Objective: The purpose of this article is to discuss the goals of palliative care with regards to acute care surgery patients and review the literature regarding administration and implementation of palliative programs. Background: For patients who experience unexpected and sometimes catastrophic life changes related to trauma or emergency general surgery, palliative care is a crucial adjunct that can help ensure the provision of optimal symptom management, communication, and goal-concordant care provided. Methods: Palliative care is medical specialty with a philosophy of care focused on improving the quality of life for patients with serious injury or illness and their loved ones. Palliative care provides significant benefit across the entire spectrum of illness and injury, regardless of prognosis. We will discuss palliative care topics related to trauma and emergency general surgery patients, including symptom management, goal setting, end of life care, communication strategies, addressing implicit/explicit bias, trauma-specific and emergency general surgery-specific considerations, and implementation strategies to reduce barriers for utilization of palliative care. Conclusions: Unfortunately, palliative care is often underutilized in the trauma and emergency general surgery population. Acute care surgeons should be familiar with principles of primary palliative care, as well as understand the added benefits that be provided by consultant palliative care specialists.


Basic education is education that underlies secondary education. Shaped elementary education elementary school (SD) and High School (SMP) and secondary education is a continuation of primary education, secondary education consists of general and vocational education. Shaped secondary education schools (SMA) and Vocational High School (SMK). Higher education is an education after secondary education includes educational programs diploma, bachelor's, master's, specialist, and doctoral organized by the college. " Does the application of machine learning methods of demonstration of interest in Prime Mover Boat class X in SMK 1 Silk can be improved ..? "
 Implementation of Class Action Research conducted at SMK Negeri 1 Sutera . This research was motivated by the location of the school affordable.
This study is a Class Action Research with a total time of study 2 months from the month from September to October in Odd Semester Academic Year 201 5 stars / 201 6 . This study was planned to consist of two cycles, which aims to improve the activity and learning outcomes Prime Mover Engineering Ship class X SMK 1 Sutera in the second semester of the academic year 2015-2016.
Subject of research is all class X SMK Negeri 1 Sutera 's 27 people in the first semester of the academic year 201 5 stars / 201 6 .
Source Data in the study were students of class X SMK 1 Sutera .
As for how to capture data that is done in this study are as follows. Data on students' learning activities implemented actions taken when using the observation sheet. In the charging process observation sheets, all indicators of activity was observed contained therein. The observed circumstances are activities in the learning process. Data on study results taken from tests of learning outcomes at each end of the cycle consists of six items about.
Motor 2 TAK; Each piston-step process is required 2x, 1x crankshaft rotation while the piston between two steps, just one step affords effort. In size and the same rotation, the motor 2 TAK can produce more power than the motor 4 TAK. The piston and cylinder wall temperature is rather high.
Easy to administer and sound quiet bike. Construction is simple because it does not require the intake valve / exhaust. Filling / flushing and incomplete combustion. Rinse pump usage, add gear motor becomes expensive. Used if required a great power and a simple construction.


BACKGROUND
Psychiatrists and other clinicians make decisions about antidepressant medications with little understanding on how to interpret the research literature.

METHODS
Pertinent clinical literature is reviewed.

RESULTS
The author reviews levels of evidence, study design, statistical significance, p values, defining outcomes, drop outs, and basic analytic strategies such as last observation carried forward and mixed-effects model repeated measures. Several recent clinical trials are dissected to illustrate these concepts.

CONCLUSIONS
Clinicians need to develop greater sophistication at interpreting research findings. No single study is definitive, and comparative antidepressant trials suffer from low statistical power.


Alexander McQueen is a typical designer of unconventional and experimental design who showed maximalism through outstanding tailoring. The purpose of this research is to study formative characteristics of maximalism that are expressed in modern fashion based on the works of Alexander McQueen, and to suggest boundless possibilities of development through his sense of design and the expressive ability of his works. Theoretical considerations will be made through literature research and precedent studies, and the collection data for case analysis will be used to select ready-to-wear women`s collections from 2001 S/S to 2010 F/W by referring to internet sites. The study results are as follows. First, the most representative characteristic of formative characteristics of maximalism expressed in Alexander McQueen`s works is expandability. Second, decorations used as a part of detail on clothes is used as decoration itself, and handcraft expression is shown through excessive use of decorations. The expandability of decoration that emphasizes splendid magnificence is expressed through flawless technique. Third, the fusion of each different image and the combination of ethnic image and modern image was most prevalent. Fourth, fantasy expresses a fictive image that could not be seen in reality by expressing an unrealistic and maximized image through the imagination of designer. Fifth, experimental element is expressed as an image that actively reflects the challenging spirit, which suggests a new direction of beauty through shocking and extraordinary images of the inner world of the designer and the root of new ideas about inhumane modern society.


A new taxon had previously been described in the genus Neisseria and it was proposed that "Neisseria polysacchareae" be the provisional epithet for this new "species". In the present work, susceptibility to antibiotics was determined using agar dilution tests. The tested strains of "N. polysacchareae" were isolated from throat, those of N. meningitidis from cases and carriers, and those of other species of Neisseria were from culture collections. The strains of "N. polysacchareae" were less sensitive than those of N. meningitidis, particularly to rifampicin, mecillinam and macrolide antibiotics; they were resistant to colistin and vancomycin and could therefore be isolated on selective medium for pathogenic Neisseria spp.


A new species of Trichomycterus endemic endemic to the Ribeira de Iguape River basin, southeastern Brazil, is proposed based on morphological and molecular evidence. The new species is diagnosed by having the outer layer of coloration composed of scattered, round, black or dark brown spots smaller or equivalent in size to the eye circumference, eight pectoral-fin rays, 28-29 opercular odontodes, 54-56 interopercular odontodes; and supraorbital line of the laterosensory system not interrupted, with pores s2 absent. Other two species of Trichomycterus are recorded for the Ribeira de Iguape River basin and their taxonomic status discussed: T. alternatus and T. jacupiranga were not differentiated by our molecular analysis, but may be consistently distinguished with basis on morphology. The phylogenetic relationships of the co-occuring species, Trichomycterus alternatus and Cambeva zonata, is inferred using mitochondrial data, reinforcing the taxonomic status of these recently revised species that have a confuse taxonomy. Additionally, we recommend a new combination for Trichomycterus taroba with its inclusion in the genus Cambeva. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.


After some patients were exposed to a blood product from a donor with Creutzfeld-Jakob disease, Winnipeg hospitals had to decide whether to inform them of the possibly minuscule health risk. The Salvation Army Grace Hospital decided to inform its patients, citing their fundamental right to facts regarding their own health; their need to make a responsible, informed decision regarding donation of their own blood or organs; and the need to maintain the trust and confidence of the public in the wake of the Krever inquiry.


Clarias gariepinus fingerlings with mean weight 10.63±0.25 g were fed five different commercial diets for eight weeks to determine the most suitable and efficient feed for growth and survival under controlled environmental conditions. The diets used were Multi feed, Ajanla feed, Vital feed, Coppens feed and ARAC feed. Ten fingerlings of the species were weighed and stocked in each tank. Final mean weights of 49.73±9.82, 37.80±5.19, 30.00±3.69, 64.51±13.31, 31.00±6.49 g and final mean lengths of 19.93±0.90, 17.67±0.61, 16.93± 0.60, 21.00±1.37 and 17.73±1.25 cmwere recorded for Multi, Ajanla, Vital, Coppens and ARAC feeds respectively. There was good survival rate in all the treatments. Water quality parameters were monitored within the documented range. Fish fed with Coppens feed had the best performance followed by Multi feed and then vital feed. The lowest growth rate was observed in fish fed with Ajanla feed though there was no significant difference in growth between fish fed with Ajanla and ARAC feed (P>0.05). Best performance observed in fish fed with Coppens feed could be as a result of inclusion of phosphorus and higher dose of vitamin C supplement in the feed. Key Words : Aquaculture, nutrition, Clarias gariepinus, growth parameters


This paper presents a prototype of a low-cost Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) that is operated by wave and solar energy which can be used to minimize the cost of ocean data collection. The current prototype is a compact USV, with a length of 1.2m that can be deployed and recovered by two persons. The design includes an electrically operated winch that can be used to retract and lower the underwater unit. Several elements of the design make use of additive manufacturing and inexpensive materials. The vehicle can be controlled using radio frequency (RF) and a satellite communication, through a custom developed web application. Both the surface and underwater units were optimized with regard to drag, lift, weight, and price by using recommendation of previous research work and advanced materials. The USV could be used in water condition monitoring by measuring several parameters, such as dissolved oxygen, salinity, temperature, and pH.


Introduction: The neonatal period is a critical initial stage of postnatal lung development and maturation. This study aimed to investigate the effects of the nutritional status on pulmonary function in late preterm and full-term neonates. Methods: A total of 172 newborns were included in the study. Nutritional risk screening, weight measurement, assessment of albumin and caloric intake, and a pulmonary function examination were conducted on the 7th day after birth. Results: There was a significant correlation between the nutritional risk and changes in body weight. Tidal volume (VT), minute ventilation (MV), VT per kg body weight (VT/kg), and MV per kg body weight (MV/kg) in the low nutritional risk group were significantly higher than those in the medium nutritional risk group (all P < .05). Albumin and caloric intake in the low nutritional risk group were significantly higher than those in the medium nutritional risk group (both P < .01). VT, VT/kg, MV, and MV/kg in the weight loss group were lower than those in the no weight loss group (all P < .05). Conclusions: Changes in neonatal weight mainly affect lung volume (VT, VT/kg, MV, and MV/kg), suggesting that an improvement in the neonatal nutritional status is important for the development of lung volume.


