This study seeks to assess the career readiness of Office Technology and Management students in polytechnics in Anambra, Ebonyi and Enugu state. Career readiness is a measure of the extent to which the OTM students possess the skills and attitudes needed for advancing in their career path. The career readiness of the students was measured using six indicators; office skills, managerial skills, entrepreneurial skills, ICT skills, communication skills and socio-psychological skills. The study employed a survey research design and polytechnics offering OTM in Anambra, Ebonyi and Enugu state were selected for the study. Seven research questions and three hypotheses guided the study, 179 HND II students offering OTM constituted the population, and no sample was taken because of the manageable size of the population. Structured questionnaire was used for data collection. The instrument was structured on a five point scale, type in line with the indicators for measuring the career readiness of the OTM students. The instrument was face validated and trial tested on 35 OTM students from Imo State Polytechnic, Umuagwo and a reliability coefficient of 0.95 was obtained. The instrument was administered to the respondents and data collected was analysed accordingly. Mean was used to answer research question 1 to 6 while research question 7 was computed using the Arowolo & Ede (2012) modified formula for computing readiness index. Hypothesis 1 and 2 were tested using t-test at .05 level of significance while hypothesis 3 was tested using ANOVA at .05 level of significance. The findings of the study showed a low career readiness index of 2.43 for the OTM students in the Polytechnics in Anambra, Ebonyi and Enugu State. The indicators for measuring career readiness showed that the students are lacking in office skills, managerial skills, entrepreneurial skills and communication skills but rated very high in ICT skills and socio-psychological skills. The low career readiness index has great implication for OTM programme in south east Nigeria and it justifies the opinion in many researches that graduates of the Nigerian higher education institutions are not employable. The study reveals that much of what is done in the classroom are mere theoretical rather than practical. It was therefore recommended among others that the polytechnics should strengthen their partnership with industry for work based training of their students and a re-evaluation of the programme should be conducted to ascertain the possible strategies for effective teaching and learning of office technology and management courses. CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION Background of the Study Career choice has been the major content of vocatio nal advocacy. However, preparedness to take advantage of the openings in t he area of career choice is more important than the mere choice of a career. To develop a care er is a lifetime process encompassing the growth and change processes of childhood, through f ormal education at school throughout a person's working adulthood and into retirement. Car eer development occurs through life and it is enhanced by lifelong learning. The term caree r as defined by Herr, Cramer and Niles (2004) is a sequence of interaction of individuals with society, education and organisations throughout their lifespan. A career can be defined as a pattern of work experiences comprising the entire life span of a person and whi ch is generally seen with regard to a number of phases or stages reflecting the transitio fr m one stage of life to the next (Weinert, 2001). Similarly, Collin (1998) explains that the term career arises from the interaction of individuals with organisations and s ociety. This interaction, as Savickas (2009) proposes, is no longer merely just a sequence of jo bs but is now a story or an identity that working people build about themselves. Developing a career is as complex as personality de velopment, which is not just a one shot event. Developing a career is not just a decis ion that takes place at the entry point to a job, but it involves the totality of an individual' s psychological, sociological, and educational events which eventually results into occupational c hoi e and other life roles. The quality of this career development significantly determines th e nature and quality of individuals' lives: the kind of people they become, the sense of purpos e they have, the income at their disposal.


Abstract An urgent forecasting problem is attacked utilizing the hypothesis that parameters relating to operationally significant weather cannot be generalized in space and time, nor in terms of a "pure physics" abstracted and removed from geographical realities. Forecasting criteria are viewed as discoverable and valid only with respect to experience at specific times and places. The empirical approach discloses an anomaly wherein drier evening air sometimes represents more of a fog hazard than does more saturated air. It also suggests a fog forecasting tool not in general use: streamline analysis, with emphasis on the hyperbolic point preceding a cold front in low latitudes. An objective aid for Miami International Airport tailored to local realities yields, on independent data, higher skill scores than are shown on the corresponding regularly published subjective forecasts.


The dermal collagen fibrils and the fibrils of the extraocular muscles and the conjunctivas of both eyes of a child afflicted with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) were studied ultrastructurally. The results were evaluated statistically. Biopsy material was used in all instances. The collagen fibrils from all involved tissues showed a high percentage of size variation. Abnormalities of shape were noted. In the reticular dermis, 48% of fibrils were of normal diameter, 23% were enlarged, and 29% were thinner than normal. In the extraocular muscles, 77% were of normal size, 14.5% were larger, and 8.5% were smaller. In the conjunctivas, 73% of fibrils were normal-sized, 22% were enlarged, and 5% were of small diameter. No small-sized fibrils were encountered in control extraocular muscles.


Scholars of color in white majority universities inhabit a zone of alterity, which forces them to make strategic choices about how they perform. Tactical essentialism is an alternative to the dichotomous ideologies of static and fluid ontologies. Rather than allowing oneself to be caught in the double bind between performing whiteness and resisting white supremacy, a tactical form of essentialism recognizes that identity is fluid, yet simultaneously linked materially to lived-empirical experience. By recognizing that the dichotomy can be complementary, the tactical subject intentionally engages in performances of identity that can be leveraged to decolonize merit in the ivory tower.


The Pontecorvo theory describes neutrinos as linear combinations of mass eigenstates. In this paper, we prove that this construction is incompatible with Poincar\'{e}-covariant quantum field theory unless all the mass eigenstates are identical where there are no flavor oscillations. The theory pioneered by Blasone and Vitiello provides a possible description of massive neutrinos as generalized coherent flavor eigenstates via Bogoliubov transformations within the extended Standard Model. In this paper, we compute the neutron $\beta$ decay spectrum using the Blasone-Vitiello theory with two neutrinos and found that in the relativistic limit, the result is in agreement with the Standard Model. An important feature is that the decay has contributions from $n\rightarrow p^{+}+e^{-}+\overline{\nu}_{e}$ and $n\rightarrow p^{+}+e^{-}+\overline{\nu}_{\mu}$. We show that the contribution from the latter flavor-violating process is a consequence of neutrino oscillations.


A new methodology is described for rapidly determining the herbicide oryzalin in water, citrus fruits, and stone fruits by liquid chromatography with negative ion electrospray ionization tandem mass spectrometry (LC/MS/MS). Oryzalin is extracted from water using a polymeric sorbent solid phase extraction (SPE) column and from fruit using methanol. The water samples require no further purification, but an aliquot of the fruit sample extracts is diluted with water and purified using a polymeric 96 well SPE plate. Purified extracts are concentrated prior to determination by LC/MS/MS at m/z 345 (Q1) and m/z 281 (Q3) using an external standard for calibration. The validated limits of quantitation were 0.05 microg/L in water (drinking water, surface water, and groundwater) and 0.01 microg/g in citrus fruits (oranges and lemons) and stone fruits (peaches and cherries). Recoveries averaged 102% for water samples and 85-89% for the various types of fruit samples. For all fortification levels combined, the relative standard deviations ranged from 4 to 6% for water and from 2 to 4% for fruit.


This paper details a system to assist with the evaluation and administration of student assignments. In order to help with the evaluation of program execution, the system automatically compiles and executes the program while logging a copy of the session. This log, together with the code and documentation is then bundled into an e-mail which is sent to the course controller.The course controller automatically processes the e-mail, verifying it's authenticity, and sends an acknowledgement back to the student. The controller also automatically logs the submission in a database which is used to monitor student performance throughout the year. Additional facilities are provided to allow grades for the assignments to be entered into the database, to allow students to be excused from assignments if appropriate and to allow summary reports to be generated.


Despite their invasive nature, interstitial techniques remain a useful treatment for unresectable or deep-seated tumours. In the digestive endoscopy field, tumours around the biliary ducts induce stenoses. This study was a preliminary step to evaluate the feasibility of using a rotating plane interstitial ultrasound transducer for ablation of malignant tissues in vivo. The applicator active part consisted of a water-cooled plane rotating transducer, 3/spl times/10 mm. Experiments were carried out on Dunning tumours (AT/sub 2/ subline) implanted subcutaneously on abdomen of rats. All the control rats died of tumour growth or were sacrificed 15 days after the treatment date. An immediate tumour decrease occurred in all treated animals. 44% of the exposed rats were still alive without a tumoral trace 60 days after treatment. A local tumour recurrence was observed on 25% of the animals after 5 days. The last rats seemed to be cured, but a tumour appeared finally away from the implantation site 10 days after treatment demonstrating the difficulties during the tumour implantation. These experiments showed the short term efficiency of a plane rotating transducer and its possibility to destroy tumours. An MRI-guided therapy should allow one to reduce the long term failure.


BACKGROUND
A chemical-induced, nonlethal, dissecting aortic aneurysm (DAA) is described following in utero exposure to semicarbazide, an inhibitor of the vascular enzyme semicarbazide sensitive amine oxidase (SSAO).

METHODS
Sprague-Dawley rat dams were given semicarbazide (0.096-49.000 mg/kg/day) by IP injection on gestation days (GDs) 14-20, a period of rapid aortic development. Newborn rats (day 1) were killed and their thoracic organs were removed en bloc for near-serial cross sections and routine histopathology, Movat stain for elastin, and immunohistochemistry to differentiate cells involved in the evolution of the DAA. In subsequent experiments, pups from treated dams (0.096-6.125 mg/kg/day) were allowed to survive for 7 or 28 days.

RESULTS
DAA occurred in nearly 100% of the rats at all doses except the lowest tested (1.530, 0.096 mg/kg/day). Dissections frequently extended to the carotids and, less frequently, to the abdominal aorta. Remodeling of vascular lesions proceeded by organization of collections of blood in vascular media (the "false lumen"), proliferation of vascular smooth muscle cells, fibrosis, and formation of irregular frayed elastic lamellae in healed vascular media. Biochemical quantitation and Western blot analysis of main extracellular matrix proteins on GD 20 showed no overt difference in expression of collagen type I, fibrillin-1, or elastin.

