In-depth interviews allow for rich exploration of stakeholders' experiences. Preparation for in-depth interviews generally consists of literature reviews and researchers' review of their own culture and understanding of a topic. We supplemented these strategies with serial "ethnographic interviews" with a single community leader to enhance our preparation for community-based in-depth interviews with Latina, immigrant, Spanish-speaking mothers and to facilitate stakeholder engagement in a research project. After an extensive literature review, we conducted a series of four 1-hour interviews with a key informant in preparation for individual in-depth interviews with 12 parents. The ethnographic interviews with the community leader provided insight into environmental context, cultural categories, and stakeholder priorities, which helped shape the research question, in-depth interview guide, sampling strategy, and interpretive analytic process. We found that ethnographic interviews can provide critical insights for preparing in-depth interview guides and can enhance the information gained while facilitating meaningful stakeholder engagement.


Introduction: During the postgraduate course, one is expected to think critically, analyze the clinical situation, and react appropriately. The practice of test dose administration among anesthesiologists is variable. As an initial experiment, we decided to study the common practice of test dose administration through epidural catheters in anesthesia postgraduate students. Methods: After approval from the institutional ethics review board, during a national academic meet for postgraduates, the delegates were asked to fill a 12-item-based survey questionnaire, in English, pertaining to the practice of test dose administration and its interpretation. Results: Eighty-five percent of delegates replied that they were practicing administration of test dose after epidural catheter insertion. Seven percent got the purpose of test dose right. Around 10% of delegates could give correct answer for composition of test dose and 9% of delegates could rightly differentiate between interpretation of test dose for thoracic and lumbar-placed epidural catheters. Discussion and Conclusion: Young anesthesiologists do have a lacuna in knowledge about the basics of administration of test dose, the key components, and the effect it can produce. The students also lack the ability to analyze the effect that the test dose would produce when administered at different segmental levels. Future research critically evaluating our current education process is probably the need of the hour.


Europe and North America share a similar history in the extirpation and subsequent recovery of large carnivore and ungulate species. Both continents face challenges and opportunities for managing human-wildlife conflict at the junction of livestock production and wildlife conservation. Predation of livestock and disease transmission between wildlife and livestock is an ongoing and escalating worldwide issue. In order to manage this conflict, producers need effective tools, and they have used livestock protection dogs (LPDs) for reducing predation for well over 2000 years. We review the history of the use of LPDs, including the loss of information on their use and the paucity of scientific research on their effectiveness. We discuss the potential for LPDs to be integral components in modern-day livestock husbandry and outline future directions to pursue.


Background Reflection in postgraduate medical education has been found to aid in the development of professional skills, improve clinical expertise, and problem solving with the aim of advancing lifelong learning skills and self-awareness, leading to good medical practice among postgraduate residents. Despite the evidenced benefits, reflection remains underused as a tool for teaching and learning, and few trainee physicians regularly engage in the process. Factors that affect the uptake of reflective learning in residency training have not yet been adequately explored. Objective The purpose of this review is to demonstrate the factors that influence the adoption of reflective learning for postgraduate students and their centrality to good clinical practice. Methods A review of the literature was performed using defined databases and the following search terms: 'reflection', 'reflective learning', 'postgraduate medical education', 'barriers' and 'facilitators'. The search was limited to peer-reviewed published material in English between 2011 and 2020 and included research papers, reviews, and expert opinion pieces. Results Eleven relevant articles were included, which identified three main categories as facilitators and barriers to the adoption of reflective learning in postgraduate medical education. These included structure, assessment and relational factors. The structure of reflective practice is important, but it should not be too rigid. Assessments are paramount, but they should be multidimensional to accommodate the multicomponent nature of reflections. Relational factors such as motivation, coaching, and role modeling facilitate sustainable reflective practice. Conclusions This review suggests that the same factors that facilitate reflection can be a barrier if not used within the right epistemic. Educators should consider these factors to increase the acceptance and integration of reflective learning in curriculums by both teachers and learners.


Americans are notoriously bad savers. Large numbers are reaching old age too poor to finance retirements that could last longer than they worked. This study uses the 2018 American Community Survey to impute retirement ages for 2019 Survey of Consumer Finances (SCF) respondents. Next, we run the SCF respondents through the Fiscal Analyzer (TFA) to measure the size and distribution of forgone lifetime Social Security benefits. TFA is a life-cycle, consumption-smoothing research tool that incorporates Social Security and all other major federal and state tax and benefit policies. The program can optimize lifetime Social Security choices. We find that virtually all American workers age 45–62 should wait beyond age 65 to collect. More than 90% should wait till age 70. Only 10.2% appear to do so. The median loss for this age group in the present value of household lifetime discretionary spending is $182,370. Optimizing would produce a 10.4% increase in typical workers' lifetime spending. For one in four, the lifetime spending gain exceeds 17%. For one in 10, the gain exceeds 26%. Among the poorest fifth of 45- to 62-year-olds, the median lifetime spending increase is 15.9%, with one in four gaining more than 27.4%.


Abstract After September 11, teaching freshman composition classes focused on traditional modes of argument seemed incomplete and socially irresponsible. While rhetorical persuasion is a valuable skill deeply embedded in American and academic cultures, it is only one stance, and it can limit the way students see the complexities of the world. Teaching other rhetorical stances, particularly mediation or conflict resolution, in writing classes can complement argumentation while also providing an alternative, more comprehensive way of understanding the world around them. ********** "I was of three minds, Like a tree In which there are three blackbirds." --Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" "If you limit your view of a problem to choosing between two sides, you inevitably reject much that is true, and you narrow your field of vision to the limits of those two sides, making it unlikely you'll pull back, widen your field of vision, and discover the paradigm shift that will permit truly new understanding." --The Argument Culture by Deborah Tannen ********** One morning in September 2001, I walked into my freshman composition class at the University of Wisconsin-Barton County. One hour beforehand, I had watched live footage of an airplane full of people crash into the second tower of the World Trade Center. My life, like everyone's, changed that morning, but at that moment of entering the classroom, my professional life changed as well. Along with questions about the safety of my family came questions about the significance of what I do every day. What was I doing in my classrooms that actually mattered? What answers could I possibly offer to my students, and what questions should I raise? At that moment, I too was quite simply an American, helplessly watching our national idealism and sense of invulnerability being bombed by our own symbols of power and superiority. What possible importance did how to write an essay have on this day? In the wake of September 11, I wasn't alone in my reflections on what and how I teach. I knew that others were wondering what they teach and why. The more familiar community concerns about a liberal curriculum of controversial books that "have no place" in the classroom, much less on our library shelves, gave way to new concerns about our perhaps more conservative approaches. A writer for our local newspaper noted in her September 26 column that "Educating our children about peace is sorely lacking.... We may be teaching our children in the home that there's another recourse to hitting their siblings, but we aren't following it up" in the classrooms (Nimm 4). She's right. While we widely teach some great thinkers who demonstrate "another recourse"--Gandhi, Thoreau, King--often our war-filled histories and, more disturbingly, the skills we teach for future actions do not. I had not. While I had included these great thinkers in my courses, I had not translated those lessons into how I teach my "skills class," freshman composition. Until September 12. Half of my teaching load--literature--provides the most eloquent of springboards for discussing war and peace, death and rebirth, fear and hope. But the other half--composition--can at times feel painfully disconnected from our lives and what's going on in the world around us. In fact, the primary type of writing taught in composition across the country sometimes seems antithetical to peaceable communication and probably wouldn't resolve a fight with a sibling or anyone else. We focus on rhetoric, the art of effective persuasion, often called "argument." We teach this kind of writing to show students how to build strong arguments, for example, by balancing logic, emotions, and common values--Aristotle's formula--in a successful attempt to convince someone of their point of view. We also teach rhetoric to arm students with the abilities to see through, protect themselves against, or disprove weak or faulty arguments, such as those found in advertising, politics, peer pressure, everywhere. …


Chronic elevated nitrogen (N) deposition can lead to ecosystem N saturation, which is theorized to occur when N supply exceeds biological demand and excess N leaches to receiving waters. This research examined the post-depositional fate and transport of atmospheric nitrate in Appalachian forests across spatial and temporal scales by characterizing the nitrate stable isotopic composition (δ15N, δ18O, and Δ17O) of precipitation, soil water, and streams. Data indicate that elevated N deposition does not saturate biological demand; rather, N processing becomes more extensive as N availability increases. Along a regional N deposition gradient (North Carolina to New Hampshire), mean proportions of atmospheric nitrate in streams were inversely related to long-term annual average nitrate deposition. Stream nitrate concentrations were also negatively correlated to the proportion of atmospheric nitrate in streams (R2=0.23; p<0.05). Similar relationships occurred along an N saturation gradient in four watersheds at Fernow Experimental Forest (West Virginia). The most N-saturated watershed had the highest stream nitrate concentrations (mean=3.7 mg L-1) but the lowest proportions of atmospheric nitrate in the stream (mean=5%). Conversely, the stream in the N-limited watershed had the lowest nitrate concentrations (mean=0.0 mg L-1) and the highest proportions of atmospheric nitrate (mean=42% among samples with sufficient nitrate for isotope analysis). High spatial variability of nitrate sources in one watershed at Fernow (WS4) suggests a decoupling of source dynamics across spatial scales. Proportions of atmospheric nitrate in soil solution ranged from zero to 96% across WS4, but consistently low proportions of atmospheric nitrate in the stream suggest that watershed areas with high proportions of atmospheric nitrate may not contribute significantly to the stream. Storm event water and nitrate isotope data support this idea, indicating transient hydrologic flowpaths from hillslopes to the stream during storms. Although these transient flowpaths resulted in a wide range of mean event water contributions to stormflow (6% to 34%) during events, the maximum proportion of atmospheric nitrate in stormflow was only 8%. These trends in nitrate source contributions to streams along gradients of space, time, N deposition, and N saturation suggest that the widely-accepted mechanisms of nitrogen saturation require reevaluation.


