This paper studies a simple model of experimentation and innovation. Our analysis suggests that patents improve the allocation of resources by encouraging rapid experimentation and efficient ex post transfer of knowledge. Each firm receives a signal on the success probability of a project and decides when to experiment. Successes can be copied. First, we assume that signal qualities are the same. Symmetric equilibria involve delayed and staggered experimentation, whereas the optimal allocation never involves delays and may involve simultaneous experimentation. Appropriately designed patents implement the optimal allocation. Finally, we discuss the case when signals differ and are private information.


Automated machine learning is a promising approach widely used to solve classification and prediction problems, which currently receives much attention for modification and improvement. One of the progressing works for automated machine learning improvement is the inclusion of evolutionary algorithm such as Genetic Programming. The function of Genetic Programming is to optimize the best combination of solutions from the possible pipelines of machine learning modelling, including selection of algorithms and parameters optimization of the selected algorithm.  As a family of evolutionary based algorithm, the effectiveness of Genetic Programming in providing the best machine learning pipelines for a given problem or dataset is substantially depending on the algorithm parameterizations including the mutation and crossover rates. This paper presents the effect of different pairs of mutation and crossover rates on the automated machine learning performances that tested on different types of datasets. The finding can be used to support the theory that higher crossover rates used to improve the algorithm accuracy score while lower crossover rates may cause the algorithm to converge at earlier stage.


Interconnect inductance introduces a shielding effect which decreases the effective capacitance seen by the driver of a circuit, reducing the gate delay. A model of the effective capacitance of an RLC load driven by a CMOS inverter is presented. The interconnect inductance decreases the gate delay and increases the time required for the signal to propagate across an interconnect, reducing the overall delay to drive an RLC load. Ignoring the line inductance overestimates the circuit delay, inefficiently oversizing the circuit driver. Considering line inductance in the design process saves gate area, reducing dynamic power dissipation. Average reductions in power of 17% and area of 29% are achieved for example circuits. An accurate model for a CMOS inverter and an RLC load is used to characterize the propagation delay. The accuracy of the delay model is within an average error of less than 9% as compared to SPICE.


Purpose: To evaluate the bond strengths of two different types of resin luting cements to dentin treated with chemical irrigants and medicaments for root canal treatment. Materials and Methods: The bovine incisors were ground with silicon carbide paper to expose a dentin. Dentin surface was treated with either 3% hydrogen peroxide (H2O2), 5% sodium hypochlorite (NaOCl), the combination of H2O2 and NaOCl (H2O2/NaOCl), formocresol (FC), or calcium hydroxide (Ca(OH)2) for 60 s, then rinsed and air dried. Dentin without any treatment was used as the control group. The area for bonding was then demarcated with a vinyl tape (4 mm-in-diameter hole), and bonded using one of two resin cement, Super-Bond C&B or Panavia F according to the manufactures' instructions. After storage in water for 1 day, tensile bond strengths were measured using a universal testing machine. Results: For Super-Bond C&B, statistically lower early bond strengths were obtained in the experimental group compared with the control. In the case of Panavia F, the early bond strengths decreased significantly in H2O2, H2O2/NaOCl, and Ca(OH)2, while no influence of NaOCl and FC on early bond strengths was observed. However, the visual inspection showed a large increase of adhesive failures between the resin and dentin occurred with the experimental groups, which was marked for both resin cements. Conclusion: The early bond strengths of resin cements to dentin were adversely influenced by the chemical irrigants and medicaments for root canal treatment. (Int Chin J Dent 2003; 3: 7-12.)


This paper considers a scenario for multi-user multi-input multi-output (MIMO) communication systems when perfect channel state information at the transmitter (CSIT) is given while the equivalent channel state information at the receiver (CSIR) is not available. Such an assumption is valid for the downlink multi-user MIMO systems with linear precoders that depend on channels to all receivers. We propose a concept called dual systems with zero-forcing design based on the duality principle, originally proposed to relate the Gaussian multi-access channel (MAC) and the Gaussian broadcast channel (BC). For the K-user N×2 MIMO BC with N antennas at the transmitter and two antennas at each of the K receivers, we design a downlink interference cancellation (IC) transmission scheme by obtaining the dual of uplink MAC systems employing IC methods. The transmitter simultaneously sends K precoded Alamouti codes, one for each user. Each receiver zero-forces the unintended user's Alamouti codes and decouples its own data streams using two simple linear operations independent of CSIR. Analysis shows that the proposed scheme achieves a diversity gain of 2(N - K + 1) for equal energy constellations with short-term power and rate constraints. Power allocation among K users can also be performed to improve the array gain but not the diversity gain. Numerical results demonstrate that the bit error rate of the downlink IC scheme has a diversity gain improvement compared to the block diagonalization (BD) method, which requires global channel information at each node.


Differential compartmentation and translation of alternatively spliced transcripts adjusts expression of the splicing regulator SR30 to ambient light conditions in Arabidopsis thaliana. Alternative splicing (AS) is prevalent in higher eukaryotes, and generation of different AS variants is tightly regulated. Widespread AS occurs in response to altered light conditions and plays a critical role in seedling photomorphogenesis, but despite its frequency and effect on plant development, the functional role of AS remains unknown for most splicing variants. Here, we characterized the light-dependent AS variants of the gene encoding the splicing regulator Ser/Arg-rich protein SR30 in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana). We demonstrated that the splicing variant SR30.2, which is predominantly produced in darkness, is enriched within the nucleus and strongly depleted from ribosomes. Light-induced AS from a downstream 3′ splice site gives rise to SR30.1, which is exported to the cytosol and translated, coinciding with SR30 protein accumulation upon seedling illumination. Constitutive expression of SR30.1 and SR30.2 fused to fluorescent proteins revealed their identical subcellular localization in the nucleoplasm and nuclear speckles. Furthermore, expression of either variant shifted splicing of a genomic SR30 reporter toward SR30.2, suggesting that an autoregulatory feedback loop affects SR30 splicing. We provide evidence that SR30.2 can be further spliced and, unlike SR30.2, the resulting cassette exon variant SR30.3 is sensitive to nonsense-mediated decay. Our work delivers insight into the complex and compartmentalized RNA processing mechanisms that control the expression of the splicing regulator SR30 in a light-dependent manner.


Porous ultra-low-k (ULK) dielectrics hold promise for improving microprocessor performance, but these materials suffer from poor mechanical properties and susceptibility to plasma damage during integration. The post-porosity plasma protection (P4) process has emerged as a promising strategy for the protection of ULKs against plasma-induced damage, but has not been shown to improve fracture properties. In this work, we transform the P4 process to provide ULKs with dual protection against both plasma damage and mechanical stresses. We infiltrate polymers with a wide range of molecular weights (1 - 103 kg/mol) into porous ULKs, leading to fracture toughness values equal to that of dense silica (10 J/m2). The polymer infiltration process results in a high level of fill (~100%) and confinement of polymer chains to dimensions far smaller than their bulk radius of gyration. This confinement alters the conformations and inter-molecular interactions of the polymer phase, resulting in novel fracture behavior that has important implications for the reliability and fracture properties of filled ULKs and other materials containing confined polymers.