CONCLUSION
This developmental model provides investigators an opportunity to explore the pathologic mechanisms of DAA and to examine the potential long-term effects of vascular remodeling of DAA.


The excitable nature of a biological cell is manifested in the many voltage gated ion channels that perforate its membrane. The forms of the associated ionic currents, and in particular the functions that govern their kinetics, permit one to distinguish, electrophysiologically, between various cell types. We show, in the context of FitzHugh-Nagumo and Morris-Lecar models and without recourse to voltage or space clamping, that such currents and kinetics may be stably inferred from a cell's voltage response to a specified input current.


Abstract Object markers in Bantu languages have commonly been analysed as either agreement morphemes or incorporated pronouns. This paper documents a number of empirical facts concerning object marking in Manyika (chiShona), showing that the distribution of object marking does not fit the predictions of either the agreement or pronominalisation accounts. Specifically, we show that doubling of the object marker and the noun phrase object is in principle possible, but is constrained in a number of instances by the information structure status of the object. This paper therefore makes two distinct claims: first, Manyika object markers (and perhaps other object markers in Bantu languages) ought to be analysed under the rubric of clitics, rather than as agreement morphemes or incorporated pronouns. Second, we claim that the constraints on clitic-doubling are not dependably syntactic in nature; instead, co-occurrence of an object marker and an object is licensed (or not) based on whether the object is in a non-focus domain.


In the present work, an innovative hybrid solar panel is proposed, which can be used to pave floors or to cover roofs. A particular heat sink is employed, which gives robustness to the panel and provides a better heat transfer effectiveness with respect to tube heat exchangers. The geometry of the heat sink which is employed in the panel is optimized with the help of a numerical model and a genetic algorithm. Some optimization examples are shown. The velocity and temperature distributions on the heat sink cross section are also investigated. The presented hybrid panel allows till 20% increase in the electrical efficiency with respect to a simple photovoltaic panel. Moreover, it can be easily installed under every environmental condition due to its robustness and resistance to water infiltration.


ZigBee is a standard that is suitable for wireless sensor networks. In ZigBee, sensor nodes can be connected by a tree topology called Distributed Address Assignment Mechanism (DAAM). It has the merits as follows: 1) it is easy to implement; 2) it simplifies the task of routing. It restricts the number of children and the depth of the network by setting a topological parameter set, which is defined as a topological policy in this paper. While there are many different kinds of geographical distributions, DAAM can have only one topological policy. If the policy in DAAM is unsuitable for the geographical deployment, the utilization of the address pool is very low. Thus, in spite that there is a large address space, some devices cannot join the sensor networks. To overcome the problem, this paper proposes Enhanced Distributed Address Assignment Scheme (EDAAS) based on DAAM; it can separate the node distribution into several simpler elements which can have their own topological policies. The evaluation shows that it can manage address space with more flexibility by using an additional storage.


The Pastoral Care of Souls in Southeast France During the Sixth Century. By HENRY G. J. BECK. Vol. LI of Analecta Gregoriana. Rome, 1950. LXXII; 414 pages. This study is a model of clarity because it sticks to its subject in orderly fashion. Definition of the subject is made inductively (p. XIV). The geographical area covered roughly describes a right triangle whose angles are Aries, Lyons, and Nice. The thirty dioceses in this region are marked on a clearly-drawn map (p. XII). Had the author intended to play up to reader interest he could hardly have done better than select A. D. 500-600, a century of "greats" and (in Duckett's phrase) the gateway to the Middle Ages. Pp. XXIII-XLVIII contain a list of "sources" and "Vitae Sanctorum", whose value is much enhanced by annotations. Pp. XLIX-LXXII list a bibliography of secondary works whose value would have been enhanced by annotations.


Polyoxometalate (POM) chemistry is an important avenue of comprehensive chemical research, due to the broad chemical, topological and structural variations of multinuclear polyoxoanions that result in advanced functionality of their derivatives. the majority of compounds in the polyoxometalate kingdom are synthesized under laboratory conditions. However, Nature has its own labs with the conditions often unconceivable to the mankind. The striking example of such a unique environment is volcanic fumaroles – the natural factories of gas-transport synthesis. We herein report on the discovery of a novel class of complex polyoxocuprates grown in the hot active fumaroles of the Tolbachik volcano at the Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia. The cuboctahedral nanoclusters {[ M cu 12 o 8 ](AsO 4 ) 8 } are stabilized by the core Fe(III) or Ti(IV) cations residing in the unique cubic coordination. The nanoclusters are uniformly dispersed over the anion- and cation-deficient NaCl matrix. Our discovery might have promising implications for synthetic chemistry, indicating the possibility of preparation of complex polyoxocuprates by chemical vapor transport (CVT) techniques that emulate formation of minerals in high-temperature volcanic fumaroles.


Existing context services mostly support context-aware applications inside a closed, tightly-scoped environment. In order to provide a user with real pervasive computing experiences, a context service must be able to support roaming applications across different environments. We propose a global context infrastructure to address this issue. We discuss the general architecture of the context infrastructure and the design of the context service in one local environment, which is based on a context flow language and the corresponding run-time environment.


The author analyzes the origins of interest towards philosophical issues the book and library scientists and researcher bibliographers take. The need for more close interaction between philosophy and the library and information science in the circumstances of transition from information society to knowledge society and digital economy is substantiated. The process of cognitive institutionalization of philosophical knowledge in the library and information science is examined. The author analyzes several works by Arkady V. Sokolov on the content and specific features of bibliosophy as a philosophical system focused on biblioshere within the historical context. The key functions of philosophical knowledge are discussed as related to library and information science which enables rationalizing and reliable, accurate and relevant assessment of multiple and unique processes and phenomena in this disciplines. The focus is made on the worldview, ontological, gnoseological, methodological and axiological functions. The authors emphasizes the role of philosophy in developing conceptual, theoretical, logical and methodological structures for serious study of bibliosphere and its rational perception as one of the fundamental cultural segments


Little is known about how emotion recognition and empathy jointly operate in youth growing up in contexts defined by persistent adversity. We investigated whether adversity exposure in two groups of youth was associated with reduced empathy and whether deficits in emotion recognition mediated this association. Foster, rural poor, and comparison youth from Swaziland, Africa identified emotional expressions and rated their empathic concern for characters depicted in images showing positive, ambiguous, and negative scenes. Rural and foster youth perceived greater anger and happiness in the main characters in ambiguous and negative images than did comparison youth. Rural children also perceived less sadness. Youth's perceptions of sadness in the negative and ambiguous expressions mediated the relation between adversity and empathic concern, but only for the rural youth, who perceived less sadness, which then predicted less empathy. Findings provide new insight into processes that underlie empathic tendencies in adversity-exposed youth and highlight potential directions for interventions to increase empathy.


In this paper, we proposed the new structure of the Rake Finger using Walsh Switch, the shared accumulator, and the pipeline FWHT(Fast Walsh Hadamard Transform) algorithm for reducing the signal processing complexity resulting from the increase of the number of data correlators. The function simulation of the proposed architecture is performed by Synopsys tool and the timing simulation is performed by Compass tool. The number of computational operation in the proposed data correlators is 160 additions and the conventional ones is 512 additions when the number of walsh code channels is 4. As a result, it is reduced about 3.2 times other than the number of computational operation of the conventional ones. Also, the result shows that the data processing time of the proposed Rake Finger architecture is 90,496[ns] and the conventional ones is 110,696[ns]. It is 18.3% faster than the data processing time of the conventional Rake Finger architecture.


The myriad debates on restitution and memory, which have been going on in Europe for decades, indicate that World War II never ended. It is still very much with us, paradoxically re-invoked by the events of 1989/90 and the expansion of Europe to the east in the aftermath of the collapse of communism and economic globalization. The growing privatization and reprivatization in Eastern Europe revive pre-war memories that lay buried under the blanket of collectivization and nationalization of property after 1945. World War II did not only result in the death and destruction on a large scale but also in an a far-reaching revolution of existing property relations. This volume offers an assessment of the problematic of restitution and its close interconnection with the discourses of memory that have recently emerged.


Airborne, high-spectral resolution, thermal-infrared (TIR) MIRACO/sub 2/LAS reflectance data were evaluated for mapping surface mineralogy and scattering behavior for a variety of semi-arid, geological test sites in Australia. MIRACO/sub 2/LAS is a rapidly tuned, airborne CO/sub 2/ laser system that measures backscattered (bidirectional) reflectance at 100 wavelengths between 9.1 and 11.2 /spl mu/m for 2-m footprints in line profile mode. An operational methodology is described that permits reduction of the raw airborne signal-to-ground reflectance. This ground reflectance has two major properties, namely, wavelength-dependent mineralogical variations and reflection albedo variations related to surface roughness. Comparisons between the airborne MIRACO/sub 2/LAS spectra and laboratory directional hemispherical reflectance (DHR) spectra show the same spectral shapes, though differences in average reflectance (albedo) occur for some types of rocks. The minerals identified using MIRACO/sub 2/LAS include silicates (for example, quartz, microcline, plagiodase, almandine, spessartine, talc, tremolite, and kaolinite) and carbonates (dolomite and magnesite) as well as vegetation (dry and green). Many of the diagnostic spectral features that allow identification of these materials are narrow (<0.2 /spl mu/m), making them difficult to detect with broadband TIR systems, like the airborne TIMS and satelliteborne ASTER. Based on an empirical relationship between the minimum and maximum reflectance established using laboratory DHR spectra, a method is proposed that allows the use of MIRACO/sub 2/LAS data to identify surfaces that are characterized by Lambertian or specular scattering. The MIRACO/sub 2/LAS results show that Lambertian-type scatterers include soils and many types of isotropic rocks.


