The Capital Asset Pricing Model has been widely used in many countries and modified to several models such as to Three-Factor Pricing Model and Four-Factor Pricing Model. The objective of this research is to compare the Three-Factor Pricing Model and Four-Factor Pricing Model for stocks in Indonesia Stock Exchange LQ45 index. Financial data for the period 2006 to 2011 were obtained from the Indonesia Stock Exchange's website. Fama-French methodology was used to construct equations Three-Factor Pricing Model, while to build a Four-Factor Pricing Model the methodology used was developed by Carhart. The result of using quantitative method and multiple-regression indicates that Four-Factor Pricing Model is fitter than Three-Factor Pricing Model for Indonesia Stock Exchange LQ45 index in that period.


ABSTRACT Lack of triose phosphate isomerase activity (TIM) is of special interest because this enzyme works at an important branch point of glycolytic flux. In this paper, we report the cloning and sequencing of the Kluyveromyces lactis gene encoding TIM. UnlikeSaccharomyces cerevisiae ΔTPI1 mutants, the K. lactis mutant strain was found to be able to grow on glucose. Preliminary bioconversion experiments indicated that, like the S. cerevisiae TIM-deficient strain, the K. lactisTIM-deficient strain is able to produce glycerol with high yield.


The cerebral vascular system stringently regulates cerebral blood flow (CBF). The components of the blood–brain barrier (BBB) protect the brain from pathogenic infections and harmful substances, efflux waste, and exchange substances; however, diseases develop in cases of blood vessel injuries and BBB dysregulation. Vascular pathology is concurrent with the mechanisms underlying aging, Alzheimer's disease (AD), and vascular dementia (VaD), which suggests its involvement in these mechanisms. Therefore, in the present study, we reviewed the role of vascular dysfunction in aging and neurodegenerative diseases, particularly AD and VaD. During the development of the aforementioned diseases, changes occur in the cerebral blood vessel morphology and local cells, which, in turn, alter CBF, fluid dynamics, and vascular integrity. Chronic vascular inflammation and blood vessel dysregulation further exacerbate vascular dysfunction. Multitudinous pathogenic processes affect the cerebrovascular system, whose dysfunction causes cognitive impairment. Knowledge regarding the pathophysiology of vascular dysfunction in neurodegenerative diseases and the underlying molecular mechanisms may lead to the discovery of clinically relevant vascular biomarkers, which may facilitate vascular imaging for disease prevention and treatment.


Mycoplasma pneumoniae-induced acute postinfectious glomerulonephritis has various pathological changes and relatively poor prognosis. It often occurs in children, barely in adults. Currently, no clear treatment guidelines have been established for its treatment using glucocorticoid and immunosuppressive. In this study, we report an adult who admitted to our hospital due to fever and gross hematuria. The patient presented with nephritic syndrome and renal failure and confirmed to have M. pneumoniae infection by serum detection and acute postinfectious glomerulonephritis with a large number of crescents by renal biopsy. He was given glucocorticoid, immunosuppressive agent combined with hemodialysis as well as other supportive treatment. Three months later, his renal function became normal, urine protein level decreased to 0.4 g/24 h, and the C3 complement increased to normal level. In conclusion, glucocorticoid and immunosuppressive treatment should be given to patients with M. pneumoniae-infection induced glomerulonephritis after confirmed to have a large number of crescents by renal biopsy and the treatment could improve the prognosis.


This paper deals with non-pilot distance protection of a double-circuit transmission line. Negative impact of the reactance effect, appearing in measuring a fault loop impedance, on operation of the relay is discussed. An adaptive algorithm allowing one to prevent the relay from mis- or mal-operation caused by the reactance effect is introduced. The algorithm is designed for a standard availability of measurements from one end of the double-circuit line, i.e. when three-phase voltage and current from the faulted line circuit, and additionally zero-sequence current from the healthy line circuit, are provided as the relay input signals. The algorithm is based on changing the position of the distance relay characteristic in such a way that the reactance effect is effectively compensated for. For this purpose the shift vector is determined in on-line relatively simple calculations. The delivered adaptive algorithm has been tested using current and voltage signals obtained from simulation of varies faults using the ATP-EMTP software program. Selected results of the evaluation are presented.


AIM
We compared results of two techniques of haemorrhoidectomy: open Milligan-Morgan (MM) and closed Ferguson (CF) techniques. Length of hospitalization, pain complaints, return to full activity, wound healing time were considered.

METHODS
We included the group of 63 patients: 29 patients (16 women) were randomly allocated to MM operation and 34 patients (15 women) to CF operation. Follow-up study was performed after 2, 4, 24 weeks and six and eighteen months postoperatively.

RESULTS
We did not note any statistically significant differences in relation to hospitalization time 30.9 days (MM) and 30.8 days (CF). Postoperative urine retention was similar: 5 (17.2%) patients (MM) and 7 (20.6%) patients (CF). No differences in the intensity of postoperative pain was observed. Patients returned to work after 293 days (MM) and 342 days (CF) (p = 0.059). We observed no infection of the wound in MM group but in four patients from CF group (11.8%); (p = 0.053). However overall wound healing time was shorter after CF method than after MM method: 233 vs. 274 days, respectively (p = 0.053).

CONCLUSIONS
Our study confirms that the results after MM and CF haemorrhoidectomy are similar. We found a trend towards faster wound healing after CF procedure, however there was a trend towards higher wound infection in that group. There was also a trend towards shorter recovery time in patients after MM operation.


By using a simple solution chemistry approach with polyvinyprrolidone (PVP) as a capping agent, Mn2W(CN)8·xH2O microcrystals with unique morphologies including rice-like, rod, octahedron, square platelet, and hollow-core square platelet have been successfully synthesized. The influence of experimental parameters such as reaction temperature, feed ratio of Mn2+ to PVP, reaction time, and reactant concentration on the morphology and size of Mn2W(CN)8·xH2O microcrystals were systematically investigated. The reaction temperature proved to be a key factor for morphological evolution of the products. It was found that 20, 55, and 85 °C were key points of morphological transformation. A possible growth mechanism of the Mn2W(CN)8·xH2O microcrystals is proposed.


A model of a two-leg spin-S ladder with two additional frustrating diagonal exchange couplings JD , JD ´ is studied within the framework of the nonlinear sigma model approach. The phase diagram has a rich structure and contains 2S gapless phase boundaries which split off the boundary to the fully saturated ferromagnetic phase when JD and JD ´ become different. For the S = 1/2 case, the phase boundary is identified as separating two topologically distinct Haldane-type phases as discussed recently by Kim and co-workers (Kim E H, Fáth G, Sólyom J and Scalapino D J 1999 e-print cond-mat/9910023).


A broadband tunable terahertz filter based on a zone plate is demonstrated in our terahertz time domain spectrometer. The central bandpass frequency covers the whole spectral range of the terahertz wave emitted from a ZnTe emitter, from 0.5 THz to 2.5 THz, and can be tuned continuously by simply moving the zone plate along the terahertz beam path. The peak transmission is about 40% and the bandwidth varies from 0.16 THz to 0.25 THz at different bandpass frequencies when the aperture size is kept constant.


We investigated a focused ion beam nanofabrication technique as a high-resolution patterning method suitable for nanocontact imprinting. Different ion beam currents, milling times, and dwell times are exploited to optimize focused ion beam milling conditions. Single-pixel lines are milled on a silicon master and replicated on polydimethylsiloxane through replica moulding. The profile of the grooves (the depth-to-width aspect ratio) was found to be depth dependent regardless of the beam current and dwell time. The depth of the line cuts was strongly dependent upon beam current and dwell time at a given dose. This technique holds great promise for mass production of nanostructures due to its simplicity and high reproducibility.


The spacecraft synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data processing functions required to produce real-time imagery can be accomplished by time domain correlation in the range and azimuth dimensions. Charge-coupled device (CCD) large-scale integration (LSI) technology may be used to implement range and azimuth correlators that are practical for future on-board applications. An already demonstrated N-stage CCD LSI transversal filter chip, providing N signal-by-weighting coefficient multiplications each clock period, offers a poten-tially attractive basis for achieving the range correlation function. Furthermore, a custom CCD LSI azimuth filter chip, currently under development by the Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), provides a potentially practical means for individually performing all of the necessary parametric corrections and correlation functions to produce complete image lines from range correlated data. By using M such azimuth filter chips in parallel, corres-ponding to the number of pulses coherently integrated in azimuth, a real-time processing capability can be achieved. This paper describes (1) applicable SAR processing principles, (2) typical requirements associated with real-time SAR processing, and (3) a real-time on-board SAR processing implementation approach using the aforementioned CCD techniques for achieving the range and azimuth correlation functions.


The analysis of slope stability over large areas is a demanding task for several reasons, such as the need for extensive datasets, the uncertainty of collected data, the difficulty of accounting for sitespecific factors, and the considerable computation time required due to the size of investigated areas, which can pose major barriers, particularly in civil protection contexts where rapid analysis and forecasts are essential. However, as the identification of zones of higher failure probability is very useful for stakeholders and decision-makers, the scientific community has attempted to improve capabilities to provide physically based assessments. This study combined a transient seepage analysis of an unsaturated-saturated condition with an infinite slope stability model and probabilistic analysis through the use of a high-computing capacity parallelized platform. Both shortand long-term analyses were performed for a study area, and roles of evapotranspiration, vegetation interception, and the root increment of soil strength were considered. A model was first calibrated based on hourly rainfall data recorded over a 4-day event (December 14–17, 1999) causing destructive landslides to compare the results of model simulations to actual landslide events. Then, the calibrated model was applied for a long-term simulation where daily rainfall data recorded over a 4-year period (January 1, 2005–December 31, 2008) were considered to study the behavior of the area in response to a long period of rainfall. The calibration shows that the model can correctly identify higher failure probability within the time range of the observed landslides as well as the extents and locations of zones computed as the most prone ones. The long-term analysis allowed for the identification of a number of days when the slope factor of safety was lower than 1.2 over a significant number of cells. In all of these cases, zones approaching slope instability were concentrated in specific sectors and catchments of the study area. In addition, some subbasins were found to be the most recurrently prone to possible slope instability. Interestingly, the application of the adopted methodology provided clear indications of both weekly and seasonal fluctuations of overall slope stability conditions.


