Neoliberal marketisation is altering the nature of non-profit work, leaving workers to navigate a 'double bind' of mission- and market-based values. Some feminist scholars suggest these dynamics are particularly challenging for female workers. Drawing on a larger study of meaningful non-profit work and neoliberal marketisation as well as on contemporary critical and feminist scholarship, this exploratory study examines how neoliberalism's entrepreneurial subject manifests along gender lines among non-profit managers. Data from interviews with 28 non-profit managers demonstrate that while both men and women evoke elements of neoliberalism's entrepreneurial subject, female managers wrestle more with conflicting discourses of market and mission values and rhetoric as well as sociocultural expectations around gender, resulting in a 'triple bind'. This article suggests that neoliberal market discourses are impactful in the manner suggested by feminist scholarship but not necessarily totalising nor deterministic.


Stroke is the leading cause of long-term disability in the US, and for many it causes loss of gait function. The purpose of this research is to examine stroke survivors' gait adaptations to training on the powered ankle–foot orthosis (PAFO). Of particular interest is the stroke survivors' ability to learn how to store and release energy properly while using the device. The PAFO utilizes robotic tendon technology and supports motion with a single degree of freedom — ankle rotation in the sagittal plane. This actuator comprises a motor and series spring. The user interacts with the output side of the spring while the robot controls the input side of the spring such that typical able-body ankle moments would be generated, assuming able-body ankle kinematics are seen at the output side of the spring. Three individuals post-stroke participated in a 3-week training protocol. Outcome measures (temporal, kinematic and kinetic) were derived from robot sensors and recorded for every step. These data are used to evaluate each stroke survivor's adaptations to robotic gait assistance. The robot was worn only on the paretic ankle. For validation of the kinematic results, motion capture data were collected on the third subject. All subjects showed increased cadence, ankle range of motion and power generation capabilities. Additionally, all subjects were able to achieve a larger power output than power input from the robot. Motion capture data collected from Subject 3 validated the robot sensor kinematic data on the affected side, but also demonstrated an unexpected gait adaptation on the unaffected ankle. Sensors on the gait-assisting robot provide large volumes of valuable information on how gait parameters change over time. We have developed key gait evaluation metrics based on the available robot sensor information that may be useful to future researchers. All subjects adapted their gait to the robotic assistance and many of their key metrics moved closer to typical able-body values. This suggests that each subject learned to utilize the assistive moments generated by the robot, despite having no predefined ankle trajectory input from the robot. The security of being harnessed on the treadmill led to more dramatic and favorable results.


Recent work in algorithmic fairness has highlighted the challenge of defining racial categories for the purposes of anti-discrimination. These challenges are not new but have previously fallen to the state, which enacts race through government statistics, policies, and evidentiary standards in anti-discrimination law. Drawing on the history of state race-making, we examine how longstanding questions about the nature of race and discrimination appear within the algorithmic fairness literature. Through a content analysis of 60 papers published at FAccT between 2018 and 2020, we analyze how race is conceptualized and formalized in algorithmic fairness frameworks. We note that differing notions of race are adopted inconsistently, at times even within a single analysis. We also explore the institutional influences and values associated with these choices. While we find that categories used in algorithmic fairness work often echo legal frameworks, we demonstrate that values from academic computer science play an equally important role in the construction of racial categories. Finally, we examine the reasoning behind different operationalizations of race, finding that few papers explicitly describe their choices and even fewer justify them. We argue that the construction of racial categories is a value-laden process with significant social and political consequences for the project of algorithmic fairness. The widespread lack of justification around the operationalization of race reflects institutional norms that allow these political decisions to remain obscured within the backstage of knowledge production.


Background: Seat belts are designed to reduce injuries due to road crash among vehicle occupants. Aims: This study aims to determine the availability of seat belt in vehicles and compliance with seat belt use among vehicle occupants. Materials and methods: This was a 24-h direct observational study of seat belt usage among vehicle occupants in Makurdi, Benue State, Nigeria. By direct surveillance and using a datasheet, we observed 500 vehicles and their occupants for seat belt availability and compliance with its use. Chi-square test was used for test of significance between variables. Results: Twenty-five (5.0%) of the observed 500 vehicles had no seat belt at all. Overall, compliance was 277/486 (57.0%). Use of seat belt was highest in the afternoon with 124/194 (64.4%), followed by 111/188 (59.0%) in the morning and 42/95 (44.2%) at night. Compliance was highest among car occupants [209/308 (67.9%)] and private vehicles, and lowest among commercial vehicle occupants. Compliance among female drivers was 77.1% compared with 51.4% among male drivers. Among drivers, the mean age of seat belt users was 38.4 (7.7) years, which was significantly younger than the 41.3 (8.7) years mean age of non-users. Similar figures were obtained among other vehicle occupants. Conclusions: Compared with previous studies, seat belt usage has improved among Nigerian road users, but there is still room for improvement, especially early in the mornings and at nights. Since these were times when law enforcement agencies were not likely to be on the roads, we advocate for improved coverage by enforcement agents to enforce better compliance.


A method of crystallographic analysis to identify myosin heads interacting with specific actin sites in vertebrate striated muscles is described. It is based on a Fourier transform of a helix in which probability of occurrence of subunits varies periodically. It predicts the presence of layer-lines at 1/24 and 1/10.4 nm(-1) which are experimentally observed in contracting and rigor vertebrate striated muscles, showing that the myosin heads are interacting with specific sites on actin but are still maintaining their average 14.5 nm axial periodicity.


Solving the Schrödinger equation with strain Hamiltonian and combining with KP theory, we obtained the conductivity effective mass and density of states effective mass of strained Si1-xGex(001) in this paper. On the basis of conductivity effective mass and density of states effective mass, considered of Fermi golden rule and Boltzman collision term approximation theory, scattering rate model was established in strained Si1-xGex(001). Based on the conductivity effective mass and scattering rate models we discussed the dependence of electron mobility on stress and doping concentration in strained Si1-xGex(001), it shows that electron mobility decrease with the increasing of stress and doping concentration. This result can provide valuable references to the research of electron mobility of strained Si1-xGex materials and the design of devices.


The method of enteral correction was clinically studied in complex treatment of 20 patients with massive blood loss. An especially elaborated solution identical in its composition to chyme was used for the intravenous infusion. Mafusol was used for anti-ischemic defense of the intestine. The intestinal therapy at the early postoperative period allows effective elimination of hypovolemia, stabilization of the central hemodynamics indices, the earlier reestablishment of functional activity of the gastrointestinal tract. The enteral correction results in 30% less total volume of the intravenous infusion therapy and less amount of complications resulting from it.


The present study aimed to evaluate the functional connectivity (FC) in relevant cortex areas during simulated driving with distraction based on functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) method. Twelve subjects were recruited to perform three types of driving tasks, namely, straight driving, straight driving with secondary auditory task, and straight driving with secondary visual vigilance task, on a driving simulator. The wavelet amplitude (WA) and wavelet phase coherence (WPCO) of the fNIRS signals were calculated in six frequency intervals: I, 0.6–2 Hz; II, 0.145–0.6 Hz; III, 0.052–0.145 Hz; IV, 0.021–0.052 Hz; and V, 0.0095–0.021 Hz, VI, 0.005–0.0095Hz. Results showed that secondary tasks during driving led to worse driving performance, brain activity changes, and dynamic configuration of the connectivity. The significantly lower WA value in the right motor cortex in interval IV, and higher WPCO values in intervals II, V, and VI were found with additional auditory task. Significant standard deviation of speed and lower WA values in the left prefrontal cortex and right prefrontal cortex in interval VI, and lower WPCO values in intervals I, IV, V, and VI were found under the additional visual vigilance task. The results suggest that the changed FC levels in intervals IV, V, and VI were more likely to reflect the driver's distraction condition. The present study provides new insights into the relationship between distracted driving behavior and brain activity. The method may be used for the evaluation of drivers' attention level.


Monitoring the cooling of neutron-star crusts heated during accretion outbursts allows us to infer the physics of the dense matter present in the crust. We examine the crust cooling evolution of the low-mass X-ray binary MXB 1659−29 up to ∼505 days after the end of its 2015 outburst (hereafter outburst II) and compare it with what we observed after its previous 1999 outburst (hereafter outburst I) using data obtained from the Swift, XMM-Newton, and Chandra observatories. The observed effective surface temperature of the neutron star in MXB 1659 − 29 dropped from ∼92 eV to ∼56 eV from ∼12 days to ∼505 days after the end of outburst II. The most recently performed observation after outburst II suggests that the crust is close to returning to thermal equilibrium with the core. We model the crust heating and cooling for both its outbursts collectively to understand the effect of parameters that may change for every outburst (e.g. the average accretion rate, the length of outburst, the envelope composition of the neutron star at the end of the outburst) and those which can be assumed to be the same during these two outbursts (e.g. the neutron star mass, its radius). Our modelling indicates that all parameters were consistent between the two outbursts with no need for any significant changes. In particular, the strength and the depth of the shallow heating mechanism at work (in the crust) were inferred to be consistent during both outbursts, contrary to what has been found when modelling the cooling curves after multiple outburst of another source, MAXI J0556−332. This difference in source behaviour is not understood. We discuss our results in the context of our current understanding of cooling of accretion-heated neutron-star crusts, and in particular with respect to the unexplained shallow heating mechanism.