This chapter provides one perspective on how a research team constructs capacity through knowledge management practices, and supports the observation that individual differences in practice do exist. This research suggests that a diversity of knowledge management practices could benefit the construction of capacity in individuals, teams and organisations.

A synthesis of the literature is used to develop the CISUS knowledge management architecture (Matthews, 2010) to account for the Create, Improve, Store, Use and Share processes that comprise knowledge management practice. This CISUS knowledge management architecture provides a conceptual and theoretical foundation to inform a case study research project into one research team's knowledge management practices, and to explore how this research team constructs capacity in knowledge management. An outline of the case study research methodology is provided, followed by an overview of preliminary results with reference to the CISUS architecture.

Analysis of the case study research results reveals that each member of the research team employs slightly different CISUS knowledge management practices, yet all of the approaches were effective for both the individual and the team. The conclusion drawn from this is that knowledge management practice is an individual, personal capacity, and that what works for one individual may be counter-productive for another. It is suggested that further research be undertaken to understand influences on this practice diversity, including researching the influence that individual personality preferences may have on knowledge management practice.


City beautification was the fundamental purpose of urban design at the time it was introduced as a separate profession. Over time, the scope and objectives of urban design have changed. Today, urban design plays a key role in the creation of sustainable urban environments in terms of the 'triple bottom line', that encompasses the three dimensions of life–economics; social and environmental sustainability. Therefore, today, urban design seeks to enhance the life of the city and its inhabitants in socio-economic and environmental terms.
Even though urban design has a wider scope for achieving sustainability on all its three fronts, the current process of urban design has often become an obstacle to attaining this scope. The current urban design process is top-down, i.e., generally the urban designers or planners design the urban environment and at a later stage the community may have some
involvement. There are serious criticisms of this process as it may not touch the "ground" level community, and therefore, there is a serious risk these projects will fail to create sustainable environments. Accordingly, in order to overcome the drawbacks of the current top-down process, researches have discussed implementing a bottom-up process. A bottomup urban design process will give prominence to the local community in the urban design process and it will assist in the identification of locally significant factors and the exact problems and issues within the area which will then ensure that the urban design solutions will address the sustainability issues.
However, it is found that the bottom-up urban design process has its own negative features which can adversely affect the creation of sustainable urban designs. In the meantime, it is discovered that the current top-down urban design process has many positive features which can positively assist for the creation of sustainable urban designs.
Accordingly, it is illustrated that neither the current top-down process nor the suggested bottom-up process will address the critical issues for achieving the current scope of urban design and, therefore, a 'balanced' community embedded urban design process was required to overcome the current research gap.
This research used the 'onion' methodological framework and the research strategy was case study. Two live neighbourhood urban design projects in North West England were used as the case studies and the key data collection methods were semi structured interviews, focus group discussions and non- participant observation.
The analysis resulted to derive 07 key factors from the case study 01 and 10 key factors from the case study 02 and these key factors were further analysed in order to develop components for two initial urban design process frameworks from the two case studies. Thereafter, the data were triangulated and the new urban design process framework was developed. Finally, at the latter stage of the research, the new urban design framework was validated via experts
in urban design. Accordingly, this research developed a new community embedded and balanced urban design process framework to replace the current standard top-down process to produce sustainable urban design solutions in a neighbourhood context in UK.


A great deal of attention has been devoted to documenting the legal experiences and knowledge of children involved in the juvenile dependency system (i.e., child protection system). Such insight is critical to inform policies that profoundly affect children and families. However, the experiences and knowledge of another population involved in the dependency system are also critically important—namely those of the children's parents. Parents' understanding has enormous potential to affect their behaviors, ongoing decisions in the case, and the eventual case outcome. In the current study, 105 parents involved in ongoing juvenile dependency cases were interviewed about their general and case-specific dependency understanding, including their understanding of commonly used dependency terms, the role of dependency professionals, and the purpose of key hearings. Parents, on average, evidenced a limited or partial general understanding of the system. More than half of the sample demonstrated a limited understanding of the judge's specific decisions in their hearings, with 12% demonstrating no knowledge of the decisions rendered. Parents at particular risk for low understanding included fathers, those who were new to the system, those with no prior dependency contact as children, and those from low educational and minority backgrounds. Practical implications and recommendations for family dependency policy, including the need for a standard assessment of parent understanding and programs to improve knowledge, are discussed.


Obtaining a uniform thickness of the final product using thermoforming is difficult, and the thickness distribution depends strongly on the distribution of the sheet temperature. In this paper, the time-dependent temperature distribution of the total sheets in the stage of storing was studied using the analysis code which has been verified based on the experimental data. It was found out that the time for storing should be managed for decreasing the temperature difference between the sheets. The time-dependent temperature distribution of the total sheets and the method for analysis in this study will be used to improve the quality of the final products.


The ADR1 protein activates transcription of the gene coding for the glucose repressible alcohol dehydrogenase II (ADH2) in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Previous characterization of ADR1$\sp{\rm c}$ mutations, which allow ADH2 to escape glucose repression, led to the hypothesis that ADR1 is inactivated post-translationally by a cAMP-dependent phosphorylation mechanism. This hypothesis was tested by investigating the in vitro phosphorylation of ADR1 and ADR1$\sp{\rm c}$ proteins in which ADR1$\sp{\rm c}$ proteins were predicted to display a diminished level of phosphorylation. A fragment of the ADR1 gene coding for the N-terminal 658 amino acids was fused to the lacZ gene of E. coli to allow for identification and assay of the ADR1 protein. The fused gene was placed under the control of the E. coli tac promotor to ensure efficient production. Beta-galactosidase activities in plasmid-bearing E. coli indicated that ADR1/$\beta$-galactosidase fusion proteins were being expressed. SDS-polyacrylamide gel analysis of E. coli extracts revealed discrete plasmid-encoded fusion proteins. Fusion proteins contained in crude E. coli extracts were phosphorylated in vitro using purified catalytic subunit of mammalian cAMP-dependent protein kinase (cAPK). Peptide mapping results indicated that ADR1 was phosphorylated at two discrete sites in vitro. The primary phosphorylation site was identified as serine-230. A secondary site to the N-terminal side of serine-230 was also identified. ADR1 DNA sequences were replaced in the expression plasmids with three sequences containing ADR1$\sp{\rm c}$ mutations, each of which encodes a single amino acid substitution within the phosphorylation sequence located between residues 227-231 (Arg-Arg-Ala-Ser-Phe). The in vitro phosphorylation of ADR1 and ADR1$\sp{\rm c}$ containing fusion proteins were compared using both bovine cAPK and the yeast cAPK catalytic subunit encoded by the TPK1 gene. Addition of purified yeast regulatory subunit completely blocked fusion protein phosphorylation by the yeast kinase in the absence of cAMP. The ADR1-2$\sp{\rm c}$ and ADR1-5$\sp{\rm c}$ mutations were found to diminish phosphorylation at serine-230. The ADR1-7$\sp{\rm c}$ mutation, which substitutes a leucine residue for serine-230, completely eliminated phosphorylation. The results of this work support the hypotheses that the ADR1$\sp{\rm c}$ proteins bypass glucose repression by avoiding phosphorylation and suggest that ADR1 is regulated by a cAMP-dependent phosphorylation. Possible mechanisms by which phosphorylation may regulate ADR1 activity are discussed.


Folded cascode configuration is a very fascinating unit to any Analog Vlsi researcher as it has advantage of high gain, lesser power dissipation and High Bandwidth. This paper describes about the parametric analysis of folded cascode opamp at low power supply requirements, input voltage and using 90nm technology. At the end, the results which are obtained are compared with the conventional two stage opamp with the same specifications and same technology (90nm).


A description is given of a modified lysimeter design and sampling procedure designed to prevent edge flow from occuring in large soil monolith lysimeters. An internal cutting ring at the base of the lysimeter casing produced a small annular gap between the soil monolith and the wall of the casing. This gap was filled with liquefied petrolatum, which provided a water-tight seal around the edge of the lysimeter. Water and solutes were unable to leak between the monolith and casing. The use of petrolatum as a sealant is suitable for waterflux and nutrient-leaching studies, but is not suitable for pesticide


Goal: Digitalization is a maior trend in intralogistics, both for academia and for the industry. This paper gives an overview on current intralogistic trends, the critical success factors of digitalization projects in intralogistics and the results of an online survey regarding these trends and success factors.
Design / Methodology / Approach: Literature reviews for both intralogistic trends and the success factors of the implementation were validated using an online survey with 105 intralogistic professionals, both from academia and industry.
Results: Both trends and success factors could be validated and brought into a ranking regarding their importance.
Limitations of the investigation: The online survey had a limited number of respondends and, even though all trends were provided with a short explanation, different interpretations or understandings of trends and success factors might have been present. Moreover, some trends and success factors have a certain overlap and the differences are not always clear.
Practical implications: The survey and the description of intralogistic trends and success factors allow practitioners to better understand, structure and prioritize their implementation projects and possibly to increase their success rate.
Originality / Value: There are several studies on general logistic trends and a few studies regarding success factors for digitalization, mostly in the field of ERP implementation. The presented research and online survey are a contribution to the specific field of trends and success factors in digitalization of intralogistics.