The article reviews the evidence for and against the use of topical corticosteroids following PRK. Two significant problems after PRK are the development of corneal haze and unpredictability of the refractive outcome. These arise from changes in the anterior stroma, the deposition of new subepithelial tissue, and individual variations in the wound healing response. In rabbits, corticosteroids reduced corneal haze by limiting the synthesis of subepithelial collagen. However, in humans, controlled trials showed that corticosteroids had no lasting effect on either haze or regression, and were associated with an unacceptably high incidence of unwanted effects. The difference between species probably related to the relative absence of collagen and predominance of glycosaminoglycans during corneal wound healing in humans. Some human studies have shown rapid changes in refraction occurring within days of stopping or restarting corticosteroids. This suggests that their transient hyperopic effect is probably mediated by changes in the hydration of the tissue. Therefore, the role of corticosteroids in PRK is very limited. There is no justification for their routine use after PRK for low or moderate myopia. If corticosteroids have a role in improving haze or refractive outcome in selected patients, a means for their early identification must be found.


Abstract Nafsat ol-Masdoor is one of the outstanding artificial and technical texts in prose that remained from the Mongol era. This text has not only been mainly written to record historical events, but also, the writer has been intended to explain his biography and problems. The writer uses various literary arts to affect the addressee and one of these components is poetic affection. Affection or sensation as the spiritual background of every artistic work is inner and the most fundamental element in the formation and integration of text. So, studying it seems necessary more than any other element in literary texts. The paper has been aimed at analyzing affection elements in the historical prose of Nafsat ol-Masdoor and studying the poetic nature of the work, in terms of affection presented by it. In the paper, all affectionate approaches have been primarily been studied; then, after a short look at the poetic nature of the historical prose of Nafsat ol-Masdoor, affection element and poetic polishment of it would be studied, in the work. Continuous affection and its high level of coordination in Nafsat ol-Masdoor have made the book exempted from what is considered as pure historical aspect and has created prose poetry so that image element would be completely served in it. The research results have been obtained through library method and based on content analysis.


Traffic congestion wastes time, energy, and causes pollution. In this paper, We propose an application taking advantage of vehicular communications, namely dynamic route planning. In dynamic route planning, the route from a travel origin to its destination, instead of being statically determined at the travel starting time, is periodically recomputed according to real-time traffic information. Estimating future travel time is indeed central to the dynamic route planning problem. Since knowing future travel times cannot be achieved, a major challenge its estimation. In this paper, we consider three estimates for the future travel time: the latest travel time heuristic commonly used in the literature, an improvement of the latest travel time heuristic, and a novel approach based on exploiting the observed correlation between vehicle density in a road segment and travel time. We show through accurate simulation that all these heuristics are able to considerably improve traffic efficiency, with up to 60% traveling time reduction with respect to the case of the static route planning. Among the considered heuristics, the one based on vehicle density is consistently outperforming the others, especially in presence of traffic build up/decongestion situations (e.g., accidents).


Programmers and users of compute intensive scientific appli cations often do not want to (or even cannot) code load balancing and fault tolerance i to their programs. The P BEAM system [PL95, PSLS96] uses a global virtual name space to pro vide migration and rollback transparency in user space for distr ibuted groups of processes on workstations. Applications always use the same virtual n ames for the operating system objects, independent of their current real locat i n. The system calls are interposed and their parameters translated between the nam spaces. Unlike other migration mechanisms, P BEAM does not require the applications to be written for a specific programming model or communication library. The first approach to execute applications in the virtual nam e space was to link the programs with a modified system library. Now, in this pape r w describe design and implementation of a separate system call interposi tion process [Bol97] that accesses the application via the debugging interface. The m ain advantage of this approach is that it can handle even unmodified (e. g. commerci ally bought) application programs. We compare measured performance figures wi th previous similar approaches [MS88, PSLS96] and the modified system library. 1 Motivation and Introduction Networks of Workstations (NOWs) become increasingly attractive as platfor ms for parallel compute intensive applications, because their price/performance ratio i s s gnificantly better than that of massively parallel systems (MPPs) [KHG96, KLB98]. At the time of writing funded by DFG contract SFB 342 at Institute fo r Computer Science, Munich University of Technology Informatik-Bericht 98-02, TU Braunschweig – 1 However, in contrast to MPPs most NOWs operate in multi user mode, the nodes a re shared between applications, and interactive users may not be disturbed by res ource hungry background computations. These constraints make it desirable to use a dynamic load balancing facility that moves work from overloaded to idle nodes, or evacuat es machines that are claimed for other purposes, e. g. interactive users. Additionally, t he high probability of machine failures [LCP91, CCS95] necessitates fault tolerance m easures for long running applications. Programmers and users of compute intensive scientific applications are mainly interested in getting their problem solved. They expect load balancing and fault toler ance as services of the underlying operating or run time system and do not want to care about them in their application code. A solution for these problems is an application tr ansparent migration and checkpointing system. Unfortunately, off-the-shelf workstation pl atforms provide these services only minimally, if at all. In the next section, we give a brief overview of our P BEAM load balancing system for distributed applications on clusters of workstations. Because the basic probl ems of "freezing" the application's state and reviving it afterwards is the same i n both cases, checkpointing or migration, P BEAM, like other systems (e. g. [LS92, Ste96]), handles them both. After that we focus on our approach to apply P BEAM transparently to unmodified binary application programs, and show some performance figures. We conclude aft er a short comparison to related work. For a broader discussion of concepts and more technical details beyond this paper we refer to [PL95, PSLS96]. A shorter version version of this report has been publis hed n the Proceedings of the 2 nd Workshop on Runtime Support for Parallel Processing at the 12th International Parallel Processing Symposium (IPPS'98) [PBL98]. 2 Overview of P BEAM The goals of this project are to provide application transparent process migration and checkpointing / rollback for distributed applications on clusters of workstations, ru ning in user space on unmodified Unix systems. The state of a distributed computation consists of the states of its processes and the states of the communication links between them. We distinguish between a proces s' internal andexternalstate [PL95]. The internal state consists of the address space and register contents, including program counter and stack pointer. The external state comprises the process' relation to the world outside its address space, the allocated res ourc , related processes and the communication peers. A process can manipulate its external s tate only through services of the system kernel. These services operate on objects like fi les, processes, communication endpoints, etc. They are invoked through system calls, whose arguments name the objects to operate on (file names, file descriptors, process num bers, transport addresses, etc.). These names depend on the current location and time of the process execution. If a process is moved from one node to another, or an application is restarted from a c heckpoint, the names for the objects will change. However, to provide transparency, t he apInformatik-Bericht 98-02, TU Braunschweig – 2 Unix Kernel Unix Kernel Application Application virtual name space virtual name space Figure 1 The virtual name space between kernel and application. plication must be able to work with the same names regardless of being moved i n space or time. Therefore, P BEAM introduces a system wide virtual name space for process IDs, transport addresses and file names. A virtual process table and virtual address t abl are maintained for mapping between the virtual and current real names. The applicat ions' system calls are interposed, the parameters are translated from the virt ual into the underlying current real name space, and then the real system service is executed. In the same manner the return values are translated back from the real into the virtual na me space. To avoid name collisions, the processes are assigned globally unique virtual proces s IDs. Through the system call interposition also the changes to the external state are tracked. While interposing system calls with a modified system kernel promises the bes t tran parency and performance, the dependency on a special operating system version is pr ohibitive to let a system be used widely [Jon92, PL95]. An early design decision was to not do any system kernel modifications [PL95, Jon92]. Basically, there are two possibilities to perform the system call inte rposition outside the kernel. Our first approach was a modified system call library. The system call functions are replaced by or wrapped into our own versions [CM92, LS92, Jon92]. It requi res that the application can be linked with the modified library. The other possibility is to control the application processes by aseparate control ler process via the debugging interface. Most modern Unix flavors offer extensions to the "traditional" debugger interface that allow to stop a controlled process just before and after execution of a system call, i. e. when entering respectively exit ing kernel mode [Sun90, FG91]. The main advantage of this approach is that it can work with applications that are available in binary form only, already completely linked, e. g. commercially bought programs. In the P BEAM system we have separated the system call interposition component from the name space administration (the P BEAM demon "pbeamd" in fig. 2), thus making it easy to switch between different versions of both. To explore scalability, we have also implemented a centralized and a distributed version of the name space admi nistration [PSB+97]. Other components of the system are a scheduler and a dispatcher that executes the decisions made by the scheduler. The system call interposition component has three main tasks, it gets its name f rom the first one: (i) During normal operation, it does the name space translations, as desc ribed above. (ii) When doing a checkpoint or migration, it has to capture the internal and external state, save it onto disk, via TCP to a checkpoint server, or to another m achine Informatik-Bericht 98-02, TU Braunschweig – 3


Recent work in the domain of misinformation detection has leveraged rich signals in the text and user identities associated with content on social media. But text can be strategically manipulated and accounts reopened under different aliases, suggesting that these approaches are inherently brittle. In this work, we investigate an alternative modality that is naturally robust: the pattern in which information propagates. Can the veracity of an unverified rumor spreading online be discerned solely on the basis of its pattern of diffusion through the social network? Using graph kernels to extract complex topological information from Twitter cascade structures, we train accurate predictive models that are blind to language, user identities, and time, demonstrating for the first time that such "sanitized" diffusion patterns are highly informative of veracity. Our results indicate that, with proper aggregation, the collective sharing pattern of the crowd may reveal powerful signals of rumor truth or falsehood, even in the early stages of propagation.


