This research was conducted to investigate the effects of tarragon extract on performance, carcass quality and hematologic parameters in male Japanese quail over a period of 42 days. In this study, 360, one day old, male Japanese quail chicks are used in a completely randomized manner. 6 experimental treatments and 4 replications are performed on 15 quail chicks in each replication. Treatments in this study include: 1) The basal diet with antibiotics, 2) The basal diet without antibiotics, 3) The basal diet + 0.5% tarragon extract, 4) The basal diet +1% tarragon extract, 5) The basal diet +1.5% tarragon extract and 6) basal diet +2% tarragon extract. Performancerelated characteristics, including feed intake, weight gain, and feed conversion ratio are measured weekly. The results indicate that the treatment containing 1.5% tarragon extract does not make a significant difference in feed intake compared with the control treatment. Also, in the treatment with 0.5% tangent extract showed no significant difference in weight gain compared with the control treatment. Conversion ratio was meaningful in some weeks. The best conversion ratio was related to the treatments containing 0.5% and 1% tarragon extract which did not have a significant difference with the control treatment over the whole period of the experiment. Investigation of the carcass characteristics shows that the treatment with 0.5% tarragon extract led to the highest carcass weight and breast weight. But no significant difference observed in the weight of the liver, heart, and thigh. There wasn't any significant difference in hematologic parameters either


Abstract : In the second year five faculty members and a research assistant were further trained in molecular imaging of breast cancer through seminars and workshops and are currently conducting two research projects with the faculty at Johns Hopkins University. We have perfected the technique of constructing a dual imaging probe for MRI and fluorescent imaging by linkage of near-infrared fluorescently labeled transferring on the surface of contrast agent encapsulated cationic liposomes. The dual probe not only enhances the tumor MR image contrast but is also an excellent probe for optical imaging. We have established three breast cancer tumor models including subcutaneous xenografts mammary gland xenografts and lung metastasis in nude mice using luciferase-expressing MDA-MB-231-luc cells. Metastatic lesion of 0.3-0.5 mm in diameter could be clearly detected by MRI or optical imaging in vivo. We have found that when MCF-7 cells are co-cultured with activated THP-1 macrophages they caused an increase in PTEN expression. MIF expression is dramatically induced in MCF-7 cells when they are co-cultured with macrophages. We have published three papers and another paper is in press. We have given six presentations in conferences. We received two new grants and five other grant applications are pending. We have recruited a new faulty member to join the project. A research assistant supported by this grant received her undergraduate degree in Biology at the Howard University with summa cum laude. The Molecular Imaging Lab continuously served as a synergic center on campus for promoting molecular imaging research. New research collaborations were established among the faculty at Howard as well as with the external scientists from Georgetown University and NIH.


Linear and quadratic discriminant analysis are two useful classification methods for which the problem of variable selection is of fundamental importance. To this end, a BIC-type selection criterion (Schwarz (1978)) was recently studied by Raftery and Dean (2006). Despite its usefulness, the BIC's selection consistency (Shao (1997)) was not investigated. To fill this gap, we show that BIC, in con- junction with a backward elimination procedure, is indeed selection consistent. To confirm our asymptotic theory, a number of numerical studies are presented.


The metabolites of baicalein in human plasma were investigated after taking baicalein, which is one of the main bioactive flavones in Scutellaria baicalensis Georgi. Five metabolites (M1–M5) together with the parent drug baicalein (P) were detected and identified by the HPLC-diode-array detector (DAD) and LC-MS/MS methods. Among them, 7-methoxybaicalein 6-O-glucuronide (M5) is a new metabolite. Based on the results, the proposed metabolic pathway of baicalein in humans was inferred.


Santiago Ramon y Cajal (1852-1934) was born in a small mountain village in the shadow of the Pyrenees. With his roots firmly fixed in this soil, he grew to become the most brilliant figure in Spanish medicine of his generation. He explored the nervous system with the same furious enthusiasm that his ancestors had exhibited in exploring the New World. "Like the entomologist in pursuit of brightly coloured butterflys, my attention hunted, in the garden of the gray matter, cells with delicate and elegant forms, the mysterious butterflys of the soul, the beatings of whose wings may someday-who knows?-clarify the secret of mental life."* The success of his work was based upon meticulous techniques developed to demonstrate the microscopic anatomy of the nervous system. He was able to prove that the neurons are independent units, contiguous, but not continuous, with other cells. For these observations he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 1906.


This paper investigated the problem of orientation detection for document images with Chinese characters. These images may be in four orientations: right side up, up-side down, 90° and 270° rotated counterclockwise. First, we presented the structure of text-recognition-based orientation detection algorithm. Text line verification and orientation judgment methods were mainly discussed, afterwards multiple experiments were carried. Distance-difference based text line verification and confidence based text line verification were proposed and compared with methods without text line verification. Then, a picture-based orientation detection framework was adopted for the situation where no text line was detected. This high-level classification problem was solved by relatively low-level vision features including Color Moments (CM) and Edge Direction Histogram (EDH), with distant-based classification scheme. Finally, confidencebased classifier combination strategy was employed in order to make full use of the complementarity between different features and classifiers. Experiments showed that both text line verification methods were able to improve the accuracy of orientation detection, and picture-based orientation detection had a good performance for no-text image set.


Recklinghausen's disease presents many variations in the localization and the intensity of the underlying pathologic process. It may remain stationary and limited to the cutaneous surface for many years, or it may be progressive at the outset and gradually involve the viscera and the central nervous system. The case to be described belongs to the latter category, and it presents some unusual localizations of neurofibromatous tumors. REPORT OF A CASE E. B., a man aged 21, for a number of years had multiple sessile tumors of various sizes, disseminated over the face, the trunk and the extremities. Six or seven years before examination an external deviation of the left eye developed. Soon afterward palsy of the peripheral type appeared on the left side of the face. Several months before examination he began to experience difficulty in walking, standing and turning while standing. At the time of examination some tumors were


The political situation in the Kingdom of France at the beginning of the 15 th century is considered. In 1417 there have been features of the dynastic crisis. There was only one minor heir, King Charles VI suffered from a disease, noble groups fought for power. To prevent the dynastic crisis, a procedure corresponding to the new conditions was needed to establish. The Ordinance of 1374, which defined the order of the regency for the period of growing of the future king, and the decisions of January 1393 formed on its basis, when the order of government at the time of illness of Charles VI first was settled, were taken into account. After several disease exacerbations of the King the Ordinance was amended in 1403 and 1405. Some responsibility for the crisis the King put on his wife, Isabella of Bavaria, so the queen, feel threatened, hurried to leave Paris. Gradually the part of the court nobility was grouped around the figure of Isabella of Bavaria. In France, in fact, turned out to be two capital cities: Paris, where were the King and deliberative organs of the central administration, and Vincennes, where Isabella of Bavaria and her court were. The article describes the split in the royal family and its implications for the political situation of the time.


The non-contractual liability of the EU constitutes an obligation on the part of EU to compensate for damages caused by its bodies and/or agents acting within the scope of their official duties. Given the low number of successful applicants, the aim of this paper is to identify the conditions set by the Court of Justice of the EU with respect to the burden of proof to be borne by the applicant in order to prove the causal nexus between the (lack of) action of the EU and the damage caused by a breach of law by the EU. An analysis of these conditions shall be preceded by defining the procedural rules for lodging a claim for damages, i.e. in particular the right to standing, the period for lodging this claim, and its formal requirements.


Epigenetic targets have emerged as an exciting area for drug discovery. The discovery that histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors had marked anticancer activity in T-cell lymphoma gave impetus to the field. In a phase I study published in Clinical Cancer Research in March 2002, romidepsin (depsipeptide), a potent HDAC inhibitor, was found to be tolerable, with a side effect profile that was later understood to be characteristic of this class of agents. Evidence of activity in this key phase I trial provided momentum for the further study of epigenetic agents. Clin Cancer Res; 21(10); 2195–7. ©2015 AACR. See related article by Sandor et al., Clin Cancer Res 2002;8(3) Mar 2002;718–28


This article argues on the basis of recent case law that the judges of the Pakistan Federal Shariat Court (FSC) have asserted their right to ijtihād and have indeed engaged in collective ijtihād. While in some areas, such as freedom of religion, Islamic law has been interpreted rigidly in a non-human-rights-friendly fashion in Pakistan, in some other areas, the flexibility and pluralism of Islamic law has been used to improve gender equality, women's rights and the right to family life. By using its constitutional powers, with its collective ijtihād, the FSC has been tackling the traditionally illiberal interpretation and application of Muslim laws in these areas. Regardless of the methodology and process of this ijtihādic endeavor, the output shows that the FSC has been either modifying the traditional ijtihāds or coming up with totally new ijtihāds to answer contemporary questions faced by Islamic law. The findings of the article once again challenge the views of scholars such as Schacht, Coulson and Chehata, who have argued that, by the fourth/tenth century, the essentials of Islamic legal doctrine were already fully formulated and that the doctrine remained fixed.


La2MoO6:Yb3+,Er3+ upconversion (UC) micro-crystals with a tetragonal structure were fabricated through a modified sol-gel method. The samples are found to be spherical in shape with a diameter of about 300 nm. Upon excitation of 980 nm light, the UC emission spectra of the phosphors exhibit green and red bands corresponding to the characteristic transitions of Er3+ ions. As Yb3+ concentration rises, the green emission intensity increases and reaches the maximum at 2.0% Yb3+ content, while the ratio of green/red emission intensities (IG/IR) declines monotonically. Temperature sensing capability was studied employing the fluorescent intensity ratio technique from the thermally coupled levels 2H11/2 and 4S3/2 of Er3+ in temperature range of 293∼533 K. It is interesting to find that Yb3+ concentration has influence on the absolute sensitivity SA, while the relative sensitivity SR is almost independent of Yb3+ content. Furthermore, excellent thermal stability and high temperature sensitivity is also demonstrated in the 2.0% Yb3+-doped sample with the obtained maximum SA and SR as high as 0.008K-1 and 1.093%K-1, respectively. The experimental results indicate that Yb3+/Er3+ co-doped La2MoO6 phosphors can be excellent candidates for temperature sensing applications.


