It would be a vast overgeneralization to suggest that the story of HIV/AIDS in Africa can be told in a single narrative. While the continent accounts for a substantially disproportionate share of the global population living with HIVor AIDS, the contours of the epidemic vary substantially across—and even within—its 54 countries. To make sense of this variation, researchers have devoted considerable attention to identifying the common and differential causal pathways of infection, barriers to treatment, and societal impacts of AIDS within African populations. Traditional sociological perspectives have contributed to our understanding of the disease from relatively early on—for example, with a focus on social inequalities in HIV HIV Exceptionalism: Development through Disease in Sierra Leone, by Adia Benton. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015. 176 pp. $22.50 paper. ISBN: 9780816692439.


The role of excitons in semiconducting materials carries potential applications. Experimental results show that excitonic signals also appear in optical absorption spectra of semiconductor system with narrow gap, such as Gallium Arsenide (GaAs). While on the theoretical side, calculation of optical spectra based purely on Density Functional Theory (DFT) without taking electron-hole (e-h) interactions into account does not lead to the appearance of any excitonic signal. Meanwhile, existing DFT-based algorithms that include a full vertex correction through Bethe-Salpeter equation may reveal an excitonic signal, but the algorithm has not provided a way to analyze the excitonic signal further. Motivated to provide a way to isolate the excitonic effect in the optical response theoretically, we develop a method of calculation for the optical conductivity of a narrow band-gap semiconductor GaAs within the 8-band k.p model that includes electron-hole interactions through first-order electron-hole vertex correction. Our calculation confirms that the first-order e-h vertex correction reveals excitonic signal around 1.5 eV (the band gap edge), consistent with the experimental data.


Background and Objectives: The purpose of the present study was to elucidate the in-hospital and long-term outcomes of patients with head and neck cancer (HNC) bleeding and to analyze the risk factors for mortality. Materials and Methods: We included patients who presented to the emergency department (ED) with HNC bleeding. Variables of patients who survived and died were compared and associated factors were investigated by logistic regression and Cox's proportional hazard model. Results: A total of 125 patients were enrolled in the present study. Fifty-nine (52.8%) patients experienced a recurrent bleeding event. The in-hospital mortality rate was 16%. The overall survival at 1, 3 and 5 years was 48%, 41% and 34%, respectively. The median survival time was 9.2 months. Multivariate logistic regression analyses revealed that risk factors for in-hospital mortality were inotropic support (OR = 10.41; Cl 1.81–59.84; p = 0.009), hypopharyngeal cancer (OR = 4.32; Cl 1.29–14.46; p = 0.018), and M stage (OR = 5.90; Cl 1.07–32.70; p = 0.042). Multivariate Cox regression analyses indicate that heart rate >110 (beats/min) (HR = 2.02; Cl 1.16–3.51; p = 0.013), inotropic support (HR = 3.25; Cl 1.20–8.82; p = 0.021), and hypopharygneal cancer (HR = 2.22; Cl 1.21–4.06; p = 0.010) were all significant independent predictors of poorer overall survival. Conclusions: HNC bleeding commonly represents the advanced disease stage. Recognition of associated factors aids in the risk stratification of patients with HNC bleeding.


This study identifies a molecular basis for malignant secretion and provides a rationale to test PI4KIIIβ antagonists as an intervention. The secrets of malignant secretion Cancer cells produce and secrete a variety of proteins that promote tumorigenesis, in a process known as malignant secretion. Tan et al. identified a region of chromosome 1 that is often amplified in cancer and plays a key role in malignant secretion. In particular, the authors discovered a mechanism by which a Golgi-associated enzyme called PI4KIIIβ promotes secretion of proteins involved in lung cancer survival and metastasis. The authors identified and optimized chemical inhibitors of PI4KIIIβ and then tested their effectiveness at blocking malignant secretion and reducing cancer cells' invasiveness in vitro and in multiple mouse models of cancer. Heightened secretion of protumorigenic effector proteins is a feature of malignant cells. Yet, the molecular underpinnings and therapeutic implications of this feature remain unclear. Here, we identify a chromosome 1q region that is frequently amplified in diverse cancer types and encodes multiple regulators of secretory vesicle biogenesis and trafficking, including the Golgi-dedicated enzyme phosphatidylinositol (PI)-4-kinase IIIβ (PI4KIIIβ). Molecular, biochemical, and cell biological studies show that PI4KIIIβ-derived PI-4-phosphate (PI4P) synthesis enhances secretion and accelerates lung adenocarcinoma progression by activating Golgi phosphoprotein 3 (GOLPH3)–dependent vesicular release from the Golgi. PI4KIIIβ-dependent secreted factors maintain 1q-amplified cancer cell survival and influence prometastatic processes in the tumor microenvironment. Disruption of this functional circuitry in 1q-amplified cancer cells with selective PI4KIIIβ antagonists induces apoptosis and suppresses tumor growth and metastasis. These results support a model in which chromosome 1q amplifications create a dependency on PI4KIIIβ-dependent secretion for cancer cell survival and tumor progression.


Positive and negative signs are frequently misapplied. In textbooks, the subject of their correct use is often ignored. This might not be because the subject is trivial. Misuse in those same books suggests it might be because authors are unaware of some basic rules.


The chemistry, sedimentology, and geology of the Meridiani sedimentary deposits are best explained by eolian reworking of the sublimation residue of a large scale ice/dust deposit. This large ice deposit was located in close proximity to Terra Meridiani and incorporated large amounts of dust, sand, and SO2 aerosols generated by impacts and volcanism during early martian history. Sulfate formation and chemical weathering of the initial igneous material is hypothesized to have occurred inside of the ice when the darker mineral grains were heated by solar radiant energy. This created conditions in which small films of liquid water were created in and around the mineral grains. This water dissolved the SO2 and reacted with the mineral grains forming an acidic environment under low water/rock conditions. Subsequent sublimation of this ice deposit left behind large amounts of weathered sublimation residue which became the source material for the eolian process that deposited the Terra Meridiani deposit. The following features of the Meridiani sediments are best explained by this model: The large scale of the deposit, its mineralogic similarity across large distances, the cation-conservative nature of the weathering processes, the presence of acidic groundwaters on a basaltic planet, the accumulation of a thick sedimentary sequence outside of a topographic basin, and the low water/rock ratio needed to explain the presence of very soluble minerals and elements in the deposit. Remote sensing studies have linked the Meridiani deposits to a number of other martian surface features through mineralogic similarities, geomorphic similarities, and regional associations. These include layered deposits in Arabia Terra, interior layered deposits in the Valles Marineris system, southern Elysium/Aeolis, Amazonis Planitia, and the Hellas basin, Aram Chaos, Aureum Chaos, and Ioni Chaos. The common properties shared by these deposits suggest that all of these deposits share a common formation process which must have acted over a large area of Mars. The results of this study suggest a mechanism for volatile transport on Mars without invoking an early greenhouse. They also imply a common formation mechanism for most of the sulfate minerals and layered deposits on Mars, which explains their common occurrence.


The implementation of the Restriction of Hazardous Substances (RoHS) European Union (EU) Directive in 2005 resulted in the introduction of pure tin as an acceptable surface finish for printed circuit boards and component terminations. A drawback of pure tin surface finishes is the potential to form tin whiskers.  Tin whiskers are a metallurgical phenomenon that is associated with tin rich/pure tin materials and has been a topic of intense industry interest. The acceptance and usage of pure tin by the electronics industry component fabricators is understandable as the pure tin surface finishes are inexpensive, are simple plating systems to operate and have reasonable solderability characteristics. However, high performance/harsh environment electronics typically have product life cycles that are measured in decades and therefore are much more susceptible to the potential long term threat of tin whiskers. The GEIA-STD-0005-2 "Standard for Mitigating the Effects of Tin Whiskers in Aerospace and High Performance Electronic Systems" established the definition of the term "Pb-free tin" as :  "Pb-free Tin is defined to be pure tin or any tin alloy with <3% lead (Pb) content by weight. A functional definition of "pure tin" was necessary so that the electronics industry could establish tin whisker risk protocols against a known acceptable target value in terms of soldering materials and processes. An investigation was conducted to determine the influence of 1% - 5% elemental lead (Pb) content in tin plating on tin whisker initiation and growth. The investigation results were used in the revision of the GEIA-STD-0005-2 "Standard for Mitigating the Effects of Tin Whiskers in Aerospace and High Performance Electronic Systems" specification technical discussions.


We fix any bicategory A together with a class of morphisms WA , such that there is a bicategory of fractions A [


In the present investigation stability analysis of 30 pea genotypes was made for sixteen characters grown over eight environments. The G × E interaction, environment (linear) were significant for all the characters except for sugar content. The genotype × environment interaction was significant for all the characters except for pod length and number of seeds per pod indicating varied phenotypic expression of most of genotypes in different environments. Variance due to pooled deviation (non-linear) components were significant for all the characters except leaf area index, time of pod filling at interval, seed yield per plant and protein content. The genotype DMR-7, L-116, P-1852 and KPMR-157 were identified as stable genotypes for yield suggesting the preponderance of linear component G × E interaction. Six varieties were identified stable for protein content and one variety was identified as sugar free and stable for sugar content.


Tungsten nanoparticles were obtained from liquid-ammonia-based synthesis via reduction of WCl6 with dissolved sodium. The W(0) nanoparticles exhibit a diameter of 1-2 nm and can be dispersed in alkanes, showing a grayish-orange color due to red-shifted plasmon resonance absorption.