Background Orbital exenteration is a disfiguring procedure reserved for life-threatening malignancies. This study examines the clinical course and outcomes of a large series of patients who underwent orbital exenteration for malignant periocular neoplasms. Methods This is a retrospective review of patients who underwent orbital exenteration from 1 July 2005 to 30 June 2015 at four tertiary referral centres in the USA, Australia and Canada. Demographics, indication for surgery, pathology, surgical technique, reconstruction type and outcomes were reviewed. Results Orbital exenteration was performed on 102 patients. The mean age at surgery was 67.5 years. The most common malignant tumours encountered were squamous cell carcinoma, melanoma and basal cell carcinoma. Seventy-six patients (75%) underwent reconstruction with a local myocutaneous flap, twelve with partial-thickness skin grafts (PTSG), or split skin graft, two had a free flap, and one had a dermis fat graft. Sixteen patients had combined procedures of two of the above. Complete removal of the tumour was achieved with clear margins in 81 cases. Of all patients, 72% were alive at 48 months or more. Conclusion The majority of orbital exenterations performed in this series were secondary to periocular malignancies with unsuccessful/insufficient previous treatments. Regional myocutaneous flaps, PTSG, full-thickness skin grafts and dermis fat grafts were all highly effective and durable reconstructive options, and were able to withstand radiation therapy without complications.


Frequent blackouts and unstable supply of electricity show that the  voltage instability problem has been one of the major challenges facing the power system network in Nigeria. This study investigates the voltage stability analysis of the Nigerian power network in the presence of renewable energy sources; FACTS device is used as a voltage controller. A 330kV, 28-bus power system network was studied using the PSS/E software-based Newton-Raphson load-flow technique. The results show that 10 out of the 28 buses had voltages lying below the statutory limit of 0.95 ≤ 1.05 p.u. The application of STATCOM and DFIG devices on two of the weakest buses restored the voltages to acceptable statutory limits. The total active and reactive power losses were reduced to 18.76% and 18.82% respectively.
Keywords: Voltage stability analysis; Integration of renewable energy sources; FACTS controllers, Reactive Power, Power Flow.


The term sand ramp has been used to define a deposit constituted of eolian, fluvial, of hill-slope facies and with paleosols established in topographical obstacle. The occurrence of sand ramp is little known in the Brazilian coast. Sand ramps have been identified in the east band in Santa Catarina Island and studied in the Joaquina and Mole Beach. The present study focuses on facies, paleosols genesis, classification and correlation with global paleoclimatic events. There are still some doubts whether the interpretations can be taken as common properties of sand ramps in the eastern band of Santa Catarina Island. The present article shows the stratigraphy of sand ramp in Mole Beach. It argues if dissipation facies predominate and if there are colluvial paleosols. We established the chronology from the stratigraphic record using the luminiscence method and the correlation of the layers and paleosols with global paleoclimatic events. We have verified the deposit of the sand ramp in Mole Beach shows aeolian, of dissipation beds and paleosols. The aeolian beds are predominant and thicker than the dissipation beds. The paleoclimatic meaning of the dissipation beds is little understood. A paleolatosol and two paleoargisols constituted by fines generated by the alteration of heavy minerals of aeolian beds were individualized. The first should have been developed during the interstadial period (marine isotope stage 5c), while the other two were formed from the beginning to the middle of the current interglacial (marine isotope stage 1). The stratigraphic record of the area showed that the deposit of the sand ramp developed 124,000 yr B.P., between the two maximum last transgressions in the Brazilian coast, being much more recent than once thougth and corresponds with known data of the coastal evolution of the Santa Catarina Island.


With rapid industrial and commercial growth and flourishing population, power demand is increasing rapidly. Modern methods of UHV transmission lines are important to transmit bulk amount of power more efficiently in comparison to earlier methods of transmission. 1200 KV UHV transmission line is India future and therefore forthcoming project to tackle this situation. However as line to line voltage level increases, complexity of the transmission line increases. But, with higher level of line to line voltage, complexity of transmission line increases. ROW is one of the major concerns with transmission lines. Many parameters need to take care in designing; one of them is a magnetic field distribution at surroundings of transmission line. India has initiated to expand its UHV range to 1200kv. Paper suggest magnetic field of three configurations of the 1200KV line. Horizontal and vertical configuration test lines have been installed. Analysis has been done by two methods finite element method and (Method of images) analytical method. FEM is used to solve partial differential equations. Results from both methods have been compared. 3D electric field analysis of configuration also performed. Plotted results are compared with ICNIRP standards and safety limits defined. Adverse effects of excess magnetic field is also discussed. Biological effects of electromagnetic field on people, animals and plants are also discussed. Thus paper aimed at magnetic field calculation and verification with respect to standard. It also helps to utilize less right of way. The subject is under broad development due to its advantages over lower voltage levels and holds significance in future as well.


The genus Flavivirus in the family Flaviviridae consists of many arthropod-transmitted human pathogens, including dengue, yellow fever, Japanese encephalitis, West Nile, St. Louis encephalitis, Murray Valley encephalitis, and tick-borne encephalitis viruses. Treatment options against flaviviral disease are extremely limited, with no effective drugs yet commercially available. Recent advances in virology, synthetic organic chemistry, and the discovery of RNA interference (RNAi), have provided the basis for advances in the development of antisense-based approaches to address flaviviral infections. Oligomers of various antisense structural types, targeted to different locations in the flaviviral RNA genome, have now been used to successfully suppress viral gene expression and thereby inhibit flavivirus replication. Double-stranded RNA, containing viral sequence and designed to induce the endogenous cellular machinery of RNAi, has also been shown capable of potently interfering with flavivirus production and transmission. These studies provide insights into flaviviral molecular biology and the basis for the development of novel therapeutic approaches. The goal of this review is to summarize the findings of many of the significant reports that have appeared on the topic of antisense-mediated strategies for the development of antiviral therapy for flaviviruses.


An analysis of the characteristics of the foreign population living in Spain in 1991 is presented using data from two sources, the 1991 census and the system for regularization of the status of foreign workers, which was brought up to date the same year. The characteristics analyzed include country of origin, current province of residence, and occupation. The differences between the data obtained from the two sources are discussed. (ANNOTATION)


Arteriogenesis, also frequently called collateral formation or even therapeutic angiogenesis, comprises those processes that lead to the formation and growth of collateral blood vessels that can act as natural bypasses to restore blood flow to distal tissues in occluded arteries [...].


We investigate a pricing based approach to control interference from a tier-2 base station (BS) to a tier-1 BS in reversed time division duplex (TDD) multi-antenna systems. The tier-2 BS is being charged for causing interference to the tier-1 BS. Also, the tier-2 BS has to satisfy the signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) targets of its downlink users under a maximum transmission power constraint. Analytical and simulation studies are carried out to understand the behavior of the tier-2 BS for different charges and for different power budgets. Observations from the analyses suggest that the tier-1 BS can perform interference control and/or profit maximization without knowing the downlink channels of the tier-2 BS.


In this dissertation, the author adopted the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and meteorological data from 1982 to 2016 of the typical climate zones in coastal areas of China to analyze the influence of daytime and nighttime warming asymmetric changes in different seasons on vegetation activities during the growing season period according to the copula function theory optimized based on Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC). The main conclusions are as follows: (1) The seasonal daytime and nighttime warming trends of Guangdong, Jiangsu and Liaoning over the past 35 years were significant, and the daytime and nighttime warming rates were asymmetric. In spring and summer of Guangdong province, the warming rate in the daytime was higher than that at night, while, in autumn, the opposite law was observed. However, the warming rate in the daytime was lower than that at night in Jiangsu and Liaoning provinces. There were latitude differences in diurnal and nocturnal warming rate. (2) The daytime and nighttime warming influences on vegetation showed significant seasonal differences in these three regions. In Guangdong, the influence of nighttime warming on vegetation growth in spring is greater than that in summer, and the influences of daytime warming on vegetation growth from strong to weak were spring, summer and autumn. In Jiangsu, both the influences of daytime and nighttime warming on vegetation growth in summer were less than that in autumn. In Liaoning, both the influences of daytime and nighttime warming on vegetation growth from strong to weak were autumn, spring and summer. (3) In Guangdong, Jiangsu and Liaoning provinces, their maximum temperature (Tmax) and minimum temperature (Tmin) and the joint probability distribution functions of NDVI, all had little effect on NDVI when Tmax and Tmin respectively reached their minimum values, but their influences on NDVI were obvious when Tmax and Tmin respectively reached their maximum values. (4) The smaller the return period, the larger the range of climate factor and NDVI, which has indicated that when the climate factor is certain, the NDVI is more likely to have a smaller return period, and the frequency of NDVI over a certain period is higher. In addition, the larger the climate factor, the greater the return period is and NDVI is less frequent over a certain period of time. This research can help with deep understanding of the dynamic influence of seasonal daytime and nighttime asymmetric warming on the vegetation in typical coastal temperature zones of China under the background of global climate change.