Migraine is frequently associated with menstruation in female migraineurs, and consequently it is commonly referred to as menstrually associated migraine. The trigger thought to be partially responsible for menstrually associated migraine is a significant drop in circulating estrogen that is noted during 2‐3 days prior to onset of menses. It is estimated that approximately 50% of women have an increased risk of experiencing migraine during the premenstrual phase of decreasing estrogen levels. Understanding the biological basis of migraine associated with menses will facilitate an accurate diagnosis and help patients recognize time susceptible to migraine exacerbations. This paper will review the biological bases for the hormonal changes that occur during the menstrual cycle and review the prevalence and burden of menstrual migraine among female headache sufferers.


Some basic considerations in design of multichannel auditory nerve array stimulators and sound processors for an electrical stimulation cochlear prosthesis are briefly reviewed. Considerations specific to the design of strict auditory nerve array simulation-based prostheses are discussed, as are considerations for production of channel vocoder-based and more purely information-based prostheses.


Background: Physicians who provide primary care to women have the opportunity to identify patients at high risk for breast cancer who are candidates for risk reduction strategies. Our objective was to determine the prevalence and determinants of the adoption of breast cancer risk assessment by primary care physicians. Methods: A cross-sectional survey of a nationally representative random sample of 351 internists, family practitioners, and obstetricians-gynecologists. We used a questionnaire that assessed knowledge, attitudes, discussion of breast cancer risk, use of software to calculate breast cancer risk, and ordering of BRCA1/2 testing. Results: Eighty-eight percent of physicians reported discussing breast cancer risk at least once during the previous 12 months; 48% had ordered or referred a patient for BRCA1/2 testing; and 18% had used a software program to calculate breast cancer risk. Physicians who had used BRCA1/2 testing or discussed breast cancer risk factors were more likely to be obstetrician-gynecologists and not in a solo practice; the use of risk software was also more common among obstetrician-gynecologists but was also associated with having a family member with breast cancer and a greater knowledge about breast cancer risk. Having patients ask for risk information was associated with the discussion of risk factors but not with the other risk assessment strategies. Conclusions: Diffusion of breast cancer risk assessment is occurring in primary care practices, with a greater adoption of BRCA1/2 testing than of the use of risk assessment software. Adoption of these strategies seems to be related to the salience of breast cancer personally (for the physician) and within the practice, as well as the size of the practice, rather than attitudes about the risk assessment methods.


The aim of this study was to investigate the validity and reliability of the Turkish Tampa Kinesiophobia Scale-Short Form in individuals with low back pain. A total of 111 volunteer patients aged between 30 and 65 years (mean 48±12 years) and diagnosed with mechanical low back pain were included in the study. Explanatory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) were applied to the data to test the construct validity. Item-total correlations were calculated to test item discrimination and Cronbach-α values were calculated to test reliability. To determine the criterion validity, the Turkish versions of the Visual Analog Scale (VAS), the SF-36, the Fear-Avoiding Beliefs Questionnaire (FABQ), and the Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire (RMDQ) as well as the TSK-11, which was translated into Turkish, were administered. There was no difference between the TSK-11 test and retest measurement results (p>0.05). Cronbach α levels for test and retest were calculated as 0.74 and 0.81. The variance of the first factor in the factor analysis was 35.372%, indicating that the Turkish version of the TSK-11 consisted of one dimension. As a result of DFA, the TSK-11 fit index criteria in other fit indices. In the test-retest analyses of the Turkish version of TSK-11, intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) values ranged from 0.403 to 0.479, while TSK-11 Cronbach's alpha values were 0.727-0.748. There was a positive relationship between TSK-11 and FABQ, RMDQ, and VAS (r=436**, 589**, 589**, respectively), and a moderate negative relationship between TSK-11 and SF-36. In our study, the Turkish version of the TSK-11 was found to be valid and reliable. The TSK-11 can be used in clinical practice and research to evaluate fear of movement in individuals with low back pain in Turkish society.


ABSTRACT Intrapancreatic trypsin activation by dysregulated macroautophagy/autophagy and pathological exocytosis of zymogen granules (ZGs), along with activation of inhibitor of NFKB/NF-κB kinase (IKK) are necessary early cellular events in pancreatitis. How these three pancreatitis events are linked is unclear. We investigated how SNAP23 orchestrates these events leading to pancreatic acinar injury. SNAP23 depletion was by knockdown (SNAP23-KD) effected by adenovirus-shRNA (Ad-SNAP23-shRNA/mCherry) treatment of rodent and human pancreatic slices and in vivo by infusion into rat pancreatic duct. In vitro pancreatitis induction by supraphysiological cholecystokinin (CCK) or ethanol plus low-dose CCK were used to assess SNAP23-KD effects on exocytosis and autophagy. Pancreatitis stimuli resulted in SNAP23 translocation from its native location at the plasma membrane to autophagosomes, where SNAP23 would bind and regulate STX17 (syntaxin17) SNARE complex-mediated autophagosome-lysosome fusion. This SNAP23 relocation was attributed to IKBKB/IKKβ-mediated SNAP23 phosphorylation at Ser95 Ser120 in rat and Ser120 in human, which was blocked by IKBKB/IKKβ inhibitors, and confirmed by the inability of IKBKB/IKKβ phosphorylation-disabled SNAP23 mutant (Ser95A Ser120A) to bind STX17 SNARE complex. SNAP23-KD impaired the assembly of STX4-driven basolateral exocytotic SNARE complex and STX17-driven SNARE complex, causing respective reduction of basolateral exocytosis of ZGs and autolysosome formation, with consequent reduction in trypsinogen activation in both compartments. Consequently, pancreatic SNAP23-KD rats were protected from caerulein and alcoholic pancreatitis. This study revealed the roles of SNAP23 in mediating pathological basolateral exocytosis and IKBKB/IKKβ's involvement in autolysosome formation, both where trypsinogen activation would occur to cause pancreatitis. SNAP23 is a strong candidate to target for pancreatitis therapy. Abbreviations: AL: autolysosome; AP: acute pancreatitis; AV: autophagic vacuole; CCK: cholecystokinin; IKBKB/IKKβ: inhibitor of nuclear factor kappa B kinase subunit beta; SNAP23: synaptosome associated protein 23; SNARE: soluble NSF (N-ethylmaleimide-sensitive factor) attachment protein receptor; STX: syntaxin; TAP: trypsinogen activation peptide; VAMP: vesicle associated membrane protein; ZG: zymogen granule.


The study included 71 samples of hair fragments, nail clippings, and skin scrapings  which were collected from patients whom admitted to Department of Dermatology at Al-Diwaniyah Teaching Hospital during the period from March 2018 to August 2018, all specimens were examined by direct KOH 10% mount smear and cultured in sabourauds dextrose agar to determine the dermatophyte species.The laboratory examination results showed that out of 71 samples processed,49 (69%) were positive in both KOH mount and culture . The main causative agents of human dermatophytes were as follow:Trichophytonrubrum 31(63.3%), Trichophytonmentagrophytes 11( 22.4%), Microsporumcanis 5(10.2%) and Epidermophytonfloccosum 2(4.1%) . Trichophytonrubrumwas selected for its ability of toxic secondary metabolites production based on the efficiency of production among tested dermatophytes.Thin layer chromatography results of chloroform extracts revealed three spots with different colors named as follows; TRA compound (dark blue), TRB compound ( dark brown), and TRC compound (light blue) under UV light have different with rate of flow values equal to 12.1, 48.5, and 84.8 respectively .


Linked Data provides an ever-growing source of geographically referenced data for application development. In this paper, we analyse the workflow behind the development of such an application. Using two examples based on worldwide development aid and refugee data, we discuss the steps from locating data for use and data integration, up to the actual visualization in a web-based application. At each step, we discuss the skill set required for completion and point to potential challenges. We conclude the paper by putting our case study in the context of GIScience curriculum development.


ABSTRACT WD40 repeat proteins, the homologs of yeast MSI1, are conserved in plants, participating in protein complexes and playing fundamental functions in plant development. Although several MSI1-like proteins have been cloned and characterized in plants, the roles of MSI1-like proteins in the biennial ornamental plant, Dendrobium nobile Lindl, are still unclear. Here, we report the cloning of the DnMSI1 gene from Dendrobium nobile Lindl with RACE technology. We found that DnMSI1 expression was induced by GA3 and TDZ but inhibited by ABA, PP333, and drought and salt stress. Furthermore, DnMSI1 over-expression in Arabidopsis resulted in decreased tolerance to NaCl stress. These results suggest that DnMSI1 plays negative regulation roles in regulating salinity-stress resistance in Dendrobium nobile Lindl.


The annual exercise of revising excise duties has become part of Budget Day tradition. The need for such revision arises because, unlike VAT and the ad valorem tax on cigarettes, excise duties are set in nominal terms according to the physical quantity of the goods on which they are levied. Hence, regardless of any policy-based changes, if the real value of excise duties is to be maintained, the effect of inflation must be countered. However, there is perception in some quarters that producers respond to changes in excise duty rates by increasing prices beyond those implied by the tax alone. No doubt there is considerable potential for 'bar-room debate' over, for example, the contention that if the Chancellor puts 1p on the price of beer, the brewers will add another 1p for themselves. Underlying such a contention is the notion that there is some feature of the industries subjiect to excise duties which allows them to engage in such behaviour. It is noticeable that the principal industries on which excise duties are levied, namely alcohol, tobacco and petrol, have been the subject of major Monopolies and Mergers Commission investigations.