The object reduction approach is applied to the (2+1)-dimensional Boiti-Leon-Pempielli system using a special conditional similarity reduction. Abundant exact solutions of this system, including the hyperboloid function solutions, the trigonometric function solutions and a rational function solution, are obtained.


: Three new catalysts based on the silica gel supported polyether ionic liquids (ILs), i.e., [HO-PECH-MIM]Cl-Si, [H 2 N-PECH-MIM]Cl-Si, and [HOOC-PECH-MIM]Cl-Si, were prepared, and their chemical structures were characterized by infrared (IR) spectroscopy and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Thermogravimetric analyzer (TG), X-ray diffractometer (XRD) and scanning electron microscope (SEM) were used to evaluate their thermal stability, crystalline structure and apparent morphology, respectively. Surface areas of the prepared catalysts were calculated by the Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET) method. The catalytic reaction for the synthesis of propylene carbonate (PC) using CO 2 and propylene oxide (PO) in the presence of the prepared catalysts was studied. The influences of times of recycling and catalyst structure on catalytic performance were also investigated. The experimental results showed that the silica gel supported polyether ILs catalysts successfully prepared under mild condition could possess the advantages of high activity, excellent thermal stability, good selectivity and easy recycling, while the phase transition of the liquid polyether ILs catalysts was also achieved. When the reaction temperature was 90 °C, the CO 2 pressure was 2.0 MPa and the dosage of the catalyst was 2.5%, [HOOC-PECH-MIM]Cl-Si was found to have the best catalytic performance in the catalytic process, with the conversion rate reaching 100% and the selectivity equating to 98.2%. The conversion rate and selectivity still could reach more than 90% even after the catalyst was reused for 15 times.


An evaluation of Bluetooth positioning in a general positioning platform is presented. The evaluation a Bluetooth based positioning system was implemented in order to complement the theoretical evaluation with empirical tests. Three different ways of positioning with Bluetooth have been developed. With a registered positioning service, a Bluetooth device has an active role in the positioning task, where a connected device to look up respective position in a database uses the unique address of the device. It is also possible to forward a position gained from the positioning platforms using the peer-to-peer characteristics in Bluetooth. The theoretical time requirements for a positioning system based on Bluetooth are discussed. Empirical tests show that these requirements hold.


The digital elevation model and the earthquake focal mechanism are utilized to define the geological structure of the Pho Lu area, northwestern Vietnam. The results allow the identification of lineaments and recognition of the correlation between the lineaments and geological structures directed in the study area. The digital elevation model (DEM) was used in the methodology of interpretation trends of lineaments derived from various enhancing techniques to show that the most lineament trend in the NW‒ SE direction. Further more, the interpreted lineament map demonstrates the NW‒SE system is correlated with the Red River fault zone, which is interpreted as a positive flower structure combined with the focal mechanism of earthquake. The results also demonstrate the capacity to used the digital elevation model and focal mechanism of the earthquake to identify deep geological structures.

http://jmes.humg.edu.vn/images/paper/2021/62_3/09. Khuong The Hung. 75 - 86.pdf


Understanding factors that affect the persistence of charismatic megafauna in human‐dominated landscapes is crucial to inform conservation decision‐making and reduce human‐wildlife conflict. We assessed the effect of environmental and anthropogenic factors at different landscape and management scales in predicting the distribution of African elephant (Loxodonta africana) within the Greater Mapungubwe Transfrontier Conservation Area in Southern Africa. We combined aerial distribution counts over a 12‐yr period with 14 variables, representing food availability, landscape, and anthropogenic effects, into generalized linear models. Generalized linear models were run for the broader landscape, as well as three separate management units within the broader landscape, namely ecotourism, trophy hunting, and a combination of hunting and ecotourism. Human activities within different management units forced elephant to trade‐off between disturbance avoidance, and good food and water availability. In addition, the important predictors of elephant distribution within each of the management units differed from the predictors at the broader landscape. Overall, our results suggest that at the fine scale, elephant are constraint by factors that may be masked at the broader landscape scale. We suggest that accounting for anthropogenic disturbance is important in determining the distribution of large, wide‐ranging, mammal species in increasingly human‐dominated landscapes, and that modeling needs to be done at the spatial scales at which conservation decisions are made.


Although the importance of dopamine (DA) for prefrontal cortical (PFC) cognitive functions is widely recognized, the nature of DA actions in the PFC remains controversial. A critical component in DA actions is its modulation of glutamate transmission, which can be different when specific receptors are activated. To obtain a clear picture of cellular mechanisms involved in these interactions, we studied the effects of DA–glutamate coactivation on pyramidal cell excitability in brain slices obtained from developmentally mature rats using whole-cell patch-clamp recordings. Bath application of NMDA, AMPA, and the D1 agonist SKF38393 induced concentration-dependent excitability increases, whereas bath application of the D2 receptor agonist quinpirole induced a concentration-dependent excitability decrease. The NMDA-mediated response was potentiated by SKF38393. This NMDA–D1 synergism required postsynaptic intracellular Ca2+ and protein kinase A (PKA) and was independent of membrane depolarization. On the other hand, the excitatory effects of both NMDA and AMPA were attenuated by a D2 agonist. Surprisingly, the D2–NMDA interaction was also blocked by the GABAA antagonists bicuculline and picrotoxin, suggesting that the inhibitory action of D2 receptors on NMDA-induced responses in the PFC may be mediated by GABAergic interneurons. In contrast, the D2–AMPA interaction involves inhibition of PKA and activation of phospholipase lipase C–IP3 and intracellular Ca2+ at a postsynaptic level. Thus, the modulatory actions of D1 and D2 receptors on PFC pyramidal cell excitability are mediated by multiple intracellular mechanisms and by activation of GABAA receptors, depending on the glutamate receptor subtypes involved.


OBJECTIVEDiffusion-based tractography has emerged as a powerful technique for 3-dimensional tract reconstruction and imaging of white matter fibers; however, tractography of the cranial nerves has not been well studied. In particular, the feasibility of tractography of the individual cranial nerves has not been previously assessed. METHODS3-Tesla magnetic resonance imaging scans, including anatomic magnetic resonance images and diffusion tensor images, were used for this study. Tractography of the cranial nerves was performed using 3D Slicer software. The reconstructed 3-dimensional tracts were overlaid onto anatomic images for determination of location and course of intracranial fibers. RESULTSDetailed tractography of the cranial nerves was obtained, although not all cranial nerves were imaged with similar anatomic fidelity. Some tracts were imaged in great detail (cranial nerves II, III, and V). Tractography of the optic apparatus allowed tracing from the optic nerve to the occipital lobe, including Meyer's loop. Trigeminal tractography allowed visualization of the gasserian ganglion as well as postganglionic fibers. Tractography of cranial nerve III shows the course of the fibers through the midbrain. Lower cranial nerves (cranial nerves IX, XI, and XII) could not be imaged well. CONCLUSIONTractography of the cranial nerves is feasible, although technical improvements are necessary to improve the tract reconstruction of the lower cranial nerves. Detailed assessment of anatomy and the ability of overlaying the tracts onto anatomic magnetic resonance imaging scans is essential, particularly in the posterior fossa, to ensure that the tracts have been reconstructed with anatomic fidelity.


Tables are effective as a compact and precise record, but they are less conducive to holistic communication or discovery of patterns. Researchers often resort to tables for reporting relationships among several variables or groups, or when reporting the results of statistical analyses. This tutorial discusses and demonstrates approaches to visualizing results in three situations that are relatively common in psychological science and where tables are often used: (1) factor analysis, (2) comparisons among multiple groups on multiple dimensions, and (3) multiverse analysis. The visualization strategies are implemented in R software (with ggplot2 and DiagrammeR packages), though they can also be implemented in other software. These visualizations trade off the compact precision of tables in favor a visual representation strategy that makes complex patterns more intuitive, both for exploratory purposes and for communicating results.


This research evaluates pattern recognition techniques on a subclass of big datawhere the dimensionality of the input space (p) is much larger than the number of observations (n). Specifically, we evaluate massive gene expression microarray cancer datawhere the ratio κ is less than one. We explore the statistical and computational challenges inherent in these high dimensional low sample size (HDLSS) problems and presentstatistical machine learning methods used to tackle and circumvent these difficulties. Regularization and kernel algorithms were explored in this research using seven datasets where κ < 1. These techniques require special attention to tuning necessitating several extensions of cross-validation to be investigated to support better predictive performance. While no single algorithm was universally the best predictor, the regularizationtechnique produced lower test errors in five of the seven datasets studied.


The emergence of crowdfunding could unleash substantial changes in the business environment. With the new funding platform, technology start-ups can easily access external resources. For fledgling entrepreneurs, both obtaining financial resources and creating innovation are important for their survival. Most research has been focusing on how entrepreneurs successfully raise money, but there is lack of attention to whether successfully funded crowdfunding projects deliver outcomes or not. We investigate the existing dynamics in fundraising process, and how the fundraising patterns are related to crowdfunding projects performance. We develop our research hypotheses based on entrepreneurship theory and bandwagon effects literature. Using functional data analysis method, we examine our research questions. The current findings show the various impacts of fundraising patterns on entrepreneurs' performance. This study will contribute to crowdfunding and entrepreneurship literature and offer practical implications by providing a theoretical framework and the supporting empirical evidence.