ABSTRACT The biographical-narrative interview has been touted as a conduit for 'giving voice' to disempowered groups and individuals. On account of this strength, a biographical-narrative approach was chosen for an investigation into the cultural identity constructions of intercountry adoptees in Australia. However, while yielding rich and detailed accounts of participants' lives, the method also facilitated the telling of 'unexpected stories' that did not conform to the researcher's expectations. This paper reports on these unanticipated findings and the methodological insights they prompted. In light of these insights, the paper argues that doing justice to participants' voices involves three imperatives: an explicit recognition of the multi-voiced and co-constructed nature of academic storytelling; sustained reflexivity during the analysis and writing of participant narratives; and the pursuance of 'socially just' acts of representation. From this perspective, the aim of biographical-narrative research should not be to 'give voice', but instead to produce deeper, more complex accounts of phenomena that change for the better those who tell, hear, and interpret biographical narratives.


At the end of November 1994, the truth about the information highway finally got out. Protesting the announcement of another 5,600 layoffs, 1,200 Bell-Atlantic employees in Pennsylvania wore T-shirts to work which graphically depicted themselves as Information Highway Roadkill. The layoffs were just the latest round of cutbacks at Bell-Atlantic, which have been matched by the elimination of jobs at the other giants of the telecommunications industry—ATT, NYNEX, Northern Telecom—supposedly the very places where new jobs are to be created with the information highway. In reality, the technology is enabling companies to extend their operations and enlarge their profits while reducing their workforce and the pay and security of those who remain by contracting out work to cheaper labor around the globe and by replacing people with machines. The very workers who are constructing the new information infrastructure are among the first to go, but not the only ones.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.


The article deals with the influence of the tool wear of several circular saw blades, each with different numbers of teeth (24, 40, and 60), on the quality of a machined wood surface. The surface quality was evaluated based on the surface roughness, which was represented by the surface arithmetical mean deviation Ra. To achieve the conditions of manual sawing, the saw blade was shifted into the cut with a constant feed force of 15 N. The results showed that the 40-tooth saw blade obtained the most suitable results; it exhibited the longest sawn distance and reached moderately good values of tool wear. The average values of surface roughness ranged from 3.9 to 14.5 µm, and the saw blade wear increased proportionally with sawn distance. The tool wear of the saw blade had no unambiguous effect; increase in tool wear did not lead to a deterioration of surface quality.


Engagement in leisure activities during retirement and its relationship to retirement adjustment were investigated. Psychosocial mediators included mastery, self-efficacy for retirement (SE-R) and activities (SE-A), positive (PA) and negative affect (NA). Resources investigated included physical health and finances. Leisure activities examined were social, home entertainment, chores, light exercise, vigorous exercise, and education. Data were gathered from a sample consisting of 243 retirees. Direct predictors of retirement adjustment included finances, health, mastery, SE-R and SE-A. Social activities were the best predictor of a wide range of positive outcomes, including PA, mastery, SE-R and SE-A. Educational activities improved SE-R. Being involved in a broader range of activities was associated with PA, mastery and SE-A. Familiarity and enjoyment of activities were implicated in the maintenance and continuation of activities at post-retirement. Research findings have implications for aged-care and other retirement service providers, as well as for individuals.


This thesis relies on realist and neo-mercantilist approaches to explain the consolidation of the US
and European aerospace and defence industry during the second half of the 1990s. Based on two
case studies, the Boeing / McDonnell Douglas (BMD) merger in 1997 and the EADS merger in
1999, the thesis analyses the different political and economic motivations that led these aerospace
and defence companies as well as their respective home governments to pursue either ethnocentric
consolidation (in the case of the US) or regiocentric consolidation (in the case of France, Germany,
and Spain) strategies. The BMD merger is interpreted as an attempt by the American hegemon to
ensure that the important military, economic, and technological benefits derived from this strategic
sector continue to accrue, above all, to the United States and its aerospace and defence industrial
base. The cross-border EADS merger, in contrast, is viewed as a Franco-German-led
counterbalancing attempt to guarantee the survival and autonomy of the European aerospace and
defence industry, including Airbus, in the face of growing competitive pressures from the rapidlyconsolidating
US mega-primes like Boeing. The thesis contrasts several high-profile transatlantic
M&A deals in a variety of business sectors with the marked absence of similar transactions between
US and European aerospace and defence companies. It thus highlights the strategic nature of this
particular sector as well as American concerns about the proliferation of advanced US technologies
to third countries, including to European NATO allies. Ultimately, realist and neo-mercantilist
arguments prevailed over liberal-institutionalist / globalisation arguments among policymakers and
business leaders on both sides of the Atlantic (especially in Washington, DC and Paris) – thus
paving the way for the BMD and EADS mergers.


Looking back over the past 5 years of articles published in JCOM, this editorial looks at the topics covered and the geographies represented and asks: are we tackling all main contemporary issues in science communication/popularisation or public engagement? It invites you to contribute with your papers, letters, essays and news to help address the holes in our coverage and to enter into dialogue on our Facebook page.


Technologies that have traditionally been used in fixed installations to detect hydrogen gas leaks, such as Catalytic and Electrochemical Point Sensors have one limitation: in order for a leak to be detected, the gas itself must either be in close proximity to the detector or within a pre-defined area. Unfortunately, outdoor environmental conditions such as changing wind directions and quick dispersion of the gas cloud from a leaking outdoor installation often cause that traditional gas detection systems may not alert to the presence of gas simply because the gas never reaches the detector. These traditional gas detection systems need to wait for the gas to form a vapor cloud, which may or may not ignite, and which may or may not allow loss prevention by enabling shutting down the gas facility in time. Ultrasonic Gas Leak Detectors (UGLD) respond at the speed of sound at gas leak initiation, unaffected by changing wind directions and dilution of the gas. Ultrasonic Gas Leak Detectors are based on robust microphone technology; they detect outdoor leaks by sensing the distinct high frequency ultrasound emitted by all high pressure gas leaks. With the ultrasonic sensing technology, leaking gas itself does not have to reach the sensor – just the sound of the gas leaking. By adding Ultrasonic Gas Leak Detectors for Hydrogen leak detection faster response times and lower operation costs can be obtained.


In this study, we propose a modified Generalized Likelihood Uncertainty Estimation method (GLUE) by using Copula function (CGLUE) with the aim of describing the correlation of parameters. Six scenarios are adopted by taking the sampling size as 10 000, 50 000, and 100 000, with threshold values of 0.5, 0.6, and 0.7. With these six scenarios, we compared the CGLUE and the GLUE methods in terms of strength and weakness of these two techniques in the evaluation of the parameter uncertainty in hydrological modelling results. The results show that, when compared to the GLUE method, the CGLUE method performs better in reflecting the correlation of the parameters by replacing the two one-variable probability distributions with a joint probability distribution. Therefore, the uncertainty of parameter within the hydrological model can be fully evaluated with more behavioral parameter sets.


Dental avulsion is a common and complex injury which affects multiple oral tissues. In this case report, a 9-year-old girl patient with two traumatically avulsed maxillary central incisors with loss of periodontal tissue was presented. Treatment guidelines for avulsed permanent teeth with open apex were carried out. Bilateral laterally sliding flap procedure was performed, to repair loss of gingival soft tissue. Conventional immobilization was carried out for 6 weeks. Five months follow-up of the patient in whom replantation was performed resulted in positive sensitivity test, no symptoms of infection, pain or any discomfort and good periodontal wound healing. In conclusion, this report presents successful replantation and periodontal treatment of a patient with complex dentoalveolar injury.


The information bottleneck (IB) principle has been proven effective in various NLP applications.The existing work, however, only used either generative or information compression models to improve the performance of the target task. In this paper, we propose to combine the two types of IB models into one system to enhance Named Entity Recognition (NER).For one type of IB model, we incorporate two unsupervised generative components, span reconstruction and synonym generation, into a span-based NER system.The span reconstruction ensures that the contextualised span representation keeps the span information, while the synonym generation makes synonyms have similar representations even in different contexts. For the other type of IB model, we add a supervised IB layer that performs information compression into the system to preserve useful features for NER in the resulting span representations.Experiments on five different corpora indicate that jointly training both generative and information compression models can enhance the performance of the baseline span-based NER system.Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/nguyennth/joint-ib-models.


We have determined the flux of calcium, chloride and nitrate to the McMurdo Dry Valleys region by analysing snow pits for their chemical composition and their snow accumulation using multiple records spanning up to 48 years. The fluxes demonstrate patterns related to elevation and proximity to the ocean. In general, there is a strong relationship between the nitrate flux and snow accumulation, indicating that precipitation rates may have a great influence over the nitrogen concentrations in the soils of the valleys. Aeolian dust transport plays an important role in the deposition of some elements (e.g. Ca2+) into the McMurdo Dry Valleys' soils. Because of the antiquity of some of the soil surfaces in the McMurdo Dry Valleys regions, the accumulated atmospheric flux of salts to the soils has important ecological consequences. Although precipitation may be an important mechanism of salt deposition to the McMurdo Dry Valley surfaces, it is poorly understood because of difficulties in measurement and high losses from sublimation.


Immunohistochemistry is the use of specific antibodies to stain particular molecular species in situ. This technique has allowed the identification of many more cell types than could be visualized by classical histology, particularly in the immune system and among the scattered hormone-secreting cells of the endocrine system, and has the potential to improve diagnosis, prognosis and therapeutic options of cancer. This book discusses all aspects of immunohistochemistry and in situ hybridization technologies and the important role they play in reaching a cancer diagnosis. It provides step-by-step instructions on the methods of additional molecular technologies such as DNA microarrays, and microdissection, along with the benefits and limitations of each method. The topics of region-specific gene expression, its role in cancer development and the techniques that assist in the understanding of the molecular basis of disease are relevant and necessary in science today. This is the only book available that translates molecular genetics into cancer diagnosis. The results of each Immunohistochemical and in situ hybridization method are presented in the form of color illustrations. The methods discussed were either developed or refined by expert contributors in their own laboratories.