Background: The aim of the study was to assess inflammatory markers and clinical outcomes in adult patients admitted to hospital with mild-to-moderate COVID-19 and treated with targeted immunosuppressive therapy using anti-IL-17A (netakimab), anti-IL-6R (tocilizumab), or JAK1/JAK2 inhibitor (baricitinib) or with standard-of-care (SOC) therapy. Methods: The retrospective, observational cohort study included 154 adults hospitalized between February and August, 2020 with RT-PCR-confirmed SARS-CoV-2 with National Early Warning Score2 (NEWS2) < 7 and C-reactive protein (CRP) levels [≤] 140 mg/L on the day of the start of the therapy or observation. Patients were divided into the following groups: I) 4 mg baricitinib, 1 or 2 times a day for an average of 5 days (n = 38); II) 120 mg netakimab, one dose (n = 48); III) 400 mg tocilizumab, one dose (n = 34), IV) SOC: hydroxychloroquine, antiviral, antibacterial, anticoagulant, and dexamethasone (n = 34). Findings: CRP levels significantly decreased after 72 h in the tocilizumab (p = 1 x 10-5) and netakimab (p = 8 x 10-4) groups and remained low after 120 h. The effect was stronger with tocilizumab compared to other groups (p = 0.028). A significant decrease in lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) levels was observed 72 h after netakimab therapy (p = 0.029). NEWS2 scores significantly improved 72 h after tocilizumab (p = 6.8 x 10-5) and netakimab (p = 0.01) therapy, and 120 h after the start of tocilizumab (p = 8.6 x 10-5), netakimab (p = 0.001), or baricitinib (p = 4.6 x 10-4) therapy, but not in the SOC group. Blood neutrophil counts (p = 6.4 x 10-4) and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratios (p = 0.006) significantly increased 72 h after netakimab therapy and remained high after 120 h. The percentage of patients discharged 5-7 days after the start of therapy was higher in the tocilizumab (44.1%) and netakimab (41.7%) groups than in the baricitinib (31.6%) and SOC (23.5%) groups. Compared to SOC (3/34, 8.8%), mortality was lower in netakimab (0/48, 0%, RR=0.1 (95% CI: 0.0054 to 1.91)), tocilizumab (0/34, 0%, RR=0.14 (95% CI: 0.0077 to 2.67)), and baricitinib (1/38, 2.6%, RR=0.3 (95% CI: 0.033 to 2.73)) groups. Interpretation: In hospitalized patients with mild-to-moderate COVID-19, anti-IL-17A or anti-IL-6R therapy were superior or comparable to the JAK1/JAK2 inhibitor, and all three were superior to SOC. Whereas previous studies did not demonstrate significant benefit of anti-IL-17A therapy for severe COVID-19, our data suggest that such therapy could be a rational choice for mild-to-moderate disease, considering the generally high safety profile of IL-17A blockers. The significant increase in blood neutrophil counts in the netakimab group may reflect efflux of neutrophils from inflamed tissues. We therefore hypothesize that neutrophil count and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio could serve as markers of therapeutic efficiency for IL-17A-blocking antibodies in the context of active inflammation.


The advances in scanner technologies over the past years and a growing number of modalities in medical imaging result in an increased amount of patient data. The physicians are faced with an overwhelming amount of information when comparing different scans. Therefore, automatic image processing algorithms are necessary to facilitate everyday clinical workflows. The present work focuses on automatic, statistical image registration approaches and applications in epilepsy diagnosis and shape-based segmentation. Registration algorithms based on image intensity statistics are currently state-ofthe-art to automatically compute an alignment between multi-modal images. The parameters, however, are sensitive to the input data. In the present work, we study the mutual influences of these parameters on the intensity statistics and present datadriven estimation schemes to optimize them with respect to the input images. This is necessary to register large sets of images both accurately and reliably. The presented evaluation results, which are based on a database with an established gold standard, confirm that individually optimized parameters lead to improved results compared to standard settings found in literature. Besides spatial accuracy, the reduction of the computation time for the registration is equally important. In this thesis, we present an approach to reduce the search space for the optimization of a rigid registration transform by a nonlinear projection scheme, which is closely related to the concept of marginalization of random variables. Within each projection, a disjoint subset of the transform parameters is optimized with greatly reduced computational complexity. With a good choice of the projection geometry, the search space can be separated into disjoint subsets. In the case of rigid 3-D image registrations, the nonlinear projection onto a cylinder surface allows for an optimization of the rotation around the cylinder axis and a translation along its direction without the need for a reprojection. Sub-volume registration problems are supported by fitting the projection geometry into the overlap domain of the input images. The required objective functions are constrained by systems of linear inequalities and solved by means of constrained, nonlinear optimization techniques. A statistical framework is proposed to measure the accuracy of the registration algorithms with respect to manual segmentation results. The aforementioned concepts of the data-driven density estimators are adopted for the estimation of spatial densities of the segmented labels in order to model the observer reliability. The accuracy of the spatial registration transform is measured between the estimated distributions of the segmented labels in both input images using the Kullback-Leibler divergence. The proposed algorithms are evaluated by a registration of a database of morphological and functional images with an established gold standard based on fiducial marker implants. Applications are presented for the subtraction of single emission computed tomography scans for epilepsy diagnosis, where the intensity distributions are estimated for both the task of the registration and the normalization of the images. Finally, the registration is utilized for shape-based image segmentation to establish a model for the variability within a collective of segmented training shapes.


Aims of the study are to address the issue concerning public perception of quality education. A theoretical approach derived from consumer psychology is adopted which involves application of dimensionality to schools. There is description of a model for prediction of satisfaction and quality in relation to secondary education.

After a review of issues concerning the political context, empirical research, and the characteristics of education, service quality, theories of motivation and impression formation, and definitions of satisfaction are considered. A consumer model of service evaluation is described, with implications of its relevance to education. There is an account of information gathering, by means of depth interviews and focus group discussions. This is followed by descriptions of four surveys and analyses of data. The study shows that a wide range of issues are involved in the school judgement process. A number of categories are matched with service quality dimensions proposed by Parasuraman et al. (1988). Information sources are investigated and factor analyses of data provides a group of overlapping judgement criteria, which contrast with the SERVQUAL structure described. Findings indicate that 'Tangibles', 'Academic', 'Communication' and 'Socio-emotional' dimensions are of consequence in the school judgement process, and various features related to satisfaction are identified.

It is concluded that several criteria are taken into account in the judgement process, and a satisfactory model is additive in nature. Although there are important differences between evaluation processes in respect of education and other services, a gap definition of service quality judgement and the dimensional structure are useful. Findings are reviewed in relation to background literature and implications for school management are indicated.


This article considers organizational and legal issues of performing document survey during of iatrogenic crime investigation. Proposed ways to resolve these problems. Attention is drawn to the fact that investigative survey of documents is preceded by one of the measures to ensure criminal proceedings. Such a measure is temporary access to belongings and documents containing certain information. This information can be used as evidence of the fact or circumstances of the crime. Except familiarization with belongings and documents, this measure allows to make copies, and in the case of a certain decision made by investigating magistrate or court to seize them. The rules and mechanism of this measure application are considered. Attention is drawn to the expediency of medical record seizure, since medical personnel can make changes to documents. They do this in order to avoid responsibility or to hide a crime.
A list of documents that are subject to survey during the investigation of crimes committed during medical care provision is defined. Such documents include: patient medical records; autopsy report; medical record of the patient who left the hospital; outpatient medical record; record about surgical treatments at hospital, records about admission to the hospital, refusal of hospitalization, etc. It was noted that information contained in the medical records and can be obtained by investigator during their survey is classified as medical secrecy. Medical secrecy is information about: the disease, medical survey and its results, fact of medical help handling, diagnosis, prescribed treatment, prognosis of the disease, intimate and family side of life, and any medical actions that were taken regarding the patient.


Neil Southwell states that he was, himself, a persistent truant from school. He returned to education as a mature student via an access course and he now lectures in education studies at the University of Northampton. He is currently researching into truancy, its causes and its management and brings to his work an unusual but highly illuminating 'truantist perspective'. In this article, Neil Southwell reviews the literature on truancy and reveals a complex and contradictory picture. Policy and practice to date have, however, tended to be united in locating responsibility for truancy with truants and their families. Drawing on his own experience and his research into the perspectives of truants, Neil Southwell makes a case for a radically different approach. He argues that truancy can be seen as a key indicator of unmet educational needs and that the issue of truancy will not be addressed effectively until policy makers, practitioners and researchers learn to listen to the voices of truants themselves. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]


Sclerosing pneumocytoma (SP) is a rare benign low-grade tumour of the lung, and typically presents as single discrete coin lesions on imaging. Multiple SP is an exceedingly rare entity and thus reported sparingly. We review the literature on multiple SP, their clinical presentations, histopathology, relevant differential diagnoses and molecular histogenesis of this entity. SP has a predilection for East Asian origin females who have never smoked. Patients are either asymptomatic or have symptoms such as cough, haemoptysis that may be persistent, chest pain if involving the pleura and presents as discrete coin lesion on chest X-ray. Histologically, they are papillary, solid, angiomatoid or sclerotic, or combinations of these four basic patterns. Multiple lesions have the same or slightly different histological patterns. They can be distributed in either lung, in any lobe and can even be bilateral. AKT-1 molecular pathways are pivotal in their molecular pathogenesis. In this review, we further propose a classification based on five types of distribution of multiple SP.