The use of thermals during the spring and autumn migration across Israel by four species of soaring birds (White Pelican Pelecanus onocrotalus, White Stork Ciconia ciconia, Lesser Spotted Eagle Aquila pomarina and Honey Buzzard Pernis apivorus) was studied by monitoring them with a motorized glider, light aircraft and radar. This is the first study in which soaring migrants have been followed in flight for any length of time and their flight performance has been recorded directly. The birds flew in an average height band between 344 and 1123 m above ground level. Altitude increased from the morning towards noon and decreased again in the afternoon. Average velocities were 29.2 km/h, 38.7 km/h, 50.9 km/h and 45.2 km/h for White Pelicans, White Storks, Lesser Spotted Eagles and Honey Buzzards, respectively. Atmospheric conditions had a major effect on flight velocity. White Storks showed a positive correlation between the flight velocity and the height between the base and top of the thermals. In White Pelicans, there was a correlation between velocity and mean height. Wing load (body mass/wing area) was positively related to the climbing time in thermals and negatively related to the mean height used by a species. There was also a positive, but not significant, relationship between wing load and velocity. Soaring birds appreciably extend the distance covered in migration in relation to the straight line from their breeding to wintering grounds (by 48–91%). The increased distance, caused through circumventing sea areas, ranged between 22–34%, while the increase resulting from soaring accounted for an additional 22–57% of the route.


This paper presents a Transformer architecture for volumetric medical image segmentation. Designing a computationally efficient Transformer architecture for volumetric segmentation is a challenging task. It requires keeping a complex balance in encoding local and global spatial cues, and preserving information along all axes of the volumetric data. The proposed volumetric Transformer has a U-shaped encoder-decoder design that processes the input voxels in their entirety. Our encoder has two consecutive self-attention layers to simultaneously encode local and global cues, and our decoder has novel parallel shifted window based self and cross attention blocks to capture fine details for boundary refinement by sub-suming Fourier position encoding. Our proposed design choices result in a computationally efficient architecture, which demonstrates promising results on Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) 2021, and Medical Segmentation Decathlon (Pancreas and Liver) datasets for tumor segmentation. We further show that the representations learned by our model transfer better across-datasets and are robust against data corruptions. Our code implementation is publicly available.


Unlicensed cognitive-radio (CR)-assisted Internet of Vehicles (IoV) users can access licensed providers' radio spectrum and concurrently utilize the dedicated channel for data transmission in vehicular communication. Optimizing channel access in cognitive IoV networks can help maximize available spectrum resources. This article proposes a novel sensing and communication integrated framework, dubbed as the CR-assisted IoV network (CRAV-Net), using a cluster-based hybrid optimization approach with adaptive congestion-aware modeling for dynamic high-mobility vehicular networks in an urban city context. In CRAV-Net, intelligent hybrid learning spectrum agents are introduced, which perform spectrum sensing (SS) using a deep learning (DL) model. It dynamically learns the multilevel spatial and temporal graphical features from input spectrograms through layer-by-layer propagation. It efficiently predicts the spectrum occupancy in the primary spectrum, without a priori knowledge of the radio environment. Then, to assign the vacant channels to the secondary vehicles, a support vector machine classifier is trained based on several learning features, including the vehicle stay time, vehicle density, and network capacity, to select the optimal resource route. The proposed framework achieves an overall accuracy of 99.74% in SS using the custom data set, outperforming state of the art by 12.60% at −25-dB signal-to-noise ratio. In addition, it brings a performance gain of 0.81% in SS accuracy when evaluated on real-world signals. Furthermore, in optimal network node allocation, the proposed framework achieves a mean accuracy of 98.45%, outperforming the existing methods by 0.63% and 18.32% in terms of accuracy and allocation time, respectively.


The era of Polyglot Persistence has begun. The emergence of NoSQL databases alarms the end of the dominance of Relational databases. 'NoSQL = Not only SQL' surly not to replace relational databases, rather, it gives more convenience to the developers to have database design with elastic nature for their projects. Relational data models will still be popular, however, will no longer be the automatic choice. To take advantage of this paradigm change, one need to be familiar with the underlying concepts of NoSQL to become Data professionals. Because, Data professionals should be familiar with these different approaches to know how to match them for their solutions. NoSQL introduces the new ways of data modeling, data consistency and data evolution. This book surly helps the developers to learn and cherish the power of NoSQL in building their representative systems using this new technique. This book gives an introductory to the underlying concepts of NoSQL such as, implementation of CAP theorem in various NoSQL databases, different data storage techniques along with the brief outline of two major document store NoSQL databases such as, MongoDB and CouchDB.


Due to the complicated background and noise of infrared images, infrared small target detection is one of the most difficult problems in the field of computer vision. In most existing studies, semantic segmentation methods are typically used to achieve better results. The centroid of each target is calculated from the segmentation map as the detection result. In contrast, we propose a novel end-to-end framework for infrared small target detection and segmentation in this article. First, with the use of UNet as the backbone to maintain resolution and semantic information, our model can achieve a higher detection accuracy than other state-of-the-art methods by attaching a simple anchor-free head. Then, a pyramid pool module is used to further extract features and improve the precision of target segmentation. Next, we use semantic segmentation tasks that pay more attention to pixel-level features to assist in the training process of object detection, which increases the average precision (AP) and allows the model to detect some targets that were previously not detectable. Furthermore, we develop a multi-task framework for infrared small target detection and segmentation. Our multi-task learning model reduces complexity by nearly half and speeds up inference by nearly twice compared to the composite single-task model while maintaining accuracy. The code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/Chenastron/MTUNet.


In preclinical development, salt forms are often screened to assess their ability to improve drug candidate properties. In this study albendazole was used as a model for poorly soluble, weak basic compounds typical of current drug discovery programs. Four salts, the hydrochloride, mesylate, sulfate und tosylate, were prepared and characterized with respect to their physicochemical properties. Identity was confirmed by 1H NMR spectroscopy, ion chromatography and vibrational spectroscopy. The solid state forms of the albendazole salts were examined by scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray powder diffraction (XRPD), laser diffraction measurement of particle size distribution (PSD), B.E.T. measurement of the specific surface area and 13C solid state NMR spectroscopy. Thermal behaviour and hygroscopicity were assessed by thermogravimetric analysis (TGA), differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), dynamic vapour sorption (DVS), Karl Fischer titration (KFT) and by variable temperature XRPD. Additionally, solubility and dissolution experiments were carried out in water and buffers. The different salt forms show pronounced differences in their physicochemical behaviour, especially with respect to hygroscopicity (sulfate > hydrochloride > tosylate > mesylate) and dissolution (rank order is pH dependent, all better than the free base). A salt form with highly improved physicochemical properties, the mesylate, was identified. The results demonstrate that extensive physicochemical characterization is needed to select the salt form most appropriate for further pharmaceutical development.


To determine whether a user can access a file in a hierarchical file system a traversal of the directory hierarchy is required in order to check access control for all the parent directories. This traversal can be especially expensive in a distributed system where the files may be on separate devices. We present two approaches for representing the complete access control for a file and its parent directories such that it can be stored locally with each file in order to avoid traversal. We use the well-known CNF and DNF (conjunctive and disjunctive normal form) formats to store permission and ownership information compactly for the entire path to a file. An examination of the structure of an existing large shared file system demonstrates the efficacy of our solution.


Background: HIV-infected (HIV+) persons are at increased risk of chronic kidney disease, but serum creatinine does not detect early losses in kidney function. We hypothesized that urine biomarkers of kidney damage would be associated with subsequent changes in kidney function in a contemporary cohort of HIV+ and HIV-uninfected (HIV–) men. Methods: In the Multicenter AIDS Cohort Study, we measured baseline urine concentrations of 5 biomarkers from 2009 to 2011 in 860 HIV+ and 337 HIV– men: albumin, alpha-1-microglobulin (α1m), interleukin-18 (IL-18), kidney injury molecule-1 (KIM-1), and procollagen type III N-terminal propeptide (PIIINP). We evaluated associations of urine biomarker concentrations with annual changes in estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) using multivariable linear mixed models adjusted for demographics, traditional kidney disease risk factors, HIV-related risk factors, and baseline eGFR. Results: Over a median follow-up of 4.8 years, the average annual eGFR decline was 1.42 mL/min/1.73 m2/year in HIV+ men and 1.22 mL/min/1.73 m2/year in HIV– men. Among HIV+ men, the highest vs. lowest tertiles of albumin (–1.78 mL/min/1.73 m2/year, 95% CI –3.47 to –0.09) and α1m (–2.43 mL/min/1.73 m2/year, 95% CI –4.14 to –0.73) were each associated with faster annual eGFR declines after multivariable adjustment. Among HIV– men, the highest vs. lowest tertile of α1m (–2.49 mL/min/1.73 m2/year, 95% CI –4.48 to –0.50) was independently associated with faster annual eGFR decline. Urine IL-18, KIM-1, and PIIINP showed no independent associations with eGFR decline, regardless of HIV serostatus. Conclusions: Among HIV+ men, higher urine albumin and α1m are associated with subsequent declines in kidney function, independent of eGFR.


This paper is concerned with the uniqueness of the solution of a nonlinear
equation, named discrepancy equation. For the restoration problem of data corrupted
by Poisson noise, we have to minimize an objective function that combines a
data-fidelity function, given by the generalized Kullback–Leibler divergence, and a
regularization penalty function. Bertero et al. recently proposed to use the solution
of the discrepancy equation as a convenient value for the regularization parameter.
Furthermore they devised suitable conditions to assure the uniqueness of this solution
for several regularization functions in 1D denoising and deblurring problems.
The aim of this paper is to generalize this uniqueness result to 2D and 3D problems
for several penalty functions, such as an edge preserving functional, a simple case of
the class of Markov Random Field (MRF) regularization functionals and the classical
Tikhonov regularization.


