Life-long production of blood from hematopoietic stem cells (HSC) is a process of strict modulation. Intrinsic and extrinsic signals govern fate options like self-renewal – a cardinal feature of HSC. Bone morphogenetic proteins (BMP) have an established role in embryonic hematopoiesis, but less is known about its functions in adulthood. Previously, SMAD-mediated BMP signaling has been proven dispensable for HSC. However, the BMP type-II receptor (BMPR-II) is highly expressed in HSC, leaving the possibility that BMP function via alternative pathways. Here, we establish that BMP signaling is required for selfrenewal of adult HSC. Through conditional knockout we show that BMPR-II deficient HSC have impaired self-renewal and regenerative capacity. BMPR-II deficient cells have reduced p38 activation, implying that non-SMAD pathways operate downstream of BMP in HSC. Indeed, a majority of primitive hematopoietic cells do not engage in SMADmediated responses downstream of BMP in vivo. Furthermore, deficiency of BMPR-II results in increased expression of TJP1, a known regulator of self-renewal in other stem cells, and knockdown of TJP1 in primitive hematopoietic cells partly rescues the BMPR-II null phenotype. This suggests TJP1 may be a universal stem cell regulator. In conclusion, BMP signaling, in part mediated through TJP1, is required endogenously by adult HSC to maintain self-renewal capacity and proper resilience of the hematopoietic system during regeneration.


This paper documents that mutual funds "herd" trade together into stocks with consensus sell-side analyst upgrades, and herd out of stocks with consensus downgrades. This influence of analyst recommendation changes on fund herding is stronger for downgrades, and among managers with greater career concerns. These findings indicate that career-concerned managers are incentivized to follow analyst information, and that managers have a greater tendency to herd on negative stock information, given the greater reputational and litigation risk of holding losing stocks. Furthermore, starting in the mid-1990s when aggregate mutual fund equity ownership is significantly higher, stocks traded by career-concerned herds of fund managers in response to analyst recommendation changes experience a significant same-quarter price impact, followed by a sharp subsequent price reversal. Our evidence suggests that analyst recommendation revisions induce herding by career-concerned fund managers, and that this type of trading has become price destabilizing with the increasing level of mutual fund ownership of stocks.

This paper was accepted by Wei Jiang, finance.


We reviewed 49 patients with Wernicke's aphasia resulting from a stroke. Their aphasia was classified on the basis of comprehensive neuropsychological testing. Wernicke's aphasia was more common in older patients and in men. Cerebral infarction occurred in 38 patients (78%) and intracerebral hemorrhage in seven (14%); the remaining four patients (8%) developed aphasia after surgery for aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage. Embolic events were the most common etiology of Wernicke's aphasia in the 38 patients with cerebral infarction, with cardiac emboli in 40% and large-vessel atheroemboli from a carotid source in 16%. In patients with Wernicke's aphasia secondary to infarction, an embolic source should be sought. Patients with Wernicke's aphasia should have computed tomography to exclude intracerebral hemorrhage before institution of anticoagulant therapy.


BACKGROUND
Team-based care has consistently been associated with improved clinical outcomes. However, strategies for promoting and sustaining a team-based approach in family medicine practice are more elusive.

METHODS
We conducted a longitudinal time series cohort study of 30 primary care providers in seven practices to assess the sequential addition of three different chronic disease management feedback reports over 24 months, culminating in a team-based quality improvement intervention linked to feedback, assessing clinical performance and self-reported effectiveness.

RESULTS
The proportion of patients at their low density lipoprotein target (<100 mg/dL) improved over the 24-month study period (P<0.001) but the rate of clinical improvement was more modest when feedback data were only presented at an individual and at a team level. When feedback reports were linked to a team-based quality improvement intervention, the results were more robust and were sustained for 12 months following the intervention cycle. Surveyed clinicians reported that the individual and team reports impacted both on their own practice approach and on team functioning.

CONCLUSIONS
These findings suggest a strategic role for clinical performance feedback linked to team initiated quality improvement initiatives for improving both clinical outcomes and clinical team-based care.


This paper empirically investigates the impacts of export intensity on plant-level productivity growth and markups by assessing Korean manufacturing data between 1992 and 2002. Our Generalized Propensity Score estimation results suggest an inverted U-shaped relationship between export intensity and productivity growth, which is consistent with Fryges and Wagner (2007). At the same time, we also find a similar pattern in the export intensity-markup nexus. Our results generally imply that increasing export intensity up to a certain threshold provides a better opportunity for exporters to improve productivity and charge higher markups than non-exporters, but a plant whose export intensity is beyond this threshold may not fully benefit from exporting activity as excessive exposure to foreign markets causes higher market uncertainties and internationalization costs.


That is a good way that use the ARCH family models to describe the time-varying characteristic of the return sequence on stocks. Intuitively, the influence to present from the long history data should not bigger than the short history data. So the order restriction to the parameter is according to the fact better. This paper researched the maximum likelihood estimator (MLE) of the parameters in the ) , 0 ( - q ARCH β model under the nonnegative restriction. At last we use the model in Chinese stock market.


Mediastinal haematoma is a rare complication following insertion of central venous catheter, with few cases reported in the literature. We report a case of mediastinal haematoma in a 33-year-old male patient with end-stage renal disease. In this patient central venous catheter insertion through the right subclavian vein was attempted on the operation table for renal transplantation but the procedure was abandoned as the attempt was unsuccessful. Post-procedure chest radiograph showed a large mediastinal haematoma occupying right hemithorax that developed as a result of injury to the subclavian vein. Patient was managed conservatively and haematoma completely resolved in four weeks time. This case is being reported to signify the importance of routine obtaining a post-procedure chest radiograph and to state that even large mediastinal haematoma can be managed conservatively in asymptomatic patients.


The paper presents the results of an application of object-oriented modeling techniques to design manufacturing systems logic controllers. In particular, the semantical aspects of specification languages like UML and Statecharts, widely used in many software engineering methods, are analysed and discussed, with regard to their adequacy for the industrial domain and their verification with formal methods. The paper ends with the description of a practical case of study, which shows that the proposed design and verification techniques can be successfully adopted in a real industrial framework, given domain-specific adaptation of object-oriented modeling languages


Current advances in recommender systems have been remarkably successful in optimizing immediate engagement. However, long-term user engagement, a more desirable performance metric, remains difficult to improve. Meanwhile, recent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have shown their effectiveness in a variety of long-term goal optimization tasks. For this reason, RL is widely considered as a promising framework for optimizing long-term user engagement in recommendation. Despite being a promising approach, the application of RL heavily relies on well-designed rewards, but designing rewards related to long-term user engagement is quite difficult. To mitigate the problem, we propose a novel paradigm, Pre ference-based Rec ommender systems (PrefRec), which allows RL recommender systems to learn from preferences about users' historical behaviors rather than explicitly defined rewards. Such preferences are easily accessible through techniques such as crowdsourcing, as they do not require any expert knowledge. With PrefRec, we can fully exploit the advantages of RL in optimizing long-term goals, while avoiding complex reward engineering. PrefRec uses the preferences to automatically train a reward function in an end-to-end manner. The reward function is then used to generate learning signals to train the recommendation policy. Furthermore, we design an effective optimization method for PrefRec, which uses an additional value function, expectile regression and reward model pre-training to improve the performance. Extensive experiments are conducted on a variety of long-term user engagement optimization tasks. The results show that PrefRec significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods in all the tasks.


4 Aim: Post-dural puncture headache (PDPH) is characterized by its severity and nausea in some patients after spinal and epidural anesthesia. The aim of this study is to evaluate the effect of epidural blood patch (EBP) application and compare it to the conservative treatment procedure in patients suffering from PDPH. Material and Methods: Between 2004 and 2007, The American Society of Anesthesiologists (ASA) physical status I patients comprising 1446 spinal (1272 males and 174 females), 45 epidural (all males) and 2 combined spinal epidural (2 females) anesthesia were performed patients, were investigated retrospectively. Results: PDPH was observed in a total of 14 patients (0.93 %). EBP was performed on 9 patients while the remaining 5 patients received conservative treatment. For EBP, 15 ml of autologous blood was injected into the epidural space. EBP provided complete relief from headache within 15-30 minutes in 9 patients. Conclusion: Epidural blood patch is an effective procedure in severe PDPH. Oral paracetamol and caffeine combinations and intravenous hydration are also effective in symptomatic treatment.


Water-soluble macroalkoxyamines are shown to be particularly well-suited initiators for nitroxide-mediated emulsion polymerization. They lead to the synthesis of amphiphilic block copolymers that self-assemble in situ into well-defined nanoobject morphologies, in agreement with the principles of polymerization-induced micellization. Depending on the molar mass of the hydrophobic block, the formed nanoparticles are hairy spherical micelles, nanofibers, or vesicles. The nanofibers are the most intriguing and spectacular structure and strongly affect the physicochemical properties of the aqueous dispersions.


The survival rate of 1674 bridges and the influence of several factors on the lifetime of bridges were analysed, based on data from patient records that belonged to a random sample of 40 Dutch general practices. It appears that the 12 year survival rate of the bridges is 87%. There is a significant difference in the survival rate between the bridges that meet and do not meet Ante's law, and only a weak significant difference between the bridges with vital vs. non-vital abutment teeth. Gender and age of the patient, length of the bridge, presence of a post and core build-up, or the construction of the bridge (conventional fixed vs. cantilever pontic) appear to have no influence on the survival rate of the bridges in this sample.


