Little research has explored linkages between work conditions and mental health in working-class employed parents. The current study aims to address this gap, employing hierarchical linear modeling techniques to examine how levels of and changes in job autonomy, job urgency, supervisor support, and coworker support predicted parents' depressive symptoms in a sample of 113 dual-earner couples interviewed five times across the transition to parenthood. Increases in job autonomy and decreases in job urgency predicted fewer depressive symptoms in fathers at 1 year postpartum. For mothers, coworker support predicted fewer depressive symptoms, and supervisor support mitigated the negative effects of job urgency on depressive symptoms. Higher work hours coupled with low job urgency predicted declines in mothers' depressive symptoms across the first year of parenthood. Our findings suggest that interventions that lead to greater autonomy, less job urgency, and more supportive work relations may enhance employee well-being among working-class families.


This paper presents a risk-based method for coordinating generation rescheduling and load shedding to enhance overall transient stability of power systems. Firstly, a generation rescheduling model that can consider the risk-based dynamic security constraint is proposed, in which some acceptable risk level should be respected and can be adjusted by a risk coordination parameter. For the purpose of considering the potential corrective control costs at the stage of preventive control design, a bi-level coordination optimization model is developed, in which on the upper level the total coordination cost is minimized by the risk coordination parameter adjustment; and on the lower level the generation rescheduling and the load shedding are performed successively to enhance the risk-based dynamic security and the transient stability performance, respectively. Finally, a hybrid method that can combine the Golden Section Search and the Successive Linear Programming is developed to solve the bi-level optimization model. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by using the New England test system and a real power system.


What are the conditions that generate minority presidents, minority governments, and deadlock in presidential regimes? What is the impact of minority presidents, minority governments, and deadlock on the survival of these regimes? Based on data for all presidential democracies that existed between 1946 and 1996, the author shows (a) that characteristics of the electoral and party systems do affect the level of support for the president in congress and hence the probability of minority presidents and minority governments; (b) that these characteristics, and the minority governments they generate, do not make deadlock more likely; and (c) that minority presidents, minority governments, and deadlock do not affect the survival of presidential democracies. Together, these findings suggest that the view that explains the instability of presidential democracies in terms of the type of executive-legislative relations these regimes are likely to induce must be abandoned. The author offers two reasons, institutional in nature, that may account for the instability of presidential regimes.


Simple Summary Dairy cows undergo a very challenging time between the weeks immediately before calving and the start of lactation after calving. In particular, high yielding dairy cows, such as purebred Holstein cows, have to cope with a severe negative energy balance. In comparison to the feed (energy) intake, they produce a great surplus of milk energy. The energy deficit is supposed to be smaller in dual-purpose breeds, such as (German) Simmental. Therefore, crossbreeding of both breeds, with the aim of using the advantageous characteristics of both breeds, and the expected advantage of crossbred cows, might reduce the negative effects of the metabolic and physiologic challenges by improving the production efficiency of dairy herds. After calving, Simmental cows and cows with greater Simmental proportions decreased less in the body condition score, had lower concentrations of ketone bodies, and nonesterified fatty acids in the blood, which are common indicators of metabolic disorders during the transition period. In particular, first generation (F1) crossbred cows produced more energy corrected milk (ECM) than purebred Holstein cows, while the other crossbred generations still showed positive heterosis effects for ECM. That means, they produced more ECM than the average of both parental breeds. Abstract Crossbreeding in dairy cattle has been used to improve functional traits, milk composition, and efficiency of Holstein herds. The objective of the study was to compare indicators of the metabolic energy balance, nonesterified fatty acids (NEFA), beta-hydroxybutyrate (BHBA), glucose, body condition score (BCS) back fat thickness (BFT), as well as milk yield and milk composition of Holstein and Simmental cows, and their crosses from the prepartum period until the 100th day of lactation at the Livestock Center of the Ludwig Maximilians University (Munich, Germany). In total, 164 cows formed five genetic groups according to their theoretic proportion of Holstein and Simmental genes as follows: Holstein (100% Holstein; n = 9), R1-Hol (51–99% Holstein; n = 30), first generation (F1) crossbreds (50% Holstein, 50% Simmental; n = 17), R1-Sim (1–49% Holstein; n = 81) and Simmental (100% Simmental; n = 27). The study took place between April 2018 and August 2019. BCS, BFT blood parameters, such as BHBA, glucose, and NEFA were recorded weekly. A mixed model analysis with fixed effects breed, week (relative to calving), the interaction of breed and week, parity, calving year, calving season, milking season, and the repeated measure effect of cow was used. BCS increased with the Simmental proportion. All genetic groups lost BCS and BFT after calving. Simmental cows showed lower NEFA values. BHBA and glucose did not differ among genetic groups, but they differed depending on the week relative to calving. Simmental and R1-Sim cows showed a smaller effect than the other genetic groups regarding changes in body weight, BCS, or back fat thickness after a period of a negative energy balance after calving. There was no significant difference for milk yield among genetic groups, although Simmental cows showed a lower milk yield after the third week after calving. Generally, Simmental and R1-Simmental cows seemed to deal better with a negative energy balance after calving than purebred Holstein and the other crossbred lines. Based on a positive heterosis effect of 10.06% for energy corrected milk (ECM), the F1, however, was the most efficient crossbred line.


This paper aimed to point out the determinants of the effectiveness of Municipal Management in Brazil. It was a quantitative, descriptive research, with secondary data from 2015 to 2017, available at the Rui Barbosa Institute web site – 11 variables correlated with the effectiveness of management. The sample was comprised of Brazilian municipalities. The results were estimated by logistic regression with balanced panel data and interpreted by the odds ratio criterion. The results showed that population size and the mayor's reelection have a positive and statistically significant relationship to explain the effectiveness of management. On the other hand, the number of candidates for mayors, and disapproved expenses showed a negative and statistically significant relationship to explain the effectiveness. By addressing the effectiveness of municipal management, this article fills a gap in the literature because it brings to the debate the relevance of the evaluation phase of the public management to improve its quality and/or mitigate negative impacts on the population.


Post-treatment coronal hermetic seal of the root canal opening prevents the food or saliva which assist to achieve successful endodontic treatment. Gutta-percha is filled in the inner canal, that is, from cervical third to apical third. Gutta-percha does not provide the hermetic seal because it does not bound with dentine walls. Various new restorative materials have been developed in the last 6–7 decade but drawback related to the polymerization shrinkage of the composite resin remains a clinical problem. In general, dental composites having volumetric shrinkage of the material depends on its formulation and curing conditions. In this article, the effect of this polymerization shrinkage on the tooth structure has been studied.


Objectives The purpose of this study was to examine the applicability of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) reference terminology model for nursing to describe the terminological value domain content regarding the entities and attributes of the detailed clinical models (DCMs) used for nursing assessments. Methods The first author mapped 52 DCM entities and 45 DCM attributes used for perinatal care nursing assessments to semantic domains and their qualifiers to the ISO model. The mapping results of the entity and attribute concepts were classified into four categories: mapped to a semantic domain qualifier, mapped to a semantic domain, mapped to a broader semantic domain concept, and not mapped. The DCM mapping results were classified into three categories: fully mapped, partially mapped, and not mapped. The second author verified the mapping. Results All of the entities and 53.3% of the attribute concepts of the DCMs were mapped to semantic domains or semantic domain qualifiers of the ISO model, 37.8% of the attributes were mapped to the broader semantic domain concept, and 8.9% of the attributes were not mapped. At the model level, 48.1% of the DCMs were fully mapped to semantic domains or semantic domain qualifiers of the ISO model, and 51.9% of the DCMs were partially mapped. Conclusions The findings of this study demonstrate that the ISO reference terminology model for nursing is applicable in representing the DCM structure for perinatal care nursing assessment. However, more qualifiers of the Judgment semantic domain are required in order to clearly and fully represent all of the entities and attributes of the DCMs used for nursing assessment.


We describe a class of olfactory displays located at the hand, well-suited to support exploratory and active smelling behavior. We have developed a handheld olfactory display for the HTC Vive VR environment, and validated it in a two-step method that combines qualitative user evaluation with an empirical task-based study. The results of our qualitative study suggest that handheld olfactory displays may enhance a sense of presence in virtual environments. Our validation method is suitable for testing instruments that engage novel forms of smell interaction, and seek to provide clear and consistent output for empirically-validated olfactory research.


Uber's arrival in Europe has generated massive demonstrations by taxi drivers and a number of court judgments banning or restricting Uber's services on the ground that the company engaged in "unfair competition". Uber and other online-enabled car transportation services to connect passengers with drivers offer an attractive alternative to regular taxi services. The difficulty is that these services are protected by regulatory measures that create significant barriers to entry. Uber's business model presents many efficiencies and there is little doubt that it will prevail over time. Regulatory authorities thus face two options. One option is to resist the market entry of Uber and other similar companies. This approach would deprive users of attractive services and trigger many years of litigation. The other option is to embrace technological change and allow Uber to compete on a level playing field with taxi companies. The regulatory changes that will be needed raise complex questions, but these questions are unavoidable and it is important to tackle them early. Taxi companies can also embrace technologies and rely on the competing online-enabled car transportation services platforms that are already available to them.