Matrix metalloproteinase-9 (MMP-9) causes adverse remodeling, whereas hydrogen sulfide (H2S) rescues organs in vascular diseases. The involvement of MMP-9 and H2S in diabetic renovascular remodeling is, however, not well characterized. We determined whether MMP-9 regulates H2S generation and whether H2S modulates connexin through N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor (NMDA-R)-mediated pathway in the diabetic kidney. Wild-type (WT, C57BL/6J), diabetic (Akita, C57BL/6J-Ins2(Akita)), MMP-9(-/-) (M9KO), double knockout (DKO) of Akita/MMP-9(-/-) mice and in vitro cell culture were used in our study. Hyperglycemic Akita mice exhibited increased level of MMP-9 and decreased production of H2S. H2S-synthesizing enzymes cystathionine-β-synthase and cystathionine-γ-lyase were also diminished. In addition, increased expressions of NMDA-R1 and connexin-40 and -43 were observed in diabetic kidney. As expected, MMP-9 mRNA was not detected in M9KO kidneys. However, very thin protein expression and activity were detected. No other changes were noticed in M9KO kidney. In DKO mice, all the above molecules showed a trend toward baseline despite hyperglycemia. In vitro, glomerular endothelial cells treated with high glucose showed induction of MMP-9, attenuated H2S production, NMDA-R1 induction, and dysregulated conexin-40 and -43 expressions. Silencing MMP-9 by siRNA or inhibition of NMDA-R1 by MK801 or H2S treatment preserved connexin-40 and -43. We conclude that in diabetic renovascular remodeling MMP-9 plays a major role and that H2S has therapeutic potential to prevent adverse diabetic renal remodeling.


Identifying agents that destroy tumor cells but leave normal cells unharmed is a major goal in developing effective cancer treatments. The cytokine TRAIL, a member of the tumor necrosis family, has shown such potential, as it preferentially induces apoptosis of cancer cells. Now, Kim et al. report a potential mechanism to expand the range of TRAIL cancer targets. Agonists for a nuclear receptor called peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor-gamma (PPARγ) sensitized tumor cells that are normally not responsive to TRAIL such that TRAIL did induce apoptosis. Although neither the PPARγ modulators nor TRAIL alone killed these tumor cells, combined treatment did. Furthermore, the combination did not kill normal cells. The mechanism appears not to involve PPARγ, because it persisted even in the presence of dominant-negative form of PPARγ. It seems to be mediated by the formation of a TRAIL receptor-associated signaling complex that activates the cell death program through caspase activation. A cytoplasmic protein called FLIP normally inhibits assembly of this complex, but PPARγ modulators somehow stimulate the degradation of FLIP through the ubiquitin-proteosome pathway. The cellular target of the PPARγ modulators that stimulates this proapoptotic effect has yet to be determined. Y. Kim, N. Suh, M. Sporn, J. C. Reed, An inducible pathway for degradation of FLIP protein sensitizes tumor cells to TRAIL-induced apoptosis. J. Biol. Chem. 277, 22320-22329 (2002). [Abstract] [Full Text]


According to the Human Development Index of the World Health Organisation, Benin is one of the least developed countries in the world with an annual population growth of about 3 percent. Although malnutrition occurs especially in children, the food supply situation seems more or less satisfying at the moment. But how will the situation develop in the next 20 years if population growth remains unchanged, and agricultural productivity remains at its current low levels? Demand in 2025 will most likely be met exclusively through the extension of cropping areas, thus increasing tensions between farmers and livestock herdsmen which depend on natural pasture and fallow land. It is well possible that an over-use of land resources will increase the need for food imports. With the assistance of BenImpact, an agricultural sector model for Benin, this question is analysed quantitatively. BenImpact is designed as a regionalised farm-household model for the whole of Benin, where income and agricultural prices are endogenous and trade between different departments within the country, neighbouring countries, and the world market is possible. The model is split into a demand and a supply module which are solved in iterative steps. In the supply part, regional prices are computed as the marginal cost of production at the production levels that would clear all markets with given demand quantities. Those regional prices and income are in turn used to compute regional demand quantities. Demand and supply are solved iteratively with the objective to maximise profits and minimise transport costs subject to land area restrictions, processing capacities and the availability of labour. The agricultural year is divided into four periods to illustrate seasonal changes and to ensure that food requirements can be satisfied throughout the year. Introducing a shock, here a significant rise in population as population is an exogenous variable, the results are compared in a comparative-static way with both the base year situation and the millennium development goals.


Boston private investigator Alex Rourke is looking forward to the weekend. He's heading to Vermont to visit his girlfriend, and also plans to do some checking on his latest missing person: a young man named Adam Webb who made the same journey, and never came back. But the truth about Adam Webb isn't the only secret buried in the Green Mountain woods. Hikers have gone missing, a prostitute has been murdered and something sinister is happening in the ghost-town of North Bleakwater. It soon becomes clear that in the mountains, who you trust can means the difference between life and death. And Alex will have to make decisions with his heart as well as his head. Because a single bullet is about to blow his world to pieces.


BACKGROUND: Chronic pelvic pain (CPP) is a common clinical condition with significant impact on quality of life. The etiology and pathogenesis of CPP is poorly understood. MATERIALS AND METHODS: To examine the epidemiology, base line demographics, and clinical variables, women with CPP were prospectively analysed by an integrated and synchronised approach. RESULTS: Of the 89 women with CPP analysed, the majority were assessed earlier, had a variety of surgical interventions and used pharmacological agents. Irritable bowel syndrome, dysfunction of the pelvic floor musculoskeletal system, and physical or sexual abuse were the most common diagnosed etiologies. Evaluation revealed an increased level of psychological impairment. DISCUSSION: CPP is a debilitating clinical condition and a result of complex interaction between different contributing factors. Patients will benefit from an orchestrated, multidisciplinary, and synchronized approach with attention paid to the different domains of pain. Treatment is mostly not curative; avoiding profound suffering despite persisting pain should be the goal.


