The distribution of immune cells within the gut-associated lymphoid tissues (GALT) of swine is highly organized. The appearance of such cells could not be separated from the effects of age, weaning and exposure to environment. Here, we have examined the distribution patterns of a subset of CD3a+ T and CD21+ B cells as well as S-100 protein+ cells and secretory (s) IgA+ cells within GALT compartments (such as jejunal lamina propria = JLP, ileal Peyerís patches = IPP, and mesenteric lymph node = MLN) of juvenile 8-week-old conventionally reared pigs using either two monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) or polyclonal antibodies (pAbs) in the immunohistochemical staining techniques with avidin-biotin complex (ABC) or peroxidase-antiperoxidase complex (PAP), respectively. The most potent porcine T-cell marker--CD3 surface antigen--is expressed as CD3a epitope on ileal intraepithelial lymphocytes, and numerous lymphocytes in the extrafollicular areas of MLN and dome region of IPP. Conversely, the cells expressing CD21 surface molecules were only demonstrable in the interfollicular areas of MLN and in the germinal centers of IPP. A strong reaction to sIgA was displayed by the plasma cells in the lumen of crypts and those residing the lamina propria of jejunum and ileum. The S-100 protein+ cells were numerous in JLP around the crypts and in IPP of weaned pigs. Both applied mAbs proved to be useful reagents for phenotypic and functional analyses of porcine lymphoid cell subsets by the ABC technique. However, further investigation of the S-100 protein marker is needed to determine which (if any) subset of porcine CD3+ CD4- CD8+ T cells could be designated as orthologue of human CD8+ CD11b+ suppressor T cells.


In the realm of short video streaming, popular adaptive bitrate (ABR) algorithms developed for classical long video applications suffer from catastrophic failures because they are tuned to solely adapt bitrates. Instead, short video adaptive bitrate (SABR) algorithms have to properly determine which video at which bitrate level together for content prefetching, without sacrificing the users' quality of experience (QoE) and yielding noticeable bandwidth wastage jointly. Unfortunately, existing SABR methods are inevitably entangled with slow convergence and poor generalization. Thus, in this paper, we propose Incendio, a novel SABR framework that applies Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) with Expert Guidance to separate the decision of video ID and video bitrate in respective buffer management and bitrate adaptation agents to maximize the system-level utilized score modeled as a compound function of QoE and bandwidth wastage metrics. To train Incendio, it is first initialized by imitating the hand-crafted expert rules and then fine-tuned through the use of MARL. Results from extensive experiments indicate that Incendio outperforms the current state-of-the-art SABR algorithm with a 53.2% improvement measured by the utility score while maintaining low training complexity and inference time.


The structure and properties of HfO_2 films deposited by plasma assisted reactive pulsed laser deposition and annealed in N_2 were studied upon thermal annealing as well as the evaluation of thermal stability by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, spectroscopic ellipsometry, and optical transmission measurements. The as-deposited HfO_2 films appear predominantly monoclinic with an amorphous matrix which becomes crystallized after high-temperature annealing. No interfacial SiO_x is observed for the as-deposited films on Si. The deposited HfO_2 films exhibit good thermal stability and show excellent transparency in a wide spectral range with optical band gap energies of 5.65–5.73 eV depending on annealing temperature. An improvement in the optical properties by high-temperature annealing is also observed.


Multi-pedestrian trajectory prediction is an indispensable safety element of autonomous systems that interact with crowds in unstructured environments. Many recent efforts have developed trajectory prediction algorithms with focus on understanding social norms behind pedestrian motions. Yet we observe these works usually hold two assumptions that prevent them from being smoothly applied to robot applications: positions of all pedestrians are consistently tracked; the target agent pays attention to all pedestrians in the scene. The first assumption leads to biased interaction modeling with incomplete pedestrian data, and the second assumption introduces unnecessary disturbances and leads to the freezing robot problem. Thus, we propose Gumbel Social Transformer, in which an Edge Gumbel Selector samples a sparse interaction graph of partially observed pedestrians at each time step. A Node Transformer Encoder and a Masked LSTM encode the pedestrian features with the sampled sparse graphs to predict trajectories. We demonstrate that our model overcomes the potential problems caused by the assumptions, and our approach outperforms the related works in benchmark evaluation.


We have previously shown that extended‐access subjects exhibit heightened motivation for cocaine in the runway model, as reflected by reduced number of retreats. This heightened motivation could reflect either an increase in cocaine‐induced reward or a decrease in cocaine‐induced aversion. The current experiment was therefore devised to assess the cocaine‐induced reward and aversion in extended‐access rats using a place conditioning test. Rats trained to lever press for intravenous (IV) cocaine (0.25 mg/infusion) were provided 6‐hour daily access to the drug over 10 days. Lever pressing in control subjects produced IV infusions of saline. Following drug self‐administration, subjects underwent place conditioning for the immediate or delayed effects of cocaine (1.0 or 2.5 mg/kg, IV). In control subjects, the immediate effects of the low dose of cocaine produced conditioned places preferences (CPPs), while the delayed effects produced conditioned place aversions (CPAs). In contrast, the animals receiving low cocaine dose for 6 hours, exhibited place aversions but not preferences; an effect that was reversed when the dose of cocaine was increased. Additionally, in the 6‐hour group, delayed conditioning was associated with a reduction in zif268 immunoreactivity in the medial prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens shell while immediate conditioning was associated with an increase in zif268‐positive cells in the central nucleus of the amygdala. Collectively, these data suggest that extended daily access to cocaine produces a shift in the subject's perceived reward threshold that is paralleled by alterations in the activity of both the reward and stress pathways.


The circulatory system processes an average of 20 liters of blood per day through capillary filtration which removes plasma while leaving the blood cells. Roughly 17 liters of the filtered plasma actually get reabsorbed directly into the blood vessels, while the remaining 3 liters are left behind in the interstitial fluid. The primary function of the lymph system is to provide an accessory route for these excess 3 liters per day to get returned to the blood. The pressure in the venous system is considerably lower than the pressure in the arterial system. It contains a larger portion of blood than the arterial system does, for the venous system is thought to be the blood reservoir of the body. The lymphatic system can be thought of as a drainage system needed because; the blood circulates through the body, blood plasma leaks into tissues through the thin walls of the capillaries nanotechnology for treatment, diagnosis, monitoring, and control of biological systems. The use of Nanotechnology in medicine and more specifically drug delivery is set to spread rapidly.


As a standard bridging law and other spheres of normativity, due diligence is pervasive across numerous areas of international law. This paper defines the features and functions of due diligence, illustrating how the concept's development reflects structural changes in the international legal order. Concerning their content, due diligence obligations can be separated into two overlapping types: procedural obligations and obligations relating to States' institutional capacity. Thus, due diligence serves to manage risks, compensate for States' freedoms being circumscribed through legalisation, expand State accountability and possibly stabilise the international order through 'proceduralisation'. However, it is argued that due diligence cannot be characterised as a general principle of international law due to its diverse content in different fields of international law and its dependence on accompanying primary rules. Finally, it is contended that due diligence introduces certain risks, particularly by diluting States' substantive obligations and contributing to the rise of 'informal' international law.


To study DCIK co-culture system with Her-2 as the pulsing antigen peptide of DC and the cytotoxicity of DCIKs against the breast cancer cells, CIK and DC were first induced and isolated from human peripheral blood. CIK and DC pulsed with antigen Her-2 peptide were then co-cultured to prepare CIK-DC co-culture system (DCIK-P). Using DCIK-P as effect cells and breast tumor cells (MDA-MB-231, SK-BR-3, MCF-7) as target cells,the antigen-specicfic cytotox-icity of DCIK-P was analysed by cell viability and cytotoxicity assay. The killer activity of DCIKs against the MDA-MB-231, SK-BR-3 and MCF-7 is 50.38% +/- 3.25%, 52.19% +/- 3.25% and 47.09% +/- 2.41% respectively. The killer activity of DCIK-Ps against the MDA-MB-231, SK-BR-3 and MCF-7 is 76.30% +/- 1.74% (P < 0.001), 55.70% +/- 3.05% (P = 0.014) and 47.67% +/- 2.40% (P = 0.697) respectively. The killer activity of DCIK-P cells was greatly enhanced against Her-2(+) breast tumor cell strains. The present results can provide tumor immunological data and experimental techniques for the development of breast tumor treatment.


INTRODUCTION
Smoking cessation is typically verified biochemically by expired-air carbon monoxide (CO) levels below 9 ppm (i.e., ≤8 ppm), but this CO criterion may lead many who have smoked within 24hr to be misclassified as abstinent.

METHODS
Adult dependent smokers (N = 261; 124 men, 137 women) prospectively recorded each cigarette smoked and provided CO on five consecutive days during each of two short-term attempts to quit smoking. Participants were those recruited for crossover tests of the effects of placebo versus medication (nicotine patch or varenicline) on the ability to initiate 24-hr abstinence. All had either a high or low interest in permanently quitting smoking soon (within 3 months) and were randomized to the presence or absence of daily ($12) monetary reinforcement of abstinence.

RESULTS
Total accuracy of sensitivity to detect smoking (83%) plus specificity to verify abstinence (87%) was optimal at a CO criterion for abstinence below 5 ppm (≤4 ppm), compared with below 9 ppm (sensitivity of 60%, specificity of 97%). Overall CO detection of sensitivity and specificity was higher in those with high versus low quit interest, but reinforcement of abstinence made no difference.

CONCLUSIONS
Results indicate a CO criterion half that used in most clinical research may optimally validate 24-hr cessation and reduce misclassification of smokers as "abstinent."