We evaluated the efficacy and safety of switching to insulin degludec (IDeg) from insulin glargine (IGlar) as basal-bolus therapy in young people with type 1 diabetes. The subjects were 36 patients, 21.3±1.0 years of age, with type 1 diabetes. IGlar had previously been injected once daily in 25 patients and twice daily in 11. They were then switched from IGlar to once-daily injection of IDeg. Both fasting plasma glucose (FPG) and HbA1c levels decreased significantly from 134±3.9 mg/dL and 7.9±0.2% at baseline to 116±2.2 mg/dL and 7.4±0.2% at 12 months after starting IDeg (P<0.0001 and P≤0.001, respectively). Overall and nocturnal hypoglycemia (PG<70 mg/dL) frequencies also decreased significantly from 4.9±0.7 and 2.0±0.3 times/month to 2.4±0.3 and 0.4±0.1 times/month at 12 months after starting IDeg (P≤0.005 and P<0.0005, respectively). The daily basal insulin dose was significantly reduced from 0.48±0.04 units/kg/day at baseline to 0.38±0.03 units/kg/day at the end of the study period (P<0.0001), which corresponded to 79.2% of the baseline value. Trends were similar in patients receiving the once-daily injection and those given twice-daily injections, but basal-insulin value reductions from baseline were more marked in patients receiving twice-daily injections of basal insulin (76.0% vs. 82.6% of the baseline value). These results suggest that switching from IGlar to an appropriate dose of IDeg may effectively control hyperglycemia while reducing the frequency of hypoglycemia episodes in young Japanese people with type 1 diabetes.


Human resources planning and competencies in a company hold an important role in improving human resource especially in term of employee performance to help company goal achieved. The problem formulation in this study is to know the influence of employee planning, consist of job description,` training, career path and employee competencies (technical competencies and non-technical competencies), toward employee performance in PT. Inalum Kuala Tanjung. The purposes of this study is to analyze and knowing the influence of planning towards employee performance, influence of competencies towards employee performance, difference in technical and non technical competencies between factories and administration employee in PT Inalum Kuala Tanjung. Planning variable consist of Job Description, Training, Career Step influence simultaneously and highly significant towards employee performance. T-Test results that career step have dominant influence towards employee performance. R 2 Test result 54.1%, while the rest of it (45.9%) is not include in this study. Competencies variable consist of technical and non-technical competencies simultaneously influence and with highly significant towards employee performance. T-Test result are technical competencies have dominant influence towards employee performance. There is a difference in technical competencies between factories employee and administration employee, and there is no difference in non-technical competencies between factories employee and administration employee.


Positioning precision is crucial to today's increasingly high-speed, high-capacity, high data density, and miniaturized hard disk drives (HDDs). The demand for higher bandwidth servo systems that can quickly and precisely position the read/write head on a high track density becomes more pressing. Recently, the idea of applying dual-stage actuators to track servo systems has been studied. The push-pull piezoelectrically actuated devices have been developed as micro actuators for fine and fast positioning, while the voice coil motor functions as a large but coarse seeking. However, the current dual-stage actuator design uses piezoelectric patches only without passive damping. In this paper, we propose a dual-stage servo system using enhanced active-passive hybrid piezoelectric actuators. The proposed actuators improve the existing dual-stage actuators for higher precision and shock resistance, due to the incorporation of passive damping in the design. We aim to develop this hybrid servo system not only to increase speed of track seeking but also to improve precision of track following servos in HDDs. New piezoelectrically actuated suspensions with passive damping have been designed and fabricated. In order to evaluate positioning precision for the dual-stage servo systems, simulation and experiments are carried out to implement the active-passive hybrid suspension with enhanced piezoelectric actuators using a composite nonlinear feedback controller


Abstract Objective: To assess the risk of nosocomial infection in transferred patients and to determine whether transfer is only a risk marker or is independently associated with nosocomial infection. Design: Retrospective analysis. Setting: A 400-bed general hospital in the Paris area. Patients: All the patients hospitalized on the days of the surveys were included. Methods: Epidemiological analysis of data collected in four annual nosocomial infection prevalence surveys conducted between 1993 and 1996. Results: Of the 1,326 patients included in the four surveys, 70 (5.3%) had been transferred from another hospital and 199 (15.0%) from another ward of our hospital. Transferred patients more frequently had known risk factors of nosocomial infection: age >65 years (P<10-5), a length of hospital stay >7 days on the day of the survey (P<10-6), at least one invasive procedure (34.2% vs 27.2%; P<.05), a recent surgical intervention (P<.05), and an immunosuppression (P<.01). The prevalence rate of infected patients was 6.7% (95% confidence interval, 5.3-8.1). The risk of being infected on a given day was more than 4 times higher in transferred patients (P<10-6); however, the risk was similar between patients transferred from another hospital (20.0%) and patients transferred within the hospital (17.1%). The multivariate analysis performed by logistic regression showed that intrahospi-tal transfer, a length of hospital stay >7 days, and having had at least one invasive procedure were independent risk factors of infection. Conclusion: According to this study, patient transfer is both a risk marker (associated with several known risk factors) and independently associated with nosocomial infection. The origin of a transferred patient is readily known at admission. It would be useful to adopt specific measures for such patients, particularly if they have other risk factors of nosocomial infection, both to protect them and to prevent transmission of the infection to other hospitalized patients.


Currently, the need arises for tools capable of unraveling the functionality of genes based on the analysis of microarray measurements. Modeling genetic interactions by means of genetic network models provides a methodology to infer functional relationships between genes. Although a wide variety of different models have been introduced so far, it remains, in general, unclear what the strengths and weaknesses of each of these approaches are and where these models overlap and differ. This paper compares different genetic modeling approaches that attempt to extract the gene regulation matrix from expression data. A taxonomy of continuous genetic network models is proposed and the following important characteristics are suggested and employed to compare the models: inferential power; predictive power; robustness; consistency; stability and computational cost. Where possible, synthetic time series data are employed to investigate some of these properties. The comparison shows that although genetic network modeling might provide valuable information regarding genetic interactions, current models show disappointing results on simple artificial problems. For now, the simplest models are favored because they generalize better, but more complex models will probably prevail once their bias is more thoroughly understood and their variance is better controlled.


Plasma pharmacokinetic (PK) properties of oral or injectable
drugs dictate whether the drug is clinically viable or not. Poor PK properties often result in
termination of the development of the drug. Optimizing PK properties of drugs is a major
challenge in the pharmaceutical industry. Ideally, sufficient circulating time of the drug in
the plasma is required, so that it has adequate opportunity to reach the target tissue.

We have used irinotecan, a known drug with poor PK properties, as a prototype
to apply our idea of improving PK in plasma by PEGylation. We compared the PK profile
of free irinotecan, irinotecan packaged in nanoparticles (NPs) with single polyethylene
glycol (PEG) layer and irinotecan packaged in NPs with double PEG layer. PK properties
of these formulations were compared in a zebrafish model when given intraperitoneally.

Dramatic differences in the PK properties of the three formulations were observed.
The AUC, Cmax and T1/2 of irinotecan in each of these formulations differed from
each other significantly. Approx. 4.5 - fold higher peak concentration (Cmax) and ~3 - fold
higher exposure (AUC0-t) were observed for double PEGylated NPs as compared to free
irinotecan and single PEGylated NPs.

In summary, our data suggest that double PEGylation of NPs could be a very
effective way to improve PK properties of drugs such as irinotecan.


Provenance is a way to answer "why" questions about computations. It has found a number of uses in the database community, such as debugging query answers or tracing unexpected results to database tuples. In fact, the ability to ask "why" can be useful for a much broader range of applications. In this paper, we summarize our experiences over the past few years in adapting provenance for diagnostic and forensic uses in networks and distributed systems. Our work draws inspirations from database provenance, yet the deployment scale, use cases, and distributed nature of networks require a significant re-design of traditional data provenance models. We review a number of use cases, ranging from investigating intrusions to diagnosing (and even automatically fixing) softwaredefined networks, and present a unified system architecture that we have designed and implemented for provenance in distributed systems. We conclude with a discussion of open issues in this space.


Abstract The kinetics of the complex formation reaction of the UO2+ 2 ion with a series of O and N donor ligands of Schiff bases were studied in methanol. The rate constants for the formation of UO2+ 2 Schiff base complexes are sensitive to the structure of the Schiff base. The specific rates increase if the ligands are multidentate. Schiff bases have their donor atoms fixed in cis position and, therefore, should generally react faster than unidentate ligands. Activation parameters and pKa values of the complexes are reported.


OBJECTIVE
In this narrative review, our aim was to clarify the roles of diagnostic methods used in COVID-19 disease.

BACKGROUND
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by coronavirusis emerged as the major healthcare challenge globally. The mainstay approach to limit this virus spread is an early and accurate diagnosis of the viral infection and appropriate quarantine of patients with coronavirus infection.

RESULTS
Real time polymerase chain reaction (PCR) offers a quick detection of the disease in either symptomatic or asymptomatic patients. In literature, there are numerous studies that underline the importance of CT as the first-step diagnostic tool in COVID-19 diagnosis. Even in asymptomatic patients, COVID-19 pneumonia may manifest with chest CT imaging abnormalities.

CONCLUSION
There is a need for an algorithm, which involves a combination of PCR and CT in diagnosis of COVID-19 (Ref. 85).