Air quality monitoring and assessment are essential issues for sustainable environmental protection. The monitoring process is composed of data collection, evaluation, and decision-making. Several important pollutants, such as SO2, CO, PM10, O3, NOx, H2S, location, and many others, have important effects on air quality. Air quality should be recorded and measured based on the total effect of pollutants that are collectively prescribed by a numerical value. In Canada, the Air Quality Health Index (AQHI) is used which is one numerical value based on the total effect of some concentrations. Therefore, evolution is required to consider the complex, ill-defined air pollutants, hence several naive and noble approaches are used to study AQHI. In this study, three approaches such as hybrid data-driven ANN, nonlinear autoregressive with external (exogenous) input (NARX) with a neural network, and adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference (ANFIS) approaches are used for estimating the air quality in an urban area (Jeddah city—industrial zone) for public health concerns. Over three years, 1771 data were collected for pollutants from 1 June 2016 until 30 September 2019. In this study, the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM) approach was employed as an optimization method for ANNs to solve the nonlinear least-squares problems. The NARX employed has a two-layer feed-forward ANN. On the other hand, the back-propagation multi-layer perceptron (BPMLP) algorithm was used with the steepest descent approach to reduce the root mean square error (RMSE). The RMSEs were 4.42, 0.0578, and 5.64 for ANN, NARX, and ANFIS, respectively. Essentially, all RMSEs are very small. The outcomes of approaches were evaluated by fuzzy quality charts and compared statistically with the US-EPA air quality standards. Due to the effectiveness and robustness of artificial intelligent techniques, the public's early warning will be possible for avoiding the harmful effects of pollution inside the urban areas, which may reduce respiratory and cardiovascular mortalities. Consequently, the stability of air quality models was correlated with the absolute air quality index. The findings showed notable performance of NARX with a neural network, ANN, and ANFIS-based AQHI model for high dimensional data assessment.


This paper reports results from a U.S. Bureau of Mines study of the flammability of various metals and other elemental dusts dispersed in air. The data are useful for evaluating the explosion hazards in the minerals and metals processing industries. The dusts studied included boron, carbon, magnesium, aluminum, silicon, sulfur, titanium, chromium, iron, nickel, copper, zinc, niobium, molybdenum, tin, hafnium, tantalum, tungsten, and lead. The dusts were chosen to cover a wide range of physical properties—from the more volatile materials such as magnesium, sulfur, and zinc to the highly "refractory" materials such as carbon, niobium, molybdenum, tantalum, and tungsten. These flammability studies were conducted in the Bureau of Mines 20‐L explosibility test chamber, using strong pyrotechnic ignitors. The parameters measured included the minimum explosible concentrations, maximum explosion pressures, and maximum rates of pressure rise. All of the elemental dusts ignited and burned as air‐dispersed dust clouds except the nickel, copper, molybdenum, and lead. In general, the dusts with the highest explosion pressures and rates of pressure rise were also those with the highest calculated, adiabatic flame temperatures and/or the ones that vaporized most easily, but this was not true in all cases. The effect of particle size on flammability was studied for the aluminum and iron dusts. The minimum explosible concentrations were relatively independent of particle size below 30 μm, but the highest explosion pressures and rates of pressure rise were found at the finest sizes tested.


An experiment was carried out to study the influence of the body condition score at birth on blood metabolites of goats in early lactation. Sixty-eight goats were placed in three groups according to the body condition score (BCS) at parturition: from 1.00 to 2.75 (thin animals); 2.75 and 3.50 (intermediate body condition) and from 3.50 to 5.00 (fat animals). The experimental was carried out in the first sixty days of lactation and blood sampling started after parturition at weekly intervals up to the eighth week of lactation. Analyses were made of the non-esterified fat acids (NEFA), betahydroxibutirate (BHBA), glucose, total cholesterol and high density lipoprotein (HDL). The plasma concentrations of the metabolites did not differ among the groups. The NEFA concentrations in the animals in the three groups at birth and in the first eight weeks of lactation were 658.46 and 232.90 mg/dL, respectively and the values of BHBA at birth were 10.31 ± 3.0 mg/dL for the thin animals, 6.88 ± 0.9 mg/dL for the intermediate animals and 4.21 ± 0.8 mg/dL for the fat animals. The glucose values at birth were 112.54 ± 15.4 mg/dL for the thin animals, 90.93 ± 13.5 mg/dL for the intermediate animals and 132.47 ± 26.7 mg/dL for the fat animals. The average of total cholesterol and HDL in the first eight weeks after birth were 109.01 ± 2.5; and 54.9 ± 1.39 mg/dL for the thin animals, 83.0 ± 21.7 and 56.0 ± 1.30 mg/dL for the intermediate animals and 84.3 ± 23.9 and 54.5 ± 1.93 mg/dL for the fat animals. The changes in the energy metabolism of dairy goats with medium production decreased, regardless of the body condition at birth, when supplied with high quality feed with high


The past decade has witnessed a marked increase in distributed system complexity. This was driven by a maturing technology that steadily decreased the number of faults. Unfortunately these fewer faults have become exponentially more costly. It becomes mandatory to detect faults prior to taking effect on the network. Such an early detection requires a new test, detection and fault containment strategy, of which the outline and some basic ingredients are sketched here.


We present the standard model prediction for the eight angular coefficients of the W boson, which completely describes its differential cross section in hadron collisions. These coefficients are ratios of the W helicity cross sections and the total unpolarized cross section. We also suggest a technique to experimentally extract the coefficients, which we demonstrate in the Collins-Soper azimuthal-angle analysis.


The myocardium, like other tissues, has enzyme and non-enzyme systems to neutralize free radicals. The enzymes superoxide dismutase, catalase and glutathione peroxidase and glutathione reductase as well as the non-enzyme antioxidants vitamin E and ascorbic acid are the main antioxidants. Oxidants are produced by the mitochondria under normal conditions and by other sources under pathologic conditions. The quantity of antioxidants present in the myocardium is matched to the production of oxygen free radicals that may be produced under basal physiological conditions. However, the myocardium can be exposed to increased levels of oxygen free radicals under conditions in which myocardial metabolism, i.e. mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation, is accelerated to match the adenosine triphosphate utilized to support the increased work load on the heart or can be exposed to oxygen free radicals under pathologic conditions such as ischemia and reperfusion, inflammation, and cardiotoxic drugs such as anti-cancer agents. Under such circumstances the normal heart has been shown to increase its antioxidant production and to be, with time, protected from further sources of oxygen free radicals. In particular, hearts previously exposed to a stimulus to produce greater antioxidant levels show less damage during ischemia reperfusion injury presumably because of neutralization of oxygen free radicals. This review will present several situations in which the myocardium increases its tolerance to ischemia reperfusion injury as a result of an initial oxidative stress.


This study was conducted to evaluate the ability of the large intestine to absorb calcium (Ca) and magnesium (Mg) from their sparingly water-soluble salts, and also to determine whether fructooligosaccharides (FOS) stimulate the absorption of these minerals in rat large intestine in vivo. Rats were fed Ca- and Mg-free diets with and without 5% FOS. An aqueous suspension of CaCO3 and MgO was infused into the stomach via a gastric tube or into the cecum via an implanted catheter. Coprophagy was prevented by using wire-mesh anal cups throughout the experiment so as to exclude the re-ingestion of feces as an oral mineral source. In rats fed an FOS-free diet, the absorption degrees of Ca and Mg infused into the cecum were the same as those infused into the stomach. The absorption degree of phosphorus (P) was slightly but significantly higher in rats with the infusion of Ca and Mg into the cecum than in rats with the infusion of Ca and Mg into the stomach. FOS-feeding increased the absorption of Mg to a similar extent in either case of infusion via cecal and oral routes, while FOS-feeding did not increase the absorption of Ca in rats with infusion of Ca and Mg into the cecum. We concluded that both CaCO3 and MgO are absorbed in the large intestine, and we ascertained that the increasing effect of FOS on the absorption of Mg took place mainly in the large intestine.


Measuring life quality (LQ) allows establishing the general subject's perception on the health processes - disease, the treatment started and the perception on health. Objective: To measure LQ in subjects with different cancer types in the city of Bucaramanga, Colombia. Method: A non-experimental descriptive study was carried out in the foundation for cancer relief (Acronym in Spanish AVAC). To measure LQ, the EORTC QLQ-C30 questionnaire was applied. Results: The study population consisted of 40 subjects of which 45% (n = 18) were hospitalized and 55% (n = 22) were in the outpatient program, the average age was 60.98 ± 11.5 years, the predominant gender is female (72.5%), the average time of cancer evolution 4.68 ± 5.17 years, breast cancer was predominant in females and prostate cancer in males, the overall average EORTC QLQ-C30 questionnaire score was 60 ± 9.3 points, the types of cancer that showed the highest scores were lymphoma, colon cancer and thyroid, while the lowest score was multiple myeloma and prostate cancer. Discussion: In relation to the measurement of LQ, the importance of the evaluation is clearly established, since it is a subjective phenomenon. Subjects with high scores must be the object of special care and concern when planning health care activities.


We address the prblem of time-stationary control synthesis for pipelined data paths. Control synthesis system accepts scheduled control data flow graph with conditional branches which are produced by high level synthesis tools such as Sehwa [1] as input specification and generates a FSM controller. First a scheduled control/data flow graph is analyzed and the various states are identified. Overlapped states are grouped together to produce L groups where L is the pipeline latency. Next, state transitions are identified and a state table is generated. Finally, a highly optimized FSM controller is implemented by performing horizontal partitioning and the corresponding stae encoding so as to minimize the total controller area. We compared our approach to published work on FSM generation and optimization and the results indicate that our method results in large savings in total controller area.


Pulmonary sarcomatoid carcinoma (PSC) is a rare type of lung cancer. The objective was to collect data on the clinical characteristics, EGFR mutations, KRAS mutations, tumor markers and prognosis of patients with PSC. Eighty-three patients with PSC and 83 patients with ordinary non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) who were treated at the Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital between 2008 and 2017 underwent EGFR and Kras mutation testing. We collected data on patient sex, age, smoking history, tumor size, TNM stage, immunohistochemical results, pathohistological subtype, and survival. Of the 83 PSC patients included in this study, All of the patients underwent mutations testing, Tumor markers, including Tissue Polypeptide Specific Antigen(TSPA), Squamous Cell Carcinoma antigen(SCC), Neuron Specific Enolase (NSE), and Carcinoma Embryonic Antigen (CEA). Pulmonary sarcomatoid carcinoma is more uncommon and aggressive than ordinary non-small cell lung cancer. Smoking history is a relevant factor associated with EGFR mutations in both patients with PSC and ordinary NSCLC. In patients with ordinary NSCLC, sex and subtype were relevant factors (p<0.0001). TNM stage was a prognostic factor for survival, and the tumor markers TSPA, SCC, NSE, CA199 and CEA were also prognostic factors for survival. Early detection and early diagnosis are the best meth-ods for PSC patients. Nonsmoking PSC patients with EGFR mutations may benefit from targeted therapy, and PSC patients with low levels of tumor markers have a good prognosis.