Background All-terrain vehicles (ATVs) are associated with substantial risk of injury for children. Despite legislative and other public health efforts, ATV use by children continues and serious injuries are common. We developed and implemented a community-based ATV injury prevention program targeting rural youth designed to improve awareness and change behavior. Methods Focus group input about effective safety themes was combined with data demonstrating injury risk factors to design the campaign. A variety of media and educational strategies were implemented in a high-risk county in rural Arkansas. Surveys documenting reported ATV safety behaviors were conducted in the local public schools prior to and after the campaign in the target county and also in a separate comparison high-risk county where no intervention was undertaken. Results A total of 1,950 survey responses were obtained from youth ages 9 to 18 years. ATV use in the previous year was reported in 1,533 (79%). Household exposure to ATVs among young children was commonly reported, with 220 (14%) reporting use by children ages 0 to 6 years, 697 (45%) reporting use by 7 to 12 year olds, and 797 (52%) reporting use by 13 to 15 year olds. Riding with passengers was reported by 1,267 youth (90.5%). Helmet use was reported in only 226 (15%), and only 825 (54%) wore any protective gear. Reports of ATV safety education and recollection of ATV safety information exposure increased in the intervention county compared with the comparison county. Protective equipment use was also somewhat increased in the intervention county (46% pre; 55% post) relative to the comparison (52% pre; 58% post). Other risk factors did not change in the short-term follow-up. Conclusions ATV use and high-risk behaviors were common in the population of both counties. Preliminary results indicate that the campaign was effective in reaching many of the target youth. Reported safety behavior in the intervention county was not changed in the short term; however, a trend toward increased use of protective equipment was found. Long-term efforts and novel approaches to ATV safety may be required to combat ATV injury.


In statistical dimensionality reduction, it is common to rely on the assumption that high dimensional data tend to concentrate near a lower dimensional manifold. There is a rich literature on approximating the unknown manifold, and on exploiting such approximations in clustering, data compression, and prediction. Most of the literature relies on linear or locally linear approximations. In this article, we propose a simple and general alternative, which instead uses spheres, an approach we refer to as spherelets. We develop spherical principal components analysis (SPCA), and provide theory on the convergence rate for global and local SPCA, while showing that spherelets can provide lower covering numbers and mean squared errors for many manifolds. Results relative to state‐of‐the‐art competitors show gains in ability to accurately approximate manifolds with fewer components. Unlike most competitors, which simply output lower‐dimensional features, our approach projects data onto the estimated manifold to produce fitted values that can be used for model assessment and cross validation. The methods are illustrated with applications to multiple data sets.


The Large Area Telescope (LAT) is the main instrument onboard the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, a space observatory launched in low-Earth orbit on June 11 2008 to survey the highenergy gamma-ray sky. The LAT tracker/converter serves the twofold purpose of converting the incoming gamma-ray into an electron-positron pair and tracking the latter in order to measure the original photon direction. With its 73 m2 of single-sided silicon-strip detectors, read out by almost 900,000 independent electronics channel, it is the largest solid-state tracker ever built for a space application. The tracker system operates on 160 W of conditioned power while achieving a single-plane hit efficiency in excess of 99% within the active area and a noise occupancy at the level of ∼ 1 channel per million. We describe the basic tracker design and its performance throughout the first five years of operation in space.


A novel invertible generalized flux/current switched reluctance machine (SRM) model based on the Fourier series expansion is presented. This model, derived from machine geometry and materials properties, is accurate enough to be used for actual machine representation, and can also be simplified for real time controller applications. Simulation and experimental results illustrate that the proposed modeling approach provides better representation of the SRM than other existing techniques


We previously reported the increased copy number of retrotransposon LINE-1 in neurons of schizophrenia as well as animal models of psychiatric disorders including poly(I:C) model. Exposure of poly(I:C), a chemical analogue of double-stranded RNA, in the prenatal stage of animal induces the behavioral impairment in its later developmental stage. Therefore, this animal model provides the opportunity to elucidate the molecular mechanism of increased LINE-1 retrotransposition during prenatal stage. Here we examined LINE-1 copy number and DNA methylation levels of brain tissues in poly(I:C) mouse. We injected poly(I:C) with various doses to pregnant mice, and found that LINE-1 copy number of pups was increased in a dose-dependent manner. Especially, pregnant mice with consecutive poly(I:C) injection showed most significant increase of LINE-1 copy number. Interestingly, DNA methylation levels of active LINE-1 subfamilies in the adult stage showed subfamily-dependent methylation changes, suggesting the distinctive functional roles among the active subfamilies. PM372 Functional change of serotonin 2C receptors in N-Methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) receptor hypofunctional condition Takahiro Tsutsumi, Ken Inada, Jun Ishigooka, Masahiko Kawano, Takaaki Kawano, Hiroyuki Muraoka, Hidehiro Oshibuchi, Makiko


Abstract : The ability to estimate a probability density function from random data has applications in discriminant analysis and pattern recognition problems. A resistive grid kernel estimator (RGKE) is described that is suitable for hardware implementation. The one-dimensional linear RGKE is compared to a kernel estimate using Gaussian kernels, and simulations are presented using both continuous and quantized data. The nonlinear form of the RGKE is shown to have desirable properties, such as the ability to detect discontinuities in the density function.


In vitro chemosensitivity was evaluated by bioluminescence ATP assay in 12 human tumors including 7 gastric cancers and 5 colo-rectal cancers. Tumor fragments minced with scissors were exposed to 6 kinds of antitumor drugs: carboquone, adriamycin, aclacinomycin A, mitomycin C, cisplatin and 5-FU at peak plasma concentration or ten times peak plasma concentration. After 3 days at 37 degrees C, each tumor fragment suspension was washed with phosphate-buffered saline, boiled for 3 min and assayed for its intracellular ATP level using the luciferin-luciferase method. The ATP level of the drug-untreated group was 6.01 +/- 4.55 X 10(-10) moles/mg tissue protein in gastric cancers and 9.77 +/- 8.46 X 10(-10) moles/mg tissue protein in colo-rectal cancers. The percentages of cases in which the ATP level was reduced to less than 50% by the antitumor drugs were 70% for carboquone, 11% for adriamycin, 30% for aclacinomycin A, 45% for mitomycin C, 13% for cisplatin and 18% for 5-FU at peak plasma concentration, and 90% for carboquone, 78% for adriamycin, 80% for aclacinomycin A, 82% for mitomycin C, 63% for cisplatin and 82% for 5-FU at ten times peak plasma concentration. The test for chemosensitivity prediction is thus available at peak plasma concentration of antitumor drugs in ATP assay.


There has been significant progress on arc-flash research in recent years, but there has been little focus on how the internal configuration of equipment affects the incident energy released. The relationship between low voltage motor control center (MCC) unit configurations and incident energy exposure resulting from an arc flash is examined in this study. Testing was conducted using actual MCC structures and units. The design of experiment methodology was used to analyze several MCC configuration variables, including unit type, unit size, percent fill of unit, power wire size and length, location of the unit within the structure, and their relationships to incident energy as well as arcing duration and arcing current. The results from 24 arcing tests were analyzed and the magnitude of incident energy measured during the events was observed to be related to the percent fill of components within the units, and properties of interior unit surfaces.


An enantioselective, catalytic aza-Sakurai cyclization of chlorolactams has been developed as an efficient entry into indolizidine and quinolizidine frameworks. Structure-enantioselectivity relationship studies and mechanistic analysis point to a dual role of the catalyst wherein the thiourea moiety of the catalyst is engaged in both anion binding and Lewis base activation of a substrate.


The basic reservoir flow unit in shallow-marine depositional systems is the parasequence since it is bounded top and base by regionally extensive shales that can form barriers to fluid flow. As a result, it is the key stratigraphic unit requiring parameterization for both exploration and development purposes. A database comprising 3385 measurement points from 385 parasequences from 28 locations, and 16 different passive margin and foreland basins was compiled from outcrop and subsurface data. Analysis of the data suggests that a mean value for parasequence thickness is 17 m (56 ft); mean parasequence sandstone fraction is 0.60, and mean shoreface sand-body thickness is 8 m (26 ft). The mean maximum-parasequence-progradation-distance is 23 km (14 mi). The results indicate that there are two critical controls that can significantly vary the parameter values stated above: (1) stacked-shoreline trajectory or systems tract and (2) shelf gradient. The analyses indicate that shelf gradient is the most important parameter that has a first-order control on parasequence properties. Shelf gradient in the ancient can be approximated to high-gradient or low-to-moderate-gradient categories via analysis of parasequence thickness change versus progradation distance from wells, mean parasequence thickness, or mean progradation distance from seismic attribute data. Parasequence progradation distance is to some degree predictable if stacked-shoreline trajectory, shelf-gradient category, and mean parasequence thickness are known. The data suggest that there are two types of parasequences: accommodation-dominated and supply-dominated parasequences. The progradation distance of these parasequences are controlled by delta autoretreat mechanisms modulated by the combination of fifth- and fourth-order Milankovitch-scale, orbitally forced, climate-change–driven, sediment-supply cycles interacting with eustatically and tectonically driven accommodation cycles.


We present a complete overview of routing protocols, routing algorithms, path planning, and cloud deployment for vehicle navigation in several fields of study in this article. In this article, we compare several approaches and algorithms with the goal of identifying the best feasible ones based on the type of application being utilized. In general, navigation of vehicles will be based on models and methods. Hence in this paper each characteristics are examined in detail and the research has been done accordingly. Under each characteristic, performance evaluation criteria are separately analysed. Questions are also provided for which the literature review serves as a form of discussion, according to the research challenge and criteria. For path planning, node-based as well as traditional algorithms are considered as the best choices. Similarly, the performance is significantly improved when using hybrid routing protocols and route planning methodologies that prefer graph based techniques. It has been observed that, a number of future research directions such as routing algorithm with queuing theory and path planning with critical link methods also serve the probable domains. This work is a concise comprehensive study of the various characteristics of a vehicle with respect to navigation. A comparison of techniques, algorithms and methods by using the standard performance criteria has also been elaborated.


