Active learning attempts to maximize a task model's performance gain by obtaining a set of informative samples from an unlabeled data pool. Previous active learning methods usually rely on specific network architectures or task-dependent sample acquisition algorithms. Moreover, when selecting a batch sample, previous works suffer from insufficient diversity of batch samples because they only consider the informativeness of each sample. This paper proposes a task-independent batch acquisition method using triplet loss to distinguish hard samples in an unlabeled data pool with similar features but difficult to identify labels. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed method, we compare the proposed method with state-of-the-art active learning methods on two tasks, relation extraction and sentence classification. Experimental results show that our method outperforms baselines on the benchmark datasets.


This study aims to examine the usability of media reports as an alternative technique to assess how pre- service teachersunderstandings on the characteristics of scientific knowledge differ in a presented media reports. Fifty pre-service mathematics teachers, who were enrolled in department of teaching mathematics at the secondary level, participated in this research study. Media reports were used to assess participants � understandings of the nature of scientific knowledge. Data were analyzed by open coding and the codes were categorized to determine conceptual constructs. Analysis of qualitative data gathered via media re- ports revealed that pre-service teachers hold inadequate understanding about the nature of scientific knowledge.


The prognostic significance of Auer rods in predicting response rate and remission duration was investigated in 257 patients of the two West German acute myelogenous leukemia (AML) studies BFM-78 and -83. Auer rods were found in 129 children (50%) in the initial bone marrow smear. The incidence was higher in myeloid subtypes M1 (63%) and M2 (78%) compared with subtypes M4 (47%) and M5 (5%) with monocytic differentiation. In both studies, the remission rate was significantly higher in patients with Auer rods (P = 0.01), and in the study AML-BFM-83 a significantly longer remission duration was evaluated for Auer rod-positive patients (P = 0.007). In the M1 type, Auer rods were of high prognostic significance regarding both the induction success (P = 0.003) and the remission duration (P = 0.004), whereas no significant differences between Auer rod-positive and -negative patients in other subtypes were found. Occurrence of Auer rods was independent of hyperleukocytosis, the most powerful prognostic parameter in the studies AML-BFM-78 and -83, whereas absence of Auer rods was associated with the AML risk group M5. In the M1 type, Auer rod-negative leukemias appears to represent cases of poorly differentiated AML. Auer rods were therefore useful in differentiating between patients with a poor and a more favorable prognosis, particularly in the M1 type.


Citrus trees growing in the Mediterranean region suffer from iron (Fe) deficiency because of the presence of high levels of carbonate ions in calcareous soils. In this context we have evaluated the effects of different citrus rootstocks on photosynthetic capacity and plant development of young 'Navelina' orange trees under Fe deprived conditions. Leaf number, shoot length, plant dry mass, leaf chlorophyll (Chl) concentration, net photosynthetic rate (P N), stomatal conductance (gS), leaf transpiration rate (E), intercellular CO2 concentration (Ci) and photosynthetic water use efficiency (WUE) of 'Navelina' orange scion budded on to eight citrus rootstocks with different agronomic characteristics were investigated. Significant decreases in leaf number, shoot length and plant dry mass under high pH conditions were observed. Plants on Tuzcu 31 31 and Gou Tou sour orange rootstocks were the least affected in terms of plant growth. The highest reduction in the leaf Chl content was observed in (-)Fe plants of Navelina on local trifoliate and C-35 citrange. These rootstocks also had significantly reduced PN, gS and E rates in the (-)Fe treatment. Shoots budded on Tuzcu 31 31 and Gou Tou sour oranges were the least affected by the induced Fe deficiency.


Recently, machine learning methods have provided a broad spectrum of original and efficient algorithms based on Deep Neural Networks (DNN) to automatically predict an outcome with respect to a sequence of inputs. Recurrent hidden cells allow these DNN-based models to manage long-term dependencies such as Recurrent Neural Networks (RNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM). Nevertheless, these RNNs process a single input stream in one (LSTM) or two (Bidirectional LSTM) directions. But most of the information available nowadays is from multistreams or multimedia documents, and require RNNs to process these information synchronously during the training. This paper presents an original LSTM-based architecture, named Parallel LSTM (PLSTM), that carries out multiple parallel synchronized input sequences in order to predict a common output. The proposed PLSTM method could be used for parallel sequence classification purposes. The PLSTM approach is evaluated on an automatic telecast genre sequences classification task and compared with different state-of-the-art architectures. Results show that the proposed PLSTM method outperforms the baseline n-gram models as well as the state-of-the-art LSTM approach.


With increasing complexity of construction industry problems, researchers are experimenting with computationally rigorous techniques with the aim of seeking innovative solutions. In order to trace the applications of quantitative analysis techniques to research in the two fields of construction economics and construction management for both conventional and AI techniques, the methodology involves compiling all the relevant papers from the top two ranking construction management journals, namely, Construction Management and Economics and ASCE's Journal of Construction Engineering and Management. The period is from 1983 to 2006. The compiled papers are classified by field, area (or topic), technique applied and year of publication to enable time series and cross-sectional analyses of the data. Mainly, the results are depicted as trends when the patterns of distribution of the papers are plotted over time. The three findings are: (1) for construction economics, the overall increasing trend is higher for papers that have applied conventional techniques; (2) for construction management, there is a clear positive trend for papers that have applied AI techniques which starts from 1995; and (3) the areas (or topics) of construction management that have increasingly higher growth in the application of AI techniques are optimization of site operations and optimization of project time, cost and resources allocation. Two broad recommendations are made that relate to advancing the fields of construction economics and construction management with the view that researchers must better enable themselves to build tools that incorporate intelligence as innovative solutions for increasingly complex problems.


The first-principles generalized pseudopotential theory of bulk transition-metal interatomic potentials is extended to surfaces by transforming the total-energy functional to a local-environment representation in which both the volume term and the multiion potentials are modulated by local averages of the electron density or the density of states. The theory encompasses and goes beyond simple embedded-atom schemes by including the angular forces necessary to treat the central bcc metals. Applications to the vacancy-formation and free-surface energetics of Cu and Mo are discussed.


James Darsey has argued that a primitive source of reform rhetoric in America is the Old Testament. We argue that the discourse of American reform has another rhetorical ancestor that originates from the prophetic tradition of the American Religion, a scholarly term for the democratic religiosity of nineteenth-century America. By performing a comparative analysis of three theophanies, recorded in the personal narrative accounts of Emanuel Swedenborg, Joseph Smith, and Ellen G. White, we present a theory of the rhetoric of theophany. We then analyze Eugene V. Debs's "How I Became a Socialist" as the reformer equivalent of a theophanic conversion myth, discussing how the experientialism, polarization, and subversiveness of theophanic rhetoric enables prophets and reformers to launch their careers, even from places of marginalization.


Proteasome inhibitors sensitize tumor cells to DNA-damaging agents, including ionizing radiation (IR), and DNA cross-linking agents (melphalan and cisplatin) through unknown mechanisms. The Fanconi anemia pathway is a DNA damage-activated signaling pathway, which regulates cellular resistance to DNA cross-linking agents. Monoubiquitination and nuclear foci formation of FANCD2 are critical steps of the Fanconi anemia pathway. Here, we show that proteasome function is required for the activation of the Fanconi anemia pathway and for DNA damage signaling. Proteasome inhibitors (bortezomib and MG132) and depletion of 19S and 20S proteasome subunits (PSMD4, PSMD14, and PSMB3) inhibited monoubiquitination and/or nuclear foci formation of FANCD2, whereas depletion of DSS1/SHFM1, a subunit of the 19S proteasome that also directly binds to BRCA2, did not inhibit FANCD2 monoubiquitination or foci formation. On the other hand, DNA damage-signaling processes, such as IR-induced foci formation of phosphorylated ATM (phospho-ATM), 53BP1, NBS1, BRCA1, FANCD2, and RAD51, were delayed in the presence of proteasome inhibitors, whereas ATM autophosphorylation and nuclear foci formation of gammaH2AX, MDC1, and RPA were not inhibited. Furthermore, persistence of DNA damage and abrogation of the IR-induced G(1)-S checkpoint resulted from proteasome inhibition. In summary, we showed that the proteasome function is required for monoubiquitination of FANCD2, foci formation of 53BP1, phospho-ATM, NBS1, BRCA1, FANCD2, and RAD51. The dependence of specific DNA damage-signaling steps on the proteasome may explain the sensitization of tumor cells to DNA-damaging chemotherapeutic agents by proteasome inhibitors.


The Upper Devonian Woodbend Group and Beaverhill Lake Formation of Alberta contain numerous crude oil and natural gas occurrences pooled in several carbonate reef chains, which are hydraulically distinct with small but subtle differences in present reservoir temperature. Regionally, these hydrocarbon occurrences exhibit typical trends from immature gases in the shallower pools, sometimes associated with biodegraded crude oils, to deeper mature crude oils. Examination of the composition of the natural gases and the broad general characteristics of the crude oils suggests that there is imposed on these typical maturation trends differences in the fluid compositions and reservoir temperatures which are related to the different hydraulic systems and the position of each syste within the low fluid-potential drain which essentially channels flow within the thick sequence of highly permeable Upper Devonian and Carboniferous carbonate rocks in the medium-depth part of the Alberta basin. End_of_Article - Last_Page 1360------------


SUMMARY Manipulative parasites with complex life cycles are known to induce behavioural and physiological changes in their intermediate hosts. Cyathocephalus truncatus is a manipulative parasite which infects Gammarus pulex as intermediate host. G. pulex males display pre-copulatory mate guarding as a response to male-male competition for access to receptive females. In this paper, we tested the influence that C. truncatus-infection might have on male G. pulex sperm number and pairing success. We considered 3 classes of G. pulex males in our experiments: (i) uninfected males found paired in the field, (ii) uninfected males found unpaired in the field, or (iii) infected males found unpaired in the field. Both infected males and uninfected unpaired males paired less with a new female than uninfected paired males did. Furthermore, infected males appear to be at a strong disadvantage when directly competing for females with a healthy rival male, and had fewer sperm in their testes. We discuss the potential effect of male and female mating strategies on such male host mating alteration.