The sound speed through the lungs is influenced by the lungs' material properties and density. Probing the lungs of intubated infants with sound may provide a means to identify changes in lung structure and composition that occur as a result of prolonged ventilation therapy. To examine the feasibility of this approach we measured the sound transit times in 6 ventilator dependent infants (birth weight 640-4960g, age 12-81 days, study weight 990-5140g) suffering from early or advanced chronic lung disease. A piezoelectric ceramic disc mounted at the entrance of the endotracheal tube was used to produce brief 3 KHz pulses that propagate into the lungs via the tube. The onset, duration, and intensity of the pulse was registered with an electret microphone at the tube entrance. A lightweight quartz accelerometer secured on the chest at the mid-thoracic level registered sound transmission across the lungs and chest wall. Transit times for the pulse to propagate from the tube entrance to the chest surface was estimated with spectral averaging and cross-correlation. The estimated transit times varied between 1.47 and 2.27 ms with an average of 1.72 ms (0.28 SD). These times correspond roughly to sound speeds of 28 (9) meters/s. The transit times correlated poorly with the body weight or chest circumference but correlated well (r= +0.90) with patient age. These results suggest that changes in the lungs material properties that occur with prolonged ventilation therapy may be a predominant factor determining parenchymal sound speed in infants with chronic lung disease.


Tuberculosis (ТВ) is the main bacterial pathogen that causes more deaths than AIDS, malaria and all infectious diseases. The unusual long doubling time (about 24h), highly hydrophobic cell envelope resistant to chemical lysis was the reason to delay the molecular study of this bacteria. Fifteen years ago, we did not have any molecular tools and methods for genetic manipulation or isolation and analysis of intracellular protein and nucleic acids. Today we have many useful shuttle or integration vectors for basic study of mycobacteria. The full sequence of M. tuberculosis genome is already known. At the present time the diagnosis of tuberculosis is supported with fast-culture system BACTEC and molecular techniques based on PCR and DNA hybridization. The mechanisms of resistance to antituberculosis drugs were described, and first identification of resistance profile is available by using PCR and sequencing or real time PCR methods. In our group in the Center for Microbiology and Virology Polish Academy of Sciences and in the Dept, of Genetics of Microorganisms, University Łódź we have characterized new insertion sequences from M. tuberculosis complex- 18990 and IS1607. In diagnostic studies we have proposed the DIG-PCR ELISA assay as a reliable, specific and sensitive test to identify M. tuberculosis directly in clinical samples. We have performed wide epidemiological studies of M. tuberculosis strains isolated from Polish ТВ patients including drug - and multidrug - resistant strains. Finally we identified the most frequently present mutations responsible for drug resistance of polish clinical isolates of M. tuberculosis.


Background: Short tandem repeats (STRs) are highly variable elements that play a pivotal role in multiple genetic diseases and the regulation of gene expression. Long-read sequencing (LRS) offers a potential solution to genome-wide STR analysis. However, characterizing STRs in human genomes using LRS on a large population scale has not been reported. Methods: We conducted the large LRS-based STR analysis in 193 unrelated samples of the Chinese population and performed genome-wide profiling of STR variation in the human genome. The repeat dynamic index (RDI) was introduced to evaluate the variability of STR. We sourced the expression data from the Genotype-Tissue Expression to explore the tissue specificity of highly variable STRs related genes across tissues. Enrichment analyses were also conducted to identify potential functional roles of the high variable STRs. Results: This study reports the large-scale analysis of human STR variation by LRS and offers a reference STR database based on the LRS dataset. We found that the disease-associated STRs (dSTRs) and STRs associated with the expression of nearby genes (eSTRs) were highly variable in the general population. Moreover, tissue-specific expression analysis showed that those highly variable STRs related genes presented the highest expression level in brain tissues, and enrichment pathways analysis found those STRs are involved in synaptic function-related pathways. Conclusion: Our study profiled the genome-wide landscape of STR using LRS and highlighted the highly variable STRs in the human genome, which provide a valuable resource for studying the role of STRs in human disease and complex traits.


To understand better the factors influencing the relationships among airborne particle exposure, lung burden, and fibrotic lung disease, we developed a biologically based kinetic model to predict the long-term retention of particles in the lungs of coal miners. This model includes alveolar, interstitial, and hilar lymph node compartments. The 131 miners in this study had worked in the Beckley, West Virginia, area and died during the 1960s. The data used to develop this model include exposure to respirable coal mine dust by intensity and duration within each job, lung and lymph node dust burdens at autopsy, pathological classification of fibrotic lung disease, and smoking history. Initial parameter estimates for this model were based on both human and animal data of particle deposition and clearance and on the biological and physical factors influencing these processes. Parameter estimation and model fit to the data were determined using least squares. Results show that the end-of-life lung dust burdens in these coal miners were substantially higher than expected from first-order clearance kinetics, yet lower than expected from the overloading of alveolar clearance predicted from rodent studies. The best-fitting and most parsimonious model includes processes for first-order alveolar-macrophage-mediated clearance and transfer of particles to the lung interstitium. These results are consistent with the particle retention patterns observed previously in the lungs of primates. The findings indicate that rodent models extrapolated to humans, without adjustment for the kinetic differences in particle clearance and retention, would be inadequate for predicting lung dust burdens in humans. Also, this human lung kinetic model predicts greater retained lung dust burdens from occupational exposure than predicted from current human models based on lower exposure data. This model is useful for risk assessment of particle-induced lung diseases, by estimating equivalent internal doses in rodents and humans and predicting lung burdens in humans with occupational dust exposures.


ABSTRACT Objective To report the case of a teenager (12 years old) diagnosed with a brain tumor in the right frontal-parietal region emphasizing the main characteristics observed in neuropsychological examinations. Methods In the pre-surgical evaluation, the patient presented behavioral alterations, including deficits in verbal comprehension, perceptual organization, working memory, processing speed, and slight alterations regarding constructive praxis. Results A reevaluation after two years surgery revealed significant improvement in verbal and perceptual comprehension and constructive praxis while remaining a slight change in processing speed. These results suggest that the tumor's surgical resection produced significant improvements in the patient's neurocognitive context, especially in executive functions. This study also indicates that Neuropsychological evaluation are useful for pre- and post- surgical evaluation of cognitive functioning and its evolution. Conclusion Brain tumor causes cognitive and behavioral changes and its resection can result in improvements in the patient's quality of life.


Abstract Previous studies of theory of mind abilities in young people with autism have found that their understanding of false belief is specifically impaired, but that simple aspects of desire are understood in line with mental age. We explored the possibility that more complex aspects of desire (in which comparison of goals with outcomes is not a sufficient strategy) are not understood by children with autism. In two experiments, we found that these children were specifically impaired in understanding desire satisfaction and desire change, when compared with children with mental handicap and normal 4-6-year-olds. Although there was some evidence that understanding of desires may be easier for individuals with autism than understanding false belief, it would appear that they have difficulties in understanding both epistemic and volitional mental states.


This paper considers the minimization of the l/sup /spl infin//-induced norm of the closed loop in linear multirate systems when full state information is available for feedback. A state-space approach is taken and concepts of viability theory and controlled invariance are utilized. The essential idea is to construct a set such that the state may be confined to that set and that such a confinement guarantees that the output satisfies the desired output norm conditions. Once such a set is computed, it is shown that a memoryless nonlinear controller results, which achieves near-optimal performance. The construction involves the solution of several finite linear programs and generalizes to the multirate case of earlier work on linear time-invariant systems.


The seasonal development of benthic communities was followed in a coastal marine sediment of the Kiel Bight (Baltic Sea ; FRG).Total benthic biomass (ATP), bacterial biomass, overall benthic activity (heat production), and enzymatic decomposition rates of carbohydrate (d-amylase activity) followed a seasonal cycle strongly related to certain events in the sediment. Among these, the input of the phytoplankton blooms in autumn and spring, the accumulation of organic material during winter, and changes in the physical characteristics of the sediment turned out to be most important for the development of benthic biomass and activity. Processes within the benthic community occurred in very short time scales (within days).


Dynamism and uncertainty are real challenges for present day manufacturing enterprises (MEs). Choosing and applying the best philosophies and techniques is very difficult as most MEs deploy complex and unique configurations of processes and resource systems to cope with changing product flows. It follows that systematic methods of achieving model-driven reconfiguration and interoperation of component-based manufacturing systems are required to design, engineer and change next generation (NG) MEs. This paper describes a novel systematic approach, namely an integrated modelling approach (IMA), designed to support next generation reconfigurable manufacturing systems (NGRMS). The IMA is helpful in creating coherent sets of models that facilitate the engineering of production planning and control (PPC) strategies. Coherent multi-perspective industrial case study models are also presented that have facilitated process reengineering and associated resource system configuration. Those models have a capability to enable PPC decision making in support of complex organisation design and change (OD&C).


ABSTRACT Rejuvenation by sprouting is a possible solution to prevent abandoned coppice forests in Japan from outbreaks of oak wilt disease. Applying this approach requires examining the sprouting capacity of large-sized oak trees. Therefore, the present study investigated the effects of stump size, sprout characteristics (emerging time and origin position), and environmental factors (slope, convexity, soil moisture, soil net nitrogen mineralization rate (Net-NMR) and canopy closure) on sprout regeneration of the two widely distributed oaks in Japan, Quercus serrata and Quercus acutissima, in the first growing season after cutting. In November 2013, a study plot (40 × 90 m) was set, and canopy trees within the plot and edge areas were cut. We recorded sprout emergence, sprout origin position, sprout survival, and length from May to October 2014. Our data indicated that both species (ca. 60 years old) have not yet lost their ability of sprouting. In Q. acutissima, the sprouting probability increased with light availability and was higher in concave area, and its number of living sprouts was positively related to stump diameter. In Q. serrata, the number of living sprouts increased with light availability. Sprouts emerged earlier and/or originated from the lower part of stump exhibited a higher survival probability. Emerging time substantially influenced sprout growth pattern and its effect followed a similar tendency in both species. Our results evidence that the ability of sprouting and the number of living sprouts might not be reduced in large-sized trees, and the increasing of light availability could promote sprout regeneration.