It is well known that the differential equations are back bone of different physical systems. Many real world problems of science and engineering may be modeled by various ordinary or partial differential equations. These differential equations may be solved by different approximate methods such as Euler, Runge-Kutta, predictor-corrector, finite difference, finite element, boundary element and other numerical techniques when the problems cannot be solved by exact/analytical methods. Although these methods provide good approximations to the solution, they require a discretization of the domain via meshing, which may be challenging in two or higher dimension problems. These procedures provide solutions at the pre-defined points and computational complexity increases with the number of sampling points.In recent decades, various machine intelligence methods in particular connectionist learning or Artificial Neural Network (ANN) models are being used to solve a variety of real-world problems because of its excellent learning capacity. Recently, a lot of attention has been given to use ANN for solving differential equations. The approximate solution of differential equations by ANN is found to be advantageous but it depends upon the ANN model that one considers. Here our target is to solve ordinary as well as partial differential equations using ANN. The approximate solution of differential equations by ANN method has various inherent benefits in comparison with other numerical methods such as (i) the approximate solution is differentiable in the given domain, (ii) computational complexity does not increase considerably with the increase in number of sampling points and dimension of the problem, (iii) it can be applied to solve linear as well as non linear Ordinary Differential Equations (ODEs) and Partial Differential Equations (PDEs). Moreover, the traditional numerical methods are usually iterative in nature, where we fix the step size before the start of the computation. After the solution is obtained, if we want to know the solution in between steps then again the procedure is to be repeated from initial stage. ANN may be one of the ways where we may overcome this repetition of iterations. Also, we may use it as a black box to get numerical results at any arbitrary point in the domain after training of the model.Few authors have solved ordinary and partial differential equations by combining the feed forward neural network and optimization technique. As said above that the objective of this thesis is to solve various types of ODEs and PDEs using efficient neural network. Algorithms are developed where no desired values are known and the output of the model can be generated by training only. The architectures of the existing neural models are usually problem dependent and the number of nodes etc. are taken by trial and error method. Also, the training depends upon the weights of the connecting nodes. In general, these weights are taken as random number which dictates the training. In this investigation, firstly a new method viz. Regression Based Neural Network (RBNN) has been developed to handle differential equations. In RBNN model, the number of nodes in hidden layer may be fixed by using the regression method. For this, the input and output data are fitted first with various degree polynomials using regression analysis and the coefficients involved are taken as initial weights to start with the neural training. Fixing of the hidden nodes depends upon the degree of the polynomial.We have considered RBNN model for solving different ODEs with initial/boundary conditions. Feed forward neural model and unsupervised error back propagation algorithm have been used for minimizing the error function and modification of the parameters (weights and biases) without use of any optimization technique. Next, single layer Functional Link Artificial Neural Network (FLANN) architecture has been developed for solving differential equations for the first time. In FLANN, the hidden layer is replaced by a functional expansion block for enhancement of the input patterns using orthogonal polynomials such as Chebyshev, Legendre, Hermite, etc. The computations become efficient because the procedure does not need to have hidden layer. Thus, the numbers of network parameters are less than the traditional ANN model. Varieties of differential equations are solved here using the above mentioned methods to show the reliability, powerfulness, and easy computer implementation of the methods. As such singular nonlinear initial value problems such as Lane-Emden and Emden-Fowler type equations have been solved using Chebyshev Neural Network (ChNN) model. Single layer Legendre Neural Network (LeNN) model has also been developed to handle Lane-Emden equation, Boundary Value Problem (BVP) and system of coupled ordinary differential equations. Unforced Duffing oscillator and unforced Van der Pol-Duffing oscillator equations are solved by developing Simple Orthogonal Polynomial based Neural Network (SOPNN) model. Further, Hermite Neural Network (HeNN) model is proposed to handle the Van der Pol-Duffing oscillator equation. Finally, a single layer Chebyshev Neural Network (ChNN) model has also been implemented to solve partial differential equations.


The quantitative relationship between induction and elicitation of delayed contact sensitivity by chemically reactive sensitizers and some of the physicochemical properties of these compounds was investigated. Guinea pigs were sensitized with 5 µmols of compound in complete Freund's adjuvant and skin tested to determine specific and cross-reactivity. The plot of specific sensitivity against a calculated reactivity coefficient was a parabola. Similar plots of specific sensitivity against nonaqueous solubility or oil-buffer partition coefficients were less significant. For a restricted group of sensitizers, the halodinitrobenzenes and dinitrobenzene thiocyanate, specific sensitivity was negatively proportional to chemical reactivity, solubility, and the atomic parameters of the 1-substituent of the benzene ring (atomic number, atomic weight, radius, surface area, volume). Cross-reactions between substituted 2,4-dinitrobenzenes were extensive but not reciprocal, delayed reactions often being elicited best by heterologous compounds. 3,5-Dinitrobenzoyl chloride was a poor sensitizer and showed little cross-reactivity with 2,4-dinitrobenzene derivatives. The mechanisms underlying these observations may be the interaction between the amount of reactive chemical lost from sensitizing depot or skin test site into the blood by solution in plasma and/or reaction with serum protein and the amount remaining capable of reacting with body cells or tissues. The material lost from the sensitizing depot or skin test site may be or become tolerogenic and influence induction and elicitation of delayed hypersensitivity.


In order to deal successfully with the expansion of higher education, eventually reaching 50% of each new age group, Swedish Universities are taking measures in order to recruit students from groups that normally don´t look for higher education. In this article the arrangement and experience of one action research project is discussed. The project focuses on the meeting between self-cultivation and formal education. Students are recruited from five "folk high schools" to an academic introduction course that is developed as the course goes along. The students are encouraged to take part in the development work. Teachers from both sides participate in the teaching and in the recruitment and curriculum work. Furthermore, teachers and researchers together form a research circle. With the introduction course as a common reference, this group study relevant litterature and reflect on teaching and working conditions. During the project all participants try to articulate what is important in their own learning and teaching experience. In this article the preliminary results are discussed under four headings: working in projects, testing one´s own and others´ understandings and valuations, working with models and images, reflecting on the leasning process.


An important step for assistive systems and robot companions operating in human environments is to learn the compositionality of human activities, i.e., recognize both activities and their comprising actions. Most existing approaches address action and activity recognition as separate tasks, i.e., actions need to be inferred before the activity labels, and are thus highly sensitive to the correct temporal segmentation of the activity sequences. In this paper, we present a novel learning approach that jointly learns human activities on two levels of semantic and temporal complexity: (1) transitive actions such as reaching and opening, e.g., a cereal box, and (2) high-level activities such as having breakfast. Our model consists of a hierarchy of GWR networks which process and learn inherent spatiotemporal dependencies of multiple visual cues extracted from the human body skeletal representation and the interaction with objects. The neural architecture learns and semantically segments input RGB-D sequences of high-level activities into their composing actions, without supervision. We investigate the performance of our architecture with a set of experiments on a publicly available benchmark dataset. The experimental results show that our approach outperforms the state of the art with respect to the classification of the high-level activities. Additionally, we introduce a novel top-down modulation mechanism to the architecture which uses the actions and activity labels as constraints during the learning phase. In our experiments, we show how this mechanism can be used to control the network's neural growth without decreasing the overall performance.


This collection of articles from Creative C~nputin~ spans a wide range of topics related (some rather distantly) to school mathematics. There are chapters on problem solving, simulations, probability,graphics, CAI and programming style. Also some useful resource material may be found in chapters entitled "Mathematical miscellany', "short pro-grams", and "puzzles, problems, and programming ideas." 77 articles include 250 programs. We would expect it to be a very useful resource for any math teacher who intends to use computers in a major way in teaching. This 33 page book is cr~ed with information for teachers who might want to have their students learn about system dynamics, an important form of simulation developed originally by Jay W. Forrestero Quoting from the introduction: The booklet consists of four sections. Section 1 discusses the need for systems thinking in high school and college curricula. The use of a simple diagramming technique for understanding systems is also explained. Section 2 discusses DYNAMO as an educational tool. Included are examples of how a variety of colleges currently use DYNAMO. Section 3 provides several examples of DYNAMO models. These models can be entered onto a computer with DYNAMO and used as examples. They also show.t he,ease with which this type of model can be understood. Section 4 provides further sources about system dynamics including an annotated bibliography and list of published models. Rather than attempt to provide a complete list of system dynamics materials, this section lists some materials most suitable for use at the high school and undergraduate levels. A comparision volume to this one is the "kit" by Nancy Roberts (see below). This 90 page book can be used to teach basic systems concepts based on the concept of the "feedback loop." It is written for use by elementary teachers but has apparently been adapted to use in executive development programs and undergraduate courses. There are four sections: (1)a discussion of how to use the materials, (2)a set of exercises involving the explanation of causal loops diagrams, (3)a set of stories from which causal loop diagrams are constructed, and (4) suggested solutions to the stories.