0000-0002-2148-7466 ABSTRACT STEM education is applied to raise individuals having 21st-century skills based on the integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. This paper aims to present the overall effect of STEM education on students' academic achievement by analyzing 64 research findings obtained from 56 quantitative studies published between 2014 and 2021. Relevant studies were identified from the databases of scholarly publications such as ERIC, Web of Science, EBSCOHost, Google Scholar, SCOPUS, ProQuest, CHE Thesis Center. The sample was then meta-analytically examined using the CMA program. Education level, duration of the application, disciplines, and publication type were determined as moderator variables. The results showed that the effect of STEM education on students' academic success was statistically higher (g= 1.150) in the random-effects model. A heterogeneous distribution was obtained from the sample. Further subgroup analyzes using Analog ANOVA revealed that disciplines (Qb= 921.394; p= .000), and publication type variables were statistically significant (Qb= 7.229; p= .007). With respect to the disciplines, the effects of STEM education showed the largest effect size of 1.156 in the discipline of science. Regarding the publication type, national studies were presented the largest effect size of


The fate of intravenously injected Ehrlich ascites tumor cells, lodging in the lungs, and their subsequent growth into grossly visible metastases have been studied in CAF1 mice, with tritiated thymidine used to label the tumor cells synthesizing deoxyribo nucleic acid (DNA). The animals were given tritiated thymidine either in a single dose at varying inter vals or in multiple doses at a given interval after intravenous injection of tumor cells. Autoradiographic and radiochemical investigations of the lungs of these animals mdi cated the following : (a) only very few of the injected tumor cells survived at the site of arrest in the capillaries of the lungs; (b) the surviving tumor cells began to synthesize DNA within @ hours after lodging in the lung capillaries; (c) after the 3d day from injection, the tumor cells in the lungs grew at a constant rate with 100 per cent of the cells dividing every 18—@0 hours; (d) such a type of growth is described by an ex ponential growth curve. These findings are discussed in the light of our knowledge on the establishment and growth of tumor metastases.


This paper presents a software package that implements Bayesian model averaging for gretl, the GNU regression, econometrics and time-series library. Bayesian model averaging is a model-building strategy that takes account of model uncertainty in conclusions about estimated parameters. It is an efficient tool for discovering the most probable models and obtaining estimates of their posterior characteristics. In recent years we have observed an increasing number of software packages devoted to Bayesian model averaging for different statistical and econometric software. In this paper, we propose the BMA package for gretl, which is an increasingly popular free, open-source software for econometric analysis with an easy-to-use graphical user interface. We introduce the BMA package for linear regression models with jointness measures proposed by Ley and Steel (2007) and Doppelhofer and Weeks (2009).


The problem of primary education has existed for some time in both the western and eastern regions of the United Republic of Cameroon in Africa. It vas generally accepted that the main reason for the poor performance of the education system was the insufficient training of the vast majority of primary school teachers. From the beginning, ENIR (Rurally Oriented Primary Teacher Training Institute) and later IPAR (Institute of, Rurally Oriented Applied Education), the new and expanded version of ENIR, were designed as essential means of solving the problem. Their endeavour was to create a ruralized school directed toward meeting the economic and social needs of Cameroon. With an average rate of primary school enrollment of over 60%, the country was reaching a critical point beyond which squandering of resources and failure to meet real needs would become hard to tolerate. If the system' were to become too expensive to operate and too unrelated to the needs of society, the development envisaged under the third five-year plan, combined with the considerable demand for training which it created, would cause a dangerous situation in which the deficit would increase.at.the same rate as school attendance and very likely even faster. This paper examines the reasons which led to the emphasis on the ruralization of primary education, and hence, the training of teachers able to carry it out; identifies the agents, stages, and mechanisms of innovation; and gives a brief account of the operation and performance of the Cameroonian education system. (NQ) Documents acquired by ERIC include many informal unpublished materials not available from other sources. ERIC makes every effort to obtain the best copy available. Nevertheless, items of marginal reproducibility are often encountered and this affects the quality of the microfiche and hardcopy reproductions ERIC makes available via the ERIC Document Reproduction Service (EDRS). EDRS is not responsible for the quality of the oliginal document. Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original. SCOPE OF INTEREST NOTICE The FIIIC Facility has assigned docurn11, ea. In sxocesising to Iii oto ludgethent thus dncument is Also of Interest to the clearinghouses noted to the right. index ing should reflect their special points Of view. UNESCO by Edward Wegman EXPERIMENTS AND INNOVATIONS IN EDUCATION This seies is published in English, in French and in Spanish Titles in this series: I. The TEVEC case 2. The school readiness project Innovation in ieading in Britain 4. Understandiny change in education : an introduction 5. Changes in secondary education and their implications for continuing education in Canada 6. A community school in Yugoslavia 7. The basic secondary school in the countryside: an educational innovation in Cuba 8, An experiment in the ruralization of education: IPAR and the Cameroonian reform The designations employed and the presentation of tilc material in this publication do not imply the expression of any opinion whatsoever 00 the part of the Unesco Secretariat concerning the legal status of any country or territory, Or of its authorities, or concerning the delimitations of the frontiers of any country Or territory. Experiments and innovations in education No. 8 An experiment in the ruralization of education: IPAR and the Cameroonian reform


In the present work, we have investigated the excited-state proton transfer (ESPT) dynamics inside lipid-based reverse hexagonal (HII), gyroid Ia3d, and diamond Pn3m LLC phases. Polarized light microscopy (PLM) and small-angle X-ray scattering (SAXS) techniques have been employed for the characterization of LLC systems. Time-resolved fluorescence results reveal the retarded ESPT dynamics inside liquid crystalline systems compared to bulk water, and it follows the order HII < Ia3d < Pn3m < H2O. The slower solvation, hampered "Grotthuss" proton transfer process, and most importantly, topological influence, of the LLC systems are believed to be mainly responsible for the slower and different extent of ESPT dynamics. Interestingly, recombination dynamics is found to be faster with respect to bulk water and it follows the order H2O < Pn3m < Ia3d < HII. Faster recombination dynamics arises due to lower dielectric constant and different channel diameters of these LLC systems. However, the dissociation dynamics is found to be slower than bulk water and it follows the order HII < Ia3d < Pn3m < H2O. Differences in critical packing parameter of LLC systems are believed to be the governing factors for the slower dissociation dynamics in these liquid crystalline systems.


Deafferentation of neural tissue can result in cell death, morphological changes, and/or alterations in sources of innervation. These changes often occur during a limited period of development. In the auditory brainstem, the ventral cochlear nucleus (VCN) projects to the contralateral but not ipsilateral medial nucleus of the trapezoid body (MNTB). This pathway is part of a circuit that computes interaural intensity differences used in sound localization. Previous studies have shown that, after the cochlea is removed early in postnatal development, cells in the VCN on the deafferented side die, and the intact VCN innervates MNTB on both sides of the brain. These changes after cochlea removal are limited to an early postnatal period that preceeds hearing onset. In this study, we lesioned the VCN directly to evaluate plasticity in axonal pathways after hearing onset. We found that novel projections from the intact VCN to ipsilateral MNTB emerge after lesions performed as late as postnatal day 25. The morphological sequence of events is similar to that seen during the initial development of this pathway. These data suggest that plasticity in the auditory brainstem is possible when pathways are challenged with denervation of target nuclei. The results show that the opportunity for plasticity in auditory brainstem circuitry is more prolonged than previously thought and that novel pathways can form after the normal pathways are fully mature and functional. Moreover, sensitive periods for changes in individual pathways are independently regulated. J. Comp. Neurol. 497:589–599, 2006. © 2006 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


This study examines the group-based emotions of vicarious shame and vicarious guilt using an elaboration of the perceptual control focus of identity theory. The concept of social identity is refined through incorporating categorical and corporate dimensions. This extends identity theory by including new dimensions of meaning, which have not been examined in the existing literature as well as by testing the predictive power of specific emotions as outcomes of the identity verification process. Moreover, the role of culture via interdependent self-construals is also considered within these processes. To empirically test these relationships, two surveys are administered to over three hundred students at a large Southwestern university. The survey contains a series of hypothetical scenarios measuring two social identities: ethnic and classmate. The purpose of the scenarios is to create the conditions in which vicarious shame and guilt are thought to occur in addition to activating the respondent's social identity. After respondents read each scenario, they are queried regarding their social identities, reflected appraisals, extent to which they saw the act as a violation, motivation to change how others perceive them and emotional responses among other things. Results are mixed; showing that while ethnic and classmate identities do not significantly predict shame and guilt, reflected appraisals do across all scenarios. In certain contexts degree of violation, degree of self-reported interdependence, and identity prominence are also shown to be significant predictors. Implications of the study findings and recommendations for future research are discussed.


Advanced fibre-reinforced polymer (FRP) composites have been widely used for strengthening concrete structures. The bond behaviour between FRP and concrete plays the crucial role in this technique. Commonly the test of this bond behaviour is conducted using a single or double shear pull-off test of an FRP-to-concrete bonded joint, or similar bending tests. Such test setups are usually modelled as a two dimensional (2D) plane stress or plane strain structure. However, the test setup is in reality a three-dimensional (3D) structure due to many factors. One of the main factors is that the concrete behaviour is three dimensional because of the presence of coarse aggregates. Because of the random distribution of coarse aggregates in concrete, it may be expected that the non-uniformity of strain distribution is also random. Compared to concrete, mortar is a much more uniform material. In the research work presented in this paper, an experimental study is employed to investigate the strain distribution in the FRP in a bond test, where the FRP was bonded to either concrete or mortar. The results confirm that the presence of coarse aggregates in the concrete leads to much more variation in the FRP strain distribution.