The authors reported one case of eumycotic mycetoma due to Madurella grisea (black grains) occurred on the right foot of the patient studied. The structure, microscopic morphology and therapeutic evolution are also studied and reported.


In this paper, we consider the problem of optimum selection of quality-of-service (QoS) classes in interworking between the networks in a next-generation-network (NGN) environment. After introducing the delay-cost and loss-cost characteristics, we discuss the time-invariant (TI) and time-variant (TV) scenarios. For the TI case, we show that under nearly lossless transmission condition, each network can make its own optimization regardless of other networks. For the TV case, we present sufficient conditions under which the optimum QoS class of each network can be considered fixed with respect to time without considerable degradation in the optimization target. Therefore, under the conditions presented in this paper, the QoS of a flow in each network can be determined solely by considering the characteristics of that network and this QoS class can be held fixed during the flow period.


Phylogenetic relationships of the genera Cladia, Heterodea and Ramalinora were reconstructed using a combined dataset of ribosomal nuclear ITS and LSU and mitochondrial SSU, and protein-coding Mcm7 DNA sequences. Maximum likelihood and Bayesian analyses strongly supported a monophyletic group in which the species of the foliose genus Heterodea and the crustose genus Ramalinora were nested within the fruticose genus Cladia. Alternative hypothesis testing rejected an independent status of Ramalinora. We tested the hypothesis that an adaptive radiation led to the morphological disparity found in the Cladia clade. Gamma-statistics indicated a significantly disproportional clustering of origins of extant lineages at the base of the Cladia clade and lineage-through-time plots were also consistent with the hypothesis of an adaptive radiation at the base of the Cladia clade. Ancestral-range reconstructions supported an origin of Cladia and the three major lineages within Cladia in Australia. On the basis of these results, we propose an evolutionary hypothesis for the genus. The results suggest that processes of adaptive radiation of the ancestor of Cladia in Australia led to the morphological disparity in the extant taxa, and that the broad distribution of some extant species is due to subsequent long-distance dispersal.


This article provides a brief overview of search engines and describes how they work. It highlights HuriSearch, a human rights search engine, initiated by HURIDOCS - Human Rights Information and Documentation Systems, International. The article describes the background and aims of HuriSearch and the way in which the project has been implemented. This is followed by a comparison between HuriSearch and the general search engine Google, concerning the relevancy of searches and the depth of crawling. Finally, the future perspectives of HuriSearch are outlined.


Abstract Introduction The central question this study sought to answer was whether the team members of Strategic Crisis Teams (SCTs) participating in mass-casualty incident (MCI) exercises in the Netherlands learn from their participation. Methods Evaluation reports of exercises that took place at two different times were collected and analyzed against a theoretical model with several dimensions, looking at both the quality of the evaluation methodology (three criteria: objectives described, link between objective and items for improvement, and data-collection method) and the learning effect of the exercise (one criterion: the change in number of items for improvement). Results Of all 32 evaluation reports, 81% described exercise objectives; 30% of the items for improvement in the reports were linked to these objectives, and 22% of the 32 evaluation reports used a structured template to describe the items for improvement. In six evaluation categories, the number of items for improvement increased between the first (T1) and the last (T2) evaluation report submitted by hospitals. The number of items remained equal for two evaluation categories and decreased in six evaluation categories. Conclusion The evaluation reports do not support the ideal-typical disaster exercise process. The authors could not establish that team members participating in MCI exercises in the Netherlands learn from their participation. More time and effort must be spent on the development of a validated evaluation system for these simulations, and more research into the role of the evaluator is needed. Verheul MLMI, Dückers MLA, Visser BB, Beerens RJJ, Bierens JJLM. Disaster exercises to prepare hospitals for mass-casualty incidents: does it contribute to preparedness or is it ritualism? Prehosp Disaster Med. 2018;33(4):387–393


Adopting free word association test, the present study investigated the developmental features of Yi students' Chinese mental lexicon. Eighty primary school students and 85 senior high school students in two typical Yi-Han bilingual schools in Yuexi County were recruited as the research subjects. With Yi language as their L1, all the participants started learning Chinese after entering primary school. The stimuli were 108 words selected from the 9,000 most frequently used words in modern Chinese, including 36 nouns, 36 verbs, and 36 adjectives. The responses were analyzed using the framework proposed by the responses were analyzed using a three-layer framework. The results showed that (1) the mental lexicon of Yi primary and middle school students were mainly connected with each other by meanings, with form-based connection followed. Compared with previous studies, their phonological associations accounted for a relatively higher proportion, while semantic associations were relatively weakened. (2) Syntagmatic associations were of primary importance, with paradigmatic and encyclopedic associations followed. (3) While syntagmatic relation was centered on determinative and governing associations, paradigmatic relation was dominated by adjacent and reverse associations. (4) The development rate of syntagmatic associations was faster than that of paradigmatic and encyclopedic associations; no significant improvement was found on students' adjacent, layer, homogeneous and supplement associations from primary school to high school. The findings generate important implications for Yi students' Chinese language education.


Epidemiological studies have implicated dental calculus as an ideal substrate for subgingival microbial colonization. Therefore, the main objective of periodontal therapy is to eliminate the microbial biofilm along with the calculus deposits from the root surface by root surface debridement. Over the past years, a large number of clinical and laboratory studies have been conducted to evaluate the efficacy of calculus removal by various methods. None of these conventional methods or devices was effective in completely eliminating all the calculus from the diseased root surfaces. In this context, a number of newer technologies have been developed to identify and selectively remove the dental calculus. Regarding this fact, the present article highlights a critical review of these devices based on published clinical and experimental data.


Disciplines as diverse as psychology, physics, marketing, and medicine have, for the past few years, been going through a soul-searching over the "reproducibility crisis". According to a recent survey in Nature, over 70% of researchers have failed in reproducing another scientist's results and more than half have failed in trying to reproduce their own results. But replication of scientific results is the heart of the scientific method; without this cornerstone we do not have science, we have faith and mysticism. Note, however, that reproducibility comes at a steep cost: more rigor, more scrutiny, and tightened controls on what is considered a publishable result will doubtless burden scientists and slow the pace of innovation. In this talk I will discuss the roots of replication problems-replication bias, null aversion, and incentive structures for researchers-and their implications on reproducibility for the field of software engineering. Finally, I will present a few ideas on how we can think about improving the state of our discipline.


Background For patients with neurofibromatosis type 2 (NF2), maintaining an independent state of living is important. The present study aimed to examine the loss of social independence (i.e., a status that patients can work and go to school) and its contributing factors in patients with NF2 using data from a national registry in Japan. Methods This longitudinal study used a registry database containing information on patients with NF2 who had submitted initial claims to receive medical expense subsidies between 2004 and 2010. Patients with "employed," "studying," and "housekeeping" categories were classified as "socially independent." Patients who were socially independent at baseline were followed-up for up to nine years. The primary outcome of the present study was the loss of social independence during the follow-up period, which was defined as the change in status from being socially independent to socially dependent. First, we examined longitudinal associations between demographic variables and neurological symptoms at baseline and the loss of social independence. Second, we examined whether the occurrence of neurological symptoms is associated with a loss of social independence in patients. Results A total of 156 patients were included in the present study. During the follow-up period, 37 (23.7%) patients experienced a loss of social independence. In the first analysis, the multivariate logistic regression model showed that the loss of social independence was significantly more frequent among patients with spinal dysfunction than among patients without. In the second analysis, logistic regression analyses showed that neurological symptoms, including bilateral hearing loss, facial nerve palsy, cerebellar dysfunction, decreased facial sensation, speech dysfunction (dysphagia/dysarthria and aphasia), double vision, blindness, hemiparesis, and seizures, were significantly associated with loss of social independence. Conclusions The occurrence of various neurological symptoms of NF2 can hinder social independence in the long term. Medical service providers need to observe patients while considering the risks, and provide appropriate support to address neurological symptoms that can restrict social independence, as this will lead to maintaining social engagement.


A total of 257 undergraduate students completed 2 sets of anagrams separated by either brief training on the Meditation Breath Attention Scores (MBAS; Frewen, Evans, Maraj, Dozois, & Partridge, 2008; Frewen, Lundberg, MacKinley, & Wrath, 2011), progressive muscle relaxation, or a video (control). Participants receiving the MBAS, relative to those in the control condition, increased the number of correctly solved anagrams on the second trial. Participants in both active conditions expressed greater credibility that their respective interventions would help them concentrate and solve more anagrams on the second trial, relative to those in the observation video condition. An attempt to enhance participants' expectation that they would improve on the second trial affected subjective ratings of success but not objective performance. Results validate the MBAS as a brief measure of focused attention and suggest that mindfulness meditation may improve concentration and objective performance on certain problem-solving tasks.


The few studies that have investigated emotion labeling in children with specific language impairment (SLI) have generally focused on global identification performances and appear contradictory. The current study is a fine-grained examination of how children with SLI and typical peers differ in the accuracy of their emotional lexicon use. Children underwent a free labeling task of five basic emotions expressed by still face photographs. Results revealed that children with SLI were less accurate in their label use than typical children. However, pattern of confusions between the two groups differed only by a confusion between sadness and anger displayed by the SLI group. It is argued that this emotion labeling deficiency may rely on semantic fields overlap.