The author probes in this study the maternity or obsterics and gynaecology in Ancient Indian medicine by interpreting various classical texts in Ayurveda, Sociology and Religion.


The present study was conducted to determine population size, infestation level and farmer's understanding of banana weevils in different banana-based farming systems (BFS) namely banana monoculture, banana-beans, banana-coffee and banana-maize. This was conducted by using banana pseudostem traps, coefficient of infestation method and standard interviewing. It was conducted from June to September 2017 in Nkoaranga, Mbuguni and Ngurdoto villages (Meru District) and Uduru, Uraa and Mbosho villages (Hai District) in Northern Tanzania. The physical and survey data collected were analyzed by using statistical packages of GENSTAT 11th edition and SPSS Version 21 respectively. There were significant differences (P<0.05) in the number of banana weevils in different BFS. The highest banana weevil population (29.2 banana weevils/trap/farm over the period of three months) was recorded in banana-maize followed by banana-beans (8.2 banana weevils/trap/farm over the period of three months); however, this reading was not significantly different from the banana-monoculture and banana-coffee farming systems. Such results not only indicated that different BFS experience different banana weevil infestation levels but also that the banana-maize system attracted more banana weevils than any other BFS in this study. Of the banana cultivars, Kimalindi recorded the highest (153 weevils per farm) number compared to other banana cultivars indicating that different banana materials attract differently banana weevils. The results also showed that banana weevil was ranked to be the first insect pest of banana and a problem for about 68.8% of banana farmers. The present study calls for more studies on identifying factors responsible for the highest population in a banana-maize farming system unlike in other BFS and how banana weevils can be managed in Tanzania.


Cause-related marketing is a business strategy where firms bundle their products and brands with contributions to designated charities. The double appeal of this strategy is that it responds to societal pressure for "corporate social responsibility" and at the same time could prove commercially profitable. The paper inquires into the origins and incidence of economic gains of cause-related marketing. It identifies two sources of its profitability – first, corporations utilize their advantages over households in covering transaction costs of philanthropy, and second, can exploit cause-related marketing as a price-discrimination tool. Cause-related marketing channels to charity significant resources that would not be available otherwise due to high transaction costs of individual donations. It thus contributes to social welfare and, at the same time, to the bottom-line of practicing firms. This explains the observed rapid proliferation of this strategy against the overall stagnation and even decline of corporate philanthropy. JEL Codes: D64, L31, M31 ________________________________________ * The paper has been produced under the New Economic School's 2004-5 research program. The authors are grateful to Mikhail Karev for useful discussions and comments.


Abstract Based on examination of ~180,000 specimens from 695 collections of 443 localities collected from the 1930s to 2015 we report 295 species of caddisflies from Michigan. Of these, 41 are reported from the state for the first time. Another 18 species previously reported from Michigan are listed as doubtful. The 11 most abundant species collectively represented over half of all specimens collected. Conversely, 80 species were known from <10 specimens, and 27 species from a single specimen. The Michigan fauna is similar to those of Minnesota and Ohio, adjacent states with comparable recent collecting effort. Regional and habitat affinities for each Michigan species are reported herein. Due to the high level of species discovery over the last few years, despite a >80-year collecting history, it is likely that additional species remain undiscovered in the state.


Cross-modal garment synthesis and manipulation will significantly benefit the way fashion designers generate garments and modify their designs via flexible linguistic interfaces.Current approaches follow the general text-to-image paradigm and mine cross-modal relations via simple cross-attention modules, neglecting the structural correspondence between visual and textual representations in the fashion design domain. In this work, we instead introduce DiffCloth, a diffusion-based pipeline for cross-modal garment synthesis and manipulation, which empowers diffusion models with flexible compositionality in the fashion domain by structurally aligning the cross-modal semantics. Specifically, we formulate the part-level cross-modal alignment as a bipartite matching problem between the linguistic Attribute-Phrases (AP) and the visual garment parts which are obtained via constituency parsing and semantic segmentation, respectively. To mitigate the issue of attribute confusion, we further propose a semantic-bundled cross-attention to preserve the spatial structure similarities between the attention maps of attribute adjectives and part nouns in each AP. Moreover, DiffCloth allows for manipulation of the generated results by simply replacing APs in the text prompts. The manipulation-irrelevant regions are recognized by blended masks obtained from the bundled attention maps of the APs and kept unchanged. Extensive experiments on the CM-Fashion benchmark demonstrate that DiffCloth both yields state-of-the-art garment synthesis results by leveraging the inherent structural information and supports flexible manipulation with region consistency.


We consider an M/G/1 retrial queue with general retrial times and single working vacation. During the working vacation period, customers can be served at a lower rate. Both service times in a vacation period and in a service period are generally distributed random variables. Using supplementary variable method we obtain the probability generating function for the number of customers and the average number of customers in the orbit. Furthermore, we carry out the waiting time distribution and some special cases of interest are discussed. Finally, some numerical results are presented.


Introduction: Standardized suicide risk assessment improves the detection of individuals at risk of suicide. We conducted a quality improvement initiative in a system of outpatient behavioral health practices affiliated with a free-standing children's hospital to implement standardized suicide risk assessment for new patients. Methods: Clinicians received education in suicide risk assessment and were trained to use an evidence-based suicide risk assessment tool, the Columbia Suicide Severity Rating Scale (C-SSRS). We standardized workflow processes and integrated the C-SSRS in the electronic health record with a feature to communicate instances of elevated risk across care teams through a problem list. We analyzed C-SSRS responses and adherence to standardized processes and compared the percentage of patients with a suicide-related item on the problem list before and after implementation. We assessed clinician knowledge through a survey. All patients with identified suicide risk received treatment to reduce their risk of suicide in the context of usual care. Results: For 3,972 new patient visits occurring postimplementation (November 2016–December 2018), the average monthly adherence to the standardized process was 97.7%. The mean monthly incidence of nonspecific active suicidal thoughts was 16%, aborted suicide attempts were 2%, and actual suicide attempts were 3%. The mean monthly incidence of a suicide-related item documented on the problem list was 5.66% in the postimplementation period compared with 1.47% in the 1-year preimplementation. Clinicians demonstrated statistically significant increases in knowledge about suicide risk factors and assessment. Conclusions: Standardization of suicide risk assessment processes improved detection and documentation of suicide risk in a pediatric outpatient behavioral health setting.


Esophageal lipomas are rare tumors, making up 0.4% of all digestive tract benign neoplasms. Most of these lesions are clinically silent as a result of their small size, however, the majority of lesions over 4 cm have been reported to cause dysphagia, regurgitation and/or epigastralgia. We report a case of a 53 year-old African American female who presented with dysphagia. Computed tomography of the chest and esophagram confirmed esophageal lipoma as the cause of the patient's symptoms. Accurately diagnosing an esophageal lipoma is crucial in order to rule out potential malignant lesions, relieve patient symptoms and plan the appropriate treatment.


A small-signal analysis of a p-n junction in breakdown is presented. The space-charge region consists of two layers, one a constant avalanche multiplication layer and the other a drift layer. The ionization rates and drift velocities for electrons and holes are considered to be different but the respective ratios are assumed to be constant and independent of field within the normal range of operation of the diode. The diode admittance and negative Q are plotted against frequency for silicon, germanium and GaAs for two structures having avalanche regions of different widths including one resembling a Read-type structure.


Summary
The present study was carried out with two sturgeon species, Siberian sturgeon (Acipenser baerii) and sterlet (A. ruthenus) to compare spermatological parameters to better understand inter-species differences. Significant differences between morphometric features were observed such as acrosome length, acrosome width, head length, midpiece width and flagellar length, while midpiece length did not reveal such differences. The sterlet has a shorter spermatozoon than the Siberian sturgeon. Ultrastructural parameters vary significantly in terms of length of the nucleus, diameter of the endonuclear canals (EC), size of posterolateral projections (PP) and diameter of flagellum. Mean values for density of spermatozoa in the semen, seminal plasma pH, osmolality (mOsmol kg−1), along with Ca2+, Na+, K+, Cl− ions concentrations (mm) were determined to be 0.61 ± 0.37 × 109, 8.16 ± 0.18, 77.20 ± 52.28, 0.24 ± 0.06, 31.39 ± 10.21, 3.51 ± 1.10, 14.00 ± 4.30 in A. baerii and 0.41 ± 0.32 × 109, 8.13 ± 0.19, 50.74 ± 6.27, 0.16 ± 0.11, 20.11 ± 3.78, 1.26 ± 0.54, 6.11 ± 0.60 in A. ruthenus, respectively. Significant differences were observed in Na+, K+ and Cl− concentrations in the seminal plasma as well as in sperm velocity. The percentage of motile spermatozoa did not show any significant difference between the two species. Comparing the results of this study with published literature data on sturgeon spermatozoa reveals that morphological and ultrastructural parameters of spermatozoa together with some parameters of the seminal fluid and spermatozoa velocity can be used in comparative spermatology to better understand inter-species differences. The observed biochemical and physiological differences should be also considered for the development of methods for controlled reproduction and for sperm cryopreservation techniques.


This paper presents a pulsewidth modulation (PWM) algorithm for a three-phase ac-dc rectifier, where the third and fifth harmonics are indicated in the input phase voltages. A mathematical analysis, which includes this voltage harmonic's components, shows that the unity input displacement factor (IDF) can be reached by appropriate evaluation of duty-cycle functions. A PWM algorithm is proposed based on this developed theoretical achievement. This approach enables current sensorless unity IDF rectification. The PWM algorithm is investigated theoretically and verified by simulations and experiment.