It is a truism, if all too lately recognized, that the more fruitful geological researches today (and tomorrow) depend to an increasing degree on the techniques of the sister sciences and mathematics. So much is this the case that a number of quasigeological "Earth and Space Science" departments or divisions have been created and others are springing up not only at universities but also in private industrial and governmental research complexes, as well. The pendulum has now swung so far from the geologists per se that these organizations are being staffed to a large degree by non-geologists trained in one of the more fundamental, yet supporting, sciences. The advantages are obvious. The disadvantages, which may be equally great, are as yet only dimly perceived. Despite th paradoxical stigma now attached to the use of the time-honored and appropriately descriptive word "geology," the Earth Science Institutes and Departments are still chiefly engaged in geological researches. In such investigations it is just as shortsighted to expect first-rate results from a staff member who has little or no geological background, as to expect outstanding contributions to stem from the "geologist" who does not have considerable mastery of at least one of the more basic scientific disciplines. As an additional adverse factor, we see fewer students entering undergraduate geological studies and, if the trend continues, fewer "genuine" geologists will be available for geological positions in teaching or in industry. In short, the situation feeds on itself. The possible over- ll effects on the science of geology, on the broadly ramifying profession of "petroleum geologist" and on the A.A.P.G. are considered. The serious, national problem of scientific and technical manpower inadequacies is also closely involved in the geological research dilemma, and is discussed in some detail. End_of_Article - Last_Page 354------------


ABSTRACT The price gap between West Texas Intermediate (WTI) and Brent crude oil markets has been completely changed in the past several years. The price of WTI was always a little larger than that of Brent for a long time. However, the price of WTI has been surpassed by that of Brent since 2011. The new market circumstances and volatility of oil price require a comprehensive re-estimation of risk. Therefore, this study aims to explore an integrated approach to assess the price risk in the two crude oil markets through the value at risk (VaR) model. The VaR is estimated by the extreme value theory (EVT) and GARCH model on the basis of generalized error distribution (GED). The results show that EVT is a powerful approach to capture the risk in the oil markets. On the contrary, the traditional variance–covariance (VC) and Monte Carlo (MC) approaches tend to overestimate risk when the confidence level is 95%, but underestimate risk at the confidence level of 99%. The VaR of WTI returns is larger than that of Brent returns at identical confidence levels. Moreover, the GED-GARCH model can estimate the downside dynamic VaR accurately for WTI and Brent oil returns.


Substantial achievements in proteomic techniques in the last decade have led to an increase in the application of proteomics to many fields, including plant sciences. Proteomics is a robust technology for the high-throughput investigation of proteins on a genome-wide scale.
With the completion of genome sequencing projects and the improvement of analytical methods for protein identification, proteomics has now become a major tool for studying functional genomics. Despite the progress in proteomics research in animals, yeast and Escherichia coli, plant proteomics is still at infancy stages. Lemba, Curculigo latifolia, is an indigenous plant of Malaysia and is found mainly in swampy areas of tropical Asia and
Australia. To date, there are no published reports of the proteome of this plant. This study focused on finding the best protein extraction protocols for specific tissues from this plant as judged by the optimal 2-DE patterns. This was an essential step that had to be performed before the identification of abundantly expressed proteins from the fruit, root and leaf could be attempted. Fruit, root and leaf tissues of Curculigo latifolia were individually subjected to 7 different published protocols (three different phenol based protocols, a TCA-acetone based protocol, a combination of phenol and TCA-acetone-based protocol, and a chloroformbased protocol) to determine the most efficient method for the specific tissue. Prior to the protein extraction of fruit, a novel pectolytic enzyme mix pretreatment was tested and was found to successfully reduce the amount of pectin which otherwise made protein extraction from that tissue nearly impossible. Chloroform, phenol and TCA-acetone-based protocols were found to be the most efficient methods for fruit, root and leaf respectively. The five most abundant spots for each tissue were excised from 2-DE gels and analyzed by MALDITOF/
TOF mass spectrometry, and identified by cross species comparisons employing available plant protein databases. Glutelin and RuBisCo were the most abundant proteins in
the fruit and leaf respectively. In root, catalase and glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate were found to be the most abundant proteins.

Keywords: Curculigo latifolia, fruit, root, leaf, protein extraction, 2-D electrophoresis


In an economy in which the private sector and academia increasingly consider cooperation in research and training as the logical choice in the name of efficiency, it is puzzling to note that translation, a field of research and study aimed at building bridges over cultural differences, has been failing so miserably at creating the type of rapprochement and mutual understanding that is so desperately required to ensure that the needs of a growing industry and field of research are met. This paper is an attempt to understand why translation scholars and translator employers have such strong views about each other and how these views are the symptom, not the cause, of such mutual misunderstanding. It will be argued that the reason why this gap exists is that the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of each party are not clearly defined, and that the success of the (life-long) pedagogical endeavour rests in the establishment of a climate of trust and cooperation between academia and the translation industry. In conclusion, we will suggest a number of initiatives that might help alleviate the situation.


Abstract : This volume, the first of three volumes, is a compilation of 22 unclassified/unlimited technical papers presented at the Joint Army-Navy-NASA-Air Force (JANNAF) 30th Propellant Development & Characterization Subcommittee Meeting, held on 18-21 March 2002 at the Sheraton Colorado Springs Hotel, Colorado Springs, Colorado. The papers presented herein reflect work performed in the areas of green energetic materials (GEM) development; liquid and gel propellant development; propellant surveillance and aging; and propellant chemistry test methods.


The molecular chaperone, heat shock protein 70 (Hsp70), is an emerging drug target for treating neurodegenerative tauopathies. We recently found that one promising Hsp70 inhibitor, MKT-077, reduces tau levels in cellular models. However, MKT-077 does not penetrate the blood-brain barrier (BBB), limiting its use as either a clinical candidate or probe for exploring Hsp70 as a drug target in the central nervous system (CNS). We hypothesized that replacing the cationic pyridinium moiety in MKT-077 with a neutral pyridine might improve its clogP and enhance its BBB penetrance. To test this idea, we designed and synthesized YM-08, a neutral analogue of MKT-077. Like the parent compound, YM-08 bound to Hsp70 in vitro and reduced phosphorylated tau levels in cultured brain slices. Pharmacokinetic evaluation in CD1 mice showed that YM-08 crossed the BBB and maintained a brain/plasma (B/P) value of ∼0.25 for at least 18 h. Together, these studies suggest that YM-08 is a promising scaffold for the development of Hsp70 inhibitors suitable for use in the CNS.


This study is a descriptive survey designed to investigate challenges teachers encounter in teaching English reading in the uThungulu District schools in the province of KwaZulu Natal. This study comprised 44 teachers who were purposely sampled on grounds of availability. Views were sampled through the use of a self-made questionnaire. This study addressed the following research question: what are the challenges teachers encounter in teaching reading in the Intermediate Phase? The objective of the study was to investigate challenges encountered by teachers in teaching reading in English in the Intermediate Phase. Data were analysed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 24, resulting in descriptive data. The findings of the study revealed that teachers were faced with numerous challenges which included, amongst others, learners who are unable to read; mother tongue interference, teaching methods used by teachers and overloading of the curriculum. Another salient finding was the lack of support for teachers from both the Department of Education and parents. Recommendations made from the study were that teachers need to be trained to use efficient methods of teaching reading. Teachers also need to be trained in identifying learners with special needs as early as possible and to refer them accordingly. Workshops and campaigns designed by the department of education need to be planned and conducted early in the year and need to be implemented in manageable packages. Teachers need to be equipped on how to encourage their learners to read for pleasure and provide reading material that is interesting to their learners. Keywords: reading; challenges and Intermediate phase


The purpose of this study1 was to investigate the relationship between the didactical strategies and educational practices and the teachers perception about inclusion and disability; and if this relationship was different on the level of experience that the teacher has acquired in inclusive context. The results showed that a positive attitude towards inclusion encourages the use of adequate educational strategies. It is also clear, a significant correlation between teachers acceptable job satisfaction and professional self-efficacy and a greater propensity to inclusion and interaction with disabled students. This seems more evident in the group of teachers with greater experience of interaction with pupils with special educational needs; unlike the less experienced colleagues for inclusion which manifest, however, a higher concern and opinions not favorable towards inclusion context. This confirms the need to focus attention on the "education" of the teacher, particularly of the curriculum one, often unable even just to imagine the different possibleworlds that an inclusive context can offer, and not just to the pupils.


Aims. We have studied the flare characteristics of 55 AGN at 8 different frequency bands between 4.8 and 230 GHz. Our extensive database enables us to study the various observational properties of flares in these sources and compare our results with theoretical models. Methods. We visually extracted 159 individual flares from the flux density curves and calculated different parameters, such as the peak flux density and duration, in all the frequency bands. The selection of flares is based on the 22 and 37 GHz data from Metsahovi Radio Observatory and 90 and 230 GHz data from the SEST telescope. Additional lower frequency 4.8, 8, and 14.5 GHz data are from the University of Michigan Radio Observatory. We also calculated variability indices and compared them with earlier studies. Results. The observations seem to adhere well to the shock model, but there is still large scatter in the data. Especially the time delays between different frequency bands are difficult to study due to the incomplete sampling of the higher frequencies. The average duration of the flares is 2.5 years at 22 and 37 GHz, which shows that long-term monitoring is essential for understanding the typical behaviour in these sources. It also seems that the energy release in a flare is independent of the duration of the flare.