The attached paper presents a research assignment carried out between April and December 1999, by the GDR Tourisme: Lieux et Reseaux under the joint scientific supervision of Josette Mesplier‐Pinet and Sophie Elias The basic aim was the realisation of a Dictionary of Tourism Concepts, Information Sources and Methods for the Observatoire National du Tourisme to define a set of tourism concepts, point out the principal statistical tools and their accompanying methodology used to secure information on supply and demand. The principle underlying this research was to provide end users of the dictionary, namely national public authorities and private practioners as well as tourism researchers, with a guideline to better understanding as well as a more accurate means of interpretation and use of this information. The purpose of this paper is to present the research carried out and to analyse thereby the role and function of the two‐way process of information building and redistribution. Consequently, the research carried out follows up the work on monitoring change and strategic decision‐making presented at last year's TRC Conference in Vienna.


The annual diet of possums (Trichosurus vulpecula) during both a beech (Nothofagus) mast fruiting year and a non-mast year in the simple beech forests of the North Branch of the Hurunui Catchment, eastern South Island, New Zealand, was determined by sorting the contents of 270 possum stomachs, collected between December 1999 and December 2001. Beech flowers and seeds contributed 46.1% to annual diet during the mast year, but were not eaten during the non-mast year. Beech foliage and bark made up 13.2% and 45.0% of annual diet in the mast and non-mast years, respectively. Fungi, herbs and grasses together comprised 23.1% and 42.4% of the annual diet in the mast and non-mast years, respectively. Diet varied with altitude and distance down the valley, principally in the relative contributions of foods from the three beech species present, which reflected local canopy composition. Other local food sources such as valley-floor herbs and grasses also contributed significantly to local diet. Although heavily reliant on beech species, possums are unlikely to have a significant impact on beech flower and seed production, or on the health of beech trees because of possums' low abundance and the large beech biomass at this site. Recognised possum-preferred foods such as Aristotelia serrata, Fuchsia excorticata, Hoheria glabrata, Raukaua simplex, Elaeocarpus hookerianus and mistletoes (Peraxilla tetrapetela and Alepis flavida) were all strongly preferred by possums but, because of their scarcity in the study area, were only eaten in small quantities. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


The influence of osmotic conditions on the gradient of capillary permeability disclosed by the distribution into mammalian muscle of vital dyes has been tested experimentally. The percentage of circulating blood proteins was increased in rabbits by the injection of compatible plasma, or of compatible serum concentrate obtained by means of a new method of ultrafiltration which has proved both rapid and effective. It was found that when this had been done and the circulatory conditions had stabilized themselves, the gradient of capillary permeability still existed, though its effective extent was less than under normal circumstances. When the percentage of circulating blood proteins was reduced, on the other hand, by repeated bleedings with return of the cells, either as such or suspended in the protein-free fluid obtained by dialysis of serum, the extent of the gradient of capillary permeability was broadened and dye passed out into the tissue more readily than usual from the capillary as a whole. In contrast to these findings injection of a very hypertonic dextrose solution during the period when dye was escaping had no perceptible effect on the gradient of capillary permeability. The observed phenomena cannot be explained by a flow of dye-stained fluid into or out of the blood vessels. The gradient of capillary permeability exists independently of osmotic conditions, though its extent can be markedly influenced by altering the amount of circulating blood proteins. A considerable proportion of the dye used to study the gradient is adsorbed upon these proteins, as subsidiary experiments have shown. This happening provides a sufficient cause for the differences observed in the extent of the gradient when the percentage of proteins is increased or diminished. The evidence like that of previous papers indicates that the cause for the gradient is to be found in a structural differentiation along the capillary, such that the barrier offered by its wall progressively diminishes on the way to the venule. Most current estimates of the effective osmotic pressure of the blood proteins fail to take into account the existence of local differences in permeability along the capillary.


Abstract This paper reports on the organization of Malaysia's linguistic landscape and the implications of this situation for contacts between providers of medical service and patients. The main purpose of this study is to clarify the position of Chinese private clinics in Malaysian society and to better understand language use between Chinese medical personnel and Chinese patients. The fieldwork focused on clinics in the Klang Valley, Malaysia and was carried out between December 2016 and March 2017. The results reveal the complex linguistic situation in the medical domain reflecting the general hierarchical social structure in Malaysia. Chinese patients have different wishes as regards their preferred language environment in these clinics, but generally prefer to use Mandarin Chinese for interaction with doctors. Medical staff also tend to prefer the use of Mandarin Chinese but also understand the need for dialect based interactions to create a feeling of harmony and belonging. The data are used to clarify existing problems in doctor-patient interaction and contribute to the debate of communication discordance in the healthcare domain.


Based on the principle of minimum potential energy, the interface slips in concrete filled square steel tubular column is calculated. According to the study of bond-slip behaviors of steel reinforced concrete and steel tube concrete, a pull-out mechanics model of concrete filled square steel tubular column has been built. The slip displacement on the interface of steel and concrete of the column along the embedment length is derived by the principle of minimum potential energy. The calculation results show that the slip curves have the basic characteristics of quadratic curves distribute. The results can be used to describe the interface slips between steel and concrete under complicated loads.


Recently, shareholders of the insurance giant AIG, which received billions of dollars in bailout funds from the federal government at the height of the 2008 financial crisis, filed suit against the United States government for $40 billion. One might think that this claim would be absurd on its face. Commentators – legal and otherwise – appeared to have been caught off guard as to how this could be a plausible legal case. If the government simply offers you a deal, which you can take or leave, how can you sue – later – if you don't like its terms? This might sound astounding, but it is not. To understand the theory of the AIG litigation, one must go to its deeper, festering root in American takings law. In a series of "exactions" cases, the United States Supreme Court has held that when government offers something (which it has no obligation to offer), in exchange for value of some sort, courts must ensure that this is "fair" – even though the offeree is under no obligation to take it. In short, we should not be surprised by AIG. It is simply Nollan/Dolan's progeny.


Small-world architectures may be implicated in a range of phenomena from networks of neurons in the cerebral cortex to social networks and propogation of viruses. Small-world networks are interpolations of regular and random networks that retain the advantages of both regular and random networks by being highly clustered like regular networks and having small average path length between nodes, like random networks. While most of the recent attention on small-world networks has focussed on the effect of introducing disorder/randomness into a regular network, we show that that the fundamental mechanism behind the small-world phenomenon is not disorder/randomness, but the presence of connections of many different length scales. Consequently, in order to explain the small-world phenomenon, we introduce the concept of multiple scale networks and then state the multiple length scale hypothesis. We show that small-world behavior in randomly rewired networks is a consequence of features common to all multiple scale networks. To support the multiple length scale hypothesis, novel network architectures are introduced that need not be a result of random rewiring of a regular network. In each case it is shown that whenever the network exhibits small-world behavior, it also has connections of diverse length scales. We also show that the distribution of the length scales of the new connections is significantly more important than whether the new connections are long range, medium range or short range.


The primary challenge of global food system is to provide food for nearly 800 million starving people and the next generations of constantly growing population. One of the solutions to this challenge is to reduce food wastage, which is especially high in the households of developed countries. Considering this fact, the analysis of a questionnaire study among WULS students determines their knowledge and awareness of food waste issues, and most often wasted food products. The study also tests the attitudes of respondents towards food waste and its consequences. Results showed that baker's good, fruit and vegetables were the most often wasted food while these products are recommended to consume in largest amounts. Respondents wrongly indicated that food service is the food chain sector with the highest food waste in Poland. The reduction of respondent's disposable income was recognized as the most important effect of food waste. In conclusion, it can be stated that the higher knowledge and awareness of food wastage issues can contribute to reduction of the scale of the problem and improvement of food consumption.


In standard nanopore analysis a constant DC voltage is used to electrophoretically drive small molecules and peptides towards a pore. Superposition of an AC voltage at particular frequencies causes molecules to oscillate as they approach the pore which can alter the event parameters, the blockade current (I) and blockade time (T). Four peptides with similar structures were studied. Alpha-helical peptides A10 (FmocDDA10KK), A14, A18 and retro-inverso A10. It was shown that the ratio of translocations to bumping events could be manipulated by a combination of AC voltages and frequencies. In particular, A10 could be studied without interference from retro-inverso A10. Similarly, a large, intrinsically disordered protein of 140 amino acids, α-synuclein, which translocates the pore readily in a DC field could be prevented from doing so by application of an AC field of 200 mV at 100 MHz.


The mismatch between an external language model (LM) and the implicitly learned internal LM (ILM) of RNN-Transducer (RNN-T) can limit the performance of LM integration such as simple shallow fusion. A Bayesian interpretation suggests to remove this sequence prior as ILM correction. In this work, we study various ILM correction-based LM integration methods formulated in a common RNN-T framework. We provide a decoding interpretation on two major reasons for performance improvement with ILM correction, which is further experimentally verified with detailed analysis. We also propose an exact-ILM training framework by extending the proof given in the hybrid autoregressive transducer, which enables a theoretical justification for other ILM approaches. Systematic comparison is conducted for both in-domain and cross-domain evaluation on the Librispeech and TED-LIUM Release 2 corpora, respectively. Our proposed exact-ILM training can further improve the best ILM method.