Mountainous road construction is one of the most difficult and challenging problems in geotechnical engineering. Geometrical complexities and geotechnical conditions make them different from many other urban projects. Retaining wall system is a principal part of these projects. Reinforced Earth Wall system can be considered as an appropriate option for mountainous road construction. In this case history, access road construction of the LARSI building (Shemshak-Iran) is discussed. Shemshak is a tourist town which is located in southern hillsides of the Alborz Mountains. Therefore, the access road is an essential component particularly in cold seasons. Nine terraced levels of the reinforced earth wall were designed according to the geometrical considerations. The walls' reinforcements were evaluated by TALREN 4 V.2.0.3. There had been some limitations, etc. which resulted in many challenges during the construction. This project was constructed in six months.


CONTEXT
Although numerous reports of mutations in GH1 and GHRHR (GHRH receptor) causing isolated GH deficiency (IGHD) have been published, mutations in GHRH itself have not been hitherto reported but are obvious candidates for GH deficiency.

OBJECTIVE
The aim of this study was to identify mutations in GHRH in a large cohort of patients with IGHD.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
DNA was isolated from 151 patients diagnosed with IGHD at national and international centers. Seventy-two patients fulfilled all the following criteria: severe short stature (height sd score ≤ -2.5), low peak GH after stimulation (peak ≤ 5 ng/ml), eutopic posterior pituitary lobe, and absence of mutations in GH1 and GHRHR and therefore were strong candidates for GHRH mutations. The coding sequence and splice sites of GHRH were amplified by PCR with intronic primers and sequenced.

RESULTS
In five of 151 patients (four of 42 from Brazil), the GHRH c.223 C>T, p.L75F change was identified in heterozygosity. This variant has been previously reported as a polymorphism and is more frequent in African than European and Asian populations. Six allelic variants (five novel) that do not predict change of amino acids or splice sites were identified in five patients: c.147 C>T, p.S49S, IVS1 -70 G>A, IVS1 -74 T>C, IVS3 -47 del1, and IVS3 +7 G>A /IVS3+41 G>A. No functional mutations were found in this cohort.

CONCLUSIONS
GHRH mutations were not identified in a selected cohort of patients with IGHD, suggesting that, if they exist, they may be an extremely rare cause of IGHD. Other, as-yet-unidentified genetic factors may be implicated in the genetic etiology of IGHD in our cohort.


Applications of item response theory frequently require estimates of only the item parameters. In this paper, a reparameterization of the logistic model is developed which involves substituting an implicit function of the number-right true score for ability. The number-right true score needs only to be computed once since the observed number-right score is a good estimator of it. This reparameterization avoids estimating each examinee's ability in every stage of the estimation procedure. An estimation method containing this reparameterization was devised and incorporated into a modified version of the LOGIST computer program. The procedure, called One-Stage, was tried out on artificial and real data. The results on the artificial data were compared to the true values and to the estimates from the operational LOGIST program. The results on the real data were compared to the estimates from the operational LOGIST program.

In the comparisons of the parameter estimates from One-Stage and LOGIST to the true values for the artificial data, One-Stage did not estimate the item parameters as well as LOGIST. One potential benefit of this procedure, the reduction in computer costs due to not estimating an ability for each examinee in each stage, was not realized when the procedure was applied to real data with a lot of not reached items.


This study aims to investigate the changes in output permeate flowrate of ultrafiltration hollow fibres with double - end configuration. Different parameters such as packing density, feed pressure and location of feed inlet are studied using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). This study adopts the numerical approach to predict how each of the factors influence the output (i.e. flowrate) of the filtration process. Preliminary studies were done to validate the numerical predictions against existing literature, showing good agreement with available data. The effect of packing density on hollow fibre with double-end configuration was then investigated. The ratio of allowable spaces between fibres, denoted by e, was used to quantify the packing density. 2 sets of numerical model for double-end hollow fibre with e ranging from 0.2 to 0.8 were simulated for fibre length of 1 metre and 2 metre respectively. Results showed that a higher e value used in for the packing of hollow fibres lead to higher permeate flowrate. However, this increment stagnates even as e is increased beyond 0.6. Other factors such as inlet positioning and fibre length, which affects feed pressure distribution were also investigated. Simulation results concluded that feed pressure distribution and output flowrate varies depending on where the inlet is situated. The proposed new inlet located along the fibre length also improves the uniformity of the feed pressure distribution along hollow fibres. This makes positioning of the inlet crucial to the overall performance of the ultrafiltration module.


Laser sintering technology is being widely applied in different industries. There is, however, a resistance to the application of this technology and the applications are limited due to the nature of the process. For example, the surface roughness of the final laser sintered product is often a major technical issue. The disadvantages in one area can probably displayed as the advantages in another area. The use of laser sintering technology in the design and manufacture of heat exchangers is such an example. In the areas of thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid mechanics, the enhancement of heat transfer is the key research topic. Heat exchangers are commonly used in engineering applications from power generation to computer processors. Some types of heat exchangers, such as finned-tube heat exchangers, helical internal or external tube heat exchangers and double tube heat exchangers, are recommended in many areas. In mass and volume critical applications such as aerospace, aeronautic, marine, biomedical, and computer engineering, the need for weight and volume efficient designs is paramount. Unfortunately these heat exchangers are difficult to be manufactured in the traditional ways, and the heat transfer is restricted by the existing contact thermal resistance between different assembles and the required rough surface is always beyond the control. The use of laser sintering technology in the design and manufacture of some kinds of heat exchangers is presented in this paper. The results show that the laser sintering technology is the feasible way to manufacture some high quality heat exchangers to reach high surface area to volume ratios through the use of unique geometries and some specific heat exchangers can be successfully manufactured, meanwhile the challenges facing the laser sintering are also identified for further investigation.


Transesophageal electric stimulation (TES) is a method of non-invasive cardiac electrophysiology studies. The aim of the study is to evaluate the possibility of TES in the research into atrio-nodal conductions. The scientific innovation is in a non-invasive analysis of the heterogeneity of the refractory period of atrio-nodal connections. 249 patients were examined. By the nature of AV-conduction curve the patients were divided into 2 groups. The first group (109 persons) consisted of the patients with diagnosed transition point (TP). The second group included 140 people, whose V1-V2 dependence of A1-A2 was close to a line —without a TP. It was discovered that the differences in atrio-nodal conductions depend on the effective refractory period of atrioventricular connection. A low index of ERP atrio-nodal conduction is more physiological and accompanied (ERP) by the absence of the increase heart rate under the most further increase the frequency atrial stimulation. A high index of ERP can be caused by different reasons. This variant of atrio-nodal conductions is followed by less favorable changes in hemodynamics.


The growth of the Internet has made publishing fan-made works based on copyrighted material cheaper and easier, while at the same time making them accessible to a larger audience than ever before. This, in turn, has encouraged more fans to try their hand at writing fan fiction. The copyright holders (or at least some of them), on the other hand, are less than thrilled. However, whether the fans' activities are actually against the law is a matter of debate and the copyright holders' measures against them sometimes target works which are actually allowed in the eyes of the law. This work deals with fan fiction from a legal and moral point of view. Are fan fictions copyright violations or are the copyright holders just being petty and unreasonable by opposing non-commercial use of their property? Is it possible to regulate this matter in a way satisfactory to both sides - allowing the fans to write and publish while protecting the copyright holders' rights? Are legal sanctions against fan fiction useful or maybe more harmful to the copyright holder than to the fan fiction writer, as the former risks alienating his fans by taking measures against their activities? Is the self-regulation within the different groups of fan fiction writers sufficient to protect the author's right not to have his work distorted? Many of these questions cannot be answered clearly, as every case must be decided on separately. At present it appears that the best solution is to leave the situation as it is, however inefficient that may be.


Most studies of song learning have been conducted in the laboratory, and thus little is known about how song learning is affected by ecological variables in nature. Taking an ecological perspective, we studied song learning and territory establishment in a sedentary population of song sparrows (Melospiza melodia). We examined the song repertoires of an entire cohort of males (41 subjects) hatched in 1992 and compared them to those of potential song tutors (adults who were present in the young birds' first year). We found that a young bird learns songs from multiple tutors who were neighbors in his first year and usually establishes a territory among or near these tutors. The degree to which tutors influenced the repertoires of the young birds varied greatly. Adult males who survived into 1993 tutored more songs than those who did not survive, supporting the hypothesis that a young male's repertoire is influenced by social interactions with adults continuing beyond the classical sensitive period of the natal summer. The final repertoire of a young bird in most cases was weighted toward one of his tutors with whom he continued to interact, as an immediate neighbor, into his first spring. We found no correlations between potential measures of male quality or vigor and degree of tutor influence.