Today energy prices are rising. As a result biomass fuel is getting more and more
interesting. Wood chips is very popular, but also straw from grain production is on the
table. Lunds Energi AB project a combined power and heating plant in Ortofta out of
Lund. Wood chips is meant to be the main energy source, complemented by straw.
In this thesis the transportation of straw for fuel is studied. The aim is to find out the
cost, what it consists of, how it can vary, and to find out the most efficient way to
transport straw for fuel.
Straw can be handled in many different ways. Bales, chopped loose material, and as
briquettes. There are many different sizes of bales, but for energy purposes the biggest is most often used; square bales, appr. 1,2x1,3x2,5 meters. Chopped straw is cheap, and
relatively easy to handle, but the transportation is expensive since the loose material is
relatively bulky. Briquettes are expensive to produce, but transportation is cheap. The
bale alternative is somewhere in between, and absolutely most often used.
To find out the cost, and to be able to compare different methods, calculations have been
made. The used values (i.e. diesel price, labour cost, driving speed and straw density)
have been varied, to see changes in the total transportation cost. Furthermore, the costs
at different distances have been calculated. Every calculation has been made with two
alternatives, for lorry and tractor.
The transportation cost consists of machinery, labour and fuel costs, where the latter is
the smallest. Lorry is cheaper than tractor, especially when the distance is getting
longer. But within 20 kilometres, the tractor might compete.
In most cases big square bales seem to be interesting. The harder the bales are, the
cheaper the management gets. Vehicles with low load platform (0,9 m) can carry bigger
load, which also reduces costs. A combination, where both bale density and transport
volume are maximized, gives transportation costs almost as low as the costs for
briquettes.

• The best way to reduce the transportation costs is to maximize load capacity,
through large and well used load volume, and high material density.

• Fuel price has relatively small effect on the total transportation costs.

• With well planned storage places and transports, extra costs can be avoided.

• Lorry transports are cheaper than tractor transport, but at short distances the
tractor alternative can be of interest.

• I believe that for Lunds Energi AB, the best thing to do is looking for flexibility,
in order to let different methods and techniques together build the optimal
system.


This paper investigates the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and the allocation of commercial bank lending in Barbados. Using an empirical framework that describes the relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and commercial bank portfolio holdings, it was found that there is a statistically significant negative relationship between macroeconomic uncertainty and the cross-sectional dispersion of the loan-to-asset ratios of commercial banks.


Foster carers characterise a highly diverse workforce that shares the choice to provide a home and family for children who can no longer reside with their family. This diversity makes supporting and providing for carers' training needs a complex task for fostering services. Understanding what might influence their engagement in training would be useful. This article outlines themes related to foster carers' engagement with social pedagogy, using data from the Head, Heart, Hands (HHH) programme evaluation. Analysis of interviews with seventy-six foster carers over a period of three years is presented. The emerging themes were used to devise an illustrative typology of receptiveness to training. The themes relate to the perceived impact of HHH on their practice and compatibility with the existing children's social care (CSC) system. The article explores the factors that may influence foster carers' positioning within the typology. The contributions that such a typology might make to the wider evidence base across CSC, in terms of the implementation and potential impacts of intervention, are discussed.


The formation of blue straggler stars (BSSs), commonly categorized as
stars bluer and brighter than the main sequence turnoff, has puzzled
astronomers since their first detection over sixty years ago. The
well-studied BSS population of the old (7 Gyr) open cluster NGC 188 has
the potential to settle outstanding issues surrounding the frequency of
different BSS formation mechanisms. NGC 188 contains 21 BSSs: 15
long-period single-lined binaries, two short-period double-lined
binaries, and four non-velocity variables. We present results of the
Hubble Space Telescope far-ultraviolet (FUV) ACS/SBC survey of the NGC
188 BSS population. This survey aims to detect white dwarf (WD)
companions of BSSs that are indicative of a mass-transfer formation
history. We directly detect FUV excesses consistent with four hot WD
companions (Teff ≥ 12,000 K). We infer the presence of
three additional WD companions with temperatures between 11,000-12,000
K. Since WDs cool as they age, these results indicate that seven BSSs
formed through mass transfer within the past 400 Myr. These WD
detections set a lower limit mass-transfer formation frequency of 33%.
After taking into account other potential formation mechanisms we
conclude that 14 long-period binary BSSs likely formed through mass
transfer, setting a total NGC 188 BSS mass-transfer formation frequency
of 67%. Comparing these results to a sophisticated N-body model of NGC
188 implies that binary population synthesis models underproduce mass
transfer products, and the parameterization of stable mass transfer may
need to be revisited. Finally, when comparing the optical CMD position
of young BSSs to the zero-age main sequence (ZAMS), we find that
distance from the ZAMS is not necessarily equivalent to BSS age. One
must use caution before using standard single-star isochrones to age
luminous BSSs.Support for Program number 12492 was provided by NASA
through a grant from the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is
operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy,
Incorporated, under NASA contract NAS5-26555. This work was funded by
the National Science Foundation grant AST-0908082 to the University of
Wisconsin-Madison.


Matrix acidizing is a widely used stimulation process during which acid is injected into the formation at pressures that are less than the fracturing pressure. The purpose of matrix acidizing is to improve formation permeability or to bypass damaged zones through rock dissolution. Because of precipitation and diagenesis, carbonate rocks might contain different compositions, including calcite (CaCO3), dolomite [CaMg(CO3)2], and other minerals. When acid is injected into the formation, reactions between acid and multiple minerals of carbonate rocks occur simultaneously. In this paper, a two–scale continuum model is implemented in UTCOMP, a 3D compositional reservoir simulator, coupled with IPhreeqc, a generalized code of PHREEQC as a module. PHREEQC is an open–source program that performs a wide variety of geochemical calculations (Charlton and Parkhurst 2011). For the UTCOMP/IPhreeqc coupled model, the two–scale continuum model describes the mechanisms of convection and dispersion, whereas IPhreeqc is used for the calculation of reactions between aqueous phase and minerals. We have validated the simulation model through comparison with the analytical solution. We also compared the UTCOMP/IPhreeqc coupled model with a simple–reaction model, in which the reaction is assumed to be a first–order reaction between acid and calcite, by modifying the IPhreeqc database to obtain consistent results. On this basis, we have investigated the effects of mineral compositions on acidizing efficiency and the wormhole–propagation process. It is found that mineralogy heterogeneity is a key factor that affects acidizing efficiency and the dissolution structure. This work contributes to simulating the acidizing process with complex geochemical reactions considering the chemistry of the aqueous solution interacting with minerals. The presented model improves our understanding of carbonate–acidizing optimization.


Background: A field study among 6 reference laboratories in the EU using chromogenic substrate assays revealed in some laboratories a FVIII level lower than expected when measuring the potency of ReFacto, a B-domain deleted recombinant FVIII concentrate. In an attempt to resolve these discrepancies, the standard used for establishing the potency of ReFacto was recalibrated in 2003. Indeed after this recalibration, the amount of ReFacto protein in each International Unit (IU) has increased by approximately 20 percent without change in the labeled dosage strength. Objectives: The primary objective of this prospective study was to assess the FVIII recovery in severe hemophilia A patients receiving recalibrated ReFacto. Methods: The study was conducted in 10 French Hemophilia Treatment Centers in Previously Treated Patients (> 150 exposure days to any FVIII concentrate). A series of 4 blood samples per patient were collected in a non-bleeding state, respectively before, 15mn, 30mn and 60mn after intravenous bolus infusion of a single dose of 50 ±5 IU/kg of ReFacto. Plasma FVIII activity was determined in a central lab using a chromogenic substrate assay (Coamatic FVIIITM). Results: Fourteen severe hemophilia A patients (FVIII: C Conclusions: In most cases the peak of FVIII activity was obtained 15 mn after the end of infusion. Recovery of recalibrated ReFacto was similar to the expected recovery with full-length FVIII concentrates.


Abstract The temperature dependence of Raman shifts and line widths (full-width at half maxima or FWHM) for the A1 symmetric stretch of TO4 (T = Si, P, S) have been analyzed for nine alkali and alkaline earth silicates, phosphates, and sulfates. In crystalline silicates, the Q0 and Q2 species Raman shifts decrease with temperature, whereas FWHM increase. The strikingly similar behavior of Q0 and Q2 in silicates and Q0 in phosphates makes it possible to estimate to within ±4 cm−1 Raman shifts up to ~1000 K. Similarly systematic increases in FWHM with temperature can be estimated to within ±5 cm−1 up to ~1400 K. The type of element centering TO4 (i.e., Si, P, or S) has no appreciable effect on the temperature dependence of Raman shifts or line widths; the local environment of the Q0 and Q2 tetrahedra is the primary determinant of the temperature dependence. The type of cation in the first coordination sphere of the tetrahedron may have a secondary effect by affecting Heisenberg lifetimes of Raman virtual states. Previous theoretical considerations have been modified to include the effect of the Heisenberg (or natural) lifetime on Raman FWHM. This contribution is required to explain the anomalous FWHM of Li2SiO3 relative to the FWHM of isostructural Na2SiO3 and the large Li2SO4 and Li3PO4 FWHM (relative to Ba and Sr phosphates). The theoretically based expressions dictate a necessary, simple relationship among temperature, Raman shift, and FWHM. The relationship is developed and it allows, with one measurement of Raman shift and FWHM (e.g., measured at 298 K), prediction of Raman shifts and FWHM of Q0 and Q2 crystals to within 5 cm−1 up to ~1500 K. The properties of the TO4 moiety (T = Si, P, S) are mostly responsible for the striking regularity of Raman shifts and FWHM, although alkali and alkaline earth cations affect to varying extent Heisenberg lifetimes, hence FWHM.