AS NURSES, most of us have experienced one of our patients "coding." No matter what the circumstances, you felt that surge of adrenaline that enables you to rapidly recognize an unresponsive, apneic patient, activate the resuscitation team, and provide basic life support until the team arrives. This is what nurses do—we save lives and so much more. But maybe you've also had this experience: After an unsuccessful resuscitation attempt, someone says, "He was 90 years old with metastatic cancer. What were we thinking?" It leaves us with the uneasy feeling that something should be different. End-of-life decision making is always difficult and should be well thought out before a crisis. The decision to forgo CPR can be one of the hardest decisions a patient or family member has to make. Writing to me about end-of-life concerns, one of you asked for "good, solid statistics about CPR in older adults" and requested some resources for family members. Evidence-based nursing is built upon examining the research, so I searched for pertinent studies that provided those "good solid statistics." Here's what I found.


The prediction of the reversible evolution of macroscopic magnetostriction strains and magnetisation in ferromagnetic materials is still an open issue. Progress has been recently made in the description of the magneto-elastic behaviour of single crystals. Herein, we propose to extend this procedure to the prediction of the behaviour of textured soft magnetic polycrystals. This extension implies a magneto-mechanical homogenisation. The model proposed is discussed and the results are compared to experimental data obtained on industrial iron-silicon alloys.


The preparation and distribution of foofoo comprises several stages, namely soaking, dewatering and storage prior to sale. The effects of four different time/temperature soaking processes on the quality of foofoo (pH, microbial load, residual cyanogens) were determined. The processes were chosen as they gave roughly equivalent degrees of retting (the softening of cassava during soaking) by which the progress of the initial fermentation is normally judged. Instrumental measurement of cassava hardness confirmed that the processes were equivalent within experimental limits. The four soaking processes had no significant effect on the water content of foofoo, nor did this change during storage. Processing did affect the pH, total titratable acidity and microbial profiles. Analysis of the aqueous extracts from the processes showed that the glucose present in the fresh cassava was fermented into a mixture of acetic, butyric, isobutyric and lactic acids with some ethanol. The lowering of the pH reduced the number of Enterobacteriaceae to the limit of detection and also affected the types of microbe present. The different processes also affected the removal of cyanogens from the product and the processes at 20°C and 35°C led to unacceptable levels of cyanogens (mainly cyanohydrin) in foofoo.


Sirtuins are NAD(+)-dependent protein deacetylases that regulate metabolism and aging processes and are considered to be attractive therapeutic targets. Most available sirtuin modulators are little understood mechanistically, hindering their improvement. SRT1720 was initially described as an activator of human Sirt1, but it also potently inhibits human Sirt3. Here, the molecular mechanism of the inhibition of Sirt3 by SRT1720 is described. A crystal structure of Sirt3 in complex with SRT1720 and an NAD(+) analogue reveals that the compound partially occupies the acetyl-Lys binding site, thus explaining the reported competition with the peptide substrate. The compound packs against a hydrophobic protein patch and binds with its opposite surface to the NAD(+)  nicotinamide, resulting in an exceptionally tight sandwich-like interaction. The observed arrangement rationalizes the uncompetitive inhibition with NAD(+), and binding measurements confirm that the nicotinamide moiety of NAD(+) supports inhibitor binding. Consistently, no inhibitor is bound in a second crystal structure of Sirt3 that was solved complexed with ADP-ribose and crystallized in the presence of SRT1720. These results reveal a novel sirtuin inhibitor binding site and mechanism, and provide a structural basis for compound improvement.


Advocates of growth diagnostics have shown it to be a preferable alternative to other methods of formulating a growth strategy such as cross-country regressions, growth accounting or international benchmarking using cross country surveys. We show that growth diagnostics also suffers from problems and demands a high level of economic sophistication from its practitioners. We suggest a simpler prelude before launching into rigorous analysis and apply this method to address the puzzle of Pakistan's lagging per capita GDP relative to India.


Circular RNAs (circRNAs) are highly conserved and stable closed-loop non-coding RNAs. They are involved in numerous biological functions, including regulating gene transcription or protein translation by interacting with proteins and regulating expression of microRNAs. The aberrant expression of circRNAs has been reported in many cancers, including gastric cancer. By regulating gene expression, circRNAs are able to affect the proliferation, invasion and metastasis of gastric cancer. The current review focused on the characteristics and biological functions of circRNAs, the carcinogenic potential and the possible implications of circRNAs on the diagnosis and treatment of gastric cancer. In conclusion, circRNAs may serve as potential biomarkers for diagnosis, as well as therapeutic targets.


In an era where an increasing number of states are affected by various types and forms of transnational crime - including terrorism, cybercrime, financial crime, murder, illegal drugs, and human trafficking - one response has been a greater emphasis upon and employment of extradition agreements. These agreements are intended to make the transfer of the alleged offender easier. However, ironically, these agreements also contain provisions that directly or indirectly may stymie the process. These include human rights, domestic and international politics as well as language, religion, race and immigration concerns. These are factors that may arise in the court of extradition, and when they are invoked by the alleged offender, they inevitably influence the decision to extradite. Thus, efforts to address the goals of protecting the national security of a state and furthering international cooperation in the interest of law enforcement on the one hand and the protection of the alleged offender, on the other hand, create a tension. These factors create tension because in the course of an extradition decision these conflicting interests are present and are conditioned by the underlying goal of overall justice and fairness in international criminal justice. It is possible to categorise these conflicting factors into two broad groups - legal and non-legal factors. It is further possible to break down these categories into human rights, diplomatic assurances, political factors, social factors and economic factors. The identification of the categories of factors enables a detailed analysis of the decision-making process. One feature arising from this analysis is the appearance of an imbalance between the competing factors – where some states place more emphasis on certain factors and other states on other factors. This occurs in spite of the international nature of extradition obligations – being found largely in bilateral extradition agreements. A facet of extradition law complicating the picture is that most states require to incorporate their international extradition obligations into their national law and procedure. International extradition law and procedure call for consistent identification and weighing-up of the competing factors within extradition decisions. This will allow the creation of a system where the relevant applicable factors are appropriately taken into account and also where the interest of the state parties, offender and victims as well as the international criminal law itself will be appropriately served. This thesis argues that fair and just decisions are made through a thorough identification, conceptualisation and the analysis of the various conflicting factors that are related to and affecting extradition. Therefore, it is the central feature of this thesis to identify, categorise and analyse the factors affecting extradition with the view of allowing a balance to be drawn that will facilitate fairness and justice.


Nature is reacting to the activities of modern society in unique and largely unexpected ways. The spread of acidified rain to every continent, a worldwide decline of forested lands, and the ubiquitous presence of persistent organic pollutants due to industrial experiments in biochemistry suggest that the contemporary naturesociety relation includes phenomena unlike any that were previously known in human, or geological, history. These reactions are surprising since human impacts on nature have traditionally been ascribed a minor role in determining the course of ecological change. While humanity has long discarded its wastes in nature, the "predominant view in the natural sciences was that life on Earth is primarily passive, responding to nonliving forces like volcanic eruptions, severe storms, droughts, and even drifting continents" (Schneider, 1990: 6).


In recent years, the literature on the subject of infant hernias has been voluminous. One phase of this problem, sliding hernia in female infants, has received little attention. In the older literature isolated mention of this sliding hernia is made without adequate descriptions or methods of treatment. In more recent reviews of the subject of infant hernias, this particular type of infant hernia is completely ignored.1,3,5,7,10In 1953 Roberto11described a sliding hernia, with uterus, adnexa, and bladder making up one wall of the sac, in a 5-weekold infant. In 1957 Wiley and Chavez13reported 12 cases of sliding hernia out of a total of 52 female infant hernias and described their method of correcting this condition. Koop,6in 1957, and DeBoer,2in 1957, in their general reviews of infant hernias, state that many of the female infants had sliding hernias, and DeBoer derribes his


needs clarification Iread with great consternation the article "Raloxifene. Not better than estrogen," translated from the French La revue Prescrire. As an article in a journal that is designed to keep Canadian family physicians up-to-date on the latest medical information, it leaves much to be desired. Without going into great detail, below is an outline of the most recent, evidence-based information on raloxifene, in particular, as it compares with estrogen. For more details, I refer readers to a review article on raloxifene, published in another Canadian peer-reviewed journal. 1. In Canada, raloxifene (eg, Evista) is indicated for preventing and treating osteoporosis in postmenopausal women. Data to support this indication come from the MORE study (Multiple Outcomes of Raloxifene Evaluation). This was a double-blind randomized placebo-controlled study of 7705 postmenopausal women with osteoporosis. It demonstrated that, after 3 years of therapy, raloxifene reduced the incidence of new vertebral fractures by 55%. Raloxifene also reduced the incidence of new vertebral fractures in women with pre-existing vertebral fractures by 30%. The 4-year data from the MORE study were presented at the American Society for Bone and Mineral Research meeting in Toronto, Ont, and are almost identical to the 3-year results. The MORE study is the first adequately powered, randomized placebo-controlled trial to demonstrate that an estrogenlike agent reduces the risk of new vertebral fractures. This is level 1 evi dence. There are no comparable data on the ability of estrogen to reduce fractures. The evidence for estrogen to reduce fractures is level 3 only, from observational studies and from one small (n=75) randomized, prospective study of the 100 μg estradiol patch. 2. There is no evidence from randomized, prospective studies that estrogen reduces cardiovascular disease. In fact, recent studies suggest the opposite, at least for secondary prevention. Both estrogen and raloxifene reduce a number of surrogate markers of cardiovascular risk, although they each have their own unique profiles. Studies are under way to determine whether raloxifene will affect cardiovascular events. 3. It is well-known that the use of unopposed estrogen results in uterine stimulation, necessitating the concomitant use of progesterone. In fact, more recent evidence shows that the use of progesterone does not completely negate the potential stimulator y ef fects of estrogen. Raloxifene has been shown in numerous studies to have an antiestrogen ef fect on the uterus, with no evidence of uterine stimulation and no need to use concomitant progesterone. 4. Numerous studies have revealed a slightly increased risk of breast cancer with estrogen use, with a more recent study suggesting the concomitant use of progesterone increases the risk further. The MORE study has demonstrated a 76% reduction in the incidence of new invasive breast cancers with raloxifene compared with placebo, not 1% as indicated in the article. This is by no means sufficient to support an indication for raloxifene for preventing breast cancer, but it shows a safety profile for raloxifene superior to that for estrogen. 5. Raloxifene does not treat hot flashes associated with menopause. In fact, in the MORE study, incidence of hot flashes while using raloxifene was 9.7% compared with 6.4% while using placebo. Estrogen remains the treatment of choice for hot flashes associated with menopause. Raloxifene should not be used to treat hot flashes in symptomatic early postmenopausal women. 6. The issue of ovarian cancer, which was raised by a few poorly informed individuals when raloxifene was first introduced to the market, has been shown to be completely unfounded.