Background There is evidence of increasing use of laboratory tests with substantial variation between clinical teams which is difficult to justify on clinical grounds. The aim of this project was to assess the effect of a demand optimisation intervention on laboratory test requesting in primary care. Methods The intervention comprised educational initiatives, feedback to 55 individual practices on test request rates with ranking relative to other practices, and a small financial incentive for practices to engage and reflect on their test requesting activity. Data on test request numbers were collected from the laboratory databases for consecutive 12 month periods; pre‐intervention 2011-12, intervention 2012-13, 2013-14, 2014-15, and post-intervention 2015-16. Results The intervention was associated with a 3.6% reduction in the mean number of profile test requests between baseline and 2015-16, although this was seen only in rural practices. In both rural and urban practices, there was a significant reduction in-between practice variability in request rates. The mean number of HbA1c requests increased from 1.9 to 3.0 per practice patient with diabetes. Variability in HbA1c request rates increased from 23.8% to 36.6%. At all considered time points, test request rates and variability were higher in rural than in urban areas. Conclusions The intervention was associated with a reduction in both the volume and between practice variability of profile test requests, with differences noted between rural and urban practices. The increase in HbA1c requests may reflect a more appropriate rate of diabetes monitoring and also the adoption of HbA1c as a diagnostic test. Strengths & limitations of the study We assessed the effect of a laboratory demand optimisation intervention both on the value and between GP practice variability in laboratory test requesting. The changes in laboratory test requesting were separately evaluated for rural and urban GP practices. Other factors (GP practice organisation, characteristics of general practitioners) potentially affecting between practice differences in laboratory test ordering were not taken into account due to data unavailability. The demand management initiative was not accompanied by the cost-effectiveness analysis. The demand optimisation intervention was conducted in a Northern Ireland (NI) Western Health and Social Care Trust and the findings have not been independently replicated in any other NI trusts.


Job Strain and Neck Symptoms in Work-related Musculoskeletal Disorders Chien-Tien Su Work-related musculoskeletal disorders (WMDs) are a major public health problem in terms of the considerable amount of disability, impairment, and associated economic cost. Among these disorders, the occurrence of WMD symptoms of the neck is prevalent and has been associated with significant disability, long periods of sick leave and loss of productivity in occupational settings. Risk factors for WMDs are multifactorial, and studies have typically focused on ergonomic factors. Psychosocial factors in the work environment have been recently considered; however, findings across these studies have not been consistent. Despite the evidence associated with ergonomic factors on the occurrence of WMDs, widespread prevention and treatment efforts have not been successfully implemented. Psychosocial factors such as high psychological demands, low decision latitude and low social support may play a role in WMD occurrence. The demand-control-support model has been widely used to predict job strain. Particularly for disorders of the neck, job strain seems to play a strong role in their occurrence. The psychosocial work environment and WMDs are listed as research priorities of the National Occupational Research Agenda developed by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health. This cross-sectional study looked at job strain and neck symptoms, while controlling for confounders. This project was carried out on a group of semiconductor manufacturing workers. The prevalence of neck symptoms was measured by a self-administered questionnaire. A Chinese version of the Job Content Questionnaire was included to assess psychosocial factors and to test the demand-control-support model. An observational checklist was developed and used to assess ergonomic exposures on individual workers' jobs. The participation rate was 86.5%. The final sample of semiconductor workers consisted of 373 female participants. Their mean age was 28.4 years ranging from 18 to 41 years. The mean length of employment was 4.3 years. The prevalence of symptoms of neck disorders in the semiconductor manufacturing population was 23.9%. It was concluded that the prevalence rates of neck symptoms of WMDs in this study were high, especially given the very conservative outcome definition that was used. The study findings partially supported the job strain model, showing an increase in prevalence of neck symptoms with psychological and physical job demands; however, association with decision latitude and social support were not supported. Further studies with more comprehensive measurements of work-related psychosocial factors are implicated and effective prevention strategies for neck symptoms of WMDs are suggested.


Humans can perform episodic memory replay dynamically by replaying fragments of fine-grained temporal patterns of events and skipping flexibly across subevents. Here, we demonstrate a similar effect in macaque monkeys. We report evidence that the monkeys apply a time-compressed, forward replay mechanism during their judgement the order of cinematic events. We trained six macaque monkeys with a temporal order judgement (TOJ) task and collected 5000 TOJ trials with naturalistic videos. In each trial, they watched a video of about 10 s comprising two across-context clips, and after a 2-s retention delay, performed a temporal order judgement between two frames extracted from the video. The results show that the monkeys adopt a self-terminating search of ordered frames in their mnemonic representation. The memory replay is forward and temporally compressed, paralleling evidence in humans. Such compression of replay is however not sophisticated enough to allow them to skip over irrelevant information by compressing the encoded video globally. Moreover, we also reveal that the monkeys can segment events using contextual boundaries like humans and such contextual segmentation facilitates their memory recall by an increased rate of information accumulation in a drift diffusion model framework. Memory replay is an elaborate mental process and our demonstration of a time-compressed, forward replay mechanism in the macaque monkeys provides insights into mapping the mechanisms and evolution of episodic memory in our lineage.


Autoimmune encephalitis (AE) associated with autoantibodies against leucine-rich glioma-inactivated protein-1 (LGI1) can present with faciobrachial dystonic seizures (FBDS) and/or limbic encephalitis (LE). The reasons for this heterogeneity in phenotypes are unclear. We performed autoantibody (abs) characterization per patient, two patients suffering from LE and two from FBDS, using isolated antibodies specified with single amino acid epitope mapping. Electrophysiological slice recordings were conducted alongside spine density measurements, postsynaptic Alpha-amino-3-hydoxy-5-methyl-4-isoaxole-proprionate-receptors (AMPA-R) and N-methyl-D-aspartate-receptors receptor (NMDA-R) cluster counting. These results were correlated with the symptoms of each patient. While LGI1 abs from LE patients mainly interacted with the Leucine-rich repeat section of LGI1, abs from both FBDS patients also recognized the Epitempin section as well. Six-hour incubation of mouse hippocampal slices with LE patients autoantibodies but not from the FBDS patients resulted in a significant decline in long-term potentiation (p = 0.0015) or short-term plasticity at CA3-CA1 neurons and in decreased hippocampal synaptic density. Cluster differentiation showed no decrease in postsynaptic AMPA-R and NMDA-R. LGI1 autoantibodies selected by phenotype show an almost distinct epitope pattern, elicit disparate functional effects on hippocampal neurons, and cause divergent effects on spine density. This data illuminates potential pathomechanisms for disease heterogeneity in LGI1 AE.


In portable applications, Ni-Cd and Ni-MH batteries are the most frequently used. In this paper, a new fast-charger is presented for these kinds of batteries, which is able to perform a full-protected charge mode. The control and supervision of the whole process is entrusted to the microcontroller, which that must be able to find out the initial battery state (detecting deteriorated devices), decide the fit way to charge the battery (in order to ensure a long cycle-life) and determine when the charge process must be finished. In this way, the state of the battery is perfectly controlled all of the time, in order to avoid any damage; including those related to an incorrect user's operations. The use of a microcontroller has been considered in order to simplify the hardware required (only a few external components are used), and provide a powerful and intelligent tool to undertake, through the programmed algorithm, complex tasks. This paper presents the implementation of this optimized fast-charger and the experimental results obtained.


Continuous changes in social demand and development provide an acute and continuous pressure on universities. The question to be asked is whether higher education institutions in Ecuador possess the capacity to deliver graduates with the competences to provide timely economic, ecological and sustainable solutions for the problems society is increasingly confronted with. Additionally, higher education institutions should prepare graduates to find employment in a society characterized by greater uncertainty, extensive use of information technology, speed, risk, complexity and interdisciplinary work. To face this challenge, universities need professors to possess a mix of aptitudes, attitudes and professional development in teaching, research and services. Unfortunately, knowledge is sparse about the impact of the aptitude, attitude and professional development of the academic community on the readiness of their pupils to function effectively in a rapid changing and increasingly globalized environment. Accordingly, this paper assesses, using as case study the public University of Cuenca, the impact of professors' aptitudes, attitudes and professional development on teaching and students' learning. The study adopted an explanatory sequential mixed approach as research method for the collection, analysis and interpretation of the broad range of questions asked to professors and students. Understanding the likely implication of the variables, aptitude, attitude and professional development, on the quality of teaching and learning is fundamental for the design and carrying out of educational reforms. It is believed that results will facilitate the formulation of criteria for the correct definition of teaching quality, the promotion of professional training, and strengthening of academic performance.


This paper inspects how risk is affected by news sign and size within – depreciation, appreciation, stability – distinct exchange rate trends, and by volatility model choice, taking on various asymmetric Generalized Autoregressive Conditional Heteroskedasticity models to daily Mozambique New Metical against South Africa Rand, MZN/ZAR, exchange rate over January 2010 - December 2014. Our results show that risk measurement and asymmetry of shocks to volatility depend on exchange rate trend, being that estimating the full sample conceals the actual behaviour, and model choice, specifically the degree of nonlinearity and persistence. In particular, we find that when positive/negative news type matches the sign of the exchange rate trend, risk increases by more. Interestingly, this means that in times of appreciation the good news turns out to be bad, likely because they raise the fear of overvaluation, under monitoring in natural resource producers and exporting countries. The findings contribute to the growing concern on nonlinear economic policy design, exchange rate targeting and surely international trade and investment decisions, where an incorrect assessment exchange rate risk and asymmetry may lead to mispricing of assets, namely options, and eventual underestimation of measures, as Value at Risk, relevant for Basel agreement.


AI systems that act on behalf of users require knowledge of user preferences, which can be acquired by preference elicitation. In many settings, users can respond more easily and accurately to preference queries reflecting their current, or recently experienced, context (e.g., state of the environment), than to those reflecting contexts further removed. We develop and study a formal model of experiential elicitation (EE) in which query costs and response noise are state-dependent. EE settings tightly couple the problems of control and elicitation. We provide some analysis of this abstract model, and illustrate its applicability in household heating/cooling management. We propose the use of relative value queries, asking the user to compare the immediate utility of two states, whose difficulty is related to the degree and recency of a user's experience with those states. We develop a Gaussian process-based approach for modeling user preferences in dynamic EE domains and show that it accrues higher reward than several natural baselines.