Introduction/ Background Whole slide images are the basis of actual Digital Pathology. We have not yet solved the problem of lack of standardization in image formats. Many different kinds of image formats coexist. Most of the time we use free viewers for local reviewing and complex servers for remote access. There is a tendency to integrate whole slide images inside hospital information environment with the rest of medical records. However this organization led to a loss of the physical management of the pathology images. We moved from the glass slides into a link in a server, and digital microscopy is really virtual microscopy. Aims With the aim of recovering the physical file archive for whole slide images to facilitate universal sharing of digital pathology images we evaluated the possibility of employing portable viewers from whole slide images. Technical difficulties have reduced the use of this type of viewers but they have the enormous advantage of the easiness of use and universal access without any installation, and display from any platform even from DVD. Open portable viewer are available and panoramic image photography generates a software technology that can be applied to Digital Pathology. Methods Four different source of whole slide images were used from four scanners: a Roche iScan Coreo, a 3D-histech Mirax Midi, a Leica SCN400 and a Dako ACIS III, getting .jp2, .mrxs, .scn and .tiff files. Aperio Image Scope viewer was used to read and convert files into three kinds of testing format tiff, jp2 and flat jpg files. A commercial Zeiss Java based software was used as portable viewer for tiff files. No direct jp2 portable viewer could be found available so flat jpg files were used instead to evaluate three other portable viewers: Zoomify, Deep Zoom and HD View. Zoomify has its own file converter from a single jpg into a image folder containing hundreds or thousands of small fragmented jpf files to reproduce the pyramidal file organization of whole slide images. Microsoft Deep Zoom Composer was used to generate the specific type of jpg fragmented pyramidal files and both hdmake command line software and Microsoft Image Composite Editor (ICE) was employ for HD View (HDV) files. Results All four tested solutions can be used as portable viewers and keep good image quality and easiness of use and distribution, independent of servers and software installation. However previous work of conversion is necessary. The use of flat jpg files as source with its known file size limit of 65.000 pixels was overcame with ICE that works as stitcher software from different files. HDV works with zip files facilitating the use of a folder with a high number of small files. These solutions have for the future another standardization issue. They are using as visualizations technology Java, Flash and Silverlight. It seems that HTML5 will be soon substitutive standard, and probably has better security built but among its limitations is a bad solution as a local and portable active content viewer like whole slide images need.


Abstract 3074 Background: Disease relapse after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplant (HCT) remains a major obstacle to treatment success and cure for patients with myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS) and acute myelogenous leukemia (AML). Early identification of patients at a high risk for disease relapse has significant practical implications allowing early therapeutic interventions. We evaluated a novel approach for an early identification of a post-transplant relapse in patients with MDS and AML. Methods: CD34 + specific donor chimerism analysis was obtained in 6 HCT recipients with CD34+ AML and MDS. Starting at day +30 post HCT CD34+ cells from peripheral blood were positively selected by immunomagnetic isolation and then underwent fluorescence-activated cell sorting. Purified CD34+ cells were subsequently evaluated for percentage of donor DNA contribution by short tandem repeat (STR) analysis. CD34+ specific donor chimerism analysis was repeated monthly until hematologic relapse or death occurred. Simultaneously, conventional donor chimerism analysis was measured in the subpopulations of peripheral blood cells. Results: CD34+ cells were isolated from peripheral blood with a very high purity >95% and in sufficient quantity for reliable STR analysis in all study patients. Out of 6 evaluated patients, 3 developed hematologic relapse confirmed by bone marrow evaluation. In each relapsed patient CD34+ specific chimerism dropped to 80% (Figure 1). Moreover, obvious and steady decline in CD34+ specific donor chimerism significantly preceded the time of hematologic relapse. In contrast, no decline in CD34+ chimerism was identified in 3 patients without hematologic relapse. (Figure 1). Conclusion: Though this is a preliminary study, the results suggest that CD34+ specific donor chimerism analysis is a useful technique for timely identification of hematologic relapse in MDS and AML patients after HCT and may provide significantly earlier relapse detection than conventional chimerism analysis. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.


Background Intravenous aminophylline is a second line treatment for children suffering an acute exacerbation of asthma. A loading dose of 5 mg/kg is recommended for children who do not take oral theophylline in order to achieve a target therapeutic range of 10–20 mg/l. This dose was calculated based on theoretical pharmacokinetic data. This study aims to assess whether a 5 mg/kg loading dose achieves therapeutic levels, and report on the clinical outcomes using routine therapeutic drug monitoring (TDM) data. Method A prospective audit analysing the serum theophylline levels and outcomes of children who receive a 5mg/kg loading dose for an acute exacerbation of asthma between August 2014 and October 2015. Results Of 29 admissions requiring IV aminophylline, 16 children were on maintenance doses (and therefore did not receive loading doses). Thirteen children were therefore included. All children received 5mg/kg IV aminophylline. Twelve TDM samples were taken ≤1 h post dose (8 were ≤30 min). One child achieved serum theophylline levels between 10–20mg/l, 12 children had levels <10mg/l and no children had levels >20mg/l. The average theophylline level achieved was 7.9 ± 0.5mg/l. Mean length of stay was 4.6 ± 3.7 days, mean days until in child was in room air was 2.0 ± 0.6, and mean days until managed on only 5 puffs inhaled salbutamol 4 hly was 3.1 ± 0.4 days. One child require PICU admission. The adverse effects of cardiac arrhythmias, nausea, hypokalaemia and hypoalbuminaemia were seen in 0, 2, 5 and 3 children respectively. Conclusion A 5mg/kg loading dose fails to achieve a serum level of >10mg/l. The resolution of symptoms in children who require intravenous aminophylline is slow, and adverse effects are noted in this population. Research to determine the optimal loading dose of aminophylline is required.


Apoptosis is a physiologic process that eradicates undesired cells without inducing an inflammatory reaction. It is an important regulator of eutopic endometrial function and evidence suggests that apoptosis aids in maintaining cellular homeostasis during the menstrual cycle by eliminating aging cells from the functional layer of the uterine endometrium. Endometriosis, which is characterized by the growth of endometrial tissue outside the uterus, could result from increased cellular proliferation or decreased apoptosis in response to appropriate stimuli. Eutopic endometrium from women with endometriosis has several differences compared with normal endometrium of women without endometriosis. These differences may contribute to the survival of regurgitated endometrial cells into the peritoneal cavity and thus to the development of endometriosis. In this article, we will summarize recent literature concerning apoptosis-related genes such as Bcl-2 and Fas, outline the molecular basis of apoptosis and review the literature focused on the alterations in regulation of apoptosis in eutopic and ectopic endometrium from women with endometriosis.


This article explores the development and creative practices of an online community within an Australian university. The authors argue that creativity can be enhanced and supported by the development and implementation of purpose-specific learning environments, such as an online learning community. Within such a community the participants are exposed to a number of requisite elements designed to support the exploration of their own learning process and the development of creativity. The following study discusses the establishment of such a community and the social, cultural and learning practices of the student participants.


Background

Between 2014 and 2016, Brazil experienced a severe shortage in penicillin supply, resulting in a lack of treatment among some pregnant women and newborns with syphilis and the use of non-evidence-based regimens. The aim of this study is to describe the different therapeutic regimens used in newborns with congenital syphilis during the period of penicillin shortage using a retrospective cross-sectional study design conducted in Fortaleza, Northeast Brazil.
Methods

Hospital medical records and case reporting forms of live births reported with congenital syphilis in 2015 and the associated maternal syphilis cases were reviewed during June 2017 to July 2018 from all public maternity hospitals in the city of Fortaleza.
Results

A total of 575 congenital syphilis cases were reported to the municipality of Fortaleza during 2015 and 469 (81.5%) were analyzed. Of these, only 210 (44.8%) were treated with a nationally-recommended treatment. As alternative therapeutic options, ceftriaxone was used in 65 (13.8%), Cefazolin in 15 (3.2%) and the combination of more than one drug in 179 (38.2%). Newborns with VDRL titers > 1:8 (p = 0.021), who had some clinical manifestation at birth (p = 0.003), who were born premature (p < 0.001), with low birth weight (p = 0.010), with jaundice indicative of the need for phototherapy (p = 0.019) and with hepatomegaly (p = 0.045) were more likely to be treated with penicillin according to national treatment guidelines compared to newborns treated with other regimens.
Conclusion

During the period of shortage of penicillin in Fortaleza, less than half of the infants with CS were treated with a nationally-recommended regimen, the remaining received treatment with medications available in the hospital of birth including drugs that are not part of nationally or internationally-recommended treatment recommendations.


Two well-known models for drop-size distribution function during dropwise condensation -called Rose model and Mei model- were examined in two different aspects, average and differential point of view. It has been proved that these two models are able to describe the relation between droplets size and distribution function at each time step. The goal of this research is to investigate how these models can predict the relation between average distribution function (Nave) and average radius (rave) of droplets during a complete procedure of dropwise condensation and the relation between differential distribution function (dN/dr ) and drops radius (r) at each time step. The empirical parameters are drop size distribution exponent (n) and fractal dimension (df) in Rose model and Mei model respectively. At first these two parameters were calculated based on the experimental data and then the validity of these calculations for our computer simulation was investigated. It was concluded that Rose method fits the results of differential distribution function with exponent n between 0.33 and 0.35, and average distribution function with n of around 0.38. The Mei model also can describe both differential and average results of simulation and experiments with fractal dimension of 1.79<df<1.99. Also it was observed that the value of both n and df vary with changing the ratio of radius of two following droplets generation (γ) in our computer simulation.


Continual Learning is a step towards lifelong intelli-gence where models continuously learn from recently collected data without forgetting previous knowledge. Existing continual learning approaches mostly focus on image classification in the class-incremental setup with clear task boundaries and unlimited computational budget. This work explores Online Domain-Incremental Continual Segmentation (ODICS), a real-world problem that arises in many applications, e.g ., autonomous driving. In ODICS, the model is continually presented with batches of densely labeled images from different domains; computation is limited and no information about the task boundaries is available. In autonomous driving, this may correspond to the realistic scenario of training a segmentation model over time on a sequence of cities. We analyze several existing continual learning methods and show that they do not perform well in this setting despite working well in class-incremental segmentation. We propose SimCS, a parameter-free method complementary to existing ones that leverages simulated data as a continual learning regularizer. Extensive experiments show consistent improvements over different types of continual learning methods that use regularizers and even replay. 1


OBJECTIVE
To study the inhibitory effects of Etoposide (VP16) combined with 8-methoxypsoralen (8-MOP) on human highly metastatic mucoepidermoid carcinoma cells (Mc3).