Fractal theory is widely used in every field of biomedicine. Digital segmentation recognition and fractal analysis of brain medical images in 30 infants (16 boys, 14 girls, age 27–36ms, average age 33.87 ± 1.12ms ) shows that infants' brains have been highly differentiated. Further clinical randomized controlled study, which was used to test the validity and accuracy of the mathematical morphological criterion, showed that spectral width parameters of multifractal spectrum and criterion of fractal dimension in normal children could be a practical specific parameter for assessing the fractal mode of normal infants' brain development, and it could provide a valuable analytical tool for predicting children's psychomotor retardation and assessing children's normal brain developmental mode.


Single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs) are uniquely suitable as lightweight electrically and thermally conductive materials. However, due to their tendency to agglomerate into fiber bundles and relatively weak adhesion to other materials, it has always been a challenge to process these materials for various applications. Solvents and additives with relatively strong specific intermolecular forces were proposed to be required to effect SWCNT dispersion along with the application of ultrasound. This work involved the use of this hypothesis, in order to disperse SWCNTs with an acid-containing copolymer that also served as a binder for the solid composite. In particular, HiPco was dispersed in DMF ant THF using a tapered vinyl acetate-acrylic acid (VA-t-AA) block copolymer with 6 wt % AA content. Dispersions were cast onto films and resulted in solid coatings that have good electrical and thermal conductive and capacitive properties.


A Proven Guide for Easily Using R to Effectively Analyze DataLike its bestselling predecessor, A Handbook of Statistical Analyses Using R, Second Edition provides a guide to data analysis using the R system for statistical computing. Each chapter includes a brief account of the relevant statistical background, along with appropriate references.New to the Second EditionNew chapters on graphical displays, generalized additive models, and simultaneous inference A new section on generalized linear mixed models that completes the discussion on the analysis of longitudinal data where the response variable does not have a normal distributionNew examples and additional exercises in several chaptersA new version of the HSAUR package (HSAUR2), which is available from CRANThis edition continues to offer straightforward descriptions of how to conduct a range of statistical analyses using R, from simple inference to recursive partitioning to cluster analysis. Focusing on how to use R and interpret the results, it provides students and researchers in many disciplines with a self-contained means of using R to analyze their data.


Two novel antimicrobial peptides have been identified and characterized from venom of the African scorpion Pandinus imperator. The peptides, designated pandinin 1 and 2, are alpha-helical polycationic peptides, with pandinin 1 belonging to the group of antibacterial peptides previously described from scorpions, frogs and insects, and pandinin 2 to the group of short magainin-type helical peptides from frogs. Both peptides demonstrated high antimicrobial activity against a range of Gram-positive bacteria (2.4-5.2 microM), but were less active against Gram-negative bacteria (2.4-38.2 microM), and only pandinin 2 affected the yeast Candida albicans. Pandinin 2 also demonstrated strong haemolytic activity (11.1-44.5 microM) against sheep erythrocytes, in contrast with pandinin 1, which was not haemolytic. CD studies and a high-resolution structure of pandinin 2 determined by NMR, showed that the two peptides are both essentially helical, but differ in their overall structure. Pandinin 2 is composed of a single alpha-helix with a predominantly hydrophobic N-terminal sequence, whereas pandinin 1 consists of two distinct alpha-helices separated by a coil region of higher flexibility. This is the first report of magainin-type polycationic antimicrobial peptides in scorpion venom. Their presence brings new insights into the mode of action of scorpion venom and also opens new avenues for the discovery of novel antibiotic molecules from arthropod venoms.


`1 regularization has been broadly employed to pursue model sparsity. Despite the non-smoothness, researchers have developed efficient algorithms by leveraging the sparsity and convexity of the problem. In this paper, we propose a novel active incremental approach to further improve the efficiency of the solvers. We show that our method performs well even when the existing methods fail due to the low sparseness or high solution accuracy request. Theoretical analysis and experimental results on synthetic and real-world data sets validate the advantages of the method.


An investigation was made of phase locking of radiators in an industrial MTL-2 multibeam laser by a spatial filter located at the focus of an intracavity telescope. Depending on the filter parameters, it was possible to vary the degree of coupling of such radiators and, consequently, the quality and power of the output radiation.


alpha,alpha-Trehalose 2-sulfate, the core carbohydrate of sulfatides of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, and the 3-sulfate isomer were synthesized by sulfation of 4,6:4',6'-di-O-benzylidene-alpha,alpha-trehalose with pyridine-sulfur trioxide complex to give the 2- and 3-sulfates, which were separated by column chromatography. The ammonium 2-sulfate salt wa was identical with the natural product obtained from the principal sulfatide (SL-I) of M. tuberculosis.


CoxFe3-xO4 oxide powders were synthesised by an oxalate decomposition process. Microstructural analysis like X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy confirmed the composition of the prepared powders. These powders were then deposited onto alumina substrates in order to study their response under ethanol gas pulses. The gas sensing experiment was carried by a defined test protocol and several characteristics were tracked. Results showed a direct link between the proportion of cobalt and gas sensing performances.


This paper reports the implementation of Systems Engineering (SE) processes by expatriate Indonesian engineers in their project or company with particular attention to awareness of cross-cultural issues within the project team. A web survey was conducted in which several questions are designed to investigate the engineers' awareness of how they manage their cultural background in implementing SE processes to achieve high quality project performance. The survey questions were designed using the results of a set of 18 interviews with Indonesian engineers working in several countries as expatriates. The interviews were used to surface the issues that would enable a tightly organized set of survey questions. The survey was answered by 291 Indonesian engineers working in various countries as expatriates. Several factors were identified as influencing productivity and performance in the implementation of SE Processes, as perceived by the Indonesian engineers. These factors include work ethic, social environment and educational background. This study reveals that engineers with an Indonesian cultural background typically exhibit several behaviors supporting a good work ethic such as discipline, responsibility, politeness and persistence. Other results from this study are that their social environment, educational background, and cultural background contributed to their awareness of their productivity and performance in implementation of SE processes. The purpose of this paper is to identify their awareness of how their cultural background influences the implementation of SE processes particularly in productivity and performance.


During a cheerleading event, a 14-year-old female sustained a right ankle physeal fracture that was treated nonoperatively with casting. She developed a distal medial tibial physeal arrest, and as the onset of menses was at age 16, she subsequently developed a varus distal tibial deformity. At the age of 19, she was no longer able to participate in collegiate cheerleading due to lateral ankle pain, ankle instability, and peroneal subluxation. After failing conservative treatment, she underwent an ankle arthroscopy, Broström-Gould procedure, peroneal retinacular repair with peroneal tenolysis, and a distal tibial medial opening wedge osteotomy using a porous titanium metal wedge and a one-third tubular plate. At 6-month follow-up, her osteotomy site showed abundant callus formation, and her lateral ankle pain had almost completely resolved. At 22-month follow-up, there were no residual ankle instability or pain complaints, and she had returned to collegiate cheerleading. This case report highlights a very useful, previously not described, application of porous titanium metal wedges for medial supramalleolar opening wedge osteotomies of the tibia. Such wedges are familiar to many foot and ankle orthopaedic surgeons and continue to have expanding indications. Levels of Evidence: Therapeutic, Level IV: Case report


Political scientists are often interested in understanding whether state laws alter individual level behavior. For example, states often alter their election procedures, which can increase or decrease the cost of voting. In this example, it is important to understand whether these changes alter turnout since changes in costs may disproportionally a ect those at the margin of voting. Analysts have typically used one of two di erent regression based research designs to estimate whether changes in state laws increase or decrease turnout. In both instances, voters from states without a change in laws are used as counterfactuals for the voters who experience a change in election law. Here, we carefully examine the assumptions behind both research designs and study their plausibility. Next, we outline a series of research design elements that can be used in addition to the usual designs. These research design elements allow the analyst to better understand the role of unobserved confounders, which is obscured in standard research designs. Using these design elements, we demonstrate that what appears to be clear cut evidence from the usual research designs is often a function confounding. We argue that to truly understand how changes in voting costs alters turnout, a di erent research design is required. Future work must rely on a research design that makes comparisons among voters who live within the same state. Our work has implications beyond turnout to any investigation of how state level treatments alter individual behavior.