Logical reasoning is of vital importance to natural language understanding. Previous studies either employ graph-based models to incorporate prior knowledge about logical relations, or introduce symbolic logic into neural models through data augmentation. These methods, however, heavily depend on annotated training data, and thus suffer from over-fitting and poor generalization problems due to the dataset sparsity. To address these two problems, in this paper, we propose MERIt, a MEta-path guided contrastive learning method for logical ReasonIng of text, to perform self-supervised pre-training on abundant unlabeled text data. Two novel strategies serve as indispensable components of our method. In particular, a strategy based on meta-path is devised to discover the logical structure in natural texts, followed by a counterfactual data augmentation strategy to eliminate the information shortcut induced by pre-training. The experimental results on two challenging logical reasoning benchmarks, i.e., ReClor and LogiQA, demonstrate that our method outperforms the SOTA baselines with significant improvements.


Often, science and engineering students have difficult time in viewing certain concepts in their holistic form. An example for such a concept is the concept of Entropy. Although it originated from the field of thermodynamics, the relation between order and disorder is a profound one and manifests itself in various fields, sometimes unrelated, such as math and science, nature and the arts. In the discipline of physics, the amount of disorder in a system has been quantified by the concept of Entropy. In the area of information theory it provides a quantitative measure of the amount of compression that may be achieved in a coding scheme and in nature it poses an intriguing question when we consider biological systems. In the arts, which is an unrelated field to the previously mentioned, entropy can be seen in the balance and the tension between the regular and irregular, the expected and the unexpected themes, which make a piece of art valuable. In this paper we provide some interesting insights into the concept of Entropy and its implications in the fields of physics, information theory, decision making, nature and the arts.


One of the main limitations of current remote eye gaze tracking (REGT) techniques is that the user's head must remain within a very limited area in front of the monitor screen. In this paper, we present a free head motion REGT technique. By projecting a known rectangular pattern of lights, the technique estimates the gaze position relative to this rectangle using an invariant property of projective geometry. We carry extensive analysis of similar methods using an eye model to compare their accuracy. Based on these results, we propose a new estimation procedure that compensates the angular difference between the eye visual axis and optical axis. We have developed a real time (30 fps) prototype using a single camera and 5 light sources to generate the light pattern. Experimental results shows that the accuracy of the system is about 1deg of visual angle


This guide shows the Virginia Transportation Research Council's 2017 Transporation Research Board Annual Meeting Schedule,and provides access to VTRC/VDOT presentations. Get help from the library.


This paper presents an experimental protocol developed for the design, performance estimation and comparison of underwater video classifier systems. Such systems have to be designed using application data that is small, sparse and extremely variable. The proposed protocol uses outlier rejection, data pairing, Bootstrap performance estimation and hypothesis testing to achieve a robust performance estimate and comparison between classifier designs. The protocol is demonstrated and assessed on an application experiment. The application involves the design of a classification system for the automated detection of trawling marks from mission video. Two systems are proposed using selective and geometric feature types and an ensemble classifier. The protocol robustly identifies differences between the two proposed system designs using error and discrimination rates. Overall the geometric feature system is chosen as the final system. The protocol was also compared with other performance estimates and found to have the closest match to actual test data performance.


The influence of intravenous somatostatin infusion (7.6 micrograms/min) on systemic and splanchnic haemodynamics was examined in 10 patients with liver cirrhosis and portal hypertension. The hepatic vein catheter technique was employed and indocyanine green dye was injected to evaluate hepatic blood flow. Mean wedged hepatic venous pressure fell from 24.9 +/- 2.8 in the basal state to 21.4 +/- 3.2 mmHg (P less than 0.2) at 60 min of infusion and the mean arterial pressure decreased from 87 +/- 5 to 80 +/- 6 mmHg (P less than 0.05). The rate of indocyanine green dye disappearance decreased from 8.7 +/- 1.9 to 6.6 +/- 1.7%/min (P less than 0.001) during the infusion, indicating decreased hepatic blood flow. Arterial-hepatic venous oxygen differences rose from 69 +/- 11 to 78 +/- 11 ml/l. Blood glucose levels fell from 4.84 +/- 0.31 to 3.79 +/- 0.33 mmol/l at 60 min of infusion (P less than 0.005). It is concluded that a continuous infusion of somatostatin in patients with liver cirrhosis and portal hypertension causes a decreased hepatic blood flow with augmented hepatic oxygen extraction and a modest reduction in mean wedged hepatic venous pressure. In view of the magnitude of the observed haemodynamic changes the findings do not suggest an important role for somatostatin in the treatment of patients with bleeding oesophageal varices.


Galectins are a medically important family of small, soluble carbohydrate-binding proteins that have been implicated in a wide variety of diseases, and are therefore targets for the development of new drugs. Many X-ray crystal structures of small molecules in complex with galectins have been determined and have given invaluable information on how natural ligands and synthetic inhibitors are recognized. However, until now the hydrogen-bonding patterns involved in ligand recognition have been a matter of informed guesswork, as X-ray crystallography can't reliably tell us where hydrogen atoms are positioned. We describe how neutron macromolecular crystallography has been applied to galectins for the first time to shed light on this question.


Longman, 1983; £3. 95; hb, ph 150 This is a volume in the series Politics Today and the General Editors in their preface affirm that politics is too important for neutrality, but therefore demands objectivity. Expressing his own views clearly, but equipping the reader to disagree, Mick Ryan makes a worthy attempt at that ideal. A review of the penal policy debate since 1945 forms half the book. Ryan divides the period into three phases according to the ideology which prevailed respectively reform, rehabilitation and justice. What is less than clear is how much difference the changing rhetoric has made to the punished. In a second section, Ryan considers the process of policy formation and the influence (or lack of it) of the Home Office, Parliament and the parties, pressure groups and public opmion. The Home Office's concern for secrecy and its reluctance to instruct are well exposed. Rarely does either party elevate its penal policy above the level oftrantrums about crime or mere dithering. Pressure groups are shown to risk either accommodation or exclusion.


Although sewer sediments are now widely recognized as a major source of misfunction of urban drainage systems (for both hydraulic and environmental considerations), it is still too infrequent that priority of research activities in this area is given to field studies. The measuring campaigns conducted since 1986 in the drainage system of Brussels-North have been focused on sedimentation processes in the major sewer lines. There is an obvious distinction to be made between solids constituting the sediment bed of a man-entry sewer, which are relevant for its hydraulic capacity, and the ones contributing to the pollutional impact of CSOs upon receiving waters. The material which is removed several times a year from the main trunk sewer of Brussels is coarse, granular and has a low environmental impact, notably because of its limited mobility. This appears to be due to a very efficient granulometric grading, as a result firstly of the retention of the coarsest solids in highly selective gully-pot inlets, and secondly of an elutriation process removing from the sediment bed all fine organic-rich particles during daily peak flows. There is evidence to show that the build-up of the sediment bed in these large-sized sewers is driven by a bed-load process (active even during dry spells), while the solid material responsible for the detrimental effects of CSOs (which is much finer) is primarily transported through wash-load and suspended-load.


Hydrogen (H2) is an alternative clean and sustainable energy source that could alleviate the fossil fuels crisis, and eco-friendly water electrolysis has been widely employed to produce H2. Herein, we report for the first time the facile synthesis of copper(I) oxide and cobaltosic oxide hybrid nanocomposites decorating defective carbon nanotubes (Cu2O/Co3O4/DC) using a hydrothermal method. Notably, the electrocatalysis of Cu2O/Co3O4/DC is significantly improved through an electrochemical activation process. The electrochemically activated Cu2O/Co3O4/DC (ECA-Cu2O/Co3O4/DC) presents excellent HER activity and durability with a small overpotential of 160 mV at a current density of 10 mA cm−2 and a small Tafel slope of 73 mV dec−1. This high hydrogen evolution performance is attributed to the synergistic interaction between Cu2O/Co3O4 nanoparticles and defective carbon nanotubes, providing further understanding of earth-abundant transition metal-bearing electrocatalysts in emerging energy applications.


The economic liberalization took place in the year 1991, opened up wide range of opportunities to the industries, service providers as well as to the investors. Investors overcome the geographical boundaries to diversify their portfolio to foreign markets. So, it is highly important to understand the inter-linkages among the nations. The present study chosen the Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) consortium's stock market indices to analyze the connectedness among them, by taking the daily closing price levels, from 1st of Feb 2015 to 31st of March 2021, applied descriptive statistics, Unit root test, Granger Causality Test and Johansen Co-integration tests are performed. The results unveil that, the data sample is stationary; there exists the inter-linkages among the BRICS nations stock markets. India's stock market has major impacts on Brazil, China, South Africa as well as Russia, where as India will not receive major impacts from China, Russia and South Africa. Study concludes that diversifying the portfolio to foreign countries stock markets benefit the investors with increased returns and reduced risk. The study results helps the investors to diversify their portfolios into foreign stock exchanges to get stabilized returns understanding the relationship among emerging countries stock exchanges.