Orostachys cartilaginous is a traditional herbal medicine and its cell cultures contain large amounts of polysaccharides. To utilize the cultured O. cartilaginous cells, this study purified the crude polysaccharides of O. cartilaginous cells by macroporous resin absorption and optimized the purification process in the experiment of orthogonal design with four factors (sample concentration and volume, and eluent concentration and volume) and three levels; the antibacterial and anti‐cancer effects of the purified polysaccharides (OTP) were further examined. The results showed that polysaccharide purity reached 95 % in the optimized group, i. e., 1.6 mg/mL of sample (crude polysaccharides) concentration, 3.0 bed volume (BV) of sample volume, 65 % eluent (ethanol) concentration, and 3.0 BV of eluent volume. In the antibacterial experiment, the growth of three bacterial species, i. e., Pseudomonas aeruginosa, Staphylococcus aureus, and Bacillus subtilis was inhibited by OTP, whereas that of Escherichia coli was not affected; the largest diameter of the inhibitory zone was found on B. subtilis; the extracellular alkaline phosphatase activity and the electrical conductivity, nucleic acid, and protein levels of B. subtilis increased after OTP treatment, indicating that the inhibition of B. subtilis growth was caused by the leakage of cell contents. In the anti‐cancer experiment, OTP decreased the cell viabilities of the tested human cancer cells, i. e., AGS (gastric cancer), HCT116 (colon cancer), HepG2 (liver cancer), and HeLa (cervical cancer), and the highest inhibitory effect was on HCT116. OTP promoted HCT116 apoptosis and affected the expression of apoptosis‐related proteins, i. e., the expression of B‐cell lymphoma‐2 decreased and that of bcl‐2 associated X protein, cytochrome c, caspase 9 and caspase 3 increased. The findings of the present study suggest that O. cartilaginous cell cultures have a potential application in food or drug production.


The Various physical mechanisms governing river flow dynamics act on a wide range of temporal and spatial scales. This spatio-temporal variability has been believed to be influenced by a large number of variables. In the light of this, an attempt was made in this paper to examine whether the daily flow sequence of the Benue River exhibits low-dimensional chaos; that is, if or not its dynamics could be explained by a small number of effective degrees of freedom. To this end, nonlinear analysis of the flow sequence was done by evaluating the correlation dimension based on phase space reconstruction and maximal Lyapunov estimation as well as nonlinear prediction. Results obtained in all instances considered indicate that there is no discernible evidence to suggest that the daily flow sequence of the Benue River exhibit nonlinear deterministic chaotic signatures. Thus, it may be conjectured that the daily flow time series span a wide dynamical range between deterministic chaos and periodic signal contaminated with additive noise; that is, by either measurement or dynamical noise. However, contradictory results abound on the existence of low-dimensional chaos in daily streamflows. Hence, it is paramount to note that if the existence of low-dimension deterministic component is reliably verified, it is necessary to investigate its origin, dependence on the space-time behavior of precipitation and therefore on climate and role of the inflow-runoff mechanism.


Abstract In this paper, we give a sufficient condition (Theorem) in order that one domain D1 bounded by a C2-smooth boundary can be enclosed in, or enclose, another domain D0 bounded by the same kind of boundary. A same kind of sufficient condition for convex bodies (Corollary) is also obtained.


Iceberg calving, the detachment of an ice block at the glacier front, is the main process responsible for the dynamic mass loss from the ice sheets to the ocean. Understanding this process is essential to accurately predict ice sheet response to the future climate. We present a transient multiphysics finite‐element model to simulate iceberg break‐off and geometry evolution of a marine‐terminating glacier. The model solves the coupled equations of ice flow, damage mechanics, oceanic melt, and geometry evolution on the same Lagrangian computational grid. A modeling sensitivity analysis shows that the choice of stress measure used for damage evolution strongly influences the resulting calving front geometries. Our analysis suggests that the von Mises stress measures produce the most realistic calving front geometry evolutions for tidewater glaciers. Submarine frontal melt is shown to have a strong impact on the calving front geometry. The presented multiphysics model includes all processes thus far shown to be relevant for the evolution of tidewater glaciers and can be readily adapted for 3‐D and arbitrary bedrock geometries.


Conventional cell tracking methods detect multiple cells in each frame (detection) and then associate the detection results in successive time-frames (association). Most cell tracking methods perform the association task independently from the detection task. However, there is no guarantee of preserving coherence between these tasks, and lack of coherence may adversely affect tracking performance. In this paper, we propose the Motion and Position Map (MPM) that jointly represents both detection and association for not only migration but also cell division. It guarantees coherence such that if a cell is detected, the corresponding motion flow can always be obtained. It is a simple but powerful method for multi-object tracking in dense environments. We compared the proposed method with current tracking methods under various conditions in real biological images and found that it outperformed the state-of-the-art (+5.2% improvement compared to the second-best).


The aim of this study is to check the factor structure of The Material Values Scale, examine the orientation of Croatian residents towards materialism, examine their basic human value hierarchy, and to identify and explain the relationship between values and materialism with control of sociodemographic characteristics. The survey was carried out on a representative sample of 1004 adult Croatian residents. The short version of The Material Values Scale (MVS) (Richins, 2004) was applied for the materialism examination and the short version of the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ) (Schwartz et al., 2001) was applied for the value examination. The results show that possession and acquisition of goods are mainly not important for Croatian residents in terms of the main preoccupation in life, and, on average, they do not believe that consumption leads to happiness. Croatian residents attribute more importance to tradition, universalism and benevolence and less to stimulation and power. In terms of the relationship between values and materialism, it turned out that ten value types with control of socio-demographic characteristics explain 16% of the total variance of happiness, as a first measured dimension of materialism, and 39% of the total variance of centrality as a second dimension of materialism.


The recent warming of Earth's surface is well documented in meteorological records. According to the World Meteorological Organization, the Earth's average surface air temperature (SAT) rose about 0.6°C in the twentieth century [Jones and Moberg,2003].

Any global scale variation in SAT is accompanied by variation of the thermal state of all major climate system components including the continental landmasses. Based on worldwide meteorological and borehole temperature records, this study suggests that the twentieth century global warming has deposited a large amount of thermal energy into the continental landmasses, and has resulted in an intensified heating of rocks underground. The feedback to the global climate system and the long-term environmental consequences of the on-going subsurface warming of the land remain to be recognized.


Recommending venues or points-of-interest (POIs) is a hot topic in recent years, especially for tourism applications and mobile users. We propose and evaluate several suggestion methods, taking an effectiveness, feasibility, efficiency, and privacy perspective. The task is addressed by two content-based methods (a Weighted kNN classifier and a Rated Rocchio personalized query), Collaborative Filtering methods, as well as several (rank-based or rating-based) methods of merging results of different systems. Effectiveness is evaluated on two standard benchmark datasets, provided and used by TREC's Contextual Suggestion Tracks in 2015 and 2016. First, we enrich these datasets with more information on venues, collected from web services like Foursquare and Yelp; we make this extra data available for future experimentation. Then, we find that the content-based methods provide state-of-the-art effectiveness, the collaborative filtering variants mostly suffer from data sparsity problems in the current datasets, and the merging methods further improve results by mainly promoting the first relevant suggestion. Concerning mobile feasibility, efficiency, and user privacy, the content-based methods, especially Rated Rocchio, are the best. Collaborative filtering has the worst efficiency and privacy leaks. Our findings can be very useful for developing effective and efficient operational systems, respecting user privacy. Last, our experiments indicate that better benchmark datasets would be welcome, and the use of additional evaluation measures—more sensitive in recall—is recommended.


This research study examined the impact of current and non-current assets on the profitability of pharmaceutical companies of Pakistan. For this study 9 years data was collected from the annual financial statements of six pharmaceutical companies listed in Karachi Stock Exchange over a period of 2010 to 2018. The profitability was measured by ROA.Current and non-current assets were taken as independent variables. The regression analysis was used and the result showed that current assets have a significant positive impact with the return on assets while the fixed assets have a significant negative impact on profitability of pharmaceutical companies of Pakistan.


Within the mathematics teacher education program, a variety of teaching strategies and theories are discussed with the aim of changing the student teachers views about mathematics and its teaching. This study was conducted with two in-service primary school teachers as they progressed through a 4-year degree programme. The purpose of the study was to identify how their views about mathematics and its teaching evolve during the three years leading to their internship assignment. Furthermore, the study was intended to document whether changes in teachers' beliefs accompanied changes in their classroom practices and more importantly, what influenced the teachers to commit to change. Data were collected through class observations, interviews, review of the lesson notes, field notes, and internship books. The results reveal that one participant modified some of his beliefs about mathematics teaching. The changes identified indicated a shift in perception of the teacher as an authority to that of a teacher concerned with initiating a learner-centered process, and using students' knowledge and errors as starting points. The other participant's perceptions of the teacher remained to be of authority; giving explanations, and demonstrations followed by students doing assigned problems. The results, however, reveal that the two participants' beliefs on how to learn mathematics changed from emphasizing algorithms to understanding concepts.


We present an experimental method that makes possible in-situ measurements of the electron loss rate in arbitrary gas mixtures. A weakly ionized plasma is induced via resonant multiphoton ionization of trace amounts of nitric oxide seeded into the gas, and homodyne microwave scattering detection is used to study the dynamics of the electron loss mechanisms. Using this approach, the attachment rate for electrons to molecular oxygen in room temperature, atmospheric pressure air is determined. The measured 0.76 × 108 s−1 attachment rate is in very good agreement with predictions based on literature data.


We analyze a 19 night photometric search for transiting extrasolar planets in the open cluster NGC 1245. An automated transit search algorithm with quantitative selection criteria finds six transit candidates; none are bona fide planetary transits. We characterize the survey detection probability via Monte Carlo injection and recovery of realistic limb-darkened transits. We use this to derive upper limits on the fraction of cluster members with close-in Jupiter radii, RJ, companions. The survey sample contains ∼870 cluster members, and we calculate 95% confidence upper limits on the fraction of these stars with planets by assuming that the planets have an even logarithmic distribution in semimajor axis over the Hot Jupiter (HJ; 3.0 < P day-1 < 9.0) and Very Hot Jupiter (VHJ; 1.0 < P day-1 < 3.0) period ranges. For 1.5RJ companions we limit the fraction of cluster members with companions to <6.4% and <52% for VHJ and HJ companions, respectively. For 1.0RJ companions we find that <24% have VHJ companions. We do not reach the sensitivity to place any meaningful constraints on 1.0RJ HJ companions. From a careful analysis of the random and systematic errors of the calculation, we show that the derived upper limits contain a +13%/ - 7% relative error. For photometric noise and weather properties similar to those of this survey, observing NGC 1245 twice as long results in a tighter constraint on HJ companions than observing an additional cluster of richness similar to that of NGC 1245 for the same length of time as this survey. If 1% of stars have 1.5RJ HJ companions (as measured in radial velocity surveys), we expect to detect one planet for every 5000 dwarf stars observed for a month. To reach an ∼2% upper limit on the fraction of stars with 1.5RJ companions in the 3.0 < P day-1 < 9.0 range, we conclude that a total sample size of ∼7400 dwarf stars observed for at least a month will be needed. Results for 1.0RJ companions, without substantial improvement in the photometric precision, will require a small factor larger sample size.