The olfactory placode gives rise to both olfactory receptor neurons, which remain as a component of the peripheral nervous system, and to luteinizing hormone-releasing hormone (LHRH) neurons, which migrate to the central nervous system. In this study, we used chick olfactory placode explants to ask several questions regarding LHRH neuronal differentiation. We found that explants of ectoderm from the fronto-nasal region of embryos as early as Hamilton & Hamburger (HH) stage 12 gave rise to LHRH neurons, that explants from all regions of the olfactory placode were able to generate LHRH neurons, that both brain conditioned medium and disruption of the olfactory placode increase the number of LHRH neurons observed in explants, and that the combination of these two manipulations results in the production of more LHRH neurons than either treatment alone. We conclude that LHRH neurons originate in the olfactory epithelium and that some of the same factors which influence olfactory receptor neuron development also affect LHRH neuronal development.


With the increasing consumer base of online video content, it is important for advertisers to understand the video context when targeting video ads to consumers. To improve the consumer experience and quality of ads, key factors need to be considered such as (i) ad relevance to video content (ii) where and how video ads are placed, and (iii) non-intrusive user experience. We propose a framework to semantically understand the video content for better ad recommendation that ensure these criteria.


Given a boolean predicate $\Pi$ on labeled networks (e.g., proper coloring,
leader election, etc.), a self-stabilizing algorithm for $\Pi$ is a distributed
algorithm that can start from any initial configuration of the network (i.e.,
every node has an arbitrary value assigned to each of its variables), and
eventually converge to a configuration satisfying $\Pi$. It is known that
leader election does not have a deterministic self-stabilizing algorithm using
a constant-size register at each node, i.e., for some networks, some of their
nodes must have registers whose sizes grow with the size $n$ of the networks.
On the other hand, it is also known that leader election can be solved by a
deterministic self-stabilizing algorithm using registers of $O(\log \log n)$
bits per node in any $n$-node bounded-degree network. We show that this latter
space complexity is optimal. Specifically, we prove that every deterministic
self-stabilizing algorithm solving leader election must use $\Omega(\log \log
n)$-bit per node registers in some $n$-node networks. In addition, we show that
our lower bounds go beyond leader election, and apply to all problems that
cannot be solved by anonymous algorithms.


Rabi oscillations have been observed in many superconducting devices, and represent prototypical logic operations for quantum bits (qubits) in a quantum computer. We use a three-level multiphoton analysis to understand the behavior of the superconducting phase qubit (current-biased Josephson junction) at high microwave drive power. Analytical and numerical results for the ac Stark shift, single-photon Rabi frequency, and two-photon Rabi frequency are compared to measurements made on a dc SQUID phase qubit with Nb/AlOx/Nb tunnel junctions. Good agreement is found between theory and experiment.


Widespread reports of bat fatalities caused by wind turbines have raised concerns about the impacts of wind power development. Reliable estimates of the total number killed and the potential effects on populations are needed, but it is crucial that they be based on sound data. In a recent BioScience article, Hayes (2013) estimated that over 600,000 bats were killed at wind turbines in the United States in 2012. The scientific errors in the analysis are numerous, with the two most serious being that the included sites constituted a convenience sample, not a representative sample, and that the individual site estimates are derived from such different methodologies that they are inherently not comparable. This estimate is almost certainly inaccurate, but whether the actual number is much smaller, much larger, or about the same is uncertain. An accurate estimate of total bat fatality is not currently possible, given the shortcomings of the available data.


Calcium and Phosphorus are the basic elements in making the inorganic matrix of bone tissue. With the purpose of our research was to study the local effect of hydoxypatite and Platelet Rich Plasma (P.R.P.) on the course of reparative osteogenesis. We used hydroxyapatite granules made by the firm "Polystom" with the chemical formula Ca(10)(PO(4))(6)(OH)(2). Platelet Rich Plasma we have got from blood of rabbits by centrifuging. Experiment was made on 30 rabbits. by operation the standard defects were created with the diameter of 66mm and the depth of 4-5mm on the mandibular bone of the rabbits. In the laboratory group defects were filled with hydroxyapatite and P.R.P., in control group with their own blood. After 7,14,21,35 and 50 days after operation three rabbits were taken from each group. Mandibular bone fractions with defects were relieved from soft tissue, were fixed in 10% neutral formalin and were stained with hematoxyn-eozine. The study showed that in the study group at the initial stage of differentiation from the moment of traumatization the pre-osteoblast and osteoblast contour permanently appears. And in the control group the resorbtion processes were clearly expressed. At the end of the experiment of 50 days in the experimental group the compaction of osteogenic structure was observed in all defect areas. Newly generated tissue underwent compaction. The results of the experiment prove that the hydroxypatite and Platelet Rich Plasma has a stimulative role in the process of osteogenesis. Activation of the reparative processes is far more intensive at the final stage of osteogenesis.


The optimization of finned tube heat exchanger is presented focusing on different fluid velocities and the consideration of aerodynamic configuration of the fin. It is reasonable to expect an influence of fin profile on the fluid streamline direction. In the cross-flow heat exchanger, the air streams are not heated and cooled evenly. The fin and tube geometry affects the flow direction and influences temperature changes. The heat transfer conditions are modified by changing the distribution of fluid mass flow. The fin profile impact also depends on the air velocity value. Three-dimensional models are developed to find heat transfer characteristics between a finned tube and the air for different air velocities and fin shapes. Mass flow weighted average temperatures of air volume flow rate are calculated in the outlet section and compared for different fin/tube shapes in order to optimize heat transfer between the fin material and air during the air flow in the cross flow heat exchanger.


Many midwives continue to use Continuous Electronic Foetal Monitoring (CEFM) on low risk women in labour, despite overwhelming clinical evidence that it is unnecessary. The use of CEFM on low risk labouring women has been linked to rising rates of medical intervention during labour and birth with no improvement in long term neonatal outcomes. This study examined the decision-making processes of midwives who used CEFM on low risk labouring women. Whilst a number of previous studies have examined various aspects of CEFM, none specific to midwives' decision-making and CEFM on low risk labouring women. This study contributes to the literature in this specific area. The theoretical origins of Symbolic Interactionism and Grounded Theory (GT) methods underpin this study. SI, a sociological theory that emphasises meaning in human interactions and behaviours is used in this study to focus on the behaviours and interactions of five midwives'when deciding to use CEFM on low risk labouring women. Primary data were collected by conducting unstructured interviews and systematic analysis was undertaken using GT methods to generate a substantive theory of: Midwives' CEFM decision-making despite evidence based guidelines. The midwives made the decision that led to CEFM at two key points in the woman's labour care. Firstly, during the initial assessment of the woman and foetus, some midwives decided to use a baseline CTG rather than intermittent auscultation (IA). Secondly, following initial assessment, the midwives made an individualised assessment and decided whether to use CEFM as the method to monitor the foetus during labour. Trust was identified as the core variable, having a profound effect on the midwives' decision-making at these two points. Another significant factor that impacted on decision-making was staff workload. Recommendations relating to these findings promote that labouring women be central and intimately involved in decisions about foetal monitoring. Workplace reforms, such as the introduction of midwifery led models of care for women within a community setting are recommended to address professional trust and workload issues. Through the implementation of these recommendations it is expected that midwives will embrace the notion of woman centred care and that the unnecessary use of CEFM on low risk labouring women will be reduced.