Heptaprenyl diphosphate synthase of Bacillus subtilis, which participates in the biosynthesis of the side chain of menaquinone-7, is composed of two dissociable subunits, component I and component II, which are encoded by two cistrons in a novel gene cluster of gerC operon [Zhang, Y.-W., et al. (1997) J. Bacteriol. 179, 1417-1419]. This enzyme essentially requires the coexistence of both subunits for its catalysis. Expression vector systems for the two structural genes, gerC1 and gerC3, were constructed separately, and the two components were overproduced in Escherichia coli cells. After purification, their dynamic interactions in forming a catalytically active complex were investigated by gel filtration and immunoblotting analyses. When a mixture of the two components that had been preincubated in the presence of Mg2+ and farnesyl diphosphate was subjected to Superdex 200 gel filtration, a significant elution peak appeared in a region earlier than those observed when they were chromatographed individually. This fraction contained both components I and II, and it corresponded to a molecular mass that is in accord with the sum of the values of the two components. Cross-linking studies indicate that the two essential subunits, farnesyl diphosphate, and Mg2+ form a ternary complex which seems to represent a catalytically active state of the heptaprenyl diphosphate synthase. On the other hand, no complex was formed in the presence of isopentenyl diphosphate or inorganic pyrophosphate and Mg2+. A photoaffinity analogue of farnesyl diphosphate was shown to preferentially label the component I protein, suggesting that component I possesses a specific affinity for the allylic substrate. Furthermore, the photoaffinity labeling of component I significantly increased in the presence of component II. The mechanism of catalysis of this unique heteromeric enzyme is understood by assuming that association and dissociation of the two subunits facilitate turnover of catalysis for the synthesis of the amphipathic product from soluble substrates.


Revealing forest drought response characteristics and the potential impact factors is quite an important scientific issue against the background of global climate change, which is the foundation to reliably evaluate and predict the effects of future drought. Due to the high spatial heterogeneity of forest properties such as biomass, forest age, and height, and the distinct differences in drought stress in terms of frequency, intensity, and duration, current studies still contain many uncertainties. In this research, we used the forests in Yunnan Province in Southwest China as an example and aimed to reveal the potential impacts of forest properties (i.e., stock volume) on drought response characteristics. Specifically, we divided the forest into five groups of stock volume density values and then analyzed their drought response differences. To depict forest response to drought intensity, the standardized precipitation evapotranspiration index (SPEI) was chosen as the explanatory variable, and the change in remote sensing-based enhanced vegetation index (deficit of MODIS-EVI, dEVI) was chosen as the response variable of drought stress. Given that the SPEI has different time scales, we first analyzed the statistical dependency of SPEIs with different time scales (1 to 36 months) to the response variable (i.e., dEVI). The optimal time scale of SPEI (SPEIopt) to interpret the maximum variation of dEVI (R-square) was then chosen to build the ultimate statistical models for the five groups of stock volume density. The main findings were as follows: (1) the impacts of drought showed hysteresis and cumulative effects, and the length of the hysteresis increased with stock volume densities; (2) forests with high stock volume densities required more soil water and were therefore more sensitive to the changes in water deficit; (3) compared with the optimal time scale of SPEI (SPEIopt), the SPEI with the commonly used time scale (e.g., 1, 6, and 12 months) could not well reflect the impacts of drought on forests and the simulation error of dEVI increased with stock volume densities; and (4) forests with higher stock volume densities were likely to experience a greater risk of degradation following higher atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases (Representative Concentration Pathway (RCP) 8.5). As a result, both the time scale of the meteorological drought index and the spatial difference in forest stock volumes should be considered when evaluating forest drought responses at regional and global scales.


Nobel's Russian connection has surfaced recently in a letter sent by him to the Russian Minister of War, reporting on progress during 1889 and 1890 on his new smokeless powder, Ballistite. The letter was found in Swedish archives with other documents, indicating that Russian army officials maintained ties with Nobel, and received a large number of Ballistite samples. Nobel's involvement with Russian development was not described before by major written sources in English. The documents have also exposed Nobel's difficulties in production and marketing across Europe, from mid 1889 to mid 1890. The new findings are useful in understanding the 'longue duree' aspect of Ballistite, described only briefly in the literature.


This paper deals with the exponential stability of the class of stochastic systems with jumps. For the linear case, a sufficient condition, which guarantees that the nominal system with a bounded diffusion term remains stable under a state feedback control law, is established. For the case of uncertain linear stochastic system, we have designed an optimal control law that guarantees the robust exponential stability of the systems. Finally, for the nonlinear case with matching conditions, we have established a similar result.


Mother-to-child-transmission rates of HIV in the absence of any intervention range between 20 and 45%. However, the provision of antiretroviral drugs (ARVs) during pregnancy, delivery and breastfeeding can reduce HIV transmission to less than 2%. Physiological changes during pregnancy can influence ARV disposition. Associations between SNPs in genes coding for metabolizing enzymes, and/or transporters, and ARVs disposition are well described; however, relatively little is known about the influence of these SNPs on ARV pharmacokinetics during pregnancy and lactation as well as their effect on distribution into the fetal compartment and breast milk excretion. Differences in maternal, fetal and infant ARV exposure due to SNPs may affect the efficacy and safety of ARVs used to prevent mother-to-child-transmission. The aim of this review is to provide an update on the effect of pregnancy-induced changes on the pharmacokinetics of ARVs and highlight the potential role of pharmacogenetics.


Identified as the core of human subjectivity, madness and the shattered self are among the issues which Cormac McCarthy represents in his brilliant though terrifying narrative The Road . This study attempts to address the representation of subjectivity's faith and reason in the face of physical and mental struggles in his novel. Moreover, the relation that subjectivity has to the Big Other will be analyzed under Žižekian paradigms. In the pre-Kantian era, the human subject was to struggle against an extremity of madness so as to redeem itself a state of reason. But since Kant proposed that the core of subject/ivity can be madness itself, the struggles represented in McCarthy's novel have been examined as significant events that show this core of inconsistency and madness. To do so, the present study analyzes his text to show the inconsistency of the subject/ivity of his characters along with the role of reason/madness and their relations to faith in the narrative. Particularly, it would be fruitful to focus on the contribution of what Žižek calls the "Light of Reason" and its fluctuations/fragmentations. The point opposite to this Light would be the Dark of the world, a dire night in which that mad center of human subjectivity could emerge into the novel's events. For this purpose, the paper will elaborate more thoroughly on Derrida's and Žižek's viewpoints regarding Enlightenment and subjectivity. Of the main consideration in McCarthy's text is deciding about life and death and about the force that compels his protagonists to keep fighting for their survival.  DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2016-1602-11


In this paper, we propose a novel method for advanced adaptive cruise control considering the reaction time of the following driver. Our research group has developed a system to anticipate future positions of adjacent vehicles. Based on the prediction results, our system plans its path to avoid a collision. However, it can conversely cause an accident when the ego vehicle excessively accelerates or decelerates, particularly the following driver. The proposed method controls the inter-vehicular distance to adjacent vehicles while considering the reaction time of drivers. It is demonstrated that the proposed method is able to decrease collision risks and improve driving safety.


BACKGROUND
Many health care institutions expect nurses to assume leadership roles in the provision of cancer education and screening. However, all too often, nurses lack the knowledge and skills needed to effectively inform, screen, and counsel their clients. The challenges may be compounded when they are expected to provide cancer care to clients from cultural, racial, and ethnic backgrounds different from their own.

METHOD
The Cancer Prevention and Early Detection Program for Nurses Working with African Americans was developed to help fill this void. The program provides nurses with theoretical, clinical, and practical information regarding cancer prevention and early detection for use within clinical and community settings.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSIONS
The Cancer Prevention and Early Detection Program for Nurses Working with African Americans enhanced participants' abilities to provide cancer education, screening, and follow up, and it heightened their sensitivity and understanding of issues and trends influencing cancer prevention and early detection among African Americans.


Premise of the study: Microsatellite primers were developed for studies of polyploid evolution, ecological genetics, conservation genetics, and species delimitation in the genus Solidago. Methods and Results: Illumina sequencing of a shotgun library from S. gigantea identified ca. 1900 putative single-copy loci. Fourteen loci were subsequently shown to be amplifiable, single-copy, and variable in a broad range of Solidago species. Conclusions: The utility of these markers both across the genus and in herbarium specimens of a wide age range will facilitate numerous inter- and intraspecific studies in the ca. 120 Solidago species.


ABSTRACT Prophylactic intranasal administration of the Toll-like receptor 5 (TLR5) agonist flagellin protects mice against respiratory pathogenic bacteria. We hypothesized that TLR5-mediated stimulation of lung immunity might improve the therapeutic index of antibiotics for the treatment of Streptococcus pneumoniae respiratory infections in mice. Intranasal administration of flagellin was combined with either oral administration of amoxicillin or intraperitoneal injection of trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole to treat S. pneumoniae-infected animals. Compared with standalone treatments, the combination of antibiotic and flagellin resulted in a lower bacterial load in the lungs and greater protection against S. pneumoniae dissemination and was associated with an early increase in neutrophil infiltration in the airways. The antibiotic-flagellin combination treatment was, however, not associated with any exacerbation of inflammation. Moreover, combination treatment was more efficacious than standalone antibiotic treatments in the context of post-influenza virus pneumococcal infection. Lastly, TLR5 signaling was shown to be mandatory for the efficacy of the combined antibacterial therapy. This report is the first to show that combining antibiotic treatment with the stimulation of mucosal innate immunity is a potent antibacterial strategy against pneumonia.


