question. A comprehensive set of scenarios and performance measures has been prepared to evaluate, in microsimulation, operations of an adaptive system InSync on a 12-intersection corridor along SR-421 in Volusia County, FL. The Vissim model of SR-421 was carefully calibrated and validated to resemble the field conditions. The findings show that InSync outperformed the TOD signal timing plans on various spatial levels and its performance made bigger savings in the case of special non-recurring traffic conditions.


Cloud computing has been envisioned as the next generation and attributed to the increasing growth of mobile devices. Rapid increment, increase demands and bandwidth cost of access cloud resources became essential user perceive incur higher cost for utilizing cloud services. Since researchers have proposed new methods, service provider need to collaborate to ensure reasonable level of QoS. In various methods, bandwidth cost of service execution and delivery schemes have suggested service level agreement as a formal contract enforces resource level quality of service against the fee. However, not sufficient for the user in dynamic wireless domains in mobile cloud. This work is dedicated to the study of impact against ensure quality of cloud based application outsourcing that satisfies the bandwidth requirements for user. A key problem in application outsourcing in the cloud-based server is the problem of bandwidth consumption, which is critical to the bandwidth cost for utilizing service infrastructure. Using mathematics expression, methodology and algorithm we formulate the bandwidth consumption problem, taking into consideration of various metrics such as service level agreement, bandwidth allocation for user and bandwidth allocation threshold limit, trustworthy security for data storage. To employ user perceived performance in mobile application outsourcing for cloud-based server, which has always been an important aspect of bandwidth cost and quality of service.


Aim: Increased serum ferritin (SF) indicates an adverse prognosis in patients with hematologic malignancies. However, its prognostic significance in multiple myeloma (MM) remains unknown. Patients & methods: The impact of SF levels on outcomes in patients with MM was retrospectively analyzed and dynamically assessed. Results: At initial diagnosis, 188 out of 295 patients (63.7%) had high SF that correlated with poor prognosis factors including adverse overall survival and progression-free survival. SF expression was dynamically observed at different time points and SF levels significantly decreased after treatment induction. In addition, SF expression significantly increased at disease progression or relapse. Conclusion: SF can be used as a prognostic factor at initial diagnosis and relapse in patients with MM.


In 1833, the abolition of slavery in the British Empire led to the import of exploited South Asian indentured workers in the Caribbean under extreme oppression. This book concentrates on the Indian descendants' processes of mixing, assimilating, and adapting while trying desperately to hold on to that which marks a group of people as distinct. In some ways, the lived experience of the Indian community in Guyana and Trinidad represents a cultural contradiction of belonging and non-belonging. In other parts of the Caribbean, people of Indian descent seem so absorbed by the more dominant African culture and through intermarriage that Indo-Caribbean heritage seems less central. The book lays out a context within which to develop a broader view of Indians in Guyana and Trinidad, a numerical majority in both countries. They address issues of race and ethnicity but move beyond these familiar aspects to track such factors as ritual, gender, family, and daily life. The book gauges not only an unrelenting process of assimilative creolization on these descendants of India, but also the resilience of this culture in the face of modernization and globalization.


"Intellectual styles" refers to people's preferred ways of processing information and dealing with cognitive and other tasks. Styles comprise an all-embracing way of understanding such constructs as cognitive styles, learning approaches, career personality types, thinking styles, teaching styles, and many others—constructs with or without the word "style." The field of intellectual styles has a history of more than eight decades. Until the early 21st century, however, the field was constantly struggling with its identity as a result of three major challenges: (a) the lack of a common language and a conceptual framework with which work on styles could be understood, (b) the difficulty in distinguishing styles from intelligence/abilities and personality traits, and (c) the ambiguity concerning the link between work on styles and work in other fields. This identity crisis was exacerbated by three principal controversial issues regarding the nature of intellectual styles: whether styles are distinct constructs or similar constructs that overlap with one another but have different labels; whether styles represent traits or states, or whether they have elements of both; and whether styles are value free or value laden (i.e., some styles are more desirable than others in terms of human learning and performance).
 Over the years, the aforementioned difficulties inherent in intellectual styles impeded the progress of the field and confused both practitioners and the general public. Despite these and other difficulties, the field has flourished since the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Concerted attempts at theoretical conceptualizations have given some degree of unity to disparate bodies of literature. At the same time, tens of thousands of empirical investigations based on a wide range of style models and carried out in diverse populations across the globe have consistently demonstrated the critical roles that styles play in various domains of human lives. Undoubtedly, the existing literature has proved that intellectual styles are real, distinct psychological phenomena. Moreover, research findings have scientific value as well as practical implications for human learning and performance. Nevertheless, for the field to prosper further, several major limitations with the existing work must be overcome, and investigations that take into account the fast-changing world need to be initiated.


Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are massively seeping into a wide range of human activities. Along with other remotely controlled or automatic devices, they have entered many aspects of human activities and industry. While the majority of researchers have been working on the construction, deployment and non-military use of UAVs, the protection against UAVs remained on the edge of their interest. Nowadays, the situation is rapidly changing. The risk of misuse of UAVs by criminals, guerrillas or terrorists has compelled authorities, scientists and defence industry to face this threat. Organisations have launched crucial infrastructure defence programs to cope with UAV threat. To solve this problem, it is necessary to develop disciplines improving the air space surveillance and UAVs elimination techniques. The substantial aspects of the UAVs detection and elimination were analysed, being supported by a number of conferences, workshops and journals articles. The contribution of the study in the Counter–UAV area consists particularly in generalisation and evaluation of the main technical issues. The aim of this paper is to emphasise the importance of developing new scientific fields for countering UAVs, and hence it is directed firstly on the scientific audience.


