BACKGROUND
There is concern that high-sensitivity cardiac troponin (hs-cTn) may have low diagnostic accuracy in patients with low acute coronary syndrome (ACS) probability.

METHODS
We prospectively stratified patients presenting with acute chest discomfort to the emergency department (ED) into 3 groups according to their probability for ACS as assessed by the treating ED physician using a visual analog scale: ≤10%, 11% to 79%, and ≥80%, reviewing all information available at 90 min. hs-cTnT and hs-cTnI concentrations were determined in a blinded fashion. Two independent cardiologists adjudicated the final diagnosis.

RESULTS
Among 3828 patients eligible for analysis, 1189 patients had low (≤10%) probability for ACS. The incidence of non-ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (NSTEMI) increased from 1.3% to 12.2% and 54.8% in patients with low, intermediate, and high ACS probability, respectively. The positive predictive value of hs-cTnT and hs-cTnI was low in patients with low ACS probability and increased with the incidence of NSTEMI, whereas the diagnostic accuracy of hs-cTnT and hs-cTnI for NSTEMI as quantified by the area under the curve (AUC) was very high and comparable among all 3 strata, e.g., AUC hs-cTnI, 0.96 (95% CI, 0.94-0.97); 0.87 (95% CI, 0.85-0.89); and 0.89 (95% CI, 0.87-0.92), respectively. Findings were validated using bootstrap analysis as an alternative methodology to define ACS probability. Similarly, higher hs-cTnT/I concentrations independently predicted all-cause mortality within 2 years (e.g., hs-cTnT hazard ratio, 1.39; 95% CI, 1.27-1.52), irrespective of ACS probability.

CONCLUSIONS
Diagnostic and prognostic accuracy and utility of hs-cTnT and hs-cTnI remain high in patients with acute chest discomfort and low ACS probability.ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT00470587.


Reconciling rates of organic carbon export from the euphotic zone with the consumption of organic material in the dark ocean remains one of the major quantitative uncertainties of the ocean carbon cycle. Euphotic zone net community production (NCP) provides one broad constraint on export flux and potential carbon drawdown. However, in vitro measurements of NCP consistently suggest that oligotrophic oceans are net heterotrophic, which is inconsistent with evidence of their carbon export to depth. Further, we have been unable to identify organic inputs on a scale to supplement the purported net heterotrophy. Here, we calculate global NCP rates using empirical relationships between in vitrophotosynthesis (P) and respiration (R) and a satellite‐based productivity model. A low value for global NCP (∼139 ± 325 Tmol C a−1) is found when a single P versus R (PvR) relation is derived from all in vitro data, with areas of net heterotrophy occupying 52% of the surface ocean. If a set of PvR relationships are instead derived by segregating the in vitro data into broad latitudinal zones associated with differing nutrient dynamics, we find a global NCP distribution in better agreement with independent model estimates of particulate carbon export, except in the 10°–40° latitudinal band where negative NCP values remain. Consistency between NCP and particulate export across all latitudes is achieved by applying a single PvR relationship derived using all in vitro data collected outside the 10°–40° latitudinal band. With this model, global NCP is estimated at ∼781 ± 393 Tmol C a−1and modeled values at well‐characterized field sites are in good agreement with non‐incubation based in situ measurements. We infer from our results thatin vitro NCP data from oligotrophic sites are too low, and suggest that this error is more likely the result of underestimated photosynthesis than overestimated respiration, although the precise physiological nature of the problem remains to be demonstrated.


Abstract Background: Also known as papulopustular dermatitis (chronic form), rosacea-like dermatitis, periorificial dermatitis, or airhostess' dermatitis, perioral dermatitis is a commonly encountered dermatological disease, especially in adult women and less frequently in children. Its diagnosis and treatment are a challenge especially in small children. Case report: We present the case of a 2-year-old girl referred to the dermatologist for widespread erythematous papules, vesicles, and pustules on the perioral area, nasolabial folds, and on the outer region of the lower eyelids. Several diagnoses had been established during the previous months: impetigo, atopic dermatitis, seborrheic dermatitis, allergic contact dermatitis, childhood rosacea, demodecidosis, infantile acne, and variable therapeutic approaches had been tried, with no clinical improvement. Clarithromycin 250 mg/day orally associated with the application of 2% erythromycin solution were successfully used. Conclusion: This case highlights the importance of the clinical diagnosis of perioral dermatitis in young children, of excluding other diagnoses and worthless treatments, and also the chronic evolution of the disease and its individualized treatment.


We report a comprehensive electronic structure investigation of the paramagnetic (PM), the large moment antiferromagnetic (LMAF), and the hidden order (HO) phases of URu2Si2. We have performed relativistic full-potential calculations on the basis of the density-functional theory, employing different exchange-correlation functionals to treat electron correlations within the open 5f shell of uranium. Specifically, we investigate-through a comparison between calculated and low-temperature experimental properties-whether the 5f electrons are localized or delocalized in URu2Si2. The local spin-density approximation (LSDA) and generalized gradient approximation (GGA) are adopted to explore itinerant 5f behavior, the GGA plus additional strong Coulomb interaction (GGA+U approach) is used to approximate moderately localized 5f states, and the 5f-core approximation is applied to probe potential properties of completely localized uranium 5f states. We also performed local-density approximation plus dynamical mean-field theory calculations (DMFT) to investigate the temperature evolution of the quasiparticle states at 100 K and above, unveiling a progressive opening of a quasiparticle gap at the chemical potential when temperature is reduced. A detailed comparison of calculated properties with known experimental data demonstrates that the LSDA and GGA approaches, in which the uranium 5f electrons are treated as itinerant, provide an excellent explanation of the available low-temperature experimental data of the PM and LMAF phases. We show furthermore that due to a material-specific Fermi-surface instability a large, but partial, Fermi-surface gapping of up to 750 K occurs upon antiferromagnetic symmetry breaking. The occurrence of the HO phase is explained through dynamical symmetry breaking induced by a mode of long-lived antiferromagnetic spin fluctuations. This dynamical symmetry breaking model explains why the Fermi-surface gapping in the HO phase is similar but smaller than that in the LMAF phase and it also explains why the HO and LMAF phases have the same Fermi surfaces yet different order parameters. A suitable order parameter for the HO is proposed to be the Fermi-surface gap, and the dynamic spin-spin correlation function is further suggested as a secondary order parameter.


There have been more and more types of electromechanical products which is detected and controlled with computer aided techniques, and also they have been more and more automatic. In order to learn and design a system to measure and control electromechanical products quickly, this paper developed a comprehensive test-bed to measure and control parameters. It combines VC++6.0 programming environment, MATLAB and PCL-818HG data acquisition card. This thesis introduced how to examine the displacement, rev, temperature, stress and the scheme of hardware composition to control the rev of engine. It also introduced the multi-threaded programming of VC++6.0 and the development methods of establishing link libraries between MATLAB and PCL-818HG. There were some applications as well.


This paper is intended to provide answers to some e-government efforts in realizing public service in Kupang City. E-government in Indonesia has undergone significant changes, which are the result of convergence of external and internal factors in support of change. E-government is a public demand and the development of Information Communication Technology which requires Governance at various levels to apply it to shift the pattern of public services that are manual. These review & description on the resource policy dimension of e-government implementation in support of public services, which provides an evaluation of the implementation of e-government conducted in this decade. The content and passion of a shift in the paradigm of public administration reflects a new understanding of e-government that is very different from the form of classical government bureaucracy. Thus, it has the potential to bring considerable change, not only in the role of e-government nationally, but in e-government relations at the regional level. Nevertheless, this study discusses the commitment of the Kupang City Government and increased resources as two factors that hinder the implementation of e-government in support of effective public services. Keywords : E-government, public services.


Methotrexate (MTX) is a folate analogue originally synthesised in the 1940s and designed to inhibit dihydrofolate reductase.1 Reduced folate (tetrahydrofolate) is the proximal single carbon donor in several reactions involved in the de novo synthetic pathways for purine and pyrimidine precursors of DNA and RNA required for cell proliferation. Furthermore, tetrahydrofolate plays a part in a second important biochemical step: the methionine-homocysteine cycle, which is necessary to provide a methyl group for several downstream reactions such as methylation of DNA, RNA proteins, and others. Therefore, MTX has been used extensively for treatment of neoplastic diseases. In 1951 the rationale for the introduction of MTX for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) was that it inhibited proliferation of the lymphocytes and other cells responsible for inflammation in the joint.2 No further studies on clinical experience with MTX in RA were published until the early 1980s, when several uncontrolled trials were reported.3-8

Finally, four well designed, blinded, placebo controlled studies published in 1984 and 1985 introduced the use of MTX in the treatment of RA.9-12

The early indications for MTX use in the rheumatic diseases were first reported in a large review in 1984.13 From the considerable experience obtained over the past 15 years, several lines of evidence clearly suggest that MTX does not act simply as a cytotoxic (antiproliferative) agent for the cells responsible for the joint inflammation in RA.14 As a matter of fact, it would be difficult to understand how a drug that diminishes inflammation by preventing proliferation of immune cells might work at effective concentrations for only a very short time and once a week. In addition, the rapid clinical remission and the short term effect on the acute phase reactants, as seen with low dose MTX administration in most patients with …


A novel method to detect short duration disturbance of distribution power system combing complex wavelet network (WN) with the improved back-propagation (BP) algorithm is presented. The paper tries to explain to design complex supported orthogonal wavelets by Morlet compactly supported orthogonal real wavelets, and then explore the extraction of disturbance signal to obtain the feature information, and finally propose several novel wavelet combined information (CI) to analyze the disturbance signal, superior to real wavelet analysis result. The feature obtained from WT coefficients are inputted into wavelet network for power quality disturbance pattern recognition. The power quality disturbance recognition model is established and the improved back-propagation (BP) algorithm is used to fulfill the network structure and parameter identification. By means of choosing enough samples to train the recognition model, the type of disturbance can be obtained when signal representing fault is inputted to the trained network. The results of simulation analysis show that the complex WT combined with wavelet network are more sensitive to signal singularity, and found to be significant improvement over current methods in real-time detection and better noise proof ability.