Recurrent Aphthous Ulceration (RAU) is a type of local inflammation of the oral mucosa with symptomatic soft tissue damage. The prevalence of RAU is about 17-67%. Dominant factors causing this disease are understood, but there are predicted internal and external factors that cause related immune disorders. RAU is initiated by mucous proteins which continuously stimulate a physiological response required for a pathophysiological reaction. The aim of this study was to characterize specific anomaly proteins in oral mucosa as causing the initiation of RAU. Samples of mucosal proteins from 30 RAU patients were analyzed with sodium dodexylsulphate polyacrylamid gelelectrophorese (SDS-PAGE) and visualized with silver stain (AgNO3) showing proteins with a range of molecular weight 27 – 180 kDa. Western blotting using a polyclonal antibody specific to RAU showed that the specific proteins of RAU have molecular weights of 23, 27, 65, 70 and 87 kDa. The finding of so many proteins appears to be a new phenomenon, suggesting that the initiation of RAU is possibly due to a continuous induction of internal and external reactions by several mucosal proteins, that become anomaly proteins of high reactivity and antigenicity. This situation can cause overreaction on the oral mucosa with specific symptoms that are known as a RAU.


A linear analytical solution is derived for the gravitational shock wave produced by a particle of mass M that decays into a pair of null particles. The resulting space-time is shown to be unperturbed and isotropic, except for a discontinuous perturbation on a spherical null shell. Formulae are derived for the perturbation as a function of polar angle, as measured by an observer at the origin observing clocks on a sphere at distance R. The effect of the shock is interpreted physically as an instantaneous displacement in time and velocity when the shock passes the clocks. The time displacement is shown to be anisotropic, dominated by a quadrupole harmonic aligned with the particle-decay axis, with a magnitude δτ ∼ GM/c 3, independent of R. The velocity displacement is isotropic. The solution is used to derive the gravitational effect of a quantum state with a superposition of a large number of randomly oriented, statistically isotropic particle decays. This approach is shown to provide a well-controlled approximation to estimate the magnitude of gravitational fluctuations in systems composed of null point particles up to the Planck energy in a causal diamond of duration τ = 2R/c, as well as quantum-gravitational fluctuations of black holes and cosmological horizons. Coherent large-angle quantum distortions of macroscopic geometry from fluctuations up to the Planck scale are shown to grow linearly with the duration, with a variance ⟨δτ 2⟩ ∼ τt P much larger than that produced in models without causal quantum coherence.


Formal verification is fundamental in many phases of digital systems design. The most successful verification procedures employ Ordered Binary Decision Diagrams (OBDDs) as canonical representation for both Boolean circuit specifications and logic designs, but these methods require a large amount of memory and time. Due to these limitations, several models of Decision Diagrams have been studied and other verification techniques have been proposed. In this paper, we have used probabilistic verification with Galois (or finite) field GF(2m) modifying the CUDD package for the computation of signatures in classical OBDDs, and for the construction of Mod2-OBDDs (also known as ?-OBDDs). Mod2-OBDDs have been constructed with a two-level layer of ?-nodes using a positive Davio expansion (pDE) for a given variable. The sizes of the Mod2-OBDDs obtained with our method are lower than the Mod2-OBDDs sizes obtained with other similar methods.


One of the foundations of the Christian faith is the truth about eternal life. All people are well aware that life on earth will end sometime. Death is the end of earthly existence, but it is not the end definitive. As Christians, we believe that death is the beginning of a new life, a transition to a new reality, a reality that will never end and will pass away. God, offering us salvation through Jesus Christ, wants that for every person this new existence is heaven, where He will be the greatest reward. The creator, however, does not deprive man of free will and the possibility of deciding his fate, which is why he accepts the unreasonable possibility of rejection by the creatures of his proposal of heaven and selfgrieving of man, that is, the voluntary election of the eternal punishment of hell. The object of reflection of this article is to present a modern teaching about the eternal punishment, called hell. It is shown what today's theology talks about the reality of eternal damnation. The truth about hell is the dogma of our faith. Often, however, this topic is not addressed in preaching and teaching. There is no doubt that this is a difficult subject because it concerns a reality that transcends human existence and is difficult to understand, but that does not mean that one should stop being interested in hell.


Objectives:Acute lung injury can result from distinct insults, such as sepsis, ischemia–reperfusion, and ventilator-induced lung injury. Physiologic and morphologic manifestations of disparate forms of injury are often indistinguishable. We sought to demonstrate that acute lung injury resulting from distinct insults may lead to different gene expression profiles. Design:Microarray analysis was used to examine early molecular events in lungs from three rat models of acute lung injury: lipopolysaccharide, hemorrhage shock/resuscitation, and high-volume ventilation. Setting:University laboratory. Subjects:Male Sprague-Dawley rats (body weight, 300–350 g). Interventions:Rats were subjected to hemorrhagic shock or lipopolysaccharide followed by resuscitation or were subjected to sham operation. First hit was followed by ventilation with either low (6 mL/kg) or high (12 mL/kg) tidal volume for 4 hrs. Measurements and Main Results:Physiologic and morphologic variables were assessed. Total RNA was hybridized to Affymetrix chips. Bioconductor was used to identify significantly altered genes. Functional enrichment predictions were performed in Gene Ontology Tree Machine. Confirmation studies included real-time polymerase chain reaction, Western blots, and immunohistochemistry. Physiologic and morphologic variables were noncontributory in determining the cause of acute lung injury. In contrast, molecular analysis revealed unique gene expression patterns that characterized exposure to lipopolysaccharide and high-volume ventilation. We used hypergeometric probability to demonstrate that specific functional enrichment groups were regulated by biochemical vs. biophysical factors. Genes stimulated by lipopolysaccharide were involved in metabolism, defense response, immune cell proliferation, differentiation and migration, and cell death. In contrast, high-volume ventilation led to the regulation of genes involved primarily in organogenesis, morphogenesis, cell cycle, proliferation, and differentiation. Conclusions:These results demonstrate the application of functional genomics to the molecular "fingerprinting" of acute lung injury and the potential for decoupling biophysical from biochemical injury.


The present state of the chemistry of extraction equilibria involving sulphoxides of diverse structure — aliphatic, cyclic, and also mixtures of petroleum origin — is discussed, and results are given for the extraction of inorganic and organic acids and metal salts from aqueous solution. Comparison of the extraction properties of neutral organophosphorus compounds with those of sulphoxides shows a promising future in liquid extraction for cyclic sulphoxides, especially those of petroleum origin. The mechanism of extraction is discussed, and the dependence of extraction properties on the molecular structure of the sulphoxide is considered. A list of 153 references is included.


Six 1-glyceryl ethers (1-6) were isolated from the red alga-sponge assemblage Ceratodictyon spongiosum/Haliclona cymaeformis. Structural assignments were conducted by interpretation of spectroscopic data and the modified Mosher's method. Four allylic alcohols were obtained as a pair of epimeric mixtures (3/4 and 5/6). These glyceryl ethers exhibited weak cytotoxic activity against HeLa human cervical cancer cells.


Phosphorus is one of the least available elements for plant growth especially in tropical soils. The high-affinity Pi transporters are assumed to be the main system responsible for Pi uptake by plant roots. The objectives of the study were to isolate the promoter of the high-affinity phosphate transporter gene from oil palm (EgPHT1) and to perform functional characterization using transgenic Arabidopsis and transient expression assay in oil palm tissues. The third objective was to study the effects of some exogenous signals and abiotic factors on the EgPHT1 promoter activity. Analysis of the isolated full-length EgPHT1 promoter region (1467 bp) using PLACE and PlantCARE databases revealed the presence of a number of putative cis-regulatory elements associated with response to Pi and various environmental and biotic-stress signals. Under Pi deprivation, excessive quartenary roots formation was observed and the GUS activity was induced to 5.5-fold higher compared to under Pi-sufficient condition in the transiently transformed oil palm roots but no activity was observed in the leaves. In transgenic Arabidopsis, 29-fold greater induction of GUS expression was observed in the Pi-starved roots with no activity in other tissues. Increasing the Pi concentration from 0 to 1250 μM resulted in reduction of the GUS activity from 9109 to 315.3 pmol/min/mg protein in the transgenic plants. As the duration of Pi starvation increased from 1 to 6 days, the GUS activity increased from 660 to 9091 pmol/min/mg protein. Increasing exogenous sucrose concentration from 0.1% to 3% elevated the GUS expression from 296 to 9151.3 pmol/min/mg protein under Pi deprivation. Glucose and fructose as metabolizable sugars could induce the promoter activity, but at low level. Pi deficient inducibilty of the promoter was maintained even under high salinity up to 100 mM. Application of IAA led to strong GUS expression, but BAP suppressed the expression under Pi deprivation. Finally, progressive 5ʹ-deletion analyses of the EgPHT1 promoter demonstrated that the region from - 690to -1 bp as the minimal promoter is sufficient to drive root- and Pi deprivation-specific expression in transgenic Arabidopsis. Deletion of the promoter region containing the P1BS element significantly reduced the promoter activity in the roots. The results also suggest the probable influenced of other positive/enhancer motifs such as W-box, G-box and E-box for maximal promoter activity. While the root-specific motifs ROOTMOTIFTAPOX1 and RAV1AAT BOX are critical for its root-specific activity.This is the first report on the high-affinity Pi transporter gene promoter of oil palm whose activity is induced exclusively in the root under low Pi. It contains the conserved elements for driving expression in both monocots and dicots and would be a potentially valuable candidate as a genetic engineering tool.