Group I metabotropic glutamate (mGlu) receptors regulate hippocampal CA1 pyramidal neuron excitability via Ca2+ wave-dependent activation of small-conductance Ca2+-activated K+ (SK) channels. Here, we show that mGlu5 receptors and SK2 channels coassemble in heterologous coexpression systems and in rat brain. Further, in cotransfected cells or rat primary hippocampal neurons, mGlu5 receptor stimulation activated apamin-sensitive SK2-mediated K+ currents. In addition, coexpression of mGlu5 receptors and SK2 channels promoted plasma membrane targeting of both proteins and correlated with increased mGlu5 receptor function that was unexpectedly blocked by apamin. These results demonstrate a reciprocal functional interaction between mGlu5 receptors and SK2 channels that reflects their molecular coassembly.


The relation between sport and social and moral education has many spots that are worth to be considered. In the present article we begin by considering the need to be aware about the significant presence of sport on a social level and how to analyze the influence it has as a social and moral agent, taking into account the need to intentionally promote the relationship sport – social and moral education. We cannot think that the simple sport promotes the development of appropriate values, it is necessary to work intentionally this aspect so that the relationship is positive. Once set the framework a model of school sports is analyzed, the Comprehensive Program Township School Sports in the municipality of Segovia (PIDEMSG) as an example of training proposal that has been developed successfully the last decade and based on it, we assess the possibility of changing the usual direction of influence between school sport and federated sport, developing transfers from the school sports model, usually more formative, to the more competitive and less educational federated sport. In this way we try to realize of sport as an educational tool reality. Following this line, alternative actions related to the development of training competitions that may pose an interesting change in the conception and development of sports are exposed.


By proving the bactericidal effects of a low-concentration titanium dioxide (TiO(2)) particle mixture against Staphylococcus aureus, we hope to ultimately apply a mixture of this type as part of a clinical treatment regimen. A bacterial suspension of S. aureus 1 x 10(5) CFU/ml was added dropwise to a TiO(2) particle mixture (19 ppm TiO(2)) and irradiated by ultraviolet (UV) light. The colony-forming units were counted and the bacterial survival rate was calculated. In the control sample, the bacterial survival rate was 83.3% even after 120 min. In the TiO(2) mixture + UV sample, the bacteria count dropped sharply, reaching 17.3% of the baseline value at 30 min and 0.4% at 60 min. TiO(2) particles dispersed in water mixtures are known to elicit highly efficient UV absorption and greater bonding to bacteria. A reaction of the TiO(2) with another oxidizer altered the aqueous pH and accelerated the photocatalytic chemical reaction. The TiO(2) particle mixture showed high antibacterial action against S. aureus even at a low concentration.


Abstract The objective of this paper was to compare the results of soil material compaction carried out with the use of the Proctor and uniaxial compression tests in order to find relations between these methods. Soil material in the form of loose mass was collected from the layer deposited at the depth from 35 to 60 cm in order to determine its typical properties (textural group, density of solid particles, humus content, reaction, plastic and liquid limits) and in order to compact it in the Proctor apparatus and in the uniaxial compression test. Results of both tests were used for construction of regression models reflecting the course of the unit stress (Pρdp), necessary to generate compaction equal to the dry density of solid particles obtained in the Proctor apparatus (ρdp) in relation to the sample moisture (ws). It was stated that the stress value Pρdp on the soil sample in the uniaxial compression test depends significantly on ws. It was proved that for the purpose of comparing the results of both tests, the uniaxial stress of samples must be performed in conditions of their lateral expansion. It was also proved that the use of the uniaxial test with possible lateral expansion of soil with a model sample, a diameter of which is 100 and the height is 30 mm, one may determine the obtained compaction with the use of the plate movement value.


Introduction: Asymptomatic colonic diverticular prevalence varies in the general population between 20 and 60% in international references, however, we couldn`t find statistics about it in national reports. A method for detection of this nosological entity is the abdomen and pelvis computed tomography. Aim: Determine the prevalence of asymptomatic colonic diverticulosis in the general population as a find in abdomen and pelvis computed tomography (TCAP). Materials and Method: Cross-sectional study with descriptive statistics, selecting patients with no history of diverticulosis, who underwent TCAP in our Hospital. 1,449 cases are reviewed and 1,177 are included. Results: The general prevalence of colonic diverticula was 28.3%. Their presence increases with age, being close to 60% in > 80 years. Almost 90% are located in the left colon, being more frequent the right side diverticulosis in population under 60 years. Conclusions: The overall prevalence of asymptomatic colonic diverticulosis, detected as a finding in TCAP, corresponds to about one third of patients.


ABSTRACT There are several models for delivering public services such as health care or education, most of which can be summarised under the headings of trust, mistrust, voice, and choice. Each contains assumptions concerning the motivation of the professionals and others who provide the service concerned: that is, the extent to which they are "knaves," motivated primarily by self-interest, or "knights," motivated by altruism and the desire to provide a public service. This article highlights the assumptions concerning motivation implicit in each of the delivery models, illustrating the points made by reference to the author's experience as a senior policy adviser to British Prime Minister Tony Blair and to some evidence on the performance of public services under the different models.


The complete molecule of the title compound, C28H24N6, is generated by inversion symmetry with the inversion centre located at the mid-point of the central C–C bond of the butanediyl unit. The benzimidazole and pyridine rings are almost coplanar, the dihedral angle between their mean planes being 6.86 (11)°.


Many enterprise systems were developed in standalone model since the end of the last century. Reengineering standalone systems into distributed environment has become a critical problem, as the standalone software can not meet the requirements of the new market. Methods have been proposed on related topics based on two classical distributed solutions, the symmetrical model and the unsymmetrical model. In this paper we report the experience in reengineering a standalone financial trading system into the service-partition distributed environment, which offers distinct advantages on horizontal scalability and performance over two classical distributed solutions.