Lupus is characterized by disturbances in lymphocyte homeostasis, as demonstrated by the marked accumulation of activated/memory T cells. Here, we provide evidence that proliferation of the CD8+ precursors for the accumulating CD4–CD8– T cells in MRL-Faslpr lupus-predisposed mice is, in part, driven by commensal antigens. The ensuing lymphadenopathy is associated with increased production of IL-7 due to expansion of fibroblastic reticular cells, the primary source of this cytokine. The excess IL-7 is not, however, consumed by CD4–CD8– T cells due to permanent down-regulation of IL-7Rα (CD127), but instead supports proliferation of autoreactive T cells and progression of autoimmunity. Accordingly, IL-7R blockade reduced T cell activation and autoimmune manifestations even when applied at advanced disease stage. These findings indicate that an imbalance favoring production over consumption of IL-7 may contribute to systemic autoimmunity, and correction of this imbalance may be a novel therapeutic approach in lymphoproliferative and autoimmune syndromes.


Epiphrenic diverticulum is a rare condition associated with esophageal motor disorder, and it is often asymptomatic, with a well-established surgical indication. The present study aims to report a case of a giant epiphrenic diverticulum in a 68-year-old male patient who, due to the symptoms, opted for surgical treatment using the daVinci® system. Robotic surgery consisting of esophageal diverticulectomy with cardiomyotomy was performed. The patient had an excellent recovery with an abbreviated hospitalization, return to food, and satisfactory routine activity.


A textile practitioner-researcher and a textile practitioner-mathematician have collaborated to analyse textile knot practice and to explore the design possibilities of knotted textiles through mathematical diagrams. The collaboration has made use of century-old mathematical knot theory diagramming techniques to characterise knots and braids in the context of textile design today. This paper reveals the textile design process - the way in which diagrams were manipulated and utilized as a design tool to generate and visualise textile knot patterns.


Behcet-like familial autoinflammatory syndrome is a rare autoinflammatory disease with an autosomal dominant mode of inheritance, which is based on heterozygous mutations in the TNFAIP3 gene. It is characterized by recurrent fever, recurrent oral-genital ulcers. Currently, only few patients with this disease are described in the world literature. The clinical case presented in the article demonstrates a new mixed phenotype of pathology in the form of a combination of symptoms resembling Behcet's disease and autoimmune lymphoproliferative syndrome. It allows us to enrich our knowledge about the genetic nature of autoinflammatory familial Behcet-like syndrome, and indicates the need to more active use of molecular genetic research methods in the differential diagnosis of these diseases.


Mona in the Promised Land is the second novel written by contemporary Chinese American writer Gish Jen. It provides the reader a broad view of the America in the late 1960s from the perspective of a second-generation Chinese-American Mona Chang. This article tries to analyze the multicultural panorama provided by this novel, and to point out Gish Jen's opinions and criticisms toward American culture as reflected in this fiction.


We introduce a novel self-attention-based normal estimation network that is able to focus softly on relevant points and adjust the softness by learning a temperature parameter, making it able to work naturally and effectively within a large neighbourhood range. As a result, our model outperforms all existing normal estimation algorithms by a large margin, achieving 94.1% accuracy in comparison with the previous state of the art of 91.2%, with a 25x smaller model and 12x faster inference time. We also use point-to-plane Iterative Closest Point (ICP) as an application case to show that our normal estimations lead to faster convergence than normal estimations from other methods, without manually fine-tuning neighbourhood range parameters. Code available at https://code.active.vision.


Cancer mortality rates are greater for African Americans than for whites. Reasons for this are due in part to the disproportionate number of the poor who are African American. Of particular concern are breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer, as screening exams, when used regularly, can reduce mortality. As part of an National Cancer Institute-funded study to improve breast and cervical cancer screening among low-income, predominately African American women, a survey was done to collect data on knowledge, attitudes, and practices related to breast, cervical, and colorectal cancer. A total of 300 women, African American and white residents of low-income housing communities, completed the survey. More African American women than white women had a mammogram within guidelines (52% vs. 40%), a clinical breast exam within the last year (60% vs. 56%), a Pap smear within the last 3 years (80% vs. 59%), and a Fecal Occult Blood Test within the last year (21% vs. 17%). Slightly more white women had a flexible sigmoidoscopy (FS) exam within the last 5 years (31% vs. 24%). When adjusted for age differences in the two populations, the differences in receiving regular screening exams were not statistically significant. Variables related to receiving these tests for all women included receiving regular check-ups (breast cancer); beliefs (breast and colorectal cancer screening), and knowledge (cervical cancer). Among African American women, barriers to screening were important for breast screening and regular checkups were related to Pap smear screening (odds ratio [OR] = 13.9, p < .01). High perceived risk of colorectal cancer was related to recent FS only for white women (OR = 47.9, p = .012). Women in this homogenous income group had similar rates of screening and had similar barriers to receiving recommended screening tests; thus, interventions should address beliefs and knowledge of risk targeted to all low-income women.


In a martensitic-bainitic microalloyed steel, the effect of hydrogen on fatigue crack growth was studied using rotary bending fatigue tests. The steel was subjected to a rapid thermal cycle to get a microstructure similar to that which would be formed within the coarse-grained heat-affected zone of a weld. Crack growth was monitored as a function of the number of cycles applied during fatigue tests on three types of specimens: 1) those without hydrogen charge, 2) those charged with hydrogen and 3) those charged with hydrogen which was then discharged through low-temperature heat treatment. All types showed persistent slip marks, and cracks propagated along high-shear-stress planes. In the presence of hydrogen, crack growth was affected by microstructural defects caused by the hydrogen charging process, and the persistent slip marks developed in an area closer to the crack tip and crack path. On the contrary, without hydrogen, crack growth occurred perpendicular to the applied force, and the persistent slip marks were fewer in number and further from the crack tip and crack path. This indicates that the plasticity increased (i.e., the damage that occurred in the presence of hydrogen matched the hydrogen-enhanced local plasticity mechanism).


The purpose of the study was to substantiate the capacities of X-ray recognition of the histological types of lung cancer and different tumor differentiation grades. The data available on 238 patients were studied; of them 169 patients were diagnosed as having primary lung cancer that was morphologically verified. In 154 patients, the tumor was not greater than 3.0 cm in diameter and belonged to the main histological types. X-ray study, analogue, digital tomography, X-ray surgery with percutaneous needle biopsy and rapid cytology were used. The diagnosis made by WHO ICD-10 C34.1-3 BDU (probable) and C34.1-3 M (valid) was a criterion for the quality of a accomplished diagnostic case. Of 13 traditional X-ray sings of lung cancer, 6 characteristics of a tumor image were taken for a following analysis. A number of signs correlate with the histological type of lung cancer in the symptom complexes that characterize the image of its histological types. Thus, "specula" are detectable in adenocarcinoma; a lobate pattern and minor focal clarification are also almost without exception characteristic. The differences between the images of squamous-cell carcinoma and adenocarcinoma were statistically significant (p < 0.05). The statistical models of lung cancer and its types were tested on 60 patients. Implementation of the optimized symptom complex positively changed the parameters of X-ray diagnosis: there were increases in the sensitivity from 68.6% to 80.0%, in the specificity from 24.3% to 65.0%; in the prognostic value of a positive result from 55.6% to 82.1%; in that of a negative result from 34.0% to 64.9%, and in the accuracy from 50.0% to 75.0%.


BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE
CSF-to-venous fistulas contribute to spontaneous intracranial hypotension. CT-guided fibrin occlusion has been described as a minimally invasive treatment strategy; however, its reproducibility across different institutions remains unclear. This multi-institution study evaluated the clinical and radiologic outcomes of CT-guided fibrin occlusion, hypothesizing a correlation among cure rates, fibrin injectate spread, and drainage patterns.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
A retrospective evaluation was conducted on CT-guided fibrin glue treatment in patients with CSF-to-venous fistulas from 6 US and UK institutions from 2020 to 2023. Patient information, procedural characteristics, and injectate spread and drainage patterns were examined. Clinical improvement assessed through medical records served as the primary outcome.

RESULTS
Of 119 patients at a mean follow-up of 5.0 months, fibrin occlusion resulted in complete clinical improvement in 59.7%, partial improvement in 34.5%, and no improvement in 5.9% of patients. Complications were reported in 4% of cases. Significant associations were observed between clinical improvement and concordant injectate spread with the fistula drainage pattern (P = .0089) and pretreatment symptom duration (P < .001). No associations were found between clinical improvement and cyst puncture, intravascular extension, rebound headache, body mass index, age, or number of treatment attempts.

CONCLUSIONS
Fibrin occlusion performed across various institutions shows a CSF-to-venous fistula drainage pattern and shorter pretreatment symptom duration, emphasizing the importance of accurate injectate placement and early intervention.


The Escaba dam is in the southwest of Tucuman province, northwestern of Argentina. The characteristics of the structure of the dam favored the development of a colonial aggregation of Tadarida brasiliensis. The colony is protected and the species is included in the Convention on Conservation to Migratory Wild Animal Species, to which Argentina has adhered in 1991. As an alternative that could make compatible the opposed interests of the conservationists groups and the civil employees in charge of the security of the dam, the colony of bats was relocated and confined to one of the seven inner bays of the structure, without affecting the integrity of the colony. The controlled confinement will facilitate the later tasks of auscultation, indispensable to guarantee the security of the dam, the people, and the material goods and productive activities downstream, and will constitute an alternative of viable handling for the protection of the colony.


BACKGROUND
Although hypotension commonly accompanies intermittent hemodialysis for acute renal failure (ARF) in the intensive care unit (ICU), little is known about how it may be prevented. Online relative blood volume (RBV) monitoring has been used to reduce hypotension in chronic hemodialysis, but is of unproven benefit in ARF. This study tested the hypothesis that hypotension is predictable using online RBV monitoring in patients dialyzed for ARF in an ICU setting.