We study the effects of ambient air humidity on the dynamics of imbibition in a paper. We observed that a quick increase of ambient air humidity leads to depinning and non-Washburn motion of wetting fronts. Specifically, we found that after depinning the wetting front moves with decreasing velocity v[proportionality](h(p)/h(D))(γ), where h(D) is the front elevation with respect to its pinned position at lower humidity h(p), while γ=/~1/3. The spatiotemporal maps of depinned front activity are established. The front motion is controlled by the dynamics of local avalanches directed at 30° to the balk flow direction. Although the roughness of the pinned wetting front is self-affine and the avalanche size distribution displays a power-law asymptotic, the roughness of the moving front becomes multiaffine a few minutes after depinning.


Summary Data from the US National Study of the Changing Workforce (a nationally representative sample of working adults) were used to test the hypothesis that employees with time-flexible work poli- cies reported less stress, higher levels of commitment to their employer, and reduced costs to the organization because of fewer absences, fewer days late, and fewer missed deadlines. The model provides persuasive findings for the hypothesized relationship and offers important suggestions to employers who can translate reduced illness into savings and increased commitment into better employees. Contrary to expectations, there were no gender differences in how employees re- sponded to flexible work policies, showing that gender-neutral work policies make financial sense. By showing that time-flexible work policies provide employer benefits, we can hasten the change to a new worker model—one that is family and employer friendly. The business case for family-friendly work policies may prove to be the best tool we have in changing how we live and work. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Studies were conducted at one location in 1997 (W97) and in two locations in 1998 (E98 and W98) near Garden City, KS, to evaluate the impact of Palmer amaranth at densities of 0, 0.5, 1, 2, 4, and 8 plants/m of row on forage yield and quality of irrigated corn and to determine if harvesting Palmer amaranth–infested corn for forage rather than for grain would reduce losses. Weed-free corn, Palmer amaranth alone, and corn–Palmer amaranth harvested together were evaluated for forage yield and quality. Forage quality was determined by evaluating in vitro dry matter digestibility (IVDMD), acid detergent fiber (ADF), neutral detergent fiber (NDF), and crude protein (CP). Corn grain and forage yield declined with increasing Palmer amaranth density. However, decline in forage yield ranged from 1 to 44% of the weed-free yield at Palmer amaranth densities of 0.5 and 8 plants/m of row, whereas decline in grain yield ranged from 11 to 74% of the weed-free yield at the same densities. Digestibility of weed-free corn forage, expressed as IVDMD, was significantly higher than that of Palmer amaranth alone at W97 and W98. The CP of weed-free corn forage was similar to that of Palmer amaranth forage at W98, but it was lower at the other two locations. In contrast, CP did not differ between corn–Palmer amaranth harvested together and weed-free corn. The IVDMD of weed-free corn forage was greater than that of corn–Palmer amaranth mixture at W98, but no differences were observed at the other two locations. The relative feeding values of weed-free corn and corn–Palmer amaranth mixture were similar, and greater than that of Palmer amaranth in monoculture. These results indicate that Palmer amaranth interference in corn may not affect forage quality but can cause a decline in yield. This decline in yield is less when harvesting corn and Palmer amaranth together for forage rather than for harvesting corn grain alone. Nomenclature: Palmer amaranth, Amaranthus palmeri S. Wats. #3 AMAPA; corn, Zea mays L. Additional index words: Forage quality, weed density, yield loss. Abbreviations: ADF, acid detergent fiber; CP, crude protein; DM, dry matter; IVDMD, in vitro dry matter digestibility; NDF, neutral detergent fiber; RFV, relative feed value.


In the course of his remarks the author stated that the first discovery of gold in California was in 1848, when a workman picked up several large nuggets out of a mill-race which he was digging. In 1850 the first quartz vein was found by some miners who were digging a hole for their cabin chimney, and was so rich that some of the pieces of ore taken from it were sold for £100 each. This state has long maintained her position as the greatest gold-producing state in the North American Union. The production just now is valued at £3,000,000 per annum, and the total value of the metal recovered since 1848, at £260,000,000. The rocks of California are divided into two series, the bed-rock, and the superjacent rock. The bed-rock series consists of highly altered sedimentary strata, crystalline schists, and slates, with intrusive igneous rocks, mostly belonging to the Carboniferous, the Jurassic, and the Triassic formations, and resembling the metamorphic Jura-Trias rocks of the Alps. From an economic point of view the most important feature of the bed-rock series is the occurrence of veins and lodes containing gold, silver, &c., and perhaps the most interesting of these is the formation known as the "mother lode." This "mother lode" is contained in a series of black schists and slates, with a dip to the E. of 20 deg. to 40 deg. from the vertical. The veins are found in a fissured area a mile or two wide, which stretches throughout


Laparoscopic cholecystectomy has become the standard approach since its introduction in 1987 by Mouret. Situs inversus totalis is a rare anomaly in which transposition of the organs to the opposite side of the body occurs. Laparoscopic cholecystectomy due to gallbladder diseases in such few cases has been reported in the literature. We aimed to present a new case with symptomatic cholelithiasis, situs inversus totalis, and with a past-medical history of multiple abdominal operations. Special attention has also been paid to the modification of the laparoscopic cholecystectomy procedure.


Mesenteric cysts are a rare phenomenon and can be encountered in different regions of the mesentery or in the retroperitoneal region. They are usually asymptomatic but may lead to a variety of symptoms depending on their site. We report a case of a mesenteric cyst presenting as a femoral hernia, which is, to our knowledge, the second case found in the literature. Forty-eight years old female patient presented with a history of pain and swelling in her left inguinal region for six months. Although femoral hernias are rare conditions, mesenteric cysts can protrude inside the femoral canal. In a case of clinical suspicion of such a condition, appropriate imaging should be performed.


Introduction: Competence in procedural skills is vital within the emergency department. Challenging procedures such as cricothyroidotomy are difficult to master as they are rare and hard to train for. Additionally, common procedures such as chest tube insertions require practice to become sufficiently competent. Opportunities to hone these skills are essential in residency training. This project aimed to create instructional video modules for specific emergency medicine (EM) procedures and gauge their utility as adjunctive resources for procedural learning in the EM residency curriculum. Methods: Tutorial videos for clamshell thoracotomy, cricothyroidotomy, and chest tube insertion were filmed within a cadaver lab with step-by-step instructions. The footage was edited and overlaid with a pre-prepared audio narration using Camtasia®/Apple® Video Editing software. These videos were embedded within modules that included foundational knowledge relevant to the procedures, including anatomy, physiology and pathophysiology. The modules were peer-edited by licensed EM staff physicians and distributed to EM residents and staff physicians for analysis. Qualitative and quantitative analysis relied upon participants' answers to questions and a Modified Task Value Scale, respectively. Results: Ten participants were included in the analysis, including EM residents (n = 6) and staff emergency physicians (n = 4). Qualitative feedback suggested that positive aspects of the modules included visuals, content, narration, and review of anatomy. Negative aspects included the lack of indications for procedures, technical details, real patient examples, and a speed up function. Quantitative feedback resulted in scores of 4 and above out of 5 on the Motivated Task Value Scale across all aspects for all the modules. Furthermore, analysis revealed an average score of 3.9 for inclination to access more modules such as these, and a score of 4.4 for overall perception of the modules. Conclusion: Participants found the video modules valuable to their learning, both qualitatively and quantitatively. This study was limited by a small sample size of modules and a low number of participants. Furthermore, a more detailed analysis with further measures, including self-efficacy and self-confidence, would yield more comprehensive conclusions. However, video-based modules provide an effective and easily accessible adjunctive tool to acquire skill and confidence with EM procedures, for medical learners and staff physicians.


Entrepreneurship oriented education would help university graduates find a job or start a new career. That is why universities try to manage entrepreneurship education in order to improve entrepreneurial knowledge and skills of students. In Iran, universities focused on entrepreneurship education during last decades. The main purpose of this article was to investigate how universities can play an effective role in entrepreneurial education in order to improve entrepreneurial knowledge and skills of their students. In this survey, a group of 110 academics out of an access population (N=382) of Bu-Ali Sina academic staff (Hamedan province, IRAN) were randomly selected. A questionnaire was designed and then validated asking a panel of experts for their comments. Reliability of the instrument calculated to be 0.90 in alpha Cronbach?s scale. Results of the enquiry indicated that cooperation of universities with other local organizations (like outreach programs), elaborately directed apprenticeship courses, up-to- date educational content (in response to cutting edge technologies) and use of creativity- focused methods of teaching were mentioned to be the most effective ways for enhancing entrepreneurial knowledge and skills of students. Based on exploratory factor analysis, a number of activities such as informing and motivating toward entrepreneurship, career education and Curriculum revitalization proved to be the most influential factors for improving students? entrepreneurship knowledge and skills. At the End, some recommendation was introduced for universities in planning and implementing entrepreneurship education program.


Due to recent advances in pose-estimation methods, human motion can be extracted from a common video in the form of 3D skeleton sequences. Despite wonderful application opportunities, effective and efficient content-based access to large volumes of such spatio-temporal skeleton data still remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a novel content-based text-to-motion retrieval task, which aims at retrieving relevant motions based on a specified natural-language textual description. To define baselines for this uncharted task, we employ the BERT and CLIP language representations to encode the text modality and successful spatio-temporal models to encode the motion modality. We additionally introduce our transformer-based approach, called Motion Transformer (MoT), which employs divided space-time attention to effectively aggregate the different skeleton joints in space and time. Inspired by the recent progress in text-to-image/video matching, we experiment with two widely-adopted metric-learning loss functions. Finally, we set up a common evaluation protocol by defining qualitative metrics for assessing the quality of the retrieved motions, targeting the two recently-introduced KIT Motion-Language and HumanML3D datasets. The code for reproducing our results is available here: https://github.com/mesnico/text-to-motion-retrieval.