ABSTRACT It is distinctly unusual in 1985 to encounter and review an 854-page reference book written by one author. This is such a volume, one in a series of Comprehensive Manuals in Pediatrics. The book is organized by systems, eg, respiratory, genitourinary, and neurologic infections. In addition, there are special chapters devoted to immunizations, antimicrobial therapy, neonatal infections, infections in immunocompromised hosts, and nosocomial infections.The text is preceded by four pages of generally excellent color photographs. The remainder of the illustrations, dispersed throughout the book, are in black and white and of highly variable quality. "Scleral icterus" is noted in a color photograph of a patient whose eyes are blocked out for confidentiality. The same photograph appears in black and white later in the text, an unnecessary duplication. We are also told to note jaundice in a black-and-white photograph of an infant with the congenital rubella syndrome. Rashes and Gram's


Renewable Portfolio Standards (RPSs) are a key policy measure used by states in the United States to increase their production of renewable electricity. Economic theory shows that RPSs are not first-best policy measures for mitigating greenhouse gas emissions or solving other environmental problems. Nevertheless, they have been politically popular, in part because states hope they will help create new jobs in what the states expect will be a growth industry. Research suggests that RPSs are supported by Democratic legislatures in states with good solar and wind potential, are more likely in states with restructured electricity markets, and are less likely in states heavily dependent on natural gas for electricity generation. Research also suggests that RPSs have been successful at increasing renewable generation capacity, have increased the cost of electricity modestly where they have been implemented, and reduce carbon emissions at a cost roughly consistent with estimates of the social cost of carbon.


Global peatlands store an unparalleled proportion of total global organic carbon but it is vulnerable to erosion into fluvial systems. Fluvial networks are being recognized as areas of carbon transformation, with eroded particulate organic carbon processed to dissolved organic carbon and CO2. Existing studies indicate biodegradation and photodegradation as key processes controlling the transformation of organic carbon in fluvial systems, with initial concentrations of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) identified as a control on the rate of carbon mineralization. This study manipulates temperature and incident light intensity to investigate carbon mineralization rates in laboratory simulations of peatland sediment transport into fluvial systems. By directly measuring gaseous CO2 emissions from sampled stream water, the relationship of temperature and light intensity with carbon efflux is identified. In simulations where sediment (as particulate organic matter, POM) is absent, temperature is consistently the dominant factor influencing carbon efflux rates. This influence is independent of the initial DOC concentration of the water sample. In simulations where POM was added, representing a peatland river receiving eroded terrestrial sediment, initial DOC concentration predicts 79% of the variation in total gaseous carbon efflux whereas temperature and light intensity predict 12% and 3%, respectively. When sampled stream water's mineralization rates in the presence of added POM are analysed independently, removing DOC as a model variable, the dominant variable affecting CO2 efflux is opposite for each sample. This study presents novel data suggesting peatland erosion introduces further complexity to dynamic stream systems where rates of carbon transformation processes and the influence of specific environmental variables are interdependent. Anthropogenic climate change is identified as a leading risk factor perpetuating peatland erosion; therefore, understanding the fate of terrestrial sediment in rivers and further quantifying the benefits of protecting peatland soils will be of increasing importance to carbon budgeting and ecosystem function studies.


This paper presents experimental measurements of the differences between a 90-nm CMOS field programmable gate array (FPGA) and 90-nm CMOS standard-cell application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) in terms of logic density, circuit speed, and power consumption for core logic. We are motivated to make these measurements to enable system designers to make better informed choices between these two media and to give insight to FPGA makers on the deficiencies to attack and, thereby, improve FPGAs. We describe the methodology by which the measurements were obtained and show that, for circuits containing only look-up table-based logic and flip-flops, the ratio of silicon area required to implement them in FPGAs and ASICs is on average 35. Modern FPGAs also contain "hard" blocks such as multiplier/accumulators and block memories. We find that these blocks reduce this average area gap significantly to as little as 18 for our benchmarks, and we estimate that extensive use of these hard blocks could potentially lower the gap to below five. The ratio of critical-path delay, from FPGA to ASIC, is roughly three to four with less influence from block memory and hard multipliers. The dynamic power consumption ratio is approximately 14 times and, with hard blocks, this gap generally becomes smaller


Vladimir Fock was born 22/12 1898 in St. Petersburg, and died 27/12 1974 in the same city, then called Leningrad. At the age of 34 he became a professor at Leningrad University. His name is associated in particular with the Hartree-Fock method in quantum mechanics and the Fock space of quantum field theory. His times were dramatic, both politically and scientifically. He was nearly deaf after serving voluntarily in the artillery during the first World War. He participated in the early developments of quantum mechanics started by Heisenberg and Schrodinger in 1925, and earned a reputation as the father of quantum mechanics in his country. Alexander Friedmann, the founder of modern cosmology, introduced him to the general theory of relativity only a few years after this theory was put forward by Einstein in 1916. Fock published a textbook on quantum mechanics in 1931 and a monograph on the general theory of relativity in 1955. These two theories, quantum mechanics and the general theory of relativity, were his main scientific fields of interest, and are also the subjects of his two articles published in the Transactions of the Royal Norwegian Society. The first article, from 1958, is his own translation of an article in Russian, presenting a numerical method for computing the ground state of the helium atom. His motivation is the observation that the pioneering work of Hylleraas 30 years earlier was based on a power series expansion which could not in principle be exact. The second article, from 1963, is a talk given in Trondheim in February of that year, on the logical structure of what he calls the Einsteinian Gravitation Theory. He is critical to the status attributed by Einstein himself to the principle of general relativity and the principle of equivalence. Some ten years earlier, Fock defended Einstein strongly against ideologically motivated attacks, but was too honest not to mention his own criticism.


Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) is a fatal neurodegenerative disease that affects the nervous system causing muscle weakness, paralysis, leading to death. Given that abnormalities in spinal motoneuron (MN) excitability begin long before symptoms manifest, developing an approach that could recognize fluctuations in MN firing could help in early diagnosis of ALS. This paper introduces a machine learning approach to discriminate between ALS and normal MN firing. The approach is based on two electrophysiological markers; namely, spiking latency and the spike-triggered average signal. The method is examined using data generated from a computational model under systematic variation of MN properties. Such variations mimic the differential dynamic changes in cellular properties that different MN types experience during ALS progression. Our results demonstrate the ability of the approach to accurately recognize ALS firing patterns across the spectrum of examined variations in MN properties.Clinical Relevance— These results represent a proof of concept for using the proposed machine-learning approach in early diagnosis of ALS.


We present DELIGHT, or Deep Learning Identification of Galaxy Hosts of Transients, a new algorithm designed to automatically and in real time identify the host galaxies of extragalactic transients. The proposed algorithm receives as input compact, multiresolution images centered at the position of a transient candidate and outputs two-dimensional offset vectors that connect the transient with the center of its predicted host. The multiresolution input consists of a set of images with the same number of pixels, but with progressively larger pixel sizes and fields of view. A sample of 16,791 galaxies visually identified by the Automatic Learning for the Rapid Classification of Events broker team was used to train a convolutional neural network regression model. We show that this method is able to correctly identify both relatively large (10″ < r < 60″) and small (r ≤ 10″) apparent size host galaxies using much less information (32 kB) than with a large, single-resolution image (920 kB). The proposed method has fewer catastrophic errors in recovering the position and is more complete and has less contamination (<0.86%) recovering the crossmatched redshift than other state-of-the-art methods. The more efficient representation provided by multiresolution input images could allow for the identification of transient host galaxies in real time, if adopted in alert streams from new generation of large -etendue telescopes such as the Vera C. Rubin Observatory.


Attention has been given to enhance boiling surfaces in order to decrease the temperature difference and to increase heat transfer coefficient. Structured surfaces may provide both surface enlargement and artificial nucleation sites, thus ameliorate the heat transfer coefficient. The goal of the present experimental work is to analyze the influence on heat transfer coefficient (HTC) of enhanced surface structures coated on mini channel heat exchanger working in a closed loop thermosyphon system. Experimental tests were carried out with three types of surface enhanced mini channel evaporators: smooth surface, threaded structure and nanoporous coating. The evaporators are single channel half circularly shaped, adapted for filming purpose, measuring 30mm in length and 3mm in diameter. Surface areas of channels are 1.41cm2 . Experiments were conducted in refrigerant 134a at 4.87bar (reduced pressure pr = 0.12) and at heat fluxes ranging from 0.7W/cm2 to 63.8W/cm2 . A high speed video camera was used for visualization of the two-phase flow in the evaporator channel. It is shown that threaded surface provides the highest heat transfer coefficient (HTC) from no load to heat flux of 7.1W/cm2 , the nanoporous structure shows the highest performance between 7.1W/cm2 and 49.6W/cm2 , and the smooth surface channel exhibits the best HTC from 49.6W/cm2 and higher. In this paper, the influences of heat flux and surface structures on HTC are discussed, and the impact of refrigerant flow regimes on heat transfer performance is also highlighted.Copyright © 2009 by ASME


Computer-assisted recognition of anatomical objects in medical images is at the center of many important clinical applications. Automatic extraction and recognition of human abdominal structures from CT images has been particularly challenging for medical imaging research and applications. Intra-patient and inter-patient spatial, morphological and intensity variability is typically significantly contributing to great difficulties in developing satisfactory automatic solutions to the problem. In this paper we report on a new approach, which treats recognition of anatomical objects from a given medical image as a task of non-rigid registration followed by segmentation. It uses the knowledge inferred from an atlas or model image to specify a sequence of smaller sub-image spaces or spatial contexts to register progressively the atlas image with the given patient image. The labels of the target objects in the atlas image are carried over to the patient image by the registration process representing the recognition result, which is further improved by a region-growing process. Preliminary experiments of artery blood vessel recognition and labeling with real patient data have demonstrated the potential of the method to be a viable alternative solution to the problem.


This essay connects the justification of trust and the justification of testimony. I provide a theory which entails that justified epistemic trust is a necessary condition on justified testimonial uptake. Two important desiderata of a theory of the epistemology of testimony are that it does not lead to generalized skepticism, nor is it susceptible to gullibility about important cases. The proposed theory of testimony doubles as a theory of epistemic trust that is better than alternatives. My theory posits two kinds of Epistemic Trust (ET): Affective and Cognitive Epistemic Trust (AET and CET). I argue both processes can be justified (JAET and JCET) and both can lead to justified uptake of testimonially-based beliefs. My theory of epistemic trust distinctly carves a role for subject stakes: when they are high, the evidential justification conditions on epistemic trust become more exacting on the testimonially-based beliefs they support.