Iron limitation affects one-third of the cultivable land on Earth and represents a major concern for agriculture. It causes decline of many photosynthetic components, including the Fe-S protein ferredoxin (Fd), involved in essential oxidoreductive pathways of chloroplasts. In cyanobacteria and some algae, Fd down-regulation under Fe deficit is compensated by induction of an isofunctional electron carrier, flavodoxin (Fld), a flavin mononucleotide-containing protein not found in plants. Transgenic tobacco lines expressing a cyanobacterial Fld in chloroplasts were able to grow in Fe-deficient media that severely compromised survival of WT plants. Fld expression did not improve Fe uptake or mobilization, and stressed transformants elicited a normal deficit response, including induction of ferric-chelate reductase and metal transporters. However, the presence of Fld did prevent decrease of several photosynthetic proteins (but not Fd) and partially protected photosynthesis from inactivation. It also preserved the activation state of enzymes depending on the Fd-thioredoxin pathway, which correlated with higher levels of intermediates of carbohydrate metabolism and the Calvin cycle, as well as increased contents of sucrose, glutamate, and other amino acids. These metabolic routes depend, directly or indirectly, on the provision of reduced Fd. The results indicate that Fld could compensate Fd decline during episodes of Fe deficiency by productively interacting with Fd-dependent pathways of the host, providing fresh genetic resources for the design of plants able to survive in Fe-poor lands.


Adaptation of rubella virus to human diploid cell strains was achieved in 1964, with attenuation in the same cells being accomplished by 1967. The production of rubella vaccine in HDCS is featured by the long period required to build up high titer. High multiplicity of infection gives optimal results. Since rubella virus does not produce a cytopathic effect in HDCS, virus harvests must be made blindly and titrated individually before pooling. A unique feature of this cell-virus relationship is the continuous virus production which takes place for months. For vaccine purposes, however, virus-containing supernatant fluids may be harvested each 48 hrs from the 5th to the 21st day post-infection. Lyophilization presents no particular problems and final titers in ampoules can be as high as 10(5.0) PFU, which represents about 100 subcutaneous doses. Control of rubella vaccine presents only the problem that viral CPE is absent or mild. Therefore the presence or absence of virus may have to be determined by interference. Titration of rubella virus produced in HDCS must be by plaquing in RK13 rabbit kidney cells or by interference in cynomolgus monkey kidney cells. Rubella vaccine (RA27/3 strain) produced in HDCS has been more immunogenic than other strains and retains an ability to infect intranasally as well as subcutaneously.


The time course for the increases in soluble renal epidermal growth factor (EGF) after ischemia has been established. These elevated levels of EGF have been compared with the degree of tissue injury as well as the extent of cell proliferation in the recovering tissue. Levels of soluble immunoreactive EGF (irEGF) in control animals were 9.74 +/- 1.1 ng/g wet wt (n = 4-8 for all values) and rose to 83.9 +/- 30 ng/g within 12 h after injury. Soluble irEGF content peaked at 88.8 +/- 15 ng/g at 24 h postinjury and returned to control values by 72 h. We previously reported that trypsin digestion of crude renal membranes (CRM) generates rat EGF that is indistinguishable from that isolated from the submandibular gland. Initial levels of trypsin-releasable membrane-associated irEGF were 439 +/- 26 ng/g. These levels fell to 46.6 +/- 9.6 ng/g at 48 h after injury. The total renal EGF demonstrated an 80% decline 48 h after injury but returned to 50% of the initial values after 72 h representing significant new synthesis of EGF-containing proteins between 48 and 72 h postinjury. Immunohistochemical staining of kidney paraffin sections for EGF immunoreactivity demonstrated staining intensities that paralleled the amount of irEGF in the trypsin-digested CRM fraction, suggesting that the membrane-associated irEGF is the predominant form detected by this technique. Regenerative hyperplasia subsequent to tubular insult was monitored by immunostaining nuclei of S phase cells after pulse labeling with the thymidine analogue 5-bromo-2'-deoxyuridine. Cell proliferation was particularly prominent in the outer stripe of outer medulla of kidneys exposed to ischemia and reached a maximum (19-fold higher than the baseline value) 48 h after reperfusion. Renal cell turnover returned to control values by day 7. The observation that the peak in soluble EGF levels (24 h) precedes the peak in tubular regeneration (48 h) by 24 h is consistent with the hypothesis that EGF is one of the mitogenic signals triggering regenerative hyperplasia after renal injury.


Recent technological innovations are reshaping the work‐life and the workplace. Advances in automation and information and communication technology (ICT) drove scholars to identify the skills required for a competitive workforce. We analysed empirical data, collected from a multinational firm, through the lenses of the situational awareness approach, with the aim of investigating managers' awareness about the relevance of digital skills to undertake a digitalization processes and whether this awareness differs across departments within the same organization. This study leads to three main contributions: (i) managers consider it essential to have a clear digital strategy in order to undertake digital transformation initiatives; (ii) managers consider it quite relevant to implement proper training initiatives both for acquiring and maintaining DS inside the organization and for fostering informal learning among senior experts and new employees; (iii) regardless of the business department, managers are often not properly aware of the DS required for a digital transformation process.


Considers a systems model of changes in industrial structure, employment and income levels. A country subsidizes imported resources to augment its existing resource base and to develop an export promotion strategy. This is leveraged with borrowed money. According to neo‐classical economic theory, factors of production are paid in proportion to their output contribution. Economic growth occurs when the return from a higher rate of factor utilization exceeds the cost of subsidization. In the study of ordinary differential equations, simultaneous changes in variables can be treated as part of a dynamic system subject to constraints. At any moment resources are fixed, and we may assume D'Alembert's principle of virtual work with respect to the internal constraints of the system. Subsidized economic growth shares a paradigm with analytical dynamics, the stability of motion around the neighbourhood of a singular point. The classical analytical‐topological methods which describe asymptotic stability are used to investigate economic policy.


Abstract Since the 1990s, Lithuania lost almost one-quarter of its population, and some regions within the country lost more than 50% of their residents. Such a sharp population decline poses major challenges to politicians, policy-makers and planners. The aim of this study is to obtain more insight into the recent processes of socio-spatial change and the role of selective migration in Lithuania. The main focus is on understanding who lives in those regions which are rapidly losing population, and who is most likely to leave these regions. This is one of the first studies to use individual-level Lithuanian census data from 2001 and 2011. We found that low socio-economic status residents and older residents dominate the population of shrinking regions, and unsurprisingly that the most 'successful' people are the most likely to leave such regions. This process of selective migration reinforces the negative downward spiral of declining regions. As a result, socio-spatial polarization is growing within the country, where people with higher socio-economic status are increasingly overrepresented in the largest city-regions, while the elderly and residents with a lower socio-economic status are overrepresented in declining rural regions. This paper provides empirical evidence of selective migration and increasing regional disparities in Lithuania. While the socio-spatial changes are obvious in Lithuania, there is no clear strategy on how to cope with extreme population decline and increasing regional inequalities within the country.


: It is showed that HAV+HBV mixed infection is a genetically determined pathology. Following HLA-antigens were immunogenetic markers of the disease: HLA-A10, B21, Cw2, Cw5, A10-A19, 88-813, B21-B35, A3-821, A9-B21. Lower risk of disease development was associated with HLA-B5, A2-Cw3, A3-Cw4, B35-Cw4, A3-B35-Cw4. Atypical forms of the hepatitis A were often met in carriers of HLA-Cw5, 827-835, A3-814, A3-B21, A9-B21, whereas typical forms - in carriers of HLA-A10, Cw2, A10-A19, B8-813, 821-835. Mild forms of hepatitis A were associated with the presence of HLA-A10,B22, A10-A19, B8-B13, A3-B21, A9-B8, A10-814, A10-822, A10-Cw3 in the patients' phenotype, whereas intermediate and severe forms - with the presence of HLA-B17, 817-818, 821 - 835, A28-B21, B18-Cw2. The findings about distribution of HLA-antigens and their combinations in mixed hepatitis A+B can be used in attempt of their prediction and prevention.


prejudice. Neither FP-Pigments Oy nor any of its affiliate companies makes any warranty or representation as to the accuracy of such information and cannot accept any duty of care, liability or responsibility in respect of any errors or any loss that may be suffered by any party relying upon or making reference to such information. Processes or formulations mentioned are offered as suggestions for experiment and are not guaranteed in any way. Although the existence of patents covering products or processes referred to in publications by or on behalf of FP-Pigments Oy are on occasion noted, the absence of such notation is not to be taken as an indication of freedom from patent restrictions and no responsibility or liability will be accepted for any infringement. © 2020 Information herein is the property of FP-Pigments Oy and no part or parts may be copied without the prior permission of FP-Pigments Oy. Citation of products not made by FPPigments Oy is offered in good faith and must not be taken to refer to qualities or circumstances other than those specifically mentioned herein. TiO2 Reduction in Polyester:TGIC Powder Coatings


Even though most organizations are using enterprise resource planning applications, very few people understand the underlying interoperability nature within them. Interoperability is the ability of systems to provide services to and accept services from other systems, and to use the services exchanged so as to operate together in a more effective manner. The fact that interoperability can be improved means that the metrics for measuring interoperability can be defined. For the purpose of measuring the interoperability between systems, an interoperability assessment model is required. A comparative analysis among these models is provided to evaluate the similarities and differences in their philosophy and implementation. The analysis yields a set of recommendations for any party that is open to the idea of creating or improving an interoperability assessment model. Interoperability of ERP Software


Epidemiological studies in healthy carriers of HB Ag show variable results that might depend on the geographical area, ethnic group, and socio-economic level analyzed. For that reason an study was undertaken in the Spanish population with the purpose of analysing contagiousness of healthy carriers and mechanism of spread of the infection. The incidence of HB Ag and HB Ab was determined by radioimmunoassay in 211 relatives of 76 healthy carriers; all members of the family could be studied in 51 cases. The results were compared to those of a sizeable sample of the normal population. The overall incidence of HB Ag (13.1 %), and of HB Ab (18.9 %) in the probands was significantly higher than in the normal population (0.8 %, and 9 %, respectively). The distribution of new cases of HB Ag positivity in the 51 families in which the members could be studied demonstrated a significantly higher frequency in children of a carrier mother (28.9 %) than in those of a carrier father (10.8 %). In conclusion, the contagiousness of healthy carriers for their families can not be disregarded. It is likely that the mechanism of spread of the infection depends on a multifactorial inheritance of the genetic alteration of the selective immunologic response to the HB Ag, compounded by environmental factors.