This paper presents the inverse dynamics analysis of 3-RRRT parallel manipulator with three translational degrees of freedom. Firstly, kinematic analysis of 3-RRRT parallel manipulator is completed using screw theory. Second, the generalized forces of moving platform and all links are expressed in screw formation. Based on these work, the inverse dynamic formula of the manipulator is gotten by the combination of screw theory and the principle of virtual work, Finally, numerical examples are reported.


In Brazil, hog plum trees are found mainly in the North and Northeast regions; they are considered to be under plant domestication and extractive exploitation. Therefore, it is economically important for those regions. In order to evaluate physiological and biochemical aspects of carbon metabolism in young hog plum plants (Spondia mombin L.) under full irrigation and water deficit conditions, an experiment was conducted in a greenhouse at the Federal Rural University of the Amazon, Belem, PA. The experimental design was completely randomized with two irrigation water conditions: full irrigation water (control) and water stress, with 20 repetitions, totaling 40 experimental units. As a result of water deficit, there were significant decreases in water potential, stomatal conductance, transpiration and starch content, and a significant increase in the levels of total soluble carbohydrates and sucrose. Water stress directly affected the levels of carbon cycle compounds.


In turbiditic environment, the spatial distribution of heterogeneities is driven by the internal architecture of channels complex, composed of multiple stacked elementary channels (e.g. Labourdette & Bez, 2010). Stochastic modelling provides scattered facies infilling and a poor rendering of the heterogeneity distribution in the reservoir. Consequently, dynamic sweep appears rather uniform/isotropic, and doesn't reflect the real fluid pathway along geological bodies. The example showed in this paper is a Miocene reservoir from offshore Congo; the definition of field development is still ongoing. The methodology used allows the implementation of organized heterogeneities for dynamic simulation. The calibration was performed thanks to dynamic data, and impacts the simulated forecast, especially in terms of sand connectivity, sweep efficiency.


Abstract Political trust is a cornerstone of political survival and development. This paper makes use of data from the 2006 AsiaBarometer Survey to examine the level of political trust in Hong Kong and Taiwan. It finds that the people of Hong Kong have a high level of trust in their government and judiciary, but a relatively low level of trust in their legislature. In contrast, the Taiwan people have a lower level of trust in all of their executive, judicial, and legislative branches, reflecting a serious problem with political confidence in Taiwan. A further analysis shows that institutional factors such as ratings of government performance, life satisfaction, and satisfaction with democratic rights and freedoms, and cultural factors such as interpersonal trust, post-materialism, and traditionalism have varying degrees of effect on the different domains of political trust in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but institutional factors appear to be more powerful than cultural factors in explaining the experiences of both societies.


The sensory world is full of uncertainty; most perception-relevant statistics are highly dynamic, featuring frequently-changing patterns. Rapid adaptation to the everchanging world requires brain sensitivity to environmental changes and resetting of functional neural networks as needed. Norepinephrine (NE) is proposed to mediate this process by initiating functional resetting (Dayan and Yu, 2006; Sara and Bouret, 2012) via the Locus Coeruleus (LC)-NE system. This doctoral thesis employs pupil diameter measurements – a reliable indicator of NE neural activity in the LC (Aston-Jones and Cohen, 2005; Joshi et al. 2016). Human participants listened to sequences of adjoined 50ms tone-pips (adapted from Barascud et al., 2016) containing transitions from random to regular frequency patterns and vice-versa. Participants were instructed to detect occasionally inserted silent gaps, ensuring attention to the auditory stream, not the transition itself. Although both transitions (regular-to-random and random-to-regular) are clearly detectable behaviourally and evoke strong MEG (Barascud et al., 2016), only violations of regularity (prediction errors) appear to elicit pupil responses. Noteworthily, this response is driven by pattern changes and not merely deviant detection. However, stimuli containing pattern emergences (precision increase) evoke no measurable pupil response; this is not due to pre-transition pupillary saturation, as transitions from random patterns to repeating single tones (random-to-repeating) evoke transient pupil dilation. Only when subjects actively reported changes in button-press did random-to-regular transitions evoke pupil dilations. Investigating the effect of task on evoked pupil responses found no response if subjects were not continuously tracking the sequences, e.g. with attention directed to visual or tactile stimuli. Multiple self-replications of these findings provide robust evidence that NE release acts as an automatic switch, resetting the brain's internal model of the sensory environment and demonstrating that the unexpected uncertainty signalling process operates over much faster timescales than previously known, implicating NE in the fundamental bases of perception.


Age determination from counts of growth layer groups (GLGs) in tooth dentine is a common method for aging marine mammals. Using known-aged animals, we validated this method for acid etched teeth of California sea lions (CSLs), Zalophus californianus. Between 1991 and 2013, the upper left canine (n = 33) was collected opportunistically during necropsy from animals tagged or branded as pups that later died. Overall, 55%-61% of age estimates by GLG counting were within 1 yr of the known-age in the sample of 1-30-yr-old CSLs. Accuracy of age estimates was found to be dependent on age of the CSLs, however. 71%-79% of age estimates were within 1 yr of the known-age in CSLs <10 yr old. These findings support the validity of counting GLGs to estimate age for CSLs <10 yr old to within 1 yr of accuracy.


A definition of the data fusion is proposed, which allows to set up a conceptual approach to the fusion of Earth observation data by putting an emphasis on the framework and on the fundamentals in remote sensing underlying data fusion. Further definitions are given which describe the information intervening in any problem of data fusion. Fusion may be performed at different levels: at measurements level, at attribute level, and at rule or decision level. Several problems are to be solved prior to any process of fusion. They deal with either the selection of the representation space and the level of fusion, or with the processing to be applied onto the data. A formalism is discussed which sketches a fusion process. Several examples of fusion processes are given using this formalism.


Identity theft can be effectively solved by the integration of biometrics and cryptography. Lately, researchers and experimenters have been greatly attracted by the improved performance (protection) of cryptographic keys produced from biometrics. However, there exists an eternal association between the biometric and the user, where in, alteration is not viable. Hence, a compromise of the biometric feature will consequently lead to a perpetual and possible loss of biometric for all the applications that employ it. The generation of replaceable biometric templates through cancelable biometrics has emerged as a possible solution to the aforesaid problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient approach for cryptographic key generation from fingerprint biometrics using cancelable templates. The proposed approach is composed of three phases namely: 1) Extraction of minutiae points from the fingerprint image, 2) Generation of cancelable biometric templates with added security and 3) Cryptographic key generation from the Secured cancelable template. The resultant cryptographic key thus generated is irrevocable and unique to a particular cancelable template, making the generation of new cancelable templates and cryptographic keys feasible. The experimental results portray the effectiveness of the cancelable template and the cryptographic key generated.


The pneumatic artificial muscle invented in the fifties by J.L. McKibben and recently introduced in robotics under the form of replicas, such as the "Rubbertuator" or the "digit muscle" is analysed. A model of the actuator made of two McKibben artificial muscles is proposed and used to explain the actuator specific natural compliance. Control experiments, both in open-loop and closed-loop, developed on a two DOF SCARA robot prototype actuated by two pairs of McKibben artificial muscles are reported.<<ETX>>


A world-volume model of a non-critical 3-brane is quantized in a strong coupling phase in which fluctuations of the conformal mode become dominant. This phase, called the conformal-mode dominant phase, is realized at very high energies far beyond the Planck mass scale. We separately treat the conformal mode and the traceless mode and quantize the conformal mode non-perturbatively, while the traceless mode is treated in a perturbative method that is renormalizable and asymptotically free. In the conformal-mode dominant phase, the coupling of the traceless mode vanishes, and the world-volume dynamics are described by a four-dimensional conformal field theory (CFT4). We canonically quantize this model on R × S 3 , where the dynamical fields are expanded in spherical tensor harmonics on S 3 , which include both positive-metric and negative-metric modes. Conformal charges and a conformal algebra are constructed. They yield strong constraints on physical states. We find that all negative-metric modes are related to positive-metric modes through the charges, and thus negative-metric modes are themselves not independent physical modes. Physical states satisfying the conformal invariance conditions are given by particular combinations of positive-metric and negative-metric modes. An infinite number of such physical states are constructed. In the Appendices, we construct spherical vector and tensor harmonics on S 3 in practical forms using the Wigner D functions and the Clebsch-Gordan coefficients and calculate the integrals of three and four products of these harmonics over S 3 .


We have performed aortic valve replacement (AVR) with mechanical valve, with/without annular enlargement in pediatric patients with left ventricular outflow tract obstruction (LVOT). Twenty-two patients underwent mechanical AVR between May 1993 and December 2012. The cumulative survival rates by the Kaplan-Meier method were 95% in 5 year, and 95% in 10 year. Long-term result of mechanical AVR with/without annular enlargement in children is excellent. Therefore, it should be the 1st choice of surgical treatment at our institute. In this strategy, we had total 10 re-operation cases. Two cases:Konno operation after performing surgical aortic valvotomy, 6 cases:Konno operation after resection of subaortic stenosis, 1 case:re-valve replacement because of thrombus formation at mechanical valve, and 1 case:re-operation with somatic growth. At the age of operation, 2 years old and over cases had postoperative estimated effective orifice area index (EOAI)>0.85 cm2/m2 in the time of 20 years old. Since some issues concerning anticoagulation-related complications remain, careful observation is mandatory.