A major task in cognitive radios (CRs) is spectrum sensing. In a wide-band regime, this is a challenging task requiring very high-speed analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), operating at or above the Nyquist rate. Compressed sensing is recognized as an effective technique to significantly reduce the sampling rate in wideband spectrum sensing, taking advantage of the sparsity of the spectrum. The recovery of the spectrum from the samples at sub-Nyquist rates is usually achieved through the so-called ℓ1-norm minimization. A more effective recovery technique for block sparse signals, called ℓ2/ℓ1-norm minimization, can be used as a replacement for ℓ1-norm minimization to reduce the sampling rate and consequently simplify the implementation of ADCs even further. In this paper, we propose two iterative ℓ2/ ℓ1-norm minimization algorithms for the recovery of block sparse spectrums. Similar to the standard ℓ2/ℓ1-norm minimization, the proposed algorithms require the side information about the boundaries of the spectral blocks. We evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms both in the absence and in the presence of noise, and demonstrate that for both cases, the proposed algorithms significantly outperform the existing ℓ1-minimization-based and standard ℓ2/ℓ1 minimization recovery algorithms. The improvement in performance comes at a small cost in complexity increase.


The ability to remember an item can be blocked, or negatively primed, by exposure to related items. For example, ALLERGY is less likely to be generated given the word fragment A_L_ _GY if one is first exposed to ANALOGY. We examined whether this memory blocking effect is influenced by list-method directed forgetting. A total of 144 participants learned two lists of items, each consisting of words that were designed to negatively prime performance on a subsequent word fragment completion task. Participants who were told to forget List 1 before learning List 2 suffered significantly less memory blocking owing to the negative primes from List 1 than participants who were told to remember List 1. These results suggest that directed forgetting can modify the memory blocking effect by affecting the accessibility of information in memory.


To determine the limit of formability of a sheet metal material the Forming Limit Curve (FLC) is a generally accepted tool. The FLC is (or should be) determined by proportionally straining the material. Experimentally FLC's are obtained via either Nakazima or Marciniak methods and it was believed that particularly in the Nakazima experiment the strains are not truly proportional. Instead, for all strain ratios to be tested the initial strain is bi-axial and gradually the strain path changes towards the final path imposed by the sample geometry and material properties. It will be demonstrated in this paper that for a forming grade the bi-axial pre-strain is noticeable and for an AHSS it is considerable. The reported results provide a solid foundation for a correction to be applied to the (Nakazima) FLC which is under discussion in the Arbeitskreis Nakazima.


Four microsatellite loci have been characterised in Eucalyptus nitens Maiden and in six other eucalypt species. The dinucleotide repeats were identified by screening a Sau3AI genomic DNA library from E. nitens with (CA)n and (GA)n oligonucleotide probes and sequencing the positive clones. Genetic analysis of 20 unrelated individuals from five populations of E. nitens showed all loci to be highly polymorphic with an average of 9.5 alleles per locus and an average heterozygosity of 0.575. Analysis of four individuals from each of six species from three subgenera showed complete conservation of microsatellite loci between species within the same subgenus, Symphyomyrtus, and conservation of 50% of loci across species between the two main subgenera, Symphyomyrtus and Monocalyptus. None of the primers amplified microsatellite loci in Eucalyptus maculata from the subgenus Corymbia. All microsatellite loci that were detected were polymorphic. Highly polymorphic microsatellite loci that are conserved across species will be useful for mapping quantitative traits, fingerprinting breeding lines, and for within-population studies requiring fine-scale analysis of genetic variation.


The purpose of this paper is to identify at-risk online students earlier, more often, and with greater accuracy using time-series clustering. The case study showed that the proposed approach could generate models with higher accuracy and feasibility than the traditional frequency aggregation approaches. The best performing model can start to capture at-risk students from week 10. In addition, the four phases in student's learning process detected holiday effect and illustrate at-risk students' behaviors before and after a long holiday break. The findings also enable online instructors to develop corresponding instructional interventions via course design or student–teacher communications.


Protostellar outflow is a prominent process that accompanies the formation of stars. It is generally agreed that wide-angled protostellar outflows come from the interaction between the wind from a forming star and the ambient gas. However, it is still unclear how the interaction takes place. In this work, we theoretically investigate the possibility that the outflow results from interaction between the wind and the ambient gas in the form of turbulent entrainment. In contrast to the previous models, turbulent motion of the ambient gas around the protostar is taken into account. In our model, the ram-pressure of the wind balances the turbulent ram-pressure of the ambient gas, and the outflow consists of the ambient gas entrained by the wind. The calculated outflow from our modelling exhibits a conical shape. The total mass of the outflow is determined by the turbulent velocity of the envelope as well as the outflow age, and the velocity of the outflow is several times higher than the velocity dispersion of the ambient gas. The outflow opening angle increases with the strength of the wind and decreases with the increasing ambient gas turbulence. The outflow exhibits a broad line width at every position. We propose that the turbulent entrainment process, which happens ubiquitously in nature, plays a universal role in shaping protostellar outflows.


Quality of life is an important aspect of the assessment of medical and psychiatric disorders, such as eating disorders. Eating disorders affect both the emotional and physical wellbeing of individuals who suffer from them and presumably impact quality of life. The purpose of this study was to assess the quality of life of individuals seeking inpatient treatment for an eating disorder using the Quality of Life Inventory. This assessment is unique because it considers both the importance and satisfaction of life domains and it is also very comprehensive, assessing 16 life domains both quantitatively and qualitatively. This is the first study to report on the use of the Quality of Life Inventory in an eating disorder sample. It was hypothesized that patients with eating disorders would have significantly worse quality of life than non-clinical groups and similar quality of life compared to other clinically impaired groups. This hypothesis was confirmed. It was also predicted that individuals with anorexia and bulimia nervosa would have statistically equivalent quality of life global scores but differences on domain scores, and this was confirmed as well. Finally, it was hypothesized that treatment history, number of co-morbid disorders, body mass index, and eating disorder symptoms would be related to quality of life, which was not supported. These results contribute to the literature about quality of life of individuals with eating disorders by supporting existing findings based on other quality of life measures and add information about life domains not previously assessed by other measures.


Research Findings: This in-depth single case study explores the experiences of a single father with finding and maintaining child care for his son. This American middle-income, Caucasian father lives and works in Minnesota. Findings include difficulty locating and maintaining child care, dissatisfaction with child care quality, concerns about paying for care, and using grandparents as a secondary form of care. Practice or Policy: This article contributes to the literature because it is the only case study available about a father's involvement in child care and how single fathers engage with nonparental care.


How to estimate the uncertainty of a given model is a crucial problem. Current calibration techniques treat different classes equally and thus implicitly assume that the distribution of training data is balanced, but ignore the fact that real-world data often follows a long-tailed distribution. In this paper, we explore the problem of calibrating the model trained from a long-tailed distribution. Due to the difference between the imbalanced training distribution and balanced test distribution, existing calibration methods such as temperature scaling can not generalize well to this problem. Specific calibration methods for domain adaptation are also not applicable because they rely on unlabeled target domain instances which are not available. Models trained from a long-tailed distribution tend to be more over-confident to head classes. To this end, we propose a novel knowledge-transferring-based calibration method by estimating the importance weights for samples of tail classes to realize long-tailed calibration. Our method models the distribution of each class as a Gaussian distribution and views the source statistics of head classes as a prior to calibrate the target distributions of tail classes. We adaptively transfer knowledge from head classes to get the target probability density of tail classes. The importance weight is estimated by the ratio of the target probability density over the source probability density. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10-LT, MNIST-LT, CIFAR-100-LT, and ImageNet-LT datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.


See related article, Blankstein U et al, on page 1783 in Gastroenterology. BACKGROUND & AIMS: Cognitive behavior therapy (CBT) is an empirically validated treatment for irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), yet it is unclear for whom and under what circumstances it is most effective. We investigated whether patients who achieved a positive response soon after CBT onset (by week 4), termed rapid responders (RRs), maintain treatment gains compared with non–rapid responders. We also characterized the psychosocial profile of RRs on clinically relevant variables (eg, health status, IBS symptom severity, distress). METHODS: The study included 71 individuals (age, 18 –70 y) whose IBS symptoms were consistent with Rome II criteria and were of at least moderate severity. Patients were assigned randomly to undergo a wait list control; 10 weekly 1-hour sessions of CBT; or four 1-hour CBT sessions over 10 weeks. RRs were classified as patients who reported adequate relief of pain, adequate relief of bowel symptoms, and a decrease in total IBS severity scores of 50 or greater by week 4. RESULTS: Of patients undergoing CBT, 30% were RRs; 90% to 95% of the RRs maintained gains at the immediate and 3-month follow-up examinations. Although the RRs reported more severe IBS symptoms at baseline, they achieved more substantial, sustained IBS symptom reduction than non–rapid responders. Both dosages of CBT had comparable rates of RR. CONCLUSIONS: A significant proportion of IBS patients treated with CBT have a positive response within 4 weeks of treatment; these patients are more likely to maintain treatment gains than patients without a rapid response. A rapid response is not contingent on the amount of face-to-face contact with a clinician.