Halobenzoquinones (HBQs), a new class of disinfection byproducts (DBPs), occur widely in treated drinking water and recreational water. The main concern regarding human exposure to DBPs stems from epidemiological studies that have consistently linked the consumption of chlorinated drinking water with an increased risk of developing bladder cancer. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Health Canada have set regulations on the amount of DBPs in drinking water to minimize the risk. However, these regulated DBPs do not account for the increased risk of bladder cancer because they have different target organs or lower magnitudes of risk based on animal carcinogenesis studies. Because of the pervasive exposure to DBPs, identification of DBPs relevant to human health has become one of the important research targets to address DBP-associated health concerns. Quantitative structure-toxicity relationship (QSTR) analysis has predicted HBQs to be potential bladder carcinogens. Therefore, this perspective focuses on the chemical and toxicological characterization of HBQs. In vitro cytotoxicity experiments have shown that HBQs induce greater cytotoxicity and/or greater developmental toxicity than most of the regulated DBPs. Cellular mechanistic studies indicate that HBQs are capable of producing reactive oxygen species (ROS) either within cells or in solution, depleting cellular glutathione levels, and influencing cellular antioxidant enzymes, which further induces oxidative stress and oxidative damage to cellular proteins and DNA. Oxidative damage to DNA was demonstrated in the form of significant increases in cellular levels of 8-hydroxydeoxyguanosine (8-OHdG), DNA strand breaks, and apurinic/apyrimidinic (AP) sites. HBQs can also form DNA adducts, affect genome-wide DNA methylation, and inhibit DNA repair enzymes. These findings demonstrate that HBQs are highly cytotoxic and potentially genotoxic and carcinogenic, although in vivo data corroborating this is not available. To fully understand the potential adverse health effects and cancer risk due to HBQ exposure, multidisciplinary research is required regarding human exposure, health risk assessment, and toxicological mechanisms of HBQs.


Power consumption is becoming an increasingly important aspect of circuit design. High power consumption can lead to high machine temperature, short battery life which makes laptop electronics difficult to be widely used. IEEE 1801 Unified Power Format (UPF) is designed to express power intent for electronic systems and components .This paper first introduces the power principles, puts forward the approaches to reduce power consumption according to UPF, and then demonstrates the Synopsys design flow based on UPF, finally gives the power report and makes a conclusion.


Objective. —To obtain estimates on (1) the percentage of children who were up-to-date on the recommended childhood vaccination series, (2) the percentage of children who were age-appropriately immunized, and (3) coverage levels by individual vaccines. Design. —Vaccination levels were estimated by conducting retrospective immunization coverage surveys of the school health records of children entering kindergarten or first grade in the 1990-1991 or 1991-1992 school year. A multistage cluster survey design was used. Setting. —Survey sites were selected from among the 60 largest urban areas in the United States. One small city and one rural area were selected for comparison. Results. —By their second birthday, 11% to 58% (median, 44%) of the children were fully vaccinated. Stricter measurement criteria lowered coverage levels further. Completed series levels at school entry were 71% to 96% (median, 87%). Conclusions. —Vaccination levels at the second birthday were far below the goal for the year 2000. All health providers need to administer vaccines according to the recommended schedule. (JAMA. 1994;271:833-839)


Right colonic and cecal diverticulitis can mimic acute appendicitis. A 14-year-old, 105-kg boy presented at the emergency department with symptoms mimicking acute appendicitis. Surgery revealed a case of perforated solitary cecal diverticulitis. Diverticulosis is a disease known to be common in adulthood, but the incidence is increasing in childhood. Therefore, emergency room residents and pediatric surgeons need to keep this diagnosis in mind in the differential diagnosis of acute appendicitis. Early clarification of the etiology will enable the planning of the best treatment strategy.


Several researchers argue that religion influences organizational behavior in nonprofit institutions (Lotfy, 2004; Brinckerhoff, 1999). This article examines this claim by outlining major organizational values embraced by the leadership of twenty-eight American Muslim nonprofit institutions. Two surveys were distributed to a random sample of 224 board members and 416 constituents in the southern and southeastern United States. Findings indicate that American Muslim nonprofit institutions remain religious even when they provide nonreligious services. Exhibiting religious organizational behavior is not random or accidental. Rather, it can be a reflection of the role of faith in nonprofits. Exploratory factor analysis reveals nine religiously important values that characterize managerial leadership in American Muslim nonprofit institutions. These values and their implications are discussed.


The wider use of malting barley with high yield potential will necessarily increase soil nutrient requirements, the resulting nutritional deficiency placing constraints on production. The Diagnosis and Recommendation Integrated System (DRIS) approach uses leaf nutrient relationships to rank the importance of different nutrients in limiting crop yield. The objectives of the present study were to: a) evaluate the sensitivity of the DRIS methodology in detecting responses to nitrogen (N) fertilizer; b) establish the ranking of the main macronutrient requirements; and c) determine whether N application improves the nutrient balance in plants. Malting barley plants were taken from fertilizer experiments carried out in 1999 and 2000 and sampled at the tillering and heading stages. At tillering, N was found to be the most deficient nutrient in the control and fertilized plots and S in cases where N was more abundant (fertilized with 30 or 60 kg N ha-1). The Nutritional Balance Index (IBN) and N:S ratio show a slight nutritional imbalance at this stage. At the heading stage the plants showed significant N deficiency, followed in many cases by S deficiency, directly affecting yield parameters. No P and K deficiencies were registered in the soils. In 1999, yields were low and showed fertilization response except in Alberti, where nitrate availability and yields were high. In 2000, higher water availability gave rise to higher yields with marked deficiencies in N owing to the shortage of N availably at sowing. S alternated with N in the order of requirements and IBN values decreased with increasing N availability. There was an 87% and 68% correlation between this index and the yields of the control and fertilized plots, respectively. The DRIS approach proved a good indicator of nutritional balance and of plant response to N fertilization.


In this article, conventional extended Kalman filter (EKF) and adaptive extended Kalman filters (AEKFs) based on adaptive fading, strong tracking, and innovation are compared for state and parameter estimation problem of induction motor (IM) by considering their estimation performances and computational burdens. The estimation performance of EKFs depends on the proper selection of system and measurement noise covariance matrices. However, it is hard to select optimum elements of those matrices using the trial-and-error method, and those are affected by the operating conditions of IM. Therefore, different AEKF approaches with the ability to update those matrices online according to the operating conditions have been proposed in the literature. However, to the best of the author's knowledge, no comparison has been yet reported as to which observer is more effective for real-time state and parameter estimation problem of IM. This paper focuses on the detailed comparison of those observers and provides useful results to the literature.