Newly emerged adult dragonflies are physiologically immature in a number of ways, including the mass, ultrastructure and biochemistry of their flight muscles. In Libellula pulchella dragonflies, adult maturation of flight muscle is accompanied by striking changes in thermal physiology. Vertical force production during fixed flight attempts in newly emerged adults (tenerals) shows a broad plateau of near-peak performance, first attained at cool thoracic temperatures (typically 2834 °C) and maintained up to thoracic temperatures of 4045 °C [mean optimal thoracic temperature (OTT)=34.6 °C; mean upper lethal temperature (ULT)=45.3 °C]. In contrast, fully mature adults show narrow thermal sensitivity curves, wherein peak performance is approached only within a few degrees of the thermal optimum, which invariably occurs at hot thoracic temperatures (3850 °C; mean OTT=43.5 °C; mean ULT=48.6 °C). These changes in the shape and position of thermal performance curves are compared with predictions from hypotheses for the evolution of thermal sensitivity.


The invention relates to the processing of a digital object that comprises: cancelling the noise of an original object (I) of a first type containing noise in order to obtain a noise-free object (J) of the first type; obtaining an object with a quasi-white noise of the first type from a difference (B) between the original object and the noise-free object; applying to the noise-free object (J) a first processing (t1) that comprises a neighboring processing for obtaining a transformed object (K) of a second type, the first processing being such that it would structure the noise contained in the original object if it was applied to said original object; applying to the noise object a second white processing (t2) for obtaining a quasi-white transformed noise object (C) of the second type; and inserting into the transformed object (K) the transformed noise object.


Currently colorectal cancer (CRC) staging (colitis, adenoma, and carcinoma) mainly relies on ex vivo pathologic analysis requiring an invasive surgical process with limited sample collection and increased metastatic risk. Thus, in vivo noninvasive pathological diagnosis is extremely demanded. By verifying the samples of clinical patients and CRC mouse models, it was found that vascular endothelial growth factor receptor 2 (VEGFR2) was barely expressed in the colitis stage and only appeared in adenoma and carcinoma stages with obvious elevation, while prostaglandin E receptor 4 (PTGER4) could be observed from colitis to adenoma and carcinoma stages with a gradient increase of expression. VEGFR2 and PTGER4 were further chosen as key biomarkers for molecular pathological diagnosis in vivo and corresponding molecular probes were constructed. The feasibility of in vivo noninvasive CRC staging by concurrent microimaging of dual biomarkers using confocal laser endoscopy (CLE) was verified in CRC mouse models and further confirmed by ex vivo pathological analysis. In vivo CLE imaging exhibited the correlation of severe colonic crypt structural alteration with a higher biomarker expression in adenoma and carcinoma stages. This strategy shows promise in benefiting patients undergoing CRC progression with in-time, noninvasive, and precise pathological staging, thus providing valuable guidance for selecting therapeutic strategies.


Background Snoring is the cardinal symptom of obstructive sleep apnea (OSA). Snoring and upper airway obstruction associated with major oxygen desaturation may occur in populations undergoing flexible bronchoscopy. Methods To evaluate the prevalence of patients at a high risk of having OSA among patients undergoing bronchoscopy with sedation and to investigate whether snoring during the procedure predicts patients who are at risk of OSA, we prospectively enrolled 517 consecutive patients who underwent the procedure with moderate sedation. Patients exhibiting audible snoring for any duration during the procedure were considered snorers. The STOP-Bang (Snoring, Tiredness, Observed apnea, high blood Pressure-Body mass index, Age, Neck circumference and Gender) questionnaire was used to identify patients at high (score ≥3 out of 8) or low risk (score <3) of OSA. Results Of the 517 patients, 165 (31.9%) snored during bronchoscopy under sedation. The prevalence of a STOP-Bang score ≥3 was 61.9% (320/517), whereas 200 of the 352 nonsnorers (56.8%) and 120 of the 165 snorers (72.7%) had a STOP-Bang score ≥3 (p=0.001). In multivariable analysis, snoring during bronchoscopy was significantly associated with a STOP-Bang score ≥3 after adjustment for the presence of diabetes mellitus, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, chronic kidney disease, and stroke (adjusted odds ratio, 1.91; 95% confidence interval, 1.26–2.89; p=0.002). Conclusion Two-thirds of patients undergoing bronchoscopy with moderate sedation were at risk of OSA based on the screening questionnaire. Snoring during bronchoscopy was highly predictive of patients at high risk of OSA.


Effects of gender on listeners' judgments of intelligibility were investigated. Subjects (15 women; 15 men) provided magnitude-estimation scaling responses and over-all impressions of the intelligibility of a male and female speaker's comparable versions of audiotaped speech samples varying systematically in terms of the number of phonemes produced correctly. There was no significant difference between male and female subjects' magnitude-estimation scaling responses; however, their over-all impressions of the intelligibility of the speakers tended to differ. Women indicated that the male speaker was more understandable, and men indicated that the female speaker was more understandable. Magnitude-estimation scaling may provide an objective means for evaluating a speaker's intelligibility. It appears to transcend gender-biases associated with judgments of speech intelligibility.


The objective of the reported experiments is to quantify the differences between two different representations of a product: function structures commonly used in systematic engineering design, and affordance structures as developed by the authors in previous work. Four consumer products are analyzed using a product tear-down strategy, and function structures from the literature are utilized where available. System level, sub-system level, and component level function structures are studied for each product. Affordance structures and Affordance-Structure Matrices (ASMs) are also generated for each product. Comparisons are made between function structures and affordance structures at each level of abstraction based on the number and types of entities and number and types of flows in each representation. During the course of the experiments, additional metrics were added to the ASM including totaling helpful relationships, totaling harmful relationships, and calculating the percent difference between helpful and harmful relationships. Function structures were also formatted to show force flows as distinct from energy flows to reduce ambiguity.


This thesis presents the modelling and analysis of an engineered genetic oscillator in E.coli. Genetic oscillators composed of transcriptional feedback loops are the central components of circadian clocks [16]. Thus understanding small genetic oscillators is key for understanding the complex regulatory networks of circadian clocks. In order to monitor clock function, a new colony based imaging assay was set up, based on luminescent transcriptional reporter constructs, that allows for automated data collection over long time spans and for the screening of clock mutants. Clock runs produced damped oscillatory behaviour after starting the clock by removal of the lac inducer IPTG or by giving a metabolic stimulus by transferring cells onto fresh agar plates. A detailed mathematical model of the clock was constructed, taking into account discrete and stochastic regulatory binding events at the promoter sites. From this model, using the theory of heterogeneous systems [69, 66], deterministic equations were derived and analysed to yield conditions for the occurrence of stable oscillations based on the system's nullclines. To facilitate the modelling, an algorithm was devised and implemented, that allows for automated construction of Markov chain models of gene activity states based on DNA binding events. In sum, the work constitutes the establishment and analysis of an integrated experimental and modelling system, which opens possibilities for further investigation in order to yield insight into the properties of genetic oscillators.


Incontinentia pigmenti is an uncommon, inherited disorder with predominantly ectodermal manifestations that is associated with skin (100%)), dental (90%), skeletal (40%), central nervous (40%), and ocular (35%) deformities. It is an X-linked dominant disease, usually lethal in males and occurring in female infants. The dental effects include delayed eruption, partial anodontia, microdontia, and cone or peg-shaped teeth. The dental, clinical, and radiological findings in a 16-year-old female are presented here. The patient had peg-shaped teeth and a unilateral maxillary transverse discrepancy associated with oligodontia in the maxillary and mandibular arches. Orthodontic treatment included rapid maxillary expansion and fixed orthodontic therapy for prosthetic purposes and elimination of the functional midline shift.


Stimuli-responsive hydrogels with adaptable physical properties show great potential in the biomedical field. In particular, the collection of electrical signals is essential for precision medicine. Here, a simple strategy is demonstrated for achieving controlled drug release and real-time monitoring using an interpenetrating binary network consisting of a graphene aerogel and a poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) hydrogel with incorporated polydopamine nanoparticles (PDA-NPs). Owing to the good physical properties of graphene and the embedded PDA-NPs, the hybrid hydrogel shows enhanced mechanical properties and good electrical conductivity. In addition, the hybrid hydrogel also shows dual thermo- and near-infrared light responsiveness, as revealed by the controlled release of a model drug. In addition, as the hydrogel exhibits detectable changes in resistance during drug release, the drug-release behavior of the hydrogel can be monitored in real time using electrical signals. Moreover, owing to the abundance of catechol groups on the PDA-NPs, the hybrid hydrogel shows good tissue adhesiveness, as demonstrated using in vivo experiments. Thus, the developed hybrid hydrogel exhibits considerable practical applicability for drug delivery and precision medicine.


A new high-voltage power switch configuration having thyristor based on-state current conduction together with high-voltage current saturation characteristics is described. Current saturation is obtained in the new thyristor structure by diverting part of the base current at a predesigned current level to bring the NPN and PNP transistors comprising the thyristor out of their regeneratively-coupled conduction mode. The concept has been experimentally verified by fabricating 1200 V, 175 A devices.


A total of 110 clinical isolates of Clostridium difficile were analyzed by agarose gel electrophoresis by using both bacterial restriction endonuclease analysis (REA) and plasmid profiles. A total of 72 isolates were divided into 12 groups according to their REA patterns. Some 38 isolates exhibited unique patterns. Pattern A occurred in 20% of isolates. Isolates with patterns B, E, and G were cytotoxin negative. The remaining groups were cytotoxin positive. Multiple isolates obtained from two stool specimens were studied to examine the variation in REA profiles found in single specimens. In these specimens no variation in REA profiles was found. The stability of C. difficile was studied by examining sequential in vitro subcultures of a single isolate and strains isolated over a 4-month period from two long-term carriers. REA patterns were stable over time, both in vitro and in vivo. Because plasmid DNA was observed in 53% of isolates, plasmid profiles alone could not be used to study the spread of C. difficile; however, they were necessary for the interpretation of REA patterns in some instances.


The clinico-radiological profile of seven patients with pleural involvement and HIV infection is presented. Five out of seven subjects had a right-sided effusion. The aetiology in three cases; two tubercular and one invasive candidiasis was established by pleural biopsy. The mortality was high (5/7) indicating a poor prognosis in patients of HIV with pleural involvement.