Argininosuccinate lyase (ASL) belongs to the liver-based urea cycle detoxifying ammonia, and the citrulline-nitric oxide cycle synthesising nitric oxide (NO). ASL-deficient patients present argininosuccinic aciduria characterised by hyperammonaemia and a multi-organ disease with neurocognitive impairment. Current therapeutic guidelines aim to control ammonaemia without considering the systemic NO imbalance. Here, we observed a neuronal disease with oxidative/nitrosative stress in ASL-deficient mouse brains. A single systemic injection of gene therapy mediated by an adeno-associated viral vector serotype 8 (AAV8) in adult or neonatal mice demonstrated the long-term correction of the urea cycle and the citrulline-NO cycle in the brain, respectively. The neuronal disease persisted if ammonaemia only was normalised but was dramatically reduced after correction of both ammonaemia and neuronal ASL activity. This was correlated with behavioural improvement and a decrease of the cortical cell death rate. Thus, the cerebral disease in argininosuccinic aciduria involves neuronal oxidative/nitrosative stress not mediated by hyperammonaemia, which is reversed by AAV gene transfer targeting the brain and the liver, acting on two different metabolic pathways via a single vector delivered systemically. This approach provides new hope for hepatocerebral metabolic diseases.


Utilising daylight is a key part of sustainable architecture. This research seeks to integrate "typical" architectural methods with computational tools, utilising optimisation, simulation, and analysation. It addresses the question "How can daylight-focussed computational tools be integrated with the design of a Civic Library to incite activity on site?" The aim is to generate insight on how computational design can be used in the future to effectively meet specific performance goals of a design. The objective of this research is the design of a library in Te Ngakau Civic Square, Wellington, New Zealand. The design begins with integrating physical drawings, physical modelling, and digital massing, produced by an optimisation tool. It takes on different design approaches to continuously influence the design, reacting to site factors, simulation results, and intuitive decisions. After each design phase, it reflects on both the design and the methodology. It concludes that although there are some disadvantages in integrating computation with other methods, simulation and optimisation tools ultimately provides more insight in reaching performance goals.


Proposes a coordinated defense scheme of distributed denial of service (DDoS) network attacks, based on the backward-propagation, on-off control strategy. When a DDoS attack is in effect, a high concentration of malicious packet streams are routed to the victim in a short time, making it a hot spot. A similar problem has been observed in multiprocessor systems, where a hot spot is formed when a large number of processors access simultaneously shared variables in the same memory module. Despite the similar terminologies used here, solutions for multiprocessor hot spot problems cannot be applied to that in the Internet, because the hot traffic in DDoS may only represent a small fraction of the Internet traffic, and the attack strategies on the Internet are far more sophisticated than that in the multiprocessor systems. The performance impact on the hot spot is related to the total hot packet rate that can be tolerated by the victim. We present a backward pressure propagation, feedback control scheme to defend DDoS attacks. We use a generic network model to analyze the dynamics of network traffic, and develop the algorithms for rate-based and queue-length-based feedback control. We show a simple design to implement our control scheme on a practical switch queue architecture.


The integrated solar energy-driven chiller combined cycle system (SCCC) has a problem of low annual solar energy utilization. The solar thermal efficiency and power output of the traditional integrated solar combined cycle system (ISCC) are limited by the integrated solar mirror field area and Rankine cycle efficiency. This paper presents a new system, on the basis of the combined cycle system with the three pressure HRSG with reheat, the solar energy is integrated into the chiller for cooling the compressor inlet air of gas turbine and the heat recovery steam generator (HRSG) for increasing the power output simultaneously. The Aspen Plus, TRNSYS and EBSILON softwares are applied in this paper to build the models of the overall system. The solar thermal efficiency, annual solar power generation and annual solar thermal efficiency are used to evaluate the performances of the new system, the traditional ISCC system and SCCC system. During the summer solstice, the proportions of solar energy used in cooling and heating are set as 40% and 60% in new system, respectively. The research results show that the new system has a higher power output (406.37MW), thermal cycle efficiency (53.61%) and solar thermal efficiency (48.85%) compared with the traditional ISCC system (385.63MW, 51.67%, and 24.43%, respectively) at the design point. The new system can regulates the proportions of solar energy used in the chiller and HRSG based on the monthly meteorological data, in order to maximize the annual solar energy utilization and annual solar power generation. The new system's annual solar energy utilization hours (2071h) and solar power generation (25.863GW·h) are far greater than those of SCCC system (1498h, 18.185GW·h, respectively). Therefore, the proposed new system with the simultaneous integrations of solar energy with both the chiller and HRSG not only greatly increases the utilization rate of solar energy, but also has the significant thermodynamic advantages.


On July 31, 1979 the AFA law suit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture was finally settled. Filed two years and four months earlier, the case was dismissed ''with prejudice." This is a legal way of saying everybody wins, or at least nobody loses face. It was a victory for AFA in that we achieved our goal: a change in USDA's policy regarding the handling of birds suspected to have Exotic Newcastle Disease, They retained their right to destroy birds known to have the disease as well as any flocks with which infected birds had direct contact. These past two years saw a great many hours of meetings, phone conversations, court room appearances, and "off the record" discussions on the part of AFA officers, lawyers, and individual members to reach this successful outcome. The single most important benefit of this legal action, however, was not the final court order, but the fact that we, the people concerned with birds of all kinds, finally now have a solid working relationship with the government. The AFA lawsuit got their attention. The fact of whether we won or lost became almost secondary to the relationship that was developing with USDA. They started to listen to us and began to understand our concerns and see that these concerns were legitimate. Many individuals working for APHIS (Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service) all over the country had shared our feelings for a long time bur could not easily voice their dissention until we gave them the "support" by presenting ourselves in such large and noisy numbers, both in the courtroom and elsewhere. APHIS officials took a much closer look at us and realized that our interests and the government's interests were very closely aligned. By working with AF A on exotic bird matters, the interests of the United States would be better served. It is a double-edged sword. We who were in the thick of the battle began to comprehend, however slowly at first, the magnitude of the problem facing APHIS. Their mission is to make the country safe for chickens. No matter how much they would like to change that mission to include other birds, they cannot. Exotic Newcastle must be kept out of the United States at any cost. If it became established it would dramatically affect the food supply. It would seem, therefore, that if APHIS is going to help us make the country safe for exotic birds (and their owners), we must help APHIS keep Newcastle out of the U.S. Fully comprehending what this means leads to an understanding of why, in recent months, AFA has cooperated wholeheartedly with APHIS on such things as locating stolen birds, etc. Our cooperation with APHIS and APHIS with AFA has become an outstanding example of how government and private industry can work together to solve common problems and avoid conflicts before they arise. Dr. Chaloux and his staff are to be complimented for the efforts they have made toward this end. So now we have a new Newcastle policy. What does this mean for the future? First of all we can be sure there will be Newcastle in our future. The most likely times to expect outbreaks are during the months of January-April. The Quarantine stations are being diagnosed positive for VVND (Exotic Newcastle Disease) at the rate of about three stations per month. This is further confirmation of the world-wide spread of disease. Any outbreaks that affect our aviaries are not likely to come from this source, however. We are likely to get VVND this year from our old friends, the Double Yellow Heads, the Yellow Napes, the Half-Moons, the parrotlets, the Mexican Red Heads, and other birds commonly imported by A. Smuggler. When you buy a bird that came from A. Smuggler and it is diagnosed positive for VVND what can you expect under the new policy? First, if there is an outbreak, the AFA Emergency Operations Plan may be used to notify all AF A members and member clubs. Any special instructions will be passed on to you at that time by telephone. Second, be thoroughly familiar with the new USDA policy: A bird coming from an infected premises will be purchased by USDA and tested for VVND. The remainder of the flock will be quarantined and possibly swabbed (Cloacal swabs can be used for VVND tests without killing the birds). If the bird from the infected premises tests negative, the quarantine on your flock will be lifted. If the bird tests positive, your flock will be "depopulated" and you will receive an indemnification based on the market value of your birds. Your birds will not be destroyed unless or until that original bird is proven to have VVND. There may be some exceptions in extreme circumstances where they can determine epidemiologically that the flock is certain to be infected. (See Exhibits B & C below). Third, keep your AF A State Coordinator informed of all actions taken by USDA regarding your flock. If the local APHIS agent or Task Force personnel do not seem to be following the above outlined policy, notify your State Coordinator or an AFA officer immediately and action will be taken. If Task Force personnel do not seem to be using necessary sanitation procedures before coming onto your property, deny entry and contact AFA. Now, for everyone's records, we are reprinting the final legal settlement as filed in U.S. District Court, Central District of California. Please read it through and then keep it in a safe place for reference when A. Smuggler's bird comes onto your property. Exhibits "B" and "C" are the result of our reluctance to accept a policy that would permit depopulation based on "epidemiological" evidence. Our fear was that one individual epidemiologist could arbitrarily decide that a flock was infected without laboratory proof. Dr. Atwell's responses we find to be satisfactory, but if things do not seem to be going the way he describes, notify AF A immediately.


The socio-ecology of Petauroides volans has been studied for subtropical and temperate populations, but not for the northern tropical subspecies, Petauroides volans minor. Data on the effects of a high population density on home ranges, time budgets and food-tree use were obtained by means of radio-telemetry. Three techniques were used to estimate home-range area (kernel, MCP and harmonic mean) and the kernel method was preferred. Estimates of home-range area (defined by the 95% kernel) gave mean values of 2.5 and 1.3 ha for males and females, respectively. Broad overlap of home ranges of males was observed, which has not been reported previously for populations of P. volans. Behaviour patterns for males and females were similar to those in previous studies, although the mating system may differ, possibly because of the high population density. Dietary patterns were similar to those previously reported for this species, the most important food items being young leaves and flower buds of particular eucalypt species, notably Eucalyptus acmenoides.