Health promotion must be person-centered, not organ- or disease-centered, in order to be effective because physical, mental, social, and spiritual aspects of human functioning are inextricably intertwined. Chronic medical disorders, such as heart disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, diabetes, cancer, asthma, and arthritis, are strongly associated with immature personality, emotional instability, and social dysfunction. All indicators of physical, mental, and social well-being are strongly related to the level of maturity and integration of personality, so personality is a useful focus for the promotion of well-being. Assessment of personality also facilitates the awareness of the clinician and the patient about the patient's strengths, weaknesses, and goals, thereby contributing to an effective therapeutic alliance. Health, well-being, resilience, and recovery of function all involve increasing levels of the character traits of Self-directedness, Cooperativeness, and Self-transcendence. Person-centered programs that enhance self-regulation of functioning to achieve personally valued goals improve compliance with medical treatment and quality of life in people with chronic disease. Effective therapeutic approaches to health promotion activate a complex adaptive system of feedback interactions among functioning, plasticity, and virtuous ways of thinking and acting. The probability of personality change can be predicted by high levels of Self-transcendence, which give rise to an outlook of unity and connectedness, particularly when combined with the temperament traits of high Novelty Seeking and high Persistence. In summary, person-centered psychobiological treatments that facilitate the development of well-being and personality development are crucial in the prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation of chronic medical diseases.


SUMMARY
As distance learning and the Internet have become popular, teaching courses over the Internet will become common. Preparing and teaching a distance learning class over the Internet is considerably different than teaching in the traditional classroom. This article presents a case study in developing and conducting a purchasing class over the Internet. It describes how class information, lectures, and class discussions were conveyed to the student on a Web site and how homework and individual correspondence were transmitted by e-mail. Additionally, the differences between traditional classrooms and Internet-based courses are discussed, and general information on distance learning is presented.


The aim of this study is to understand the mind set of youths in relation to gender, college, and achievement levels. It is of essence, that counsellors, educators, parents and policy makers are able to uncover the factors that increase the gap between generations, so that they are can help them adjust to educational institutions, family system, work environment, and life in general. A sample of 310 students (male and female) was randomly selected from eight scientific and humanities colleges at Sultan Qaboos University (SQU). A questionnaire of Sulaiman and Al-Muscati was used to measure the students' perception of generation gap. The researchers found that: Personality characteristics, information level, technical information, life style, social norms and cultural values, work values, and ways of communication were the factors that contributed to generation gaps from the pilot qualitative study and quantitative studies. The reliability and validity of the instruments were high and suitable for implementation. The result of the study indicated a high generation gap between youths and their parents due to technological information, life style, and personality characteristics factors. Also, there was medium generation gap due to social norms and cultural values factors. However, there was low generation gap between youths and their parents in communication ways, and information level factors. The generation gap is higher between the male students and their parents than female students in social norms and cultural values, communication ways, and information levels factors. Also the result showed Science College students have a greater generation gap with their parents than Humanities College students on two factors: Personality characteristics and technological information. Moreover the result revealed differences among the three categories of achievers (medium achievers, average achievers, and low achievers). All the differences were in favour of the three categories based on life style. The study suggests adjustment and bridging of generation gap.

 Key words: Psychology of young people, counselling, generation gap, gender, college, achievement, Oman.


Accurate master-slave control is important for Robot-Assisted Microsurgery (RAMS). This paper presents a handheld master controller for the operation and training of RAMS. A 9-axis Inertial Measure Unit (IMU) and a micro camera are utilized to form the sensing system for the handheld controller. A new hybrid marker pattern is designed to achieve reliable visual tracking, which integrated QR codes, Aruco markers, and chessboard vertices. Real-time multi-sensor fusion is implemented to further improve the tracking accuracy. The proposed handheld controller has been verified on an in-house microsurgical robot to assess its usability and robustness. User studies were conducted based on a trajectory following task, which indicated that the proposed handheld controller had comparable performance with the Phantom Omni, demonstrating its potential applications in microsurgical robot control and training.


Parkinson's disease (PD) is associated with a loss of internal cueing systems, affecting rhythmic motor tasks such as walking and speech production. Music and dance encourage spontaneous rhythmic coupling between sensory and motor systems; this has inspired the development of dance programs for PD. Here we assessed the therapeutic outcome and some underlying cognitive mechanisms of dance classes for PD, as measured by neuropsychological assessments of disease severity as well as quantitative assessments of rhythmic ability and sensorimotor experience. We assessed prior music and dance experience, beat perception (Beat Alignment Test), sensorimotor coupling (tapping to high- and low-groove songs), and disease severity (Unified Parkinson's Disease Rating Scale in PD individuals) before and after four months of weekly dance classes. PD individuals performed better on UPDRS after four months of weekly dance classes, suggesting efficacy of dance intervention. Greater post-intervention improvements in UPDRS were associated with the presence of prior dance experience and with more accurate sensorimotor coupling. Prior dance experience was additionally associated with enhanced sensorimotor coupling during tapping to both high-groove and low-groove songs. These results show that dance classes for PD improve both qualitative and quantitative assessments of disease symptoms. The association between these improvements and dance experience suggests that rhythmic motor training, a mechanism underlying dance training, impacts improvements in parkinsonian symptoms following a dance intervention.


Duchenne muscular dystrophy patients report masticatory problems. The aim was to determine the efficacy of mastication training in Duchenne muscular dystrophy using chewing gum for 4 weeks. In all, 17 patients and 17 healthy age-matched males participated. The masticatory performance was assessed using a mixing ability test and measuring anterior bite force before, shortly after and 1 month after the training. In the patient group the masticatory performance improved and remained after 1-month follow-up, no significant changes in anterior maximum bite force was observed after mastication training. In the healthy subject the bite force increased and remained at the 1-month follow-up; no significant differences in masticatory performance were observed. Mastication training by using sugar-free chewing gum in Duchenne muscular dystrophy patients improved their masticatory performance. Since bite force did not improve, the working mechanism of the improvement in chewing may relate to changes of the neuromuscular function and coordination, resulting in improvement of skills in performing mastication.


I. INTRODUCTION "Carelessness about our security is dangerous; carelessness about our freedom is also dangerous." (1) The obvious message of this statement is to be ever-mindful of the fine line between a comfortable co-existence with the government and a pronounced separation from the government. Accordingly, decisions to support or oppose governmental action should contemplate this cautious yet responsible approach. The abstraction of the statement requires its individualized application to specific governmental action to determine whether our decision to endorse or oppose that action is prudent. One such governmental action is the FBI's implementation of Carnivore, an Internet monitoring system introduced on July 11, 2000. (2) Carnivore was designed, and is used exclusively, to carry out court-ordered surveillance of electronic communications, e.g., e-mail. (3) Carnivore is a tangible, portable device, tantamount to a phone tap, that acts as a "sniffer," allowing the FBI to intercept and collect criminal suspects' e-mail without their knowledge or consent. (4) Carnivore is used only in limited circumstances--after FBI, Department of Justice, and judicial scrutiny--pursuant to detailed court orders prescribing and proscribing retrieval procedures. (5) The concern that Carnivore transforms George Orwell's fictitious "Big Brother" concept to reality (by allowing the FBI to engage in unfettered e-mail monitoring), however, raises the need to address the system. Accordingly, this Note addresses competing and parallel interests between the government and society to determine the legitimacy and necessity of Carnivore. The purpose of this Note is twofold: first to demonstrate the need for Carnivore to enable law enforcement to keep up with criminals who utilize cyberspace to communicate criminal plans; and second to dispel privacy concerns associated with the system by allaying misconceptions and fears related to its implementation and usage. Part II of this Note addresses the catalyzing reasons for Carnivore's design and use. Part III describes the FBI's extensive and mandatory internal procedures that dictate the decision to use Carnivore to pursue a suspected criminal, and addresses the three federal statutes that can empower Carnivore's use. Part IV explains Carnivore's method of operation; i.e., how it works in each of three stages. Part V articulates the privacy concerns raised by privacy advocates, including: (1) the possibility of collecting and storing e-mail in violation of federal law; (2) Fourth Amendment infringement; and (3) a lack of FBI individual accountability by failing to employ tracking mechanisms that allow for independent oversight. Finally, this Note concludes by addressing policy considerations that should shape the future for Carnivore. II. A BACKGROUND TO CARNIVORE: REASONS FOR IMPLEMENTATION As computer technology and usage rapidly proliferates within our society, criminals embrace this advancement by capitalizing on the opportunities and capabilities produced by that technology's increasing pervasiveness. (6) The FBI recognizes cyberspace as an efficient and increasingly popular medium for criminal activity, especially among spies, hackers, and other dangerous criminals. (7) In response to these threats against the safety of the American people, to the security of our communications infrastructure, and to the important commercial and private need for a safe, secure, and vibrant Internet, the FBI has concentrated its technological efforts and resources to fight a broad array of cyber crimes. (8) One of these efforts has been in the design and implementation of Carnivore, which the FBI hopes will increase public safety by reducing the amount of computer-assisted criminal activity. Specifically, the FBI has articulated five types of critically important crimes that Carnivore will target: terrorism, information warfare, child pornography, fraud (including white collar), and virus writing and distribution. …


Estimating the position of a mobile node by linear sensor fusion of ranging, speed, and orientation measurements has the potentiality to achieve high localization accuracy. Nevertheless, the design of these sensor fusion algorithms is uncertain if their fundamental limitations are unknown. Despite the substantial research focus on these sensor fusion methods, the characterization of the Cramér Rao Lower Bound (CRLB) has not yet been satisfactorily addressed. In this paper, the existence and derivation of the posterior CRLB for the linear sensor fusion of ranging, speed, and orientation measurements is investigated. The major difficulty in the analysis is that ranging and orientation are not linearly related to the position, which makes it hard to derive the posterior CRLB. This difficulty is overcome by introducing the concept of posterior CRLB in the Cauchy principal value sense and deriving explicit upper and lower bounds to the posteriori Fisher information matrix. Numerical simulation results are provided for both the parametric CRLB and the posterior CRLB, comparing some widely-used methods from the literature to the derived bound. It is shown that many existing methods based on Kalman filtering may be far from the the fundamental limitations given by the CRLB.