Although a term more commonly associated with social action, we have recently seen "the law of unintended consequences" as made popular by the sociologist Robert Merton1 rear its troubling head in the paediatrics department of a busy district general hospital in the south west of England in the context of the swirling frenzy and ongoing concerns about pandemic influenza (H1N1)2009 or "swine flu".

According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control at the time of writing there have been 143 841 laboratory-confirmed cases of pandemic influenza (H1N1)2009 globally, with 813 deaths. The highest numbers of confirmed cases are currently found in the USA (40 617), Mexico (14 229), Australia (14 037) and Chile (10 926).2 In the UK there have now been 10 649 laboratory-confirmed cases of pandemic (H1N1)2009 since the beginning of the pandemic, with a total of 28 deaths. However, the majority of pandemic influenza cases continues to be mild, and children and young adults remain those predominantly affected. Of 652 inpatients with suspected swine flu in the UK (on 16 July 2009) approximately a third (218) were infants and children up to 15 years of …


This chapter is based on one company's pioneering work in developing resource management systems and integrated design thinking to make cities more sustainable.
The case of Dongtan eco-city near Shanghai in China is used as an example to illustrate the types of frameworks and guiding principles which have been used to design an eco-city. The company is Arup, named after its founder Sir Ove Arup. It is a global firm of designers, engineers, planners, and business consultants providing a diverse range of professional services to clients around the world.

Dongtan was chosen by the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation (SIIC) to be the site for an impressive demonstrator eco-city and in mid 2005 Arup was contracted to design and masterplan the project. As an eco-city being built from the ground up, Arup had to take an innovative approach to formulating the key principles for guiding the building phase of the project.

The chapter defines eco-cities, and then explores the design process used by Arup. This process includes the use of specific tools, models and calculations to compare design options to achieve optimum 'scores' for sectors selected in designing 'demonstrator' or planned cities. Although the design process is presented in four distinct tasks, it is clear that complex masterplans, such as those for eco-cities, involve iterative processes throughout the entire lifecycle in order to be considered more sustainable. In the most basic linear format there are: masterplans, constraints and opportunities, design options and potential solutions. The chapter considers the eight guiding principles of the Dongtan sustainability framework and how these interact with the models used in designing eco-cities. The chapter concludes that 'learning by doing' may be the most beneficial way to create more sustainable cities along with meeting difficult reduction targets for energy, waste, water, and food/consumables.


Magnesium hydroxide is a popular inorganic compound used in wide range of applications such as: flame retardant in polymers, special ceramics, fillers in bleaching agent and a raw material for preparation of magnesium oxide, which were currently imported into Nigeria from foreign countries using hard earned currency. Thus, this current study focused on dissolution kinetics of a biotite ore treated via leaching in sulphuric acid leachant. During leaching, parameters such as leachant concentration, particle size and reaction temperature on the extent of ore dissolution were examined. At optimal leaching conditions (2.5 mol/L H 2 SO 4 , 80°C), 98.23 % of the initial 10 g/L ore reacted within 120 minutes. The shrinking core dissolution model was adopted to evaluate the various dissolution parameters for better understanding of the rate determining step. Experimental results indicated that the reaction rate of the leaching process was controlled by diffusion model, with calculated activation energy (Ea) of 38.56 kJ/mol. By considering the solubility differences of corresponding elements, a two-step precipitation process was applied to remove Fe and Al and recovery of Mg. Subsequently, magnesium hydroxide was prepared by precipitation from the leach solution with ammonia as the precipitant. X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning electron microscope (SEM) analyses showed that the high purity Mg(OH) 2 existed in the form of flower-like spherical aggregation. Furthermore, the final solution of ammonium–potassium chlorate can be used for agricultural compound fertilizer. Keywords : inorganic, optimal, leaching, ammonium-potasium chlorate, fertilizer


We study several techniques whichare well known in the case of Besov and TriebelLizorkin spaces and extend them to spaces with dominating mixed smoothness. We use the ideas of Triebel to prove three important decomposition theorems. We deal withsocalled atomic, subatomic and wavelet decompositions. All these theorems have much in common. fRoughly speaking, they say that a function belongs to some function space if, and only if, it can be decomposed into the sum of products of coefficients and corresponding building blocks, where the coefficients belong to an appropriate sequence space. These decomposition theorems estabilisha veryusefulconnection between function and sequence spaces. We use them in the study of the decay of entropy numbers of compact embeddings between two function spaces of dominating mixed smoothness reducingthis problem to the same question on the sequence space level. The considered scales cover many important specific spaces (Sobolev, Zygmund, Besov) and we get generalisations of respective assertions of Belinsky, Dinh Dung and Temlyakov.


The most common vegetation in the Maule region of central Chile is sclerophyllous forest. The microclimate weather on the west oriented hillsides of the coastal range of the Maule region, however, allows the occurrence of the mesophyllous Maulino coastal forest (Torres-Diaz, et al., 2007; Santelices et al., 2011). Its floristic composition is characterized with deciduous tree species, evergreen-sclerophyllous trees and shrubs (Santelices et al., 2011). This forest is represented by formations dominated by species of the genus Nothofagus, such as Nothofagus glauca (hualo) and Nothofagus obliqua (roble). It harbors endemic plants and, in particular, highly threatened tree species of the Nothofagus genus (Villalobos & Huenchuleo-Pedreros, 2010; Santelices et al., 2011).

The Nothofagus genus is part of the Fagacea family and includes 40 species only located to the south of the equator (Villalobos & Huenchuleo-Pedreros, 2010). Nearly all Nothofagus species are concentrated in the south center of Chile, specifically, in the Chilean forests amidst the latitudes 33°S and 55.5°S (San Martin & Sepulveda, 2002; Villalobos & Huenchuleo-Pedreros, 2010; Silva-Munoz, 2012). Nothofagus glauca (hualo) and Nothofagus obliqua (roble) has a vulnerable state of preservation according to the "International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN)". This forest is refuge of the most threatened Nothofagus species of the country: Nothofagus alessandrii (San Martin et al., 2006; Santelices et al., 2011). Along with Gomortega Keule and Pitavia punctata, the IUCN assigns these three trees a critical conservation status (IUCN, 2001; San Martin & Sepulveda, 2002; Arnold et al., 2009; Silva-Munoz, 2012). According to Olivares et al. (2005), Nothofagus alessandrii is at the verge of extinction if no specific conservation measures are applied.

The Maulino coastal forest is situated in 16 municipalities in the west side of the Maule region and covers 53,945 hectares, representing 13% of the region's coastal forest area. The extent of the Maulino coastal forest including its Nothofagus alessandrii remnants was substantially reduced from the expansion of agriculture as well as plantations of the exotic pine species Pinus radiata. Furthermore, the Maulino coastal forest is viewed as vulnerable to further damage from climate change (Olivares et al., 2005).

Global warming is predicted to alter the dispersal of global flora (Pliscoff, 2013) and, consequently, the habitat for vulnerable and critically threatened species. With likely climate change effects on the Maulino coastal forest, Nothofagus alessandrii may be in particular danger (Olivares et_al.,_2005; San Martin et_al.,_2006; Santelices et_al.,_2012). Much of its remaining environment exists in fragments of Maulino coastal forest, surrounded by Pinus radiata plantations. The pine invades the Maulino coastal forest, placing additional pressure on the Nothofagus alessandrii (Olivares et al., 2005).

According to the Chilean law, Decree Law 2,186 (Organic Law of Expropriation Procedure), the Chilean conservation agencies cannot implement protected areas on private land without compensating landowners for financial losses. Thus, funds for extra preservation of nature are in particularly short stock in Chile (Pliscoff, 2013). Therefore, funds for preservation must be employed very efficiently (Wilson et al., 2009; Pliscoff, 2013). To optimize conservation planning from cost-effectiveness point of view, spatial conservation priorities must be identified that meet intended biodiversity targets while reducing conservation costs (Barth, 2016). With respect to the Maulino coastal forest, such an optimization is the central objective of this thesis.

There are several methods and tools to optimize costs associated with conservation planning. One of them is spatial conservation prioritization. Spatial conservation prioritization is a biogeographic economic procedure used for determining sites for biodiversity preservation that optimally equilibrates the achievement of conservation goals and cost (Pliscoff, 2013; Duarte et al, 2014). It uses quantitative, spatially explicit data to recognize places for the location of funds for preservation. In addition to this, these methods, allow incorporated the effect of climate change in the research (Wilson_et al.,_2009; Pliscoff, 2013).

Here, I present a regional analysis of cost-effective spatial conservation priorities that accounts for opportunity costs linked to the renunciation of the profits coming from agriculture or forestry production in Chile's Maule region. The focus is on how agricultural and forest areas and their subsequent land uses compete with the Maulino coastal forest for space. The analysis uses modeled species distribution data that incorporate climate change effects. With this research, I seek to reduce the economic impact of forest biodiversity preservation in central Chile – hoping to, simultaneously, (i) limit impacts on regional livelihoods and (ii) increase the prospects for the realization of a well-designed network of protected natural sites for the Maulino coastal forest and its species.

I performed the analysis with the conservation planning software Marxan. Marxan recognizes cost-effective priority sites that reach a preset conservation targets (Ball et al., 2009). In addition to biogeographical data of the Maulino coastal forest and Nothofagus alessandrii, I used spatial data on the main economically relevant land use types in the study area and two distribution models of Nothofagus alessandrii: a "current distribution model" and a "future distribution model". The future distribution model was used to incorporate climate change effects.

I examined three scenarios in the analysis: a current vegetation data scenario of the Maulino coastal forest, and two modeled scenarios of Nothofagus alessandrii (current and future model scenarios of Nothofagus alessandrii). One level of protection for each scenario was used and a range of Marxan adjustments (BLM and SPF) were explored. The final output is a set of cost-effective reserve networks for the preservation of the Maulino coastal forest and for the preservation and restoration of Nothofagus alessandrii forest.