Nine Campylobacter-like strains were isolated from human gingival crevices and characterized. These strains were gram-negative, straight rods that were motile by means of multiple unipolar flagella. They were asaccharolytic and preferred an anaerobic atmosphere rather than a microaerophilic atmosphere for growth, and their growth was stimulated by formate and fumarate. These strains were biochemically similar to Campylobacter curvus and Campylobacter rectus, but were clearly distinguishable from these organisms by the number of flagella (two to five flagella at one end of the cell), by being catalase positive, by their whole-cell protein profiles, by their Western blot (immunoblot) patterns, and on the basis of DNA-DNA homology data. They could also be differentiated from the other species of the genus CampyZobacter. The nine Campylohcterlike strains were compared with two strains (FDC 286 and VPI 10279) representing a previously described but unnamed WolinelZu sp, The nine isolates and strains FDC 286 and VPI 10279 were found to be members of a single species. The 16s rRNA sequences of two strains of the newly identified species were compared with the rRNA sequences of 21 reference Campylobacter, Wolinelh, and Helicobacter species in order to generate a phylogenetic tree. We propose the name Campylobacter showae for the newly identified strains; strain SU A4 (= ATCC 51146) is the type strain of this new species.


The Paris Agreement stipulates that global warming be stabilized at well-below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, with aims to further constrain this warming to 1.5°C. However, it also calls for reducing net anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to zero during the second half of this century. Here, we use a reduced-form Integrated Assessment Model to examine the dependency between temperature and emission-based targets. We find that net-zero GHG emissions are not necessarily required to remain below 1.5°C or 2°C, assuming either target can be achieved without overshoot. With overshoot, however, our analysis suggests that the emissions goal is consistent with the temperature targets; substantial negative emissions are required to reduce warming after it peaks. Temperature targets are put at risk by late achievement of emissions goals and some GHG emission metrics. Therefore, refinement of Paris Agreement emissions goals should include a focus on net zero CO2 –not GHG –emissions, achieved early in the second half of the century.


'Technological activities are now firmly established in schools . They have been introduced by diverse methods, but they are here to stay'. Not my words, but those used to introduce each Project Technology Handbook published since 1967 when Project Technology was set up by the Schools Council. By 1973 , Handbook No. 10 - Industrial Archaeology for Schools - had been published, serving as an excellent guide for any school attempting activities of this type and also giving accounts of studies which had already been developed in areas which were littered with relics of an industrial past . Hayle Secondary School in Cornwall was in just such an area and teachers and pupils took full advantage of their unique opportunities.


2D transition metal carbides and nitrides, known as MXenes, are an emerging class of 2D materials with a wide spectrum of potential applications, in particular in electrochemical energy storage. The hydrophilicity of MXenes combined with their metallic conductivity and surface redox reactions is the key for high‐rate pseudocapacitive energy storage in MXene electrodes. However, symmetric MXene supercapacitors have a limited voltage window of around 0.6 V due to possible oxidation at high anodic potentials. In this study, the fact that titanium carbide MXene (Ti3C2Tx) can operate at negative potentials in acidic electrolyte is exploited, to design an all‐pseudocapacitive asymmetric device by combining it with a ruthenium oxide (RuO2) positive electrode. This asymmetric device operates at a voltage window of 1.5 V, which is about two times wider than the operating voltage window of symmetric MXene supercapacitors, and is the widest voltage window reported to date for MXene‐based supercapacitors. The complementary working potential windows of MXene and RuO2, along with proton‐induced pseudocapacitance, significantly enhance the device performance. As a result, the asymmetric devices can deliver an energy density of 37 µW h cm−2 at a power density of 40 mW cm−2, with 86% capacitance retention after 20 000 charge–discharge cycles. These results show that pseudocapacitive negative MXene electrodes can potentially replace carbon‐based materials in asymmetric electrochemical capacitors, leading to an increased energy density.


Students in a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) interact with each other and the course staff through online discussion forums. While discussion forums play a central role in MOOCs, they also pose a challenge for instructors. The large number of student posts makes it difficult for an instructor to know where to intervene to answer questions, resolve issues, and provide feedback. In this work, we focus on automatically predicting speech acts in MOOC forum posts. Our speech act categories describe the purpose or function of the post in the ongoing discussion. Specifically, we address three main research questions. First, we investigate whether crowdsourced workers can reliably label MOOC forum posts using our speech act definitions. Second, we investigate whether our speech acts can help predict instructor interventions and assignment completion and performance. Finally, we investigate which types of features (derived from the post content, author, and surrounding context) are most effective for predicting our different speech act categories.


We consider two-player infinite games played on graphs. The games are concurrent, in that at each state the players choose their moves simultaneously and independently, and stochastic, in that the moves determine a probability distribution for the successor state. The value of a game is the maximal probability with which a player can guarantee the satisfaction of her objective. We show that the values of concurrent games with ω-regular objectives expressed as parity conditions can be decided in NP ∩ coNP. This result substantially improves the best known previous bound of 3EXPTIME. It also shows that the full class of concurrent parity games is no harder than the special case of turn-based stochastic reachability games, for which NP ∩ coNP is the best known bound.While the previous, more restricted NP ∩ coNP results for graph games relied on the existence of particularly simple (pure memoryless) optimal strategies, in concurrent games with parity objectives optimal strategies may not exist, and ε-optimal strategies (which achieve the value of the game within a parameter ε > 0) require in general both randomization and infinite memory. Hence our proof must rely on a more detailed analysis of strategies and, in addition to the main result, yields two results that are interesting on their own. First, we show that there exist ε-optimal strategies that in the limit coincide with memoryless strategies; this parallels the celebrated result of Mertens-Neyman for concurrent games with limit-average objectives. Second, we complete the characterization of the memory requirements for ε-optimal strategies for concurrent games with parity conditions, by showing that memoryless strategies suffice for ε-optimality for coBüchi conditions.


comparison with behavioural changes in activity patterns and differences in fat deposition. We have measured both of these variables longitudinally, using the recently developed doubly labelled water (2H2180) method, which assesses body composition and total energy expenditure in free living subjects.4 The high level of variability between subjects observed in the calorimetry study was equally apparent, and thetotal cost of pregnancy (computed as the cumulative change in total energy expenditure plus the energy deposited as fat and as the products of conception) averaged 532 (254) MJ (n=7), with a range of 104-790 MJ. This average far exceeds the assumption of the World Health Organisation and the Food and Agricultural Organisation of 335 MJ because the women chose to be more physically active during pregnancy. These results show that changes in energy expenditure associated with increased or reduced physical activity may easily exceed the physiological cost of pregnancy, and to meet these costs the women in this study must have substantially increased their food intake. With regard to this point, the introductory statement by the authors may need clarification. They point out, correctly, that a few studies have apparently shown little increase in food intake, but this is not the general rule. A review of 25 studies from affluent societies showed that pregnant women on average consume 1-0 MJ more daily than non-pregnant women.2 T'he recorded intakes have been below internationally recommended levels not because there was no increase in intake during pregnancy but because the increase was added to a very low baseline intake caused by our modern, inactive lifestyle.5 A M PRENTICE R G WHITEHEAD W A COWARD G R GOLDBERG HI L DAVIES P R MURGATROYD Medical Research Council Dunn Nutrition Unit, Cambridge CB4 IXJ


Wind tunnels are test devices used in aerodynamic experiments to understand the effects of air moving through solid objects. Wind tunnels are often used to provide a steady and controlled flow of wind to replace natural winds and to test new models of spacecraft, aircraft and vehicles, and some wind tunnels have enough room to inspect full-size cars.