Forming groups of agents is an important task in many agent-based applications, for example when determining a coalition of buyers in an e-commerce community or organizing different Web services in a Web services' composition. A key issue in this context is that of generating groups of agents such that the communication among agents of the same group is not subjected to comprehension problems. To this purpose, several approaches have been proposed in the past in order to form groups of agents based on some similarity measures among agents. Such similarity measures are mainly based on lexical and/or structural similarities among agent ontologies. However, the necessity of taking into account a semantic component of the similarity value arises, for example by considering the context in which a term is used in an agent ontology. Therefore we propose a clustering technique based on the HISENE semantic negotiation protocol, using a similarity value that has lexical, structural and semantic components. Moreover, we introduce a suitable multiagent architecture that allows computing agent similarities by means of an efficient distributed approach.


English as a foreign language make students in Indonesian faced some difficulties in understanding the meaning and structure of language. This condition also happen at MA Al Huda Sumber Nangka Pamekasan. To overcomethis basic problems, so teacher need a good method in their teaching process especially in speaking that is have an important roles in mastering language. 2013 curriculumrevision implemented High Order Thinking Skill (HOTS) method. The purpose of this research is to know the factors that affected students low mastery of English and to describe headmaster and teachers point of view about the implementation of HOTS method in students mastery. The research design of this research was used descriptive qualitative. Researcher used observation, interview, questionnaire and documentation asinstrument in data collection. After got the data,researcher analyzed the data by using Miles and Huberman. The result showed that factors which make students have a low speaking ability are students attitude, motivation to study well and also lack of parental supervision of students learning outcome. Headmaster and teacher very appreciate with the implementation of 2013 curriculum revision in order to increase education quality. It can be prove that students speaking skill at MA AlHuda better than before by using HOTS method.
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As the largest mucosal compartment, the human gastrointestinal tract (GI) is highly colonized with a complex microbial ecosystem that includes fungal organisms. Although fewer in numbers and less extensively studied in the context of the intestinal mucosa, it is unclear whether commensal members such as Candida species play a role in intestinal mucosal immunity. Recent studies have suggested that Candida sp. in the intestinal mucosa are associated with a number of human diseases such as gastric ulcers, Crohn's disease and Hirschsprung-associated enterocolitis. We have recently identified, a specific non-macrophage dendritic cell (DC) population within intestinal Peyer's patches (PP) that expresses the C-type lectin receptor (CLR)-Langerin and are able to specifically uptake Candida albicans, Candida tropicalis and yeast purified β-1,3-glucan particles (GPs). We hypothesize that Langerin+ DCs are central in the sampling, presentation and regulation of C. albicans within PPs. To address this hypothesis, we are currently defining the role of Langerin+ DCs in the processing of Candida sp. after uptake using the Langerin-DTR- EGFP mouse model as well as the Langerin-DTR- EGFP-DSS model. We are also characterizing the local gene expression profiles of PP B and T- lymphocytes as well as Langerin+ DCs in response to C. albicans. Additionally, we are investigating whether Langerin+ DCs are a migratory cell subset that not only transports C. albicans near germinal centers but can also take them to tolerogenic sites such as the MLN. These studies will advance our knowledge of how commensal members that are also part of the "mycobiome" are sampled, what mucosal immune responses are elicited and how these fungal organisms are tolerated.


With the rapid development of the Network, the webpage tampering has become a problem that can not be ignored. In October 2019, for example, the number of websites tampered with in China reached more than 20,000, with the largest share coming from Beijing, Shandong and Guangdong respectively [1]. This shows that webpage tampering is no longer a mere simple problem, but requires greater attention. In order to find a better way to detect web page tampering, the website tamper-proof technology receives much attention in the area of web security. This paper * proposes a method of webpage tampering detection based on the webpage change features through analyzing the features of webpage changes and the illegal tampering purpose. Webpage changes will be determined before detecting. The detection model is decided by webpage change time, webpage change code amplitude, webpage change frequency, webpage change content location and webpage change content relationship. To be more specific, the detection process includes two training and detection stages, training phase and detection phase. In the training phase, the effective detection evidence only suitable for the webpage can be obtained through using the data set (multiple changes data in the webpage) to train model. In the detection phase, the detection model will detect the particular webpage according to the detection evidence, and then gives the detection result. If the result is misdeclaration, the detection evidence will be retrained. Furthermore, the simulation tampering experiment is designed to verify the feasibility of the detection method. And the optimal number of the experimental webpage changes firstly into the training phase is determined according to the accuracy and recall rate of the test results. After Verifying, the accuracy and recall of the test results were 98.32% and 99.12% respectively. The best number of changes was 55 and the risk value was 1.


Oligodon hamptoni is a rare species of Kukri Snake known from only two specimens, both collected nearly a century ago in northern Myanmar. Here, we report the third record of this species based on a photograph taken in Mt. Gaoligongshan, Tengchong City, Yunnan Province, China, approximately 235 km northeast of the nearest record in Bhamo District, Kachin State, Myanmar. We also provide a detailed redescription of the holotype, showing that the photo record from Mt. Gaoligongshan can be unambiguously identified to this species. This rediscovery represents the first observation of O. hamptoni in China and is the first report of this species in almost 100 years.


We have developed a generalized mathematical model for the autoignition of hydrocarbons under the conditions of high pressure and temperature achieved in a rapid-compression machine. The model is able to simulate the essential phenomena of the two-stage autoignition of alkanes under these conditions; these are a well-defined cool flame that is often quenched rapidly and completely before the onset of a sharp ignition. It also predicts correctly the transition to single-stage autoignition at even higher temperatures and the variation with temperature of the characteristic induction periods. The model is based on a degenerate-branched-chain mechanism. We show that it must contain as necessary features two termination processes, one linear and the other quadratic in radial concentration, and two routes for the formation of branching agent, one of which involves intermediate products of oxidation. The model also predicts, without any adjustment of the kinetic parameters, the essential phenomena of cool-flame and ignition behaviour that are observed at low pressures.


Data remain a very important ingredient required by any organization to make informed decision as it affects operations. Companies have been collecting data from various sources over the decades bringing about a very large volume of data warehouse. Unfortunately, most organizations build databases which are redundant and never used for any meaningful thing. While few companies use the data collected in their databases when taking strategic decisions others barely do same. However, for an organization to immensely derive benefits from the massive data warehouse, there is the need for an effective and efficient means of analysing the data with a view to extracting meaningful knowledge that is sufficient to achieve organizational goal. To achieve this, Artificial Neural Network (ANN) technique through the concept known as data mining is presented. The paper reviewed artificial neural network technique for data mining, examines the computational model behind this technique and analysed its use and application as a predicting or forecasting tool. Results shows that ANN' has capability in data management, analysis and able to provide desirable knowledge for management decision making processes. It is therefore recommended that data mining tools like ANN and others be applied to organization's databases which hitherto have not been minned in order to provide management with intelligence for decision making


This paper analyses the impact of expansive tourism growth on protected areas on example of Plitvice lakes National park as the most visited protected area in Croatia, with annualy more than 1,2 milion visitors; the highest concentration of visitors is noted from april to semptember when their number exceeds 13.000 daily. Majority of visitors visit the lake system that amounts only 1% of total Park surface; lake sytem comprises the main natural attractions whereat much pressure is pursued on a few critical points of the environment and natural processes. In that situation a need arises to manage the above mentioned processes with the instruments of strategic crisis management in order to prepare and abate negative effects of turist expansion and to find effective models of visitor system management that will minimise eventuall harm effects of uncontrolled turistic developement. The results of observational, analytical and statistical methods confirm some expected tendencies defined in hypothesis; the paper also shows the need for crisis management in current situation, since a high level of impact on ecological variable is present as well as constant decrease of quality of visitor's experience; as one solution a long-term model for expansive visitors growth management of Plitvice lakes is suggested, aplicable to other croatian protected areas.


A diagrammatic expansion of coefficients in the low-momentum expansion of the genus-one four-particle amplitude in type II superstring theory is developed. This is applied to determine coefficients up to order s6 R4 (where s is a Mandelstam invariant and R the linearized super-curvature), and partial results are obtained beyond that order. This involves integrating powers of the scalar propagator on a toroidal world-sheet, as well as integrating over the modulus of the torus. At any given order in s the coefficients of these terms are given by rational numbers multiplying multiple zeta values (or Euler-Zagier sums) that, up to the order studied here, reduce to products of Riemann zeta values. We are careful to disentangle the analytic pieces from logarithmic threshold terms, which involves a discussion of the conditions imposed by unitarity. We further consider the compactification of the amplitude on a circle of radius r, which results in a plethora of terms that are power-behaved in r. These coefficients provide boundary `data' that must be matched by any non-perturbative expression for the low-energy expansion of the four-graviton amplitude. The paper includes an appendix by Don Zagier.


Omicron, the most heavily mutated SARS-CoV-2 variant so far, is highly resistant to neutralizing antibodies, raising unprecedented concerns about the effectiveness of antibody therapies and vaccines. We examined whether sera from individuals who received two or three doses of inactivated vaccine, could neutralize authentic Omicron. The seroconversion rates of neutralizing antibodies were 3.3% (2/60) and 95% (57/60) for 2- and 3-dose vaccinees, respectively. For three-dose recipients, the geometric mean neutralization antibody titer (GMT) of Omicron was 15, 16.5-fold lower than that of the ancestral virus (254). We isolated 323 human monoclonal antibodies derived from memory B cells in 3-dose vaccinees, half of which recognize the receptor binding domain (RBD) and show that a subset of them (24/163) neutralize all SARS-CoV-2 variants of concern (VOCs), including Omicron, potently. Therapeutic treatments with representative broadly neutralizing mAbs individually or antibody cocktails were highly protective against SARS-CoV-2 Beta infection in mice. Atomic structures of the Omicron S in complex with three types of all five VOC-reactive antibodies defined the binding and neutralizing determinants and revealed a key antibody escape site, G446S, that confers greater resistance to one major class of antibodies bound at the right shoulder of RBD through altering local conformation at the binding interface. Our results rationalize the use of 3-dose immunization regimens and suggest that the fundamental epitopes revealed by these broadly ultrapotent antibodies are a rational target for a universal sarbecovirus vaccine. One sentence summary A sub-set of antibodies derived from memory B cells of volunteers vaccinated with 3 doses of an inactivated SARS-CoV-2 vaccine work individually as well as synergistically to keep variants, including Omicron, at bay.