The highly increasing penetration of single-phase photovoltaic (PV) systems pushes the grid requirements related to the integration of PV power systems to be updated. These upcoming regulations are expected to direct the grid-connected renewable generators to support the grid operation and stability both under grid faulty conditions and under normal operations. Grid synchronization techniques play an important role in the control of single-phase systems in order to fulfill these demands. Thus, it is necessary to evaluate the behaviors of grid synchronization methods in single phase systems under grid faults. The focus of this paper is put on the benchmarking of synchronization techniques, mainly about phase locked loop (PLL) based methods, in single-phase PV power systems operating under grid faults. Some faulty mode cases are studied at the end of this paper in order to compare these methods. It is concluded that the Enhanced PLL (EPLL) and the Second Order Generalized Integrator based PLL (SOGI-OSG PLL) technique are the most promising candidates for future single-phase PV systems due to their fast adaptive-filtering characteristics. KeywordsAC, DC, Solar Photovoltaic Modules, Phase Locked Loop, 555 Timer, and Synchronization.


Professionals who counsel and serve survivors of childhood abuse may be at risk of experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), which can be exacerbated by cognitive and emotional processes. It is hypothesized that (1) a significant proportion of professionals who primarily serve child abuse survivors experience elevated levels of PTSD symptoms and (2) elevated PTSD symptoms are associated with psychological inflexibility processes, specifically increased experiential avoidance, cognitive fusion, and emotion regulation difficulties. Child abuse counselors and service workers (N = 31) in a major metropolitan area were recruited for a small pilot study. Participants completed self-report measures of PTSD symptoms and levels of psychological flexibility processes. A significant proportion of counselors endorsed clinically significant PTSD symptoms (n = 13, 41.9%). PTSD symptoms were significantly associated with experiential avoidance (r = .54, p < .01) and emotion regulation difficulties (r = .51, p < .01). These associations remained significant after controlling for the personality trait of emotional stability/neuroticism. These findings suggest that PTSD symptoms may be common among child abuse counselors and service workers, and these symptoms tend to be of greater intensity when responded to in avoidant and inflexible ways.


Recognizing implicit discourse relation is a challenging task in discourse analysis, which aims to understand and infer the latent relations between two discourse arguments, such as temporal, comparison. Most of the present models largely focus on learning-based methods that utilize only intra-sentence textual information to identify discourse relations, ignoring the wider contexts beyond the discourse. Moreover, people comprehend the meanings and the relations of discourses, heavily relying on their interconnected working memories (e.g., instant memory, long-term memory). Inspired by this, we propose a Knowledge-Enhanced Attentive Neural Network (KANN) framework to address these issues. Specifically, it establishes a mutual attention matrix to capture the reciprocal information between two arguments, as instant memory. While implicitly stated knowledge in the arguments is retrieved from external knowledge source and encoded as inter-words semantic connection embeddings to further construct knowledge matrix, as long-term memory. We devise a novel paradigm with two ways by the collaboration of the memories to enrich the argument representation: 1) integrating the knowledge matrix into the mutual attention matrix, which implicitly maps knowledge into the process of capturing asymmetric interactions between two discourse arguments; 2) directly concatenating the argument representations and the semantic connection embeddings, which explicitly supplements knowledge to help discourse understanding. The experimental results on the PDTB also show that our KANN model is effective.


Twin studies have been considered as strong approaches in determining the cause of complex diseases with regard to identifying the involvement of multiple genes, single genes, environmental factors, and a possible relation between genetics and the environment. The concordance observed among monozygotic (MZ) twins suggests the involvement of genetic factors. Nonetheless, MZ twins demonstrate a rate of discordance in different characteristics, like proneness towards diseases, despite virtually identical genetic backgrounds. Discordance has been suggestive of the involvement of the environment alongside genetic factors. As a result, a bulk of studies has supported the hypothesis that environmental factors can impress the epigenetic construction and, therefore, influence disease susceptibility. Twin studies yield data about clinical courses and outcomes of disease, in addition to knowledge of genetics, epigenetics, environmental factors, and risk of disease development. To date, genome-wide association studies (GWASs) have reported that genomic variants are responsible for only a number of cases of autoimmunity in twins and have been unable to explain the disease discordance among MZ twins. With respect to the exploration of epigenetic mechanisms in autoimmunity, discordant MZ twins have been attractive models and have contributed remarkably. It is essential for future studies to evaluate the genetic variants as well as epigenetic changes in large twin populations. The current review discusses the genetic and epigenetic lessons obtained from studies of twin cases.


Historical interactions are the default choice for recommender model training, which typically exhibit high sparsity, i.e., most user-item pairs are unobserved missing data. A standard choice is treating the missing data as negative training samples and estimating interaction likelihood between user-item pairs along with the observed interactions. In this way, some potential interactions are inevitably mislabeled during training, which will hurt the model fidelity, hindering the model to recall the mislabeled items, especially the long-tail ones. In this work, we investigate the mislabeling issue from a new perspective of aleatoric uncertainty, which describes the inherent randomness of missing data. The randomness pushes us to go beyond merely the interaction likelihood and embrace aleatoric uncertainty modeling. Towards this end, we propose a new Aleatoric Uncertainty-aware Recommendation (AUR) framework that consists of a new uncertainty estimator along with a normal recommender model. According to the theory of aleatoric uncertainty, we derive a new recommendation objective to learn the estimator. As the chance of mislabeling reflects the potential of a pair, AUR makes recommendations according to the uncertainty, which is demonstrated to improve the recommendation performance of less popular items without sacrificing the overall performance. We instantiate AUR on three representative recommender models: Matrix Factorization (MF), LightGCN, and VAE from mainstream model architectures. Extensive results on two real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of AUR w.r.t. better recommendation results, especially on long-tail items.


Roman suburbia in contemporary cinema: the (symbolic) place of contrasts and difficult existences. Roman suburbia became the backdrop for numerous contemporary cinematographic works in which the dramatic lives of people are marked by events and dramas which condition their existence. In this context, the suburbia hasn't a marginal role, because it is a place that accompanies, breathes and absorbes events and circumstances charging itself with symbols and meanings. In fact, it leaves together with the characters of the movies studied in the paper, contributing to their definition. In particular, these movies are "Lo chiamavano Jeeg Robot" (2015), "Il piu grande sogno" (2016), "Cuori puri" (2017), "Fortunata" (2017), "Il contagio" (2017), "Manuel" (2017), "La terra dell'abbastanza" (2018), "Dogman" (2018). The main purpose of the paper is to understand why roman suburbia is a "symbolic place", returned to the top of the cinematographic contemporary works.


Chinese college students' physical activity mainly consists of physical activity in physical education (PE) classes and extra-curriculum physical activity. With the improvement of college PE teaching, as well as the decline of college students' physique and the frequent occurrence of psychological problems in college students, more and more Chinese colleges has started promoting students' active participation in physical activity. This is performed as a means of improving the physique and the mental health of college students. Flow is a positive psychological experience that quite often takes place in physical activity. Based on the theory of flow, this paper investigates flow characteristics in physical activity of college students in Shanghai. Contributing to existing literature on flow, this paper focuses on empirically exploring the manifestation of flow characteristics, differences in flow characteristics in different types of sports, and differences in flow characteristics in different grades of college students in Shanghai. The data are collected from questionnaire survey. Questionnaire questions are based on the Flow State Scale of Jackson and Marsh (1994). A preliminary test was carried out to assess the effectiveness of questionnaire questions. According to test results, a minor amendment of questionnaire questions was made to ensure that all questionnaire questions can be effectively understood. 500 questionnaires are handed out, and all were successfully retrieved. Factor analysis is utilized to reduce dimension, i.e., factorizing the answers to 36 questions into 6 variables and in calculating the value of flow. Test results found that the manifestation of flow characteristics in physical activity of college students in Shanghai are "self-experience", "integration of action and awareness", "clear goals and feedback", "lack of self-consciousness", "sense of control", and "time transformation". There are sharp differences between flow characteristics in physical activity of different types of sports. The flow in closed motor skills physical activity is higher than that in open motor skills physical activity. The main differences are manifested through four factors: European Scientific Journal May 2018 edition Vol.14, No.13 ISSN: 1857 – 7881 (Print) e ISSN 18577431 90 self-experience, integration of action and awareness, clear goals and feedback, and sense of control. There are also significant differences among flow characteristics of college students in different grades, with freshmen having the highest value of flow. The flow characteristics of students in different grades also differ in terms of different types of sports.