A small wind tunnel system has been acquired and requires re-design and testing. These works follow on the ENG470 work by Mr Ibrahim Noor Izham, who undertook the initial study that analysed the functionality and limitations of the existing wind tunnel. However, the conclusion of the works shows the current wind tunnel does not have the capability to meet the requirements of Murdoch University.

Therefore, this project aims to design and construct a new open return wind tunnel system for Murdoch University, which has been designed to achieve 20m / s in the test section with expected low turbulence intensity level. Making it available for Murdoch University research and education purposes, for example, research particular emission from biochar-amended soil, low-speed aerodynamics experiments (ENG 339: Wind and Hydro Power Systems: testing aerofoil and wind turbine models). In order to implement these goals, a very detail design was carried on using theoretical modelling and CFD simulations. Moreover, flow stabilization and control are also performed by using a honeycomb and screens; all of these are optimized to produce low turbulence levels in the test section. Furthermore, the axial fan with a VFD for this wind tunnel project was delivered at the end of March 2019, to assist the subsequent wind tunnel project, an experiment was conducted on 25th May 2019 to study the relationship between wind flow speed generated by the axial fan with different fan speed in RPM.

The report has addressed the dimension of the new wind tunnel design by theoretical modelling method. Base on this dimension of the wind tunnel design, an AutoCAD modelling and a CFD simulation is conducted to investigate the turbulence intensity level in the test section. The results show that when the wind tunnel is operated at a wind speed of 20 m / s, the turbulence intensity of the test section is less than 3%. The fan test results show that the maximum wind speed produced by the axial fan is 12.97 m / s, which is much lower than the expected speed of the fan section of 15.405 m / s. The reason is that the vibrations of the fan test structure affect the wind speed measurement of the Pitot tube. In addition, after completing the construction of the entire wind tunnel, the contraction cone will accelerate the flow through the wind tunnel to meet the expected speed.


The purpose of this study is to explore the undergraduates' perception of the quality and value of library services offered to them in the 21st-century in federal universities in Southeast Nigeria. Prof. Festus Aghagbo Nwako Library (PFANL) in Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka was used as a case study. A descriptive survey research design was adopted for the study. From a population of 14,196 registered regular undergraduates' users of the library, a sample of 120 was selected through an accidental sampling technique. From the 120 questionnaires distributed, 103 copies received were valid, 17 responses were either incomplete or not answered, and so, the efficient rate was 85.8 percent. The study employed the use of two instruments which include: observation checklist, used to ascertain the available library services, and a questionnaire used to elicit users' perception of library service quality and value. The instruments were face validated by two experts in Nnamdi Azikiwe University Awka. The internal consistency of the instrument on library services used by the undergraduates was established using Kudder-Richardson which yielded 0.86 while Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used for the undergraduates' perception of quality and value of library services offered to them which yielded 0.78 and 0.81 respectively. Frequency count, percentage, mean and standard deviation using SPSS, were used to analyze data from research questions, t-test was used to test hypotheses. The major findings revealed that the undergraduates have a positive perception of the quality of library services offered to them at Prof. Festus Aghagbo Nwako Library (PFANL). However, they had a negative perception of the quality of computer/Internet services and reprographic services offered to them. This shows that these two services should immensely be improved upon in this 21st-century. The study equally shows that undergraduates have high value for library services offered to them. Nevertheless, they have low value on computer/internet services and reprographic services which are most needed in this 21st-century. The finding also revealed the host of impediments that affects high perception of library services quality and value in this 21st century at PFANL to include; insufficient current information resources, an unfriendly attitude of staff, slow internet connectivity, limited access, insufficient availability of modern facilities, insufficient training on technology use and unsteady power supply. The finding further revealed that there is no significant difference in the mean rating of males and female's perception of the quality and value of library service offered to them at PFANL. Based on the findings, it was recommended among others that the library management at PFANL should sustain undergraduates' level of perceived library quality and value, and boost it by providing continuously, relevant and current information resources and services especially on the aspect of computer/Internet services and reprographic services suitable in this 21st-century.


Between the 19th November and 6th December 2012 Oxford Archaeology East conducted an archaeological excavation in advance of the construction of a new village hall and community centre on the recreation ground in Isleham. A previous evaluation had uncovered evidence for early medieval activity in this area and the subsequent excavation aimed to examine and characterise the extent of this activity and its relationship to the development of medieval Isleham.
The earliest activity that was uncovered dated to the Early Iron Age. This consisted of a partially surviving enclosure ditch within which were located several storage pits and postholes. The postholes may have been part of domestic structures and pottery recovered from one of the pits indicated that there had been a settlement located here at this time.
Two phases of medieval activity were uncovered on either side of a large natural hollow or pond. The pond was bounded by ditches, fences and hedges throughout the medieval period to keep animals away from crops and storage buildings located to the east and south of the excavation area. This activity was closely related to the alien Benedictine priory which was established shortly after the Norman conquest.
A structure located in the south-eastern part of the excavation area was of sill-beam and post construction and may have been designed to hold a raised floor for storage of produce. This structure was rebuilt in the second medieval phase. An area directly to the east of this structure may have been used for crop cultivation.
The southern corner of a field was located to the north-east of the trench and contained linear features thought to represent medieval ploughing and root action of crops in this area. These field boundaries were later backfilled with domestic refuse, including large amounts of charred grain, before a small barn was constructed. The barn may signify that the field was being used to hold animals rather than for agriculture. Activity on the site may have declined after the monks of the priory moved away from Isleham in the 13th century.
During the post-medieval period several pits were dug for the quarrying and working of clunch for construction. This may indicate that Isleham was beginning to expand.


It is widely recognized that continuous sensory feedback plays a crucial role in accurate motor control in everyday life. Feedback information is used to adapt force output and to correct errors. While primary motor cortex contralateral to the movement (cM1) plays a dominant role in this control, converging evidence supports the idea that ipsilateral primary motor cortex (iM1) also directly contributes to hand and finger movements. Similarly, when visual feedback is available, primary visual cortex (V1) and its interactions with the motor network also become important for accurate motor performance. To elucidate this issue, we performed and integrated behavioral and electroencephalography (EEG) measurements during isometric compression of a compliant rubber bulb, at 10% and 30% of maximum voluntary contraction, both with and without visual feedback. We used a semi-blind approach (functional source separation (FSS)) to identify separate functional sources of mu-frequency (8-13[Formula: see text]Hz) EEG responses in cM1, iM1 and V1. Here for the first time, we have used orthogonal FSS to extract multiple sources, by using the same functional constraint, providing the ability to extract different sources that oscillate in the same frequency range but that have different topographic distributions. We analyzed the single-trial timecourses of mu power event-related desynchronization (ERD) in these sources and linked them with force measurements to understand which aspects are most important for good task performance. Whilst the amplitude of mu power was not related to contraction force in any of the sources, it was able to provide information on performance quality. We observed stronger ERDs in both contralateral and ipsilateral motor sources during trials where contraction force was most consistently maintained. This effect was most prominent in the ipsilateral source, suggesting the importance of iM1 to accurate performance. This ERD effect was sustained throughout the duration of visual feedback trials, but only present at the start of no feedback trials, consistent with more variable performance in the absence of feedback. Overall, we found that the behavior of the ERD in iM1 was the most informative aspect concerning the accuracy of the contraction performance, and the ability to maintain a steady level of contraction. This new approach of using FSS to extract multiple orthogonal sources provides the ability to investigate both contralateral and ipsilateral nodes of the motor network without the need for additional information (e.g. electromyography). The enhanced signal-to-noise ratio provided by FSS opens the possibility of extracting complex EEG features on an individual trial basis, which is crucial for a more nuanced understanding of fine motor performance, as well as for applications in brain-computer interfacing.