(1) Background: Globally there is a vast legacy of contaminated sites from past industrial, commercial and military activity, waste disposal, and mineral extraction. This review examined the extent to which the remediation of contaminated sites reduces health risks to new and existing populations. (2) Methods: Standard academic databases were searched for papers that reported on health-related outcomes in humans following remediation and redevelopment of contaminated sites. Title/abstract screening, followed by full-text screening identified sixteen papers that met the eligibility criteria. (3) Results: Most studies were set in the United States of America and reported changes in blood lead concentrations in children, following soil remediation and, in some cases, public health campaigns to reduce exposure. Two further studies examined the impacts of remediation on soil contaminated with chromium and sediments contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). (4) Conclusions: Overall, the evidence suggests that remediation via removal, capping, and replacing soil, and planting vegetation is effective at reducing concentrations of lead and chromium in blood and urine in children. There is also evidence that sediment dredging can reduce PCB concentrations in umbilical cords in infants. Study designs are relatively weak and some recommendations are provided for those wishing to examine the health impacts of remediation.


The International Atomic Energy Agency's third standard problem exercise (SPE-3) is simulated with the RELAP5/MOD2 and RELAP5/MOD3 computer codes. The SPE-3 consists of the simulation of the transient resulting from an 11.9% break in the hot collector of the steam generator (primary-secondary leak) of the PMK-NVH test facility. The predicted scenario is compared with the experimental data. Generally, a reasonable agreement between the code predictions and experimental data is obtained. One important calculated parameter that demonstrates deviation for the data is the break mass flow rate. The RELAP5/MOD3 predictions did not display significant differences. This paper is a part of an international effort for codes/benchmarks.


Objectives : This study was fulfilled in order to support the hypothesis which atopic dermatitis can be treated better by therapy of liver rather than of spleen and stomach from the view point of Korean Medicine, or not. Methods : From October to December in 2013, 12 children from elementary school participated in this therapy and prevention program. We divided into 3 degrees, for example, light, moderate, and severe symptoms. They were treated by 3 step therapy consisted of detoxification, treatment, and supplement to both Qi and blood. Results : After 3 months of therapy, we discovered that their symptoms had been improved to 11 among 12 children(91.7%). Conclusions : From the result, we verified the hypothesis atopic dermatitis can be treated better by therapy of liver rather than of spleen and stomach in Korean Medicine.


Much attention has been paid to two interacting RNA molecules involved in post‐transcriptional control of gene expression. Although there have been a few studies on RNA‐RNA interaction prediction based on dynamic programming algorithm, no grammar‐based approach has been proposed. The purpose of this paper is to provide a new modeling for RNA‐RNA interaction based on multiple context‐free grammar (MCFG). We present a polynomial time parsing algorithm for finding the most likely derivation tree for the stochastic version of MCFG, which is applicable to RNA joint secondary structure prediction including kissing hairpin loops. Also, elementary tests on RNA‐RNA interaction prediction have shown that the proposed method is comparable to Alkan et al.'s method.


Social environments that are extremely enriched or adverse can influence hippocampal volume. Though most individuals experience social environments that fall somewhere in between these extremes, substantially less is known about the influence of normative variation in social environments on hippocampal structure. Here, we examined whether hippocampal volume tracks normative variation in interpersonal family dynamics in 7- to 12-year-olds and adults recruited from the general population. We focused on interpersonal family dynamics as a prominent feature of one's social world. Given evidence that CA1 and CA2 play a key role in tracking social information, we related individual hippocampal subfield volumes to interpersonal family dynamics. More positive perceptions of interpersonal family dynamics were associated with greater CA1 and CA2/3 volume regardless of age and controlling for socioeconomic status. These data suggest that CA subfields are sensitive to normative variation in social environments and identify interpersonal family dynamics as an impactful environmental feature.


We have characterized the effect of the hepatomitogen epidermal growth factor (EGF) on the expression of the cellular protooncogenes c‐Ha‐ras and c‐myc in short‐term (48 hours) primary hepatocyte culture. mRNA concentrations of both protooncogenes increased dramatically in nonproliferating cultures and in the absence of EGF, suggesting that the isolation procedure or the culture conditions may trigger expression of these genes or potentially increase the lifetime of transcripts in vitro, regardless of the presence of a mitogen. In cells treated with EGF, a distinct peak in c‐Ha‐ras expression was seen 24 hours after EGF treatment. This coincided with the onset of DNA synthesis. No such peak was seen in cultures not treated with EGF. The c‐myc mRNA concentrations were increased relatively equally in all cultures with or without the addition of EGF. These data show a differential response of these two cell‐cycle‐associated genes to the culture conditions and EGF stimulation. It also demonstrated that enhanced gene expression for Ha‐ras and myc in hepatocytes can occur in the absence of cell proliferation.


I carry out in this paper a philosophical analysis of the principle of excluded middle (or, as it is often called in the version I favor here, principle of bivalence: any meaningful assertion is either true or false). This principle has been criticized, and sometimes rejected, on the charge that its validity depends on presuppositions that are not, some believe, universally obtainable; in particular, that any well-posed problem is solvable. My goal here is to show that, although excluded middle does indeed rest on certain presuppositions, they do not have the character of hypotheses that may or may not be true, or matters of fact that may or may not be the case. These presuppositions have, I claim, a transcendental character. Hence, the acceptance of excluded middle does not necessarily require, as some have claimed, an allegiance to ontological realism or some sort of cognitive optimism, construed as factual theses concerning the ontological status of domains of objects and our capability of accessing them cognitively.


Data mining is a typical application of high performance computing in the business field. An efficient data mining system which can deal with huge amount of data is desired. This paper describes the parallel processing of decision tree which is a typical algorithm for classification of large database. A free software C4.5 is parallelized for SMP machine using thread library. Parallelism in generating a decision tree can be classified into intra-node parallelism and inter-node parallelism. Intra-node parallelism can be further classified into record parallelism, attribute parallelism, and their combination. We have implemented these four kinds of parallelizing methods, and evaluated their effects with four kinds of test data. The result shows that there is a relation between the characteristics of data and the parallelizing methods, and combination of multiple parallelizing methods is the most effective one.


Background: Early onset (EO) alcohol dependence (AD) has been found to represent a subtype of alcoholism with a distinct profile and prognosis compared to late onset (LO) alcohol dependence. Externalizing disorders, especially attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) that may continue as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, residual type (ADD, RT) in adulthood, may increase susceptibility to early-onset AD. Aims: To examine the relationship between ADHD and ADD, RT symptoms and age at onset of AD in a sample of Indian male patients. 70 male subjects with AD presenting to the De-Addiction Services of the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore, were studied. The study had a retrospective design. Materials and Methods: Patients were examined for evidence of past ADHD in childhood and current ADD, RT using structured instruments. Chi-square tests and odds ratios were used to express the relative risk of association of ADHD with early- and late-onset AD. Results: Significantly more EO alcoholics (19/30, 63.3%) had a history of ADHD in childhood compared to LO alcoholics (7/28, 25%, P < 0.05) ADD, RT was also over-represented in EO probands. Conclusions: The results of this study are consistent with previous research that shows a high incidence of ADHD in early-onset alcoholics. This may have important management implications.


Kunun-zaki, a beverage popular among the Northern Nigerians lacks varieties in terms of taste and flavor, because it is made from cerealsonly. This has accounted for the low demand and intake of the beverage in other parts of the country. There is therefore the need to add variety to the convectional kunun-zaki and also increase its nutritional value. In this study, proximate composition, mineral content and sensory quality of non-convectional kunun-zaki produced from blends of millet and Vigna-racemosa was determined. The Millet-Vignaracemosakunun blends were prepared by substituting kunun-zaki with Vigna-racemosakunun at varying proportions (100:0; 95:5; 90:10; 85:15; 80:20; 75:25). The results of the proximate composition, mineral content and sensory properties showed that addition of Vigna-racemosakunun to millet based kunun-zaki increases the protein content of the conventional kunun by 233-330%, ash content by 5 to 27% and fat content by 35 to 63%. However, moisture, crude fibre and carbohydrate content of the kunun decreased slightly, depending on level of substitution. The mineral contents (calcium, copper, zinc, iron and manganese) of the non-conventional kunun were also higher than that of the conventional kunun-zaki. Results of the sensory analysis showed that the Millet-Vigna-racemosakunun blends had the best sensory attributes. Generally, kunun from millet and Vigna-racemosa blends were highly acceptable and more nutritious compared to the conventional millet based kunun-zaki.


Green mold (Penicillium digitatum) and blue mold (Penicillium italicum) are among the most economically impactful post-harvest diseases of citrus fruit worldwide. Post-harvest citrus diseases are largely controlled with synthetic fungicides such as pyrimethanil, imazalil, fludioxonil, and thiabendazole. Due to their toxic effects, prolonged and excessive application of these fungicides is gradually restricted in favor of safe and more eco-friendly alternatives. This review comprehensively describes alternative methods for the control of P. digitatum and P. italicum: (a) antagonistic micro-organisms, (b) plant extracts and essential oils, (c) biofungicides, (d) chitosan and chitosan-based citrus coatings, (e) heat treatments, (f) ionizing and non-ionizing irradiations, (g) food additives, and (h) synthetic elicitors. Integrating multiple approaches such as the application of biocontrol agents with food additives or heat treatments have overcome some drawbacks to single treatments. In addition, integrating treatment approaches could produce an additive or synergistic effect on controlling both molds for a satisfactory level of disease reduction in post-harvest citrus. Further research is warranted on plant resistance and fruit-pathogen interactions to develop safer strategies for the sustainable control of P. digitatum and P. italicum in citrus.