The Social Security trust fund will be exhausted in the early 2030s. The U.S. government will need to make a choice about how to address the impending trust fund exhaustion, but it is unclear what it will choose to do. This indecision leaves young and middle-aged workers not knowing whether they will face Social Security benefit cuts, payroll tax increases, or an increase in the full retirement age. This uncertainty about what will happen in the future causes young and middle-aged cohorts who are saving for retirement to make mistakes that could be avoided if the government decided earlier what will happen when the trust fund runs dry. This paper examines the cost of government indecision on Social Security reform. We calculate the value that people in different income classes and different birth cohorts would receive if the government decided now what it will do when the trust funds are exhausted. We find that the cost of indecision can be large. In some cases, the value of knowing today what the policy change will be in 2035 is worth more than two months of labor market earnings.


To solve the security issues in a mobile agent system, the access control is always employed. Existing access control models enable the agent's identity, trust and other information to influence the security decisions. We argue that the path, which a mobile agent travels along, should be taken into consideration and affect what the agent can do dynamically. An access control model is proposed in this paper which captures the path history of the agent and reaches a decision according to both whether the path matches a path pattern set and whether the path can follow a host patch set. The flexibility of this model is shown and some issues in implementing such a model are discussed as well.


The present study evaluated the biochemical measures of urinary homovanillic acid (HVA) and 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (MHPG) in relation to functioning on selected psychoeducational tests in a group of boys with attention deficit disorder and hyperactivity. The Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children-Revised (WISC-R), the Wide Range Achievement Test (WRAT), and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test were administered to 28 hyperactive and 23 control subjects. The findings suggest subtle differences in psychoeducational test performance in relation to specific levels of homovanillic acid and MHPG. (J Child Neurol 1987;2:50-56).


Abstract Data from the First ISCCP (International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project) Regional Experiment (FIRE) were combined with NOAA synoptic products, satellite imagery, and boundary-layer model data to document the existence and causes of periodic clearing of large regions of marine stratocumulus clouds off the coast of California during the summer season. These synoptic-to-mesoscale clearing episodes appear to be correlated with the ridging of the Pacific subtropical anticyclone into the United States Pacific Northwest, resulting in offshore flow effects. Furthermore, the subsidence associated with the Pacific subtropical anticyclone may help cause the clearing episodes, or prevent the redevelopment of these clouds in the clear regions. Because of the contribution of marine stratocumulus clouds to the global albedo, the clearing of large regions of these clouds may impact climate. Therefore, better understanding of these clouds is necessary in order to parameterize them in global climate models.


Mild growth conditions based novel techniques are essential for the controlled synthesis of zinc oxide (ZnO) nanostructure (ZNS) with desired properties. Most of the existing synthesis methods of ZNSs are limited by complicated growth conditions such as high vacuum, expensive devices, high temperature, long growth time and requirement of template. The freshwater pollution due to residual industrial organic dyes is presently being a major environmental concern that needs efficient photocatalytic materials to overcome it. To achieve these goals, this work synthesized good quality ZNS films using two different methods and evaluated the photodegradation of industrial methylene blue (MB) dye by these ZNS films under sunlight irradiation. Such films were grown on glass and silicon (Si) substrates via a simple hydrothermal method in the absence of any catalyst. Prepared samples were characterized using various techniques to determine their physical and optical properties. The effects of growth time and temperature, substrate type, nutrient pH and concentration on the morphology, size, crystallinity, and the emission properties of as-grown ZNS films were evaluated. Results showed that the morphology of these ZNSs was strongly influenced by the growth time, nutrient pH and concentration. A good quality ZNS was achieved within 5 min whereby nutrient solution with lower pH was appropriate for the growth of 1D ZNSs. However, higher pH values produced 3D flower-like ZNSs. Variation of growth temperature from 90-110 oC allowed good size-control of ZNSs. Growth conditions and substrate type dependent emission spectra were used to evaluate the optical band-gap energy. To get better control of the ZNS growth and evolving morphology, a novel catalyst-free and rapid preparation technique was adopted. In this method a mixture of precursor solution and ZnO nanoparticles (ZNPs) colloid/or only ZNPs colloid as a nutrient solution was used. Pulse laser ablation in liquid (PLAL) was combined with hydrothermal (H) method to develop PLAL-H growth technique. A Q-switched Nd:YAG laser with wavelength 532 nm, 8 ns pulse duration, and 10 Hz repetition rate was employed as the irradiation source. Metallic zinc target of 1 mm thick was used to produce colloidal ZNPs. The effects of varying growth time of 0.5, 5, 30 and 60 min and ablation energy of 200-400 mJ on the physical and optical properties of the grown ZNSs were examined. Four types of ZNSs with varying sizes and shapes were obtained on Si substrate at 110 oC for 5 min duration. Increasing ablation energy led to a substantial change of ZNS morphology and promoted the structure quality together with photoluminescence emission intensity. ZNSs synthesized under prolonged growth time of 60 min exhibited remarkable morphology alteration from rod/flower-like ZNSs to ZNPs with higher crystallinity and enlarged bandgap due to increase of nutrient pH of 10.5. Finally, the photocatalytic activities of the optimal ZNS films were assessed via sunlight driven photodegradation of MB dye. Experimental findings verified that the ZNPs prepared by PLAL-H technique possessed excellent photocatalytic efficiency (97.4%) towards degradation of MB dye. The observed boost in the photocatalytic activities was ascribed to the synergism of the improved surface area and band-gap modification. It was established that the proposed novel PLAL-H growth strategy is not only cost-effective but greatly useful for the rapid production of different quality of ZNSs at low temperature in a controlled way. This may overcome the shortcomings involving the effective exploitation of sunlight source towards practical photocatalytic applications of ZNSs.