The costs for implementing optimized reserve networks vary from € 1.7 to € 3.6 million: as a function of the required protection grade and the compactness (BLM) of the reserve network.

Pinus radiata plantings would be the most affected commercial land use, representing 34% to 40% of the overall surface of the proposed reserve networks. On the other hand, agriculture land comprises only between 0.7% and 1.5%. In part, the low percentage of agriculture is a cost-minimizing result of the spatial optimization process as the opportunity cost of agricultural land is higher than that for Pinus radiata plantations.

When was taking into account the influence of climate change in Nothofagus alessandrii, the reserve networks produced in the future scenario have a small economic impact. This is because the future scenario surface represents half of the surface of the current scenario. This results in smaller reserve networks. This reduction is because many areas today suitable for Nothofagus alessandrii are forecast to be not suitable in the future for this species as a consequence of climate change.


Service and assistance robots that must move in human environment must address the difficult issue of navigating in dynamic environments. As it has been shown in previous works, in such situations the robots can take advantage of the motion of persons by following them, managing to move together with humans in difficult situations. In those circumstances, the problem to be solved is how to choose a human leader to be followed. This work proposes an innovative method for leader selection, based on human experience. A learning framework is developed, where data is acquired, labeled and then used to train an AdaBoost classification algorithm, to determine if a candidate is a bad or a good leader, and also to study the contribution of features to the classification process.


The correspondence included here represents the first selection of Pepys' letters drawn from all possible sources to be published since 1933. Since the Diary does not cover this period, the letters enable the reader to follow Pepys' early career on the staff of the Earl of Sandwich, his rise to greatness as Secretary of the Admiralty, and his retirement after the Glorious Revolution. Along the way, Pepys fought battles with opponents of his naval reforms and enemies who tried to implicate him in the Popish Plot, while taking care of his various relatives and keeping up with an array of friends and acquaintances who included many of the great and famous of late-seventeenth-century England.The letters have been chosen to reflect all these aspects of Pepys' varied and fascinating life, and include 30 never before published. They are accompanied by a running commentary, biographies of persons mentioned, a glossary, a chronology, and an introduction that explains how the letters have survived and analyses how they were written. Guy De La Bedoyere is an historian and archaeologist with numerous books to his credit. His specialist field is Roman Britain but he has published three books for Boydell on the 'other' seventeenth-century diarist, John Evelyn (1620-1706), including the widely-acclaimed "Particular Friends: The Correspondence of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn" which features all the letters exchanged by the two men over a period of 38 years.


The dispersion of the spin-waves in single crystals of Li2CuO2 has been investigated by means of inelastic neutron scattering. The results yield a single spin-wave branch characterized by a large gap Δ = 1.4 meV at the zone centre due to easy-axis uniaxial anisotropy. Linear spin-wave theory is used to obtain the exchange integrals in this material. It turns out that the nearest-neighbor exchange interactions in the basal plane are antiferromagnetic leading to frustration between the magnetic moments. Our results show that Li2CuO2 is an S = 1/2 antiferromagnetic insulator with competing interactions.


Portable sensors for bioanalytes are becoming of increasing interest, because their development will permit analyses of biological samples at the point of sampling, i.e., at the time when an individual is being examined by a health professional. In this paper, the design requirements for a fluoride sensor are outlined. Currently, commercially available fluoride sensors, ion-selective electrodes, do provide the capability to measure fluoride content in samples directly. However, the sensitivity of these devices is lower than the normal content of fluoride in plasma, and thus, samples must be concentrated before measurement. Recent progress in improving the sensitivity of chemical sensors for fluoride shows sensitivities up to 0.1 μmol/L, which is within the range of interest. In addition, the use of biological systems for developing sensors (biosensors) is expanding rapidly, because of the potential of achieving high selectivity and sensitivity through the use of the amplification power of enzymes. However, relatively few enzyme systems have been discovered that are affected by fluoride-thus the need for expanded research to find appropriate enzymes for this purpose. The characteristics of some enzymes, such as adenylate cyclase, that could be used in the development of a fluoride biosensor are discussed.


Electron paramagnetic resonance measurements were used to probe spin dynamics over mid-to-far critical range for four samples of different structural forms of La0.9Ca0.1MnO3. As a result of different fabrication routes, these samples contain different imperfections which may have specific impacts on temperature dependence of the EPR linewidth. An analysis of critical spin relaxation speedup, manifested by sharp increase of the linewidth and Onsager kinetic coefficient when approaching to magnetic transition points, was carried out using two critical exponents derived from dynamic and static scaling laws. Deviations of these exponents from theoretical bounds were proposed to be hallmarks of the disorder types.


A wideband E-patch antenna with microstrip line feed for WLAN and other wireless communication systems covering the 5.35-6.03 GHz frequency band is presented. The antenna has a bandwidth of more than 12.3%, it has a maximum gain around 8.12 dBi. The antenna could be easily integrated with microwave circuits. An overview of the antenna design along with the simulation results are presented.


The International Liaison Committee on Resuscitation (ILCOR) published the Consensus of Science for Treatments and Recommendations (CoSTR) 2015, a body of systematic reviews on resuscitation science. According to the CoSTR, Guidelines 2015 have been developed in several countries, in which targeted temperature management (TTM) at 33 to 36 ℃ has been recommended in unconscious victims after out-of-hospital cardiac arrest (OHCA) at least for 24 hours, but the optimal duration for TTM was unclear. Dr. Hans Kirkegaard et al . has tested a hypothesis in an international multicenter randomized control trial (RCT) whether TTM at 33 ℃ for 48 hours could bring more favorable outcomes as compared to that for 24 hours in patients at six months after OHCA from a presumed cardiac origin, in which TTM for 48 hours did not show any benefits on neurologic outcomes over 24 hours (1). This result indicates that TTM of 33 ℃ for 24 hours could be a choice of the treatments for comatose survivors from OHCA. Regarding the 'dosing' of TTM duration in this study, there has already been a thoughtful and excellent editorial written by Dr. Clifton Callaway, Pittsburg Medical Center, in the same issue of JAMA. So, I would like to review the current study from a different point of view as follows.


Abstract : In Wireless ATM networks transmission resources are shared among geographically disperse applications with disperse applications with diverse Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and traffic characteristics. To provide QoS guarantees and use the bandwidth efficiently, call admission and scheduling functions are necessary. These functions should ensure the delivery of the target QoS to the supported applications while achieving statistical multiplexing gains, without explicit and continuous exchange of information. In this research the problem of sharing resources (slots of an up-link TDMA frame) among heterogeneous Variable Bit Rate (VBR) applications with diverse QoS requirements is addressed. The QoS requirements for each application is defined in terms of a maximum tolerable packet delay and dropping probability; a packet is dropped if it experiences excess delay. The region of achievable QoS vectors is established for policies that are work conserving and satisfy the earliest due date (EDD) service criterion (WC-EDD policies); such policies are known to optimize the overall system performance. In addition to the determination of the region of achievable QoS vectors, this study leads also to the construction of scheduling policies which deliver any performance in the region established for WC-EDD policies. Finally, an upper bound on the region of QoS vectors that can be achieved under any policy (not limited to the WC-EDD policies) is determined.


Abstract This paper aims to develop a new crash box with improved crashworthiness at reduced cost and weight as a base design for use in the automotive industry. Firstly, a baseline crash box model as presently used by the automotive industry was comprehensively examined by numerical crash analysis using Ls-Dyna software. Considering the initial design geometry, forty-five different crash box designs were developed by making changes in the geometry and wall thickness of the thin walled structures. The effects of the changes in wall thickness and geometry in alternative crash box designs on crash performances such as total energy absorption, peak crush force, mean crush force, specific energy absorption and crush force efficiency were investigated. The optimum crash box design obtained numerically was validated experimentally by means of the drop tower impact system. The numerical crash analysis results clearly agree with the experimental test results. In this study, a new crash box design at a lower cost and performing better in crashes compared with the other forty-six designs has been obtained and can be used in the automotive industry as an energy absorber. The results have revealed that crash box geometry, as well as the number and position of the spot welds and sheet-metal thickness have an important effect on crash performance, weight and cost of the crash boxes.


We address the flutter instability of a flexible plate immersed in an axial flow. This instability is similar to flag flutter and results from the competition between destabilizing pressure forces and stabilizing bending stiffness. In previous experimental studies, the plates have always appeared much more stable than the predictions of two-dimensional models. This discrepancy is discussed and clarified in this paper by examining experimentally and theoretically the effect of the plate aspect ratio on the instability threshold. We show that the two-dimensional limit cannot be achieved experimentally because hysteretical behaviour and three-dimensional effects appear for plates of large aspect ratio. The nature of the instability bifurcation (sub- or supercritical) is also discussed in the light of recent numerical results.


Bark exfoliation is a common feature of London planes (Platanus×acerifolia) that reportedly increases during periods of drought-induced stem shrinkage. Here, we explore the spatial patterns and potential drivers of plane bark exfoliation in Mainz, a central European city of 220,000 inhabitants, following the exceptional summer drought of 2018.We estimate the degree of bark exfoliation of 349 urban plane trees across the city and use stem microcores to analyze their tree-ring widths from 2006 to 2019. Further to impervious cover, settlement structure and vegetation cover in the vicinity of each tree, we investigate the relationships between bark exfoliation and tree, site, and climate factors.Results indicate that plane bark exfoliation correlates significantly with tree size and inner bark width (bothp< 0.001) but is independent of impervious cover and local site conditions. Similarly, stem growth does not change within the city underlining the resilience of London planes to cope with highly diverse urban site conditions. Plane tree-ring widths were only weakly associated with exfoliation estimates (p< 0.05) but strongly controlled by cold season temperatures (p< 0.001).As tree growth was also not affected by summer drought, potential detrimental effects by limited infiltration, increased runoff and altered evaporation are of less concern for the plane trees in Mainz. Projected winter warming is likely to enhance urban plane growth in upcoming decades.