METHODS
Mc3 cells were exposed to the drugs and their combinations at various concentrations. The inhibitory effects were tested with microculture tetrazolium colorimetric assay (MTT assay) and cologenic assay.

RESULTS
The IC50 values of VP16 and 8-MOP were 1625. 25 ng/ml and 750000 ng/ml respectively, the CI50 of the combination at 100320 and 1000 ng/ml of VP16 with 8-MOP were 0.350, 0.599 and 0.880 respectively.

CONCLUSION
The data indicate that combination of VP16 and 8-MOP is synergic in the inhibition of Mc3 cell growth.


In recent years, nations have been establishing policies to construct smart cities and promote their operation at the national level and competing with one another through the support of the required resources. Smart cities are futuristic state-of-the-art cities wherein all components of the urban infrastructure are inter-operated through networks using the core technologies in the Fourth Industrial Revolution and ICT(Information and Communication Technology). Various kinds of on-site state information are collected and monitored by installing sensors that are IoT(Internet of Things) devices in various services, and on-site controlling devices are controlled remotely if needed. Smart cities face increasing cyber security threats compared to existing cities as advanced technologies are utilized, so the importance of cyber security and user privacy has increased. In this study, security threats against the smart city architecture are analyzed, and possible cyber-attack scenarios in the construction of services and operation environment are identified and analyzed. The ripple effects of each attack are also analyzed. The analysis results in this study can be utilized in security technology research and development and applications in the future.


Peoples with disabilities are facing low in-come and high expenditure which resulted disabled household's food insecurity problem. The general objective of this research was to investigate the major determinants of disabled household's food insecurity in the case of Debre Tabor town, South Gonder Administrative Zone, Amhara National Regional State. This study employed a basic tool of research and investigated the determinants factors of disabled household's food insecurity. Descriptive statistics were used to understand the effects of various socioeconomic, demographic environmental and institutional factors on disabled household's food insecurity as well as to identify the relative importance of each factor in affecting disabled household' food insecurity. By the model of binary logistic regression resulted the number of income sources β=0.656, p<0.01, the amount of income per capita β=0.381, P<0.05, the total assets β= 0.580, P<0.01 and monthly food expenditure per capita β=0.492, p<0.01 were significantly predicted and positively determined food security.The developmental partner support ought to scale up of assets for the asset poor disabled households.


Synaptotagmin (syt) 1 is localized to synaptic vesicles, binds Ca2+, and regulates neuronal exocytosis. Syt 1 harbors two Ca2+-binding motifs referred to as C2A and C2B. In this study we examine the function of the isolated C2 domains of Syt 1 using a reconstituted, SNARE (soluble N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor attachment receptor)-mediated, fusion assay. We report that inclusion of phosphatidylethanolamine into reconstituted SNARE vesicles enabled isolated C2B, but not C2A, to regulate Ca2+-triggered fusion. The isolated C2B domain had a 6-fold lower EC for Ca2+ 50-activated fusion than the intact cytosolic domain of Syt 1 (C2AB). Phosphatidylethanolamine increased both the rate and efficiency of C2AB- and C2B-regulated fusion without affecting their abilities to bind membrane-embedded syntaxin-SNAP-25 (t-SNARE) complexes. At equimolar concentrations, the isolated C2A domain was an effective inhibitor of C2B-, but not C2AB-regulated fusion; hence, C2A has markedly different effects in the fusion assay depending on whether it is tethered to C2B. Finally, scanning alanine mutagenesis of C2AB revealed four distinct groups of mutations within the C2B domain that play roles in the regulation of SNARE-mediated fusion. Surprisingly, substitution of Arg-398 with alanine, which lies on the opposite end of C2B from the Ca2+/membrane-binding loops, decreases C2AB t-SNARE binding and Ca2+-triggered fusion in vitro without affecting Ca2+-triggered interactions with phosphatidylserine or vesicle aggregation. In addition, some mutations uncouple the clamping and stimulatory functions of syt 1, suggesting that these two activities are mediated by distinct structural determinants in C2B.


The field equation for a complex scalar field with a cubic nonlinear term in tour-dimensional Minkowski space is studied. Two classes of exact solutions, corresponding to solutions of plane and spherical waves, are presented.


An overall analysis of single-fluid jet grouting is presented. Current concepts and design rules are first reviewed and compared. Alternative approaches to the analysis of single-fluid jet grouting are proposed and implemented with experimental data and observations taken from recent and well-documented case histories. In-situ observations and measurements as well as laboratory tests are presented, indicating the influence of both treatment parameters and original soil properties on treatment effects. On the basis of the experimental evidence, the mechanical phenomena induced by jet grouting are discussed.


The mean precipitation along the U.S. West Coast exhibits a pronounced seasonality change under warming. Here we explore the characteristics of the seasonality change and investigate the underlying mechanisms, with a focus on quantifying the roles of moisture (thermodynamic) versus circulation (dynamic). The multimodel simulations from phase 5 of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) show a simple "wet-get-wetter" response over Washington and Oregon but a sharpened seasonal cycle marked by a stronger and narrower wet season over California. Moisture budget analysis shows that changes in both regions are predominantly caused by changes in the mean moisture convergence. The thermodynamic effect due to the mass convergence of increased moisture dominates the wet-get-wetter response over Washington and Oregon. In contrast, mean zonal moisture advection due to seasonally dependent changes in land–sea moisture contrast originating from the nonlinear Clausius–Clapeyron relation dominates the sharpened wet season over California. More specifically, the stronger climatological land–sea thermal contrast in winter with warmer ocean than land results in more moisture increase over ocean than land under warming and hence wet advection to California. However, in fall and spring, the future change of land–sea thermal contrast with larger warming over land than ocean induces an opposite moisture gradient and hence dry advection to California. These results have important implications for projecting changes in the hydrological cycle of the U.S. West Coast.


Due to expansion of vector borne diseases and their importance for human
 health we have investigated the prevalence of antibodies to Leishmania
 infantum antigens in serum samples of dogs. Leishmaniasis is a disease caused
 by protozoan parasites of the genus Leishmania. According to the World Health
 Organization the disease is a constant threat to 350 million people in 88
 countries, provided that most Mediterranean countries belong to the area
 designated as endemic. Since Crna Gora is a country of Mediterranean basin,
 it is important to present the results of the investigation on the presence
 of antibodies on L. infantum antigens in blood serum of dogs, considering
 that dogs can be reservoirs and source of infection for humans. In the period
 from 2006. to 2010., there were tested 433 serum samples of dogs with
 clinical symptoms and 68 serum samples of dogs without symptoms of the
 disease. Those were dogs with visible symptoms of the disease such as
 alopecia, weight loss and lymphadenomegalia. In 66% of cases, there was known
 hematological profile with predominant hypochromic anemia and neutrophilic
 leukocytosis. As mentioned above, the investigation included also 68
 asymptomatic dogs in good condition, out of which 45 were service dogs in use
 in military and police as well as 23 dogs from the asylum. By Indirect
 immunofluorescence test or Indirect Fluorescent Antibody Technique (IF-AT)
 and Direct Agglutination Test (DAT), there was determined the presence of
 specific antibodies to L. infantum antigens. Positive findings in the serum
 dilution 1:160 was determined in 258 samples (59.58%) in the group of dogs
 with clinical symptoms, and in 5.9% in the tested asymptomatic dogs. A part
 of the territory of Crna Gora with its average annual air temperature of 14.6
 - 17.8°C and mediterranean climate (long, warm and dry summer and mild, rainy
 winter) has all the prerequisites for the development and maintenance of the
 infection. The confirmed presence of five kinds of Phlebotomines on the
 territory of Crna Gora which are essential in the cycle of developing and
 maintaining of Leishmania species with dominant Phlebotomus neglectus
 species, additionally proves a great risk of occurrence and maintenance of
 the disease. The obtained results of seroprevalence in dogs are in
 correlation with the results of 55 cases of visceral leishmaniasis recorded
 by the Institute for Public Health in people from 1992 to 2009. Taking into
 consideration that seronegative findings and absence of symptoms does not
 exclude the infection, as well as that seropositive finding does not
 necessarily confirm it, a high level of seroprevalence (of 59.58%) in dogs in
 urban regions of Crna Gora, recorded during 5 years period, is by itself an
 alarming epizootiological and epidemiological fact.


Increased Blood Pressure is one of the main causes for ischemic heart disease, and effective management of Hypertension as a key to preventing both primary and secondary Ischemic heart disease. In primary prevention, keeping blood pressure at or below 140/90 mmHg is advised; in secondary prevention, levels of 130/85 mmHg were previously advised. In addition to acting alone to increase Ischemic heart disease (IHD) risk, hypertension also multiplies the likelihood of negative outcomes when it coexists with the other major IHD risk factors mentioned above. Numerous research and guideline recommendations had published over the past 20 years with the goals of explaining the pathophysiology of IHD, identifying an ideal blood pressure (BP) threshold at which to start pharmacotherapy, and defining the ideal pharmacologic components of a treatment plan. The goal blood pressure for IHD patients is generally agreed to be less than 140/90 mmHg. The prescribed pharmaceutical class (or classes) will vary depending on the coexisting conditions that each patient has. It is expected that 1.56 billion adults would have hypertension in 2025. In the South-East Asia region, hypertension claims the lives of up to 1500000 people per year; consequently, it is the world's biggest cause of death (WHO). The study's objective is to assess people who have ischemic heart disease (IHD awareness of blood pressure control). The pre-experimental research design for the project was authorized. Patients with ischemic heart disease (IHD) and stage I hypertension made up the study's sample population. This pilot study's findings demonstrate the effectiveness of lifestyle modification education on blood pressure control among patients with ischemic heart disease (IHD) who have primary hypertension in particular hospitals.