In the static gauge, we investigate the supersymmetry realized on a D3 brane in the AdS5×S background. For the κ symmetry fixing condition, the covariant and the Killing spinor gauges are taken. The worldvolume supersymmetry transformation rule for each gauge is then obtained. We show that neither of the two fixing conditions is not suitable for the correct description of the 'vacuum' configuration of the worldvolume theory because both make the 'vacuum' non-supersymmetric as opposed to the usual expectation. Thus, we manifest what the problem of κ symmetry fixing is in the study of the D3 brane in the AdS5×S background.


Background
Hepatic epithelioid angiomyolipoma (HEA) shares some similarities with other hepatic tumors, such as hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). Thus, establishing a definite diagnosis of HEA based on medical imaging is often difficult. In this study, we evaluated multiphasic computed tomography (CT) imaging to differentiate HEA from HCC in patients with noncirrhotic livers.

Methods
We retrospectively analyzed the clinical and imaging data of both contrast and non-contrast enhanced CT scans from 25 patients with HEA and 50 patients with HCC in noncirrhotic livers. CT features, including lesion position, size, shape, interior content, border, enhancement degree, and enhancement pattern, were independently evaluated by two radiologists. Intratumoral blood vessels, peripheral supply vessels, the early display of the hepatic vein, peripheral abnormal perfusion, peripheral washout sign, pseudocapsule, and portal tumor thrombus were also evaluated. Next, we quantitatively analyzed difference within results of clinical and CT characteristics between the HEA and HCC groups.

Results
The number of female HEA patients is more than male (76% vs. 24%), with a mean age of 49.44±10.33 years (from 30 to 68 years). The majority (64%) of HEA patients were asymptomatic, without hepatitis (88%). On non-contrast enhanced CT, HEA mainly manifested as a round (92%), hypodense mass (100%) with little fat (12%) and rare complications, such as hemorrhage (4%) and calcification (4%). HEA all manifested as an intensely enhanced mass on contrast-enhanced CT. The differences between HEA and HCC were significant in the imaging characteristics of the early display of the hepatic vein (32% vs. 0%, P=0.000), intratumoral blood vessels during the nonarterial phase (36% vs. 8%, P=0.003), washout enhancement (52% vs. 86%, P=0.001), and prolonged enhancement (40% vs. 4%, P=0.000).

Conclusions
Although HEA is an uncommon hepatic tumor, clinical and CT manifestation may be indicative. Clinical and CT characteristics including asymptomatic, non-hepatic, fat-deficient, early display of the hepatic vein, intratumoral blood vessels during the nonarterial phase and prolonged enhancement are selected to improve the recognition of HEA, supporting for a differential diagnosis from HCC.


This guide has been created to help NUR480 students with database searching and finding articles for their senior scholarly projects (SSP).


The macroscopic Maxwell equations, which quantum mechanics uses to define radiation fields, are shown to be in violation of the special principle of relativity. This is resolved by applying Maxwell's equations microscopically to each of the n constituent wave trains of a macroscopic wave. It is then shown that spontaneous emission may be accounted for by subjecting a bound electron to the combined influence of the n superimposed wave trains. If emission is induced by a coherent wave, then frequency-doubling phenomena are predicted. Several examples are cited, showing the pervasiveness of frequency doubling in nature. The evidence suggests further that quantum statistics is due to microscopic field fluctuations rather than photon counting. A manifestly covariant description of an electron transition is obtained in the form of a Lagrangian density, which is then quantized by applying appropriate limits of integration. A simple shift in these limits yields an independent field in free space, or photon, which is bounded by parallel surfaces separated by a distance equal to the wavelength and period. The implications of this photon model upon interference phenomena and the inverse square law are briefly discussed. A test of the inverse square law is proposed.


The Italian LTER network is an integrated and shared system for ecosystem monitoring (Long Term Ecological Research-Italy). The research sites of Abruzzo and Molise are part of the LTER site 20 " Coastal sand dunes in central Italy" (www.lteritalia.it) and include 5 S.C.I. along the central Italy Adriatic coastline. The paper aims to carry out a short review of the main results recently achieved through the dune vegetation monitoring in these LTER sites and proposes a synthesis on the species composition (focal and alien species occurrence) and the spatial distribution of dune EU habitats. We recorded 17 EU dune habitats, 4 of them are priority habitats (2250*, 2270*, 3170*, 1510*). Results suggest that many EU habitats are still locally widespread, with the exception of wet slacks and evergreen woods, occurring only in residual small patches. Moreover all EU habitats host several invasive alien species and only in salt marshes they are almost absent, because of the occurrence of extreme salinity. This natural heritage is therefore vulnerable and further efforts should be made to reduce the impacts of human pressure, through increased awareness of environmental issues and the education on ecosystem services provided by the natural landscape of coastal dunes.


The increasing demand for low cost consistent quality composite materials, especially of the automotive industry, creates the necessity for fast high quality processes. Pultrusion is one of the processes that can fulfill this demand. While the process is highly automated, manufacturing parameters still have to be chosen manually. The choice of line speed, mould temperature and injection pressure is based on best practice and therefore requires manual optimization that results in cost intensive manufacturing errors and suboptimal machine productivity. This paper presents a possible solution for this problem by providing an on-line cure monitoring approach that allows to overcome this challenge. Resonant Ultrasonic Spectroscopy (RUS) shows a high potential for in-line cure monitoring inside the pultrusion tool. RUS has been adapted for the first time in a pultrusion process. This paper focuses on the successful application of this technique to control the pultrusion process based on the state of cure of the material inside of the tool. As one of the only techniques for in-line cure monitoring which can be used continuously in closed tools despite high abrasion, it provides a new insight into the pultrusion process.


We propose an automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) framework for combinational threshold networks. The motivation behind this work lies in the fact that many emerging nanotechnologies, such as resonant tunneling diodes (RTDs) and quantum cellular automata (QCA), implement threshold logic. Consequently, there is a need to develop an ATPG methodology for this type of logic. We have built the first automatic test pattern generator and fault simulator for threshold logic, which has been integrated on top of an existing computer-aided design (CAD) tool. These exploit new fault collapsing techniques we have developed for threshold networks. We perform fault modeling to show that many cuts and shorts in RTD-based threshold gates are equivalent to stuck-at faults at the inputs and output of the gate. Experimental results with the MCNC benchmarks indicate that test vectors were found for all testable stuck-at faults in their threshold network implementations.


Single crystals of cobalt oxyborates Co3O2BO3 and Co3-xFexO2BO3 were synthesized. The crystal structure and electric properties were investigated. The difference in the electrical resistivity behaviors was found. For parent Co3O2BO3 nor simple activation law, nor Mott variable range hopping (VRH) are acquirable to describe the experimental data in wide temperature region. In contrast for Co3-xFex O2BO3 Mott's variable-range hopping conductivity clearly dominates.


These notes present the fundamentals of Fermi acceleration at shocks, with a special attention to the role that supernova remnants have in producing Galactic cosmic rays. Then, the recent discoveries in the theory of diffusive shock acceleration (DSA) that stem from first-principle kinetic plasma simulations are discussed. When ion acceleration is efficient, the back-reaction of non-thermal particles and self-generated magnetic fields becomes prominent and leads to both enhanced shock compression and particle spectra significantly softer than those predicted by the standard test-particle DSA theory. These results are discussed in the context of the non-thermal phenomenology of astrophysical shocks, with a special focus on the remnant of SN1006.


Part of rethinking philosophy today, the author believes, is to rethink our logical concepts. The author questions the ontological existence of the proposition as the content of sentential utterances—written or spoken— as it was originally proposed by John Searle. While a performative is an utterance where the speaker not only utters a sentential or illocutionary content such as a statement, but also performs the illocutionary force such as the act of stating, the author reasserts John Austin's constative as the general label (genus) of specific utterances (species) that can be rendered true or false such as a statement, assertion, description, and prediction. In the remainder of the paper, the author tries to show that it is a category mistake for someone to assert a statement or to state an assertion.


Summary Dr. Donald A. B. Lindberg, Director of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, received an honorary doctorate from UMIT, the University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology in Innsbruck, Tyrol. The celebration took place on September 28, 2004 at an academic event during a conference of the Austrian, German, and Swiss Societies of Medical Informatics, GMDS2004. Dr. Lindberg has been a pioneer in the field of computers in health care from the early 1960s onwards. In 1984 he became the Director of the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, the world's largest fully computerized biomedical library. Dr. Lind-berg has been involved in the early activities of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA), among others being the chair of the Organizing Committee for MEDINFO 86 in Washington D.C. He was elected the first president of the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA), and served as an editor of Methods of Information in Medicine.


OBJECTIVE
To assess the effect of a personalized repeated feedback approach using digital step counters (pedometers) on mobility after cesarean delivery in high-risk patients.