Objective: To evaluate associations between the Functional Movement Screen (FMS), Star Excursion Balance Test (SEBT), and Balance Error Scoring System (BESS) scores. Design: Correlational. Setting: College athletic training facilities. Participants: Fifty-two intercollegiate athletes (men = 36 and women = 16) representing 8 sports and cleared for unrestricted sport participation. Interventions: Participants completed the FMS, SEBT, and BESS, in random order, during 1 testing session. Testing order was randomized to control for fatigue and learning effects. Main Outcome Measures: Composite and item scores for the FMS, SEBT, and BESS. Results: A fair, negative correlation was found between FMS asymmetry and SEBT composite (r = −0.31, P = 0.03) scores. Fair, positive correlations were reported for FMS rotary stability task and SEBT anterior (r = 0.37-0.41, P ⩽ 0.007) and posteromedial (r = 0.31, P = 0.03) reaches. Fair, negative correlations were reported for FMS deep squat and BESS single-leg firm (r = −0.33, P = 0.02), double-leg foam (r = −0.34, P = 0.02) and tandem foam (r = −0.40, P = 0.003), FMS inline lunge and BESS single-leg firm (r = −0.39, P = 0.004), FMS trunk stability pushup and tandem foam (r = −0.31, P = 0.025), and FMS composite and BESS single-leg firm (r = −0.37, P = 0.007). Little-to-no correlations were reported for remaining comparisons. Conclusions: Results indicate that each instrument provides distinct information about function, with only small areas of overlap. Associations between the FMS asymmetry score and SEBT composite score may indicate a relationship between movement asymmetry and postural stability. Associations between the FMS deep squat and BESS foam tasks may be related to underlying neuromuscular control factors.


Abstract African-Americans are approximately half as likely as their white counterparts to use professional mental health services. High levels of religiosity among African-Americans may lend to a greater reliance on religious counseling and coping when facing a mental health problem. This study investigates the relationship between three dimensions of religiosity and professional mental health service utilization among a large (n = 3570), nationally representative sample of African-American adults. African-American adults who reported high levels of organizational and subjective religiosity were less likely than those with lower levels of religiosity to use professional mental health services. This inverse relationship was generally consistent across individuals with and without a diagnosable Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition, anxiety, mood, or substance use disorder. No association was found between nonorganizational religiosity and professional mental health service use. Seeking professional mental health care may clash with sociocultural religious norms and values among African-Americans. Strategic efforts should be made to engage African-American clergy and religious communities in the conceptualization and delivery of mental health services.


Two ceramic blocks were made with dimensions of 6x6x5mm following the technical guide lines wich were duplicated in composite resin (W3D MASTER®). One of the faces of the ceramic block (6mmx5mm) was sandblasted with the Rocatec system® and cemented with the two different cements under constant load of 750g to the correspondents faces composite blocks. After the storage of the samples (seven days in distilled water at 37o) each group formed by ceramic, cement and resin was split up in two axis X and Y and it were obtained specimens with adehive area of 1 mm² ± 0,1. Two groups (n=27) were obtained: PanaviaF group and RelyX group. Each sample was fixed with cyanocrylate in an adapted device which was attached to a universal testing machine (EMIC) and then subjected to tensile forces at a crosshead of 0,5 mm/min and load cell of 10kgf. The results showed that the medium values of rupture (MPa) for the PanaviaF group (median=17,011 ± standart deviation=4,131) are statistically different comparing to RelyX group (median 10,071 ± standart deviation 3,550) (p-value=0,001). The conclusion of this study was that the Panavia F had better adhesive resistance than RelyX. All fractures analyzed occurred at the adhesive interface, with no findings of cohesive fracture of the porcelain.


Modern System-on-Chip (SoC) designs are faced with many challenges among which efficient communication managing is one of the most important. On-chip communication architectures can have a strong impact on the performance of SoC designs. The traditional SoC interconnects, cannot keep up with the high demands of today's SoC. To address this problem, SoC makers propose new protocols to implement high performance data transfer. AMBA AXI4, is one of the widely used protocols as on-chip bus in recent Wireless Sensor Network SoCs. It includes three distinct interconnect protocols: stream, burst and lite. In this paper, we highlight the various parameters that must be taken into consideration to select the adequate interface for a given application. We analyze and compare the on-chip interfaces for hardware/software (HW/SW) communication when various code transformations are applied on the Zynq-7000 Xilinx platform. Many experiments have been conducted to evaluate the communication between the main processor and the reconfigurable hardware accelerators.


In modern applications pertaining to transmission and receiving of multimedia data, the demand for data privacy has never been more significant. Hence, encryption of data becomes very much essential. Many encryption algorithms had been proposed, however, algorithms with high security, good efficiency and high performance are the demands of today's applications. The work proposed in this paper is a diffusion process involving position based transformation with respect to pixels in two stages of encryption. The first stage involves dividing the image into non-overlapping blocks for which the image size is decided by a key. The second stage involves pixel shuffling with a particular pattern within each block in an image. The encryption algorithm implemented in this paper also validates for colour images of RGB format.


Consumers make their activity decisions generally under time and money constraints. The most important temporal constraint is the total amount of time that individuals can spend on their activities which is 24 hours a day. In addition, individuals also have limited amount of money available, depending on their income. These constraints influence consumers' preferences by forcing them to make trade-off across their activities and expenditures when spending time and money on the activities. Choice experiments deal with the trade-off across attributes. However, the construction of choice sets generally does not consider any constraints. Therefore, to understand the budget constraint effects on activity decisions, we used a mixture amount design which allows us to use constraints in a choice experiment. This experiment is conducted for four activities such as shopping, out-of-home leisure, culture and at-home activities and four different available time and money budgets as constraints. The aim of this paper is to report the results of this experiment to understand how changing time and money budgets influence activity preferences.


In the traditional nomadic culture of the Mongols, their philosophy does not centre around people when it comes to relating to the environment. Instead, sky and nature are worshipped as having the significance of a spiritual being with a Divine soul. This manner of worship manifests itself not only in their daily greetings – Hoorhii–Amitan , for example – but also is reflected in their literature, their rituals regarding life and death, and in historical events. This philosophy allowed them to protect their natural habitat, and to live in harmony with nature for centuries; it brought them an inner world of profound peace and tranquillity. In this modern world where their natural environment is facing destruction, and their cultural environment is being contaminated, it is important for us to re-evaluate these issues and redefine traditional Mongolian worship and its meanings.


Abstract The major components of an engine are the cylinder block, cylinder head, crankshaft, connecting rod, and camshaft, which are more popularly known as the 5 C's. Thus, the engine shop usually consists of six sub-lines, including five machining lines and one assembly line. The flow line is the typical concept of the layout when the engineer designs the engine shop. This paper introduces a simulation study regarding the new crankshaft machining line in a Korean automotive factory. The major factors for designing the machining line are considered, and their effects on the system performance are evaluated with a three-dimensional (3D) simulation model that is developed with QUEST ® . The initial layout is analyzed using the simulation model, and we suggest some ideas for improvement.


Abstract Background Invasive meningococcal disease clusters occur among university students and may reflect higher carriage prevalence among this population. We aimed to measure meningococcal carriage prevalence, acquisition, and risk factors among first-year university students in South Africa. Methods In summer–autumn 2017, after consenting to participate, we collected oropharyngeal swabs and questionnaires on carriage risk factors and tested students for HIV at 2 universities, during registration week (survey 1) and 6–8 weeks later (survey 2). Meningococci were detected by culture and polymerase chain reaction. Results We enrolled 2120 students at registration. Mean age was 18.5 years, 59% (1252/2120) were female and 0.8% (16/1984) had HIV. Seventy-eight percent of students returned for survey 2 (1655/2120). Among the cohort, carriage prevalence was 4.7% (77/1655) at registration, increasing to 7.9% (130/1655) at survey 2: 5.0% (83) acquired new carriage, 2.8% (47) had persistent carriage, 1.8% (30) cleared the initial carriage, and 90.3% (1495) remained carriage free. At both surveys, nongenogroupable meningococci predominated, followed by genogroups Y, B, W, and C. On multinomial analysis, risk factors for carriage acquisition included attending nightclubs (adjusted relative risk ratio [aRRR], 2.1; 95% CI, 1.1–4.0), having intimate kissing partners (aRRR, 1.8; 95% CI, 1.1–2.9) and HIV (aRRR, 5.0; 95% CI, 1.1–24.4). Conclusions Meningococcal carriage among first-year university students increased after 2 months. Sociobehavioral risk factors were associated with increased carriage for all analyses. HIV was associated with carriage acquisition. Until vaccination programs become mandatory in South African universities, data suggest that students with HIV could benefit most from meningococcal vaccination.


Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) studies and computerised tomography (CT) are becoming more readily available and widely used modalities of clinical investigations. An increasing number of mass lesions involving the sellar region are now being detected on MRI and CT performed for reasons unrelated to pituitary diseases. These incidental sellar lesions include neoplastic conditions such as pituitary adenomas, meningiomas, craniopharyngiomas, gliomas and metastases. Non-neoplastic lesions may include Rathke's cleft cysts, carotid artery aneurysms, granulomas, hypophysitis, mucocoeles, and other uncommon pathologies. This article will focus on the two most commonly encountered entities incidental pituitary adenomas and Rathke's cleft cysts.


The light-matter interaction in the 2D materials can greatly be enhanced by spirally rolling them into nanoscroll (NS) structures. Hybridization of such 2D material NSs with high yield quantum dots produces type-II band alignment at the heterostructure interface. The combination of enhanced photoabsorption and occurrence of internal reflections at NS wall stimulates coherent lasing action with an unprecedently low lasing threshold and enhances the photoresponsivity by almost 3000 fold compared to its planar counterpart. Furthermore, the NS morphology imparts photosensors with an inherent ability to detect polarization. Finally, the charge transfer efficiency in NSs is enhanced by the formation of heterojunctions after intercalation of graphene. Our approach enables novel ways to develop high-performance flexible devices toward future applications.


Objective: Dental solid wastes often contain hazardous substances. The first step of management of dental solid wastes includes detection and classification of these substances. This study aimed to qualitatively and quantitatively assess the management of solid wastes by dental offices in Urmia city in 2013. Methods: This descriptive study was conducted on all private dental offices in Urmia city and six samples were collected of the wastes of each office per season. Samples were manually searched, divided into 16 different categories and weighed by a digital scale. In the next step, the weighed components were classified according to their characteristics and hazardous potential. Results: The total amount of solid wastes produced by dental offices in Urmia city was 81 kg/day consisting of 28.3% infectious wastes, 59% domestic-like wastes, 9.6% chemical and pharmaceutical wastes and 2.7% toxic wastes. Waste reduction and recycling programs were not performed in any office. Conclusion: Considering the type and quantity of generated dental solid wastes, especially the infectious wastes and their adverse effects on public health and the environment, a specific strategy must be designed for management of dental solid wastes.