In Model-Based Systems Engineering (MBSE), the Systems Modeling Language (SysML) specification includes a metamodel that defines the language concepts and a user model that defines how the language concepts are represented. In SysML, an important use of metamodel is to provide an integrated semantic framework that every diagram in the user model can be projected as a view of the metamodel. However, most existing SysML metamodels lack such capability of being a basis for unification of different views of a system. To overcome the shortcomings of the current SysML metamodel approaches, we developed Channel-Based Multi-Queue Structure-Behavior Coalescence Process Algebra (C-M-SBC-PA), which provides an integrated semantic framework that is able to integrate structural constructs with behavioral constructs. Using C-M-SBC-PA as the metamodel of SysML, each diagram in the user model can be projected as a view of the C-M-SBC-PA metamodel.


Purpose
The study aims to conceptualise, develop and validates a scale to measure an employer brand(ing) (EB) based on the opinion of existing and potential employees.

Design/methodology/approach
A total of 431 student-respondents from B-Schools across India were surveyed in a cross-sectional study using a 70-item scale generated through literature review and expert interviews. Through exploratory factor analysis, six EB dimensions were derived. These were further validated using confirmatory factor analysis on data of 120 employees of the power sector.

Findings
A new 20-item EB scale- "EmBran" covers six dimensions of EB, namely, good human resource (HR) practices, business impression and work conditions, financial compensation, work-life balance, passive culture and standard HR policy. The paper posits EB as a second-order factor determined by six first-order factors.

Practical implications
The EB scale can be used by talent acquisition teams to derive meaningful insights into designing a policy for hiring and attracting young talent. It, thus, makes a significant contribution towards talent management. The scale also provides researchers with a fresh conceptualisation of the concept of the EB.

Originality/value
This study is unique as it considers the opinions of both existing and potential employees. Additionally, dimensions of passive culture and business impression and working conditions, emerged in the study.


There have been significant advancements in the safe delivery of anesthesia as well as improvements in surgical technique; however, the perioperative period can still be high risk for the pediatric patient. Perioperative respiratory complications (PRCs) are some of the most common critical events that can occur in pediatric surgical patients and they can lead to increased length of hospitalization, worsened patient outcomes, and higher hospital and postoperative costs. It is important to determine the various factors that put pediatric patients at increased risk of PRCs. This will allow for more detailed and accurate informed consent, optimized perioperative management strategy, improved allocation of clinical resources, and, hopefully, better patient experience. There are only a few risk prediction models/scoring tools developed for and validated in the pediatric patient population, but they have been useful in helping identify the key factors associated with a high likelihood of developing PRCs. Some of these factors are patient factors, while others are procedure-related factors. Some of these factors may be modified such that the patient's clinical status is optimized preoperatively to decrease the risk of PRCs occurring perioperatively. Fore knowledge of the factors that are not able to be modified can help guide allocation of perioperative clinical resources such that the negative impact of these non-modifiable factors is buffered. Additional training in pediatric anesthesia or focused expertise in pediatric airway management, vascular access and management of massive hemorrhage should be considered for the perioperative management of the less than 3 age group. Intraoperative ventilation strategy plays a key role in determining respiratory outcomes for both adult and pediatric surgical patients. Key components of lung protective mechanical ventilation strategy such as low tidal volume and moderate PEEP used in the management of acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS) in pediatric intensive care units have been adopted in pediatric operating rooms. Adequate post-operative analgesia that balances pain control with appropriate mental status and respiratory drive is important in reducing PRCs.


Harwood's Spurfowl Pternistis harwoodi is an endemic bird of Ethiopia. Globally, it is categorised as Vulnerable. Habitat loss and hunting are the major conservation threats to the species. This study investigated the activity patterns of Harwood's Spurfowl in relation to biophysical variables in the Central Highlands of Ethiopia. A species focal sampling method was applied to quantify the time budget of the target species during the dry and wet seasons of 2016. The time spent by the species on various activity patterns were significantly different (p < 0.05). The mean proportion of time utilised by the species for 'calling', 'feeding', 'preening' and 'resting' activities based on habitat types and seasons were also statistically different (p < 0.05). Except for 'resting', most activity patterns showed bimodal patterns with peaks during the early morning and late in the afternoon. The number of Harwood's Spurfowl (birds per hour per square metre) detected was higher during the cooler wet season. The highest bird counts occurred during low temperature, low wind speed and high relative humidity in the early morning and late afternoon. The species was recorded most in the scrubland habitat where human disturbance was low. Thus, this habitat should be conserved and managed to sustain the population.


Objective We aimed to describe the theoretical basis and the potential applications of the test-negative design for estimating influenza vaccination effectiveness in sentinel influenza surveillance. Introduction The test-negative design is a variation of the case-control study, in which patients are enrolled in outpatient clinics (and/or hospitals) based on a clinical case definition such as influenza-like illness (ILI). Patients are then tested for influenza virus, and VE is estimated from the odds ratio comparing the odds of vaccination among patients testing positive for influenza versus those testing negative, adjusting for potential confounding factors. The design leverages existing disease surveillance networks and as a result, studies using it are increasingly being reported. Methods We sought to examine the theoretical basis for this design using causal analysis including directed acyclic graphs. We reviewed studies that used this design and examined the study populations and settings, the methodologic choices including analytic approaches, and the estimates of influenza VE provided. We conducted simulation studies to examine specific potential biases. Results We show how studies using this design can avoid or minimize bias, and where bias may be introduced with particular study design variations. A purported advantage of the test-negative design is to minimise selection bias by health-care seeking behaviour and we demonstrate why residual bias may occur. Another purported advantage of the test-negative design is minimization of misclassification of the exposure; however we show how this source of bias may persist and how exposure misclassification may be a greater cause for concern not dealt with by the study design. In our review, we found great variation in estimates, but consistency between interim and final VE estimates from the same locations, and consistency between VE estimates from inpatient and outpatient studies in the same locations, age groups and years. One outstanding issue is the potential bias due to non-collapsibility. Conclusions Our work provides a starting point for further consideration of the validity of the test-negative design, which is an efficient approach for routine monitoring of influenza VE that can be implemented in existing surveillance systems without substantial additional resources. Harmonization of analytic approaches may improve the potential for pooling VE estimates.


Multibody simulation with frictional contact has been a challenging subject of research for the past thirty years. Rigid-body assumptions are commonly used to approximate the physics of contact, and together with Coulomb friction, lead to challenging-to-solve nonlinear complementarity problems (NCP). On the other hand, robot grippers often introduce significant compliance. Compliant contact, combined with regularized friction, can be modeled entirely with ODEs, avoiding NCP solves. Unfortunately, regularized friction introduces high-frequency stiff dynamics and even implicit methods struggle with these systems, especially during slip-stick transitions. To improve the performance of implicit integration for these systems we introduce a Transition-Aware Line Search (TALS), which greatly improves the convergence of the Newton-Raphson iterations performed by implicit integrators. We find that TALS works best with semi-implicit integration, but that the explicit treatment of normal compliance can be problematic. To address this, we develop a Transition-Aware Modified Semi-Implicit (TAMSI) integrator that has similar computational cost to semi-implicit methods but implicitly couples compliant contact forces, leading to a more robust method. We evaluate the robustness, accuracy and performance of TAMSI and demonstrate our approach alongside relevant sim-to-real manipulation tasks.


Two field experiments were carried out under saline water irrigation conditions at Ras Sudr Experimental Station, South Sinai, Egypt during 2008/2009 & 2009/2010 growing seasons. The main objective was aimed to study the effect of tow saline irrigation water levels i.e. 3700 ppm and 6300 ppm on barley yield and some yield attributes i.e. plant height, number of tillers/plant, number of tillers/m, number of leaves/plant, flag leaf area, peduncle length, spike length, biological yield and grain yield by using three different irrigation systems i.e. drip irrigation (DI), furrow irrigation (FI) and gated pipe irrigation (GPI) systems. Performed pipes which include 110 mm PVC pipes (6 bars) to convey water to the furrows in GPI irrigation system .Such pipe equipped with gated holes (25 mm) to control the water discharge. The distance between each hole is about 75 cm. Drip irrigation was performed by the distance about 40 cm between drip irrigation lines. The drip holes were about 20 cm between holes in the same line. Every irrigation system was irrigated by constant quantity of water as recommended for the region. The obtained results showed that increasing irrigation water saline level significantly decreased yield and all yield attributes studied of barley under the three irrigation systems. The high values of the growth characters and biological and grain yield were obtained by using drip irrigation system under 3700 ppm salinity followed by using gated pipe irrigation system compared with furrow irrigation system. Whereas under high saline irrigation water (6300 ppm) level the lowest values of all growth and yield and some yield attributes were obtained by using drip irrigation system compared with gated pipe irrigation and furrow irrigation systems.


The development of binary classifiers to identify highly error-prone or high maintenance cost components is increasing in the software engineering quality modeling literature and in practice. One approach for evaluating these classifiers is to determine their ability to predict the classes of unseen cases, i.e., predictive validity. A chi-square statistical test has been frequently used to evaluate predictive validity. We illustrate that this test has a number of disadvantages. The disadvantages include a difficulty in using the results of the test to determine whether a classifier is a good predictor, demonstrated through a number of examples, and a rather conservative Type I error rate, demonstrated through a Monte Carlo simulation. We present an alternative test that has been used in the social sciences for evaluating agreement with a "gold standard". The use of this alternative test is illustrated in practice by developing a classification model to predict maintenance effort for an object oriented system, and evaluating its predictive validity on data from a second object-oriented system in the same environment.