Traditional development processes do not include dynamic and creative aspects that exist in multimedia development environments. In these domains, creativity, design and animation are non-functional requirements that have great relevance in the final product and are often not considered in the implementation of traditional software. In this article, we make a comparison of the main traditional development processes and their suitability to the domains of multimedia software, proposing as an alternative Multimedia Smart Process (MSP).


Geophysicists since Karcher have been striving to improve resolution—to see thinner beds, to image smaller faults, and to detect lateral changes in lithology or rock property. The classic definition of resolution, provided by Bob Sheriff, is "The ability to separate two features which are very close together. The minimum separation of two bodies before their individual identities are lost on the resultant map or cross-section."


The optimization of Knopoff's method computer computation of surface-wave dispersion, and the comparison of this method with the Thomson-Haskell technic and its extensions are studied. Of the various versions of the Thomson-Haskell formulation for Rayleigh-wave dispersion computations, the reduced-δ-matrix extension is the most powerful, i.e., the fastest which contains the feature controlling the loss-of-precision problem occasionally encountered by the original formulation. It is shown that the results of the δ-matrix extensions are actually contained in Knopoff's work, which appeared earlier than these extensions, and that these results are obtainable directly from his formulation without recourse to δ-matrix theory. The flexibility of Knopoff's method is used to devise a new representation of the Rayleigh-wave dispersion function which is more powerful than the most powerful of the Thomson-Haskell versions, i.e., it contains the loss-of-precision control feature and is about 38 per cent faster than the reduced-δ-matrix extension; in fact, it is about 12 per cent faster than the fastest of the Thomson-Haskell versions. Explicit forms of the new representation are given for the layered-half-space analogs of continental and oceanic models of the Earth, which can be terminated by a homogeneous half-space beginning in the mantle, a liquid outer core, or a solid inner core. The representations for symmetric and antisymmetric modes of the symmetric-plate analog of the Earth are also given. The Rayleigh-wave dispersion functions for the product form of the original Thomson-Haskell formulation, the δ-matrix and reduced-δ-matrix extensions of this formulation, and the representations developed from Knopoff's method, are identical when written out fully. The various technics differ only in their matrix representations of the dispersion function, which, of course, govern the speeds of computation of the various methods.
 The Knopoff and Thomson-Haskell technics for computing Love-wave dispersion are compared. Although the matrix representations of the dispersion function differ for the two technics, the functions are identical, except for a possible sign reversal, when written out fully. The speeds of computation are also identical. The representations derived from Knopoff's method are given for the two possible flat-layer analogs of the Earth, which are applicable to Love-wave propagation.


Partial label learning (PLL) is a typical weakly supervised learning framework, where each training instance is associated with a candidate label set, among which only one label is valid. To solve PLL problems, typically methods try to perform disambiguation for candidate sets by either using prior knowledge, such as structure information of training data, or refining model outputs in a self-training manner. Unfortunately, these methods often fail to obtain a favorable performance due to the lack of prior information or unreliable predictions in the early stage of model training. In this paper, we propose a novel framework for partial label learning with meta objective guided disambiguation (MoGD), which aims to recover the ground-truth label from candidate labels set by solving a meta objective on a small validation set. Specifically, to alleviate the negative impact of false positive labels, we re-weight each candidate label based on the meta loss on the validation set. Then, the classifier is trained by minimizing the weighted cross entropy loss. The proposed method can be easily implemented by using various deep networks with the ordinary SGD optimizer. Theoretically, we prove the convergence property of meta objective and derive the estimation error bounds of the proposed method. Extensive experiments on various benchmark datasets and real-world PLL datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve competent performance when compared with the state-of-the-art methods.


This study is based on a research project funded by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR-IMPRESS). This research examined the dynamics of Punjab State's tourist image from the standpoint of Social Media Analytics. This study analyses data available over social media platforms such as Twitter and TripAdvisor, for analysing user generated contents. The social media data was pre-processed for removing unwanted data which does not contribute to the analysis and reduces the accuracy of the results. By probing techniques such as "Word Cloud, Keyword Frequency Counts and Word Association", this study is able to find various motivations for popularity of Punjab State's tourist attractions among its consumers (tourists). Punjab State's destination management organisations, its leaders and managers could benefit from our analysis. The findings provide suggestions on how to market the state's tourist attractions across the country and the world at large more strategically in the foreseeable future.


The requirements in terms of service quality such as data rate, latency, power consumption, number of connectivity of future fifth-generation (5G) communication is very high. Moreover, in Internet of Things (IoT) requires massive connectivity. Optical wireless communication (OWC) technologies such as visible light communication, light fidelity, optical camera communication, and free space optical communication can effectively serve for the successful deployment of 5G and IoT. This paper clearly presents the contributions of OWC networks for 5G and IoT solutions.


Unlike hospital-oriented western medical practice, traditional medical science and technology include aspects of botany, anatomy, psychology, psychiatry, and sociology. Indigenous medical treatment has been successful in extensive comminuted fractures, psychosomatic disorders, and frantic manic psychosis. Traditional practitioners also work to prevent disease. They often advise against marriages that might perpetuate diseases. Traditional birth attendants and doctors in Africa, Asia, and Latin America routinely perform external cephalic versions on women with breach birth presentations thereby avoiding the need for often risky and undesirable cesarean sections. In many cultures, traditional birth attendants and female advisors from within and outside immediate families are among the regular local services available to mothers during gestation and early child care periods. Breastfeeding, which has been discouraged in industrialized countries, is nutritious and partially serves as a form of contraceptive to aid in child spacing, especially if lactation is prolonged. In most hospitals in developing countries, in contrast to western hospitals, the mother is encouraged to stay with her sick child to provide psychological support and assist with feeding and some aspects of care and treatment. Family organizations and extended families help in child bearing, care and nurturing and continues into socialization and adolescence.


The paper reviews results achieved in a pilot study about the effect of chemical mutagens on the Czech population. The method of non-work population studies revealed that the most significantly changing category was the frequency of birth defects. In a group of workers occupationally exposed to epichlorohydrin and haloethers, the suitability of cytogenetic analysis of peripheral lymphocytes as an indicator of occupational damage was tested. Current trends indicate that the late effects of genetic damage due to exposure to environmental factors are becoming a population problem. For this reason a program has been worked out for late effect studies to be conducted by the hygienic service and methods are recommended to be used for occupational and non-occupational exposure analyses. Their merits will be experimentally verified up to 1980. The objective of the program is to prove the practical applicability of the two methods and to obtain reliable data for preventive measures to be accepted to reduce the genetic risk to the population and the individual.


In network communication domain, one of the most widely used protocol for encrypting data and securing communications is the IPSec protocol. The design of this protocol is based on two main phases which are: exchanging keys phase and transferring data phase. In this paper we focus on enhancing the exchanging keys phase which is included in the security association (SA), using a chaotic cryptosystem. Initially IPSec is based on the Internet Key Exchange (IKE) protocol for establishing the SA. Actually IKE protocol is in charge for negotiating the connection and for authenticating both nodes. However; using IKE gives rise to a major problem related to security attack such as the Man in the Middle Attack. In this paper, we propose a chaotic cryptosystem solution to generate SA file for the connected nodes of the network. By solving a 4-Dimension chaotic system, a SA file that includes 128-bit keys will be established. The proposed solution is implemented and tested using FPGA boards.


PURPOSE
In this article, the authors describe the experiences of men with prostate cancer and their spouses between diagnosis and surgery.

DESCRIPTION
As part of a longitudinal qualitative study, semistructured interviews were held with 34 prostate cancer patients who were waiting for surgery. Separate interviews were held with their spouses.

RESULTS
Six main components of experience were evident from the analysis of transcripts related to the presurgery period: 1) the news of a diagnosis of prostate cancer came initially as a shock for both partners, the impact of which lessened over time; 2) the new reality of illness necessitated readdressing the marital relationship, most often resulting in a sense of renewed connection and commitment; 3) the illness crisis precipitated a search for information to guide decisions about treatment; 4) there was a need for couples to decide who to inform about the cancer diagnosis and how much to say about it; 5) couples attempted to seek a semblance of normality in their lives, especially after treatment decisions had been made; and 6) despite attempts to minimize the potential impact of upcoming surgery, anxiety was typically experienced at least intermittently by one or both partners.

CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS
Physicians, nurses, social workers, and other health professionals need to facilitate attempts by the patient to gather and synthesize information. Cancer specialists can play a positive role in reducing distress in couples, and, thus, the attention of the specialists to communication issues is critical. The strain of waiting for surgery must be considered when treatment recommendations are made; watchful waiting protocols require further study from a psychological perspective. Clinicians need to be alert to the balance between being positive and carrying on as normal, and acknowledging and dealing with the distress that arises.


Electrical trees have long been the interest of the electrical insulation community due to their role in power systems equipment failure at locations where high divergent fields might arise due to impurities, contaminants or voids. Even through trees take a long time to grow in real life, they can be grown experimentally in shorter times under various conditions so that their growth characteristics can be investigated. Different samples have been fabricated to investigate the effects of interfaces in electrical tree propagation. Initially, the impact of an interface perpendicular to the electric field, and the interface position, thickness and/or composition on the polymer?s lifetime was investigated. In the results acquired, the positive impact of interfaces positioned perpendicular to the electric field was evident: increasing the samples? time to breakdown as well as the electrical tree inception time. Due to the encouraging results, further investigation has been focused on interface modification and how this might be used to control the electrical tree growth as well as the samples? time to breakdown. Altering the interface?s surface roughness using a number of different methods was carried out. Results were graphically and statistically analysed so that the any conclusions are robust, and uncertainties clear. The statistical analysis used by generating regression model equations was a novel method to predict how different electrical tree parameters were affected/affecting by others. In this way the dielectric?s lifetime could be predicted with a certain level of confidence. The modification of the interface by coating the surface with either a thin layer of pure or nano-filled (hexagonal Boron Nitride) epoxy resin resulted in it being impervious thus preventing the electrical tree to propagate through it. This was a novel method that showed that specific modification methods can significantly enhance the dielectric?s lifetime when applied appropriately. Details of new sample fabrication techniques are described which enable better control of the materials and interfaces, and data on tree length growth characteristics are discussed.