Onion yellow dwarf virus (OYDV) and Garlic viruses (GarVs) A–D belonging to the genera Potyvirus and Allexivirus, respectively, cause serious disease problems and yield losses in garlic (Allium sativum L.). Possibility of obtaining virus-free garlic using stem-disc dome (SDD) culture and its combination with thermotherapy (36 °C for 4 and 5 weeks) were studied. Duplex reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain reaction was used for detecting these viruses. Results showed that the efficiency of viral elimination is depended on viral type, applied methods and duration of thermotherapy. For SDD culture, an overall average efficiency of virus-free plant production was 61 and 77% for GarVs and OYDV, respectively. Thermotherapy combined with SDD culture had a deleterious effect on OYDV elimination. For GarVs, it was more effective than SDD culture by itself and a high GarVs elimination of 75% was achieved by thermotherapy for four weeks of treatment. The efficiency of GarVs elimination (90%) was improved as treatment duration prolonged for five weeks.


Purpose
Healthcare services have enormous potential for growth in the country. However, the drivers of clinical productivity are yet to be explored. The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of clinician buy-in, clinician ease of use, clinician work stream flexibility and device placement comfort on clinician' s involvement. The study further examines the effect of converged devices implementation and wireless portable devices adoption on care delivery agility. Lastly, the authors examine the influence of clinician's involvement and care delivery agility on clinical productivity.

Design/methodology/approach
Measures for the constructs were developed from extant literature and expert feedback complemented with pre-testing. Further, perceptual responses were collected from 221 doctors through internet surveys and were analyzed using partial least squares.

Findings
The study identified clinician's ease of use and workflow streamlining flexibility as key enablers of clinician's involvement. Findings further reveal that converged devices implementation and wireless portable adoption as prominent enablers of care delivery agility. Further, the authors found clinician's involvement and care delivery agility to have a positive contribution in enhancing clinical productivity.

Research limitations/implications
The study has collected perceptual responses from doctors practicing both in hospitals and private clinics and their perceptions have been based on their experiences at those specific institutions or sites, which may limit generalizability of the current study findings. This study incorporated only doctors and ignored other assistant staffs' perceptions who assisted and aided doctors in executing treatment procedures either in private clinics or hospitals.

Practical implications
The study has practical implications for enhancing clinical productivity.

Social implications
The study findings highlight the role of process focus and infrastructure focus on the human elements of involvement and agility which often play pivotal role for motivation for individual physicians and their productivity.

Originality/value
The study is the foremost to develop perceptual measures for several constructs in the healthcare services.


Hydraulic stimulation is a technique in which a mixture of viscous fluids is pumped through an injector well in order to initiate and/or propagate fractures in the rock formation to enhance well-reservoir connectivity. Analytical and numerical methods have been proposed in the literature for predicting the evolution of the induced hydraulic fractures. Most of those studies are limited to some assumptions, such as fracture propagation through intact materials that follow a linear elastic behavior. However, those assumptions do not apply in naturally fractured porous media. The presence of geological discontinuities such as faults, joints, and natural fractures increases the complexity of the hydraulic fracturing treatment, affecting the final configuration of the hydraulic fracture network. This work investigates the effect of natural fractures on hydraulic fracture propagation in two limiting propagation regimes: toughness-fracture storage and viscosity-fracture storage dominated.
 The model fully couples permeable rock deformation and fluid flow inside and across the fractures. The hydromechanical triple-nodded zero thickness interface element has been combined with a cohesive zone model to simulate hydraulic fracture propagation. Mohr-Coulomb criterion and a contact model represent frictional and closure behavior of natural fractures, respectively. The longitudinal flow within the fracture is governed by Reynold's lubrication theory through smooth narrow parallel plates (i.e., Poiseuille flow). An innovated intrinsic mesh fragmentation technique is used to simulate complex crack patterns during hydraulic crack propagation.
 The results of the new approach are compared with analytical solutions. Moreover, the influence of parameters such as rock permeability, fluid viscosity, initial stress state, and natural fracture orientation on the hydraulic fracture propagation is analyzed.


The control arithmetic is proposed for axial blood pump driven by extracorporeal alternating magnet field based on ventricular work. According to health physiological parameters, the control model is verified by calculation and experiment. The control model used for driving blood pump is derived from the relationship of natural heart and artificial heart. By comparison with others, the control arithmetic based on ventricular work is more helpful in appraising the property of left ventricular aided device (LVAD), in meeting human body's natural need, and in effective use of motor for avoiding motor running at high speed and hence preventing the blood from the destruction caused by a blood pump at high temperature.


Method for the selection of processor core and algorithm combinations for system on chip designs is presented. The method uses a mappability concept that is an addition to performance and cost metrics used in codesign. The mappability estimation is based on the analysis of the correlations of algorithm and core characteristics. The method is demonstrated with an analysis tool and the experimental results with DSP cores and algorithms are similar to expectations.


This research paper is about media role in constructing people's picture of the world. People
make their choices according to the pictures in their heads. And media is one of the most
important factors influencing it. Therefore it is relevant to make research on picture of the
world, which media is presenting to us.
Work compares the foreign news agenda in three quality-newspapers from different European
countries: Postimees from Estonia, The Times from United Kingdom and Suddeutsche Zeitung
from Germany. Study is based on content analysis, where all stories with foreign focus during
the period of July 2004 – February 2005 (18 issues from each newspaper) were studied. The
focus of present study was coverage of European Union countries.
Study found out that all newspapers prefer to cover negative events from abroad. Among the
topics above all the politics and economics are dominant in all three newspapers.
The coverage of countries differs in three newspapers. The same tendency can be only found
in extensive coverage of Europe generally and USA. Estonian newspaper concentrates on the
news from Europe. British newspaper writes more about the other continents than Estonian
and German dailies. The Times and Suddeutsche Zeitung cover much more conflict regions
and Asian countries. South-America, Africa, Australia and Oceania are by large "grey areas"
in all newspapers (The Times directs its attention to these continents at most).
Within European Union old member-states are been covered more extensively in all
newspapers. Postimees writes more about new member-states than other newspapers.
Postimees writes also more about small member-states, whereas British and German
newspapers focus mainly on the other large member-states.