METHODS
This was a randomized controlled trial at a tertiary university hospital. Patients who underwent cesarean delivery and were defined as high risk for thromboembolic events were asked to wear a pedometer around their wrists postpartum for 48 hours. Patients were randomized to the feedback group, which received personalized feedback by the research staff regarding their mobility at three set timepoints, or the control group, which received standard care. The number of steps taken by patients was compared between the groups and served as the primary outcome. Secondary outcomes included patient reported pain, physical and mental recovery, and overall satisfaction. Sample size was predetermined to detect a 25% between-group difference in the primary outcome.

RESULTS
From December 2018 to July 2019, 215 patients were recruited, randomized and completed follow-up-108 in the feedback group and 107 in the control group. Patients' demographics and intrapartum course were similar between the groups. The number of steps taken was significantly higher in the feedback group compared with the control group: 5,918±3,116 vs 4,161±2,532 steps, P<.001. Pain scores were similar between the groups, as was analgesic consumption. Patients in the feedback group reported a significantly easier physical and mental postpartum recovery and were significantly more satisfied with their delivery experience. Postpartum complications did not differ between the groups.

CONCLUSION
In high-risk patients after cesarean delivery, mobility was improved by using a personalized feedback approach. Enhanced mobility was not associated with a higher rate of complications or pain and was positively associated with patient satisfaction.

CLINICAL TRIAL REGISTRATION
ClinicalTrials.gov, NCT03724760.


Breast reconstruction is a crucial step in the treatment of breast cancer providing a durable solution for patients seeking to restore their physical and psychological integrity. If only part of the breast parenchyma is removed, local glandular flaps are used to restore breast shape and volume. After total mastectomy, when prosthetic reconstruction is contraindicated because of poor skin quality, distant flaps are preferred. Most of the time, two types of flaps are used : the pedicled myocutaneous latissimus dorsi flap and the deep inferior epigastric perforator (D.I.E.P.) free flap. The first flap is simple to execute and reliable, but requires some breast prosthetic material to add volume to the reconstruction. The second flap allows performing autologus reconstructions, providing a high quantity of supple tissues, while remaining a significantly more complex technique.


The main condition for the effective use of existing reclamation systems in Ukraine is to increase the productivity of reclaimed lands along with improving their ecological condition. This is emphasized in a number of state documents, namely: Presidentia l Decrees, Resolutions of the Verkhovna Rada, Laws of Ukraine. One of the main reasons for the weak dynamics of the revival of the domestic reclamation complex is the lack of qualified management and technological staff in the infrastructure that provides reclamation agriculture. Therefore, in the educational process these issues are given more and more attention. Reclamation agriculture is considered b y scientists as a complex technology for sustainable development of production in the agricultural sector of the economy. There is a systematic approach to the development of modern technologies and technical means of irrigation for the sustainable development of agricultural production, obtaining quality products, preserving the fertility of lands, fauna and flora that inhabit it with important conceptual tasks of the educational process and research and production activities. Current strategic issues include: the formation of water policy in Ukraine in view of the availability of water resources and the development of adaptation measures in the context of climate change; development of conceptual bases of restoration and development of irrigation and drainage in Ukraine. And also water resources of Ukraine and modern methods of research of aquatic ecosystems; scientific bases of formation of sustainable bioenergy agroecosystems; system of laboratory diagnostics of water-physical properties of soils; scientific and methodological bases of organization and conduct of ecological and reclamation monitoring; water and ecological risks of transformation of reclaimed lands and ways of their minimization; information technologies in scientific research in the field of agricultural reclamation, etc. Important issues in the development of modern technologies and technical means of irrigation also include: conceptual principles of irrigation management; features of designing irrigation systems; method of setting watering dates the basis of irrigation regimes; use of the method "Penman-Monteith" for irrigation management; irrigation management based on phytomonitoring; use of remote sensing data for irrigation control; Irrigation management information system "Irrigation online"; operation of irrigation systems; technologies of repair and restoration works on hydraulic structures of irrigation systems, etc.


This dissertation investigates how variation in trade credit standards play a role in firm maturation. In Chapter 1, I survey existing research in trade credit. Following this, I identify lifecycle trends in supplier trade credit policy in Chapter 2. Young suppliers assume greater risks in trade credit provision early in their lifecycles in order to advance growth and product market agendas. There is a peak around a supplier's IPO in the riskiness of trade credit supplied, measured by doubtful receivables and the length of credit provided (receivables length). I find that young firms in industries where customer-supplier relationships are more significant have higher doubtful receivables, consistent with suppliers varying trade credit standards to build relationships. Additionally, young suppliers with more complex products (as measured by R&D intensity) offer longer duration loans compared to suppliers of similar age. Offering riskier trade credit terms affects economic outcomes. In Chapter 3, I study if varying trade credit standards for the purpose of relationship building is a viable strategy for all firm maturities. I use the incidence of a major free trade agreement to study firm responses to a major disruption in existing supplier-customer relationships. Chapter 3 posits both supplier driven as well as customer driven explanations for the observed responses, finding evidence consistent with older suppliers have a reduced incentive as well as capacity to engage in relationship building.


The data collected through high densely distributed wireless sensor networks is immense. The asymmetry between the data acquisition and information processing makes a great challenge to the restriction of energy and computation consumption of the sensor nodes, and it limits the application of wireless sensor networks. However, the recent works show that compressed sensing can break through this limitation of asymmetry. Compressed sensing is an emerging theory that is based on the fact that a signal can be recovered through a relatively small number of random projections which contain most of its salient information. In this paper, we introduce the background of compressive sensing, and then applications of compressed sensing in wireless sensor networks are presented.


The issue of employability among engineering graduates has been examined, debated and tried to be resolved by various organizations and researchers. The lack of employability skills especially communication skills causes graduates struggling to fulfill current work demands and professional expectations in order to succeed in today's fast-changing and global working environments. Communication skills are a crucial factor of employability, thus there is a need for quality assessment especially in job interview to enhance communicative competence of undergraduates. This research aims to unfold and assess what and how job candidates perform in a mock job interview and how they are being judged by the interviewers. It also studies the underlying linguistic evidence in job interviews of future engineers under the conditions of English as a Second Language (ESL) by applying Appraisal analysis (Attitude subsystems) of Systemic Functional Linguistics and Verbal Impression Management. The findings revealed that future graduates who possess certain elements of linguistics competencies are better in answering and some are in dire need to be equipped with the skills of job interview in preparing them to be employable. It can be concluded that good communication skills especially the job interview skills as what the industry required and persisted are not only based on the fluency of English but the ability to present ideas explicitly and facts using appropriate words and positiveness. The study also recommends the need to assess the future engineering graduates' linguistics abilities in preparing them to be employable.


Athletes' endorsement earnings receive significant attention in the trade/popular press, but the academic literature on this issue is sparse. Thus, the purpose of the study was to examine factors that drive variation in endorsement earnings. Resulting analyses indicated the Positive Q Score measure (likability) was worth about $750,000–$1 million for each unit of the scale, while the Negative Q Score measure was statistically insignificant. One unit increases in Exposure and Familiarity were worth roughly $600,000 and $200,000, respectively. These findings can be used by athletes, agents, and sponsors to determine estimates, or fair-market value, for endorsement deals. Subscribe to JASM


The problems brought about by traffic jams and a need for assimilating information for simulation, real – time control and communication networks has aroused the interest in Intelligent Transportation. A traffic light based on timer is the simplest way of controlling the traffic.
A system for controlling traffic light by image processing and artificial intelligence is proposed in this paper. A camera is installed alongside the traffic light to capture image sequences. The acquired image is wirelessly transmitted to a computer using a memory card. Using low-level image processing modules and high-level adaptive neuro fuzzy based module the traffic data is analyzed. The control signal given by the adaptive fuzzy controller decides the order of a lane to receive the required traffic light signal. The designed controller is tested first with Software in Loop (SIL) and then in Hardware in Loop (HIL) simulations. The assimilation of plant models with a control model or code guarantees the needed precision as well as accessibility of the variables needed for controls. The SIMULINK model of the adaptive controller is implemented on C2000 microcontroller using Hardware in Loop Simulation.


This study was aimed to isolate, identify and characterize the bacterial pathogens causing calf diarrhea in Baghdad province and study it's susceptibility toward different antibiotics. The study was conducted on 105 faecal samples collected directly from the rectum of diarrhoeic calves and brought to the laboratory for bacteriological examination. Isolation and identification of the microorganisms were confirmed on the basis of their, staining, cultural, morphology and biochemical tests. Furthermore, antibacterial test was study for different clinical isolates of pathogenic bacteria toward varying concentration of antibiotics by disc diffusion technique. samples were examined for the isolation of bacteria of which 45 (42.85%) samples were positive for E. coli, 22 (20.95%) samples were positive for Salmonella spp, 16 (15.23%) samples were positive for Staphylococcus, 12 (10.5%) samples were positive for Mixed infection, 10 (9.52%) samples were negative for bacteria. The susceptibility study revealed that most of the E. coli, Salmonella spp., and Staphylococcus spp. were resistant to ampicillin, amoxicillin, erythromycin, gentamicin, tetracycline, streptomycin and trimethoprim / sulfamethoxazole with varying percentages, and susceptible to ciprofloxacin and azithromycin. The findings of the present study indicate that the clinical isolates of pathogenic bacteria resistance to  a number of bacterial antibiotics.