Purpose The Jefferson Center for Injury Research and Prevention (JCIRP) is a full entity of the Department of Surgery's Trauma Division and the College of Nursing at Thomas Jefferson University. The ability to have stakeholders at the table, with the sole mission of saving life and reducing disability, exemplifies the importance of strengthening research partnerships in a health care system. Our injury science experts devote themselves to conducting research, providing education, engaging social entrepreneurship and partnering with communities in the Delaware Valley and beyond. The aim of this Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis is to evaluate the effectiveness of an injury-based research partnership within an academic, medical and trauma center. Methods/Approach The constant monitoring and a periodic review and reformation of health systems are of fundamental importance in all countries of the world, in order to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare services delivery, quality, equity, and sustainable financing (Han, 2012). To identify the SWOT of JCIRP a thorough analysis was completed by the center's leadership and stakeholders. Through this analysis, facilitators and barriers were identified that helped cultivate the growth of our research center. Results Analyzation of the SWOT analysis identified four prominent themes. The accessibility of multidisciplinary professionals with a common interest of injury research and prevention and continued opportunities to enhance research partnerships in various disciplines at Jefferson was a commonality. The demonstration of return of investment in injury prevention research and advocacy and the controversial nature of violence prevention research in an ICRC were identified barriers to the successful implementation of an ICRC. Conclusion The benefits of interdisciplinary partnerships and the investment of enterprise support are integral for the success of an ICRC. Significance and Contribution Strengthening research partnerships in an ICRC through various disciplines will afford us the opportunity to continue injury prevention research.


Introduction Osteoarthritis (OA) of the thumb carpometacarpal (CMC) joint is a common disorder that negatively impacts hand function. Denervation of the thumb CMC joint has emerged as a viable treatment option. However, the innervation pattern of the thumb CMC joint is controversial. Therefore, the objective of this study was to identify the articular branches supplying the thumb CMC joint and to document their relationship to anatomical landmarks to provide the foundation for image-guided diagnostic block and denervation procedures. Methods In 10 formalin-embalmed upper limb specimens articular branches supplying the thumb CMC joint were dissected from their origin to termination. A frequency map documenting the number of articular branches was generated. The frequency map enabled visualization and comparison of the relative area of innervation of the thumb CMC joint by each articular branch. Results The thumb CMC joint received innervation from six nerves. These were the deep branch of ulnar nerve (DBUN), dorsal articular nerve (DAN) of the first interosseus space, thenar branch of median nerve (TBMN), palmar cutaneous branch of median nerve (PCBMN), lateral antebrachial cutaneous nerve (LACN) and superficial branch of the radial nerve (SBRN) and/or their branches. Each nerve was found to innervate different aspects of the joint. The DBUN and DAN were found to innervate the posteromedial aspect of the thumb CMC joint, the TBMN and PCBMN anterior/anteromedial aspects, LACN posterolateral/lateral/anterior aspects and SBRN posterolateral/anterolateral aspects. Conclusions The thumb CMC joint was innervated by articular branches originating from the SBRN, DAN, LACN, PCBMN, TBMN and DBUN. The documented anatomical relationships provide the foundation to inform selective diagnostic block and denervation of the thumb CMC joint. Further investigations are needed to assess the clinical implications of the current study.


This article presents the first survey ever conducted in Cyprus in relation to stress in social service organizations as a result of budgetary cuts due to the financial recession the country entered in 2010. Social service professionals were asked whether and how they experienced the current economic crisis in their work. The aim of the study was to examine whether the recent economic crisis in Cyprus was a predictor for stress. This article has no intention of examining stress per se, but rather the general consequences for professionals working in governmental and non-governmental social service organizations. The purpose of the study is to examine whether the current financial crisis in Cyprus has affected the work of social service professionals. The participants in our study included social workers, psychologists and sociologists, as well as administrative staff from governmental and non-governmental social service agencies and volunteer organizations. In total, 205 professionals working in 200 social service agencies in Cyprus took part in this survey by completing a questionnaire. A focus group consisting of eight individuals was also formed. The results indicate that social service professionals have been significantly affected by the recent financial recession in Cyprus.


Autoxidations of oleic acid, methyl oleate and ethyl oleate were carried out in the temperature ranges of 343–393 K, 358–378 K and 383–413 K, respectively, and in the oxygen partial pressure range of 0–0.1 MPa. The accumulation and decomposition rates of hydroperoxide were measured under the reaction control condition to obtain the following results. (1) Auto-acceleration in the formation rate of hydroperoxide was clearly observed in the initial stage of the oxidation. (2) A first-order dependence of hydroperoxide formation rate on oxygen partial pressure was found at low oxygen partial pressure, but the rate was almost independent of oxygen partial pressure at comparatively high oxygen partial pressures. (3) A semi-theoretical rate equation of hydroperoxide formation with four kinetic constants was developed to explain the autoxidation behavior of oleic acid and oleates.


Modern electron storage rings produce bright X-rays via spontaneous synchrotron emission, which is useful for a variety of scientific applications. The X-ray free-electron laser oscillator (XFELO) has the potential to amplify this output, both in terms of peak power and photon coherence. However, even current 4th generation storage rings (4GSRs) lack the requisite electron beam brightness to drive the XFELO due to its electron energy spread. The transverse gradient undulator (TGU) can overcome this issue, thus providing a practical means to couple the 4GSR to the XFELO. In this study, we first examine the theoretical basis of the TGU interaction by deriving the 3D TGU gain formula in the low gain approximation. Then, we perform an optimization study of the gain formula in order to determine optimal beam and machine parameters. Finally, we construct a hypothetical storage ring TGU-XFELO based on near-optimal parameters and report on its projected performance using multi-stage numerical simulation. We also discuss potential implementation challenges associated with the ring-FEL coupling.


Butea frondosa,is an important medicinal plant. The bark is reported to possess astringent, bitter, pungent, alternative, aphrodisiac and anthelmintic properties. It is useful in tumour, bleeding piles and ulcer.The roots are useful in elephantiasis and in curing night blindness and other defects of sight. The root bark is used as an aphrodisiac and as analgesic and anthelmintic. The flowers are reported to possess astringent, diuretic, depuretive, aphrodisiac and tonic properties; they are used as an emmenagogue and as poultice in orchitis and to reduce swellings, for bruises and sprains. They are also effective in leprosy, leucorrhoea and gout. Seeds are reported to possess aperient and rubefacient properties. The important parameters studied are macro and microscopical character, measurement of fiber length & diameter starch grain, histochemical studies, ash analysis, inorganic element, total extractive values, moisture content, behavior of powder with different chemical reagent & fluorescence analysis. In the present paper an attempt has been made to find out, botanical, physico-chemical and preliminary phytochemical characteristics of Butea frondosa bark.


This work reports on the implementation of a neural network (NN) feature selection technique to identify the design features that impact the rise of spurious modes in high performance X-cut Lithium Niobate MEMS resonators. A metric based on spurious modes location, number, and peak-to-peak excursion is introduced to serve as a target function for the NN training. Measured data from 814 fabricated resonators operating between 50 MHz and 1 GHz is used to train and validate the NN and identify the most significant design features that introduce spurious responses. Number of electrode pairs, electrode length, and anchor width are found to be the driving feature of this process. To verify the NN outcome, finite element simulations based on optimized and non-optimized feature sets are finally reported, showing significant spurious modes suppression.


Insulins and C-peptides were extracted and purified from bison and fox pancreatic glands. The insulins were reduced and pyridylethylated, and the derived A- and B-chains separated by HPLC. Amino acid sequence determinations of the pyridylethylated A- and B-chains proved bisontine insulin to be identical to bovine insulin and fox insulin to be identical to dog and porcine insulin. Bisontine C-peptide proved to be identical to bovine C-peptide. The isolated fox C-peptide comprises 23 amino acid residues and probably represents a major tryptic fragment of a larger C-peptide. The fox C-peptide fragment is identical to the dog C-peptide (9-31) except for residue 3 (residue 11 in the dog C-peptide), which is aspartic acid as compared with glutamic acid in the dog C-peptide.


The vibration feature of weak gear fault is often covered in strong background noise, which makes it necessary to establish weak feature enhancement methods. Among the enhancement methods, stochastic resonance (SR) has the unique advantage of transferring noise energy to weak signals and has a great application prospection in weak signal extraction. But the traditional SR potential model cannot form a richer potential structure and may lead to system instability when the noise is too great. To overcome these shortcomings, the article presents a periodic potential underdamping stochastic resonance (PPUSR) method after investigating the potential function and system signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). In addition, system parameters are further optimized by using ant colony algorithm. Through simulation and gear experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method was verified. We concluded that compared with the stable-state matching underdamped stochastic resonance (SMUSR) method, the PPUSR method had a higher recognition degree and better frequency response capability.


Chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) is a stem cell disorder in which Philadelphia (Ph) chromosome is implicated in the etiopathogenesis. Ph chromosome translocation results in the formation of BCR-ABL   oncogene which is known to deregulate different downstream pathways which ultimately lead to cell proliferation, defective DNA repair, and inhibition of apoptosis. But evidence show that the Ph chromosome alone is insufficient for development of CML. Host genetic susceptibility factors which favours CML development are not clear. Fas cell surface death receptor (FAS) is a member of tumor necrosis factor   superfamily which interacts with its ligand, FASL to initiate apoptosis. Promoter polymorphisms in FAS/FASL genes are known to influence the apoptotic signaling and influence carcinogenesis. So this study was undertaken in a total of 191 subjects (93 CML patients and 98 normal control) to investigate the frequencies and impact of FAS -670A>G and FASL -844 T>C polymorphism on CML susceptibility risk. After getting written consent, blood samples of study subjects were collected, DNA extraction done from blood samples and genotyping was performed using PCR-RFLP technique. The genotypes were categorized into homozygous wild type, heterozygous and homozygous variant. The association of the genotypes with CML susceptibility risk was assessed by means of logistic regression analysis and deriving odds Ratio with 95% CI. Homozygous wild genotype was used as reference. Few representative genotypes were validated using DNA sequencing. Data was analyzed using SPSS Version 22. On evaluating the impact, the study revealed a significant association of FASL −844T>C polymorphisms with CML susceptibility risk. Both variant C allele (OR 1.756, CI 1.163,2.652, p =0.007) and variant genotype CC of FASL -844 (OR 2.261, CI 1.013,5.047, p =0.047) carried significantly higher risk for CML development. The heterozygous genotype TC significantly conferred lower risk for CML susceptibility (OR 0.379, CI 0.176,0.816, p =0.013) For FAS -670 A>G polymorphism, both heterozygous genotype AG and variant genotype GG showed higher values (OR 1.642 CI, 0.719-3.750 and OR 1.133, CI 0.464-2.768, respectively) but were statistically insignificant ( p = 0.239 and p = 0.784 respectively). Our results highlight the impact of FASL -844T>C polymorphism on CML susceptibility risk. This novel finding might be helpful in early identification of individuals who are at higher risk for development of CML.


A discrete problem can be relaxed by taking the continuous relaxation of an integer programming formulation An equivalent relaxation is obtained by projecting this relax ation onto the original continuous variables The projection is simple for piecewise linear functions xed charge problems and some disjunctive constraints This allows one to solve much smaller relaxations without sacri cing the quality of bounds In particular the projected relaxations for some classical network design and warehouse location problems are minimum cost network ow problems a fact that can dramatically accelerate their solution A relaxation for a problem with discrete elements is often obtained by adding integer variables to the model The integrality constraints not only capture the discrete element but can be dropped in order to obtain a continuous relaxation of the model An equivalent relaxation can be obtained however by projecting the traditional continuous relaxation onto the original continuous variables Projection can generate a large number of inequality constraints but in some important special cases it does not In such cases one can obtain a relaxation that is of the same quality as the conventional one but much more succinct due to the absence of integer variables Occasionally the projected relaxation has special structure that the convention relaxation lacks and can be more easily solved for that reason as well Once integer variables are removed from the relaxation they can be eliminated entirely Logical expressions can be used to express the discrete elements of a problem perhaps more naturally as noted in Branching on logical possibilities or propositional variables can re place branching on integer variables This may even allow branching to terminate sooner than in an integer programming context as argued in In any case the use of projected relax ations almost certainly accelerates the solution of the problem because it provides the same bounds as traditional integer programming and does so more rapidly because the relaxations are smaller This paper examines three projected relaxations First Beaumont s use of elementary inequalities to relax logical disjunctions is brie y reviewed and strengthened due to the usefulness of disjunctions for expressing the discrete aspect of a problem Next a simple convex hull relaxation of piecewise linear functions is presented Finally it is noted that xed charge problems also have a compact projected relaxation In particular the projected relaxation of xed charge network ow problems including warehouse location problems has the structure of a minimum cost network ow problem whereas the conventional relaxation does not This permits a far more rapid solution of the relaxation than is otherwise possible Because solving the relaxation consumes nearly all the solution time in branch and bound algorithms projected relaxations can dramatically accelerate the solution of these problems The relaxations presented here are simple Nonetheless they and their advantages are normally overlooked Elementary Inequalities Beaumont showed that a single elementary inequality relaxes a disjunction of linear inequal ities


Diseases of the male mammary gland are clinically manifested as unilateral or bilateral, well-defined or diffuse consolidations in the breast. In some cases, the affected tissues are extremely tender on pressure. Gynaecomastia is most frequently seen (n = 22), whereas inflammatory or tumourous changes of the glandular parenchyma are rare (n = 2). The most important causes of gynaecomastia are shifts in hormonal balance where the controlling impulses acting on the glandular parenchyma are enhanced. Gynaecomastia is frequently found in patients who have cirrhosis of the liver or are taking certain drugs. 29 cases are described from the author's own patient material. The radiological image, the clinical findings, the possible aetiological aspects, as well as histological findings, if any, are described and discussed in relation to literature. Closer examination of this poly-aetiological disease pattern--namely, swelling of the male mammary gland--leads to a number of interesting differential diagnoses which sometimes require internistic and endocrinological clarification before the correct diagnosis can be found.


This study focuses on the shipping sector and examines how it has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic. More specifically, the paper examines the extent to which stock price returns, corporate systematic risk, and key financial performance variables were affected, as well as how all these variables correlated with the spread of COVID-19. Moreover, the paper examines the correlation of these variables with key shipping indexes, such as the Baltic Dry Index and Baltic International Tanker Route, and bunker prices, and how this correlation changed. Our sample consists of shipping companies listed on US stock exchanges, and the study period is 2015–2021. The findings reveal that the shipping companies' level of systematic risk increased after the pandemic. In addition, the beta coefficient of shipping companies is more affected by changes in bunker prices since the pandemic, and the average daily returns and bunker prices have a lower correlation after the pandemic.


ABSTRACT Background Diagnosis of peritoneal TB is difficult owing to unusual clinical manifestations and low sensitivities obtained with most of the available diagnostic modalities. Hence, there is an urgent need to design a reliable diagnostic test so that an early therapy is initiated. Research design and methods We designed a quantitative real-time immuno-PCR (RT-I-PCR) assay to detect a cocktail of Mycobacterium tuberculosis CFP-10 (Rv3874) and HspX (Rv2031c) proteins in clinical samples (ascitic fluids and peritoneal biopsies) of peritoneal TB patients, and results were compared with I-PCR/ELISA. Results A wide range of CFP-10+ HspX (0.6 pg/mL to 9.9 ng/mL) was detected in clinical samples of peritoneal TB patients by RT-I-PCR, whereas ELISA exhibited a narrow range (3 ng/mL to 11.5 ng/mL). Sensitivities of 81.5% and 65.7% and specificities of 92.5% and 90% were obtained in a total of 78 cases (comprising 38 peritoneal TB and 40 non-TB controls) by RT-I-PCR and I-PCR, respectively. Markedly, sensitivity obtained by RT-I-PCR was significantly higher than I-PCR (p = 0.0143) and ELISA (p = 0.0005). Conclusions Our RT-I-PCR revealed good accuracy for the rapid diagnosis of peritoneal TB cases. After further improving the specificity and reducing the cost, this assay may develop into a diagnostic kit.


Accurately detecting and tracking pedestrians in 3D space is challenging due to large variations in rotations, poses and scales. The situation becomes even worse for dense crowds with severe occlusions. However, existing benchmarks either only provide 2D annotations, or have limited 3D annotations with low-density pedestrian distribution, making it difficult to build a reliable pedestrian perception system especially in crowded scenes. To better evaluate pedestrian perception algorithms in crowded scenarios, we introduce a large-scale multimodal dataset, STCrowd. Specifically, in STCrowd, there are a total of 219 K pedestrian instances and 20 persons per frame on average, with various levels of occlusion. We provide synchronized LiDAR point clouds and camera images as well as their corresponding 3D labels and joint IDs. STCrowd can be used for various tasks, including LiDAR-only, image-only, and sensor-fusion based pedestrian detection and tracking. We provide baselines for most of the tasks. In addition, considering the property of sparse global distribution and density-varying local distribution of pedestrians, we further propose a novel method, Density-aware Hierarchical heatmap Aggregation (DHA), to enhance pedestrian perception in crowded scenes. Extensive experiments show that our new method achieves state-of-the-art performance for pedestrian detection on various datasets. https://github.com/4DVLab/STCrowd.git.


Uveal melanomas are unique among the malignant tumors of the eye investigated by MRI in that both T1 and T2 are relatively shortened due to the paramagnetic effect of melanin. Bearing in mind this property, we conducted a comparative study between MRI and CT in 11 patients with histologically proven choroidal malignant melanoma. The results of this study confirm that MRI is far superior to CT in both differential diagnosis and in determining the extent of the tumor which is crucial if conservative treatment is to be undertaken.


Biomineralization of fish otoliths is regulated by macromolecules, such as proteins, whose presence is crucial for the functionality and properties of these mineralized structures. Special regulatory effects are exerted by intrinsically disordered proteins, such as the polyanionic Starmaker-like protein from medaka, a homolog of zebrafish Starmaker. In this study, we employed a set of bioinspired mineralization experiments with a single diffusion system to investigate the effect of the Starmaker-like protein on calcium carbonate biominerals with regards to the prior exposition of the protein to calcium or carbonate ions. Interestingly, the bioinspired minerals grown in the presence of the Starmaker-like protein in calcium- or carbonate-type experiments differ significantly in terms of morphology and protein distribution within the crystals. Our deeper analysis shows that the Starmaker-like protein action is a result of the environmental conditions to which it is exposed. These findings may be of special interest in the areas of biomineralization process pathways and biomaterial sciences.