Search by boolean queries suffers from a paradox of precision: if the query is too general (with respect to the corpus), the response is an avalanche; if the query is too specific, the response is empty. It is difficult to cast a query balanced on this scale of specificity that retrieves a reasonable number of items. Nowhere is this more evident, perhaps, than in search on the World Wide Web. For this reason, many Web search engines employ information retrieval (IR) techniques other than boolean search. Indeed, this problem of specificity is a key reason, in general, that other IR techniques have been researched. For instance, AltaVista's standard interface employs an IR scoring technique across the document list to rank-order a result list. (AltaVista's "advanced" interface is for boolean search.) However, the IR searches have problems too. Quite often, IR search queries result in avalanches. If the IR scoring is not "natural" for the query at hand, the documentsof-interest may be buried in the results, never to be found. The utility of boolean queries could be saved if a good method to recover from over-specified queries were evident. In this paper, we work to devise such a method. We show how boolean queries can be relaxed automatically, by throwing away just as many keywords as necessary for the query to succeed. With this relaxation facility, a new search paradigm becomes possible: ask a specific query; it will be relaxed to the points of success to find the closest related documents.


Abstract Six-month-old seedlings of Quercus serrata and Quercus glauca in a nursery were inoculated with the ectomycorrhizal fungus Laccaria amethystea encapsulated in alginate gel and grown in the nursery. The seedlings were collected at 1, 3, and 5 months after the inoculation and examined for colonization of the root system with ectomycorrhizal fungi. The roots within 5 months after the inoculation showed rudimentary ectomycorrhizal colonization. The level of colonization of the root system was estimated based on the intensity of hyphal covering on the root tips by staining with a fluorescent dye and expressed as an index of mycorrhizal colonization (IMC). IMC increased with the time after inoculation and reached values of 4 and 12% in Q. serrata and Q. glauca, respectively at 5 months after the inoculation. The determination of IMC may enable to assess the development of mycorrhizal colonization of the root system that shows rudimentary ectomycorrhizas after the inoculation.


The increasing resistance to antibacterials commonly employed in the clinic and the growth of multidrug resistant strains suggest that the development of new therapeutic approaches should be of primary concern. In this context, EPIs may restore life to old drugs. In the present work, the EPI activity of the COX-2 inhibitor celecoxib was confirmed and a new class of pyrazolo[4,3-c][1,2]benzothiazine 5,5-dioxide analogues acting as inhibitors of the Staphylococcus aureus NorA multidrug efflux pump was identified.


Abstract The genetic, proteomic, disease and pharmacological studies have generated rich data in protein interaction, disease regulation and drug activities useful for systems-level study of the biological, disease and drug therapeutic processes. These studies are facilitated by the established and the emerging computational methods. More recently, the network descriptors developed in other disciplines have become more increasingly used for studying the protein–protein, gene regulation, metabolic, disease networks. There is an inadequate coverage of these useful network features in the public web servers. We therefore introduced upto 313 literature-reported network descriptors in PROFEAT web server, for describing the topological, connectivity and complexity characteristics of undirected unweighted (uniform binding constants and molecular levels), undirected edge-weighted (varying binding constants), undirected node-weighted (varying molecular levels), undirected edge-node-weighted (varying binding constants and molecular levels) and directed unweighted (oriented process) networks. The usefulness of the PROFEAT computed network descriptors is illustrated by their literature-reported applications in studying the protein–protein, gene regulatory, gene co-expression, protein–drug and metabolic networks. PROFEAT is accessible free of charge at http://bidd2.nus.edu.sg/cgi-bin/profeat2016/main.cgi.


During the summer of 1993, residents of the Norris Lake community in the Piedmont Province of Georgia, USA, experienced a swarm of shallow ( m b ). In this epicentral area no earthquakes were previously reported and no significant events have occurred since, and the swarm is considered complete and isolated. The swarm began June 8 with a short, 5-day burst of activity. The number of events per day and cumulative strain release increased exponentially to mid-August, when more than 200 events occurred per day. After the mid-August peak, the number of events per day decreased at a rate consistent with an aftershock sequence. The largest event ( m b = 2.7) occurred late in the sequence on September 23, 1993. Times of occurrence were read and magnitudes computed from visual records covering the time period of June 13, through December, 1993 for over 4,800 events with m b magnitude greater than -2i149 The correlation dimension of occurrence times suggests that the swarm may be divided into constant-valued segments that start and end at a large event. The peak of the swarm was characterized by a high dimension, suggesting a uniform rate of occurrence of earthquakes, whereas the beginning and end of the swarm were characterized by low dimensions typical of clusters of events. The average b -value in the Gutenberg-Richter recursion relation for the complete swarm was 0.8. The b -value for shorter time segments of the swarm increased gradually from 0.4 in July to greater than 1.0 in September, including the period of the highest rate of seismicity in August. The b -value returned to its average, 0.8, at the end of the swarm. The b -values were constant or increased gradually before the four largest events, changed at the time of three of these events, and on average tended to decrease with time afterward. We speculate that the systematic increase and subsequent decrease in b -value and correlation dimension are characteristics of earthquake swarms triggered during a transient decrease in strength. Furthermore, we speculate that the decrease in strength may be caused by increases in fluid pressure and that the increase in fluid pressure may have been augmented by the conversion of elastic stress to hydrostatic stress during the occurrence of earthquakes in the swarm.


The gadolinium-based nanoagent named AGuIX® is a unique radiosensitizer and contrast agent which improves the performance of radiotherapy and medical imaging. Currently tested in clinical trials, AGuIX® is administrated to patients via intravenous injection. The presence of nanoparticles in the blood stream may induce harmful effects due to undesired interactions with blood components. Thus, there is an emerging need to understand the impact of these nanoagents when meeting blood proteins. In this work, the influence of nanoagents on the structure and stability of the most abundant blood protein, human serum albumin, is presented. Synchrotron radiation circular dichroism showed that AGuIX® does not bind to the protein, even at the high ratio of 45 nanoparticles per protein at 3 mg/L. However, it increases the stability of the albumin. Isothermal thermodynamic calorimetry and fluorescence emission spectroscopy demonstrated that the effect is due to preferential hydration processes. Thus, this study confirms that intravenous injection of AGuIX® presents limited risks of perturbing the blood stream. In a wider view, the methodology developed in this work may be applied to rapidly evaluate the impact and risk of other nano-products that could come into contact with the bloodstream.


The growth rate hypothesis (GRH) asserts, from known biochemistry, that maintaining high growth rates requires high concentrations of ribosomes. Since ribosomes are rich in phosphorus (P), the GRH predicts a positive correlation between growth rate and P content; this correlation is observed in some organisms. We consider the application of the GRH to phytoplankton and identify several key problems that require further research before the hypothesis can be accepted for these organisms. There are severe methodological problems that confound interpretation of data for testing the GRH. These problems include the measurement of protein and nucleic acids (such that ratio of these components carries a high level of uncertainty), studies of steady‐state versus dynamic systems, and the presentation of data per cell (especially as cell size varies with growth rate limitations) and the calculation of growth rates. In addition, because of the short generation times and rapid responses of these organisms to perturbations, ribosome and RNA content is expected to vary in response to (de)repression of various systems; content may increase on application of growth‐limiting stress. Finally, that most phytoplankton accumulate P when not P stressed conflicts with the GRH. In consequence, the value of the GRH for any sort of predictive role in nature appears to be severely limited. We conclude that the GRH cannot be assumed to apply to phytoplankton taxa without first performing experimental tests under transient conditions.


 Abstract — The volume ratio in the total solid particle mixture is an important parameter indicating the characteristics of particulate mixtures. Therefore, a simple measurement method is desirable. In this paper, the normalized permittivities of two groups of particle mixtures are tested using Electrical Capacitance Tomography (ECT) with the series and parallel models. The experimental results show that normalized permittivity changes obtained from the series ECT model have a very strong linear relationship with the volume ratio of higher permittivity materials in the mixture. The Maxwell Garnett Formula (MGF) can predict the normalized permittivity only after the permittivity of each type of particle is known. The comparison between two methods suggests that ECT with the series model is a better way to monitor the volume ratio in mixtures comprising two different types of solid particle.


Education is an important factor in the development of human resources where the teacher influences the quality of the education process. The attachment that arises between the teacher and the school as an organization determines the achievement of the vision and mission of the school. There are still a number of teachers in private vocational schools in Bandung who do not have performance-based employment contracts, the number of teachers with honorary and non-civil servant status, uncertainty in career paths, and incentives/rewards inconsistently give rise to doubts about the commitment of schools as organizations thus determining the extent of engagement that arises between teachers and schools. In this study, researchers tested knowing how "Psychological Contracts, Financial Incentives, Employee Empowerment in Organizational Behavior and its implications in Employee Engagement in Private Schools in the City of Bandung. Testing in this study uses partial least square (PLS) data analysis with data processing using the help of the XLSTAT program. The population in this study was 1,198 honorary teachers of private vocational schools in Bandung with a total sample of 93 honorary teachers of private vocational teachers in Bandung, taking samples using a purposive sampling method with calculations using the Slovin formula. The results of the study indicate that psychological contracts have a positive and significant influence in forming employee empowerment and have positive implications on employee engagement while financial incentives have an insignificant influence on forming employee empowerment and have implications on employee engagement.


This paper presents a method for the damping of power swings in the ac lines interconnecting two power systems, utilising the fast electronic power flow control characteristics of a parallel dc link. The basic principle of the method is that the dc link is operated in order to maintain constant active power flow in the ac tie lines and constant reactive power consumption at the converter terminals. The proposed control strategy was tested using dynamic simulation techniques and the results obtained show that, under certain conditions, the contribution of a parallel dc link to the stability the ac system can be significant.