METHODS
The primary definition of hypotension was mean arterial pressure (MAP) <70 mm Hg; systolic blood pressure (SBP) <100 mm Hg was used as a secondary outcome. Fifty-seven treatments were prospectively studied in twenty consecutive adult patients treated with intermittent hemodialysis. RBV was continuously measured using the Hemoscan device (Gambro).

RESULTS
Hypotension occurred in 30% of treatments as defined by MAP, and 18% as defined by SBP. There was no evidence of patient-specific or universal RBV thresholds that were associated with hypotension. Analysis using the kappa statistic showed that concordance of RBV and hypotension (that is, RBV falling prior to hypotensive episodes rather than rising or remaining stable) was no greater than chance. RBV and rate of change in RBV slopes did not predict hypotension as a dichotomous outcome, and were not correlated with MAP or SBP whether autocorrelation was corrected for or neglected. Substituting rate of change in RBV (RBV slopes) for absolute RBV values did not improve predictive power.

CONCLUSIONS
These results suggest that strategies based on online RBV monitoring are unlikely to reduce hypotension in intermittent hemodialysis for ARF that is delivered through central venous catheters.


Bacteria growing at high temperatures have a high proportion of charged residues in their proteins to stabilize their 3D structure. By mining 175 disparate bacterial and archaeal proteomes we discovered that, against the general trend for charged residues, the frequency of aspartic acid residues decreases strongly as natural growth temperature increases. We conclude that organisms likely adapt to high temperatures by minimizing the harmful consequences of spontaneous chemical transformations of Asp residues.


In orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, the multipath components whose delays exceed cyclic prefix (CP) cause intersymbol interference (ISI) and intercarrier interference (ICI), which may degrade system performance severely. In this paper, we propose two novel iterative cyclicity restoration (CR) schemes to efficiently cancel these interferences for OFDM-based wireless local area network (WLAN) systems. The time-domain parallel CR (PCR) scheme is introduced first. Using time-domain iterative solution, PCR provides much lower computational complexity than conventional CR. Furthermore, in order to improve the performance of PCR, we present successive CR (SCR) method based on Gauss-Seidel iteration. SCR offers faster convergence speed than PCR without increasing the computational cost. It is shown that both PCR and SCR need only a few iterations to approach the system performance with sufficient CP. SCR has approximately the same performance as conventional CR with much lower computational complexity for WLAN applications.


The aim of the study was to observe and quantify the intake of water by piglets in the sucking period up to 28 days. An attempt was made to compare the quantity of taken water sinks in four different periods, similar to the occurrence of calendar seasons in Poland's climatic conditions. The research was conducted in the conditions of a pig farm, producing fatteners in a closed cycle. The observations included 17 litters obtained from Polish Landrace (PL) sows mated by four Polish Large White (PLW) boars. They were conducted during the full calendar year in four groups, depending on the date of birth and rearing: from 1 December to 28 February (Group I), from 1 March to 31 May (Group II), from 1 June to 31 August (Group III) and from 1 September to 30 November (Group IV). The number piglets in litters, total weight of litter and individual weight of piglets were similar among groups. Some piglets (Group I) started taking water from the first day of life, but it was a small amount. The regular intake of all piglets started at 3 days of age. The highest water intake was recorded in spring-summer (Group II and III), and as a percentage of 1 kg body weight of piglets, the highest consumption occurred in group II (March-May). It was hypothesized that the increased water requirement in the spring and summer months may be due to the variability of the conditions related to the outdoor temperature, the length of the light day and thus the varied life activities of the piglets. Perhaps, it is also related to atavistic symptoms in pigs. However, this requires further research.


Experiments using spatial cues and spatial probes provide strong evidence for an attention mechanism that chooses a location and selects all information at that location. This selection process can work very quickly; so quickly that selection probably begins before segmentation and grouping. It can be implemented in a neural network simply and efficiently without temporal binding. In conjunction with this spatial attention, however, temporal binding can potentially enhance visual selection in complex scenes. First, it would allow a target object to be selected without also selecting a superimposed distractor. Second, it could maintain representations of objects after attention has moved to another object. Third, it could allow multiple parts of an object or scene to be selected, segmented, and analysed simultaneously. Thus, temporal synchrony should be more likely to appear during tasks with overlapping targets and distractors, and tasks that require that multiple objects or multipart objects be analysed and remembered simultaneously.


The patenting and licensing of human genetic material and proteins represents an extension of intellectual property (IP) rights to naturally occurring biological material and scientific information, much of it well upstream of drugs and other disease therapies. This report concludes that IP restrictions rarely impose significant burdens on biomedical research, but there are reasons to be apprehensive about their future impact on scientific advances in this area. The report recommends 13 actions that policy-makers, courts, universities, and health and patent officials should take to prevent the increasingly complex web of IP protections from getting in the way of potential breakthroughs in genomic and proteomic research. It endorses the National Institutes of Health guidelines for technology licensing, data sharing, and research material exchanges and says that oversight of compliance should be strengthened. It recommends enactment of a statutory exception from infringement liability for research on a patented invention and raising the bar somewhat to qualify for a patent on upstream research discoveries in biotechnology. With respect to genetic diagnostic tests to detect patient mutations associated with certain diseases, the report urges patent holders to allow others to perform the tests for purposes of verifying the results.


All four series of experiments—transplants of periosteum, subperiosteal resections, cap implantations, and bone transplants—combined to emphasize the osteogenetic function of the specific-osteoblastic cells of the periosteum and the inability of the adult bone cell to form new osseous growth. Bone growth occurred in all the transplants of periosteum, and from the periosteum after subperiosteal resection; it was, however, absent in the cap experiments where the ingrowth of periosteum had been excluded. In the bone transplants, the adult bone cells of the graft gave no evidence of activity whereas the periosteum showed marked osteoblastic properties. Similar osteogenetic power was manifested by the transplanted endosteal cells lining the marrow cavity and the Haversian canals, provided their vitality was maintained by intimate union with the tissues of the environment.

Bone macroscopically bare of periosteum can be successfully transplanted into the soft parts, not because the bone cells give rise to new bone formation, nor because of a metaplasia of the surrounding connective tissue cells into osteoblasts, but because of adherent periosteal cells, and of living endosteal cells. The practical conclusions for the surgery of bone transplants are self-evident: bone should be transplanted with the periosteum; if feasible it should be split lengthwise, so as to insure an intimate union of the endosteum with the surrounding tissues. Bone macroscopically bare of peniosteum can, however, be transplanted with good hope of success if care be taken not to scrape away the adherent cells of the osteogenetic layer of the periosteum.

The classical conception of a complete necrosis of the bony portion of the transplant must be modified, since, though the majority of the transplanted bone cells necrose, numerous cells can maintain their vitality until the graft has become vascularized. These cells, however, give no evidences of osteogenesis.

The process by which the necrotic bone of the transplant is replaced by living bone consists not only in the usual sequence of lacunar absorption and subsequent bone apposition, but in a "creeping replacement." In this process the young bone cells before they have assumed the adult form and before the bone has become lamellar in structure, show evidences of direct cell division, and of power to absorb necrotic bone and form new bone. The living osseous tissue advances into the old by the intercellular deposit of bone, also probably by a direct advance of the young bone cells in the old lacunae.

We wish to acknowledge our indebtness to Prof. Borst, director of the Pathological Institute of the University of Munich, for placing all the facilities of his laboratory at our disposal and for his constant interest in the research, to Dr. Walter M. Brickner, of New York, for calling our attention to the work of Sir William Macewen and for suggesting the need of further study of bone growth, to Dr. Carl W. Henze of New Haven for much helpful criticism, and to Fraulein Bertha Neresheimer, to whose accuracy and skill we owe the camera lucida drawings.


We have developed a dynamic model for photoelectric effect in bipolar devices exposed to a wide range of ionizing radiation intensities. We represent the stationary and dynamic photocurrents by current sources in parallel with each p-n junction. These sources include the prompt photocurrent of the depletion regions and the delayed response associated with the buildup and discharge of excess charge carriers in the quasi-neutral (q-n) regions adjacent to the junctions. The latter are described in terms of dynamic delay times for each q-n region, which can be represented by RC equivalent delay circuits. The model has been implemented in the circuit simulator AIM-Spice and has been verified by numerical simulations.


among of with the de fi nitive in this subgroup. in anti-spike the primary dose in the of Objectives: Admission to stroke units following transient ischemic attack (TIA) increases hospital length of stay (LOS) resulting in reduced bed availability. Studies have demonstrated clinical safety for TIA to be man- aged in an Emergency Department Observational Unit (EDOU). 1-3 At our institution, all TIA presentations were previously admitted to the Stroke Unit (SU). We aimed to compare 90-day stroke risk of admitted TIA patients in SU versus EDOU. Methods: Retrospective analysis was performed on all admitted TIA patients from January 2019 to December 2020. Patients were strati fi ed into high-risk TIA if they had new atrial fi brillation (AF), pre-existing AF not anticoagulated or symptomatic carotid stenosis >50%. LOS was calculated from time of presentation to time of discharge. 90-day stroke risk was also determined. Results: 377 patients were identi fi ed; 126 had admissions into the SU and 251 into the EDOU. High-risk TIA was seen at 18.3% (23/126) in the SU versus 12.3% (31/251) in the EDOU. Average LOS in the SU was 177.9 hours vs 19.6 hours in the EDOU. LOS in the SU was largely accounted for by inpatient endarterectomy (median 93 hours) and inpa- tient magnetic resonance imaging (median 29.6 hours) whilst LOS in the EDOU was contributed to by carotid ultrasonography (median 13.3 hours). 90-day stroke risk was at 2% (5/251) for the EDOU which is comparable to structured nonadmission-based TIA protocols as shown in previous international studies. Conclusion:


The communicative approach has based its teaching techniques on the division of the process of learning languages as L2 into four skills: reading, writing, speaking and listening. The importance attached to the spoken word has benefited the latter two at the expense of the reading and writing skills, which fell in a state of semi-oblivion. Course writers of the 1990's have re-introduced the printed word as a fundamental part of the learning process, since foreign students will be required, sooner or later, to understand a written text or write an application or a letter. ELT specialists have also become interested in the written word and, thus, new books on the subject have recently been published while older ones have been revised and updated. This article aims at examining the importance of including the written skill in our syllabuses (from the evidence that correcting our students's compositions provide) and at suggesting ways of making our students aware of the need to improve their writing tasks.