Temporal prefetchers have the potential to prefetch arbitrary memory access patterns, but they require large amounts of metadata that must typically be stored in DRAM. In 2013, the Irregular Stream Buffer (ISB), showed how this metadata could be cached on chip and managed implicitly by synchronizing its contents with that of the TLB. This paper reveals the inefficiency of that approach and presents a new metadata management scheme that uses a simple metadata prefetcher to feed the metadata cache. The result is the Managed ISB (MISB), a temporal prefetcher that significantly advances the state-of-the-art in terms of both traffic overhead and IPC. Using a highly accurate proprietary simulator for single-core workloads, and using the ChampSim simulator for multi-core workloads, we evaluate MISB on programs from the SPEC CPU 2006 and CloudSuite benchmarks suites. Our results show that for single-core workloads, MISB improves performance by 22.7%, compared to 10.6% for an idealized STMS and 4.5% for a realistic ISB. MISB also significantly reduces off-chip traffic; for SPEC, MISB's traffic overhead of 70% is roughly one fifth of STMS's (342%) and one sixth of ISB's (411%). On 4-core multi-programmed workloads, MISB improves performance by 19.9%, compared to 7.5% for idealized STMS. For CloudSuite, MISB improves performance by 7.2% (vs. 4.0% for idealized STMS), while achieving a traffic reduction of 11x (96.2% for MISB vs. 1082.7% for STMS).


In the present paper we analyzed the behavior of firms in the construction and manufacturing sectors, located in the region of Vale do Sousa, in the north of Portugal. From the literature, even existing some disagreements, it is possible to conclude that planning is crucial for firms survival and growth. Cooperation is another aspect that the literature presents as an important factor for firms sustainability. It also plays a major role in competition, since firms are adopting coopetition strategies. By studying a sample of 251 firms, it was possible to realize, that the majority started their business without a formal planning, and they keep going without using it. In cooperation aspects, there is a lack of cooperation. It was possible to verify, that existing cooperation has some evidence but at a vertical level. These vertical relations were also identified in stakeholder's involvement. Key-Words: Planning; Cooperation; Competition; Innovation, Strategy;


The most severe forms of injuries to the knee often do not properly heal without surgical intervention. This is true whenever any major ligament is completely cut across or avulsed from its attachment, and particularly when the torn ends of one structure come to lie in positions that hinder the union of other structures. Surgical experience with over 150 cases of injury to the knee has shown that conservative treatment can be expected to lead to healing only when tears are partial. When the symptoms of pain, instability, abnormal mobility, hemarthrosis, and circumarticular effusions testify to severe injury, conservative treatment fails. The best results in such cases have been obtained when diagnosis was precise and surgical treatment prompt. Surgery is followed, on the same day, by physical therapy, which includes muscle-setting exercises (isometric contraction without joint motion) and other graded activities. A policy of complete repair and conscientious rehabilitation has given increasingly gratifying results.


The above article, published on August 1998 in Wiley Online Library (http://wileyonlinelibrary.com) and in Volume 42, pp. 851‐857, has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal Editor‐in‐Chief, Professor Michael Haney and John Wiley and Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to the lead author's declaration that official permission from the Ethical Committee of the Faculty of Medicine, Tokyo Medical and Dental University was not sought and therefore was not granted for this study.


Princeton University is building an integral field spectrograph (IFS), the Coronagraphic High Angular Resolution Imaging Spectrograph (CHARIS), for integration with the Subaru Coronagraphic Extreme Adaptive Optics (SCExAO) system and the AO188 adaptive optics system on the Subaru telescope. CHARIS and SCExAO will measure spectra of hot, young Jovian planets in a coronagraphic image across J, H, and K bands down to an 80 milliarcsecond inner working angle. SCExAO's coronagraphs and wavefront control system will make it possible to detect companions five orders of magnitude dimmer than their parent star. However, quasi-static speckles in the image contaminate the signal from the planet. In an IFS this also causes uncertainty in the spectra due to diffractive cross-contamination, commonly referred to as crosstalk. Post-processing techniques can subtract these speckles, but they can potentially skew spectral measurements, become less effective at small angular separation, and at best can only reduce the crosstalk down to the photon noise limit of the contaminating signal. CHARIS will address crosstalk effects of a high contrast image through hardware design, which drives the optical and mechanical design of the assembly. The work presented here sheds light on the optical and mechanical considerations taken in designing the IFS to provide high signal-to-noise spectra in a coronagraphic image from and extreme adaptive optics image. The design considerations and lessons learned are directly applicable to future exoplanet instrumentation for extremely large telescopes and space observatories capable of detecting rocky planets in the habitable zone.


The U.S. confronts an unprecedented public health crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, in the presidential election year in 2020. In such a compound situation, a real-time dynamic examination of how the general public ascribe the crisis responsibilities taking account to their political ideologies is helpful for developing effective strategies to manage the crisis and diminish hostility toward particular groups caused by polarization. Social media, such as Twitter, provide platforms for the public's COVID-related discourse to form, accumulate, and visibly present. Meanwhile, those features also make social media a window to monitor the public responses in real-time. This research conducted a computational text analysis of 2,918,376 tweets sent by 829,686 different U.S. users regarding COVID-19 from January 24 to May 25, 2020. Results indicate that the public's crisis attribution and attitude toward governmental crisis responses are driven by their political identities. One crisis factor identified by this study (i.e., threat level) also affects the public's attribution and attitude polarization. Additionally, we note that pandemic fatigue was identified in our findings as early as in March 2020. This study has theoretical, practical, and methodological implications informing further health communication in a heated political environment.


Create dynamic, interactive websites with HTML5 and CSS3 HTML5 and CSS3 are the newest revisions of the primary standards for structuring and styling web content - major updates that enable designers and developers to streamline source code and publish more dynamic, interactive content without having to learn complex scripting languages.The Complete Idiot's Guide to HTML5 and CSS3 provides both new and existing web developers the tools they need to code and design the web content that people increasingly expect to experience when they surf the web. Even better, you learn HTML5 and CSS3 in the context of building a website with a content management system (CMS), such as WordPress. You can then apply your knowledge of HTML5 and CSS3 to customize your site, instead of starting from scratch. You discover how to: Design and maintain a website using web-based tools instead of a complicated HTML editor. Code pages properly using the new HTML5 structure tags, including , , , , , , and the simplified tag. Embed audio and video using the new HTML5 and tags. Apply a CSS theme to format pages, and customize the theme using CSS3 styles. Use CSS3 to round box corners and make images and backgrounds more or less transparent. Take full advantage of new CSS3 transformation and animation features to animate objects on a page, create image rollovers, and build your own drop-down menus. Test and fine-tune your site to make it load faster and look just right. Perform an SEO audit of your site and keyword-optimize your site's content. The Complete Idiot's Guide(r) to HTML5 and CSS3 features: 16-page color insert HTML5 Quick Reference CSS3 Properties and Values Quick Reference HTML Special Characters and Symbols Quick Reference Speak Like a Geek Glossary


Liquid chromatography (LC)-solid-phase extraction (SPE)-nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)-mass spectrometry (MS) coupling is a key technology for fast and thorough structure elucidation of valuable mass-limited samples. Laborious serial isolation and purification procedures of metabolites, byproducts or impurities from complex biomatrices, natural product extracts or other mixtures of several components can be circumvented by the use of this integrated modular system. This combination of high-end analytical technology significantly accelerates the structure-elucidation process for valuable samples present in minute quantities in mixtures. The information depth is significantly increased by the concurrent availability of NMR and MS data of one chromatographic peak. Thus, this flexible technique is well on its way to becoming the gold standard in analytical chemistry of mixtures. LC-SPE-NMR-MS overcomes the limitations of directly coupled LC-NMR. Full flexibility regarding chromatographic conditions and NMR acquisition is gained by this modular technique. LC-SPE-NMR-MS allows for a rapid structure-elucidation process that would not be possible on the basis of MS or NMR data alone.


A sequence of seven nematic phases has been observed in chiral mesogenic dimers, having odd number of carbon atoms in the spacer, thus a bent shape. The highest temperature phase is a chiral nematic (cholesteric) phase on heating or blue phases on cooling. The lowest temperature nematic phase expels the chiral twist and exhibits spontaneous bent–splay modulation.


The Tat system is an important protein export system critical for bacterial physiology and pathogenesis. It has been observed for a long time that the Tat system is critical for bacterial motility. ABSTRACT Flagellum-mediated bacterial motility is important for bacteria to take up nutrients, adapt to environmental changes, and establish infection. The twin-arginine translocation system (Tat) is an important protein export system, playing a critical role in bacterial physiology and pathogenesis. It has been observed for a long time that the Tat system is critical for bacterial motility. However, the underlying mechanism remains unrevealed. In this study, a comparative transcriptomics analysis was performed with extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli (ExPEC), which identified a considerable number of genes differentially expressed when the Tat system was disrupted. Among them, a large proportion of flagellar biosynthesis genes showed downregulation, indicating that transcription regulation plays an important role in mediating the motility defects. We further identified three Tat substrate proteins, MdoD, AmiA, and AmiC, that were responsible for the nonmotile phenotype. The Rcs system was deleted in the Δtat, the ΔmdoD, and the ΔamiAΔamiC strains, which restored the motility of ΔmdoD and partially restored the motility of Δtat and ΔamiAΔamiC. The flagella were also observed in all of the ΔtatΔrcsDB, ΔmdoDΔrcsDB, and ΔamiAΔamiCΔrcsDB strains, but not in the Δtat, ΔmdoD, and ΔamiAΔamiC strains, by using transmission electron microscopy. Quantitative reverse transcription-PCR data revealed that the regulons of the Rcs system displayed differential expression in the tat mutant, indicating that the Rcs signaling was activated. Our results suggest that the Rcs system plays an important role in mediating the motility defects of the tat mutant of ExPEC. IMPORTANCE The Tat system is an important protein export system critical for bacterial physiology and pathogenesis. It has been observed for a long time that the Tat system is critical for bacterial motility. However, the underlying mechanism remains unrevealed. In this study, we combine transcriptomics analysis and bacterial genetics, which reveal that transcription regulation plays an important role in mediating the motility defects of the tat mutant of extraintestinal pathogenic Escherichia coli. The Tat substrate proteins responsible for the motility defects are identified. We further show that the Rcs system contributes to the motility suppression. We for the first time reveal the link between the Tat system and bacterial motility, which is important for understanding the physiological functions of the Tat system.