[Purpose] This study aimed to examine the effect of osteoporosis complications on the physical function, frailty in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus. [Participants and Methods] The participants were 27 female type 2 diabetes mellitus patients aged ≥65 years. Of these, 14 patients had osteoporosis. In order to evaluate the physical function, we measured the lower limb muscle strength, handgrip, gait speed, etc. We performed statistical comparison of both the groups and examined the applicable number of items on the Linda Fried Frailty scale and the correlation by evaluating the physical function. [Results] The lower limb muscle strength of patients with osteoporosis and type 2 diabetes mellitus was significantly lower than that of type 2 diabetes mellitus patients without osteoporosis. Factors of the osteoporosis group that inversely correlated to the Linda Fried Frailty scale included lower limb muscle strength, handgrip, and gait speed. [Conclusion] We found that osteoporosis reduced lower limb muscle strength in type 2 diabetes mellitus patients and was correlated with frailty.


The larvicidal activity of preparations from different groups of compounds was assayed after their exposure to microwaves and magnetic field. The radiation was found to have a varying impact on the insecticidal properties of the preparations. Thus, the efficiency of spheric larvicides decreased, which is likely to be associated with the structural changes of toxin crystals, whereas the larvicidal activity of the organophosphorus compound dursban and the pyrethroid aikon increased 2-5-fold. The higher activity of dursban irradiated with a magnetic field was demonstrated to retain for over 2 months.


The article sketches the history and practice of multi-stakeholder platforms (MSPs) along the Amu-Panj river basin in Afghanistan. The MSP model, in the form of multistakeholder River Basin organisations was entirely externally driven, at the behest of the European Union and facilitated by European experts. Knowledge created during the Panj Amu River Basin Pilot (PARBP) programme, started in 2005, was of little use to stakeholders who were mainly interested in new infrastructural projects. This contributed to the enthusiastic response to PARBP's infrastructural focus and regulatory aspects of water sector reform through supporting the development of strategies, laws and policies. The project was not perceived as relevant and legitimate in resolving practical water management problems. Multi-stakeholder working groups, mainly composed of water users and line ministries, were formed by the facilitator for each sub-basin. These externally facilitated fact-finding groups however were not found to take on a meaningful role in sub-basin management, had rather varied participation and their dissolution in 2008 was greeted with general indifference, including the responsible Ministry of Water Resources and Energy. Meanwhile, local institutions such as the provincial governor and the mirab (traditional community water provider) continue to function or evolve independently, often developing outside of the water management reform framework proposed by the European Community. By contrast, local ad-hoc MSPs, so called Water Allocation Committees (WACs) emerged in 2011, and tackled several conflictual issues over water distribution and management between users. These processes were driven and facilitated by local power holders. A counterintuitive outcome is that the more power the Ministry for Water Resources and Energy was given, and therefore the less power delegated and participation allowed, the better the deal for people living downstream of the PanjAmu's sub-basins.


Magnetic refrigeration uses magnetic field changes to provoke a phase transition in solid Magneto-Caloric Materials (MCM). Then, using a Heat Transfer Fluid, a Brayton-like refrigeration cycle can be produced. Developing these kind of refrigerators is usually costly, due to the amount of rare earth materials needed for the permanent magnet and the MCM. In order to aid in better designing such machines, a 3D DNS solver was developed. The solver includes the simulation of four different physical phenomena: the magnetic field, fluid velocity field, temperature field, and the Magneto-Caloric Effect. To produce an efficient solver, collateral coupling mechanisms were studied and deemed negligible, including the temperature dependency of the HTF (water) viscosity, and the influence of the magnetic permeability on the internal magnetic field of Gadolinium. The resolution of the physical phenomena was benchmarked separately and then the performance of the cycle solver was compared to a measured prototype. The solutions given by the new 3D DNS solver provide a more accurate description of the temperature field than the 2D solver available in the literature. The authors argue that this is probably partially due to the detailed simulation of the magnetic field (not accounted in 2D codes). The produced numerical solver is aimed to serve as a tool in the design process of magnetic refrigerators. By simulating conceptual magnetic regenerators, it is expected that the new prototypes experience a qualitative jump.


Objective To investigate the effects of Shenfu injection and prostaglantin E1(PGE1) on ischemic cardiomyopathy with heart failure.Methods 140 patients of ischemic cardiomyopathy with heart failure were randomly divided into therapy group(80 cases) and control group(60 cases),the patients in therapy group received routine therapy plus intravenous Shenfu injection and intravenous PGE1 once a day.the patients in control group only received routine therapy.Before and after therapy,the changes of the clinicl symptoms,the cardiac function,the hematological dynamics were measured.Results The total efficacy rate of therapy group was 89%.In post-treatment,the changes of the clinical symptoms,the cardiac function,and the hematological dynamics were obviously improved compared with pre-treatment(P0.01).There was a significant difference in therapy group compared with control group(P0.05or0.01).Conclusion Shenfu injection in combination with prostaglandin E1 have obvious efficacy intreating the ischemic cardiomyopathy with heart failure.


Flavans from the roots of Desmos cochinchinensis exhibited potent aromatase inhibitory activity at nanomolar levels, and could be leads for the development of anti-aromatase drugs. In addition, these aromatase inhibitors did not show pronounced cytotoxic activity. Flavans exert their inhibitory activity through binding, as revealed by molecular docking studies, with aromatase at Arg115, Met374, and Leu477; the C-7 hydroxyl (or methoxyl) forms hydrogen bonds with Met374 and Arg115 of aromatase.


Acknowledgments Chapter One: Introduction Chapter Two: An EAP Classroom Chapter Three: Exploring the Making of Meanings Chapter Four: The Multimodalities of Neoliberal Globalization Discourses in YouTube videos Chapter Five: Engaging with Neoliberalization Discourses, Part Two: Summer term class Chapter Six: Who is 'Jennifer Wong'? Multiculturalism and the model minority consumer Chapter Seven: Bringing the political into an EAP Classroom? Chapter Eight: Everyday life of an EAP classroom


This paper aims at presenting an installation of wastewater treatment. It shows in detail a facility that processes water used in an industrial production process. Wastewater from this process contains traces of paint. Treatment process consists of three stages. The first step involves adding chemical substances in the reactor that produces the flocculation effect. The second step implies neutralizing the pH value. The last step consists in filtration of coagulated impurities. Water treated in this process is brought into the parameters required by the regulations in force in order to be discharged.


– Different climate models, modeling methods and carbon emission scenarios were used in this paper to evaluate the effects of future climate changes on geographical distribution of species of economic and cultural importance across the Cerrado biome. As the results of several studies have shown, there are still many uncertainties associated with these projections, although bioclimatic models are still widely used and effective method to evaluate the consequences for biodiversity of these climate changes. In this article, it was found that 90% of these uncertainties are related to methods of modeling, although, regardless of the uncertainties, the results revealed that the studied species will reduce about 78% of their geographic distribution in Cerrado . For an effective work on the conservation of these species, many studies still need to be carried out, although it is already possible to observe that climate change will have a strong influence on the pattern of distribution of these species.


Turbidity is an effective tool for estimating and monitoring suspended sediments in aquatic systems. Turbidity can be measured in situ remotely and at fine temporal scales as a surrogate for suspended sediment concentration (SSC), providing opportunity for a more complete record of SSC than is possible with physical sampling approaches. However, there is variability in turbidity-based SSC estimates and in sediment loadings calculated from those estimates. This study investigated the potential to improve turbidity-based SSC, and by extension the resulting sediment loading estimates, by incorporating hydrologic variables that can be monitored remotely and continuously (typically 15-min intervals) into the SSC estimation procedure. On the Roanoke River in southwestern Virginia, hydrologic stage, turbidity, and other water-quality parameters were monitored with in situ instrumentation; suspended sediments were sampled manually during elevated turbidity events; samples were analyzed for SSC and physical properties including particle-size distribution and organic C content; and rainfall was quantified by geologic source area. The study identified physical properties of the suspended-sediment samples that contribute to SSC estimation variance and hydrologic variables that explained variability of those physical properties. Results indicated that the inclusion of any of the measured physical properties in turbidity-based SSC estimation models reduces unexplained variance. Further, the use of hydrologic variables to represent these physical properties, along with turbidity, resulted in a model, relying solely on data collected remotely and continuously, that estimated SSC with less variance than a conventional turbidity-based univariate model, allowing a more precise estimate of sediment loading, Modeling results are consistent with known mechanisms governing sediment transport in hydrologic systems.