Intestinal adaptation following small bowel resection (SBR) is associated with greater rates of enterocyte apoptosis by unknown mechanism(s). Because postresection adaptation is associated with increased translocation of luminal bacteria, we sought to characterize the role for the extrinsic, death receptor pathway for the activation of enterocyte apoptosis after massive SBR. We first performed SBR or sham operations in mice, and the temporal expression of caspases 8, 9, and 3, death receptors tumor necrosis factor receptor-1 (TNFR1) and Fas and corresponding ligands (TNF and Fas ligand) was determined in the remnant intestine at various postoperative time points. Ileal TNFR1 and Fas expression were then measured after SBR in the setting of increased (waved-2 mice) or decreased (exogenous EGF administration) apoptosis. Finally, intestinal adaptation and apoptosis were recorded in the remnant ileum after SBR in TNFR1-null and Fas-null mice. The expression of death receptor family proteins and caspases demonstrated only modest changes after SBR and did not correlate with the histological appearance of apoptosis. In the setting of accelerated apoptosis, TNFR1 and Fas expression were paradoxically decreased. Apoptotic and adaptive responses were preserved in both TNFR1-null and Fas-null mice. These results suggest that the mechanism for increased enterocyte apoptosis following massive SBR does not appear to involve the extrinsic, death receptor-mediated pathway.


Abstract. When a mobile phone camera is tested and benchmarked, the significance of image quality metrics is widely acknowledged. There are also existing methods to evaluate the camera speed. However, the speed or rapidity metrics of the mobile phone's camera system has not been used with the quality metrics even if the camera speed has become a more and more important camera performance feature. There are several tasks in this work. First, the most important image quality and speed-related metrics of a mobile phone's camera system are collected from the standards and papers and, also, novel speed metrics are identified. Second, combinations of the quality and speed metrics are validated using mobile phones on the market. The measurements are done toward application programming interface of different operating systems. Finally, the results are evaluated and conclusions are made. The paper defines a solution to combine different image quality and speed metrics to a single benchmarking score. A proposal of the combined benchmarking metric is evaluated using measurements of 25 mobile phone cameras on the market. The paper is a continuation of a previous benchmarking work expanded with visual noise measurement and updates of the latest mobile phone versions.


We aim to understand how to help young people recognize the value of science in their lives and take initiative to see the world in scientific ways. Our approach has been to design life-relevant science-learning programs that engage middle-school learners in science through pursuit of personally meaningful goals. In this paper, we analyze the case studies of two focal learners in the Kitchen Science Investigators life-relevant, science-learning program. Our analysis highlights ways to design life-relevant science-learning programs to help learners connect science to their everyday lives in meaningful ways. Our findings point to the ways in which learners' dispositions develop, which have implications for the design of programming and learning environments to promote the development of scientific dispositions.


The paper points out the importance of evaluating the image of a destination. The author clearly emphasises the role of identity in management branding and treats the process of image evaluation as a self-analysis process leading towards building a strong destination brand. This process is even more important for young countries like Slovenia. Slovenia's general image as seen by tourist experts is evaluated, especially the perceptual/cognitive component. Possible image factors are presented and reasonable suggestions for marketing actions in line with new trends on the demand side are offered. The emphasis is on the active component, involving different types of activities offered to foreign tourists in the mountain areas and the participation of Slovenian people in living and sharing the destination brand.


Dynamic Programming in Economics is an outgrowth of a course intended for students in the first year PhD program and for researchers in Macroeconomics Dynamics. It can be used by students and researchers in Mathematics as well as in Economics. The purpose of Dynamic Programming in Economics is twofold: (a) to provide a rigorous, but not too complicated, treatment of optimal growth models in infinite discrete time horizon, (b) to train the reader to the use of optimal growth models and hence to help him to go further in his research. We are convinced that there is a place for a book which stays somewhere between the "minimum tool kit" and specialized monographs leading to the frontiers of research on optimal growth.


This paper presented the composite coatings of nickel with graphite particle on the aluminum substrate using a nickel sulfamate bath. Effects of graphite particle concentration on the surface morphologies of the composite coatings were investigated. The inclusion of graphite particle into metal deposits was dependent on many process parameters, including particle concentration, current density, pH and temperature. Results of SEM and XRD demonstrated that graphite particle had successfully deposited on that nickel matrix; besides, the surface morphology of coatings obtained from sulfamate bath containing 2g/L graphite particle dispersed more uniformly than the ones with higher concentration.


Tom Kitwood is a key figure in the development of thought about dementia, but generally no references are made to his work outside of elderly care. This article argues that Kitwood's thought has much to offer to all the professional caregivers, regardless of the users' category they are caring for, and to the broader field of professional social work. Some key themes from the writings of Kitwood are examined, namely the critique of the 'standard paradigm'; the conception of malignant social psychology; the respect for otherness in the positive person work; the person with dementia as a resource for reciprocity processes; the new culture of dementia. For each of these issues similarities between Kitwood's approach and relational social work are identified. Relational social work considers the helping process and the well-being development as co-constructions, in which the contributions not only by the helper (or the caregiver, or the social worker), but also by the helpee (or by the care recipient, or by the user) are essential: both at the same time are helped and helpers, and both are empowered by this. This idea—of great value to all social work fields—is remarkably close to the Kitwood's thought about the dementia care.


Financing Agreement (Programmatic Development Policy Financing) between the Republic of Tajikistan and the International Development Association (with schedule, appendix and International Development Association General Conditions for Credits and Grants, dated 1 July 2005). Dushanbe, 27 July 2006


Condensin and cohesin, both members of the structural maintenance of chromosome (SMC) family, contribute to the regulation and structure of chromatin. Recent work has shown both condensin and cohesin extrude DNA loops and most likely work via a conserved mechanism. This review focuses on condensin complexes, highlighting recent in vitro work characterising DNA loop formation and protein structure. We discuss similarities between condensin and cohesin complexes to derive a possible mechanistic model, as well as discuss differences that exist between the different condensin isoforms found in higher eukaryotes.


Background: Anemia usually has a bad impact toward girl teenagers who suffer from it. The most frequent cause of anemia in girl teenagers is iron deficiency. The value of MCH can be used to measure the hemoglobin content per erythrochyte. Glycine, one of materials needed in Hb synthesis, has been assumed to have an impact in increasing iron absorbs ion. So it is hoped that glycine can increase the value of MCH.

Purpose : This research is aimed to prove the impact of glycine addition toward the value of MCH in girl teenagers aged 12 -18 years old who were supplemented with iron.

Method : This research uses Randomized Controlled Trial design. Twenty volunteers consisting of girl teenagers with Hb less than 12 were randomly designed into two groups: treatment group and control group. Then an initial measurement of value of MCH was done. Next, for five weeks, iron supplement was given to them. For the control group, the iron supplement was added with placebo, while for the treatment group, glysine was the addition. At the end of the research, the final measurement of value of MCH was conducted. The data gained, then, was tested with an Independent Sample T-Test to measure the differential change of inter group. The data process and analysis were done using SPSS program for windows 15,0 with the meaning degree, level of p<0,05.

Result : The increasing value of MCH in treatment group is bigger than in control group after having been given glycine for five weeks. Independent sample T-test showed that p=0,110 (p>0,05). The result of this research proved that consumption of glycine gave a difference, but it is not significant.

Conclusion : There is a difference value of MCH between the control and the treatment group in glycine addition given toward girl teenagers for five weeks, even though the difference is not significant.

Keywords : Glycine, girl teenagers , iron supplementation, MCH


The uniqueness of community health centers provides for a sound environment for total quality management (TQM). Structure, process, and outcome are valued equally under TQM. With strong management leadership and a framework for quality of care, community health care specialists (e.g., advanced practice nurses) can easily incorporate the TQM measurement criteria in their daily practice routines. By applying the principles of TQM, the community health center will advance toward its goal of enhancing the effectiveness of health care delivery to a community and its members in partnership with the community.


We present a new calculation of the first Gegenbauer moment a K 1 of the kaon light-cone distribution amplitude. This moment is determined by the difference between the average momenta of strange and nonstrange valence quarks in the kaon. To calculate a K 1 , QCD sum rule for the diagonal correlation function of local and nonlocal axial-vector currents is used. Contributions of condensates up to dimension six are taken into account, including O(α s)-corrections to the quark-condensate term. We obtain a K 1 = 0.05 ± 0.02, differing by the sign and magnitude from the recent sum-rule estimate from the nondiagonal correlation function of pseudoscalar and axial-vector currents. We argue that the nondiagonal sum rule is numerically not reliable. Furthermore, an independent indication for a positive a K 1 is given, based on the matching of two different light-cone sum rules for the K → π form factor. With the new interval of a K 1 , we update our previous numerical predictions for SU(3)-violating effects in B (s) → K form factors and charmless B decays.