Abstract Background HER2 breast cancer status determines patients' eligibility for targeted therapy. HER2 level of amplification is associated with a better response to anti-HER2 therapy. Benefit of anti-HER2 therapy for equivocal cases remains debated. Methods We aimed to better characterize HER2-equivocal breast cancers by immunohistochemistry (IHC) and fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) according to 2018 ASCO/CAP guidelines using PAM50 gene expression-based molecular subtyping and to investigate genome-wide copy number alterations of these cases. PAM50 (nCounter assay; Nanostring) was performed on RNA from FFPE samples of 60 HER2-equivocal cases. These cases were subsequently analyzed by Agilent 60-mer oligonucleotide microarrays for array-based comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH). Results The 60 HER2-equivocal cases were classified as Luminal B in 31 cases (52%), HER2-Enriched in 14 cases (23%), Luminal A in 13 cases (22%) and Basal-like in 2 cases (3%) using PAM50. By IHC, 52 cases (87%) were ER+, 43 (72%) were also PgR+, 40 (67%) were grade III and 45 (75%) showed a high Ki67 > 20%. With aCGH, 23 cases (38%) presented chr 17q large copy number gain, 14 (23%) showed segmental copy number gain including HER2, 10 (17%) showed HER2 amplification, one (2%) showed a large copy number loss and 12 cases (20%) didn't show any copy number alteration of the chr 17. Out of the 14 PAM50 HER2-Enriched cases, only 5 showed HER2 genomic amplification (Table). In total, 14 cases (23%) were discordant between molecular classification and genomic alteration status of the chr 17. Table . 260P Genomic alterations of chromosome 17 Basal- like HER2- Enriched Luminal A Luminal B Total HER2 amplified 0 5 2 3 10 Large copy number gain 0 1 5 17 23 Segmental copy number gain 2 5 4 3 14 No alteration 0 3 2 7 12 Large copy number loss 0 0 0 1 1 Total 2 14 13 31 60 Conclusions Using PAM50, the majority of HER2-equivocal cases were classified as Luminal tumors (Luminal B 52% and A 22%) and harbored mostly at the genomic level chr 17 segmental or large copy number gains. As there is no evidence of benefit of anti-HER2 therapy in these cases, it emphasizes the need of genomic status determination of HER2-equivocal cases. Legal entity responsible for the study Anne Vincent-Salomon. Funding Has not received any funding. Disclosure P. Morel: Full / Part-time employment: Nanostring. H.A. Brauer: Full / Part-time employment: Nanosting. A. Vincent-Salomon: Advisory / Consultancy, Consulting fees: Roche; Advisory / Consultancy, Consulting fees: AstraZeneca; Non-remunerated activity/ies, Contracted Research: Nanostring. All other authors have declared no conflicts of interest.


This paper provides an overview of the privatization of the Russian coal industry. It reviews the salient aspects of the Government's privatization policy as it evolved over the years, and looks at the reasons for the successes and the pitfalls encountered along the way. Specific procedures and methods of sale are described in detail. A profile of the new owners of the industry is given, with a look at the implications for competition in the industry and at first performance indicators. As the World Bank has been closely involved in the support of the Government's coal sector restructuring program through provision of financing and policy advice, throughout the paper aspects of World Bank advice are considered.


The physiologically active metabolite of vitamin D, 1alpha,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 (calcitriol), induces gap junctional intercellular communication in human skin fibroblasts 161BR at a concentration of 10(-7) M. In human skin fibroblasts, FIB5, devoid of a functional nuclear vitamin D receptor (VDR), there is no effect on gap junctional intercellular communication. Parallel to the increase in cell-cell communication, we observed a VDR-dependent increase in connexin43 protein and connexin43 mRNA levels. These results suggest that 1alpha,25-dihydroxyvitamin D3 affects gap junctional intercellular communication at the level of transcription or of mRNA stability via the nuclear VDR.


We derive upper and lower bounds on the encoding and decoding complexity of two capacity-achieving ensembles of irregular repeat-accumulate (IRA1 and IRA2) codes on the binary erasure channel (BEC). These bounds are expressed in terms of the gap between the channel capacity and the rate of a typical code from this ensemble for which reliable communications is achievable under message-passing iterative (MPI) decoding. The complexity of the ensemble of IRA1 codes grows like the negative logarithm of the gap to capacity. On the other hand, the complexity of the ensemble of IRA2 codes with any choice of the degree distribution grows at least like the inverse square root of the gap to capacity, and at most like the inverse of the gap to capacity.


This exploratory study analyzes limited English proficient (LEP) Chuukese patients' perspectives on dual-role interpreters in Guam and Chuuk. Methods included ethnographic observations of encounters with health care workers (HCWs) and 225 female Chuukese patients seeking reproductive healthcare in community health clinics: 126 women in Guam and 99 women in Chuuk. Ethnographic observations were supplemented by semi-structured interviews with 26 HCWs, and life history interviews with 15 Chuukese transnational migrant women. Notes from interview transcripts and observations were analyzed using critical interpretive and grounded theory. Findings demonstrated that Chuukese LEP patients need and at times want interpreters in order to understand their healthcare visits. In the absence of professional interpreters, ad-hoc interpreters (family interpreters and employees of the clinic) are an important resource. However, social and cultural concerns with community confidentiality influenced patient trust of staff interpreters. This lack of trust can limit access to health care overall, as some patients may avoid seeking care to prevent their confidential health information being disclosed. These complexities in interpretation must be considered in order for clinics to provide optimal care for the communities they serve.


We use a microscopic density-functional theory based on Wertheim's [J. Chem. Phys. 87, 7323 (1987)] first-order thermodynamic perturbation theory to study the wetting behavior of athermal mixtures of colloids and excluded-volume polymers. In opposition to the wetting behavior of the Asakura-Oosawa-Vrij [J. Chem. Phys. 22, 1255 (1954); Pure Appl. Chem. 48, 471 (1976)] model we find the polymer-rich phase to wet a hard wall. The wetting transition is of the first order and is accompanied by the prewetting transition. We do not find any hints for the layering transitions in the partial wetting regime. Our results resemble the wetting behavior in athermal polymer solutions. We point out that an accurate, monomer-resolved theory for colloid-polymer mixtures should incorporate the correct scaling behavior in the dilute polymer regime and an accurate description of the reference system.


The Internet has grown into a tremendously large and complex system with hundreds of millions of end hosts. Because of its size, complexity and heterogeneity, understanding the Internet has proved to be very difficult. Network measurements provide valuable insight and quantitative information on network performance, management, and pathology diagnosis. This work aims to infer hidden network properties from the complex Internet by addressing the following open questions based on network measurements: (1) Can we identify the existence of a dominant congested link (i.e., a significant source of performance degradation) on an end-to-end path using only end-to-end packet delay and loss observations? (2) Can we classify an end user's access network (Ethernet, wireless LAN, cable modem, ADSL, dialup) using only measurements at a server? (3) Can we infer the extent of wireless LAN usage and identify wireless LAN traffic based on passive measurements at the edge of a large network? The key to answering the above questions is network modeling. In this book, we demonstrate how to use various network modeling techniques to solve the above challenging problems. This book is for both researchers and practitioners in the field, and graduate students who are interested in computer networks.


Protein C (PC) plasma activity is now widely determined in patients who have experienced thrombotic events. Several methods for PC activity measurements have been published and they were compared in a multicenter trial (1). A common feature is the need for an extraction step. More recently an alternative method using direct activation of PC by a snake venom (Protac@) has become commercially available (2, 3), which avoids the tedious extraction step and the thrombin neutraltzatton procedure. Activated PC is then determined either by clotting assay in an aPTT system or with a chromogenic substrate. The main advantages of clotting assays lie in their ability to use the natural substrate (FVIIIa) of PC (and hence to detect some variants with nonnal amidolytic activity) and to be less sensitive to acarboxylated forms of PC (4, 5) In some patients without anticoagulant treatment we have found discrepant results between Protac@ based clotting and chromogenic assays (reagents, Standard Human Plasma and Fibrintimer from Behringwerke, Marburg, FRG), 8S previously reported by Lobermann et al. (3).As shown in the table the values obtained with the chromogenic assay were higher and better correlated with antigen levels measured by electroimmunoassay (Assera Plate Proteine C, Stago, Asnidres, France) than those found with the clotting assay (r 0.975 versus 0.309). However, when the clotting assay was performed at higher plasma dilutions (1120 and Ll40) than that recommended by the manufacturer (1/10) the PC levels were found to increase and the correlation with PC antigen values to improve (r 0.92 at Il40 dilution), even if the correction was not complete. A common feature in this group of patients was a high level of FVIII activity (determined by one-stage clotting assay, reagents from Behringwerke). The apparent low PC levels and their partial correction by higher plasma dilutions could arise from an increase in the total FVIII concentration due to patient plasma FVIII contribution in the assay mixture. The.influence of FVIII on the clotting assay was also tested by measuring PC levels after DDAVP infusion, since its effect on haemostasis is relatively specific for the FVIIUvon Wllebrand complex and t-PA (6). The raise in FVIII (mean three-fold over baseline values) did not change PC levels when measured with the chromogenic assay but gave low values with the clotting one, which could not be totally corrected by increasing dilutions (data not shown). PAI was undetectable in DDAVP plasma (Coa-Set t-PA/PAI, KabiVitrum, Sweden). DDAVP and Normal Human Plasma were also submitted to extraction according to Francis and Patch (7) (except that the MES-citrate-NaCl supernatant was immediately diluted IlI0 in the Veronal buffer supplemented with 0.1 moVl HEPES pH 7 .6), and clotting activity after Protac@ activation was measured. Extraction did abolish the dilution effect, suggesting that some plasma component, probably FVIII, is the cause of the artefact. Thus, the Protac@ clotting method alone cannot be recommended for screening PC deficiency. The partial correction by Table Protein C values Patient FVIII PC Ag PC chrom PC clotting, dilutions utO u20 u40


We report the case of a 46-year-old man with hemicrania continua presenting as exacerbations mimicking trigeminal neuralgia. The patient was tentatively diagnosed with trigeminal neuralgia, and treatment with various combinations of drugs was performed after the onset of pain. However, when the condition of the patient did not improve, we suspected hemicrania continua, and treatment with indomethacin was initiated. There was a marked alleviation of his pain within 24 hours. Thus, clinicians should be aware that the duration and frequency of exacerbations of hemicrania continua are variable.