Summary Individual loci affecting economic traits can be located using genetic linkage. Application of either daughter or granddaughter designs requires determination of allele origin in the progeny. If only the sires and their progeny are genotyped, the paternal allele origin of progeny having the same genotype as the sire cannot be determined. The expected frequency of informative sons can be predicted for each sire and genetic marker from the allele frequencies in the population. The accuracy of a predictor of the frequency of informative progeny was tested on 103 grandsire x microsatellite combinations. Number of sons per grandsire varied from 24 to 129. Allele frequencies in the population were estimated by genotyping seven sires. The regression of the frequency of informative sons on the predicted frequency was 1.04 with a zero intercept model. Thus, considering the large number of genetic markers available for analysis, predicted informative frequency is a useful criterion for selection of genetic markers.


We report the design and fabrication process of MEMS actuators for optical attenuators integrated with two-dimensional photonic crystal waveguide. Fabrication process has been improved from our previous model such that the SOI PhC layer is not delaminated during the sacrificial release in HF. The device was successfully developed and optically tested to obtain 2 dB modulation contrast at an 86 V with -27 dB insertion loss


Background: Skin grafting is a simple and common procedure for achieving wound closure. Despite its widespread use, there is little objective information about the outcomes of skin-grafted burn wounds. The purposes of this study were to determine the length of time it takes to achieve complete wound healing in split-thickness skin-grafted burn wounds and to identify factors that affect time to complete wound healing. Methods: The authors prospectively collected information from January through September of 2003 on 52 consecutive patients. Time to complete wound healing was defined as the number of days from burn wound skin grafting until the wound was 100 percent epithelialized. Percentage of total body surface area burned, preoperative prealbumin level, sex, age, graft type, burn mechanism, cause of graft loss, and presence of hypergranulation tissue were assessed and correlated with time to complete wound healing. Results: The time to complete wound healing ranged from 2 to 75 days. Forty-six percent of skin grafts had 100 percent wound closure at postoperative day 7. No grafts were lost to infection. Factors that significantly affected time to complete wound healing were graft loss by seroma, preoperative prealbumin level, presence of hypergranulation tissue, and burns caused by hot solids. Conclusions: The authors' results suggest that most patients will heal skin-grafted burn wounds within 2 weeks. Meticulous attention to prevention of seroma, hypergranulation tissue formation, and malnutrition might decrease time to complete wound healing. Factors thought to influence time to complete wound healing, such as total body surface area burned, sex, age, graft type, and infection, did not significantly affect the authors' patient group.


Abstract 1729 Background: Primary myelofibrosis (PMF) is a myeloproliferative neoplasm whose survival at diagnosis is predicted by the International Prognostic Scoring System (IPSS), which is based on the presence of the following five risk factors: age greater than 65 years, presence of constitutional symptoms, hemoglobin level below 10 g/dL, leukocyte count greater than 25 ×109/L, and circulating blast cells 1% or greater (Cervantes et al, Blood 2009). To allow dynamic prognostication at any time during follow up, we further developed the Dynamic International Prognostic Scoring System (DIPSS), based on the same IPSS-factors, but with different score values (one point for each risk factor, two points for acquisition of anemia) and with a distinct score model (low risk, LR, 0 points; intermediate-1 risk, Int-1R, 1–2 points; intermediate-2 risk, Int-2R, 3–4 points; high risk, HR, 5–6 points) (Passamonti et al, Blood 2010). The DIPSS model was also efficient in the prediction of acute myeloid leukemia (AML) evolution (Passamonti et al, Blood 2010) and in the assessment of survival and non-relapse mortality after allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation (Scott et al, Blood 2012). Aim: The aim of the present study is to update outcome data of PMF patients included in the original series used to generate the DIPSS model and to assess the DIPSS prediction of survival in PMF patients with a longer follow up. The Institutional Review Board approved the study, and the procedures followed were in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. Patients and methods: This study was performed on 520 of 525 regularly followed DIPSS-PMF patients, as five patients have been lost to follow up after the original publication. Results: Updated median follow up was of 4.1 years (range, 0.1–30.1). At the time of analysis 326 (63%) patients died, of whom 194 due to known causes: 69 AML, 16 non-AML disease progression, 21 bleeding, 17 thrombosis, 33 infections, 38 other. Median survival was 6 years (95% CI: 5.1–6.7). DIPSS stratification allowed different survivals in PMF patients even with a longer follow-up (Figure 1). Hence, to assess the time to DIPSS-category progression, we evaluated the median time spent within each risk group. This estimate revealed that the median time spent in each risk category was: 4.9 years in LR (range, 0–26.7), 2.1 years in Int-1R (range, 0–18.7), 1.7 years in Int-2R (range, 0–13.4), and 0.74 years in HR (range, 0–13.7). To investigate the prognostic role of the DIPSS score on survival, we analyzed the score as a categorical time-dependent covariate in a Cox survival regression model: the hazard ratio of shifting category from LR to Int-1R was 5.0 (95% CI: 2.4–10.6; P Conclusion: The updated analysis shows that the DIPSS model continues to predict survival in patients with PMF. Disclosures: No relevant conflicts of interest to declare.


We address the problem of sharpness enhancement of 3D colored meshes. The problem is modeled with graph signals and their morphological processing is considered. A hierarchical framework that decomposes the graph signal into several layers is introduced. It relies on morphological filtering of graph signal residuals at several scales. To have an efficient sharpness enhancement, the obtained layers are blended together with the use of a nonlinear sigmoid detail enhancement and tone manipulation, and of a structure mask.


Psoriasis has been linked to an increased incidence of coronary artery disease, stroke, myocardial infarctions and cardiovascular deaths. Dyslipidemia, a well‐established risk factor for cardiovascular disease, involves inflammatory pathways that are also implicated in psoriasis. An understanding of the relationship between psoriasis and dyslipidemia may have a substantial clinical impact.


We calculate the leading electroweak corrections to the light neutral Higgs boson production via q (q) over bar' --> W H at the Fermilab Tevatron in both the standard model and the minimal supersymmetric model, which arise from the top-quark and Higgs boson loop diagrams. We found that the leading electroweak corrections can exceed the QCD corrections for favorable values of the parameters in the MSSM, but such corrections are only about -2% similar to -4% in the SM, which are much smaller than the QCD corrections. For the mass region of 90 < m(h0) < 120 GeV, the leading electroweak corrections can reach -20% for large tan beta, and these corrections may be observable at a high luminosity Tevatron; at the least, new constraints on the tan beta can be established.


Blockchain is a revolutionary immutable, shared ledger technology for recording transactions between parties in a secure, chronological chain. By distributing Blockchain databases between multiple linked-nodes, it essentially does not require legal tender nor abiding legal framework by central bank regulation thus, removing intermediaries in transaction. This decentralized approach effectively made the transaction transparent to all connected nodes in the network. In this paper, a preliminary study on the implementation of smart contract in adoption of Blockchain based system will be discussed focusing on agricultural sector in supply chain system, to prevent fraud, track and to verify that by applying smart contract, the state of an event in the supply chain transaction can be autonomously execute when specific rule are meet. A proposed solution is to embed Blockchain technology into agricultural supply chain management system with digital authentication and tagging function to track product's record of ownership and location tracking in Malaysia perspective.


The importance of computer aided engineering in product development processes and research has been increasing throughout the past years. As e.g. energy efficiency and therefore mechanical lightweight structures of new products plays a large role, optimization tools gained more and more importance. Weight reduction can be achieved by a change of the component's design and by selection of adapted materials. Such an improved utilization of material can be implemented only if there is an accurate knowledge of the loads and the conditions on the material. As modern composite materials can make a clear weight reduction possible, appropriate tools and methods are necessary within the design process. Even for isotropic materials, the design of complex parts is not trivial. For the design of composites, additional parameters have to be considered, such as number and thickness of the plies and the orientation of fibers. Hence, design by intuition leads only in few cases to optimal parts. For the determination of the basic layout of a new design topology optimization can be used. It involves the determination of features such as the number, location and shape of holes and the connectivity of the domain. Today topology optimization is very well theoretically studied and also a very common tool in the industrial design process but is limited to isotropic materials. Several approaches for the determination of optimal fiber orientation have been presented in the past e.g. placing the fibers in the direction of the first main stress. Based on a finite element analysis, a method is presented that uses the orientation of main stresses to determine optimal orientations and thickness relations of plies. It is now applicable to complex 3D geometries. The result is a design proposal for the laminate structure (orientation and thicknesses of plies), taking multi-axial load cases into account. To determine a design proposal for complex 3D laminate structures, the application of both methods, topology and fiber optimization, is appropriate. Regarding an independent serial application of topology and fiber optimization it makes sense carrying out topology optimization in a first step and the determination of fiber orientations in a second step. An integrated approach might show even better results in certain cases. For that, we combined topology and fiber optimization in a two-level approach by optimizing laminate structure within each iteration of topology optimization process. In this paper topology and fiber orientation optimization are integrated into a straightforward, automatic way.Copyright © 2008 by ASME


Nowadays, Wireless Body Area Network (WBAN) has become an interesting area of researchers since it can facilitate medical experts to provide a real-time health monitoring. The increasing of elder population is the main driven factor in implementing the medical intelligent services. Application of intelligent medical care system in the disaster environment is also not even less important. In such a vital application system as well as other large bandwidth requirement system, such as a cardiogram and heartbeat monitoring, the communication needs not only the reliability but also the realtime action. Considering the physical layer of IEEE 802.15.6 standard, Ultra Wideband offers an advantage in term of bandwidth availability. In this paper we propose the preliminary investigation of the application of error control code to MAC layer data. Of its both random and burst error correction capability, Reed-Solomon codes have been considered. In our investigation, several MIT-BIH Arrhythmia databases are chosen as input data. The coding scheme is applied to the 250 byte payload data. RS(250, k) which is the shorten version of RS(255, k) defined in GF(256) with variable code rate are investigated. AWGN channel and fading channels are employed to examine code's performance.