The Thomson scattering spectrum represents the projection of the three-dimensional electron velocity distribution on the scattering vector. From this the local electron temperature and density can be derived. To determine the three-dimensional electron velocity distribution it is necessary to have several viewing directions, assuming axial symmetry in velocity space perpendicular to the magnetic field. Thomson scattering experiments in the TORTUR tokamak demonstrated the first experimental determination of f(v⊥, v||) from radially and tangentially observed spectra. The latter made it possible to determine the toroidal current density. The scattering spectra, averaged over 30 laser pulses observed in both the radial and the tangential direction, show clearly two symmetrical dips near the top of the Gaussian spectrum


Convolutional Neural Network (CNNs) models' size reduction has recently gained interest due to several advantages: energy cost reduction, embedded devices, and multi-core interfaces. One possible way to achieve model reduction is the usage of Rotation-invariant Convolutional Neural Networks because of the possibility of avoiding data augmentation techniques. In this work, we present the next step to obtain a general solution to endowing CNN architectures with the capability of classifying rotated objects and predicting the rotation angle without data-augmentation techniques. The principle consists of the concatenation of a representation mapping transforming rotation to translation and a shared weights predictor. This solution has the advantage of admitting different combinations of various basic, existing blocks. We present results obtained using a Gabor-filter bank and a ResNet feature backbone compared to previous other solutions. We also present the possibility to select between parallelizing the network in several threads for energy-aware High Performance Computing (HPC) applications or reducing the memory footprint for embedded systems. We obtain a competitive error rate on classifying rotated MNIST and outperform existing state-of-the-art results on CIFAR-10 when trained on up-right examples and validated on random orientations.


Between 1972-1991, 44 cases of megacolon disease were treated at the Sacré-Coeur Hospital by the same surgical team. 13 cases were excluded because of negative biopsy or lost for follow-up. 30 cases were operated by Soave technique with 1 mortality by septicemia and 19 years of follow-up of 29 patients. 11 patients had minor complications and were treated successfully. One patient had a posterior myomectomy for a short segment. Results were excellent in 29 cases and considered to be cured.


We report on IRAC 4.5 μm, IRAC 8.0 μm, and MIPS 24 μm deep observations of 16 gamma-ray burst (GRB) host galaxies performed with the Spitzer Space Telescope, and we investigate in the thermal infrared the presence of evolved stellar populations and dust-enshrouded star-forming activity associated with these objects. Our sample is derived from GRBs that were identified with subarcsecond localization between 1997 and 2001, and only a very small fraction (~20%) of the targeted sources are detected down to f4.5 μm ~ 3.5 μJy and f24 μm ~ 85 μJy (3 σ). This likely argues against a population dominated by massive and strongly starbursting (i.e., SFR ≳ 100 M☉ yr-1) galaxies as has been recently suggested from submillimeter/radio and optical studies of similarly selected GRB hosts. Furthermore, we find evidence that some GRBs do not occur in the most infrared luminous regions—hence the most actively star-forming environments—of their host galaxies. Should the GRB hosts be representative of all star-forming galaxies at high redshift, models of infrared galaxy evolution indicate that ≳50% of GRB hosts should have f24 μm ≳ 100 μJy. Unless the identification of GRBs prior to 2001 was prone to strong selection effects biasing our sample against dusty galaxies, we infer in this context that the GRBs identified with the current techniques cannot be directly used as unbiased probes of the global and integrated star formation history of the universe.


We studied histomorphology of the CBA line mice liver after 30 and 90 days of the low dose gamma-radiation influence combined with incorporated Th(NO3)4 in doses 0.03; 0.1; 0.3 grams per kilogram of the living mouse weight. Morphophysiological and morphometric changes were shown. The liver mass and index were significant by increased after 30 days influence. The same changes after 90 days influence were not shown. The morphometric parameters (dynamics of double-nucleus and polyploid hepatocytes, nucleoluses numbers) gave evidence of the liver energy disbalance.


Covering 32% of the planet, boreal forests are one of the last relatively intact terrestrial biomes, and are a critical carbon sink in global climate dynamics. Mature and old-growth boreal forests provide a large number of products that are culturally and economically important, from wood-based lumber, pulp, and fuel wood, to numerous nonwood products. Intensive wood harvest and conservation of naturally dynamic intact forests tend to be mutually exclusive; where biodiversity is highly valued, wood harvests are limited or banned outright. The authors of this
 Policy Forum
 advise that increasing domestic forest protection without decreasing demand for wood necessitates an increase in foreign imports, which introduces a negative impact on forest biodiversity elsewhere. In some cases, exporting impact across the border may cause negative impacts to boomerang back into the country9s protected forests.


One of the major issues in wireless sensor networks is to find algorithms and protocols that are suitable to the limited capacities of the sensor nodes. In this paper, we present a novel opportunistic mechanism that achieves routing of critical periodical information transmitted by mobile nodes. A multi-hop fixed tree topology that uses hierarchical addresses is deployed to cover the area in which mobile nodes evolve. This fixed topology is used to route traffic between mobile nodes and towards a sink that is connected to a control station. Traffic destined to a mobile node is routed towards the nearest fixed node in its range. Our mechanism avoids overloading the network with control traffic and ensures delivery of critical data to the destination.


Stroke as the third cause of death in indus trialized societies after cardiovascular and cancerous diseases Based on the type of artery involved, its location and size can lead to various side effects such as half-body movement disorder, sensory impairment, memory impairment, and other problems. In this regard, due to the complications of chemical drugs and their long-term use in treating the disease, and on the other hand, by proving the efficacy of herbal medicines in scientific societies, herbal medicines can be used as alternative treatments with fewer complications or supplementation of treatment Used. The aim of this s tudy was to inves tigate the relationship between the effect of herbs and the rate of s troke reduction. This s tudy is a review of the literature. A total of 12 research articles, review articles and meta-analyses published from 2005 to the end of 2016 in the database of Pubmed, Ovid, Elsevier, ProQues t, Google and iran medex using keys words cerebral ischemia, herbs, antioxidant titles and or abs tracts for herbs or herbal supplements, such as virgin olive oil, black cherry and watermelon, were searched and examined. A review of s tudies has shown that drug treatments and their derivatives can reduce the amount of brain damage, cerebral edema, sensory and motor disorders, and the consequences of cerebral ischemia (tissue damage to the pneumobra and kanon regions). A roughly common mechanism is the reduction of oxidative and titrating s tress, increased nitric oxide, reduced cerebrospinal fluid flow, decreased the activity of microglia and as trocytes, and inhibited the expression of apoptotic proteins. The findings show that herbal treatments can be dramatically enhanced due to their neuroprotective properties The risk of lesions and abnormalities after cerebral ischemia can be reduced, but the desire of different groups of society to this range of drugs cannot be neglected.


Some of the main challenges in developing an effective network-based intrusion detection system (IDS) include analyzing large network traffic volumes and realizing the decision boundaries between normal and abnormal behaviors. Deploying feature selection together with efficient classifiers in the detection system can overcome these problems.  Feature selection finds the most relevant features, thus reduces the dimensionality and complexity to analyze the network traffic.  Moreover, using the most relevant features to build the predictive model, reduces the complexity of the developed model, thus reducing the building classifier model time and consequently improves the detection performance.  In this study, two different sets of selected features have been adopted to train four machine-learning based classifiers.  The two sets of selected features are based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) approach respectively.  These evolutionary-based algorithms are known to be effective in solving optimization problems.  The classifiers used in this study are Naïve Bayes, k-Nearest Neighbor, Decision Tree and Support Vector Machine that have been trained and tested using the NSL-KDD dataset. The performance of the abovementioned classifiers using different features values was evaluated.  The experimental results indicate that the detection accuracy improves by approximately 1.55% when implemented using the PSO-based selected features than that of using GA-based selected features.  The Decision Tree classifier that was trained with PSO-based selected features outperformed other classifiers with accuracy, precision, recall, and f-score result of 99.38%, 99.36%, 99.32%, and 99.34% respectively.  The results show that using optimal features coupling with a good classifier in a detection system able to reduce the classifier model building time, reduce the computational burden to analyze data, and consequently attain high detection rate.


This article presents the findings of a mixed methods study that explores the individual, social, and infrastructure factors that influence educational participation of 403 "Champions" in Maharashtra, India. Champions are defined as second year female college students whose parents completed a primary school education or less. The results of the study, as framed by Kenneth McLeroy et al's social ecology model, suggest "Champions" owe their success primarily to exceptional levels of familial support, mentorship from teachers, and personal resilience in the face of considerable obstacles including inadequate facilities and rampant sexual harassment. These findings mount a critique of the efficacy of public educational measures targeted at improving gender equality in education.


While the most important financial and accounting issues of early-stage enterprises with fast growth potential (startups) are widely covered in practice-oriented literature, academic studies do not deal with this subject. In the author's opinion, this subject should receive more attention in academic writing, as inappropriate financial management can make it more difficult for startups to raise capital at a later stage of operation and, thus, to grow further. This paper is based on a sample of financial and tax due diligences of Hungarian startups. The authors intended to present some of the issues identified and relevant also to startups operating outside Hungary. The sample shows that due to a loss making operation in the early years, this type of companies can quickly use up their equity and, therefore, they need continuous ownership (equity) financing. The sample demonstrates that debt financing is not a viable option for this group of companies, the only option for them is venture capital financing. The authors confirmed the positive relation between startups and R&D&I. In their opinion, compliance with the rules and the optimization permitted by the rules themselves is highly significant for startups to manage their high upfront losses and to attain their general aim to raise investment capital. The financial and tax due diligences at startups allowed to identify several inappropriate practices due to complicated accounting and tax laws.