Supplier evaluation is a part of logistic management. In the present era, resilient supply chain performance (RSCP) assessment of the vendor enterprise is respected as a hot topic. The purpose of this paper is to enable the managers to map the performance in percentage system and also enabling managers for identifying the weak indices-metrics, which need to be improved up to ideal or standard level and strong indices-metrics.,The authors found two research gaps via a literature survey. The first research gap revealed that the performance of a resilient supplier is computed solely in terms of a fuzzy mathematical scale. The articles are not yet published, which could measure the RSCP in percentage. The second research gap argued about the mitigation of the multi-level hierarchical resilient vendor/supplier evaluation framework for materializing RSCP and identifying weak and strong performing indices-metrics. To compensate the both research gaps, the authors developed a novel fuzzy gain-loss evolutionary computational approach to assess the performance of a firm in percentage. Next, a revised ranking technique coupled with trapezoidal fuzzy set based fuzzy performance importance index is implemented on the framework to seek weak and strong indices-metrics. The performance loss of each metric using the ideal solution concept considering the attitude of decision makers is also revealed.,The authors found the RSC performance of supplier firm 74 per cent, whereas performance loss 26 per cent, while actual performance is compared with standard fuzzy performance index (SFPI). Performance loss 26 per cent can be compensated by improving the performance of weak indices-metrics.,The novelty of the paper is that the authors used the ideal solution concept to compute the SFPI and compare it with actual FPI for evaluating the gain and loss of resilient supplier firm in percentage and identify weak and strong indices so that managers can improve the performance of weak indices. The work possesses the significant for all organizations, as research work enables the managers to map and improve the RSC performance of any vendor firm in future. The presented work considers the case of an automobile parts supplier industry to validate the developed approach.


Humans learn to better understand the world by moving around their environment to get more informative viewpoints of the scene. Most methods for 2D visual recognition tasks such as object detection and segmentation treat images of the same scene as individual samples and do not exploit object permanence in multiple views. Generalization to novel scenes and views thus requires additional training with lots of human annotations. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised framework to improve an object detector in unseen scenarios by moving an agent around in a 3D environment and aggregating multi-view RGB-D information. We unproject confident 2D object detections from the pre-trained detector and perform unsupervised 3D segmentation on the point cloud. The segmented 3D objects are then re-projected to all other views to obtain pseudo-labels for fine-tuning. Experiments on both indoor and outdoor datasets show that (1) our framework performs high-quality 3D segmentation from raw RGB-D data and a pre-trained 2D detector; (2) fine-tuning with self-supervision improves the 2D detector significantly where an unseen RGB image is given as input at test time; (3) training a 3D detector with self-supervision outperforms a comparable self-supervised method by a large margin.


This brief summarizes the group versus individual liability: long term evidence from Philippines microcredit lending groups for the period 2004-2008. Group liability in microcredit purports to improve repayment rates through peer screening, monitoring, and enforcement. However, it may create excessive pressure, and discourage reliable clients from borrowing. Two randomized trials tested the overall effect, as well as specific mechanisms. The first removed group liability from pre-existing groups and the second randomly assigned villages to either group or individual liability loans. In both, groups still held weekly meetings. We find no increase in default and larger groups after three years in pre-existing areas, and no change in default but fewer groups created after two years in the expansion areas.


Large-scale 3-D crossbar arrays offer a path to both high-density storage class memory and novel non-Von Neumann computation. However, such arrays require each non-volatile memory (NVM) element to have its own non-linear access device (AD), which must pass high currents through one or more selected cells yet maintain ultra-low leakage through all other cells. Using circuit-level SPICE simulations, we explore design constraints on crossbar arrays composed of a generic NVM element (+1R) together with the novel AD developed by our group, based on Cu-containing mixed-ionic-electronic-conduction (MIEC) materials. We show that power consumption during write, not read margin, is the most stringent constraint for large 1AD+1R crossbar arrays. As array size grows, in order to keep NVM write power-efficient, the voltage at which the AD "turns on" must outpace the NVM switching voltage. Failure to achieve this condition causes the total array power, injected into the array to ensure the success of the worst-case single-bit write, to greatly exceed the actual NVM write power. Extensive tolerancing results show that NVM switching current and other AD parameters (subthreshold slope and series resistance) are also important, but not to the same degree as AD and NVM voltage characteristics. We show that scaled MIEC devices (Voltage Margin Vm ~ 1.54V) can support 1 Mb arrays for NVM switching voltages up to 1.2V, and that stacking two MIEC devices could enable ~2.4V. The impact of Vm variability is quantified-we show that there is minimal degradation in write power and read margin at variabilities (standard deviation in Vm) not very different from those already demonstrated experimentally.


On the 31st of July, the SAICE UCT Student Chapter was proud to host its fourth annual Civil Engineering Cocktail Evening. In addition to professors, lecturers and students of the UCT Civil Engineering Department, the event was attended by SAICE CEO Manglin Pillay, guest speaker Dr James Cullis, and representatives from several South African civil engineering companies. This year's event, held at the Leslie Social Science Building on UCT upper campus, is considered by the UCT Student Chapter as their most successful yet.


In the vacuum film coating field, the co-sputtering method by two or more targets has been widely used for coating the composite film consisted of a variety of component elements. In this paper, a typical co-sputtering system is studied which composes the twin round planar magnetron sputtering targets settled symmetrically and slantways towards a single flat substrate with self-rotation. A model is set up to describe the non-dimensional relationship between the film thickness and the structural parameters of co-sputtering system, such as distance of the substrate-to-target , symmetrical eccentricity , translation length and obliquity angle of target . On the assumption that the sputtered particles are emitted in the direction of cosine distribution and fly straightly without collision scattering, the depositing rate distribution, film thickness distribution, the utilization ratio of the target sputtering material, and the fluctuant ratio of the components from two targets are calculated. Some of simulating examples are given by use of Matlab software.


The theory of the motion of magnetic particles in a viscous Newtonian medium, first outlined by Newman and Yar-brough, has been extended to include both low and high field orientation modes. It is shown that the equations of motion can be solved analytically, i.e., without resort to numerical integration. The results of the analysis are used to predict values for easily measured parameters of recording media, such as the initial remanence ratio and squareness ratio.


In applied geology/geomorphology tridimensional reconstruction of the ground surface (Digital Terrain Model, DTM) is used since a few years; it provides an accurate definition of the topographic features as well as the management of a large amount of data. At present, the DTM is obtained using digital photogrammetric stations to process stereoscopic pairs. In the last years, marine technology allows to realize digital bathymetry (i.e. digital terrain model of the seafloor) using multibeam or interferometer instruments. The article describes the methodology we used to generate a joint digital model of the seafloor and of the subaereal surface along the eastern and southern flank of Palmarola Island; we call such model DTMM (Digital Terrain and Marine Model). This methodology can be especially useful in describing volcanic islands and coasts, that are usually affected by conspicuous erosional and instability processes. The DTMM combines aerial photogrammetric data and swath bathymetry data (where possible, as far as the shoreline). Aerial photos (1:13.000 scale) were digitized and processed by a digital photogrammetric unit with a 1000 dpi resolution; in this way the pixel size is approximately 0,3 m on the ground. The DTM was georeferenced by means of a GPS network of ground control points established on natural features clearly visible on the photos. Thus the DTM coordinates are derived in the WGS84 reference system. The seafloor model was obtained by a swath bathymetry using a sonar interferometric technology. Data were collected from the shoreline to a depth of 60 m. Data were georeferenced using the DGPS with a reference station located at a known position; thus bathymetric data are referred to the WGS84 ellipsoid too. In order to generate the DTMM, the two sets of data should have: 1) a congruent reference system, which is possible connecting the reference station used for the marine survey into the ground GPS network; 2) an homogeneous spatial resolution, achieved by re-sampling and/or interpolation procedures; 3) a good height/depth matching, achieved by mosaicking the two data sets along the coastline; 4) a congruent file format to perform the same image processing and mapping. DTMM can be used in large scale geomorphological mapping, for a homogeneous description of the whole earth surface, highlighting features continuity between terrestrial and shallow-marine environment. The Palmarola Island (eastern and southern flank) DTMM allows to identify two different processes active respectively on cliffs and pocket beaches, controlled by wave erosion and mass instability, and on the inner shelf (-15/-50 m), controlled by downwelling currents re-distributing the debris produced on the coast.


Mutants of Streptococcus sanguis resistant to novobiocin (NovR-mutants) were isolated after mutagenesis of strain Challis with ethyl methanesulphonate. The resistance phenotype was transferred by DNA-mediated transformation back into the parent strain at high frequency suggesting resistance was due to mutation(s) in a single gene or in closely-linked genes. Cells of NovR-mutants had normal morphology and secreted similar proteins to the wild-type strain. However, mutant cultures had slower growth rates, the mutant cells had reduced hydrophobicity, and they showed a reduced degree of coaggregation with Actinomyces viscosus and Actinomyces naeslundii. Cell envelopes prepared from NovR-mutants differed from wild-type cell envelopes in that they (a) were impaired in ability to coaggregate with A. viscosus cells, and (b) had altered protein composition as detected by SDS-PAGE. The results suggest that hydrophobic proteins in the cell envelope of S. sanguis may be necessary for coaggregation of this bacterium with actinomycetes.


Forty patients who underwent penile venous surgery (PVS) because of suspected veno-occlusive dysfunction, were evaluated approximately 15 months (median) postoperatively as to their sexual capability. Although 47.5% were able to obtain penile rigidity, this was sufficient for intercourse in only 35%. Short-term subjective improvement was noted in 55% as opposed to long-term improvement in 35%. Analysis for predictive factors was negative. In conclusion, the indication for PVS should be reconsidered, as an insufficient theoretical concept might explain the low long-term success rate.