We present four case reports that describe neurotoxicity experienced in adult patients with cystic fibrosis (CF) receiving intravenous polymyxin B. Paresthesia was observed after the first dose of polymyxin B in all patients. These symptoms resolved after discontinuation of polymyxin B and switching treatment to colistin. All four patients completed therapy with colistin without experiencing additional adverse reactions. This report contributes to the small body of literature currently available on the use of polymyxin B in the CF population.


Congenital, bilaterally symmetrical dislocation of the lens within the posterior chamber is referred to as lens ectopia. The behavior of the anterior hyaloid membrane in congenital lens ectopia has not been considered hitherto. The anterior hyaloid membrane in the aphakic area of the pupil is intact or ruptured and the ciliovitreal connex in the region of the lens dislocation may be normal or absent. If surgery is planned because of the dislocation, a knowledge of biomicroscopic details of the anterior hyaloid membrane might be useful.


Background
Patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) have a higher risk of developing obstructive sleep apnea (OSA) compared to the general population. Our study aims to analyze the usefulness of the STOP-BANG score, tool which was not yet validated in patients with diabetets, as a tool that estimates the severity of OSA, in patients with T2DM.

Methods
120 patients, who answered the STOP-BANG questionnaire and underwent polysomnography, were included in the study. The patients were divided into 3 groups, depending on the severity of OSA, defined by the apnea/hypopnea index (AHI).

Results
A significant percentage of participants (42.1%) had a severe form of OSA (AHI ≥30) and a high percentage of subjects had a STOP-BANG score ≥5 (58.7%), equivalent to a severe form of the disease. The STOP-BANG score increased proportionally with AHI (p<0.001). The area under the ROC curve for the STOP-Bang score indicated an optimal cut-off value of 4.5, with a sensitivity of 88.2% and a specificity of 62.9% (p <0.001), STOP-BANG score ≥5 being an independent predictor for severe OSA in patients with T2DM.

Conclusions
The STOP-BANG score can be used in patients with diabetes to detect severe OSA in order to establish appropriate therapeutic measures.


Background: Commonly malignant solid tumor have an abundant tumor-associated cellular matrix (ECM). Although radioimmunothrepy (RIT) have proven to be effective and precise treatment in cancer, yet RIT has a limited performance in solid tumor, due to highly distributed ECM inside solid tumor tissue. Previously, we designed the combination RIT to enhance the penetration of monoclonal antibody (mAb), where we investigated that, using Relaxin which contain oncolytic adenovirus (OA) as combination therapy decreases tumor associated ECM. In this study, we developed mathematical modeling to explain and describe the diffusion and penetration of mAb inside the tumor with ECM. To obtain the model parameters in our developed mathematical model, we performed related experiments such as immunofluorescence and qRT-PCR. Methods: We developed the reaction-diffusion partial differential equations (PDE) for describing the dependency of cancer cell, ECM density, diffusion and penetration of mAb and ECM modulated therapy that include our experimental data, also to overcome the classical limitation of PDE method. Model included the rapid decrease of ECM by OA, and density dependent diffusion coefficient. Initial condition for solving the PDE was derived using our experimental result. Diffusion coefficient for mAb and OA was modelled for simulating actual behavior of mAb and OA. Various condition of ECM density, and structure were modelled that derives the actual result of distribution of collagen. To confirm the mathematical prediction, we designed in vitro experiment with same condition as used as "in model". Results: Using our developed model, we successfully described relationship between ECM and mAb transport by OA, and investigated the change of ECM. Diffusion and penetration of mAb and OA were well described from tumor vessel and tumor surface. Regardless of ECM structure, all ECM structure were degraded after spreading of OA. In addition, our model simulation results predicted that mAb uptake dramatically increased in combination approach and was more than mAb alone treatment. Our developed mathematical model predicted the optimal schedule of OA pretreatment and it shows great results more than mAb pretreatment. Pretreatment results with OA shows a great anti-tumor effect more than mAb pretreatment in experimental data. Our model could well predicted and matched the experimental results. Collectively, in our study, we suggested new theoretical mathematical model framework to explain various ECM condition with drug transport Citation Format: Hyeongi Kim, Yangjin Kim, Yong-Jin Lee, Jin-su Kim. Derivation of mathematical modeling for the diffusion and penetration of monoclonal antibody delivery into tumor [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the American Association for Cancer Research Annual Meeting 2019; 2019 Mar 29-Apr 3; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2019;79(13 Suppl):Abstract nr LB-219.


The remodeling of the bronchial walls is an important process of the pathophysiology of COPD as the matrix metalloproteinase-2 (MMP-2) is shown to play an important role in this process. The aim of the current study was to elucidate the possible role of MMP2 -1306C>T promoter polymorphism and plasma MMP-2 level as risk and biomarker of COPD. We genotyped by PCR-RFLP 84 patients with COPD and 71 control individuals and assessed with ELISA the plasma MMP-2 levels in 59 patients and 20 controls. The genotype, but not allele distribution, differed between COPD patients and controls (p=0.021 and 0.602, respectively). Carriers of the variant T allele ( CT+TT ) tended to have 1.64-fold higher risk for COPD (95% CI: 0.82-3.26, p=0.164) than those with CC genotype, as that risk was significant in the subset of older than 65 years individuals (OR=4.24, 95% CI:1.31-13.57, p=0.019). Patients with T genotypes ( CT+TT ) had later onset of the disease (64.1±7.1 years) than those with GG genotype (59.7±9.5 years, p=0.045). The plasma MMP-2 levels were higher, although not significantly, in patients than in controls (440±208 vs. 373±234 ng/ml, p=0.229). This difference was significant in women (555±176 vs. 354±230 ng/ml, p=0.033), but not in men (p=0.798). MMP-2 plasma levels tended to correlate positively with the age of the disease onset (R=0.235, p=0.082), especially in women (R=0.730, p=0.040). The patients with stage IV COPD had significantly lower MMP-2 than those with less advanced state (254±34 vs. 457±210 ng/ml, p=0.039). In conclusion, our results suggest that the T genotypes of MMP2 -1306C>T SNP may determine a risk for COPD especially in advanced age, while the plasma MMP-2 may not be a useful biomarker for COPD.


Optical waveguides made from periodically poled materials provide high confinement of light and enable the generation of new wavelengths via quasi-phase-matching, making them a key platform for nonlinear optics and photonics. However, such devices are not typically employed for high-harmonic generation. Here, using 200-fs, 10-nJ-level pulses of 4100 nm light at 1 MHz, we generate high harmonics up to the 13th harmonic (315 nm) in a chirped, periodically poled lithium niobate (PPLN) waveguide. Total conversion efficiencies into the visible--ultraviolet region are as high as 10 percent. We find that the output spectrum depends on the waveguide poling period, indicating that quasi-phase-matching plays a significant role. In the future, such periodically poled waveguides may enable compact sources of ultrashort pulses at high repetition rates and provide new methods of probing the electronic structure of solid-state materials.


Seaport  remains the most  feasible for the activities of terminals, international export and import business  activities where loading and offloading  of inter-land distribution through inland  waterways, rail,  road and air to ensure  that what comes in or go out are checked to meet the national  and international rules and regulation guiding seaport operations.   As a source of  major  point  of commercial  activity  along the coast. As a source of pollution, harbors need to be strategically located to provide the greatest  benefit  according to economic and environmental issues.  The marine environment  and its effects on ports design, port warehousing,  port operation,  port hydraulics,  coastal geomorphology, littoral  drift and  sedimentation, port security  and safety  for  shipping   technology  and  economics activities,  design  and construction  of a floating  port related  structure  and  other  environmental  issues.     Seaport building  must have the organizational  capacities  to appropriately  perceive issues, analysis  information  about complex  economic  and  environmental   relationships  factors  of  turbulent  transition, increasing demand  on ports  to  acquire, assimilate,  highly  fragmented  information  about new potential  constraints  and  opportunities  in port management and challenges of it sustainability.   The  geotechnical  and  Structural  aspect  of the port  construction have been given very little attention.    This  research  use an annotated  conversation  and  questioner  to  address the  above  issues,  with the aim  to apply   concepts  of  practice,  port  elements  and  their  effects  on seaports.    This  research  use an annotated  conversation  and  questioner  to  address the  above  issues,  and  their  effects  on seaports.   This  research  have to investigate the needed  professionals,  in civil,  structural , geotechnical, hydraulic  engineers  and consultants  to strength  the usage  of modern  materials,  corrosion, naval-architecture  and other  input knowledges  of which  is  required  to  produce a sound  and  commercial  design of a modern  standard  seaport  or marine terminal for sustainability.