This paper attempts to define conservation–development strategies for sustainability of archaeological heritage composed of historical cultural layers which traces back approximately four–thousand years as known Alaaddin Hill in the city of Konya in terms of the possibilities of in situ presentation to future generations and also integrate within urban life by using a methodology based on the strategic spatial planning approach. It is considered that this definition will contribute to the planning studies focused on the archaeological heritage in the historic cities in Turkey in terms of the methodological framework and also approaches on conservation– development strategies to the future.


To determine the immunogenic potential of biotherapeutics in nonclinical species, assays for anti-drug antibody (ADA) detection must be developed and validated before testing of samples from toxicity studies, to ensure accurate assessment of immunogenicity. ADAs can cause adverse events effecting drug exposure and efficacy complicating the interpretation of the toxicity, pharmacokinetics and pharmacodynamics data. For each compound, a validation is performed prior to study sample analysis. Parameters assessed include Inter analyst, sensitivity, accuracy, drug tolerance, precision, interference and stability of reagents and ADAs. The first step in the validation is to perform precision analysis. Precision is used to determine acceptance criteria for the assay. The inter-analyst experiment is performed by two scientists to show reproducibility. Assay acceptance criteria consists of the acceptable criteria for the pooled negative control (PNC), low quality control (LQC), high quality control (HQC) and LQC/PNC ratio to set the assay cut point. Once this criteria is determined, sensitivity, drug tolerance, interference, and stability are performed to set validation criteria for study samples, reagents, and controls. The drugs to be used on study are labeled with Biotin and Sulfotag and ADAs are assessed utilizing immuno-assay such as a standard ELISA or an electrochemiluminescent immuno-bridging assay. Once study samples are analyzed, it can be determined which subjects have an ADA response elicited by the compound and at what severity. An ADA response helps determine immunogenicity in toxicological evaluations, so it is important to assess for this response when dealing with immunotherapeutic.


Robots will be capable of navigating in the environment autonomously and efficiently with accurate pose estimates. In this paper, we develop an inertial sensor module that provides accurate absolute 3D velocity and orientation estimates. The module fuses together data from accelerometer, gyroscope and digital compass. A client-server infrastructure comprises of concurrent multiple cameras calibration and robot localization is also presented. The presented infrastructure integrates information from 3D inertial sensor module, odometry data from robot and images from overhead cameras in the environment to localize the robot and concurrently cameras can then be calibrated. Experiment results show the presented approach could calibrate multiple cameras and estimate robot poses iteratively with average errors around 20cm in world reference plane.


Corneal blood staining represents deposition of hemoglobin and its breakdown products within the cornea. Pathologic examination of these corneas typically reveals degenerating endothelial cells and keratocytes. These degenerative changes have typically been attributed to the blunt trauma itself or to toxicity of the erythrocytic debris (a "localized hemosiderosis"). Another possible mechanism for this injury, however, is porphyrin-induced photosensitivity. Examination of frozen sections of an acutely blood-stained human cornea demonstrated fluorescence within all layers of the cornea, similar to that seen with hematoporphyrin derivative. The production of cytotoxic oxygen species within the blood-stained cornea exposed to light may contribute to endothelial and keratocyte degeneration. Limiting light exposure of blood-stained corneas or eyes with hyphemas might theoretically reduce light-induced and porphyrin-mediated toxicity.


Criminality has always been part of human social interactions, shaping the way peoples have constructed states and legislation. As social order became a greater concern for the public authorities, interest in investigating incentives pushing individuals towards engaging in illegal activities has become a central issue of the political agenda. Building on the existing literature, this paper proposes to focus on a few primary determinants of crime, whose effect is in- vestigated using a Responsiveness Scores (RS) approach performed over 50 US states during the period 2000-2012. The RS approach allows us to account for unit heterogeneous response to each single determinant, thus paving the way to a more in-depth analysis of the relation between crime and its drivers. We attempt to overcome the limitations posed by standard regression methods, which assume a single coecient for all determinants, thus contributing to the literature in the field with stronger evidence on determinants' e ects and the geographical patterns of responsiveness scores.


Objectives To investigate the associations between quality of life, co-morbidity, treatment and social support from the workplace with non-employment and early retirement among breast cancer survivors. Methods We identified breast cancer survivors diagnosed between 1997 and 2002 from a hospital or cancer registry in Denmark, Finland, Iceland and Norway (a NOCWO study). All patients had been treated with curative intent. Information on employment, co-morbidity and support was collected via a questionnaire 1–8 years after diagnosis (response rate 76%). The sample included 1111 working-aged currently cancer-free survivors who had been employed at the time of diagnosis. Multivariable logistic regression models were used to analyse the association of various determinants with early retirement and non-employment (due to unemployment, subsidised employment or being a homemaker). Results Among the breast cancer survivors, 82% were employed, 11% were retired and 7% were non-employed. Low physical quality of life, co-morbidity and pain were associated with both non-employment and early retirement after cancer. In addition, non-employed survivors rated their mental quality of life lower and had received less support from the supervisor in their workplace after the diagnosis than the employed survivors, whereas retired survivors more often had blue collar occupations and low level of support from co-workers. Chemotherapy was not associated with retirement or non-employment. Conclusions Lack of supervisors' or colleagues' support seemed to play a role in the breast cancer survivors' non-participation in the workforce. Morbidity, pain and low quality of life were also associated with both early retirement and being non-employed.


Polygraph interrogations are used by half of all surveyed juvenile sex offender (JSO) treatment programs in the United States. This is a distinctive and controversial practice that is rarely if ever used with other juvenile delinquent populations, and that is rarely used or is banned from JSO treatment programs in other countries. Clinical polygraphy is an ethically sensitive issue because it involves mental health therapists in involuntary coercive interrogations of minors. This article reviews core mental health professional ethics principles for juveniles. JSO polygraphy is used as an illustrative issue for applying human rights principles to a practice in light of its benefits, risks, and available alternatives.


The paper analyses the humorous treatment of the David Beckham scandals in the British press, focusing on various poetic devices such as word play, punning, creative coinages and allusion to taboo. It argues that readers may find a disarming pleasure in the spectacularly playful - and playfully spectacular - tabloid discourse about morally questionable non-footballing acts committed by football celebrities. Often contrasting the celebrities' open frontstage performance with their actual backstage behaviour, this kind of discourse relativizes the distinctions between reality and fiction, seriousness and non-seriousness, and the private and public spheres. With respect to taboo and sex-related topics, the popular press tends to present the readers with a semantic puzzle in order to titillate them, while flaunting the media's own blatant moralistic attitudes.


Background Cure rates above 90% have been reported in most Phase III clinical trials using distinct all-oral direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) in chronic hepatitis C patients. Preliminary results in real-world patients have confirmed this, although efficacy tends to be lower. Methods All consecutive chronic hepatitis C patients treated with all-oral DAA regimens at three hepatitis clinics in Spain were retrospectively examined. Host and viral factors were tested as predictors of treatment failure. Results A total of 363 chronic hepatitis C patients had completed a course of all-oral DAA therapy outside clinical trials up to the end of 2015. All but 14 (4%) patients achieved sustained virological response. There were 10 failures that occurred after 12 weeks of sofosbuvir-ledipasvir, despite 5 of them being on ribavirin. All failures but one were relapses. The only patient with viral breakthrough selected NS5B L159F and NS5A Y93H. In multivariate analyses, only advanced liver fibrosis (Metavir F3–F4) and HIV coinfection were significantly associated with treatment failure. A trend towards lower response was seen for HCV genotype 4. Conclusions Treatment failures outside clinical trials are roughly seen in 4% of chronic hepatitis C patients who complete a course of all-oral DAA therapy, resembling what is seen in registration trials. In our series, outcomes were not significantly influenced by ribavirin addition, IL28B polymorphisms, HCV genotype, high baseline HCV RNA or prior interferon failure. However, advanced liver fibrosis and HIV coinfection were significantly associated with treatment failure. Our findings support that there is still room for individualization of current DAA therapy.


Cardiovascular malformations are the most common type of birth defect. Currently, only a fraction of cases have associated causative factors and little is known about the aetiology of the rest. Despite this, our understanding of normal and abnormal heart development continues to grow, a number of recent discoveries even challenging long-held concepts. In this review, we highlight some of this new knowledge, emphasising aspects that may be of interest to the clinician.


Cracks situated parallel to, and very near, the interface in layered, ductile-brittle composite specimens were investigated with finite-element analysis. Elastic, plastic and thermal properties previously obtained from experiments were utilized in the model. A routine was employed for automatic crack extension and remeshing, enabling simulation of incremental crack propagation. The elastic, thermal and plastic contributions to crack propagation behavior were investigated, along with the variation of these with crack length and crack-tip position. Thermal residual stresses are shown to have a large influence on crack path, although this is mitigated to some extent by plasticity. The implications on the inherent reliability of joints and layered materials containing brittle constituents are discussed.