Deep clustering techniques combine representation learning with clustering objectives to improve their performance. Among existing deep clustering techniques, autoencoder-based methods are the most prevalent ones. While they achieve promising clustering results, they suffer from an inherent conflict between preserving details, as expressed by the reconstruction loss, and finding similar groups by ignoring details, as expressed by the clustering loss. This conflict leads to brittle training procedures, dependence on trade-off hyperparameters and less interpretable results. We propose our framework, ACe/DeC, that is compatible with Autoencoder Centroid based Deep-Clustering methods and automatically learns a latent representation consisting of two separate spaces. The clustering space captures all cluster-specific information and the shared space explains general variation in the data. This separation resolves the above mentioned conflict and allows our method to learn both detailed reconstructions and cluster specific abstractions. We evaluate our framework with extensive experiments to show several benefits: (1) cluster performance – on various data sets we outperform relevant baselines; (2) no hyperparameter tuning – this improved performance is achieved without introducing new clustering-specific hyperparameters; (3) interpretability – isolating the cluster-specific information in a separate space is advantageous for data exploration and interpreting the clustering results; and (4) dimensionality of the embedded space – we automatically learn a low-dimensional space for clustering. Our ACe/DeC framework isolates cluster information, increases stability and interpretability, while improving cluster performance.


Physical activity and exercise are core components of lifestyle modification strategies for the management of chronic kidney disease (CKD). Yet, physical activity levels have consistently remained poor across all stages of CKD. Exercise interventions, including aerobic and resistance training, and lifestyle interventions promoting physical activity, have been shown to improve a multitude of clinical endpoints and factors important to patients; however, despite the evidence, the provision of physical activity in clinical practice is still inadequate. The usefulness of any study hinges on the adequacy and clinical relevance of the outcomes and outcome measures used. Inconsistent reporting and wide disparities in outcome use across studies limit evidence synthesis to help guide clinical practice. The kidney exercise and physical activity field has been particularly prone to inconsistent outcome reporting. To ensure research is relevant and able to influence clinical practice and future research, we need to ensure the use (and reporting) of standardized, relevant outcome measures. Core outcome sets (COS) have been widely developed across many chronic conditions, yet these COS have not been tailored to physical activity and exercise in CKD. Outcomes in clinical research need to be relevant to the intervention being employed. From this perspective, we summarize the importance that standardizing outcomes and outcome measures may have in relation to physical activity and exercise interventions for people living with kidney disease.


This Innovative Practice Work in Progress presents progress in developing exercises for high school students incorporating level-appropriate mathematics into robotics activities. We assume mathematical foundations ranging from algebra to precalculus, whereas most prior work on integrating mathematics into robotics uses only very elementary mathematical reasoning or, at the other extreme, is comprised of technical papers or books using calculus and other advanced mathematics. The exercises suggested are relevant to any differential-drive robot, which is an appropriate model for many different varieties of educational robots. They guide students towards comparing a variety of natural navigational strategies making use of typical movement primitives. The exercises align with Common Core State Standards for Mathematics.


Coded caching is a problem where encoded broadcasts are used to satisfy users requesting popular files and having caching capabilities. Recent work by Maddah-Ali and Niesen showed that it is possible to satisfy a scaling number of users with only a constant number of broadcast transmissions by exploiting coding and caching. Unfortunately, all previous schemes required the splitting of files into an exponential number of packets before the significant coding gains of caching appeared. The question of what can be achieved with polynomial subpacketization (in the number of users) has been a central open problem in this area. We resolve this problem and present the first coded caching scheme with polynomial (in fact, linear) subpacketization. We obtain a number of transmissions that is not constant, but can be any polynomial in the number of users with an exponent arbitrarily close to zero. Our central technical tool is a direct connection between Ruzsa-Szeméredi graphs and coded caching schemes with linear file size.


Previous studies have shown that children of women with type 1 diabetes are at risk for cardiometabolic diseases later in life, such as obesity, hypertension and type 2 diabetes. However, most of these studies have been performed in children of mixed cohorts of women with type 1, type 2 and/or gestational diabetes, or in children who were born >20 years ago when glycemic control was not as good as in current times. It has been concluded from a previous nationwide study on pregnancy outcome in women with type 1 diabetes in The Netherlands that the risk of perinatal complications was still increased as compared to the non-diabetic population, despite the fact that prepregnancy care and glycemic control during pregnancy were near-optimal. In this follow-up study we investigated whether the good glycemic control during pregnancy would have beneficial effects regarding the long term adverse effects on the development in the offspring. Therefore, we investigated several aspects of the development at 6-8 years of age in a nationwide cohort of 213 children of women with type 1 diabetes and compared them to those in a control group of 79 children of non-diabetic women. Overall intelligence, fasting glucose regulation, lipid metabolism, cardiac function and prevalence of childhood overweight and other components of the metabolic syndrome were comparable in both groups. Based on these findings, we suggest that near-optimal glycemic control during pregnancy in women with type 1 diabetes may therefore prevent, or at least lower, the incidence of adverse effects on later development in the offspring. However, we did find a slightly higher mean systolic blood pressure and a higher in vitro pro-inflammatory cytokine response in children of women with type 1 diabetes. Future follow-up studies should show whether these subtle cardiovascular and immunological differences may nonetheless be indicative of later cardiometabolic morbidity in these children. We suggest that in the mean time the goal of pregnant diabetic women and their attending physicians should be to achieve the lowest HbA1c level possible, without increasing the incidence of severe maternal hypoglycemia (as this may be harmful to the mother). Children of women with type 1 diabetes who were macrosomic at birth (with a birth weight >90th percentile for gestational age, sex and parity) had developed twice as much overweight compared with children who had a birth weight appropriate for gestational age. Possible targets for prevention of childhood overweight in children of diabetic women are fetal macrosomia, maternal overweight, and an increase in body mass index standard deviation score during the first years of life. Furthermore, severe maternal hypoglycemia during pregnancy had no proven adverse effects on later neurocognitive functioning in the offspring. However, we found that severe neonatal hypoglycemia (which has a high incidence in the direct neonatal period) influenced later neurocognition, and should therefore be avoided. Maternal HbA1c during pregnancy did poorly relate to developmental outcome measures in the offspring, possibly because it is not a reliable indicator of glycemic control during pregnancy.


Abstract The evolution of the NMC global data assimilation system in the period 1978–81 is presented. The improvements include revisions to the analysis programs and the replacement of the initialization and the prediction model. Data are analyzed over a finer analysis grid, are scrutinized by a more thorough "buddy cheek," and are subject to a multivariate wind relationship. The impact of the changes upon the wind analysis is examined with respect to the case of 1200 GMT, 21 October 1979. The system changes concurrent with the addition of the spectral prediction model are noted. Experimental evidence demonstrates the superiority of the spectral system with respect to the gridpoint system previously in use.


The Saccharomyces cerevisiae spindle pole body (SPB) serves as the sole microtubule-organizing center of the cell, nucleating both cytoplasmic and nuclear microtubules. Yeast pericentrin, Spc110, binds to and activates the γ-tubulin complex via its N terminus, allowing nuclear microtubule polymerization to occur. The Spc110 C terminus links the γ-tubulin complex to the central plaque of the SPB by binding to Spc42, Spc29, and calmodulin (Cmd1). Here, we show that overexpression of the C terminus of Spc110 is toxic to cells and correlates with its localization to the SPB. Spc110 domains that are required for SPB localization and toxicity include its Spc42-, Spc29-, and Cmd1-binding sites. Overexpression of the Spc110 C terminus induces SPB defects and disrupts microtubule organization in both cycling and G2/M arrested cells. Notably, the two mitotic SPBs are affected in an asymmetric manner such that one SPB appears to be pulled away from the nucleus toward the cortex but remains attached via a thread of nuclear envelope. This SPB also contains relatively fewer microtubules and less endogenous Spc110. Our data suggest that overexpression of the Spc110 C terminus acts as a dominant-negative mutant that titrates endogenous Spc110 from the SPB causing spindle defects.


Restructuring in power systems has introduced new complexities and difficulties in controlling of these systems. Therefore, new control strategies should be investigated in operation of power systems. On the other hand, communication infrastructure (CI) is responsible for establishing any control strategy. The purposes of this study are twofold: firstly, to design a communication infrastructure for any given power network with determined measurements; secondly, to compare communication infrastructures for centralized and decentralized control strategies in power grids. The comparison criteria are communication network cost, delay (latency), and reliability. In this study, hybrid state estimation (HSE), as one of the most important wide area measurement systems (WAMS), is opted. Communication infrastructures are designed for two different control strategies; centralized and decentralized (multi-area) HSE. These strategies have been investigated in IEEE 118-bus test network. Some new concepts, that help us to compare any two given communication infrastructures with each other, are introduced. Finally, two designed communication infrastructures for these two strategies are compared with each other. The results show that, although communication infrastructure investments are almost the same in both cases, decentralizing, as a cause of decentralized control strategy, results in improvement of latency and reliability of CI.


Reinforcement learning algorithms are often tasked with learning an optimal control policy in a continuous state space. Since it is infeasible to learn the optimal action to take for every possible observation in a continuous state space, useful abstractions of the space must be constructed and subsequently learned on. Abstraction techniques that generalize the space into very few abstract states must take care to avoid creating an abstraction that prevents learning the optimal policy. Many commonly used abstractions, such as CMAC can take considerable effort to tune to ensure a learnable abstraction is created. In this work we propose three methods that derive state abstractions automatically, in part by making use of the dimensionality reduction capability of the RL-SANE algorithm. We show that abstractions derived from these automatic methods can allow a learning algorithm to converge to the optimal policy faster than with a fixed abstraction. Additionally, these techniques are able to break the space into very few abstract states, further facilitating rapid learning.