Author concluded that all three newspapers transmit significantly distorted picture of the
world by covering more prominent countries and neighbouring countries. Although these pictures differ in all newspapers, the main trend is similar. Author concluded that it is hard to
give a normative evaluation to these results, but it is sure that the awareness of distorted
world-picture given by media help to make people conscious while being exposed to the
media.


BACKGROUND/AIM
Increased expression and prognostic significance of major redox regulator nuclear factor erythroid-2-related factor (Nrf2) is recognized in many cancers. Our aim was to investigate the role of oxidative stress markers in melanoma.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
We characterized the immunohistochemical expression of Nrf2, kelch-like ECH-associated protein 1 (Keap1), BRAF(V600E), 8-hydroxy-2'-deoxyguanosine (8-OHdG) and nitrotyrosine in 36 nevi, 14 lentigo maligna and 71 malignant melanomas. We measured Nrf2 expression in melanoma cell lines and conducted cytotoxicity assays combining BRAF/NRAS ablation and H2O2treatment.

RESULTS
Nuclear Nrf2 expression in melanoma correlated with deeper Breslow (p<0.0005), invasive phenotype (Clark III-V) (p=0.011), nodular growth (p=0.001) and worse melanoma-specific survival (p=0.008). Absence of 8-OHdG in the endothelium was a greater significant predictor of poor prognosis (p=0.024) than ulceration (p=0.17) and had a similar impact on prognosis as Breslow (p=0.024). A decrease of Nrf2 followed the BRAF/NRAS inhibition, but combination of inhibitor with H2O2did not increase cytotoxicity.

CONCLUSION
Nrf2 and 8-OHdG influence prognosis in melanoma.


There are certain debates regarding epidural anesthesia (EA) and analgesia in cardiac surgery. The objective : to evaluate functions of left ventricle (LV) and right ventricle (RV) function with echocardiography after off-pump coronary artery bypass grafting (OPCAB) using combined inhalation and epidural anesthesia. Subjects and methods : 68 patients were randomized into 2 groups, differed by anesthesia techniques. In Group 1 (GA, n = 34), we used general anesthesia with sevoflurane and fentanyl, while in Group 2 (CA, n = 34) – its combination with epidural anesthesia by 0.5% ropivacaine followed by infusion of 0.2% ropivacaine after OPCAB. Parameters of cardiac performance and ventricular function were assessed by echocardiography. Results . There were no differences in systolic function of LV, RV, diastolic function of LV between the groups. The difference in the left atrial strain was revealed before hospital discharge and made 18.0 (14.5‒21.5) % in CA Group and 24.0 (18.0–26.0)% in GA Group ( p = 0.028). Conclusions . The use of epidural anesthesia and analgesia is not associated with clinically significant changes in inotropic and lusitropic functions of LV as well as RV systolic function after OPCAB.


Part C early intervention is a program administered under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (2004) that provides services to eligible infants and toddlers with disabilities and their families. Part C coordinators oversee the program in states. This article presents an examination of state Part C program coordinators' leadership practices. We conducted a qualitative secondary analysis to explore the practices that Part C program coordinators described using in a prior study on the processes, barriers, and solutions during a systems change. The present study used two new theoretical frameworks – organizational drivers for systems change and a strengths-based orientation – to create a positive lens on leadership through which to view identified practices. We selected five interview transcriptions with five state Part C program coordinators that contained explicit reflections about leadership behaviors in systems as our primary data set. Five categories of leadership practice emerged from a progressive inductive-deductive coding process: meeting practitioners where they are, identifying leaders, establishing consistent procedures, readying professionals, and relationships. These themes aligned with organizational drivers of systems change and highlighted the consistent use of a specific type of leadership: facilitative administration. Implications for the study of systems leadership in early intervention are discussed.


Cytogenetic analysis was performed on short‐term cultures of primary tumor tissue obtained from five patients with pleural malignant mesothelioma. Clonal karyotypic abnormalities were detected in four patients, none of whom had received cytotoxic therapy prior to karyotypic evaluation. Recurring chromosomal changes included partial deletions of 1p and 3p, and monosomy of 18, 19, and 22. We also reviewed data on 24 previously reported pretreatment patients and determined that alterations of chromosomes 1, 3, and 22 are frequently associated with malignant mesothelioma. Partial loss of chromosome 1 due to deletions or other rearrangements most frequently involve bands 1p11‐pter with the shortest region of overlap (SRO) occurring at 1p21–p22 in our patients. Deletions and other structural changes of chromosome 3 usually involve the region 3p14‐p25. The SRO of 3p deletions appeared to be at band 3p21. Monosomy 22 represents the most consistent specific whole chromosome loss seen in malignant mesothelioma, being observed in 11 of 28 cases summarized. In addition, structural changes of 22q have been observed in three patients, and a breakpoint at 22q11 was reported in each case. Taken collectively, these data suggest that a cascade of events involving alterations of genes on more than one specific chromosome may play a critical role in the development of malignant mesothelioma. The pattern of recurring chromosomal loss, particularly of 1p, 3p, and 22q, indicates that these regions should be targeted for future molecular investigations into the possible involvement of suppressor genes in this malignancy.