Dynamic simulation and applications of a novel, continuous-fed, constant level modified sequencing batch reactor for biological nutrient removal are presented. The underlying mathematical model and practical applications of the simulation are discussed. Case studies are presented to illustrate the applications as well as the flexibility of the system in meeting different wastewater treatment requirements. Operation experience from full-scale wastewater treatment plant demonstrates the reliability, ease of operation and high efficiency of the system. Average BOD5, total nitrogen, total phosphorus and TSS removals of 97, 81, 88 and 94% are achieved respectively on an annual basis with little operator attention. Consistently high waste activated sludge concentrations are demonstrated, averaging approximately 20,000 mg/L.


There is a widespread belief among elite level athletes and their coaches that adequate sleep is pre-requisite for those seeking to achieve optimum performance. Despite the prevalence of this belief, combined with the common occurance of sleep complaints among athletes, there has been surprisingly little empirical investigation of sleep in this population; the vast majority of sleep research takes place in normal populations, and employs methods of sleep disturbance that are not relevant to elite level athletes. When athletes have been studied, investigations thus far have failed to measure sleep objectively during the competitive season, and have relied on subjective and retrospective self-report.
The aim of this thesis has been to examine the prevalence of sleep disturbance among elite level athletes, and to investigate the impact that sleep can have on subsequent performance both in training for competition and in competition itself. The impact that training and competing in elite level sport could have on sleep was also investigated, as were a number of other factors related to elite level competition.
A total of 68 elite level athletes, both male and female, from 3 different sports (football, basketball, swimming), volunteered to have their sleep measured by wrist actigraphy for a period of at least 2 weeks. Twenty-seven age-matched sedentary participants were similarly recruited to act as a control group. Thirty-three professional football players, playing in either an England and Wales Premiership or Championship football club continued to have their sleep measured by wrist actigraphy for a period of eight weeks of the regular competitive season, during which their on-pitch performance was measured by means of the ProZone® player tracking system, and their performance in training was measured by the Catapult X3® GPS system. Both measures are widely used currently to measure performance in professional football, ensuring that performance was measured as it occurred naturally instead of in a contrived setting. Wrist actigraphy was similarly chosen since it allows for long term objective measurement of sleep.
In agreement with anecdotal reports and previous research, evidence of a significant level of sleep disturbance was found among all the types of elite athletes studied. A number of stressors associated with elite competition also demonstrated a significant impact on sleep, particularly to sleep timing following matches, and more generally as a consequence of physical activity during evening matches. Sleep did not have a statistically significant impact on subsequent performance during matches, although, given the narrow margins between success and failure involved in competing at such a high level, the size of the effect in evidence may still have important implications for athletes and coaches. Sleep also demonstrated a significant impact on performance during training.
The evidence of significant sleep disturbance has serious implications for elite level athletes; on its own the level of sleep disturbance has a number of potentially adverse consequences, such as increased risk of infection and illness, compromised metabolism, and sub-optimal recovery from training, potentially serious factors for those training for optimal performance. In addition, the consequences that poor sleep has on training could hamper efforts to prepare properly for elite athletic competition, as well as having a marginal impact on performance itself.


As to the origin of the pulmonary vein, there are two theories held by the earlier investigators. One holds that the anlage of the pulmonary vein grows out through the dorsal mesocardium toward the lung buds as an endothelial proliferation from the sinus venosus; the other view asserts that this vein arises from an indifferent preexisting plexus which connects the lung buds and the sinus venosus. On the further developmental stages of the vein there are also some interesting problems which were less studied, namely: 1) The connection between the pulmonary vein and the systemic circulation. 2) The position of the opening of pulmonary vein in the heart primordia. 3) The length and the direction of the common pulmonary vein. In an effort to solve these questions, the author has selected the embryos of Uroloncha domestica Flower for investigation. A large majority of the embryos were fixed in Zenker's fluid, and stained with borax carmine. After the subsequent treatment in the usual manner, these specimens were embedded in paraffin, trimmed and cut in transverse serial sections with a thickness of 10 microns. A number of models were prepared according to Born-Peter's method of wax-plate reconstruction. From the results of these experiments, the following summary and conclusions may be made: 1) The anlage of the pulmonary vein first grows out in the embryo 4.0mm. in length with 20 somites as an endothelial proliferation from the sinus venosus. 2) The pulmonary opening is found in the median plane of the sinus venosus at an early stage of development, and when the interatrial septum is formed, the opening migrates from the median plane to the left. Consequently, the pulmonary vein empties into the left atrium dorsally. 3) The pulmonary vein is connected with the systemic circulation by a small branch to the post-caval plexus. 4) The direction of the common pulmonary vein is toward dextro-dorsad from the pulmonary opening, and in the growth of the heart, this direction migrates from dextro-dosad to dorsad. 5) The length of the common pulmonary vein is increased as the pulmonary anlage develops, but at the later stage of development it is decreased and the vein is gradually absorbed into the atrial wall.


Health professionals view medical ethics as a discipline that provides the basis for more adequate patient care. In recent years the concepts of quality of care and human rights - with their attending discourses - have joined the concept of medical ethics among the paradigms to consider in care for humans both at the individual and health policy levels. The current study seeks to analyze such paradigms, based on a case study of sexual and reproductive health policies in Peru in the last 10 years.


Organic matter in Tertiary strata of the Niger delta is mainly a mixture of types II and III kerogen as defined by pyrolysis, has a high pristane/phytane ratio (> 1%), and is composed of the macerals vitrinite and minor liptinite. The main palynofacies are structured woody material, opaque organic matter, cuticles, pollen and spores, and minor amorphous organic matter. The geochemistry, petrology, palynofacies, and distribution data indicate a predominantly terrestrial and detrital source of the organic matter irrespective of facies, formation, or age. The distribution and abundance of the organic matter are related to both the age of the strata and depositional environment. The most significant variation is the decline in mean total organic carbon (TOC) content from late Eocene (2.2% TOC) to Pliocene strata (.90% TOC) and an associated general decline in pyrolysis-defined hydrogen index (HI) and pristane/phytane ratio. The decrease in TOC and HI in younger strata reflects increased dilution of a nearly constant supply of terrestrial organic matter with the generally higher sedimentation rates of younger strata. A simple linear dilution model accounts for about 50% of the variance in measured TOC. The low pristane/phytane ratio of younger strata may reflect less-oxidizing depositional conditions. The variation in organic matter with depositional environments and environmental depth zones (defined by foraminiferal assemblages) is significant, although less important than variation due to age. The highest TOC and HI values occur in nonmarine swamp, marsh, and floodplain deposits, reflecting proximity to the organic source. Beach, barrier and offshore bar facies have lower TOC and HI values due to selective winnowing of organic matter and greater oxidation. From continental to transition marine depth zones, a marked decline in TOC and HI occurs as a result of dilution, selective transport, and oxidation of the organic matter. From transitional to bathyal depth zones, little variation is found in TOC but a general increase is found in HI, which reflects a relative increase in more hydrogen-rich autochthonous organic matter. In all facies, autochthonous organic matter comprises less than 20% of the TOC. No interpretable variation appears in maceral or palynofacies abundance with sediment type, which probably reflects the homogeneity of the organic matter. Paradoxically, no rich source rocks occur in the Tertiary succession in the Niger delta and, as conventionally measured, the strata have little or no oil-generating potential. The poor quality of the source rocks has been more than compensated for by their great volume, by the excellent migration routes provided by interbedded permeable sands, and possibly by the relatively rapid rate of maturation. Niger delta type of source rock, although an end member in terms of general source rock composition, appears to be relatively typical of Tertiary deltas.


This paper presents two characterization methods that are used to describe viscoelastic behavior.  In the Prony series method, a discrete representation of the generalized Kelvin model is used, whereas the spectral method uses a continuous distribution. The Prony series coefficients are determined through the linear least squares technique. The Elastic-Viscoelastic Correspondence Principle and the Laplace transform are used in the spectral function approach, which utilizes a selected distribution function that has the potential to describe a wide range of viscoelastic material behavior. Characterization exercises from both methods used strain histories from short-term unidirectional tensile creep experiments that were obtained at three temperatures below the glass transition temperature of a vinyl ester polymer. Experimental strains in both the longitudinal and transverse directions were measured using the digital image correlation technique and linear viscoelastic material properties were obtained without using Poisson's ratios. The measured data was subsequently used to determine the tensile creep compliance function for each test configuration. The potential and limitations of each modeling approach are discussed.


A taxonomic revision and phylogenetic analysis of the generic group Anaphothrips are presented. Several genera in Central America are closely related to this generic group. Based on the analysis of characters and its possible evolution, the new genus Nakaharathrips has been segregated from Anaphothrips, and the taxonomic status of the subspecies of Aurantothrips has been changed to the species level. The phylogenetic analysis shows a close relationship between the genera Anaphothrips, Ranjana, Nakaharathrips n.gen., Aurantothrips, Nicolemma n.gen., Ameranathrips, Baileyothrips and Gonzalezya n.gen., where the first lineage is formed by the genera (Ranjana (Aurantothrips+Nicolemma)) and the second lineage contains the genera [(Anaphothrips+Nakaharathrips)(Baileyothrips (Ameranathrips+Gonzalezya)].


We present a method to search for a probe (or query) image representation against a large gallery in the encrypted domain. We require that the probe and gallery images be represented in terms of a fixed-length representation, which is typical for representations obtained from learned networks. Our encryption scheme is agnostic to how the fixed-length representation is obtained and can therefore be applied to any fixed-length representation in any application domain. Our method, dubbed HERS (Homomorphically Encrypted Representation Search), operates by (i) compressing the representation towards its estimated intrinsic dimensionality with minimal loss of accuracy (ii) encrypting the compressed representation using the proposed fully homomorphic encryption scheme, and (iii) efficiently searching against a gallery of encrypted representations directly in the encrypted domain, without decrypting them. Numerical results on large galleries of face, fingerprint, and object datasets such as ImageNet show that, for the first time, accurate and fast image search within the encrypted domain is feasible at scale (500 seconds; $275\times $ speed up over state-of-the-art for encrypted search against a gallery of 100 million). Code is available at https://github.com/human-analysis/hers-encrypted-image-search.