Biothermal engineering applications impose thermal excursions on tissues with an ensuing biological outcome (i.e., life or death) that is tied to the molecular state of water and protein in the system. The accuracy of heat transfer models used to predict these important processes in turn depends on the kinetics and energy absorption of molecular transitions for both water and protein and the underlying temperature dependence of the tissue thermal properties. Unfortunately, a lack of tissue thermal property data in the literature results in an overreliance on property estimates. This work addresses these thermal property limitations in liver, a platform tissue upon which hyperthermic engineering applications are routinely performed and a test bed that will allow extension to further tissue property measurement in the future. Specifically, we report on the thermal properties of cadaveric human and porcine liver in the suprazero range between 25 °C to 80 °C for thermal conductivity and 25 °C to 85 °C for apparent specific heat. Denaturation and water vaporization are shown to reduce thermal conductivity and apparent specific heat within the samples by up to 20% during heating. These changes in thermal properties significantly altered thermal histories during heating compared to conditions when properties were assumed to remain constant. These differences are expected to alter the biological outcome from heating as well.


addition and subtraction. Medical journals have insisted since 1988 that authors should give confidence intervals for the differences between means and proportions3 4, but the same expectation does not seem to apply to correlation coefficients. Second, the authors have drawn lines through the four arrays presented in their Figure 1. The lines are not defined but are probably least squares axes. But since they are not regressing the y variable (ESR) on the x variable (Hb), why are lines shown? The result is an illusion of definitiveness and precision whereas the underlying relationships are weak and obscure. Indeed the correlations are so poor that it is difficult to know whether the relationships are even linear and there is evidence that they are heteroscedastic. Third, they place mistaken reliance on significance levels for correlation coefficients: 'In both sexes a significant inverse correlation was demonstrated in all patients and notably also in non-anaemic patients'. If populations are large, say in excess of 100 or thereabouts, correlations are always significant even if very weak and of no importance. In a large population it is almost impossible for two biological variables not to have a statistically significant relationship. It is the strength or weakness of the relationship as indicated by the correlation coefficient and the confidence interval which matter and not the P value. Examination of their Figure 1 shows that the relationship between the ESR and Hb for males with a normal range of Hb is poor (n=381, r=-0.31, 95% CI -0.22 to -0.40) whilst that for the females is negligible (n=619, r=-0.14, 95% CI -0.06 to 0.22). The results indicate that for patients of either sex with normal haemoglobins the relation between the ESR and the Hb is trivial and of no interpretive importance.


Two experiments with 79 monolingual German speaking children between 2.5 and 4.5 years showed a consistent developmental gap between children's memory/inference of what someone wanted and what someone wrongly said or thought. For instance, when John is still playing and mother says, "John should be going to bed," more than 70% answered correctly that mother wanted John to go to bed. However, when mother said, "John is going to bed," about 70% answered wrongly that she thought/said that he was still playing. Correct answers emerged with the mastery of the false-belief task. In German, want sentences (about something to happen) obligatorily take the same grammatical that complement as say or think sentences. Therefore, the observed gap constrains de Villier's (1995) linguistic determinism, which claims that acquisition of the necessary grammatical structures for talking about the mind drives children's ability to think about the mind.


This article studies from different angles the ideological and human relationship between Kazantzakis and the philosopher Nietzsche. The Greek writer was attracted to and identified himself with Nietzsche's figure. In the terrain of ideas, Nietzsche left a visionary impression of protests and exaltations in favor of a festive life, far from a Christian religious shadow according to the moment and society where he lived. Kazantzakis continues that call to freedom and that longing of drunkenness within one's own life and not in an other world.


This paper presents the design of a wideband circularly polarized antenna using a multiple-circular-sector dielectric resonator (DR). The DR is composed of twelve circular-sector DRs with identical central angles of 30∘ but with different radii. A genetic algorithm is utilized to optimize the radii of the twelve circular-sector DRs to realize wideband circular polarization. The proposed antenna is excited using an aperture-coupled feeding technique through a narrow rectangular slot etched onto the ground plane. An antenna prototype is experimentally verified. The measured −10 dB reflection and 3 dB axial ratio (AR) bandwidths are 31.39% (1.88–2.58 GHz) and 19.30% (2.06–2.50 GHz), respectively, covering the operating bands of the following systems: UMTS-2100 (2.145 GHz), WiMAX (2.3 GHz), and Wi-Fi (2.445 GHz). A measured peak gain of 7.65 dBic at 2.225 GHz and gain variation of less than 2.70 dBic within the measured 3 dB AR bandwidth are achieved. In addition, the radiation patterns of the proposed antenna are presented and discussed.


We present a computational study of the magnetic circular dichroism (MCD) spectra in the 200-300 nm wavelength region of purine and its derivative hypoxanthine, as well as of the pyrimidine bases of nucleic acids uracil, thymine, and cytosine, using the B3LYP and CAM-B3LYP functionals. Solvent effects are investigated within the polarizable continuum model and by inclusion of explicit water molecules. In general, the computed spectra are found to be in good agreement with the experimental ones, apart from some overall blue shifts. Both the pseudo-A term shape of the MCD spectra of the purines and the B term shape of the spectra of pyrimidine bases are reproduced. Our calculations also correctly reproduce the reversed phase of the MCD bands in purine compared to that of its derivatives present in nucleic acids. Solvent effects are sizable and system specific, but they do not in general alter the qualitative shape of the spectra. The bands are dominated by the bright π → π* transitions, and our calculations in solution nicely reproduce their energy differences, improving the estimates obtained in the gas phase. Shoulders are predicted for purine and uracil due to n → π* excitations, but they are too weak to be observed in the experiment.


This paper describes automation methods for device driver development in IP-based embedded systems in order to achieve high reliability, productivity, reusability and fast time to market. We formally specify device behaviors using event driven finite state machines, communication channels, declaratively described rules, constraints and synthesis patterns. A driver is synthesized from this specification for a virtual environment that is platform (processor, operating system and other hardware) independent. The virtual environment is mapped to a specific platform to complete the driver implementation. The illustrative application of our approach for a USB device driver in Linux demonstrates improved productivity and reusability.


A patient with acute necrotizing vasculitis is described in whom tests for circulating immune complexes were negative. The patient's serum injected intradermally produced lesions which closely resembled those occurring spontaneously. When the serum was fractionated, the skin‐reactive fraction was found to be associated with IgG, but was of a higher molecular weight than normal IgG. Im‐ munofluorescent studies showed that lesions induced by this active fraction contained IgG and complement in the epidermal basement membrane zone and within the small dermal vessels. We conclude that an immune complex of relatively low molecular weight is present in the active fractions, and capable of initiating the lesions of acute necrotizing vasculitis.


Capitalism (or, in general, the industrial system) advances into commodity frontiers because it uses more materials and energy, therefore it produces more waste, undermining the conditions of livelihood and existence not only of future generations but also of contemporary peripheral peoples, who complain accordingly. Such movements for environmental justice cannot be subsumed under the conflict between capital and labour. They may become a strong force in favour of sustainability and eco-socialism, and also against market-fundamentalism, because conflicts over the use of the environment are expressed in many languages of valuation. For instance, we know that economic growth goes together with increased emissions of greenhouse gases. Some social actors see climate change as an 'externality', the (damage or abatement) costs of which can be calculated in economic terms and compared to the benefits of economic growth. Others will appeal instead to the livelihood and rights of local peoples and/or future generations, or to the sacredness of nature, or to ecological and landscape values measured in their own units, or to the equal dignity of all humans when confronted by 'environmental racism'. Why should all evaluations of a given conflict (e.g. over gold or bauxite extraction in Peru or Orissa, over hydro-electrical dams in the North-East of India, over mangroves in Bangladesh or Honduras sacrificed to shrimp exports, or over the determination of an acceptable level of carbon dioxide emissions by the European Union), be reduced to a single dimension? People who are poor, and whose health and lives are cheap, often appeal to non-monetary languages of valuation. It is only capitalism, with its fetishism of commodities (even fictitious commodities, as in the 'contingent valuation' methods of neoclassical environmental economics), that sees only one way to value the world. Ecological economics rejects such a simplification of complexity, favouring instead the acceptance of a plurality of incommensurable values. By rejecting money-reductionism in favour of value pluralism, ecological economics can contribute to the success of struggles over distribution. For instance, Via Campesina denies that modern agriculture really achieves productivity increases, pointing to its decreased efficiency of energy use, chemical pollution, loss of seed varieties, and loss of local cultures.


We investigate operating performance of Turkish IPOs between January 2010 and December 2017 through well-specified industry – and performance-adjusted models advocated by Barber and Lyon (1996). We find that issuers underperform matched peers in the long-run regardless of the choice of model. Any improvement in performance is either temporary or precedes the issue. We conclude that performance improvements observed around the issue do not extend to long-term, because better profitability could point to earnings management which leads to earnings reversal, while improvements in leverage and liquidity end when proceeds are exhausted.


Infants, children and adults have been shown to track co-occurrence across ambiguous naming situations to infer the referents of new words. The extensive literature on this cross-situational word learning (CSWL) ability has produced support for two theoretical accounts — associative learning (AL) and hypothesis testing (HT) — but no comprehensive model of the behaviour. We propose WOLVES, a formal account of CSWL grounded in psychological processes of memory and attention that explicitly models the dynamics of looking at a moment-to-moment scale and learning across trials. Here we use WOLVES to capture data from 12 studies of CSWL with adults and children, thereby providing a comprehensive account of data purported to support both AL and HT accounts. Moreover, we offer the first developmental account of CSWL, offering insights into how underlying processes change from infancy through adulthood. WOLVES shows that selective attention in CSWL is both dependent on and indicative of learning. Further, learning is driven by real-time synchrony of words and gaze-fixations and constrained by memory processes operating over multiple timescales. Additionally, WOLVES explains a) how performance is impacted by the structure of test paradigms, b) how partial knowledge boosts learning of new words, c) how within- and across-trial competition produces mutual exclusivity; and d) how previously observed individual differences can emerge from learning in the task. The larger theoretical framework in which WOLVES is situated, Dynamic Field Theory, provides neural grounding and ties to other visual processing phenomena like novelty detection and habituation as well as multiple early word learning behaviours.