Engineered nanomaterials interfaced with plant seeds can improve stress tolerance during the vulnerable seedling stage. Herein, we investigated how priming seeds with antioxidant poly(acrylic acid)-coated cerium oxide nanoparticles (PNC) impacts cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) seedling morphological, physiological, biochemical, and transcriptomic traits under salinity stress. Seeds primed with 500 mg L−1 PNC in water (24 h) and germinated under salinity stress (200 mM NaCl) retained nanoparticles in the seed coat inner tegmen, cotyledon, and root apical meristem. Seed priming with PNC significantly (P < 0.05) increased seedling root length (56%), fresh weight (41%), and dry weight (38%), modified root anatomical structure, and increased root vitality (114%) under salt stress compared with controls (water). PNC seed priming led to a decrease in reactive oxygen species (ROS) accumulation in seedling roots (46%) and alleviated root morphological and physiological changes induced by salinity stress. Roots from exposed seeds exhibited similar Na content, significantly decreased K (6%), greater Ca (22%) and Mg content (60%) compared to controls. A total of 4779 root transcripts were differentially expressed by PNC seed priming alone relative to controls with no nanoparticles under non-saline conditions. Under salinity stress, differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in PNC seed priming treatments relative to non-nanoparticle controls were associated with ROS pathways (13) and ion homeostasis (10), indicating that ROS and conserved Ca2+ plant signaling pathways likely play pivotal roles in PNC-induced improvement of salinity tolerance. These results provide potential unifying molecular mechanisms of nanoparticle-seed priming enhancement of plant salinity tolerance.


The study investigated the knowledge levels of orphan crops among farmers in Kwara State, Nigeria using primary data collected from 80 farmers randomly selected from Edu Local Government Area of Kwara State, Nigeria. It was found that farmers are generally aware of them but are not much involved in their production. The alternative use of cassava for ethanol production has the potential to reduce the number of poor farmers from 55% to 47% based on 50% of the mean of gross income or from 90% to 57.5% based on $1/day. The farmers should be encouraged to engage in the production of these orphan crops for their alternative uses as a quick fix for poverty.


ABSTRACT EMS is a system that can manage the environmental performance and has been widely introduced in many organizations, like enterprise, factory, health centre, etc. The system focuses on reducing the environmental impact and providing reliable statistics to support future implementation. It responds to the proposition from the government, which shows that everything on earth should consider the sustainability. Introducing EMS to a university is rather a creative concept. In Sweden, University of Gavle (HIG) advocates the environmental performance should be controlled and it is a pioneer in introducing EMS to educational organization, and it got the ISO 14001 certificate in 2004. . In order to monitor the performance after it got the certificate, the university decided to keep environmental vitality in a way of making policies and rules regulating all the people studying in and working in the university. The performance would be shown in an annual report including paper usage, waste, the structure of staff, environmental impacts and energy consumption. And these statistics were mainly collected by the questionnaire distributed through the e-mail. This study shows how important the after-certificate maintenance is and its effects on the EMS. It is going to analyze the statistics of EMS reviews of University of Gavle from 2002 and 2007 and find out the effects of EMS in university together with the problem discussion. Finally it will provide suggestions to University of Gavle. Keywords Barriers Drivers Environmental Impacts Environmental Management System (EMS) HIG- University of Gavle ISO 14001


This paper presents a new approach for multiple speaker DOA estimation using an array of microphones. The method relies on the fact that multiple independent speakers have a small overlap in the time-frequency domain, i.e. the individual signals are almost W-disjoint orthogonal. By introducing a time-frequency mask and by continuously tracking the set of time-frequency points corresponding to each individual speech signal, a single source DOA estimation algorithm is used to find the DOA for each separated signal. This approach does not limit the solution to cases where the number of sensors exceeds the number of sources. Real room recordings are used to evaluate the performance of the method where source movements are also included


Internal cooling channel in gas turbine blades use ribs as turbulence promoter to increase local turbulence and improve heat transfer from hot wall to coolant air flowing through the internal cooling channels. The ribs protrude into the flow and result in a significant pressure drop of the coolant air. Indentations like grooves in the cooling channel wall can also be used as turbulence promoters to enhance local heat transfer and as they do not protrude into the mainstream flow, the pressure drop penalty could be much lesser than a conventional ribbed channel. A numerical study is conducted under stationary condition on a square cross section channel representing an internal cooling channel of a turbine airfoil. Some standard and modified cross sections of grooved channel are used as turbulence promoters with a goal to enhance heat transfer from the internal cooling channel wall with minimal pressure drop. The steady state solution is based on using the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equation and k-omega-SST turbulence model. Numerical calculations are done at four Reynolds numbers (Re=15000, 30000, 68000 and 88000) based on fluid properties at the inlet of the internal cooling channel. The grooves are placed on two opposite sides of the square cross section channel and other two walls are smooth walls without any turbulence promoters. A hemispherical cross section continuous groove which is placed perpendicular to the mainstream flow direction is taken as baseline case and a teardrop shaped groove is used to compare the performance difference between the two groove cross section. A broken shaped angled groove configuration with the teardrop cross section groove is also investigated to find the relative performance improvement with the baseline case. Performance comparison with standard 90° rib geometry is done to understand the overall effectiveness of the grooved geometries with respect to common standard in gas turbine blade internal cooling. The straight teardrop cross section groove improves the heat transfer values compared to the hemispherical cross section groove by 8–12% and the broken angled teardrop groove case improves heat transfer by 11–14% compared to the hemispherical cross section groove case. The pressure drop produced by all the groove geometries is about the same. It is seen that the broken angled groove can produce the same heat transfer enhancement compared to a 90° ribbed channel but the pressure drop is more than 3 times lesser compared to the ribbed case. Considering the heat transfer and pressure drop, an increase in thermal performance factor of 37–41% is seen for the angled grooved case compared to the 90° ribbed geometry.Copyright © 2015 by ASME


Background Emerging information technologies present new opportunities to reduce the burden of malaria, dengue and other infectious diseases. For example, use of a data management system software package can help disease control programs to better manage and analyze their data, and thus enhances their ability to carry out continuous surveillance, monitor interventions and evaluate control program performance. Methods and Findings We describe a novel multi-disease data management system platform (hereinafter referred to as the system) with current capacity for dengue and malaria that supports data entry, storage and query. It also allows for production of maps and both standardized and customized reports. The system is comprised exclusively of software components that can be distributed without the user incurring licensing costs. It was designed to maximize the ability of the user to adapt the system to local conditions without involvement of software developers. Key points of system adaptability include 1) customizable functionality content by disease, 2) configurable roles and permissions, 3) customizable user interfaces and display labels and 4) configurable information trees including a geographical entity tree and a term tree. The system includes significant portions of functionality that is entirely or in large part re-used across diseases, which provides an economy of scope as new diseases downstream are added to the system at decreased cost. Conclusions We have developed a system with great potential for aiding disease control programs in their task to reduce the burden of dengue and malaria, including the implementation of integrated vector management programs. Next steps include evaluations of operational implementations of the current system with capacity for dengue and malaria, and the inclusion in the system platform of other important vector-borne diseases.


Background: Annually 2 million people in India develop Tuberculosis and 330,000 die. WHO-recommended DOTS strategy was pilot-tested in 1993 and launched as Revised National Tuberculosis Control Program (RNTCP) in 1997. Awareness of DOTS among the doctors in the private sector was appalling although nationwide coverage was attained by 2006. OBJECTIVE: To study awareness of DOTS among Medical Practitioners of urban and rural Mysore. Methodology: 401 Medical practitioners in hospitals and nursing homes of urban and rural areas of Mysore who treated Tuberculosis patients (private and public sector) were approached. They were grouped under different specialties as per the year of graduation (before or after introduction of DOTS). Results: 38 % doctors who graduated before the introduction of DOTS didn't follow DOTS compared to 14.9% doctors who graduated later. 100% doctors working in Government sector felt that DOTS was better than daily regimen while 85% from the private sector felt so. Only 47.9% of the doctors in the private sector practiced DOTS compared to 95.1 % in the Govt. Sector. Hence, the number of doctors practicing DOTS in Private Sector was less than 50 % of that in the Govt. Sector. Both of these comparisons were found to be statistically highly significant (p<0.001). Awareness of DOTS was alarmingly low among Orthopedic Surgeons, Gynecologists and Pediatricians when compared to Physicians and General Practitioners. Conclusions: DOTS awareness is still low among doctors who graduated before the introduction of DOTS. Private practitioners harbored myths and misconceptions about DOTS.


Community health workers (CHWs) operating as volunteers are vital front-line health care workers. They are critical actors in enhancing access to universal health care. The 2006 WHO Report which focuses on human resources for health sees task-shifting as a key response to staff shortage. CHWs thus undertake delegated health care system service delivery at the community level and in most cases for no pay. This paper is drawn from a two years (2015 - 2017) TDR/WHO supported implementation research project which sought to enhance the role of CHWs in malaria prevention and control. The CHWs use community development methodologies to promote work which is otherwise bio-medical. Community engagement is employed not only as a method of passing on critical information on malaria prevention but also as a process of empowering the community to make decisions and to implement and manage change. The CHWs drawing from the Paulo Freire conscientisation process also leads communities to reflect and act on ways of controlling and preventing malaria. The paper also discusses the dilemma of working with CHWs as volunteers whom under task shifting provide services for which compensation could be offered. The study, using a descriptive survey design, collected data from twenty purposively selected CHWs who participated in the project. It found that CHWs are of relatively low socioeconomic status, with only 36.4% having completed primary school education. CHWS are involved in promoting general community health, immunization and sanitation; referring the sick to hospital; and malaria control activities. CHWs perceived their strength as lying in their training and the community recognition and appreciation of their work. CHWs were also aware of the empowerment process that took place in communities out of the community engagement process. While CHWs work as volunteers, they appeared to be keen on getting compensation (Mnyafulo) out of the project. The suggestion was that for sustainability and after the project phase out they could be motivated through some regular stipend as well as uniforms and certification for recognition purposes. This paper concludes that to the extent that task shifting is a reality given the shortage of health staff, policy measures need to be put in place to institutionalize CHWs and their work. This would also entail (and on ethical basis) ensuring some form of compensation for the crucial work done by CHWs in their community units. Continuing capacity building of CHWs also needs to be inbuilt in the county health system.