To understand the microbiology of sepsis and its relationship with tumor necrosis factor (TNF)-alpha, 444 septic patients were studied in a phase II clinical trial. In total, 270 (61%) 444 of episodes were microbiologically documented. The most common isolates were Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus, and Streptococcus pneumoniae. In some patients, obligate anaerobes were isolated in pure culture. Data on baseline TNF-alpha (n=409) showed that the geometric mean TNF-alpha concentrations in patients with severe sepsis and in those with late shock were 41 pg/mL (range, 5-3310) and 58 pg/mL (range, 5-1870), respectively. Patients with a positive culture had significantly higher TNF-alpha levels (65.9 vs. 29.2 pg/mL, P=.0001). Patients with a pure gram-negative infection had significantly higher TNF-alpha levels than those with a pure gram-positive or mixed infection, especially in the late shock group (142.6, 64.0, and 52.8 pg/mL, respectively, P=.004). These results provide further support for the concept that patients with sepsis are a heterogeneous group that require more precise definition.


Biosensors are becoming increasingly important in the food industry for application in safety and quality control among routinely used techniques such as microbiology, chromatography, or specific enzymatic methods. Biosensors offer advantages as alternatives to conventional methods because of their inherent specificity, simplicity, and rapid response. This article presents a short review of vitamin and pseudovitamin analysis techniques using biosensor technology as applied in the food industries, with particular attention to immobilization techniques of biorecognition elements, transducers, an overview of vitamin biosensors, and some future trends.


Speech samples of 14 male and 10 female patients with central dysphonia were examined. Eighteen patients had suffered a severe closed head trauma and the remaining six patients had experienced cerebrovascular accident (CVA). Several parameters were developed in order to find acoustic correlates for three major pathologic voice qualities in central dysphonia. The well know jitter parameter, fundamental period perturbation (PP), was adapted for our purposes and proved to be a good measure for rough voices, though the patients revealed less jitter than in peripheral dysphonia. The vocal onset parameter, time lag of preexhalation (Tb), and the spectral parameter, spectral energy above 5 KHz (A5), classified the breathy voices. Most of the tense voices could be detected by the spectral parameters, spectral energy in the 1-5 KHz range (A1), and variance of spectral energy above 5 KHz (V5). The successful classification of these voice qualities allowed the description of compound pathologic voice types in central dysphonia.


Advances in x-ray crystallographic data collection, structure solution, and refinement/validation have reduced the time required and expanded the range of samples amenable to x-ray crystallographic studies. Consequently, we can now collect complete atomic resolution data sets on physically smaller crystals and solve larger problems by direct methods beyond what could have been accomplished even five years ago. Applying these improved methods to the study of opioid ligands has enhanced our knowledge of the opioid pharmacophore. Despite considerable progress, it is still difficult to define the pharmacophoric parameters required for highly selective and potent opioid peptides. In part this is due to the conformational flexibility remaining even in conformationally constrained peptides.


Comparison of catalytic properties of a Mn2(+)-dependent and a Ca2+, Mg2+ dependent endonucleases of rat liver cell nuclei was carried out. The Mn2(+)-dependent endonuclease has Mr 31 kDa by SDS-PAAG-electrophoresis; pH optimum 5.5; calcium-magnesium synergism less than 3 in rat liver DNA, RF M13 DNA and phage M13 DNA. The rate of hydrolysis of single strand and double strand circular DNA was the same. The Mn2(+)-dependent endonuclease split DNA by double hit manner, and didn't change the manner in the presence of different divalent cations. Ca2+, Mg2(+)-dependent endonuclease has pH optimum 6.5; calcium-magnesium synergism up to 40 in rat liver DNA and 175 in RF M13 DNA. The rate of hydrolysis of single strand DNA was higher than double-strand DNA.


To evaluate the sterilize efficiency of nano-sized recycled aggregates (RAs), several types of RAs were examined for the purpose of environmental stamping out procedure. The poultry (e.g., chicken) was selected as a target livestock of epidemic disease, and the blast furnace slag (BFS), fly ash (FA), slaked lime (SL), nano-cerium (n-Ce) and shell (Sh) were used as the RAs materials. The fermented solution of effective microorganisms (EM) was added to decompose the target livestock. Various kinds of lab-scale reactor were operated to examine the effects of RAs volume; high and low volume of RAs (e.g., 1.89 w/v% and 1.14 w/v% of RA in solution, respectively), and the effects of EM concentration (e.g., concentrated solution (100%) and diluted solution (12.5%)) with tested in different reaction time. The number of microorganisms after batch tests was counted for the sterilized effects of RAs, and organic matters (e.g., chemical oxygen demand (COD)) and inorganic matters (e.g., suspended solids (SS), heavy metals and potential ions) were analyzed before and after adsorption process. The cases of SL and n-Ce showed high removal of microorganism in the batch of high concentrated EM for 20 days. However the other RA materials were less effective on the sterilization especially in lower volume of RAs. In diluted EM (e.g., 12.5%) tests, most RAs have high sterilization efficiencies in the short periods of batch reaction regardless of RAs types, and it was more effective with longer reaction time. The BFS and n-Ce exhibited higher surface area than others and they adsorbed highly heavy metals in water. The results suggested that the concentration of target organism was the most important to determine sterilization and adsorption properties of RAs.


The spleen is a multitasking secondary lymphoid organ with specialized cells for initiating immunity to blood-borne targets. The spleen is the largest secondary lymphoid organ in the body and, as such, hosts a wide range of immunologic functions alongside its roles in hematopoiesis and red blood cell clearance. The physical organization of the spleen allows it to filter blood of pathogens and abnormal cells and facilitate low-probability interactions between antigen-presenting cells (APCs) and cognate lymphocytes. APCs specific to the spleen regulate the T and B cell response to these antigenic targets in the blood. This review will focus on cell types, cell organization, and immunologic functions specific to the spleen and how these affect initiation of adaptive immunity to systemic blood-borne antigens. Potential differences in structure and function between mouse and human spleen will also be discussed.


Critical National Information Infrastructure (CNII) is crucial to the survivability of a nation. The destruction or disruption of these systems and communication networks would significantly affect the economic strength, image, defense and security, government capabilities to function, and public health and safety. CNII would probably become an attractive target for terrorists as the result of cyber attacks could leave the nation with difficult conditions due to the disruption of critical services. This paper provides an overview on the concept and fundamental elements of cyber terrorism. This paper also highlights the cyber security policy initiatives as a guideline for the development of the policy framework. This paper further recommends the need of policy development addressing the protection of CNII from cyber terrorism activities specifically for Malaysia.


Fish sperm is a crucial part of fish reproduction, especially for Cyprinus carpio. This study aimed to determine the effect of coconut water and glycerol on the motility and viability of sperm koi fish (Cyprinus carpio) and the best treatment on sperm storage of Showa koi fish.This research was conducted for 45 days at Installation ofPunten Freshwater Cultivation - Malang. Thecompletely randomized design (CRD) used with five treatments and three replications. The treatment comes in 750µl coconut water, 500µl coconut water, and 250µl glycerol, 375µl coconut water, and 375µl glycerol, 250µl coconut water and 500µl glycerol, and 750µl glycerol (P1, P2, P3, P4, and P5, respectively). Briefly, the spermis stored at a low temperature (4℃). Observation of sperm motility used sperm cell dilution contained physiologicalNaCl, while the viability calculation used eosin 2% by the smear method. Motility and viability investigationwere employedwere carried out under a microscope with 400x magnification. The results revealed that the addition of coconut water and glycerol had a significant difference on the motility and viability of sperm koi fish.  It could survive 96 hours of storage, but the longer motility and viability would decrease. The P3 showed the best result compared to others. The P3 had an average motility scale of 96 - 5.00 and the average viability is 87.38%. Based on it, the treatment could increase the motility and viability of koi fish sperm.


Recent models for the tectonic development of the southern Scottish Caledonides are reviewed in terms of the deformation sequence observed within the Southern Uplands of Scotland. The early stages of this history are consistent with deformation within an accretionary prism formed above a northwest-directed subduction zone. Later stages show a reversal in transport direction and also evidence for sinistral shear. A deformational history for the area is proposed in terms of recent data on the deep structure of the Southern Uplands and adjacent regions. The Southern Uplands is considered to be a large-scale, popup structure between a forethrust, the Iapetus suture, and a backthrust, which partially obducted it toward the northwest.


This study evaluated the effect of hydraulic retention time on chemical oxygen demand (COD) and total nitrogen (TN) removal in an intermittently aerated constructed wetlands. Two horizontal subsurface-flow constructed wetlands were used: one without aeration and the other aerated intermittently (1 hour with aeration/7 hours without aeration). Both systems were evaluated treating domestic wastewater produced synthetically. The flow rate into the two CWs was 8.6 L day-1 having a hydraulic retention time of 3 days. The results show that the intermittently aerated constructed wetland were highly efficient in removing COD (98.25%), TN (83.60%) and total phosphorus (78.10%), while the non-aerated constructed wetland showed lower efficiencies in the removal of COD (93.89%), TN (48.60%) and total phosphorus (58.66). These results indicate, therefore, that intermittent aeration allows the simultaneous occurrence of nitrification and denitrification processes, improving the removal of TN in horizontal subsurface-flow constructed wetlands. In addition, the use of intermittent aeration also improves the performance of constructed wetlands in removing COD and total phosphorus.