ECMO (extracorporeal membrane oxygenation) is a cardiac or respiratory support which uses the principle of extracorporeal circulation (ECC). It consists of a pump generating an output as well as a membrane oxygenating blood and removing CO2. Thanks to an ECMO mobile team, expert caregivers can now perform the circulatory support in primary centers and then transfer patients under assistance to the referral center. After a brief summary of the two different anatomical approaches (veno-arterial and veno-venous) as well as their indications, the authors will share their experience of two transferred patients under ECMO to Geneva. Referral center and ECMO mobile team concepts will then be detailed focusing on the present situation in Switzerland.


The incidence of anomalies associated with vitiligo has been variously reported. Diabetes mellitus, pernicious anemia, hyperthyroidism, hypothyroidism, and Addison's disease have all been linked with vitiligo. The association of antithyroglobulin antibodies and antiparietal cell antibodies with vitiligo have added support to the theory of an autoimmune cause, as has the recent association of HLA 13 with vitiligo and antithyroid antibodies. However, we were unaware of any study dealing exclusively with vitiligo in black patients. For this reason, we studied the black patients attending the vitiligo clinic at Cook County Hospital, Chicago, for any evidence of the previously mentioned conditions, including determination of antithyroglobulin and antiparietal cell antibodies. No patient was admitted to the study prior to being examined independently by three investigators. If there was any disagreement on the diagnosis, the patient was excluded from the study. Patients and Methods Fifty black patients were randomly selected from the vitiligo clinic


To obtain CME credits, complete the test below following these guidelines: I. Read each article carefully. 2. Choose .the most appropriate resp onse for each of the following questio ns and record these on the registrat ion form. Unanswered questions are considered incorrect. 3. Send the completed registration form and your payment '(check, money order, VISA, Mastercard) to the Center for Continuing Education. University of Nebraska Medical Center (UNMC).


Background data revealed that some American and Japanese patients with essential hypertension, including many who were not being treated with any anti-hypertensive drug, had a deficiency of coenzyme Q10. Eight clinically used anti-hypertensive drugs have now been tested for inhibition of two mitochondrial coenzyme Q10-enzymes of heart tissue, succinoxidase and NADH-oxidase. Diazoxide and propranolol significantly inhibited the CoQ10-succinoxidase and CoQ10-NADH-oxidase, respectively. Metoprolol did not inhibit succinoxidase, and was one-fourth as active as propranolol for inhibition of NADH-oxidase. Hydrochlorothiazide, hydralazine, ans clonidine also inhibited CoQ10-NADH-oxidase. Reserpine did not inhibit either CoQ10-enzyme, and methyldopa was a very eak inhibitor of succinoxidase. The internationally recognized clinical side-effects of propranolol may be due, in part, to inhibition of CoQ10-enzymes which are indispensable in the bioenergetics of cardiac function. A pre-existing deficiency of coenzyme Q10 in the myocardium of hypertensive patients could be augmented by subsequent treatment with propranolol, possibly to the "life-threatening" state described by others.


Shape Memory Ceramics Shape memory materials convert heat into strain and vice versa. These materials are often made from metal alloys, which can generate large stresses with small shape changes. Ceramics have certain characteristics that underlie shape memory transformation, but generally crack under strain. Lai et al. (p. 1505; see the Perspective by Faber) introduce a modified ceramic structure with limited crystal grains that can withstand comparable cyclic strains to shape memory metals. Fine-scale shape memory ceramics are capable of many actuation cycles to strains up to 7%. [Also see Perspective by Faber] Shape memory materials are a class of smart materials able to convert heat into mechanical strain (or strain into heat) by virtue of a martensitic phase transformation. Some brittle materials such as intermetallics and ceramics exhibit a martensitic transformation but fail by cracking at low strains and after only a few applied strain cycles. Here we show that such failure can be suppressed in normally brittle martensitic ceramics by providing a fine-scale structure with few crystal grains. Such oligocrystalline structures reduce internal mismatch stresses during the martensitic transformation and lead to robust shape memory ceramics that are capable of many superelastic cycles up to large strains; here we describe samples cycled as many as 50 times and samples that can withstand strains over 7%. Shape memory ceramics with these properties represent a new class of actuators or smart materials with a set of properties that include high energy output, high energy damping, and high-temperature usage.


Major issues in forest science, such as climate change, bio-energy, biodiversity, and water, were assessed by IUFRO responsive to the broader scientific and policy communities to tackle more complex global environmental, social, and economic issues impacting forests. Other issues highlighted in this paper are forest health and forest genetics; forest modeling and operations engineering; challenges for mitigation and adaptation; public participation on decisions, research, and distribution of benefits; estimating ecosystem services, biofuels and biodiversity; societal issues, including health, food, poverty, urbanization, and lifestyle; educational change in structure and topics; and information and research administration. As forest science faced various challenges in the last few years, there is a need for interdisciplinary approaches and cross-sectoral collaboration. These interrelated and emerging key-issues, particularly climate change, biodiversity, bio-energy and water, are of strong interest to policy makers and groups inside and outside the forest sector. These will all be of high relevance to forest science and to IUFRO in the coming years, primarily for global collaboration.


YAG-laser radiation was used for endoscopic hemostasis in 33 patients with bleeding endobronchial carcinomas and in 4 patients with chest injury complicated by bleeding from wounds of the lung and chest wall. For conducting laser photocoagulation, the authors prefer a rigid bronchoscope and a thoracoscope and pulsed laser radiation with a power of up to 40 Wt. As the results of treatment, hemostasis was achieved in 24 patients with lung carcinoma and in 4 patients with trauma of the chest. In some patients with pulmonary carcinoma laser photocoagulation creates conditions for successful surgery or chemoradiotherapy. The performance of thoracoscopic laser operations in chest injuries and traumas allows wide thoracotomy to be avoided in some patients. Complications were not registered in endoscopic laser operations.


We introduce an assertion language for run-time checking of linked list data structure shapes. The assertion language is expressive enough to define characteristic predicates for data structures created with the use of pointers and dynamic memory allocation. Examples of such data structures include singly linked list, binary tree, doubly linked list, and cyclic list. These characteristic predicates may be used for automatic run-time detection of data constraint violations. Some results of experiments with a prototype assertion checker implementation for the PASCAL programming language are presented.


MapReduce is one of the programming model for processing large amount of data in cloud where resource allocation is one of the research areas since it is responsible for improving the performance of Hadoop.Many resource allocation strategies are discussed that aims to improve resource utilization in Hadoop by focusing on the speculative execution and maximizing the data locality by meeting the deadlines of the job. The implementation is done in Hadoop slot based MapReduce system ex: Hadoop MVR1


The Review-Essay discusses Lucas Powe's recent book, The Warren Court and American Politics. Examining Powe's analysis of the way in which the Warren Court's decisions influenced politics and of the way in which politics affected the Warren Court's decisions, it raises questions about the evidentiary support for some of Powe's claims. It suggests that Powe may have too narrow a conception of politics, almost confining it to what happens in Washington, D.C., and that a deeper political analysis of the Warren Court would require attention to American progressive liberalism understood as an intellectual and conceptual construct.


Summary Objectives To summarize current excellent research in the field of bioinformatics, with an emphasis on those that have direct application in the medical domain. Method Synopsis of the articles selected for the IMIA Yearbook 2011. Results The selection process for this yearbook's section on Bioinformatics results in six excellent articles highlighting the continuous progress towards a better understanding of human phenotype. Compared to the selection in Yearbook 2010, several key advancements can be noted. First, year 2010 marked the inaugural use of a complete human genome in a clinical context. This proof-of-principle study represents a large step towards personalized medicine. Second, there is a clear trend to understand diseases beyond the genome level, namely to include environmental and epigenetic information. Third, an innovative framework making use of the web to harness participant-driven genotype-phenotype information sets a new scene for conducting research in an era where social media plays an increasingly important role. Conclusions The current literature showed that all pieces are now present to enable a much more comprehensive understanding of human diseases and traits, beyond the highly focused genetic or genomic studies seen previously.


The resistive switching characteristics and switching mechanisms of the Au-implanted-ZrO2 film are extensively investigated for nonvolatile memory applications. Reversible resistance-switching behavior from a high resistance to low resistance state can be traced by dc voltage and pulse voltage. After more than 200 dc switching cycles, the resistance ratio between the high and low resistance states is more than 180 times under 0.7 V readout bias. In the voltage pulse test, the "write" and "erase" speeds can be as fast as 50 and 100 ns, respectively. No data loss is observed for more than 106 s. The formation and rupture of conducting filamentary paths related to the implanted Au ions are suggested to be responsible for the resistive switching phenomenon. The dependence of resistance on temperature indicates that the variable-range hopping conduction mechanism is dominated in the low-resistance state, while the current characteristics are governed by the trap-controlled space limited conduction mechanism in...