Although (oxy)hydroxides generated by electrochemical reconstruction (EC-reconstruction) of transition-metal catalysts exhibit highly catalytic activities, the amorphous nature fundamentally impedes the electrochemical kinetics due to its poor electrical conductivity. Here, EC-reconstructed NiFe/NiFeOOH core/shell nanoparticles in highly conductive carbon matrix based on the pulsed laser deposition prepared NiFe nanoparticles is successfully confined. Electrochemical characterizations and first-principles calculations demonstrate that the reconstructed NiFe/NiFeOOH core/shell nanoparticles exhibit high oxygen evolution reaction (OER) electrocatalytic activity (a low overpotential of 342.2 mV for 10 mA cm-2 ) and remarkable durability due to the efficient charge transfer in the highly conductive confined heterostructure. More importantly, benefit from the superparamagnetic nature of the reconstructed NiFe/NiFeOOH core/shell nanoparticles, a large OER improvement is achieved (an ultralow overpotential of 209.2 mV for 10 mA cm-2 ) with an alternating magnetic field stimulation. Such OER improvement can be attributed to the Néel relaxation related magnetic heating effect functionalized superparamagnetic NiFe cores, which are generally underutilized in reconstructed core/shell nanoparticles. This work demonstrates that the designed superparamagnetic core/shell nanoparticles, combined with the large improvement by magnetic heating effect, are expected to be highly efficient OER catalysts along with the confined structure guaranteed high conductivity and catalytic stability.


The author discusses some applications of virtual reality and the limitations of interactivity. He considers how automatic simulated behavior minus the application judgment of direct human participation is already evolving in computer animation. In traditional animation, the animator explicitly controls every action of the characters, provides every cause, and determines every effect. While we think of virtual reality as the ultimate interactive technology, it is likely that only new tasks will be purely interactive. As applications are better understood, the ratio of interactive to automated processing will go down. We can expect anthropomorphic simulated humans to work on simulated projects in not necessarily visible virtual worlds. >


Several African species of seed beetles named by J. Decelle between 1972 and his death in 1996 were left undescribed. Nine species belonging to the Bruchidius rubicundus group, namely Bruchidius auratopubens, Bruchidius cadei, Bruchidius campylacanthae, Bruchidius gilloni, Bruchidius lamtoensis, Bruchidius pennatae, Bruchidius pygidiopictus, Bruchidius sieberianae, and Bruchidius summotus are described. One further species, Bruchidius nongoniermai, is described in the Bruchidius centromaculatus group. All these species belong to a large clade of Mimosoideae feeders; they predate upon seeds of Faidherbia albida and various Acacia species. In addition, Bruchidius ivorensis, which belongs to a small group of Asian and African seed beetles that predate on various Desmodieae, is described.


A multivariate statistical technique, Q-mode factor analysis, was applied to 120 samples collected from five lacustrine soils of southwestern Ontario. In each sample, 23 variables were measured: 11 chemical, and 12 particle size classes. Three factors were found to account adequately for the variation in the original data, i.e. 120 samples x 23 variables. The factors can be interpreted as indicators of depositional and weathering environments. To simplify such an interpretation and to try and separate the effects of the depositional environment from the pedogenic processes, the chemical data was treated separately from the grain size data. Two factors were found to describe adequately the variation in chemical data and three factors accounted for the variation in the grain size data. The chemical factors were interpreted to represent the processes of weathering occurring in the soil profile. The grain size factors were postulated as representing energy levels in the environment of deposition of the parent materials, i.e. a low energy environment where the sediments were formed predominantly through settling from suspension, a relatively higher energy environment where a significant portion of the sediments were deposited from traction currents, and an intermediate energy level where both settling and traction were important processes. These interpretations were arrived at considering only laboratory data and they agree with morphological information obtained from the field. In the exploratory or preliminary stages of research, factor analysis is a useful tool for manipulating a large amount of data. This type of analysis can complement morphological studies that are still needed for a full understanding of the genesis and classification of soils.


Abstract The object of this communication was to describe the fall of an aërolite or bolide, which took place on the 25th December, 1869, at Mourzouk, in Fezzan (lat. 26° N., long. 12° E. of Paris), in the presence of a group of Arabs. The bolide is described as a globe of fire nearly a metre in diameter, which, on falling, exploded with a sound resembling pistol-shots and a strong odour. It is further stated that the whole or portions of the bolide will be forwarded—and that, according to information given, the poignards, sabres, and lances of the principal people of Waddai are constructed of meteoric iron, much of which has fallen in that district.


Samples of cucumber plants (Cucumis sativus L.) were collected from different locations of Bakrajo/Sulaimani governorate, Kurdistan region, Iraq. The collected plants were by stunting and yellowing while the roots with obvious root-knots. For nematode identification two methods were used for nematode identification, Perennial Patterns and PCR, with species-specific primers, showing that there were two species; Meloidogyne incognita (Kofoid & White) Chitwood, and M. javanica (Treub) Chitwood. An experiment was designed, different methods have been used for controlling RKN, The results showed that after application of the above treatments whether alone or in combination, the minimum numbers of juvenile 2 (J2) were as well as in Nemakey, Humic acid and Chitosan combination treatment to be (66.33) recorded the maximum number after 30 days of application. Plant receiving combined treatments (Nemakey, Humic acid and Chitosan) significantly reduced the number of total nematode population at (p ≤ 0.05) in comparison to controls. The minimum number of gall formation on the cucumber root system and galling index with the highest percentage of gall decreasing (23.76, 3.1 and 77.00%) were revealed in case of combined treatments (Nemakey, Humic acid and Chitosan). A significant decrease (p ≤ 0.05) of disease severity percentage was recorded under Humic acid and Chitosan treatment (66%). The combination (Nemakey, Humic acid and Chitosan) also recorded vigorous growth and high yield. This paper is first scientific report about diagnosing and controlling the cucumber root-knot nematode in the region.


Physical-chemical characteristics of chitosan influence the development of crops when applied as a biostimulants. The objective of the research was to determine the influence of chitosan of different molecular masses on the in vitro initial vegetative growth of soybean seedlings. The seeds were disinfected and imbibed for one hour in chitosan solutions at 10, 100 and 500 mg L -1 , with medium molecular mass (Q 1 , 100 kDa) and low (Q 2 , 25.3 kDa). After 72 hours of incubation the seeds were determined the percentage of germination and the length of the radicle, before placing in containers with sterile Hougland nutrient solution and, cultivated in a room of lights for 10 days (Phase R1). The results obtained showed the biostimulant effect of chitosan, when applied by imbibition of seeds, regardless of their molecular mass and concentration, in the percentage of germinated seeds, while the growth of the seedlings was influenced by the concentration of 500 mg L - 1 of chitosan. The application of medium molecular mass chitosan (Q 1 ) increased the number of leaves, the length of the stem and roots, the radical dry mass and the leaf area of the seedlings. Not influenced on the dry mass of the aerial part was observed, however, Q 2 stimulated the dry biomass, while Q 1 , increased the leaf area index (LAI) of the seedlings, by ten times with the concentration of 500 mg L -1 . Both chitosan polymers doubled the root-stem ratio (r/v), in relation to the control plants from seeds embedded in water. The effect of the molecular mass and concentration of chitosan on the biostimulant capacity of soybean seedlings when applied by seed imbibition was demonstrated.


Social media, and then the online platforms contain a huge amount of the data in the form of tweets, blogs, and updates on the status, posts, etc. Sentiment analysis of the data is handy to express the opinion of the group or any individual. Sentiment analysis is the analysis of emotions and opinions from any type of text. And the comparison of the Times of India movie reviews and Tweets of the same movies are taken using Machine Learning Algorithms. The primary motivation was to explore disparate data sources that had not encountered before that are also often used in data science, specifically Twitter and sentiment analysis. The main goal was to gain insight on market research analysis on social media, and traditional media sources. The resulting analysis is helpful to moviegoers and the movie industry in understanding the perception of reviews.


The prospects of utilizing single-carrier (SC) and multi-carrier (MC) waveforms in future terahertz (THz)-band communication systems remain unresolved. On the one hand, the limited multi-path components at high frequencies result in frequency-flat channels that favor low-complexity wideband SC systems. On the other hand, frequency-dependent molecular absorption and transceiver characteristics and the existence of multi-path components in indoor sub-THz systems can still result in frequency-selective channels, favoring off-the-shelf MC schemes such as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM). Variations of SC/MC designs result in different THz spectrum utilization, but spectral efficiency is not the primary concern with substantial available bandwidths; baseband complexity, power efficiency, and hardware impairment constraints are predominant. This paper presents a comprehensive study of SC/MC waveforms for THz communications, utilizing an accurate wideband THz channel model and highlighting the various performance and complexity trade-offs of the candidate schemes. Simulations demonstrate that discrete-Fourier-transform spread orthogonal time-frequency space (DFT-s-OTFS) achieves a lower peakto- average power ratio (PAPR) than OFDM and OTFS and enhances immunity to THz impairments and Doppler spreads, but at an increased complexity cost. Moreover, DFT-s-OFDM is a promising candidate that increases robustness to THz impairments and phase noise (PHN) at a low PAPR and overall complexity.