With the increasing number of mobile location services, the ability to answer future queries, based on the current mobile data motion status (reference position and velocity vector), becomes a desirable feature in spatiotemporal databases. A predictive continuous k nearest neighbor (k-CNN) query retrieves the k-nearest neighbors among a mobile date set that satisfy the query in a given time interval (from current to near future). The difficulty in such a case is that both the query and the objects change their position continuously, and then we use time-parameterized objects' position and queries to provide the answer. In this paper we investigate mechanisms to perform k-CNN search on time-parameterized R-tree structure, and develop an efficient method in order to process predictive k-CNN queries in moving object databases. We propose novel metrics to support our branch-and-bound algorithms. An extensive performance evaluation shows that the proposed method achieves significant improvements compared to existing techniques.


Epigenetic alterations are widespread in cancer and can complement genetic alterations to influence cancer progression and treatment. To better understand the potential contribution of DNA methylation alterations to tumor phenotype in non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) in both smoker and never-smoker patients, we performed a comprehensive, genome-wide profiling of DNA methylation in 17 primary non-small cell lung cancer and 10 matched normal lung samples using the complementary methylation assays MeDIP-seq and MRE-seq. Compared to patient-matched non-malignant lung tissue, we report recurrent methylation changes of several gene promoters, many previously implicated in cancer, including FAM83A and SEPT9 (hypomethylation), and PCDH7, NKX2-1, and SOX17 (hypermethylation). Although smoker and never-smoker patients shared many methylation changes, several were specific and recurrent within a particular smoking status. In particular, never-smokers displayed a greater proportion of hypoDMRs and exhibited a greater number of recurrently hypomethylated promoters, including the promoter of the oncogene ASPSCR1, and others previously linked to cancer, including TOP2A, DPP9, and USP39. Methylation changes outside of promoters were also widespread and often recurrent, particularly the loss of methylation over repetitive elements, highly enriched for ERV1 subfamilies. Recurrent hypoDMRs were also enriched for several transcription factor (TF) binding motifs, often for genes involved in signaling and cell proliferation, including 71% encoding a binding site of NKX2-1, which was found to be significantly upregulated in TCGA LUAD samples. Furthermore, the overwhelming majority of DMRs identified in this study were found to reside in an active chromatin state in at least one tissue profiled using the Roadmap Epigenome data, suggesting that methylation changes may contribute to altered regulatory programs through the adaptation of cell type-specific expression programs.


Sound insulation is mainly affected by the mass or density of the wall. Therefore, in order to compare their effectiveness depending on thickness, the specimens of the same density have been made. Sound insulation also depends on sound frequency, and therefore frequency dependent analysis has been conducted. Considering all positions of thickness, the effectiveness of sound reduction has been dispersed with deep dips in some specific frequencies. Besides, the effectiveness of straw and different configurations of reeds has been compared with respect to frequency bands.


. SUMMARY Structure-borne sound transmission at a subfloor/joist connection typical of wood frame buildings is investigated experimentally and theoretically. The first part of this paper investigates the influence of the fastener spacing on the vibration attenuation across a joist. For this purpose, measurements were carried out on a small floor section for various coupling conditions of the joist. The experimental results suggested the existence of an effective coupling area characterizing the screwed joist/floor connection. In the second part of this study, a calculation model is developed based on Statistical Energy Analysis (SEA) and plate strip theory for the idealized case of a rigid line connection. The presented model is verified experimentally on a Plexiglas structure and a subfloor/joist connection. The experimental validation showed fair agreement between measured and calculated data, but revealed that more work is required to improve the prediction accuracy in realistic situations.


This article examines the impact over a 30-year period of a 4-year organization development project in the Metro County Sheriff's Department. Interventions included confrontation team-building sessions, management training, process consultation, survey feedback, third-party consultation, technological interventions, implementation of methods for increasing accountability, and changes in the organization structure, the physical setting, and the policy formulation procedures. Results include improved organization climate and leader effectiveness; decreased employee turnover, jail breaks, and citizen complaints; increased resources allocated to the organization; and improved organizational effectiveness, as measured by criminal justice leaders in the community. This research becomes the longest longitudinal study of the effects of organization development interventions in the behavioral science literature.


Ground water is a source of preferred water supply especially in Kelantan because of its good natural quality.However groundwater may be exposed to contamination by various anthropogenic activities,such as agricultural, domestic and elevated concentration of The quality of groundwater normally related to high hardness. high salinity and elevated concentration of Iron manganese,ammonium and fluoride Therefore. groundwater should be treated before it can be used for domestic purposes Initially. water treatment used chemicals for heavy metals removal and chemicals were known to be hazardous for human consumption Thus plant based waste was proposed to provide a more environmental friendly approach for drinking groundwater treatment. This study was carried out with the objectives to use different dosage of rambutan seed extract in removing heavy metals while determine the water quality of groundwater sources. Nephelium lappaceum or locally known as rambutan is a native species found in Malaysia Rambutan seed based coagulant-flocculant was tested for groundwater collected within Tanah Merah district. Only the yellowish portions of the Rambutan seed were used to test coagulant rate and the optimum dosage The heavy metals content of groundwater samples were measured before and after the jar test in the laboratory by using Atomic Absorption Spectrometer. All water samples were tested with different concentration of rambutan seed crude extract. The experiments were carried out with coagulant dosage of 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 7 0, 8.0 mg/L with the interval of 1.0mg/L. The results shown that Nephelium lappaceum seed can remove up to 91 38% of Fe in groundwater sample by using optimal dosage of 6mI/L. The seed also removed 90,91% manganese concentration in groundwater samples using the optimal dosage of 5mg/L. Rambutan seed was proposed for Iron and Manganese removal due to the high seed oil content which was believed to remove both the heavy metals Besides, rambutan seeds are abundant in supply especially during the fruit season and therefore the price to get the supply is lower compared to other chemicals.
The high removal rate for both iron and manganese proved that rambutan seed has a great potential to replace other absorbents or chemicals.


OBJECTIVE
To analyze the clinical characteristics of recurrence of vulvar squamous cell cancer and to explore the treatment thereof.

METHODS
The clinical data of 18 patients vulvar squamous cell cancer, confirmed at the age 28-76, who developed recurrence were retrospectively analyzed.

RESULTS
The overall recurrence rate was 21.3%. The time range between the primary operation and the discovery of primary recurrence was 2 months - 16 years. Local recurrence occurred in 11 of the 18 patients (61.1%). Recurrence in groin alone occurred in 4 of the 10 patients (22.2%) and recurrence in both the vulva and groin occurred in 3 of the 18 patients (16.7%). Local recurrence occurred more than 1 year after the primary treatment and inguinal recurrence occurred mostly within 1 year after the primary treatment. The survival time of the patients with vulvar recurrence was (63.2 +/- 8.1) months, significantly longer than that of the patients with groin recurrence [(10.7 +/- 1.6) months, P < 0.01].

CONCLUSION
The clinical characteristics and the prognosis of recurrent vulvar squamous cell cancer depend on the site of recurrence. The best treatment option for recurrence is surgery.


Hepatitis C is a hepatotropic virus that causes progressive liver inflammation, eventually leading to cirrhosis and hepatocellular carcinoma if left untreated. All infected patients can achieve a cure if treated early. Unfortunately, many patients remain asymptomatic and tend to present late with hepatic complications. Given the economic and health burdens of chronic hepatitis C infection, the World Health Organization (WHO) has proposed a strategy to eliminate hepatitis C by 2030. This article describes the epidemiology of hepatitis C in Lebanon and highlights the challenges hindering its elimination. An extensive search was conducted using PubMed, Medline, Cochrane, and the Lebanese Ministry of Public Health–Epidemiologic Surveillance Unit website. Obtained data were analyzed and discussed in light of the current WHO recommendations. It was found that Lebanon has a low prevalence of hepatitis C. Incidence is higher among males and Mount Lebanon residents. A wide variety of hepatitis C genotypes exists among various risk groups, with genotype 1 being the most predominant. In Lebanon, many barriers prevent successful hepatitis C elimination, including the absence of a comprehensive screening policy, stigma, neglect among high-risk groups, economic collapse, and a lack of proper care and surveillance among the refugees. Appropriate screening schemes and early linkage to care among the general and high-risk populations are essential for successful hepatitis C elimination in Lebanon.


The aim of this work was preparation and characterization of nanoemulsions containing Caprylic/Capric Triglyceride, Caprylic/Capric/Linoleic Triglyceride and Caprylic/Capric/Succinic Triglyceride as the oil phase. Stable emulsion system was obtained by using Polisorbate 40 as emulsifier and n-buthanol as cosurfactant. The formulations were prepared by phase inversion composition method (PIC), one of the low energy emulsification method, by stepwise water addition to the mixture of oil and surfactant, at room temperature(25 o C).The mixture was stirred by using a magnetic stirrer. The type of the emulsions was confirmed by conductivity measurement. The particles size distribution was analyzed by Dynamic Light Scattering measurement technique using Zetasizer Nano ZS (Malvern Instruments, UK). Rheological studies of the systems were carried out using Brookfield Rheometer Model -R/SPlus. The obtained results showed that properties of the emulsions depend on kind of the oil phase. It was observed that the increase of oil phase polarity causes the increase of the particle size of internal phase.