Primary sclerosing cholangitis (PSC) is a chronic cholestatic liver disease characterized by biliary inflammation and stricturing. Exploration of the pathogenesis of PSC in light of its association with inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and the "gut-liver" axis is an emerging area of interest. A growing number of studies have begun to elucidate the role of the gut microbiota, its metabolites and its influence on host immune responses in the development of PSC and PSC-IBD. Studies of the fecal microbiota have highlighted enriched levels of certain species, including Veillonella, Streptococcus and Enterococcus, among others. A heightened immune response to enteric dysbiosis and bacterial translocation have also been implicated. For example, Klebsiella pneumoniae strains derived from gnotobiotic mice transplanted with PSC-IBD microbiota were found to induce pore formation in human intestinal epithelial cells and enhanced Th17 responses. Gut microbes have additionally been hypothesized to be implicated in PSC pathogenesis through their role in the synthesis of various metabolites, including bile acids (BAs), which function as signaling molecules with important gut and hepatic effects. An expanded knowledge of the gut microbiome as it relates to PSC offers critical insight into the development of microbe-altering therapeutic interventions, such as antibiotics, nutritional interventions and fecal microbial transplantation. Some of these have already shown some preliminary evidence of benefit. Despite exciting progress in the field, much work remains to be done; areas that are particularly lacking include functional characterization of the microbiome and examination of pediatric populations. In this review, we summarize studies that have investigated the microbiome in PSC and PSC-IBD as well as putative mechanisms, including the potential role of metabolites, such as BAs. We then briefly review the evidence for interventions with microbe-altering properties for treating PSC.


OBJECTIVE
The primary objective of this preliminary study was to examine the impact of NFL play on interregional functional connectivity between two brain regions, the supramarginal gyrus (SMG) and the thalamus, identified as having higher binding of [11C]DPA-713 in NFL players. The authors' secondary objective was to examine the effect of years since play on the interregional connectivity.

METHODS
Resting-state functional MRI was used to examine functional brain changes between regions with evidence of past injury in active or recently retired NFL players (defined as ≤12 years since NFL play) and distantly retired players (defined as >12 years since NFL play). Age-comparable individuals without a history of concussion or participation in collegiate or professional collision sports were included as a control group.

RESULTS
Compared with healthy control subjects, NFL players showed a loss of anticorrelation between the left SMG and bilateral thalami (mean z score=-2.434, p=0.015). No difference was observed when examining right SMG connectivity. The pattern of connectivity in active and recently retired players mimicked the pattern observed in distantly retired players and older control subjects.

CONCLUSIONS
Further study of the clinical significance of this altered pattern of interregional connectivity in active and recently retired NFL players is needed.


Energy intake, total volume (bulk) and the energy density (kcal/ml) of the diets of preschool children of middle and lower-middle economic groups from an urban area and of a rural low economic group were examined. The energy intake of children from the urban area was higher than that of the children from the rural area. The total solid intake in the three groups was not different. However, the energy density of the diets (kcal/ml) of the urban preschool children (1.17 kcal/ml or 4.74 kJ/ml) was significantly higher as compared to the energy density of the diets of rural children (0.74 kcal/ml or 2.94 kJ/ml). The urban children of higher income groups had a much higher intake of fat and milk than the rural poor children, which accounts for the differences in the energy densities of their diets. The results of this study suggest that one of the reasons for low energy intake of rural poor preschool children may be the low energy density of their diets.


Bleomycin (BLM)-induced pulmonary fibrosis, a progressive and lethal form of interstitial lung disease, is mediated through the generation of reactive oxygen species. Since the dynamic thiol/disulphide homeostasis is a substantial marker for oxidative stress, for future glutathione based methodological researches on the progressive BLM toxicity in lungs, it is very valuable to show that the toxic mechanism. We investigated the dynamic thiol/disulphide homeostasis in a rat model with BLM-induced pulmonary fibrosis. BLM (5 mg/kg) or saline was injected into the lungs as 0,1 ml by insuline syringe that inserted into gently opened trachea of anesthetized rats. Native thiol (SH), total thiol (total SH), and disulphide (SS) levels were measured in rat serum at pre-treatment, 24th hour, 2nd, 4th, 7th, 14th, and 28th days of BLM treatment, with a novel automated method recently described. The levels of native SH and total SH in BLM group were decreased at 24th hour and this reduction were gradually continued up to 28th day when compared with pre-treatment BLM and/or the saline control group. On the other hand there were significantly a high ratio in BLM group with %SS/SH at 4th day and %SS/total SH at 4th and 28th days while there was no difference at 7th and 14th days. Results clearly indicate that the thiol/disulphide homeostasis can be acutely disturbed in the experimental model of BLM-induced fibrosis. So this data offer a new modeling option to discuss the therapy strategies and the effect mechanisms of BLM-induced lung toxicity.


A comprehensive mechanical characterization of the wellbore rock relies on a three-dimensional (3D) characterization of the acoustic slowness in terms of radial, azimuthal, and axial variations. These acoustic rock property variations arise because of non-uniform stress distributions, mechanical or chemical nearwellbore alteration caused by the drilling process, and formation-intrinsic anisotropy. A 3D formation acoustic properties characterization is achieved through comprehensive acquisition of broadband waveforms from all borehole modes (monopole, dipole, and Stoneley) coupled with an integrated inversion of all acquired data. Compressional slowness radial variations are enabled through monopole acquisition with a wide range of transmitterreceiver spacings, from very short to very long, unique to this new technology. Shear slowness radial variations are quantified through inversions of the broadband dispersions of the dipole flexural and Stoneley modes over a wide frequency band featured by this new sonic tool. The unique design of the dipole source enables it to be fired in either pulse mode or chirp mode. Open hole wireline logs from China, Norway, Mexico, Brazil and the United States demonstrate the improved accuracy of both compressional and shear slowness measurements and their radial variations. With the increased number of axial and azimuthal receivers and an acoustically quiet and predictable structure, shear wave anisotropy is estimated more robustly with data showing reliable fast shear azimuth measurements down to 1–2% slowness anisotropy. Shear slownesses from 90 to 900 µs/ft have been measured with this new tool. Improved dispersion curves for both monopole and dipole modes lead to clear identification of formation homogeneity, inhomogeneity, isotropy and mechanisms of anisotropy. Cased hole formation evaluation data demonstrate that shear slowness through casing as high as 450 µs/ft can be measured reliably.


This millennial era that is inseparable with technological advancement, the role of media and communication become more crucial. Those two components shape up and influence human psychological development. Media and communication are two aspects that intertwined from both good and bad influence. Those good and bad stigmas are also inseparable from propaganda. The strength of propaganda depends on whether or not the socio-cultural element is accurately used to deliver the selected message. Sciences regarding social system have become more important because it is related to potential target to support the psychological operations. The psychological operations consisted of delivering a particular message or information through selected media (product) to influence or modify the behavior of the receiver (target audience). In the context of national resilience, astagatra  is also known as one of the aspects that influence the success of psychological operations. Therefore, this paper will discuss the study of psychological operations from several disciplines such as communication, media, propaganda, and socio-cultural perspective. The study regarding history and development of psychological operations will be explained using critical-literacy methods strengthened by literature review. This research finds that psychological operations are one of the ways that shown to influence human mindset and trait, or behavior to a specific target audience that supported by intertwining aspects such as communication, media, propaganda, and socio-cultural aspects that significant to the success of psychological operations of a particular country.


It is argued that university education has a moral and social function in society. Its purpose is to provide a liberal education (developing the intellect by challenging it to grapple freely with difficult ideas), the development of new knowledge and the provision of trustworthy, disinterested research. To serve society in this way safeguards are necessary: a separation from the state, giving institutional autonomy and academic freedom in teaching and research. With the rise of extreme free market capitalism and the "knowledge society", these safeguards are being eroded: national governments, partly through the ramifications of the Bologna convergence process, are in the process of moulding universities to the needs of the market, and now see the accommodation of students to the workplace as the principal, or indeed only, objective for a university education. Example of the consequences of these changes are discussed, including the corruption of research integrity and erosion of individual liberties.


The current COVID-19 pandemic greatly affected many global activities, including teaching and learning. This research investigated teachers' perceived challenges and coping strategies to craft localized school-based support mechanisms. This study followed a mixed methods convergent parallel design where quantitative and qualitative data were collected during the same phase of the data-gathering process. This design was followed to enrich quantitative data with qualitative data. This study utilized two research instruments to gather quantitative data for the following variable – perceived challenges and coping strategies. To collect qualitative data, interviews were conducted using the sub-questions aligned with the study's central question. The data were derived from randomly selected public school teachers of an educational institution in Makati City. Three of those teachers who answered were chosen at random to be interviewed. During analysis, Shapiro-Wilk's normality test was done for the quantitative data to determine the statistical analysis to be employed. Both quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed through Pearson r coefficient and thematic analysis, respectively. Results showed that perceived challenges have no significant relationship with overall coping strategies. However, by analyzing the subcomponents of coping strategies, perceived challenges positively correlate with problem-focused coping. This result revealed that when teachers experience a high intensity of challenges in their teaching practices during the pandemic, they tend to do active coping strategies indicative of grit and a more practical approach to solving the problem. Moreover, qualitative data supported that teachers must also be given mental and emotional support besides physical, technological, and financial support. Furthermore, parallel studies must be conducted with a more diverse and large sample to serve as a guide in crafting a nationwide support mechanism for teachers during a challenging situation


Congestion is one of the major problems that affects on throughput, delay, losses and other performance metrics of the network. During the last decade, several congestion control protocols have been proposed to overcome this problem. The most widely protocols are TCP Tahoe, Reno, New Reno, Vegas and SACK. In this paper, a new approach is developed to enhance most of the existing host-to-host congestion control protocols. The main idea is to adjust the congestion window size (cwnd) dynamically according to the available bandwidth of the network. In the proposed strategy, instead of increasing the cwnd size linearly by the AIMD, the cwnd is increased according to the available bandwidth of the network. Also, instead of decreasing the cwnd to half of its size as congestion happens, the cwnd is decreased to latest value that was used effectively without losses. The proposed approach is implemented in the TCP Tahoe, Reno, Newreno, Vegas and SACK and the performance is evaluated by using the network simulator NS-2 considering a realistic network topology generated by the GT-ITM.