Atomic force microscopy (AFM) has a wide range of applications and is rapidly growing in research and development. This powerful technique has been used to visualize surfaces both in liquid or gas media. It has been considered as an effective tool to investigate the surface structure for its ability to generate high-resolution 3D images at a subnanometer range without sample pretreatment. In this paper, the use of AFM to characterize the membrane roughness is presented for commercial and self-prepared membranes for specific applications. Surface roughness has been regarded as one of the most important surface properties, and has significant effect in membrane permeability and fouling behaviour. Several scan areas were used to compare surface roughness for different membrane samples. Characterization of the surfaces was achieved by measuring the average roughness (R a ) and root mean square roughness (R rms ) of the membrane. AFM image shows that the membrane surface was composed entirely of peaks and valleys. Surface roughness is substantially greater for commercial available hydrophobic membranes, in contrast to self-prepared membranes. This study also shows that foulants deposited on membrane surface would increase the membrane roughness.


This article explores the connection between modernismo, a literary movement that relied heavily on imitation and intertextuality, and accusations of plagiarism, copying, and appropriation. It contextualizes the analysis within a nineteenth-century legal moment in which intellectual property protections were just beginning to take hold at the international level. It examines claims of authorship in the absence of meaningful intellectual property legislation, and in an asymmetrical context in which European authors were widely reprinted and read in Latin America but Latin American authors were barely read in Europe. And it considers performances of plagiarizing and of being plagiarized—that is, the unease expressed by one who suspects his work has been copied. Specifically, the article analyzes an accusatory epistolary exchange between Enrique Gómez Carrillo and Manuel Díaz Rodríguez; the novel El hombre de hierro (The Iron Man; 1907) by Rufino Blanco Fombona, which was interpreted as a copy of Flaubert's Madame Bovary but justified by its local character; and the very curious case of Rafael Bolívar Coronado, whose writing implodes the category of authorship that underlies intellectual property legislation. Taken together, the three cases demonstrate the development of the notions of authorship and plagiarism in Venezuelan literature at the turn of the century.


This paper addresses the question of financial constraints in Ukrainian agriculture in transition. The main objective is to reveal the evidence of the both phenomena, soft budget constraints and credit rationing, investigating investment behaviour of large farms in Ukraine. Our empirical analysis is based on unbalanced panel data containing 529 agricultural enterprises from three Ukrainian regions between 2001 and 2005. Estimates of the Euler investment equation for several sub-samples reveal a dissimilar level of financial constraints. We confirm the presence of the soft financial environment (soft budget constraints) for the Ukrainian large farms being in an unconstrained financial regime. The farms belong to this regime if they receive credits after being unprofitable in two consecutive years. The other farms defined a priori as being in an constrained financial regime face evidence of credit rationing. With regard to the empirical results, we derive macroeconomic implications of financial constraints in the agriculture of Ukraine.


and monographs upon the subjects which it embraces have been published of late in various countries-America, France, Germany, and this country having each contributed valuable works. The volume before us, containing the writings of Dr. De SAITGBRMAIN, collected and published by Dr. Mercier, is remarkable for the number of subjects which it includes, many of which are not usually considered to belong to orthopmdic surgery; we may instance deformities of the teeth, strabismus, imperforate anus, and hernia. Notwithstanding this fault, the work is a sound one. The author reviews the various opinions of other writers, and records his own experience, drawing impartial inferences as to the best treatment to be adopted in various cases. He has not availed himself of some of the more recent publications upon orthopedic surgery; but, upon the whole, the book is very fairly and well written. We cannot agree with the author upon several points of treatment, but we consider that the principles by which he is guided are sound ones. the Atlas der Gelenkkrankheiten consists of a series of twentythree large quarto plates, containing many well-executed illustrations of pathological specimens of joint-diseases. A descriptive text accompanies the plates, and thirty-five pages are devoted to a description of the anatomy of the joints. Thie IHysterieal Element in, Ort/wopwadlc Surqery is a valuable contribution to medical literature. Dr. SHAFFER deals chieflytwith hysteria in reference to joint-affections, and he illustrates his observations by recording some very instructive cases. It seems to us that hysteria, or neuromimesis, as Sir James Paget has called this morbid condition, is of particular interest to the orthopedic surgeon; and we are very glad to call attention to Dr. Shaffer's able essay upon the subject.


To assess the impact of a diagnosis of bladder cancer on smoking behavior and to analyze the role of the physician in smoking cessation. Nonmuscle-invasive bladder cancer patients completed a phone survey of their smoking habits. They were asked about smoking behavior before and after the diagnosis of cancer and whether they had been informed by their physician about the relation between smoking and bladder cancer. Two hundred-twelve patients responded to the survey. The mean age was 60.03±6.36 years. Ninety-three of the 135 current smokers (68.9%) were advised to quit smoking, whereas nine of 20 nonsmokers (45%) were not commented about the future risks of smoking. The results showed that 13% of the current smokers and 35% of the current nonsmokers were not warned about the relation of bladder cancer with smoking. Statistical significance was not seen in terms of sex, disease stage, and tumor grade at diagnosis. The relation between smoking and bladder cancer has been well established. However, some patients are not informed to quit smoking by their physicians.


The aim of this study was to examine whether newly qualified healthcare staff can be supported in their journey to become a practitioner using an interprofessional framework to mentoring. The study involved the mentoring of
newly qualified doctors (pre-registration house officers - PRHOs) by senior nurses for the first six months of their clinical practice. The setting for this study were the wards within four NHS Trusts across the South West of
England where all the participating newly-qualified staff were practising. An ethnographic approach, which allows the use of both qualitative and quantitative methods of data collection, was adopted for this study. Data collection involved predominately qualitative methods (one-on-one
interviews). Quantitative methods (questionnaires) were, however, also employed. The total number of participants in this study included 69 mentors (senior nurses), 64 mentees (PRHOs), four project leaders, four clinical tutors and three post-graduate managers, of which four clinical tutors, four project leaders, two postgraduate managers, 12 mentees and 12 mentors were interviewed. The objectives, pursuant to the aim, were to: • Examine the experiences of interprofessional mentoring for mentors, PRHOs and those involved in implementing the scheme; • Identify factors that support or hinder interprofessional mentoring among
nurses and doctors; • Identify any benefits for the learning path of nurses and doctors; • Explore perceived benefits for healthcare delivery. The mentoring period for this study was six months and data collection occurred at the beginning and at the end of this period. All those involved Interprofessional mentoring Abstract completed a pre- and post- questionnaire. Additionally, some of the mentors, junior doctors, clinical tutors and project leaders from each of the four participating Trusts were interviewed prior to the commencement of mentoring
and after six months. The data was thematically analysed using a personcentred approach. The findings from this study show that mentoring usmg an interprofessional method is a viable approach to supporting professionals,
particularly during the early stages of their professional lives and in the current health service climate. Interprofessional mentoring was perceived as a means
for supporting the personal and professional development of newcomers as well as the professional development of the mentors. Professionally it involved learning clinical skills through observation, increasing knowledge about the
roles and responsibilities of other professional groups and their contribution to healthcare, and developing working relationships with other professionals. In terms of personal development, it helped develop increased confidence and thereby an ability to cope with stress, enhanced interpersonal skills, and improved communication skills. These benefits ultimately influenced the care
received by patients, and provided improved staff job satisfaction and a more effective use of resources. The main recommendations for interprofessional mentoring and the
research process based on the findings of this study are as follows: • The use of various means, e.g., shared learning, should be employed in the preparation of students during their training for collaborative work • Training for medical staff should give attention to mentoring
• Interprofessional mentoring can be applied to any grade. For example, consultants or senior registrars can easily support the educational needs of senior nurses, such as nurse consultants or nurse practitioners, in the same
clinical speciality. • Clear guidelines for mentors, mentees and all hospital staff about the aims and objectives of interprofessional mentoring programmes.
• The process must receive the full support and backing of management and senior staff. Interprofessional mentoring Abstract• Time should be allocated for training mentors and for meetings between mentor and mentee. • The incorporation of interprofessional mentoring as one of the support
systems within the hospital would be advantageous. This would necessitate the inclusion of interprofessional mentoring in hospital policy. This study demonstrates that junior doctors can be mentored and receive support from senior nurses in the early days of their practice. Furthermore, this study provides an example of how interprofessional initiatives can be implemented on general acute wards.


E. coli heat stable enterotoxin STa is an agonist of the membrane guanylate cyclase C whose endogenous ligands are the peptide hormones guanylin and uroguanylin. Whereas these peptides contain only two disulfide bonds, STa is stabilized by one additional disulfide bridge. We chemically synthesized the enterotoxin STh that originates from the E. coli strain found in humans, and we determined its structure and its dynamics by nuclear magnetic resonance spec- troscopy and molecular dynamics calculations. Chemical synthesis clearly proved successful and resulted in the formation of the native disulfide bonds. The endogenous ligands guanylin and uroguanylin show the same general structural features and dynamics properties as the enterotoxin.