In 2011, Michael Woods argued that "'rurality is … a social construct … an imagined entity that is brought into being by particular discourses of rurality that are produced, reproduced and contested by academics, the media, policy-makers, rural lobby groups and ordinary individuals. The rural is therefore a 'category of thought'" (2011:9). In this paper, I show how, through a circuit of the emergence, circulation and reproduction of ideological discourses (Phillips, Fish and Agg 2001), Southern English rurality is constructed and reproduced through the strategic deployment in TV, in film, in song and in other media of rhoticity, the realisation of non-prevocalic /r/ in words such as 'farm' and 'car'.

Rhoticity is a rather rapidly obsolescing phonological characteristic of the English rural South-West (and, appears today to be more robustly preserved in the area's larger urban areas, such as Bristol). In other areas of the rural South of England, such as East Anglia, it died out well over a century ago (Ellis 1889). Despite the waning use of rhoticity in the South-West, however, comedians, film-makers, and dramatists still routinely recruit rhoticity to phonologically construct the peripheral 'South-West'. Characters that we are urged to read as from this area, especially old ones in pastoral occupations, especially those without a long formal education, are routinely portrayed with rhotic accents. These deployments are, furthermore, also deeply classed – the rhotic are blue-collared, not white.

The ideological circuit has led to the association of rhoticity as being iconically rural. Rhoticity has, therefore, been deployed to construct *any* such older, less educated rural character, wherever they come from in the south of England and whether or not their character comes from a part of England where rhoticity can still be found. Examples from TV drama, comedy, film, and the internet will be used to demonstrate how a recessive consonant is put to work to construct and disseminate ideologies of the countryside, ideologies which erase rural linguistic diversity. Such constructions of rurality as these, broadcast regularly into people's living rooms, strongly shape how people 'see', and, 'hear', the countryside, despite contestations from academics and from those in the rural South itself.


The effects of prostaglandin (PG) E1, E2 and F2 alpha on isolated smooth muscles of rabbit bladder and urethra were studied by in vitro techniques for recording contractile activities. To examine the mechanism of PGs' effect, intracellular cyclic AMP content was also measured by radioimmunoassay. Spontaneous contractile force of muscle strips isolated from rabbit urinary bladder dome and base was increased dose-dependently by administration of PGE1, E2 or F2 alpha. Isolated muscle strips from bladder dome responded to PG more markedly than those from bladder base. The rank order of potency to induce contractile responses was PGF2 alpha greater than PGE2 greater than PGE1 in both dome and base muscles. Spontaneous contractile force of muscle strips isolated from rabbit urethra was increased dose-dependently by administration of PGF2 alpha, and, in contrast, was decreased dose-dependently by PGE1 or E2. These effects were not affected by pretreatment with atropine, phentolamine, propranolol and tetrodotoxin, but were significantly inhibited by pretreatment with verapamil, a Ca-antagonist. Cyclic AMP accumulation in urethral muscle strips significantly increased after administration of PGE1. These results demonstrated that contractile response of rabbit bladder smooth muscle to PG was mainly induced by Ca2+ influx and that cyclic AMP was related to the relaxation of rabbit urethral smooth muscle by PGE1.


The combined effect of moisture and mechanical loading on asphalt mixtures has been recognized as one of the main causes of premature deterioration of flexible pavements. This paper presents a micromechanical model of moisture-induced damage in asphalt mixtures. The model couples the effect of moisture diffusion and mechanical loading to quantify the level of damage within the mixtures. The mechanical properties of the materials are defined as a function of the amount of moisture content. The cohesive zone modeling technique is used to simulate adhesive damage at the aggregate-mastic interfaces. Damage is evaluated based on the location and time for crack initiation and propagation at the aggregate-mastic interfaces and on the level of strains and stresses within the bulk of the mastic. Results show that micromechanical models provide a better understanding of moisture damage mechanisms in asphalt mixtures and can guide the development of continuum damage models.


Introduction: The study aimed to assess the extent to which pharmacists in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, voluntarily participated in recording their CPD activities on the CPD online recording system of the South African Pharmacy Council (SAPC), and to identify associated challenges.
Methods: A quantitative, descriptive study was conducted. Data were collected using Survey Monkey from 578 registered pharmacists over a four month period. Responses were exported to Microsoft Excel and analysed using SPSS version 25.
Results: The response rate was 25.4%. Most pharmacists (87%) agreed that CPD was necessary. While 64% participated in CPD activities, only 24.8% recorded these activities voluntarily. Challenges faced with participating in recording activities included recording of CPDs is currently not mandatory (27.3%), lack of information (27.3%), lack of interest (27.3%), time constraints (39.1%) and system/programme issues (26.1%) were also cited as reasons for not recording CPD activities.
Conclusion: Improving the ease of accessing the SAPC system (83.7%) was suggested as a way to improve participation in CPD activities and subsequent recording online.


In this paper a Graphical User Interface (GUI) platform to supplement teaching and learning in Engineering Mechanics — Statics course is developed. The package encompasses several interrelated modules of the concepts introduced in a typical Statics class. The GUI provides a user-friendly interactive approach to solving problems and displaying the results both numerically and graphically in two- and three-dimensional spaces. In addition to visualization, GUI approach allows users to modify input data and observe the effect on the solution, thus providing students with additional insight to predict the behavior of structures under different loading scenarios.Copyright © 2005 by ASME


For the first time, the effect of the gate structure on the kink phenomenon in S22 of the AlGaN/GaN HEMT is investigated in this study. To provide critical understanding into the S22 kink effect, the kink effect in S22 of the AlGaN/GaN HEMTs is investigated with transistors that have various gate lengths (Lg) and gate connected field plate lengths (LgH ). The HEMTs are fabricated and characterised at the same conditions, and the equivalent circuit models are used to get consistent results. The experimental results show that the gate structure can play an important role on kink effect in S22. The results present valuable information on the development of the AlGaN/GaN HEMT technology and the MMIC design regarding kink effect.


This study describes an automated data quality verification procedure supported by a database of power spectral densities (PSD) estimates for geophysical waveform data. The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) manages a 100‐TB archive of continuous geophysical data collected from accelerometers, geophones, broadband seismometers, and infrasonic arrays deployed across the continental and Caribbean Netherlands. This rapidly expanding network at a scale of over 700 instruments makes the manual evaluation of data quality impractical and must be supported by data policies and automated methods. A technique is presented to compress and store PSD estimates in a database with a storage footprint of less than 0.05% of the raw data archive. Every week, the instrument performance is validated by comparing statistical properties of its latest monthly probabilistic PSD distribution to strict quality metrics. The criteria include thresholds based on global noise models, datalogger quantization noise models, constraints imposed by ambient noise conditions, and confidence intervals based on PSD estimates calculated from validated archived data. When a threshold is crossed, the station operator is alerted of the suspected degraded instrument performance, severely limiting the required amount of manual labor and associated human errors. The automated PSD assessment technique is applicable to accelerometers, geophones, broadband seismometers, infrasonic stations, and is demonstrated to be extendable to hydrophones, gravimeters, tiltmeters, and Global Navigation Satellite System receivers. The approach is therefore suitable for other geophysical monitoring infrastructures, for example, observational networks dedicated to continuous volcano monitoring. It is shown that it possible to detect degraded instrument performance that may otherwise remain undetected.


Optical probes are an essential component of the two-phase flow instrumentation, but their performances are still not well known, mainly due to a bad control of their sensitive tip, and to defects in signal processing. The DER-EDF, the LEGI and the GICEP have grouped together in order to improve the mastership of such probes. New sensitive tips geometries have allowed to simultaneously measure the gas phase characteristic function and its velocity with a single probe. A dedicated real time signal processing has been elaborated: its performances render it quite objective. The measuring ensemble has been checked in various air-water flows. The discrepancy with reference mesurements lies between 0 and -13% for the void fraction as well as for the velocity, provided that the gas fraction is higher than 5%. Beside, the real time processing has been extended to double-probes, but, in that case, a criteria remains which must be set by the user. Calibrations of bi-probes exhibit an error on velocity as high as 30%. Thus, the measuring ensemble for single probes appears to be more reliable and accurate than the classical double-probe technique: it offers an elegant solution for the characterisation of gas/liquid flows. Various extensions are discussed.


Osteosarcoma (OS) is the most common primary bone malignancy in children and young adults. Despite advances in medical and surgical management, survival rates for OS remain low. The biology of osteosarcomagenesis is poorly understood and the OS initiating cell remains elusive. We generated a model of osteosarcomagenesis by overexpressing MET oncogene in primary cultured human osteoblasts (HOB), since aberrant MET expression is found in high percentage of human OS. MET encodes for the receptor of HGF. It is normally expressed in epithelia, while HGF is secreted by cells of mesenchymal origin. MET activation elicits a physiologic program known as invasive growth. If deregulated, this program contributes to cell transformation and tumor progression. Using a LV-mediated approach, we overexpressed MET in HOB at level similar to human OS. We obtained transformed and tumorigenic clones derived from single cells, as shown by patterns of transgene integration. Interestingly, the number of susceptible cells was very small. A candidate for this minor population is the still elusive target cell of osteosarcomagenesis. Notably, MET-transformed clones are maintained by a self renewing cell population able to form bona fide sarcospheres. To characterize the target cell of MET-induced transformation, we used genome-wide expression profiling with Illumina platform. We compared the transformed clones to parental HOB and primary human mesenchymal stem cells (MSC). Transformed clones resulted phenotypically identical, supporting their common origin. They showed 584 genes differentially expressed with respect to parental HOB. The expression levels of MSC markers are down regulated in clones, while markers of stemness (POU5F1, ABCB1) are up regulated. Moreover, markers of early phase of osteoblastic differentiation (CDCA2, RUNX2, ALPL, MATN2) are up regulated, while that associated to late phase (FN1, SPARC, COL1A1, SPP1, BGLAP) are down-regulated. These results suggest that the target cell of MET-induced transformation is an osteoprogenitor rather than a MSC. To identify this progenitor along the osteoblastic differentiation pathway, we compared the expression profiles of transformed clones with that of MSC differentiated towards osteoblasts, chondrocytes and adipocytes at defined time points (7-14-21 days). MET-transformed clones clustered with 7 days osteoblasts, with some transcripts shared with other 7-days differentiated cells. These data suggest that clones originate from a committed osteoprogenitor cell, which retains self renewal, but not multi-lineage potentials. This assumption is supported by the fact that transformed clones are able to fully differentiate along the osteoblastic, but not the adipocytic or chondrocytic lineages. Altogether, these results indicate that MET overexpression sustains the amplification of premalignant population with an osteoprogenitor-defined gene signature. Citation Format: {Authors}. {Abstract title} [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 101st Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2010 Apr 17-21; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2010;70(8 Suppl):Abstract nr LB-259.