This study sought to explore the concept of mental toughness (comprising the attributes challenge, commitment, control, and confidence) from the perceptions of adolescents, to better understand their views on these attributes and the extent to which each were regarded as important within an educational setting. In total, 54 adolescents (31 female) aged 12–17 participated. Focus group interviews (n = 15, average group size 3–4) were conducted, audio-recorded, and transcribed verbatim. Data were analyzed using the principles of abbreviated grounded theory. The students' views are discussed with reference to relevant psychological theory and literature and implications for teachers interested in encouraging these positive psychological attributes among adolescents are discussed.


Feminism is part of cultural studies in literature, which arises since women feel discredited and being treated unequal to men as human. Feminists acquire the nature that men and women are certainly created different by God. Yet, what is not acceptable is the differentiation in position, that men are superior to women. That awareness prompts women to rise up and fight for their rights. Feminism deals with freedom, appreciation, and fair treatment for women. It is not women?s disability to sit equal with men, but because of the system in their society discourage women to gain self-assertion to actualize themselves as well as men. Meanwhile, women want to grow as human beings who have equal role and opportunity in their own life and in their society. Both main Female characters, Anna in Anna Karenina, and Sri in Pada Sebuah Kapal exert themselves to strive for freedom, appreciation and fair treatment from their husband, for being depressed with their marriage. Therefore, despite the similarities and differences, since they come from different cultural background, still the reasons behind their rebel in traditional norms and the way they face oppressive marriage bring the idea of feminism to the surface. It is the freedom to gain self-assertion as women by seeking for appreciation and fairness. Hence, the discussion will be on the reasons behind the main female characters? rebel toward traditional norms they hold, which are actually their unfulfilled needs of equality, for Anna has to cope her husband?s snobbery, while Sri has to bear her husband?s rudeness Then, I also analyze the way Anna and Sri face their oppressive marriages. Although I find that both women are struggling on the same track, I notices that the Anna?s inner conflict is more complicated, since she lives in her own country, Russia, where the women traditional concept is strongly hold, while Sri lives in foreign country with her husband, so that it is easier for Sri to forget about the traditional concept of Javanese women. In fact, through all the conflicts with their traditional ideal image of good-natured women, their changed paradigm about marriage and women?s rights drive them to struggle toward their husbands? superiority. Through the discussions, I find that women?s need to be treated equal, to be respected an appreciated as equal living partners to men are universally the same.


ABSTRACT In this paper we propose fast solution methods for the Cauchy problem for the multidimensional Schrödinger equation. Our approach is based on the approximation of the data by the basis functions introduced in the theory of approximate approximations. We obtain high-order approximations also in higher dimensions up to a small saturation error, which is negligible in computations, and we prove error estimates in mixed Lebesgue spaces for the inhomogeneous equation. The proposed method is very efficient in high dimensions if the densities allow separated representations. We illustrate the efficiency of the procedure on different examples, up to approximation order 6 and space dimension 200.


A fascinating hypothesis is that human and animal intelligence could be explained by a few principles (rather than an encyclopaedic list of heuristics). If that hypothesis was correct, we could more easily both understand our own intelligence and build intelligent machines. Just like in physics, the principles themselves would not be sufficient to predict the behaviour of complex systems like brains, and substantial computation might be needed to simulate human-like intelligence. This hypothesis would suggest that studying the kind of inductive biases that humans and animals exploit could help both clarify these principles and provide inspiration for AI research and neuroscience theories. Deep learning already exploits several key inductive biases, and this work considers a larger list, focusing on those which concern mostly higher-level and sequential conscious processing. The objective of clarifying these particular principles is that they could potentially help us build AI systems benefiting from humans' abilities in terms of flexible out-of-distribution and systematic generalization, which is currently an area where a large gap exists between state-of-the-art machine learning and human intelligence.


Purpose of review Component-resolved diagnostics makes use of defined allergen molecules to analyse IgE-mediated sensitizations at a molecular level. Here, we review recent studies on the use of component-resolved diagnostics in the field of Hymenoptera venom allergy (HVA) and discuss its benefits and limitations. Recent findings Component resolution in HVA has moved from single molecules to panels of allergens. Detection of specific immunoglobulin E (sIgE) to marker and cross-reactive venom allergens has been reported to facilitate the discrimination between primary sensitization and cross-reactivity and thus, to provide a better rationale for prescribing venom immunotherapy (VIT), particularly in patients sensitized to both honeybee and vespid venom. Characterization of IgE reactivity to a broad panel of venom allergens has allowed the identification of different sensitization profiles that in honeybee venom allergy were associated with increased risks for side effects or treatment failure of VIT. In contrast, component resolution so far has failed to provide reliable markers for the discrimination of sensitizations to venoms of different members of Vespidae. Summary Component-resolved diagnostics allows a better understanding of the complexity of sensitization and cross-reactivities in HVA. In addition, the enhanced resolution and precision may allow identification of biomarkers, which can be used for risk stratification in VIT. Knowledge about the molecular composition of different therapeutic preparations may enable the selection of appropriate preparations for VIT according to individual sensitization profiles, an approach consistent with the goals of personalized medicine.


Brachystegia Eurycoma seed is an important food thickening agent with seed gum that has potential as binding agent in the pharmaceutical industry in Nigeria. Presently, the kernel is obtained by manually dehulling the seed and the operation is not only time consuming and tasky but also wasteful. In order to overcome the above problems associated with the processing of the seed, there is the need to development a mechanical device for handling and processing the crop. The development of such device requires knowledge of the mechanical properties of the seed. To provide the needed data, investigation of the mechanical properties of the seed under different processing conditions of soaking, parboiling and roasting and moisture content levels of 8.90, 14.02, 20.90 and 26.30% (w.b) was carried out using the Testometric Universal Testing Machine (UTM). The properties studied include bioyield point, yield point, rupture point, bioyield strength, compressive strength and rupture strength, modulus of elasticity, modulus of stiffness, modulus of resilience and modulus of toughness. Results showed that all the above mechanical properties of Brachystegia Eurycoma seed decreased with increase in moisture content. Highest values of the properties were obtained from unprocessed seeds followed by parboiled seeds except for the compressive strength which was highest on unprocessed seeds and followed by soaked seeds. Roasting gave the lowest values of the properties except on modulus of stiffness at the highest moisture level and modulus of toughness that was lowest on soaked seeds. From the results obtained, it could be taken that the Brachystegia Eurycoma seeds subjected to roasting operation prior to dehulling, would require less energy to handle.


Serum hCG and free beta hCG subunit were measured in intrauterine pregnancies (n = 21), ectopic pregnancies (n = 20) and spontaneous abortions (n = 19) matched for gestational age. Significantly higher concentrations of both dimer and free beta subunit hCG were detected in normal pregnancies (86,336 IU/L) and 21.02 IU/L respectively) compared to abortions (10,460 IU/L and 3.73 IU/L) and ectopic pregnancies (3,900 IU/L and 3.73 IU/L) (p less than .05). When the ratio of free beta hCG/intact hCG (%) was studied, however, EP had significantly higher ratios (0.09 +/- 0.09) than IUP (p less than .05). Assessment of the relative distributions of these ratios revealed that 100% of IUP and AB and 65% of EP had ratios less than 0.10. Most notably, 35% of EP were uniquely characterized by ratios greater than 0.10. This ratio was sufficiently higher in 35% of EP to define a profile completely unique to EP. These data suggest that an increased free beta to dimer hCG ratio of greater than 0.10 may assist in the differentiation of ectopic from intrauterine pregnancies of spontaneous abortions and provide insight into a possible trophoblastic mechanics in these clinical events.


Research Question: The investigation of the optimal allocation of current assets. Motivation: Current assets investment is a decision process which affects firm value. In this paper, we develop a framework that encompasses these decisions by taking into consideration the trade-off between risk and return. Idea: We build up a model implemented in two stages. In the first stage, using random coefficient modeling on panel data, we obtain the estimates of the expected returns and standard deviations for cash holdings, inventories and receivables along with the correlations between them. Having these estimates on hand we move on to the second stage to determine the optimal allocation of current assets portfolio and construct the efficient frontier of the possible combinations of the current assets' elements. Data: For the purposes of our study we use financial data from Greek manufacturing firms, drawn from their annual income statements and balance sheets. Firms are classified into the manufacturing industry for the years 2003 to 2014. Tools: In the first stage we use random coefficient modeling on panel data while in the second stage mean-variance analysis is employed. Findings: By applying the model in the Greek manufacturing sector we find that the minimum-variance portfolio of the average firm of our data set has an expected return of 10.00% with a 6.14% standard deviation (risk) and consists of 13% cash and cash equivalents, 29% inventories and 58% receivables. Contribution: Our model would be useful to assess and monitor firms' current assets investments and may be used in the formulation of sound current assets policies and procedures.


New ab initio surfaces of the potential energies and the induced electric dipole moments of H2‐H2 and H2‐He collisional complexes are obtained with H2 bond distances from 0.942 to 2.801 bohr. These data permit the calculation of collision‐induced absorption (CIA) spectra of dense hydrogen‐helium gas mixtures at temperatures up to thousands of kelvin, i.e., under conditions where strong rotovibrational excitations of the H2 molecules exist. First results of CIA spectra are obtained over an extended range of frequencies and temperatures. The work is an extension of our previous work on the opacities of the (low‐temperature) atmospheres of the outer planets.