Spermatocytic seminoma of the testis is a specific clinicopathologic entity and a unique germ cell neoplasm without a homologous counterpart in the ovary or in extragonadal sites. Six spermatocytic seminomas were subjected to a detailed ultrastructural study, and seven spermatocytic seminomas were analyzed using microspectrophotometry. Five classic seminomas were also subjected to microspectrophotometric analysis for comparison. Ultrastructurally, spermatocytic seminoma cells were shown to contain a larger number of cytoplasmic organelles than classic seminoma, but they did not exhibit structures that are diagnostic of cells capable of meiotic division and precursors of acrosomes. Microspectrophotometric analysis confirmed the absence of haploid cells and indicated that spermatocytic seminoma cells have lower modal numbers than classic seminoma cells. The majority of spermatocytic seminomas exhibit hyperdiploid or peritriploid DNA modal values, whereas in classic seminomas these values range from peritriploid to peripentaploid. These findings support the view that spermatocytic seminoma represents a better differentiated variant of seminoma than the classic type, but they oppose the view that spermatocytic seminoma is composed of spermatocytes capable of meiotic division. It is considered that spermatocytic seminoma is composed of cells differentiating in the direction of spermatocytes but which have not yet reached this stage of differentiation.


INTRODUCTION
Obesity is one of the greatest public health challenges world wide and its prevalence has increased during the past 20-30 years. Obesity is related to physical and mental health and increased mortality. There are few evidence-based treatment options for the obese available in Iceland.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
The purpose of this pilot study was to develop a 15 week group program based on Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Appetite Awareness Training for young obese women. The participants were randomly allocated to two groups, A and B, in a convenience sample of 20 women, aged 19-44 with a BMI 30-39.9 kg/m². Group A attended the program while group B served as a control in a crossover design where group B subsequently participated in the program. The effectiveness of the program was evaluated before, during and at the end of the program and at six and twelve month follow-up. Information was collected on body weight, BMI, body fat and body fat mass, blood pressure, cholesterol, triglyceride, high density lipoprotein and 25(OH)D, quality of life (SF-36 and OP scale), symptoms of depression (BDI-II) and anxiety (BAI). Additionally participants completed a questionnaire on demographics and their view on participating in the program was assessed.

RESULTS
Participants reduced their weight (P=0.001), BMI (P=0.001), body fat (P=0.010), body fat mass (P=0.002), diastolic blood pressure (P=0.005) and vitamin D status improved (P=0.008). Symptoms of depression and anxiety decreased (P<0.001 and P<0.004). Quality of life measured with OP scale improved (P=0.006) and the mental component summary (MCS) (P=0.012) of the SF-36 scale. The mean weight loss was 3.7 kg following intervention which was maintained at follow up.

CONCLUSION
"The enjoy eating" program is a promising health promotion approach in the health care sector for obese women to improve mental health, quality of life and loose weight.


On the leg of one of the colossal statues on the facade of the great funerary temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel, in Nubia, Archon son of Amoibichos and Peleqos son of Eudamos, two mercenaries of Greek-Carian origin who militated in the ranks of the Egyptian Army, engrave a five lines inscription in which they recall the salient data of the expedition against the Nubian populations launched by the pharaoh of the XXVI dynasty Psammethicus II between 593 and 592 BC. The different origins of the people who left their mark in this and in the other graffiti on the Abu Simbel temple, explained by the palaeographic and dialectal peculiarities of the texts, confirm what we can learn from other sources, above all Herodotus, on the opening of the Saitic Egypt to external presences, also organised in stable settlements. The reasons for such a reception were certainly of an economic nature, but it is undeniable that for the Egyptians a considerable advantage came also from the possibility of exploiting the new military potentials of the Greek hoplite tactics, contributing to the spread of a mercenary service that encouraged different degrees of ethnic and social integration.


This study examines the relationship between economic factors, particularly tax variables and the growth of underground economy in Indonesia. The study also examines the size of underground economy and loss in tax revenue. The approaches which were selected in this study to estimate the underground economy were based on tax audit and Multiple Indicator and Multiple Cause. The research finding suggests strong evidence that underground economy increases significantly in response to individual tax policy changes and the rise in the unemployment rate. Furthermore, an increase in tax awareness to pay and submit the tax returns were also confirmed would minimize the growth of the underground economy in Indonesia. As a last finding on the study, the size of underground economy in Indonesia between 2000 and 2008 were estimated on average at 20% of GDP.


Weight loss can reduce the increased cardiovascular risk associated with obesity. Pharmacotherapy is a recognized weight loss treatment option; however, cardiovascular safety issues with some previous weight loss drugs raise concerns for newly approved pharmacotherapies. Phentermine is approved for short-term obesity treatment in conjunction with lifestyle modifications, but is commonly used chronically. Topiramate, approved for treating epilepsy and preventing migraines, also induces weight loss. A single-dose combination of low-dose phentermine and topiramate extended-release was recently approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration as an adjunct to lifestyle intervention for the chronic treatment of overweight/obese adults. This review summarizes and evaluates the cardiovascular risk/benefit profile associated with phentermine and topiramate, individually and in combination. Cardiovascular data associated with long-term use of phentermine and topiramate extended-release indicate that this combination may be a safe and effective option for reducing weight in overweight/obese patients at low-to-intermediate cardiovascular risk.


CD40 and CD20 are expressed in several B-cell malignancies and represent attractive targets for therapeutic intervention. The anti-CD20 monoclonal antibody, rituximab, is an approved drug for the treatment of non-Hodgkin's lymphomas. however, the existence of patients with rituximab-resistant disease limits its clinical utility. We have previously reported that the novel, highly potent , fully human antagonistic anti-CD40 monoclonal antibody, CHIR-12.12, generated from XenoMouse ® mice (Abgenix, Inc) has greater anti-tumor activity than rituximab in both rituximab-responsive and rituximab-resistant human NHL models. In this study, we evaluated the potential therapeutic application of combining CHIR-12.12 and rituximab for the treatment of NHL. Namalwa is a Burkitt's lymphoma cell line that gives rise to aggressive rituximab-resistant tumors when implanted in nude mice. Direct treatment of these tumor cells with CHIR-12.12 or rituximab in culture does not affect cell growth when compared to treatment with an isotype control antibody. Although Namalwa cells express more CD20 than CD40 (average of 10,059 CD20 and 3,138 CD40 molecules per cell respectively, P=0.05), when tested for in vitro ADCC killing using human NK cells as effectors, CHIR-12.12 mediated stronger target cell lysis than rituximab (31.43% vs. 14.15%, P in vitro ADCC killing. When CHIR-12.12 and rituximab were tested in a subcutaneous Namalwa xenograft model, CHIR-12.12 alone caused 60% tumor growth inhibition (P=0.028) whereas rituximab alone at 10 and 20 mg/kg did not inhibit Namalwa tumor growth. When tumor-bearing mice were administered rituximab at 10 mg/kg plus CHIR-12.12 at 5 or 10 mg/kg, synergistic anti-tumor activity was observed in a CHIR-12.12 dose-dependent manner. The mean tumor volume reduction in combination groups is 77% with CHIR-12.12 at 5 mg/kg (P=0.0037) and 83% with CHIR-12.12 at 10 mg/kg (P=0.0018), respectively. The potential interaction between CD40 and CD20 molecules was evaluated in vitro by treating the tumor cells with CHIR-12.12 and assessing the change in CD20 expression and vice versa. The result showed no augmentation of one antigen expression by treating the tumor cells with the other antibody. The mechanism of anti-tumor synergy observed in this combination is under evaluation. Taken together, these data suggest that the combination therapy with anti-CD40 CHIR-12.12 and rituximab has the potential to improve patient outcome in B-cell malignancies co-expressing CD20 and CD40 antigens and support the further development of CHIR-12.12 antibody for treatment of B-cell malignancies.


ABSTRACT The ability to measure the activation of the unfolded protein response (UPR) in plants is important when they are exposed to stressful environments. To this end, we developed a unique and versatile biosensor-reporter system to indicate the activation of UPR in living plant cells. The small cytoplasmically spliced intron from the bZIP60 locus was incorporated into the 5' end of the GFP gene, creating the 35S::bZIP60 intron:GFP construct. When this construct is transiently expressed in Arabidopsis protoplasts, the presence of the bZIP60 intron prevents GFP mRNA from being translated under non-UPR conditions. However, when UPR is activated, the IRE1 kinase/ribonuclease splices this intron from the GFP mRNA and its translation proceeds, generating GFP fluorescence. We demonstrated the utility of the system in Arabidopsis leaf protoplasts treated with DTT, which is a chemical inducer of UPR, followed by visualization and quantification using confocal microscopy. The 35S::bZIP60 intron:GFP construct was also expressed in protoplasts from an overexpressor line containing the coding sequence for the UPR-induced, protein folding chaperone, protein disulfide isomerase-9 (PDI9). PDI9 also influences the strength of the UPR signaling pathway. Protoplasts from WT and PDI9 overexpressor plants treated with DTT exhibited significantly higher GFP fluorescence relative to untreated protoplasts, indicating that the bZIP60 intron was spliced from the GFP mRNA in response to activation of UPR. RT-PCR further confirmed the higher induction of PDI9 and bZIP60 (total and spliced) mRNA levels in DTT-treated protoplasts relative to controls. This system can be adapted for monitoring crop stress and for basic studies dissecting the UPR signaling pathway.