The evolution of a unitary healing praxis model derived from three unitary appreciative inquiries of despair is described. Explication of unitary appreciative inquiry and how it informed and contributed to the development of the model is provided. The model is based on a conceptualization of healing as appreciating the inherent wholeness of life and provides knowledge specific to the individual lives of women in despair. The process of generative theorizing that led to the creation of the model is explicated. Unitary, appreciative, and participatory responses to despair are integrated in the model, praxis modalities are delineated, key concerns and perspectives of women in despair are addressed, and potentialities for healing are illustrated.


The recent development of Geographic Information Technologies (GIT), such as GIS, Remote Sensing and Desktop Mapping gives to the technicians of landscape management and regional development areas, access to a new powerful set of tools with an high potential for spatial analysis. Our project's ambition is to confirm that GIT can be useful tools for the definition and management of development policies. The ability of GIT to analyse geographical information (more or less 80 to 90% of the overall information that exists can be georeferenced) will create conditions to establish a model for economical development and with the support of this model decisions can be more accurate. By doing so, we will encourage the use of GIS in the regional science field. The results that we already had achieved with our project push us in front. That's why it is important to present them. In order to gather more people for this area. This paper will resume the activities and the major conclusions of some projects being developed since 1996 with the main purpose of establishing a theoretical background and create sample methodologies to support economic development through the use of GIS.


Promotion tour of Bandung through the news Minangkala Bandung Festival (MBF) in the online media is a strategy to increase tourist visits. This study aims to analyze the contents of MBF news coverage in online media during the period of August to October 2016, with a focus of the study describing the meaning of messages conveyed in the promotion of tourism Bandung. The method used is the technique of content analysis with quantitative approach, then do the interpretation of news data in the substance of destination branding. The results showed that the promotion of tourism through MBF 2016 has contained five stages of destination branding, where the highest percentage is containing the content of brand launch and introduction which discussed the participation of citizens of Bandung and delegates from abroad, and has an impact on the formation of people's perception and reality in increasing the visit tours. The most frequent source of information was from bureaucrats, the topics contained about the topic of review and festival organizing, and the most news category themed lifestyle, with a more positive tone of news that could give a good impression to the public. In order to promote tourism through MBF as expected, should be made measurable maping data as monitoring and evaluation material to know its development significantly.


Extant theories of trust assume the trustee has agency (i.e. intentionality and free will). We propose that a crucial qualitative distinction between placing trust in Artificial Intelligence (AI) vs. trust in a human lies in the degree to which attributions of agency are made to the trustee by the trustor (human). We specify two mechanisms through which the extent of agency attributions can affect human trust in AI. First, the importance of the benevolence of the trustee—the AI—increases if the AI is seen as more agentic, but so does the anticipated psychological cost if it violates the trust (because of betrayal aversion, see Bohnet & Zeckhauser, 2004). Second, attributions of benevolence and competence become less relevant for placing confidence in a non-agentic seeming AI system, and instead benevolence and competence attributions to the designer of the system become important. Both mechanisms imply that making an AI appear more agentic may increase or decrease the trust that humans place in it. While designers of AI technology often strive to endow their creations with features that convey its benevolent nature (e.g. through anthropomorphizing or transparency), this may also change agency perceptions in a manner that results in making it less trustworthy in human eyes.


In the Proterozoic Wafangzi deposit, China, sedimentary manganite ores are interstratified with red shale and silty limestone, whereas sedimentary rhodochrosite ores are interbedded with organic-rich black shale. Lateral change in mineralogy of the ores accompanying lateral changes in the host rocks demonstrates a classic example of facies variation in a "zoned" deposit. The manganite ores show a distinct Ce depletion reflecting a hydrothermal contribution in the seawater from which they precipitated. Absence of volcanics in the sequence suggests that the source of the hydrothermal input should be remote. It is likely that manganite precipitated directly from seawater in these deposits above the redox interface, whereas rhodochrosite was possibly early diagenetic formed in an anoxic environment. Manganite has been converted to braunite through a deoxidation-dehydration reaction during late diagenesis. Both types of ores have been thermally metamorphosed at the contact with igneous intrusions. Four distinct mineral assemblages have been identified in the thermally metamorphosed ores which were produced as a result of variations in bulk compositions (including volatiles) of the premetamorphic ores. In the final stage, the ores have been affected by supergene processes to give rise to pyrolusite-vernadite assemblages in the weathering zone.


Introduction Evaluations of weight management programs in real-world settings are lacking. The RE-AIM model (reach, effectiveness, adoption, implementation, maintenance) was developed to address this deficiency. Our primary objective was to evaluate a 12-week insurance-sponsored weight management intervention by using the RE-AIM model, including short-term and long-term individual outcomes and setting-level implementation factors. Our secondary objective was to critique the RE-AIM model and its revised calculation methods. Methods We created operational definitions for components of the 5 RE-AIM indices and used standardized effect size values from various statistical procedures to measure multiple components or outcomes within each index. We used χ2 analysis to compare categorical variables and repeated-measures analysis of variance to assess the magnitude of outcome changes over time. Results On the basis of data for 1,952 participants and surveys completed by administrators at 23 sites, RE-AIM indices ranging from 0 to 100 revealed low program reach and adoption (5.4 and 8.8, respectively), moderate effectiveness (43.8), high implementation (91.4), low to moderate individual maintenance (21.2), and moderate to high site maintenance (77.8). Median (interquartile range) weight loss was 13 lb (6.5-21.4 lb) among participants who completed phase I (12 weeks; 76.5%) and 15 lb (6.1-30.3 lb) among those who completed phase II (1 year; 45.7%). Conclusions This program had a significant, positive effect on participants and has been sustainable but needs to be expanded for more public health benefit. The RE-AIM model provided a useful framework to determine program strengths and weaknesses and to present them to the insurance agency and public health decision makers.


This study examines the effect of the recent radical agricultural liberalization policy, i.e. the 1996 FAIR Act, on agricultural commodity price volatility using Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models. Results of the study indicate that the agricultural liberalization policy has caused an increase in the price volatility for three major grain commodities (corn, soybeans and wheat) and little change for oats, but a decrease for cotton. These findings stand in sharp contrast to Crain and Lee's observations in 1996 based on wheat markets that market-oriented measures in government farm policies tend to reduce agricultural price volatility.


Two Colombian deposits belonging to the western emerald belt of the Eastern Cordillera, namely Coscuez and Quipama-Muzo, hosted in Lower Cretaceous black shales, have been dated for the first time by 40 Ar/ 39 Ar induction and laser microprobe methods on contemporaneous greenish Cr-V-rich K mica aggregates consisting of muscovite as a dominant phase + or - kaolinitc, + or - paragonitc, + or - quartz, + or - albite, and + or - chlorite, pyrite, and calcite. Contamination of the K mica aggregates by wall-rock impurities is eliminated by in situ 40 Ar/ 39 Ar laser spot analysis. Two distinct plateau and spot fusion ages of 35 to 38 Ma and 31.5 to 32.6 Ma were obtained for the Coscuez and Quipama samples, respectively, i.e., a late Eocene to early Oligocene age. Concordant conventional K-Ar ages show that in spite of the small size of these micas, they did not suffer significant 39 Ar loss due to recoil during irradiation of the samples. Internal 39 Ar recoil may explain the slight disturbances observed on the age spectra. Microthermometry, Raman spectroscopy, and SEM experiments performed on fluid inclusions trapped in emerald crystals from the Coscuez deposit show that the hydrothermal fluids are complex H 2 O-NaCl-CaCl 2 -KCl-CO 2 -N 2 brines (38 wt % NaCl equiv). Constrained by the 40 Ar/ 39 Ar age determinations, the Eastern Cordillera subsiding model, and the assumption of lithostatic confining pressures, isochoric extrapolations lead to a pressure-temperature estimate of 1.06 to 1.12 kbars and 290 degrees to 360 degrees C for the emerald deposition. The P-T evaluation is in agreement with the paragenesis accompanying the emerald deposition.A moderate-temperature epigenetic hydrothermal-sedimentary model is proposed for Colombian emerald genesis. This model makes use of the following points: (1) the depth of hydrothermal circulation within the Lower Cretaceous series, (2) abasinal origin of mineralizing fluids as inferred from oxygen and carbon isotope data, (3) an evaporitic source for the NaCl sulfate-rich brines trapped within emerald crystals, as deduced from sulfur isotope data, (4) a likely source of the metallic components, and particularly Be, Cr, and V, being the black shale reservoir, and (5) the timing of hydrothermal circulation and emerald vein formation in relation to Eastern Cordillera tectonic evolution--in particular, the strong shortening episode beginning during the Eocene.