Bronchial asthma is a multifactorial disease. Industrial chemical compounds are also included in the list of causative factors of bronchial asthma. The contribution of industrial allergens to the formation of bronchial asthma is undeniable. In studies carried out in conjunction with professional pathologists, children were found to be sensitized to industrial allergens (nickel, chromium, formaldehyde, etc.), which contribute to the formation of bronchial asthma. However, determining factor, is the presence of atopy.


The proteomic analysis of glycosylation is uniquely challenging. The numerous and varied biological roles of protein-linked glycans have fueled a tremendous demand for technologies that enable rapid, in-depth structural examination of glycosylated proteins in complex biological systems. In turn, this demand has driven many innovations in wide ranging fields of bioanalytical science. This review will summarize key developments in glycoprotein separation and enrichment, glycoprotein proteolysis strategies, glycopeptide separation and enrichment, the role of mass measurement accuracy in glycopeptide detection, glycopeptide ion dissociation methods for MS/MS, and informatic tools for glycoproteomic analysis. In aggregate, this selection of topics serves to encapsulate the present status of MS-based analytical technologies for engaging the challenges of glycoproteomic analysis.


Despite the capability in successfully fixing more and more real-world bugs, existing Automated Program Repair (APR) techniques are still challenged by the long-standing overfitting problem (i.e., a generated patch that passes all tests is actually incorrect). Plenty of approaches have been proposed for automated patch correctness assessment (APCA). Nonetheless, dynamic ones (i.e., those that needed to execute tests) are time-consuming while static ones (i.e., those built on top of static code features) are less precise. Therefore, embedding techniques have been proposed recently, which assess patch correctness via embedding token sequences extracted from the changed code of a generated patch. However, existing techniques rarely considered the context information and program structures of a generated patch, which are crucial for patch correctness assessment as revealed by existing studies. In this study, we explore the idea of context-aware code change embedding considering program structures for patch correctness assessment. Specifically, given a patch, we not only focus on the changed code but also take the correlated unchanged part into consideration, through which the context information can be extracted and leveraged. We then utilize the AST path technique for representation where the structure information from AST node can be captured. Finally, based on several pre-defined heuristics, we build a deep learning based classifier to predict the correctness of the patch. We implemented this idea as Cache and performed extensive experiments to assess its effectiveness. Our results demonstrate that Cache can (1) perform better than previous representation learning based techniques (e.g., Cache relatively outperforms existing techniques by \( \approx \) 6%, \( \approx \) 3%, and \( \approx \) 16%, respectively under three diverse experiment settings), and (2) achieve overall higher performance than existing APCA techniques while even being more precise than certain dynamic ones including PATCH-SIM (92.9% vs. 83.0%). Further results reveal that the context information and program structures leveraged by Cache contributed significantly to its outstanding performance.


Document selling 150 acres of land held by Ziza Moore to Elizabeth, M. B., and Nancy E. Damron. According to the agreement, the Damron family will pay $2,000 for the land in installments, including interest. The document is signed by Ziza Moore and two witnesses.


The objectives of this research were to: (1) develop process trees in Definiens Developer 7® for mapping and monitoring riparian zone land-cover classes within two QuickBird images; and (2) compare the results of four object-oriented and pixel-based change detection approaches. Two QuickBird images, atmospherically corrected to at-surface reflectance, were captured in May and August 2007 for a savanna woodlands area along Mimosa Creek in Central Queensland, Australia. In-situ vegetation structural measurements and LiDAR data, obtained on 28 May 5 June and 15 July 2007 respectively, were used for calibration and validation. A sequential segmentation routine was applied to enable segmentation of large image datasets. An Isodata unsupervised classification was used for pixel-based classification and process trees were developed for object-oriented classification of the following land-cover classes: streambed; riparian vegetation; bare ground; rangelands; and woodlands. Four object-oriented and pixel-based change detection routines were applied to the image data: post-classification comparison; image differencing; image regression; and the tasselled cap transformation. The object-oriented classification results showed that objectand class-related features and membership functions could be standardized in the process trees for classifying the two QuickBird images. Results from the different change detection approaches indicated that post-classification comparison and image differencing produced more accurate results, especially when used together. All four change detection approaches were suited to object-oriented analysis. Advantages of the object-oriented change detection routines included: (1) no need for post-change detection filtering and smoothing; (2) less impact of slight geometric offsets between image datasets; and (3) the ability to include context relationships to improve change detection results.


We compute the properties of a sample of 221 local, early-type galaxies with a spectral energy distribution (SED) modeling software, CIGALEMC. Concentrating on the star-forming (SF) activity and dust contents, we derive parameters such as the specific star formation rate (sSFR), the dust luminosity, dust mass, and temperature. In our sample, 52% is composed of elliptical (E) galaxies and 48% of lenticular (S0) galaxies. We find a larger proportion of S0 galaxies among galaxies with a large sSFR and large specific dust emission. The stronger activity of S0 galaxies is confirmed by larger dust masses. We investigate the relative proportion of active galactic nuclei (AGNs) and SF galaxies in our sample using spectroscopic Sloan Digital Sky Survey data and near-infrared selection techniques, and find a larger proportion of AGN-dominated galaxies in the S0 sample than the E one. This could corroborate a scenario where blue galaxies evolve into red ellipticals by passing through an S0 AGN active period while quenching its star formation. Finally, we find a good agreement comparing our estimates with color indicators.


It is my purpose in this short paper to give my personal experience only, in the use of jequirity in the treatment of the above affection; when used in picked cases, I know of nothing that will take its place. I have used it in all cases except the acute, with nothing but the best results. I have never seen an ulcer of the cornea follow its use. I have seen some few cases of xerosis after using jequirity, but none I could say positively depended upon, or was the direct after affect of, this medication. Several years ago one of my assistants, while squeezing a case of trachoma, was unfortunate enough to become inoculated. This case was a peculiar one from the beginning. His eyes stood no treatment well; his corneae were extremely irritable; all the mydriatics produced increased corneal irritation; his eyes were made worse by all treatment.


From the moment gamma-band synchronization has been proposed to be a mechanism for the integration of neuronal populations in functional areas widely distributed over the brain, there has been a need for a reliable and robust method to measure this synchronization. This method could then be applied to noninvasive measurements, performed by MEG or EEG, on the human brain in order to study synchronization between different brain areas. In the past two decades several types of measures have been introduced and have been applied mainly to EEG and MEG studies on subjects performing simple tasks during the measurement and epileptic patients, with results giving an insight into some of the neuronal processes going on in the brain. Despite the interesting results, often spurious synchronizations is measured, the result is spoiled by the large amount of noise present or measures are applied to noncorresponding situations, such as stationary measures being applied in nonstationary situations. An overview of the most often used measures to detect synchronization is presented and commented here.


Almost all commercially available haptic interfaces share a common pitfall, a small shoebox-sized workspace; these devices typically rely on rigid-link manipulator design concepts. In this paper we outline our design for a new kinesthetic haptic system that drastically increases the usable haptic workspace. We present a proof-of-concept prototype, along with our analysis of its capabilities. Our design uses optical tracking to sense the position of the device, and air jet actuation to generate forces. By combining these two technologies, we are able to detach our device from the ground, thus sidestepping many problems that have plagued traditional haptic devices including workspace size, friction, and inertia. We show that optical tracking and air jet actuation successfully enable kinesthetic haptic interaction with virtual environments. Given an appropriately large volume high-pressure air source, and a reasonably high speed tracking system, this design paradigm has many desirable qualities when compared to traditional haptic design schemes.


Red mud, an industrial waste obtained from alumina plants, is usually discharged into marine or disposed into a landfill polluting the surrounding water, atmosphere, and soil. Thus, disposal of red mud is an environmental concern and it should be recycled in an effective way. Since red mud consists of iron- and aluminum-rich phases, it can potentially be processed into cementitious material and can be used for a construction purpose. This research investigated the synthesis of nanoferrite (NF) clinker by using red mud as a raw material through chemical combustion technology for potential use in cement-based composite. Before the synthesis of NF, red mud was characterized by using XRF, XRD, and SEM techniques. From characterization results, the stoichiometric ratio of raw materials was calculated and experimentally optimized. The sample was then tested at various temperatures (815, 900, 1000, and 1100°C) to find the optimum synthesis temperature. Finally, the hydraulic activity of NF was verified and the contribution to mechanical properties was determined by replacing cement with NF at various substitution levels (0, 5, 10, and 20 wt%). Test results showed that the optimum condition for the synthesis of NF was found when the ratio of CaCO3/red mud was 1.5 and the sintering temperature was 815°C. The synthesized NF had an average diameter of 300 nm, and the main composition was brownmillerite (C4AF) with distinct hydraulic reaction. When NF was used as a substitute of Portland cement in mortar, the flexural strength with a 5% replacement level improved by 15%. Therefore, it can be concluded that the synthesis of NF provides an alternative approach to recycle red mud and could significantly help in reducing environmental pollution.


The mechanisms of interaction between microorganisms and their environment in a stirred bioreactor can be modeled by a stochastic approach. The procedure comprises two submodels: a classical stochastic model for the microbial cell circulation and a Markov chain model for the concentration gradient calculus. The advantage lies in the fact that the core of each submodel, i.e., the transition matrix (which contains the probabilities to shift from a perfectly mixed compartment to another in the bioreactor representation), is identical for the two cases. That means that both the particle circulation and fluid mixing process can be analyzed by use of the same modeling basis. This assumption has been validated by performing inert tracer (NaCl) and stained yeast cells dispersion experiments that have shown good agreement with simulation results. The stochastic model has been used to define a characteristic concentration profile experienced by the microorganisms during a fermentation test performed in a scale‐down reactor. The concentration profiles obtained in this way can explain the scale‐down effect in the case of a Saccharomyces cerevisiae fed‐batch process. The simulation results are analyzed in order to give some explanations about the effect of the substrate fluctuation dynamics on S. cerevisiae.