Abstract Objectives To assess discordance in overall treatment satisfaction between patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and their physicians. Methods This was a multicenter, cross-sectional, observational study of patients with RA (in low disease activity or remission) and their board-certified treating physicians in Japan; 202 patient–physician pairs were analyzed. Treatment satisfaction and perceptions were assessed using a structured questionnaire. Results Using a two-level ('satisfied' or 'unsatisfied') assessment of satisfaction, 195 patients (96.5%) and 190 physicians (94.1%) answered 'satisfied' with a high level of concordance (184 pairs, 91.1%). Using a four-level assessment, the ratio of 'satisfied' to 'somewhat satisfied' was higher in patients (66.3%/30.2%) than physicians (43.6%/50.5%). Satisfaction with treatment outcomes (e.g. joint conditions, subjective symptoms) was generally high in patients and physicians; relatively less satisfaction was reported for medication cost, especially among patients. Shared treatment decision-making was reported in ≥96% of patient–physician pairs. The most common 'most important' treatment target differed between patients ('Have a social life without worrying about RA') and physicians ('Prevent joint damage, deformity, and joint swelling'). Conclusions Treatment satisfaction and concordance were high between patients in low activity/remission and physicians. Some differences between patients and physicians were reported in satisfaction for specific treatment outcomes and important treatment targets.


This study explored the lived experiences of 20 Australian early childhood preservice teachers while on practical experience placement and examined the factors that informed their pedagogical experiences when working across both prior-to-school and school settings. Transcripts from interviews were analysed using grounded theory-informed methodology. Findings highlighted that preservice teachers' prior experiences, and their experiences during placement, shaped their perspectives and pedagogical decisions when working across the two education contexts. Findings showed a disparity between preservice teachers' practical experiences on placement in prior-to-school and school settings. Understanding the discontinuities for early childhood preservice teachers between the two education environments is instructive for theoretical knowledge, content design of tertiary degrees and the support needed for successful transference of skills and induction into early childhood teaching contexts. Close work with industry partners is needed on mentorship and explicit application of early childhood technical knowledge in differing curricula environments.


During the classical radical treatment for sigmoid colon cancer, ligation of the inferior mesenteric artery (IMA) at its root is typically performed to achieve better dissection of central and intermediate lymph node groups and improve the surgical outcomes. However, the blood supply to the left colon artery (LCA), sigmoid artery, and superior rectal artery (SRA) is blocked after the ligation at the root of the IMA. Here, we report laparoscopic radical treatment with preservation of the LCA and SRA for sigmoid colon cancer to preservation of blood supply to the anastomosis. The method was indicated to treat cancer at the middle portion of sigmoid colon. In the operation, we careful dissection of IMA exposes the trunk of IMA. The surrounding lymphatic tissue is dissected from the IMA root to its distal end. The LCA is preserved. After IMA divides LCA, 2–5 sigmoid colon arteries are transected one after another at the distal end of the LCA until it further divides into left and right rectal arteries before entering the lateral wall of rectum. The inferior mesenteric vein (IMV) is transected at the lower edge of the pancreas, and the mesorectum is cut open towards the spleen curvature at the lower edge of the pancreas. Other procedures are similar with IMA high ligation surgery. Generally, LCA and SRA can be successfully preserved, and if necessary, the colonic splenic flexure should be mobilized to ensure that there is no tension at the anastomosis. The operation doesn't significantly prolonged operation, but retrieved comparable lymph node counts with IMA high ligation surgery. Dissection of the lymphoadipose tissues at the root of IMA with the preservation of LCA and SRA is an easily performed surgery. It guarantees further prospective clinical research to compare the anastomosis leakage and oncological outcome with IMA high ligation surgery.


Hole drilling and bolt screwing are frequently performed tasks in construction, decoration, and maintenance. Traditionally, sending human workers to perform these tasks in hard-to-reach locations is both dangerous and costly. In this letter, we present an aerial manipulation platform that allows a human user to remotely conduct omnidirectional drilling and screwing. The design of the platform features a quadrotor UAV with each pair of rotors independently tilted by a servo, forming an "H" configuration, on which a 1-DOF manipulator carrying a motorized drill or screw driver is mounted. With such a design, the end-effector can face any direction on the longitudinal plane and exert a big enough contact force for drilling and screwing without the need of changing the vehicle body's orientation. Compared to previous UAVs that can only drill holes vertically into the ground, the proposed design also allows horizonal drilling/screwing into a wall or a cliff, making it suitable for a vast range of real applications. Based on the dynamic equations of the system, a dual-level control law is proposed. The low-level attitude controller uses an adaptive robust control (ARC) to accurately regulate the attitude angles in the presence of force/torque uncertainties that may occur during the drilling and screwing process, while a selective impedance controller is implemented at high level to indirectly control the contact force commanded by the user. In addition, a vision-based real-time target identification and tracking method integrating a YOLO v3 real-time object detector with feature tracking, and morphological operations is developed to identify and track the target point for drilling and screwing specified by the user. Various in-lab experiments on a self-made prototype demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach for aerial drilling and screwing.


Randomized trials evaluating the use of androgen deprivation therapy (ADT) before radical prostatectomy have consistently shown significant decreases in prostate volume and in serum prostate-specific antigen (PSA) levels. All but one study have reported that hormonal pretreatment significantly reduces the incidence of positive surgical margins. However, androgen deprivation does not significantly influence seminal vesicle extension or lymph node involvement nor does it affect tumor grade. The fibrotic reactions that sometimes result from hormonal pretreatment can increase the difficulty of surgery but this has not been associated with a higher incidence of perioperative or postoperative complications. In closely monitored clinical trials, bothersome side effects of neoadjuvant hormonal therapy have been limited. Issues that remain to be addressed are the optimal duration of neoadjuvant treatment and whether the benefits of such therapy will translate into improved disease-free survival. At this time, patients with clinical stage T2b disease, PSA elevations greater than 10 to 20 ng/mL, and a high Gleason grade may be considered candidates for neoadjuvant hormonal treatment before surgery.


MECH 3000 THERMAL SYSTEMS AND DESIGN (3 credits) Applications of control-volume analysis (mass, energy and momentum), both transient and steady; mixtures of gases and vapors; introduction to combustion; thermodynamic relations and establishment of data banks of thermal properties; applications of computer-aided engineering to processes and cycles; methodologies and case studies for thermal systems design; execution of small-scaled design projects. Prerequisite(s)/Corequisite(s): MECH 2000 or MENG 2000. Not open to non-degree graduate students.


Despite the recent development in the topic of explainable AI/ML for image and text data, the majority of current solutions are not suitable to explain the prediction of neural network models when the datasets are tabular and their features are in high-dimensional vectorized formats. To mitigate this limitation, therefore, we borrow two notable ideas (i.e., "explanation by intervention" from causality and "explanation are contrastive" from philosophy) and propose a novel solution, named as GRACE, that better explains neural network models' predictions for tabular datasets. In particular, given a model's prediction as label X, GRACE intervenes and generates a minimally-modified contrastive sample to be classified as Y, with an intuitive textual explanation, answering the question of "Why X rather than Y?" We carry out comprehensive experiments using eleven public datasets of different scales and domains (e.g., # of features ranges from 5 to 216) and compare GRACE with competing baselines on different measures: fidelity, conciseness, info-gain, and influence. The user-studies show that our generated explanation is not only more intuitive and easy-to-understand but also facilitates end-users to make as much as 60% more accurate post-explanation decisions than that of Lime.


MEDICAL SPECIALTIES have expanded and proliferated, in part because they are the career choice of a majority of medical students. Most experts acknowledge that specialists provide excellent medical care, but it is fragmented, expensive, and partially responsible for the high cost of health care in our country. Replacement of sporadic, expensive specialty care with a system of managed care is imperative. A managed care system cannot be implemented immediately because the present ratio of generalists to specialists is inadequate. Accordingly, academic medical centers face a challenge to produce more generalists and fewer specialists. The generalist imperative is supported and promulgated by a spectrum of influential groups and organizations, including the Association of American Medical Colleges, the Council on Graduate Medical Education, prestigious foundations and organizations, and lawmakers at the state and federal levels. The theme that academic medical centers must produce and deploy more generalists and fewer specialists was formalized


A high-speed circuit, a high-yield redundancy technique, and a soft-error immune cell are essential to realize ultra high density static RAMs. A 16 Mb (4Mx4/2Mx8) CMOS SRAM fabricated using 0.4 /spl mu/m CMOS technology is reported. An address access time of 12.5 ns is attained with 3.3 V supply voltage by using a common-centroid-geometry (CCG) layout sense amplifier and divided data bus architecture. A flexible redundancy technique (FRT) with high efficiency and with no access penalty has been incorporated into the 16 Mb SRAM. A 7.16 /spl mu/m/sup 2/ TFT load cell with stacked capacitors, achieves soft-error immunity even for the supply voltage of 3.3 V.