This paper proposed a DE-based two-stage algorithm for power system reactive power planning with wind power integration. In the first stage, with the aid of the sensitivity analysis of Jacobin matrix from power flow program and the partial derivative of the reactive power injection to the node shunt susceptance, a new susceptance-based voltage sensitivity matrix consists of the partial derivative of the voltage to the shunt susceptance for each bus is obtained. The new matrix is used to narrow the boundaries of the compensation capacity with respect to the lower and upper bounds for the bus voltage. The second stage of the proposed method consists of a DE algorithm. The two-stage algorithm is designed to take advantage of the merits of each technique. The method of the first stage is employed to provide a good initial guess and to quickly and locally improve upon the solution provided by the DE with less computation. In this paper, the SVC device is used to minimize the real power losses and to improve the voltage profile during various operation scenarios disturbed by wind power variations. The model is formulated as a constrained optimization problem, where the constraint is to let the voltage of each bus close to 1 p.u. The proposed DE-based two-stage method has been tested in a modified version of the IEEE 30 bus system for 6 scenarios of different wind speed levels and compared with the typical DE one with satisfactory results. (7 pages)


A non-targeted volatile metabolomic approach based on the gas chromatography-quadrupole time of fight-mass spectrometry (GC-QTOF-MS) coupled with two different sample extraction techniques (solid phase extraction and solid phase microextraction) was developed. Combined mass spectra of blueberry wine samples, which originated from two different cultivars, were subjected to orthogonal partial least squares-discriminant analysis (OPLS-DA). Principal component analysis (PCA) reveals an excellent separation and OPLS-DA highlight metabolic features responsible for the separation. Metabolic features responsible for the observed separation were tentatively assigned to phenylethyl alcohol, cinnamyl alcohol, benzenepropanol, 3-hydroxy-benzenethanol, methyl eugenol, methyl isoeugenol, (E)-asarone, (Z)-asarone, and terpenes. Several of the selected markers enabled a distinction in secondary metabolism to be drawn between two blueberry cultivars. It highlights the metabolomic approaches to find out the influence of blueberry cultivar on a volatile composition in a complex blueberry wine matrix. The distinction in secondary metabolism indicated a possible O-methyltransferases activity difference among the two cultivars.


This report discusses the construction of a tandem mirror plasma propulsion facility, the numerical modelling of the hybrid plume exhaust, and rf heating of the plasma. A preliminary experiment of the ICRH (Ion Cyclotron Resonance Heating) heating of plasma ions was carried out. For 2.0 kW ECRH (Electron Cyclotron Resonance Heating) power injected into the central cell and 10 kW ICRH power into the end cell, the results obtained from the probe in the central cell are: n{sub e} = 2.5 {times} 10{sup 16} m{sup {minus}3} and T{sub e} = 80 eV (928,000 K) in the central cell. The estimated values in the end cell are: n{sub I} = 1.25 {times} 10{sup 17} m{sup {minus}3} and T{sub I} = 500 eV (5,797,000 K). The power conversion efficiency was about 80%. The results from time dependent 3-D three fluid numerical modeling indicate that a boundary layer can be formed. The formation of this layer is strongly dependent on neutral jet geometry and injection angle. The ICRH heating of plasma was modeled numerically and power absorption efficiency is about 50%. Analytical analyses was done on slab geometry. 12 refs., 20 figs., 3 tabs.


Abstract This essay considers readings of Plato's Symposium in sixteenth-century trattati d'amore (love treatises) — especially Francesco Patrizi's L'amorosa filosofia — that offer an alternative to Marsilio Ficino's pervasive interpretation as presented in his De amore. Against the backdrop of a larger debate concerning the role of the lower senses (touch, in particular) and the relationship between body and soul, these alternative readings of the Symposium attempt to redeem the role of tactility in love matters. Whereas Ficino and his most influential followers — Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Bembo, and Baldassare Castiglione — center their exegesis on Diotima's speech and privilege sight as the most noble sense, Patrizi's reading — to a large extent preceded by those of Sperone Speroni, Agnolo Firenzuola, and Flaminio Nobili — focuses on Aristophanes's myth and the figure of the hermaphrodite as the model for a different kind of human love that is both sensual and spiritual.


A 57-year-old Chinese gentleman presented with pruritic skin eruptions located mainly over the shins since childhood. Scratching resulted in skin blister and finally scarring. He also had nail dystrophy over the fingers and toes since childhood. Incisional skin biopsy for histology and electron microscopy was compatible with the diagnosis of dystrophic epidermolysis bullosa. His mother had "prurigo nodularis" and nail dystrophy, but she was not available for examination as she lived abroad. His siblings, children and father were free of skin diseases. He was given symptomatic treatment with topical steroid, eurax cream and oral antihistamine. Antibiotics and local antiseptic solution were used to control skin infections. His pruritic symptom was under control, although the skin scarring and nail dystrophy remained the same. 57


A 15-year-old Quarter Horse gelding was examined because of chronic intermittent colic of 40 days' duration. The clinical signs included acute onset of depression, ptyalism, abdominal splinting, and rolling within an hour of eating. An intramural mass of the esophagus was identified during esophagoscopy. A large soft-tissue density surrounding the distal portion of the esophagus, creating a stricture, was identified on an esophagogram. With the horse slightly sedated, pleuroscopy was performed, allowing direct visualization and biopsy of the mass. The histopathologic diagnosis was squamous cell carcinoma.


Abstract Background Anabolic steroid misuse is very common and has been linked to the development of a severe cardiomyopathy, arrhythmias, and sudden death. Case summary A 46-year-old miner presented to hospital with subacute dyspnoea and palpitations. Investigations revealed atrial fibrillation and a severe dilated cardiomyopathy with left ventricular ejection fraction of 12%. The patient had a history of longstanding exogenous testosterone administration. Haematological investigations demonstrated a marked polycythaemia, with haematocrit of 0.60 L/L (normal 0.40–0.54 L/L). Hormonal investigations revealed an elevated testosterone level of 46.4 nmol/L (normal 8.0–30.0 nmol/L) and suppressed luteinizing and follicle-stimulating hormones, consistent with excess testosterone use. The patient was referred to the endocrinology specialty team for support with ceasing excess testosterone use, while commencing guideline-directed heart failure therapy. At 6 months of follow-up, the patient's left ventricular ejection fraction had normalized and he was asymptomatic. Biochemical indicators of testosterone excess had also normalized. Discussion Anabolic steroids are widely misused, particularly among young and middle-aged males. Cardiovascular complications include a potentially reversible severe cardiomyopathy, accelerated coronary disease, dyslipidaemia, arrhythmias, and sudden death. It is important to identify a history of anabolic steroid misuse when investigating cardiomyopathy and be alert for indicators such as polycythaemia. Cessation of anabolic steroid misuse may lead to complete reversal of cardiomyopathy but should be undertaken in close partnership with the patient and endocrinologists.


Valencia oranges (Citrus sinensis (L.) Osbeck cv. Valencia) and Marsh grapefruit (Citrus paradisi Macf.) were treated with single or double layers of coating. In cases where two coatings were applied, the first coating was a moisture-barrier wax; the second was either polyethylene wax or a mixture of shellac and resin ester. The inner coating reduced weight loss, and the outer coating imparted gloss. Fruit gloss, as measured by reflectome- ter, decreased more rapidly during 1 week at 20C with a single glossy coating than with the same coating applied as a second layer over a wax-based first coating. For citrus fruit, using resin ester or shellac as a high-gloss second coating tended to overly restrict the exchange of O2 and CO2; however, two layers of wax did not. The formulator of citrus coatings is con- fronted with the challenge of attaining high gloss, reducing fruit shrinkage, imparting re- sistance to moisture damage, and permitting passage of sufficient CO 2 and O2 to prevent


Introduction Nowadays it is possible to manage as outpatients selected young febrile infants with low risk criteria for serious bacterial infection. A sequential approach, evaluating, firstly, the appearance of the infant, secondly, the urinanalysis, and, finally, the results of the blood biomarkers, including procalcitonin, may identify better low risk febrile infants suitable for outpatient management. Objective To assess the value of a sequential approach ("step by step") to febrile young infants in order to identify low risk patients suitable for outpatient management and compare it with other ones previously described (Rochester criteria and Lab-score). Methods A retrospective comparison of three different approaches ("step by step", Lab-score and Rochester criteria) was made in 1123 febrile infants less than 3 months of age attended in seven European Pediatric Emergency Departments. Results Of the 1123 infants (Invasive Bacterial Infection - IBI-, 48; 4.2%), 488 (43.4%) were classified as low risk criteria for IBI according to the "step by step" approach (vs 693–61.7%- with the Labscore and 458–40.7%- with the Rochester criteria). The prevalence of IBI in the low-risk criteria patients was 0.2% (95% CI 0–0.6%) using the "step by step" approach (vs 0.7%–95% CI 0.1–1.3% with the Labscore and 1.1%–95% CI 0.1–2%- with Rochester). Using the "step by step" approach, 1 patient with IBI was not correctly classified (2.0%, CI95% 0–6.12) vs 5 using the Labscore or Rochester (10.4%, CI95% 1.76–19.04%). Conclusions A sequential approach to young febrile infants including procalcitonin identifies better patients more suitable for outpatient management.


Background: Breast cancer genome sequencing projects, performed by the genome sequencing centers in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., are elucidating the somatic mutations and other genomic alterations that occur in human breast cancer. These studies recently identified somatic HER2 mutations in breast cancers lacking HER2 gene amplification. Results: Compilation of data from seven sequencing studies documented 22 patients with somatic HER2 mutations. These mutations clustered in three regions. The first cluster was at amino acid (aa) 309–310 (exon 8), located in the extracellular domain. These aa residues form part of the HER2 dimerization interface. The second cluster was at aa 755–781, located in the kinase domain (exons 19–20). This was the most common location for HER2 mutations, with 17 out of 22 patients having somatic mutations here. The third region was at aa 835–896, also in the kinase domain (exons 21–22). Using multiple experimental approaches (cell line experiments, in vitro kinase assays, protein structure modeling, and xenograft experiments), we tested seven of these HER2 mutations and showed that 4 of them are activating mutations that are sensitive to lapatinib and trastuzumab. Another 2 mutations were found to be lapatinib resistant and we determined their sensitivity to neratinib, canertinib, and gefitinib. Conclusions: These findings biologically validate somatic HER2 mutations as good targets for breast cancer treatment, but the appropriate choice of targeted drug is dependent on the precise mutation present. This study is among the first to functionally characterize mutations identified by breast cancer genome sequencing. A prospective, multi-institutional clinical trial has been launched to screen for HER2 mutation positive patients and determine the clinical outcome of treatment with HER2 targeted drugs. Citation Information: Cancer Res 2012;72(24 Suppl):Abstract nr S5-6.