In this study, it was intended to evaluate the effect of childhood trauma on the anger status of university students. A total of 323 students who were studying in a University, Department of Nursing were included in this cross-sectional study. All data were collected by using Descriptive Information Form, Childhood Trauma Questionnaire and Trait Anger and Anger Expression Scale. Data were analyzed by using numerical and percentage values, Mann-Whitney U test, Kruskal-Wallis test and Spearman Correlation Analysis. It was found that mean total score of Childhood Traumatic Events Scale was 102.26, mean score of emotional abuse and neglect was 59.96, mean score of physical abuse was 33.18 and mean score of sexual abuse was 9.11. Mean trait anger score of students was found to be 22.67; and mean scores of anger-out, anger-in and anger control, that are the subdimensions of anger expression styles, were found to be 17.16, 16.58 and 21.57, respectively. When the relationship between childhood traumatic events of the students and their trait anger and the forms of anger expression was examined, it was determined that their trait anger levels increased (p=0.000, r=0.203), and they reflected their anger more (p=0.000, r=0.217) as their exposure to traumatic events increased. According to the results of this study, it was found that mean score of Childhood Traumatic Events Scale was was high.
Key Words: University student, Childhood Traumatic Events, Anger status


The protection of offshore wind farms (OWFs) against overvoltages, especially resonant overvoltage, is of paramount importance because of poor accessibility and high repair costs. In this paper, we study how switching overvoltages at the wind turbine transformer (WTT) medium voltage (MV) side can lead to high overvoltages on the low voltage (LV) side. The effect of overvoltage protective devices is analyzed. A detailed model of an OWF row is developed in electromagnetic transients program–alternative transients program (EMTP-ATP), including interconnecting cables, WTT, surge arresters and resistive–capacitive filters. A parameterized black-box WTT model is obtained from measurements and is used for investigating the transfer of resonant overvoltages from the MV to the LV side. The model is capable of shifting systematically the frequencies and adjusting the transformer input impedance. Simulation results show that wind turbine energization in an OWF can lead to overvoltages on the LV terminals. The rate of rise of overvoltages (du/dt) is in the range of 300–500 pu/µs. It is found that resistive–capacitive filters should be installed on both MV and LV terminals of WTTs to decrease both resonant overvoltages and du/dt, which is unachievable by surge arrester alone. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


A new mathematical model for representing the geometric variations of lines is extended to include probabilistic representations of one-dimensional (1D) clearance, which arise from positional variations of the axis of a hole, the size of the hole, and a pin-hole assembly. The model is compatible with the ASME/ ANSI/ISO Standards for geometric tolerances. Central to the new model is a Tolerance-Map (T-Map) (Patent No. 69638242), a hypothetical volume of points that models the 3D variations in location and orientation for a segment of a line (the axis), which can arise from tolerances on size, position, orientation, and form. Here, it is extended to model the increases in yield that occur when maximum material condition (MMC) is specified and when tolerances are assigned statistically rather than on a worst-case basis; the statistical method includes the specification of both size and position tolerances on a feature. The frequency distribution of 1D clearance is decomposed into manufacturing bias, i.e., toward certain regions of a Tolerance-Map, and into a geometric bias that can be computed from the geometry of multidimensional T-Maps. Although the probabilistic representation in this paper is built from geometric bias, and it is presumed that manufacturing bias is uniform, the method is robust enough to include manufacturing bias in the future. Geometric bias alone shows a greater likelihood of small clearances than large clearances between an assembled pin and hole. A comparison is made between the effects of choosing the optional material condition MMC and not choosing it with the tolerances that determine the allowable variations in position.


Since the start of 2020, a COVID-19 emerged as a new strain of Coronavirus. Initially, it affected the population of Wuhan, China and after that it outspread all over the world and was declared as a pandemic by World Health Organization on 30th January, 2020.1 It has been identified that COVID-19 can cause mild illness including common cold to more severe condition known as acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS), if not treated promptly.2 While people of all ages are susceptible to COVID-19, those over 60 years of age and with cardiovascular diseases along with diabetes have even more chances of becoming seriously ill Whereas children seem to be less affected.3 Currently there is no pharmacological treatment, still some antiviral drugs have been proven to be helpful along with plasma transfusion in which plasma is extracted from the blood of patient who got recovered from COVID-19 an is transfused into the patient still suffering from the said disease.4 Symptoms of respiratory complications due to this disease influence the mind of a Physical Therapist (PT). Though after discussing the maneuvers of respiratory Physical Therapy with fellow professional colleagues as well as clinicians and practically applying it on respective relatives, friends and advice seekers after getting the informed consent from them; those who started to have initial symptoms of COVID-19 before being tested positive and then later got positive. It resulted in great ease for most of them to breathe and did not led to serious respiratory complications that include dyspnea and accumulation of thick and tenacious secretions inside the lungs, which ultimately is a precursor of pneumonia. Following were the PT interventions suggested to the patients showing acute symptoms; Steam inhalation, breathing exercises and postural drainage positions were inculcated in the treatment plan and guided respectively, steam inhalation therapy is normally advised to be used as primary care in acute respiratory diseases.5 It is most commonly used therapy at home and is inexpensive, moreover it promotes self-reliance in the patients; it is used therapeutically by inhaling steam through nose so that it reaches the respiratory system.6-8 Steam inhalation helps in loosening the mucus, it opens the nasal airway passages decreases mucosal inflammation and heat can prevent replication of viruses.9 It helps to relax muscles and relieves coughing by preventing excessive dryness in the mucosal membranes.10 Moreover, breathing exercises have been reported to have beneficial effects in improving symptoms and optimizing pulmonary function in patients. Breathing programs have been reported to have positive effects in alleviating symptoms and optimizing pulmonary function in patients.11 Breathing exercises aim to improve the individuals breathing pattern and increase in lung expansion, they also enhance the performance of respiratory muscles thus leading towards increase in functional residual capacity, and inspiratory reserve volume.12 Breathing exercises reduces breathlessness, increase exercise capacity and improve overall well-being of a person 13,14,15,16 The physiological effect of breathing exercises comprises of increase in intra-bronchial pressure thus preventing the collapse of bronchi and leading towards increase in inspiratory and expiratory flow rate.13,15 It act by stimulating the autonomic system thereby promoting relaxation and in return improves the physiological parameters.16 Furthermore, body positioning improves the efficiency and effectiveness of both primary and accessory muscles of breathing leading to ease in dyspnea and reduction in work of breathing.17 These positions improve the ventilation perfusion ratio and utilize the gravity to remove secretions.18 Positioning decrease the ventilation demand resulting in longer expiratory time thereby preventing hyperinflation and ultimately resolving dyspnea.19 As a healthcare professional and specially a Physical Therapist we would like to ask the imminent researchers to fill this gap by conducting different surveys and trials. Through our experience we've found that the manoeuvres we applied have been very effective and improved the overall outcome of the patients suffering from COVID -19.