ABSTRACT IÇEMER., G.T., CAN, E., ATASOY, L AND YILDIRIM, U.B., 2011. The Effects of Yacht Activities on Sea Water Quality. In: Micallef, A. (ed.), MCRR3-2010 Conference Proceedings, Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue, No. 61, pp. 471. Grosseto, Tuscany, Italy, ISSN 0749-0208. Nowadays, in our country sea tourism become a popular and growing tourism trend. That's way researches of marine pollution and investigation of sea water quality come into prominence in these days. Marine tourism and yachting are common in Aegean Sea and Mediterranean Sea is the second place in popularity. In the Mediterranean zone, yacht tourism is more common in Antalya coast and lies down from Alanya to Kaş. Antalya - Phaselis - Olympos - Kekova and Kemer - Phaselis - Olympos ship's cruises are the most preferred ways and yacht tourism is done as daily tours or blue cruises in this zone. During the tours, yachts remove their rest and staying needs at the small bays in their cruises. The study area of this research is Phaselis, where daily yachts take meal break and charters stay for a few days. It is placed in the 70. km of Finike - Antalya highway and open to the visitors come from land with a 1,5 km way. There are three small bays at Phaselis ancient city (north, south and center bays). In the high level tourism season this bays are used intensively by yachts and people. As a result of this intense usage, water pollution is occurred. Sometimes, this pollution can't be assimilated and physical carrying capacity of water is exceeded. Yacht activities in the Bay cause pollution as air emissions, exhaust gases, anchors, solid wastes, shower water, sewage water and noise. The wastes, meal rests, plastic wastes, glasses which launched into the sea from yachts are big problem for the sea ecosystem. On the other hand, most of the wastewater which formed during daily tours is discharged to the sea. Some of the swimmers use sea as a toilette. In this study, the effects of yacht originated wastes to the sea water quality are investigated. For this purpose, water samples were collected by two weeks intervals and 5 times totally, from five different sampling points of the bay. Then samples are kept in a cold chain and physical, chemical and microbiological (Escherichia coli and Intestinal enterococcus) analyses were done at laboratory. On the other hand, three samples were taken from the shoreline at different times of day (morning, noon and evening) and microbiological parameters (Escherichia coli and Intestinal enterococcus) were analyzed daily during two weeks (one week in August and other in September). As a result of this study, it has seen that water quality is affected in a bad way because of this intensive usage. The nutrient quantity is not serious but there is a significant bacteriological pollution. To add, the bacteria count is not high in the morning but it increases during day in connection with the usage of sea by swimmers and yachts. For a sustainable use of this place everybody have to hold one's end of the bargain up. For this purpose, awareness of the people have to be raised, education must be given to people especially to the yachters. Physical carrying capacity of the bay must be determined and precautions should be taken to protect the bay from excess pollution


Metastasis is the primary cause resulting in the high mortality of breast cancer. The inherent antimetastasis bioactivity of Pluronic copolymers with a wide range of hydrophilic-lipophilic balance (HLB) including Pluronic L61, P85, P123, F127, F68, and F108 was first explored on metastatic 4T1 breast cancer cells. The results indicated that P85 and P123 could strongly inhibit the migration and invasion of 4T1 cells. The effects of the polymers on cell healing, migration, and invasion exhibited bell-shaped dependencies on HLB of Pluronic copolymers, and the better antimetastasis effects of Pluronic copolymers could be achieved with the HLB between 8 and 16. P85 and P123 themselves could significantly inhibit pulmonary metastasis in 4T1 mammary tumor metastasis model in situ. In addition, a synergetic antimetastasis effect could be achieved during drug combination of doxorubicin hydrochloride (DOX) and P85 or P123 intravenously. The metastasis effects of P85 and P123 both in vitro and in vivo were partially attributed to the downregulation of matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9). Therefore, Pluronic copolymers with moderate HLB 8-16 such as P85 and P123 could be promising excipients with therapeutics in drug delivery systems to inhibit breast cancer metastasis.


The theme of this paper is to design a real-time fuzzy target tracking control scheme for autonomous mobile robots by using infrared sensors. At first two mobile robots are setup in the target tracking problem, where one is the target mobile robot with infrared transmitters and the other one is the tracker mobile robot with infrared receivers and reflective sensors. The former is designed to drive in a specific trajectory. The latter is designed to track the target mobile robot. Then we address the design of the fuzzy target tracking control unit, which consists of a behavior network and a gate network. The behavior network possesses the fuzzy wall following control (FWFC) mode, fuzzy target tracking control (FTTC) mode, and two fixed control modes to deal with different situations in real applications. Both the FWFC and FTTC are realized by the fuzzy sliding-mode control scheme. A gate network is used to address the fusion of measurements of two infrared sensors and is developed to recognize which situation is belonged to and which action should be executed. Moreover, the target tracking control with obstacle avoidance is also investigated in this paper. Both computer simulations and real-time implementation experiments of autonomous target tracking control demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed control schemes.


Solitary plasmacytoma is a disease included in plasma cell dyscrasias, presenting outside of the bone marrow, and with the potential to turn into multiple myeloma. A 66-year male patient was admitted to the hematology clinic with the complaint of impaired taste. Physical examination revealed edema of the left pharynx. After excisional tissue biopsy, serum/urine protein electrophoresis, and immunofixation tests of the patient diagnosed with plasmacytoma were negative. An increase in atypical plasma cells was noted on bone marrow aspiration and biopsy. There was no systemic involvement outside the pharynx on the PET-CT examination. He was referred to the radiotherapy department for further management. Since the affected area is frequently the nasopharynx, sinuses, and larynx in extramedullary solitary plasmacytoma cases, they generally presented to the clinic with difficulty in swallowing, shortness of breath and pain symptoms. This case presented with a non-specific complaint of taste disturbance along with difficulty in swallowing. Key Words: Plasmacytoma, Nasopharynx, Multiple myeloma.


The contribution highlights certain core elements which inform the context within which social protection and labour law protection in the SADC (i.e. the Southern African Development Community) region is bound to operate. Given the inadequate social protection and labour law protection in the SADC region, the article suggests that responses at both regional (SADC) and country level are needed, and investigates some of the distinct and innovative developments in the region which potentially form the basis for fostering social protection. It examines different possibilities for the coordination of social security measures in SADC, bearing in mind experiences elsewhere, stressing in particular the possibility of adopting an international or regional minimum standards and human rights baseline approach for purposes of social security coordination in the region and the strengthening of social and labour law protection in the SADC region.


In this letter, a multichannel decision-directed approach to estimate the speech power spectral density (PSD) matrix for multichannel speech enhancement is proposed. There have been attempts to build multichannel speech enhancement filters which depend only on the speech and noise PSD matrices, for which the accurate estimate of the clean speech PSD matrix is crucial for a successful noise reduction. In contrast to the maximum likelihood estimator which has been applied conventionally, the proposed decision-directed method is capable of tracking the time-varying speech characteristics more robustly and improves the noise reduction performance under various noise environments.


Sedimentary and photogrammetric analysis of a sector of Cadiz Bay (SW Spain), including the intertidal zone onthe left bank of the Rio San Pedro tidal channel, were performed to understand its environmental evolution andthe main factors that controled it. The study of this especially vulnerable environment has allowed to establishits depositional and morphological responses to the dynamic processes caused by recent environmental orclimate changes. In the bank of the Rio San Pedro tidal channel, there is a well-developed saltmarsh, whichalternates with sandy beaches the data indicate erosional processes. The saltmarsh retreat rate was estimated in0.65m/yr from 1977 to 2008. In this time-period, the tidal channel experienced a lateral displacement towardthe SE of 1.24m/yr, and the beach width decreased from 50 to 21m. Three evolutionary stages were established:a youth stage, represented by a relatively high water energy beach environments; a maturity stage: representedby saltmarsh with deposition of mud and halophyte vegetation; a reactivation stage: represented by erosivefeatures in the saltmarsh, such as tidal pools, tidal channel, etc. The geological location of Cadiz, close tothe Eurasian–African plate boundary, account for its relatively high seismic and tsunami activity, that causedsignificant depositional changes in the area. Others important factors controlling the sedimentation are: firstthe tides, followed by the waves and the proximity to a sand source, such as the sandy mantle of La Algaida.


2577 Molecular dissection of chromosome translocations has identified many genes important to the cause or progression of leukemia. Aside from their diagnostic and prognostic value, the identification of these genes is critical to our understanding of the molecular pathways of leukemogenesis and a necessary precedent to the design of targeted, less toxic treatments. However, the genetic basis of up to 40% of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) cases remains unknown. We hypothesize that novel chromosome translocations may mark the location of genes potentially rearranged more frequently by cryptic submicroscopic mechanisms in leukemia patients. We have targeted the breakpoints of a novel t(5;10)(q22;q24) translocation found as the sole abnormality in the leukemic cells of a 59 year old male with ALL. Our positional cloning efforts using a combination of fluorescent in situ hybridization, large-insert bacterial-, yeast- and P1-artificial chromosome (BAC, YAC, PAC) clones, end-sequencing, in silico analyses, leukemic t(5;10) metaphase studies, custom PCR analyses and Southern hybridization studies of patient DNA, have mapped the 10q24 breakpoint to a 700 bp genomic region, physically disrupting UniGene Hs.500667 which encodes a novel RNA transcript. Using RACE and Northern blot analyses we have confirmed the unique transcriptional activity of Hs.500667, a novel gene now newly implicated in this case of ALL. Chromosome 5 sequences abnormally fused to Hs.500667, disrupt its normal transcription and unknown function, and potentially links it to the etiology of this ALL. In addition, Hs.500667 overlaps the promoter of the deoxynucleotidyltransferase terminal (DNTT) gene and transcribes in the opposite direction of, and from within, DNTT intron 1, suggesting a possible coordinated regulation or shared promoter between Hs.500667 and DNTT. The breakpoint site within Hs.500667 is less than 5 kb centromeric of DNTT and only 27 kb telomeric of the B-cell linker protein (BLNK) gene, in a tightly regulated genomic region directly involved in lymphocyte development that has not previously been associated with leukemia. This translocation likely causes or contributes to the genetic basis of this ALL and may still prove to generate a fusion gene and/or deregulate the transcription of DNTT. Suspicions have previously focused on DNTT which exhibits abnormal activity in many leukemias, but this remains to be explained and the genomic evidence has so far been absent. Any deregulation of DNTT is likely to have major downstream effects, as this gene is expressed stage-specifically in lymphoid cells and encodes terminal deoxynucleotidyltransferase (TdT), the enzymatic component of a recombinase complex essential for N-region antibody diversity in V(D)J recombination and which is active in double strand break repair.