For many reinforcement learning (RL) applications, specifying a reward is difficult. This paper considers an RL setting where the agent obtains information about the reward only by querying an expert that can, for example, evaluate individual states or provide binary preferences over trajectories. From such expensive feedback, we aim to learn a model of the reward that allows standard RL algorithms to achieve high expected returns with as few expert queries as possible. To this end, we propose Information Directed Reward Learning (IDRL), which uses a Bayesian model of the reward and selects queries that maximize the information gain about the difference in return between plausibly optimal policies. In contrast to prior active reward learning methods designed for specific types of queries, IDRL naturally accommodates different query types. Moreover, it achieves similar or better performance with significantly fewer queries by shifting the focus from reducing the reward approximation error to improving the policy induced by the reward model. We support our findings with extensive evaluations in multiple environments and with different query types.


DNA methylation is an epigenetic modification involving the transfer of a methyl group to cytosine residues of a DNA molecule. Altered DNA methylation of certain genes is associated with several diseases including cancer. Nanomaterials, such as graphene oxide (GO), offer great potential as sensing elements for methylated DNA (mDNA) detection due to their distinct properties. Understanding molecular interactions between mDNA and GO can make provision for developing a universal cancer screening test. Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation and density functional theory (DFT) calculation have been employed for investigating their detailed macro- and microscale interactions. Based upon the MD simulation, different adsorption levels of methylated and unmethylated DNAs on GO were represented by a contacting surface area (CSA), which depends on surrounding conditions (in water or a MgCl2 solution). In water, the CSAs of the methylated and unmethylated single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) were ≈13 and ≈5 nm2, respectively, representing more preferable adsorption on GO for the methylated ssDNA. In the presence of divalent ions (Mg2+), the CSAs of both methylated and unmethylated DNA molecules were ≈8 nm2, suggesting that there was no significant difference in adsorption in a saline solution. To reveal the electrical property of GO covered by either methylated or unmethylated DNA, its electronic structure was investigated by the DFT calculation. The energy gaps of pristine graphene (pG) and GO adsorbed by 5-methylcytosine (5mC) were 1.6 and 12.9 meV, respectively, while cytosine adsorption resulted in lower energy gaps (1.2 meV for pG and 9.5 meV for GO). When comparing methylated DNA-covered GO with that covered with unmethylated DNA, remarkable differences in electrical conductivity, which were caused by the electronic structure of GO, were observed. These findings will provide a new route for an efficient detection method of DNA methylation, which can further be used to develop a universal cancer test.


We consider on-demand healthcare platforms that allow patients to seek care online from distributed doctors. Healthcare costs have been steadily increasing, while patient experience continues to sour with costly (many times unnecessary) commute and waiting. To alleviate the costs, various on-demand healthcare platforms have emerged but have been little investigated in academic research. We develop a strategic queueing model where the platform decides the commission rate upon which potential doctors make their participation, service quality and pricing decisions and potential patients make their service acquisition decisions independently. We find that in equilibrium a higher commission rate always lowers doctor participation as well as service quality, but it may increase the service price if it significantly softens the competition. Moreover, as patient intensity increases, the service quality improves, accompanied largely with a higher price. We further investigate the effect of platform price control. We find that allowing the platform to control the service price in addition to the commission rate may result in more doctor participation, higher service quality and price, higher platform profit, and surprisingly even higher profit for the doctors. This generally occurs when the patient intensity is either low or high, the waiting cost is low, or the doctor heterogeneity is low. Our results are useful to understand the performance of on-demand healthcare platforms.


The classical Airy function has been generalized by Kontsevich to a function of a matrix argument, which is an integral over the space of skew-hermitian matrices of a unitary-invariant exponential kernel. In this paper, the Kontsevich integral is further generalized to integrals over the Lie algebra of an arbitrary connected compact Lie group, using exponential kernels invariant under the group. The (real) polynomial defining this kernel is said to have the Airy property if the integral defines a function of moderate growth. A very general sufficient criterion for a polynomial to have the Airy property is given. It is shown that an invariant polynomial on the Lie algebra has the Airy property if its restriction to a Cartan subalgebra has the Airy property. This result is used to evaluate these invariant integrals completely and explicitly on the hermitian matrices, obtaining formulae that contain those of Kontsevich as special cases.


The Introduction, which gives information about the life and work of Procopius and also about previous editions and studies of the text, is followed by Chapter 1 which contains an analytical codicological and palaeological description of codex Ath, which was written in the late 13th century and is thus the earliest extant ms of Procopius' Wars. Section 2 examines the position of the codex in the stemma codicum, proposed by the latest editor of the text, Jacob Haury, Procopius Caesariensis Opera Omnia (Teubner: Leipzig, 1905-12, revised by G.Wirth, 1963). A collation of the text with the principal manuscripts (K and L) of the two families, z and y, shows that Ath belongs to the y family. A further collation of Ath with all other extant manuscripts of this family of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, illustrates the importance of Ath in the tradition of the text, despite its minor phonetic, grammatical, syntactical and linguistic errors. Section 3 gives a description and updated information of all manuscripts of family y, which were briefly described by previous editors, and some of them were not examined at all, before their relation is examined and the stemma codicum is revised on the basis of a series of propositions. It is concluded that Ath has been the exemplar for some of the later manuscripts, either directly or through intermediaries. The study concludes with a more theoretical chapter, Section 4, which places the production of Ath and other manuscripts, containing Procopius' works and other early Byzantine historiographical texts, in the general context of the intellectual milieu of the Palaeologan period.


Purpose:Ritonavir is a powerful inhibitor of cytochrome P450 3A (CYP3A) that metabolizes many antiretrovirals. We examined the effect of ritonavir and of chronic viral hepatitis (CVH) status on CYP3A activity. Methods:Twenty-six HIV-positive men (13 with CVH, 16 on chronic ritonavir-based highly active antiretroviral therapy) received oral and intravenous midazolam, a probe for CYP3A phenotypic activity. Results:CYP3A activity was expressed as oral clearance of the midazolam probe. In HIV-positive subjects not on ritonavir, CYP3A activity (mean ± SD) did not differ between subjects by CVH (no CVH, controls: 28.5 ± 9.0 vs. CVH+: 23.2 ± 6.2 mL/min/kg, not significant). In those on ritonavir (R), CYP3A activity was 7% of controls (R: 2.1 ± 0.8 vs. no R 28.5 ± 9.0 mL/min/kg, P < 0.0004). CYP3A activity in subjects on ritonavir and with CVH was further reduced to 4% of controls (no CVH, R+ 2.1 ± 0.8 vs. R+, CVH+ 1.0 ± 0.4 mL/min/kg, P < 0.006). Conclusions:Ritonavir markedly decreases CYP3A activity. In the presence of CVH, ritonavir-based therapy further reduces CYP3A activity by half. Coinfection with CVH impairs CYP3A activity in the presence of the CYP3A inhibitor ritonavir.


In the current global scenario, automotive industries struggle for fuel consumption and emission reductions, while constantly improving the engine power output and performance. These require turbocharger units which make easy long maintenance intervals along with improved reliability and efficiency. A Turbocharger basically consists of a radial inflow turbine, a centrifugal compressor and a central housing of rotating assembly. The present work focuses on the modelling and dynamic analysis of the turbocharger rotor supported on floating ring and foil bearings for parametric identification, stability analysis and vibration reduction aspects. The flexible rotor-bearing system is modelled using the finite element approach and the nonlinear dynamic responses due to unbalance and aerodynamic loads are obtained. Numerical and experimental modal analysis is performed on a real time automotive turbocharger test rig. After validating the response data, the model is employed to identify the bearing parameters using inverse analysis methodology. The optimization based identification scheme of bearing dynamic stiffness and damping coefficients is presented with the measured dynamic responses as input signatures. The robustness of the approach is illustrated with noisy input signals. Later-on, the coupled field fluid dynamic study is conducted for fully-floating ring bearing rotor system with consideration of fluid film properties and structural data of the ring, casing and journal. The pressure and temperature distributions in the floating ring bearing are obtained with appropriate boundary conditions. Further, the effect of the speed ratio on the pressure and temperature distribution is evaluated. The integrated thermo-hydrodynamic (THD) analysis of rotor- bearing system with temperature dependent oil viscosity in floating ring bearings is presented. Furthermore, the stability issues are discussed under accelerating/decelerating conditions. Effects of various parameters including unbalance and phase angle difference at the discs on the dynamics of the overall system are also studied. The influence of nonlinear external gas forces on the dynamics of the rotor is studied. Exhaust gas excitations are modelled with Muszynska's force model along with axial engine order harmonic excitations. In turbochargers, in order to provide a stable connection between static and rotating parts, often one axial or thrust bearing is provided on compressor side in addition to two radial bearings. Effect of the thrust bearing forces on the stability of the rotor system is studied with a linear spring element model as well as by using a finite difference scheme. In order to minimize the vibration amplitudes at critical and sub-critical operations, semiactive and active control approaches are implemented. In semi-active control scheme, electrorheological fluid lubricants are used in the floating ring bearings and their effectiveness is studied under different input voltage conditions. For, the rotor supported on the foil bearings, a vibration attenuation methodology is proposed to generate a momentary preload by reducing the angular clearances which alters the film thickness via a wedge mechanism. In active control approach, conventional electromagnetic actuator with PD feedback configuration is used to provide the control forces in vibration reduction. In overall, the dynamic modeling and control studies via computer simulations saved the time with reliable results resulting in the better rotor designs.