Previous reports suggest that cyclosporine (CsA) may have direct effects on arachidonic acid (AA) metabolism in several different tissues. However, the effects of CsA on renal eicosanoid production are unclear. Furthermore, the potential role of changes in renal prostaglandin and thromboxane metabolism in mediating CsA nephrotoxicity is not known. Therefore, in this study, we evaluated the effects of CsA toxicity on the production of AA metabolites by the kidney. In a postischemic, denervated rat model, CsA (50 mg/kg/day) administered for 12-14 days resulted in significant nephrotoxicity with marked decreases in both glomerular filtration rate and renal blood flow. This reduction in renal function was associated with an increase in the renal production of TXB2, PGE2, and 6-PGF1 alpha in vitro. Arachidonic acid significantly stimulated renal eicosanoid production above control values. Increased urinary excretion of TXB2, 2,3-dinorTXB2 (a major TXB2 metabolite), and 6-keto-PGF1 alpha also occurred in rats with CsA nephrotoxicity and reflected the increase in renal production of these eicosanoid products. In contrast, urinary PGE2 excretion was not increased in CsA toxic rats. Thus, CsA nephrotoxicity is associated with specific alterations in renal AA metabolism. Furthermore, alterations in AA metabolism may be important in modulating renal hemodynamics and excretory function in this model. These studies suggest that specific inhibition of vasoconstrictor products of AA metabolism might ameliorate the nephrotoxic effects of CsA.


In this paper, we propose a unified framework for trust management that can cover a broad variety of trust mechanisms including reputations, credentials, local data and environment parameters. The proposed trust management framework leverages established standards and it covers a broad variety of situations in different environments. This framework can provide utilizing and enabling tools for trust management. Under this framework, different trust mechanisms can be assembled together when multiple mechanisms of trust are necessary. Here, we refer to our trust management system as TrustEngine. The TrustEngine follows the initial ideas of PolicyMaker to separate generic mechanisms of trust management from application-specific policies which are defined by each application. TrustEngine has a generic set of functions, interfaces, and data storage for trust management in distributed environments. TrustEngine is an open system and it can easily include new trust components. We describe the architecture and implementation details of TrustEngine. We provide an application scenario to illustrate the usage of TrustEngine in the real world. We believe that the development of trust management in real applications can be automated to substantially higher level based on our proposed framework


Folate absorption and transport were studied in young (2 to 3 months) and aged (28 to 30 months) rats. From studies of the rise in serum folate levels after ingestion and transport across everted intestinal segments it was concluded that the absorption of dietary polyglutamyl folates was impaired in aged animals. Simple folates (monoglutamyl pteroates) were utilized equally well in both age groups. Decreased hydrolysis of polyglutamylfolates to simple forms have been observed in the aged group. High folyl conjugase (pteroyl gamma-glutamyl hydrolase) levels are induced in pancreas as a response to dietary folate intake; the conjugase is secreted into the gut lumen where enzyme levels rise sequentially reaching maximum in the midgut region within 30 to 60 min after folate ingestion. The rise in serum folate after folate ingestion parallels the rise in luminal folyl conjugase. Pancreatic and luminal conjugases (but not mucosal conjugase) have similar pH optima. It is suggested that dietary folates are preferentially hydrolyzed to absorbable forms by a luminal folyl conjugase which is of pancreatic origin. The overall enzyme levels are much lower in pancreas of the aged rats, leading to reduced availability of absorbable dietary folates and resulting in folate malabsorption in these animals. It is suggested that the intestinal mucosal conjugase does not play a significant role in the physiological absorption of dietary folates.


The start of operation of several large-aperture telescopes has motivated several groups around the world to conduct deep large imaging surveys, complementing other wide-area but shallower surveys. A special class of imaging surveys are the public ones such as those being conducted by the ESO Imaging Survey (EIS) project established with the primary objective of providing to the ESO community large datasets from which samples can be drawn for VLT programs. To date several surveys have been carried out providing multi-passband optical data over relatively large areas to moderate depth, deep optical/infrared surveys of smaller fields as well as observations of a large number of selected stellar fields. These surveys have produced a large amount of well-defined datasets with known limits from which a variety of data products have been extracted and distributed. The goal of the present contribution is to give an overview of the EIS project, to present the endto-end survey system being developed by this program and to highlight the effort being made to standardize procedures, to build software tools to assess the quality of the derived products and to explore the available datasets in a systematic and consistent way to search for astronomical objects of potential scientific interest.


The aim of the article is to describe language learning conditions for improvement of students learning experience. The practical task is to promote students' knowledge about language learning, foreign language learning pedagogical conditions and its transformation in the study process. The study is carried out in previous research analysis to gain insight into the overall situation of the foreign language studies in Latvia. The research provides an explanation of students' learning and teaching conditions, the results show that a unified foreign language study conception should be developed and implemented in practice. Research Methods Theoretical methods: analysis of scientific and methodological literature, modelling. Empirical research methods: methods of data acquisition – observation, experimenting, data analysis by using the data processing software SPSS 17.0. The research is based at the Riga Teacher Training and Educational Management Academy RTTEMA Pre-School and Primary School Teacher programmes.


This research problem resulted in the following main research question of this research:
What are the reasons for the unstructured, incomplete and inefficient risk management process, in the tender phase of Heijmans Infra, and how can these problems be overcome?
To answer this research question a theoretical and empirical research has been executed. A literature review, based on scientific literature, is held to determine how the risk management process can be structured to be complete and reliable in construction tendering. At first the terms risk and project risk have been investigated to determine a baseline for this research. Thereafter risk categorizing and risk management are extensively investigated. This resulted in the following process steps to come to a complete and reliable risk management process:
1. Risk management planning: deciding how to approach and plan the risk management activities
2. Risk identification: determining which risks might affect the project and documenting their characteristics.
3. Qualitative risks analysis to prioritize the effects on project objectives
4. Quantitative risk analysis: measuring the probability and consequences of risks and estimating their implications for project objectives
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5. Risk response planning: developing procedures and techniques to enhance opportunities and reduce threats to the project's objectives.
6. Risk monitoring and control: monitoring residual risks, identifying new risks, executing risk reduction plans, and evaluating their effectiveness throughout the project lifecycle.
The empirical research consisting of case studies and interviews gave an answer to the question why the current risk management process is unstructured, incomplete and inefficient. In the case studies five projects were analysed. These case studies gave more understanding in the result of the risk management process during the tender. Based on the analysis the following conclusion have been made:
1. Risks are missed during the risk identification in the tender phase.
2. The risk management analysis is not complete because control measures are missing.
3. On average only 50% percent of the risks is financially quantified in the tender phase
4. The risk budget from the tender phase coffers on average only 22% of the top-10 financial budget overruns.
The tender and project managers explained the results of the case studies during interviews. This led to the following conclusions why the risk management process is unstructured, incomplete and inefficient.
1. The role of the risk manager during the tender phase is not explicit enough
2. The tender team is not the same from the start of the tender until the end, which makes it difficult to instruct the tender team.
3. The format of the risk register used in the tender phase is not suited to quantify the risk effectively and not suited to register the control measures.
4. The main reason for de incompleteness of the risk register is related to the period of economic crisis, in which Heijmans was desperate for work. As a result, risks were deleted from the risk register, which resulted in a lower risk budget. Which resulted in the construction phase that when risks occurred there was no budget for the corrective control measures which resulted in the cost overruns.
Based on the literature review and the conclusions from the case studies, a process plan for risk management in construction tendering is developed to make the risk management process in the tender phase better structured, complete and reliable. This process plan is validated during a validation session with the risk managers from Heijmans Infra. It is the product resulting form this Master Thesis.


Dozens of school districts and college admissions systems around the world have reformed their admissions rules in recent years. As the main motivation for these reforms, the policymakers cited the strategic flaws of the rules in place: students had incentives to game the system. However, after the reforms, almost none of the new rules became strategy‐proof. We explain this puzzle. We show that the rules used after the reforms are less prone to gaming according to a criterion called "strategic accessibility": each reform expands the set of schools wherein each student can never get admission by manipulation. We also show that the existing explanation of the puzzle due to Pathak and Sönmez (2013) is incomplete.


In any overall assessment of the changing relationship between the church and the state in late imperial Russia it is important to include an account of the thought and activity of Konstantin Petrovich Pobedonostsev. Although not a clergyman, he was probably the most visible of all Orthodox Church figures of the period, both in the empire and in Western Europe. As the emperor's Ober Procurator of the Most Holy Governing Synod, a post he occupied between 1880 and 1905, he was the perfectly placed official to represent the power of the Romanov government in church affairs and, in its turn, the will and needs of the church to the emperor and his chief councilors of state. Nor, in this case, was it merely the office that made the man. Pobedonostsev himself was a thoughtful and critical student of Western and Russian culture who used his authority in a way that fulfilled his own visions and not the whims of the tsar. He was not a Count Protasov, the loyal Ober Procurator of Nicholas I, and he insisted that the office of Ober Procurator stand equally in the high councils of the tsar along with all other government ministries. Finally, it must be added that Pobedonostsev revealed in his thought and in his public acts a consistent body of religious and political opinion that enjoyed a respectable following among the so-called conservatives of the educated classes, and he was known and admired in this company both for the views he espoused and for the enemies he made.


Abstract The possible drawdown of a massive CO2 atmosphere in early Earth history is discussed using two working hypotheses: first, that this removal of CO2 from the atmosphere occurred mainly via silicate weathering; second, that crust-to-mantle recycling rates found from forward modelling of crust-mantle history can be used to estimate rates of this ancient silicate weathering. Previous U-Th-Pb and Sm-Nd forward modelling efforts are reviewed, from which it was concluded that an insignificant amount of continental crust existed at 4.4 Ga, i.e. so-called 'no-growth models' for the continental crust appear untenable. New modelling carried out is based on a crustal growth curve starting with zero mass at 4.2 Ga and reaching 75% of the present crust mass by 2 Ga. It concerns variations in crust-to-mantle recycling rates through geological time. Best fits to isotope data are obtained if it is assumed that erosion rates (mass removal per unit surface) were approximately constant from early Archaean time to the present. From the results it can be estimated that drawdown of a massive CO2 atmosphere by silicate weathering could have been completed by the end of Archaean time at the earliest, and about 1.5 Ga ago at the latest.