The intuitive restructuring role of commercial banks can gradually gain the elements of a purposeful activity, especially with how the banks manage to: overcome the barrier of inadequate information about the real value relations between individual branches, enterprises, etc.; the given non-existence of the consistent economics research and analyses; react positively to the problem of non-existence of a distinct structural national economy related concept, according to which they could orientated otherwise in their crediting; formulate under such condition its own strategic approaches, including not only the actual (bank) partial standpoints, but integrating in the objective behaviour of banks the aspect of meeting the national economic, macroeconomic requirements and connections in the own interests of bank.


Recent advances in solar cells designed to operate under high-level injection conditions have produced devices that are approaching some of the limits imposed by the fundamental band-to-band Auger recombination in Silicon. A device has been optimized to study this recombination by using the fabrication technology developed for point-contact solar cells. Using both steady-state and transient measurements, the recombination rates in high-resistivity Si in the injected carrier density range of 1015to 2 × 1017carriers / cm3were investigated. The coefficient of the recombination, which depends on the carrier density cubed, is found to be 1.66 × 10-30cm6/s ± 15 percent. This result is four times higher than the ambipolar Auger coefficient commonly used in the modeling of devices that operate in this injected carrier density range and lowers the expected limit efficiencies for silicon solar cells.


Protecting the copyrights of multimedia content is necessary to discourage unauthorized distribution or sharing of the content over Internet. Digital watermarking helps in protecting the copyrights while reduces the monetary loss to the content owner. Digital watermarking is the process of inserting owner or customer related unique information as a watermark into a host signal such as audio or speech or image or video without disturbing perceived quality of the host signal. One of the main characteristic of a digital watermarking is to enable accurate watermark detection even if the multimedia content undergoes some changes that may eliminate the watermark from the content. These changes include compression, rate conversion, filtering and noise addition etc. In this paper, we present a watermarking method that can be used for watermarking both audio and speech. Watermark embedding is done using singular values obtained by applying Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) on the structured Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) coefficients, correlation peak to side-lobe ratio (PSLR) metric is used to detect watermark from the correlation output, which is computed between the singular values obtained from the watermarked content and each watermark in the database. This method has been implemented in MATLAB and tested on various audio and speech tracks against various signal processing modifications. The experimental results prove the robustness of proposed method while satisfying the imperceptibility criteria.


This volume brings together sixteen essays on the American Revolution by leading historian Jack Greene. Originally published between 1972 and the early nineties, these essays approach the Revolution as an episode in British imperial history rather than as the first step in the creation of an American nation.In Understanding the American Revolution, Greene explores such problems as Virginia's political behavior during the Revolutionary era; the roles of three cultural brokers, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, and Philip Mazzei; and why the Revolution had such a short half-life as a model for large-scale revolutions. He explores the colonial roots of the political structures that Revolutionary leaders created, and he asks why the American Revolution was not more radical.


Local differential privacy (LDP) is a recently proposed privacy standard for collecting and analyzing data, which has been used, e.g., in the Chrome browser, iOS and macOS. In LDP, each user perturbs her information locally, and only sends the randomized version to an aggregator who performs analyses, which protects both the users and the aggregator against private information leaks. Although LDP has attracted much research attention in recent years, the majority of existing work focuses on applying LDP to complex data and/or analysis tasks. In this paper, we point out that the fundamental problem of collecting multidimensional data under LDP has not been addressed sufficiently, and there remains much room for improvement even for basic tasks such as computing the mean value over a single numeric attribute under LDP. Motivated by this, we first propose novel LDP mechanisms for collecting a numeric attribute, whose accuracy is at least no worse (and usually better) than existing solutions in terms of worst-case noise variance. Then, we extend these mechanisms to multidimensional data that can contain both numeric and categorical attributes, where our mechanisms always outperform existing solutions regarding worst-case noise variance. As a case study, we apply our solutions to build an LDP-compliant stochastic gradient descent algorithm (SGD), which powers many important machine learning tasks. Experiments using real datasets confirm the effectiveness of our methods, and their advantages over existing solutions.


Ribosomal (r)-proteins are generally viewed as ubiquitous, constitutive proteins that simply function to maintain ribosome integrity. However, findings in the past decade have led to the idea that r-proteins have evolved specialized functions beyond the ribosome. For example, the 40S ribosomal protein uS5 (RPS2) is known to form an extraribosomal complex with the protein arginine methyltransferase PRMT3 that is conserved from fission yeast to humans. However, the full scope of uS5's extraribosomal functions, including whether uS5 interacts with any other proteins, is not known. In this study, we identify the conserved zinc finger protein 277 (ZNF277) as a new uS5-associated protein by using quantitative proteomics approaches in human cells. As previously shown for PRMT3, we found that ZNF277 uses a C2H2-type zinc finger domain to recognize uS5. Analysis of protein–protein interactions in living cells indicated that the ZNF277–uS5 complex is found in the cytoplasm and the nucleolus. Furthermore, we show that ZNF277 and PRMT3 compete for uS5 binding, because overexpression of PRMT3 inhibited the formation of the ZNF277–uS5 complex, whereas depletion of cellular ZNF277 resulted in increased levels of uS5-PRMT3. Notably, our results reveal that ZNF277 recognizes nascent uS5 in the course of mRNA translation, suggesting cotranslational assembly of the ZNF277–uS5 complex. Our findings thus unveil an intricate network of evolutionarily conserved protein–protein interactions involving extraribosomal uS5, suggesting a key role for uS5 beyond the ribosome.


There are three historically recognized methods of intra-arterial infusion for oral cancer: Conventional intra-arterial infusion via the superficial temporal artery: Superselective intra-arterial infusion via the femoral artery (Seldinger method), New superselective intra-arterial infusion via the superficial temporal artery. Here we report a recent instance of daily concurrent chemoradiotherapy using a new superselective intra-arterial infusion. A catheter with a curved tip was inserted superselectively into the feeding artery of the tumor via the superficial temporal artery (long-term catheterization has become possible using this method). The patient with T3 tongue cancer was treated by chemoradiotherapy. Radiotherapy (total dose: 40 Gy/4weeks) and superselective intra-arterial infusion chemotherapy using docetaxel (DOC) (total dose: 60 mg/m2/4weeks, 15 mg/m2/week) and cisplatin (CDDP) (total dose: 100 mg/m2/4weeks, 5 mg/m2/day) were concurrently performed daily, followed by surgery, after which no major complication was observed. The clinical effect was complete response (CR), and the pathological effect on the resected tumor after surgery was pathological CR. This method promises to be a new strategy of choice for the treatment of oral cancer.


At the Center for Computational Electromagnetics at the University of Illinois, we recently solved a very-large-scale electromagnetic scattering problem. We computed the bistatic radar cross-section of a full-size aircraft at 8 GHz, involving the solution of a dense matrix equation with nearly 10.2 million unknowns. We regarded this as the "ultimate test" of a massively parallel implementation of the multilevel fast multipole algorithm (MLFMA), called ScaleME. In this paper, we narrate the technical difficulties faced and the experience gained from a very informal point of view. We describe the various methods developed for surmounting each of the obstacles.


The photoisomerisation reaction of 4-methoxy-4'-nitrostilbene in condensed phase was studied by femtosecond pump probe spectroscopy. Transient changes in absorption intensity exhibit oscillations which reflect chirped vibrational motions on the potential surface.


The Nellore mica belt became famous since 1887 as the largest producer and exporter of high-value block mica and mica splittings next only to Bihar through hundreds of underground mica mines in the private sector. Incidental to mining of high-value mica, large quantities of other minerals such as waste mica, quartz, potash and soda feldspar, biotite and vermiculite, and rarer minerals such as garnet, beryl, apatite and coltan extracted were simply dumped around the mines as waste. The importance gained by the Nellore mica belt can be appreciated from the fact that the Mica Mines Labour Welfare Fund (MMLWF) Act, 1946 was the first Act to be enacted in India for the welfare of mine workers in the private sector, while similar Acts to benefit mine workers of other minerals could be enacted only after a lapse of over 25 years.


Meeting the mental health needs of rural populations is challenging internationally, with few methods and scarce data available to inform site-specific planning. We developed a mixed methods approach that integrates Not-for-profit (NFP) organization data in a Geographic Information System (GIS) to explore interrelated understandings of mental health experiences in rural places. Integrating qualitative experience data from online forums with quantitative data from service search and emergency pickup locations via GIS demonstrates how NFP health service data can be ethically sourced, reused, integrated, analyzed, and ground-truthed to explore how mental health is experienced in rural places. This article contributes to the mixed methods literature an ethical approach that utilizes NFP health service datasets to inform research in contexts of data scarcity.


Abstract Across North America, many older adults have expressed their preference to live in their own homes and communities for as long as possible — and to 'age in place'. To address challenges faced by older adults living in the community, home-sharing - an exchange-based intergenerational housing approach, has empowered older adults to 'thrive in place' by providing additional income, companionship, and support with household tasks. In 2018, Toronto HomeShare was launched as an intergenerational home-sharing pilot program (n=22), matching older adults (55+) with postsecondary students intending to simultaneously address social isolation and the affordable housing crisis. In 2019, the pilot was adopted as a funded program in the City of Toronto with over 200 participants. Program results highlight unique benefits and challenges for older adults participating in home-sharing: (1) the capacity for intergenerational engagement to fulfill social needs, and (2) the importance of agency facilitation as a determinant of the experience for older adults. Survey findings indicate 88% of participants reported that participation in HomeShare positively impacted their general well-being, 88% reported improved financial security, 94% reported a delay in the need to move out of their community, and 72% felt that participation in HomeShare prevented the need for institutional care. These findings were used to transition Toronto HomeShare into a fully funded program as well as in the development of a national program. Beginning in January 2021 Toronto HomeShare transitioned to Canada HomeShare and will be scaling the program to Vancouver, Winnipeg, Halifax, Calgary, Montreal and other Canadian cities.