Being a relatively low-temperature technique, the sol-gel technology enables the synthesis of hybrid polymers doped by organic dyes. In order to ensure the required properties of the final product, however, the mixing of sol and dye must be strictly controlled to avoid unwanted chemical reactions between them. Raman spectroscopic in-situ monitoring of the process was used to address this problem. Problems encountered in spectroscopic studies of non-transparent dye-doped sols, arising from intensive scattering, attenuation of the Raman signal inside the investigated material, and fluorescence induced by the laser beam, are discussed. The Raman measuring system constructed for the research presented in this paper uses a diode laser and a compact spectrometer connected to a reaction glass vessel by a fibre optic probe. Proper selection of the excitation beam wavelength and suitable design of the opto-mechanical setup results in an increase of the Raman signal and improved rejection of interfering signals. The system presented does not require access inside the vessel. In-situ monitoring was carried out for the process conducted at room temperature and up to 87 °C. As the intensity of the Raman bands assigned to the dye did not change during the process, it can be concluded that dye does not decompose.


An inhibitor of MET tyrosine kinase with potential antineoplastic activity. MET tyrosine kinase inhibitor BMS-777607 binds to c-Met protein, or hepatocyte growth factor receptor (HGFR), preventing binding of hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) and disrupting the MET signaling pathway; this agent may induce cell death in tumor cells expressing c-Met. c-Met, a receptor tyrosine kinase overexpressed or mutated in many tumor cell types, plays an important role in tumor cell proliferation, survival, invasion, and metastasis, and in tumor angiogenesis.


This article aims to determine whether and how an increased entry of Generation Z could impact HR work. To answer this, two hypotheses were formulated. Afterward, an extensive literature search was carried out on various databases, with the search results being narrowed down step by step using two selection criteria. The finally selected literature, focusing on German-speaking areas, was then evaluated through qualitative content analysis.
First, it was found that the research results on Generation Z are not as uniform as one might assume from the first impression, especially since there is also a tendency in the studies to prefer to interview students. However, it seems that the individual consideration of employees and communication with them will increasingly be demanded by them and thus become the focus of HR work, regardless of whether the employee is a talent or not. This fundamental claim could lead to the fact that the considerations regarding an exclusive or inclusive Talent Management approach are no longer expedient or even rather obstructive, especially since talent management in its current form has apparently not yet arrived at many companies even after more than 20 years. Considering the definition problem of the concept of talent alone, this is not surprising.
The advantage of Talent Management over HR Management is that some main tasks from HR management are linked together. However, due to the framework conditions, all employees must be considered individually, and it could make sense to rename inclusive Talent Management to Employee Management. In that case, exclusive Talent Management is understood solely as Talent Management (methodological level), and both terms could be summarized under the generic term Human Resources Management (didactic level). This would result in a hierarchy of terms in which the terms are clearly distinguished from each other. Furthermore, the sharpening of the terms and the concentrated summary of essential aspects of personnel work (see Figure 3) should also make it easier for managers who are inexperienced in personnel work to carry out Human Resources Management.
This article aims to contribute to the sharpening of theoretical concepts to facilitate their practical implementation. The article is suitable for entrepreneurs, executives, HR specialists, and academics.


ABSTARCT The efficient and effective Anomaly detection system essentially requires identifying the behavior analysis for each activity. For this purpose unsupervised techniques are used but the accuracy and reliability of them results depend on the data set which have used for modeling. It is essential to identify important input features, missing values, redundancy, feature exploration etc... So for the data preprocessing different statistical analytical methods are used. In this paper, a statistical feature construction scheme is proposed based on Factor analysis. The proposed Feature construction model provides the way to remove redundancy, identify missing values and co-linearity between the initial data set. Experimental result shows the related good features are factorized using statistical measures. So it will improve the performance of the unsupervised algorithm results for the effective anomaly detection system.


ABSTRACT The extreme osmotic conditions prevailing in hypersaline environments result in decreasing metabolic diversity with increasing salinity. Various microbial metabolisms have been shown to occur even at high salinity, including photosynthesis as well as sulfate and nitrate reduction. However, information about anaerobic microbial iron metabolism in hypersaline environments is scarce. We studied the phylogenetic diversity, distribution, and metabolic activity of iron(II)-oxidizing and iron(III)-reducing Bacteria and Archaea in pH-neutral, iron-rich salt lake sediments (Lake Kasin, southern Russia; salinity, 348.6 g liter−1) using a combination of culture-dependent and -independent techniques. 16S rRNA gene clone libraries for Bacteria and Archaea revealed a microbial community composition typical for hypersaline sediments. Most-probable-number counts confirmed the presence of 4.26 × 102 to 8.32 × 103 iron(II)-oxidizing Bacteria and 4.16 × 102 to 2.13 × 103 iron(III)-reducing microorganisms per gram dry sediment. Microbial iron(III) reduction was detected in the presence of 5 M NaCl, extending the natural habitat boundaries for this important microbial process. Quantitative real-time PCR showed that 16S rRNA gene copy numbers of total Bacteria, total Archaea, and species dominating the iron(III)-reducing enrichment cultures (relatives of Halobaculum gomorrense, Desulfosporosinus lacus, and members of the Bacilli) were highest in an iron oxide-rich sediment layer. Combined with the presented geochemical and mineralogical data, our findings suggest the presence of an active microbial iron cycle at salt concentrations close to the solubility limit of NaCl.


An important physical indicator of soil quality, which regulatory authorities may wish to monitor, is aggregate
stability. In a recent study, Rawlins et al. (in press) presented a novel method for determining the stability of aggregates
in water using a laser granulometer (LG). The LG is used to make two measurements of the continuous
size distribution (<2000 μm) within a sample of aggregates. The first measurement is made on water stable aggregates
after these have been added to circulating water (initial air-dried aggregate size range 1000 to 2000 μm). The
second measurement is made on the disaggregated material after the circulating aggregates have been disrupted
with ultrasound (sonication). The difference between the mean weight diameters of these two size distributions
is referred to as the disaggregation reduction (DR; μm). Soils with more stable aggregates, which are resistant
to both slaking and mechanical breakdown by the hydrodynamic forces during circulation, have larger values of
DR. Rawlins et al showed that for two soil types, the DR values had coefficients of variation of 12.1 and 19%
suggesting the DR value is reproducible based on the small mass of soil used. If such a test is to be applied for
soil aggregate monitoring, it will be necessary to analyse a reference material (RM) with consistent disaggregation
properties (DR value) to demonstrate that the procedure is consistent over the period of monitoring.
To our knowledge no one has previously attempted to use or apply a RM for testing soil aggregate stability.
We know of no commercially available anthropogenic material which has consistent disaggregation properties.
Field soils, which are exposed to seasonal variations in organic matter content plus wetting and drying cycles, are
unlikely to have sufficiently consistent disaggregation properties for use as an aggregate RM. Paleosols are likely
to be less reposnosive to seasoanl cycles because they are often buried at depths (>1 m) beyond the most active
hydrological and biogeochemical cycles, and so they are likely to disaggregate more consistently over time. They
are also sufficiently abundant for bulk samples to be collected repeatedly.We present analyses of DR for a paleosol
(brickearth) material collected from a site at Ospringe in Kent (sourthern England) at a depth of 1.6 m to determine
whether it has properties that indicate its potential for use as a RM for monitoring soil aggregate stability based on
the method presented by Rawlins et al.. We discuss the implications of our initial findings.
Rawlins, B. G., Wragg, J. Lark, R. M. in press. Application of a novel method for soil aggregate stability measurement
by laser granulometry with sonication. European Journal of Soil Science.


The construction of a suitable farrowing environment is a continuing dilemma: the piglet's needs must be matched with those of the sow and the farmer during the main phases that constitute farrowing: nest building, parturition and lactation. Difficulties exist in resolving the various conflicts of interest between and within these three parties (e.g. sow v. farmer: space needed for nest building v. space needed to maximise the amount of farrowing accommodation, or sow v. sow: ensuring the survival of the current litter v. maintaining condition for future litters). Thus, the challenge is to resolve these conflicts and design a system that maximises sow and piglet welfare while maintaining an economically efficient and sustainable enterprise. In order to successfully design a farrowing and lactation environment, it is necessary to consider the biological needs of both the sow and her litter. The natural behaviour of the sow has been well documented and very little variation exists between reports of peri-parturient behaviour observed in extensively kept domestic sows and their wild counterparts. The failure for domestication to significantly alter these behavioural patterns provides evidence that they are biologically significant and that the commercial farrowing environment should attempt to accommodate this behavioural repertoire. In addition, the behavioural needs of the piglets, as well as the physiological needs of both sows and their offspring should be considered. This article aims to review the considerable body of literature detailing the behavioural repertoire of sows and their offspring during the different phases of farrowing, and the accompanying physiological processes. The focus is on identifying biological needs of the animals involved in order to synthesise the appropriate design criteria for farrowing and lactation systems, which should optimise both welfare and animal production.


We determine that the continuous-state branching processes for which the genealogy, suitably time-changed, can be described by an autonomous Markov process are precisely those arising from $\alpha$-stable branching mechanisms.  The random ancestral partition is then a time-changed $\Lambda$-coalescent, where $\Lambda$ is the Beta-distribution with parameters $2-\alpha$ and $\alpha$, and the time change is given by $Z^{1-\alpha}$, where $Z$ is the total population size. For $\alpha = 2$ (Feller's branching diffusion) and $\Lambda = \delta_0$ (Kingman's coalescent), this is in the spirit of (a non-spatial version of) Perkins' Disintegration Theorem.  For $\alpha =1$ and $\Lambda$ the uniform distribution on $[0,1]$, this is the duality discovered by Bertoin & Le Gall (2000) between the norming of Neveu's continuous state branching process and the Bolthausen-Sznitman coalescent. We present two approaches: one, exploiting the `modified lookdown construction', draws heavily on Donnelly & Kurtz (1999); the other is based on direct calculations with generators.