Sea-urchin zygote mitotic apparatus (MA) isolated in a glycerol/dimethylsulphoxide medium were treated with pressure. Pressure treatment had no effect on spindle birefringence when MA were in full-strength isolation medium. After placing MA in quarter-strength isolation medium, pressures of 4-0 X 10(3)-1-8 X 10(4) lbf in.-2 (2 X 76 X 10(4)-I X 24 X 10(5) k N m-2) for 15 min caused reduction of birefringence which occurred in 2 steps: firstly 20-30% of the birefringence was lost, and then, at higher pressures, the rest of the birefringence was lost. Electron microscopy suggested that pressure-induced changes were in non-microtubule material. Pressure treatment had no effect on MA isolated with hexylene glycol when the MA were pressurized in hexylene glycol; but pressure treatment did cause loss of birefringence when MA isolated in hexylene glycol were transferred immediately into glycerol/dimethylsulphoxide medium and were subsequently treated with pressure (after dilution into quarter-strength glycerol/dimethyl-sulphoxide). We discuss the differences in response between isolated MA and in vivo MA, and we discuss the possibility that 2 components contribute to MA birefringence.


Geophysical models show that electrical conductivity in Earth's mantle rises about two orders of magnitude through the transition zone in the depth range 410 to 660 kilometers. Impedance measurements obtained on Mg1.8Fe0.2SiO4 olivine, wadsleyite, and ringwoodite at up to 20 gigapascals and 1400 degreesC show that the electrical conductivities of wadsleyite and ringwoodite are similar and are almost two orders of magnitude higher than that of olivine. A conductivity-depth profile to 660 kilometers, based on these laboratory data, shows a conductivity increase of almost two orders of magnitude across the 410-kilometer discontinuity; such a profile favors a two-layer model for the upper mantle. Activation enthalpies of 1.2 to 1.7 electron volts permit appreciable lateral variations of conductivity with lateral temperature variations.


Artificial Neural Networks can be used to predict future returns of stocks in order to take financial decisions. Should one build a separate network for each stock or share the same network for all the stocks? In this paper we also explore other alternatives, in which some layers are shared and others are not shared. When the prediction of future returns for different stocks are viewed as different tasks, sharing some parameters across stocks is a form of multi-task learning. In a series of experiments with Canadian stocks, we obtain yearly returns that are more than 14% above various benchmarks.


The effects of landslides on contaminant sources and transport during storms in steep pastoral hill country were evaluated for a small, first-order hillslope in the Lake Tutira catchment, New Zealand. Nitrate (NO 3 . -N) concentrations were significantly higher in soil water than in subsurface water in the saturated zone, in surface runoff, and in a stream draining the hillslope. Concentrations in colluvium and undisturbed areas were higher than in landslide debris, scars and the stream. Stream NO 3 . -N was lower due to instream processes, and was derived primarily from soil water in colluvium and undisturbed areas where livestock congregate and waste accumulates. Concentrations of dissolved reactive phosphorus were higher in streams than in other types of water, particularly greater than in runoff from scars. Colluvium and other unmonitored source areas were contributing dissolved reactive phosphorus to the stream, Landslide scars and debris were not significant sources of NO 3 . -N or dissolved reactive phosphorus because of the lack of soil, vegetation, livestock and waste in these areas. Soil and subsurface water had the highest levels of total dissolved solids because of the relatively long residence times and leaching of solutes. Landslide-disturbed areas had the greatest dissolved solids concentrations and, with the exception of nutrients, were sources of solutes transported to the stream via subsurface pathways. During a storm NO 3 . -N loadings were largest from colluvium and debris subsurface discharges. Loadings of total P in runoff were much higher than those of dissolved reactive phosphorus and were greatest from debris. They were primarily composed of particulate P and were a significant source of elevated stream phosphorus values. Loadings of total dissolved solids in runoff were also highest from debris, and loadings in subsurface water were greatest from debris and colluvium. Landslides can alter the sources and transport of contaminants in steep, agricultural hill country directly through physical disturbances that affect pollutant generation and movement, and indirectly by altering livestock use of areas. These effects should be considered when modelling contaminant transport and managing these types of catchments.


One quarter of all the world's cranes are located in the fastest growing city in the world; Dubai. The paradox is, that in striving for global economic recognition Dubai has become a parody of itself, a mythology of forms; an adult Disneyland built upon the silent deserts of the past. The emphasis upon 'landmark' architecture is primarily driven and controlled by global economics and the quest for recognition upon the global stage. As a result, these new forms lack empathy and humility and have no connection with other complex domains involved in the making of architecture. Analysis of the particular climate, culture and place is absent. The traditions of the indigenous Bedouin-Arabs founded existence upon an absence of building. Tent architecture was temporary, horizontal, climatically responsive, plastic, lightweight and black. All qualities that sit in stark opposition to the current trend of building in Dubai, expressed as permanent, vertical, un-responsive to climate, static, heavy and usually white. The result is that Dubai has become firmly disconnected from both the concept and spirit of place. Where camels and their herdsmen roamed 50 years ago we can now find an indoor ski-slope and high-rise apartments. The date palm, an essential element of economic tradition, is given hollow signification through an abstracted plan-form of a new island development, providing no sign, in the semiotic sense, of the long tradition of human reliance upon the palm, for food, shade and survival. Much of the debate upon sustainable design focuses upon the physical domain. The inclusion of wind turbines and photovoltaic cells might be judged laudable but the complex relationships between climate, culture and place lie largely undisturbed in Dubai. The indigenous traditions of making place are, by definition, sustainable and indeed beautiful, because such traditions have evolved into perfect models. This paper sets out a hypothesis that by interrogating the Dubai paradigm using phenomenological methodology, architecture of reconciliation may be possible. Such architecture recognises contemporary global driving forces for development but equally, recognises the opportunities held in acknowledging the richness and authenticity of place in making appropriate and thus by implication, sustainable place.


Abstract Investors face uncertainty over models when they do not know which member of a set of well-defined "structured models" is best. They face uncertainty about models when they suspect that all of the structured models might be misspecified. We refer to worries about the first type of ignorance as ambiguity concerns and worries about the second type as misspecification concerns. These two types of ignorance about probability distributions of risks add what we call uncertainty components to equilibrium prices of those risks. A quantitative example highlights a representative investor's uncertainties about the size and persistence of macroeconomic growth rates. Our model of preferences under concerns about model ambiguity and misspecification puts nonlinearities into marginal valuations that induce time variations in market prices of uncertainty. These reflect the representative investor's fears of high persistence of low growth rate states and low persistence of high growth rate states.


Terrestrial anuran amphibians absorb water across specialized regions of skin on the posterioventral region of their bodies. Rapid water absorption is mediated by the insertion of aquaporins into the apical membrane of the outermost cell layer. Water moves out of the epithelium via aquaglyceroporins in the basolateral membrane and into the circulation in conjunction with increased capillary blood flow to the skin and aquaporins in the capillary endothelial cells. These physiological responses are activated by intrinsic stimuli relating to the animals' hydration status and extrinsic stimuli relating to the detection of osmotically available water. The integration of these processes has been studied using behavioural observations in conjunction with neurophysiological recordings and studies of epithelial transport. These studies have identified plasma volume and urinary bladder stores as intrinsic stimuli that activate the formation of angiotensin II (AII) to stimulate water absorption behaviour. The coordinated increase in water permeability and capillary blood flow appears to be mediated primarily by sympathetic stimulation of beta adrenergic receptors, although the neurohypopyseal hormone arginine vasotocin (AVT) may also play a role. Extrinsic stimuli relate primarily to the ionic and osmotic properties of hydration sources. Toads avoid NaCl solutions that have been shown to be harmful in acute exposure, approx. 200–250 mm. The avoidance is partially attenuated by amiloride raising the hypothesis that the mechanism for salt detection by toads resembles that for salt taste in mammals that take in water by mouth. In this model, depolarization of the basolateral membrane of taste cells is coupled to afferent neural stimulation. In toad skin we have identified innervation of skin epithelial cells by branches of spinal nerves and measured neural responses to NaCl solutions that elicit behavioural avoidance. These same concentrations produce depolarization of the basolateral membrane in isolated epithelial preparations. As with salt taste in mammals, the neural responses and depolarization of basolateral membrane potential are partially inhibited by amiloride. In addition, toads are more tolerant of sodium gluconate solution which is consistent with the phenomenon in mammalian taste physiology termed the anion paradox in which sodium salts with larger molecular weight anions produce a reduced intensity of salt taste. Finally, toads also avoid concentrated solutions of a non‐electrolyte, mannitol, which differs from NaCl solutions in not affecting transepithelial conductance and requires a longer time to depolarize the basolateral membrane. Osmotic stimuli may mediate sensory processes for longer term detection of conditions with low water potential while ionic stimuli are more important for shorter term analysis of rehydration sources.


Studies on students' conceptions and reasoning in geometric optics have revealed that students have scientifically incorrect knowledge or lack of understanding in basic optical phenomena. For this reason, as well as the identification of these conceptions or reasoning, the factors or sources that may cause the construction of them should be determined. In the literature, textbooks are considered as one of the main sources of students' unscientific or lacking conceptions. In introductory optics, students may not recognize the role of the observer's eye in the formation and the observation of an image. In this study, nine commonly used physics textbooks around the world and the physics textbook advised by Ministry of National Education in Turkey analyzed in terms of the use of observer's eye and critiqued as a potential source of students' unscientific or lack of conception in optics. Document analysis method is used in order to analyze the ten textbooks. It is found that the role of the observer's eye is ignored or not specifically emphasized in the image formation or observation process in the textbooks. It is suggested that textbooks should be reviewed by experts and the role of observers' eye should be considered especially at the introductory optics for students' better understanding of the optical phenomena.