Detection and mitigation of radio frequency interference (RFI) is the first and also the key step for data processing in radio observations, especially for ongoing low frequency radio experiments towards the detection of the cosmic dawn and epoch of reionization (EoR). In this paper we demonstrate the technique and efficiency of RFI identification and mitigation for the 21 Centimeter Array (21CMA), a radio interferometer dedicated to the statistical measurement of EoR. For terrestrial, man-made RFI, we concentrate mainly on a statistical approach by identifying and then excising non-Gaussian signatures, in the sense that the extremely weak cosmic signal is actually buried under thermal and therefore Gaussian noise. We also introduce the so-called visibility correlation coefficient instead of conventional visibility, which allows a further suppression of rapidly time-varying RFI. Finally, we briefly discuss removals of the sky RFI, the leakage of sidelobes from off-field strong radio sources with time-invariant power and a featureless spectrum. It turns out that state of the art technique should allow us to detect and mitigate RFI to a satisfactory level in present low frequency interferometer observations such as those acquired with the 21CMA, and the accuracy and efficiency can be greatly improved with the employment of low-cost, high-speed computing facilities for data acquisition and processing.


Scala is an object-oriented programming language for the Java VirtualMachine. In addition to being object-oriented, Scala is also afunctional language, and combines the best approaches to OO andfunctional programming.In Italian, Scala means a stairway, or steps. Indeed, Scala lets you step up to a programming environment that incorporates some of the best recent thinking in programming language design while also letting youuse all your existing Java code.Artima is very pleased to publish a new edition of the best-sellingbook on Scala, written by the designer of the language, Martin Odersky.Co-authored by Lex Spoon and Bill Venners, this book takes astep-by-step tutorial approach to teaching you Scala. Starting with thefundamental elements of the language, Programming in Scala introducesfunctional programming from the practitioner's perspective, anddescribes advanced language features that can make you a better, moreproductive developer.


Recently, environmental concerns and issues have become great concerns for the public. Therefore, this study is conducted with the objective of preventing energy depletion and emission. PCM (Phase Change Materials) having latent heat characteristic is mixed in mortar to find a proper mix proportion. Also, the mortar properties and performances as well as a melting point of PCM when applied to air conditioning and heating conditions in at building environments were obtained by performing experiments. Also, latent heat and heat transfer characteristics were obtained from experiments by test of thermal performance to formulate temperature gradient about amount of heat transfer of PCM content using the Fourier`s thermal equation. The study results can be used in the application of PCM in buildings and expected effect of air conditioning and heating energy.


This paper proposes a new method for view-invariant action recognition that utilizes the temporal position of skeletal joints obtained by Kinect sensor. In this method, the actions are represented as sequences of several pre-defined poses. After pre-processing, which includes skeleton alignment and scaling, the appropriate feature vectors are obtained for recognizing and discriminating the pose of every frame by the proposed Fisherposes method. The proposed regularized Mahalanobis distance metric is used in order to recognize both the involuntary and highly made-up actions at the same time. Hidden Markov model (HMM) is then used to classify the action related to an input sequence of poses. For taking into account the motion in the actions which are not separable by solely their temporal poses, histograms of trajectories are also proposed. The proposed action recognition method is capable of recognizing both the voluntary and involuntary actions, as well as pose-based and trajectory-based ones with a high accuracy rate. The effectiveness of the proposed method is experimented on three publicly available data sets, TST fall detection, UTKinect, and UCFKinect data sets.


Children's refraction and its progression are important because refractive errors can be precisely corrected. Some types of simple ametropia can generate reversible perturbations after optical correction and others are amblyogenic and strabogenic ametropia. Definition, epidemiology (frequency and risk factors), progression of refraction, evaluation and an optical correction method are described.


This study examined the effects of professional development integrating academic literacy and biology instruction on science teachers' instructional practices and students' achievement in science and literacy. The intervention consisted of 10 days of professional development in Reading Apprenticeship, an instructional framework integrating metacognitive inquiry routines into subject-area instruction to make explicit the tacit reasoning processes, problem-solving strategies, and textual features that shape literacy practices in academic disciplines. The study utilized a group-randomized, experimental design and multiple measures of teacher implementation and student learning and targeted groups historically unrepresented in the sciences. Hierarchical linear modeling procedures were used to estimate program impacts. Intervention teachers demonstrated increased support for science literacy learning and use of metacognitive inquiry routines, reading comprehension instruction, and collaborative learning structures compared to controls. Students in treatment classrooms performed better than controls on state standardized assessments in English language arts, reading comprehension, and biology.


Transforming growth factor beta (TGF-β) induced myofibroblast differentiation is central to the pathological scarring observed in Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) and other fibrotic diseases. Our lab has recently identified expression of GPR68 (Ovarian Cancer Gene Receptor 1, OGR1), a pH sensing G-protein coupled receptor, as a negative regulator of TGF-β induced profibrotic effects in primary human lung fibroblasts (PHLFs). We therefore hypothesized that small molecule activators of GPR68 would inhibit myofibroblast differentiation. Ogerin is a positive allosteric modulator (PAM) of GPR68, inducing a leftward shift of the dose response curve to proton induced signaling. Using PHLFs derived from patients with both non-fibrotic and IPF diagnoses, we show that Ogerin inhibits, and partially reverses TGF-β induced myofibroblast differentiation in a dose dependent manner. This occurs at the transcriptional level without inhibition of canonical TGF-β induced SMAD signaling. Ogerin induces PKA dependent CREB phosphorylation, a marker of Gαs pathway activation. The ability of Ogerin to inhibit both basal and TGF-β induced collagen gene transcription, and induction of Gαs signaling is enhanced at an acidic pH (pH 6.8). Similar findings were also found using fibroblasts derived from dermal, intestinal, and orbital tissue. The biological role of GPR68 in different tissues, cell types, and disease states is an evolving and emerging field. This work adds to the understanding of Gαs coupled GPCRs in fibrotic lung disease, the ability to harness the pH sensing properties of GPR68, and conserved mechanisms of fibrosis across different organ systems.


The differential diagnosis of focal liver lesions (FLL) frequently presents a dilemma, as FLL cannot be reliably characterized with conventional ultrasound. Recently, ultrasound contrast agents (UCA) and contrast-specific imaging methods have substantially improved the characterization of FLL. This was made possible by the known differences in dynamic vascular patterns (DVP) between healthy parenchyma and various FLL types, revealed by UCA. The purpose of this work was to develop a new method, called DVP processing, which provides a DVP-enhanced imaging mode of FLL using contrast ultrasound; this mode allows an improved differentiation of benign from malignant lesions. DVP processing consists in generating a sequence of images, where hyper-echoic and hypo- echoic pixels, compared to reference levels taken in healthy parenchyma, are coded over time in warm and cold colors, respectively. For example, a benign lesion remains hyper-echoic over time, while a malignant lesion is hyper-echoic in the arterial phase and turns into hypo-echoic in the portal phase. This method was implemented as an image-processing software program, which was the object of clinical evaluation. Sequences of 111 FLL were acquired with real-time low-MI contrast- specific ultrasound after a 2.5-mL bolus injection of SonoVuetrade, and subsequently analyzed off-fine with DVP processing. The sensitivity and specificity achieved by two clinical observers in this way were 92%, and 86%, respectively. These results reflect a significant improvement over accuracy scores achieved with contrast-enhanced ultrasound alone, having resulted in 93% and 82% in sensitivity and specificity, respectively.


As HIV-related behavioral research moves increasingly in the direction of seeking to determine predictors of high-risk sexual behavior, more efficient methods of specifying patterns are needed. Two statistical techniques, homogeneity analysis and latent class analysis, useful in scaling binary multivariate data profiles are presented. Both were used to analyze reported sexual behavior patterns in two samples of homosexually active men, one sample of 343 primarily White gay men attending an HIV workshop and one sample of 837 African American gay men recruited nationally. Results support the existence of a single, nonlinear, latent dimension underlying male homosexual behaviors consistent with HIV-related risk taking. Both statistical methods provide an efficient means to optimally scale sexual behavior patterns, a critical outcome variable in HIV-related research.


Composting is a proven technology for releasing the economic value of kitchen wastes. Following our previous efforts to expand and modify a novel, pilot-scale two-stage oxidative-reductive treatment technology for future implementation as a full-scale tower system, the objective of this work was to examine this scrubber tower system using the optimal operational scenario observed in our previous bench-scale experiments and with two different scrubbing liquid flow rates to allow for its subsequent application at full-scale. As the pH values ranged from 4.0 to 6.0 and from 10.0 to 11.5 in the acidic and alkaline scrubbers, respectively, and the total chlorine concentration ranged from 10 to 95 mg/L as Cl in the acidic scrubber, odor control treatment efficiencies of more than 95% were observed using this treatment technology. A slightly enhanced performance was obtained when a lower scrubbing liquid flow rate being employed, possibly due to the additional contact time between the scrubbing liquids and odor-causing substances in the composting gases. Although a higher scrubbing liquid flow rate increased the possibility of leaking chlorine into the treated gases, which affected the performance of this technology, stronger pH variation and chlorine consumption at the lower scrubbing liquid flow rate indicated the importance of controlling sufficient levels of scrubbing liquid in the system to maintain the treatment efficiency. The results provided insights regarding the use of this treatment technology for minimizing the adverse impacts associated with kitchen waste composting, including the emission of substances that may cause health and/or environmental concerns.


Oil palm development is a major subject in controversies over sustainable agriculture. Economic benefits are very high due to the crop characteristics and its impact on smallholder development and economic growth. Producer countries have targeted oil palm expansion to meet national and global demands for food and energy. However, oil palm development also has considerable environmental costs in the form of deforestation, loss of biodiversity and greenhouse gas emissions. In this article, the concept of sustainable pathways is used to describe how sustainability issues are being addressed in three different countries: Indonesia, Colombia and Cameroon.