The paper describes a field trial using deep in situ dry soil mixing to stabilize soft peat deposits beneath the route for the Channel Tunnel Rail Link in the SE of the UK. The aim of this trial was to evaluate whether a ground granulated blast furnace slag (GGBFS)–red gypsum mixture could be used as a replacement for a cement-based binder. Red gypsum is produced as a co-product to the production of the white pigment titanium dioxide. Trial columns were installed adjacent to the main stabilization works. A combination of in situ and laboratory testing has shown that the blended binder was as effective as ordinary Portland cement in increasing the strength of the peat. The blended binder columns also displayed similar durability characteristics. Using the alternative binder required no alteration to existing equipment and caused no reduction in production rates. The minerals formed in the samples from the GGBFS–red gypsum columns were of the type formed by pozzolanic reactions and the strength of the GGBFS–red gypsum columns was dependent on achieving a pH of 10.5. The paper recommends that peat samples must be stored in airtight containers prior to initial design mix testing. If required, the pH of the soil–binder mixes should be adjusted (using a small addition of lime) during the treatment process.


Summary:  The neglected tropical diseases (NTDs) represent a group of parasitic and related infectious diseases such as amebiasis, Chagas disease, cysticercosis, echinococcosis, hookworm, leishmaniasis, and schistosomiasis. Together, these conditions are considered the most common infections in low‐ and middle‐income countries, where they produce a level of global disability and human suffering equivalent to better known conditions such as human immunodeficiency virus/acquired immunodeficiency syndrome and malaria. Despite their global public health importance, progress on developing vaccines for NTD pathogens has lagged because of some key technical hurdles and the fact that these infections occur almost exclusively in the world's poorest people living below the World Bank poverty line. In the absence of financial incentives for new products, the multinational pharmaceutical companies have not embarked on substantive research and development programs for the neglected tropical disease vaccines. Here, we review the current status of scientific and technical progress in the development of new neglected tropical disease vaccines, highlighting the successes that have been achieved (cysticercosis and echinococcosis) and identifying the challenges and opportunities for development of new vaccines for NTDs. Also highlighted are the contributions being made by non‐profit product development partnerships that are working to overcome some of the economic challenges in vaccine manufacture, clinical testing, and global access.


Economic Load Dispatch (ELD) is an important part of cost minimization procedure in power system operation. Different derivative and probabilistic methods are used to solve ELD problems. This paper proposes a powerful Salp Swarm Algorithm (SSA) to explain the ELD issue including equality and inequality restrictions. The main aim of ELD is to satisfy the entire electric load at minimum cost. The SSA is a population based probabilistic method which guides its search agents that are randomly placed in the search space, towards an optimal point using their fitness function and also keeps a track of the best solution achieved by each search agent. SSA is being used to solve the ELD problem with their high exploration and local optima escaping technique. This algorithm confirms that the promising areas of the search space are exploited to have a smooth transition from exploration to exploitation using the movement of Salps in the sea. Simulation results prove that the proposed algorithm surpasses other existing optimization techniques in terms quality of solution obtained and computational efficiency. The final results also prove the robustness of the SSA.


The publish/subscribe paradigm has been known as the appropriate communication model for providing high scalability and mobility in data-centric networks such as wireless sensor networks. Through an internal infrastructure, in the publish/subscribe paradigm consumers and producers are completely decoupled in the three essential properties: decoupling in space, time, and synchronization. In other words, the internal infrastructure should be hidden from consumers and producers, and it should provide anonymous, asynchronous, and multicasting communication for the decoupling properties. The properties are suitable for the large-scaled mobile environment with many mobile consumers and many mobile producers. Hence, we propose a novel data dissemination scheme satisfied fully with three decoupling properties, and an embedded grid structure is used as the internal infrastructure for supporting shared buffering and multicasting. Through our performance analysis from computer simulation, we conclude that our scheme may be not only the first attempt to implement the true publish/subscribe paradigm in wireless sensor networks, but also can support high scalability and mobility in the wireless sensor networks.


The objective of this study is to explore whether changes in neighbourhood characteristics bring about changes in travel choice. Residential self-selection is a concern in the connections between land-use and travel behaviour. The recent literature suggests that a longitudinal structural equations modelling (SEM) approach can be a powerful tool to assess the importance of neighbourhood characteristics on travel behaviour as opposed to the attitude-induced residential self-selection. However, the evidence to date is limited to particular geographical areas and evidence from one country might not be transferrable to another because of differences in land-use patterns and land-use policies. The paper is to address the gap by extending the evidence using British data. The case study is based on the metropolitan area of Tyne and Wear, North East of England, UK. An SEM is applied to 219 respondents who reported residential relocation within the previous 8 years. We found that neighbourhood characteristics do influence travel behaviour after controlling for selfselection. For instance, the more people are exposed to public transport access, the more likely they drive less. Neighbourhood characteristics also impact through their influence on car ownership. A social environment with vitality also reduces the amount of private car travel. These findings suggest that land-use policies at neighbourhood level can play an important role in reducing driving.


Abstract The scientific objective of this research was to screen random amplified polymorphic DNA (RAPD) and intersimple sequence repeat (ISSR) primers in order to find the molecular markers enabling the distinction between male and female individuals of the European yew. This is an initial step toward understanding the mechanisms of sex determination in this species. The study was conducted on European yew originating from two sites in Poland: the Zadni Gaj nature reserve near Cieszyn and the yew collection from the Botanical Garden of the Jagiellonian University in Krakow. In the present study, 716 random primers (696 RAPD primers: OPA-OPAI_1-16 and 20 ISSR primers marked as UBC) were tested to identify the sex in European yew by means of a modified bulked segregant analysis (BSA) method. The work was conducted in three stages, gradually limiting the number of primers through the elimination of primers that either did not exhibit any differences between the examined groups or did not provide amplification products. Among the tested primers, no ideal markers that would be present in all individuals of one sex but absent in the individuals of the other sex were found. However, some markers were found (A07_954, H13_729, J08_660, L12_390, U01_457, V14_527, AE03_941, AE03_1014) to occur with greater frequency in one sex. Using these, we further examined 13 band combinations (profiles) that were observed to occur only in male individuals and another 13 combinations that were observed only in female individuals, which could be used in the practical identification of sex. This is the first report to ascertain the sex of Taxus baccata trees, and it may help to determine the sex at an early stage of development.


The principle neuronal output of the neostriatum comes from medium spiny neurons that project from the caudate/putamen to the globus pallidus and substantia nigra. Although current evidence generally indicates that γ‐aminobutyric acid (GABA) is the principal neurotransmitter in this pathway, this cannot account for the excitatory synaptic activity present among cultures of striatal neurons or the short latency excitatory postsynaptic potentials which often proceed or obscure inhibitory activity evoked by striatal stimulation. In this study, retrograde transport of [3H]D‐aspartate has been used to demonstrate striatopallidal and striato‐nigral neurons that possess a high‐affinity uptake system for glutamate and aspartate and are therefore putatively glutamatergic. Injections of [3H]D‐aspartate into the globus pallidus or substantia nigra, pars reticularis of the rat retrogradely labeled mediumsized neurons throughout the rostral‐caudal extent of the neostriatum. To characterize this population further, adjacent sections were immunoreacted with antibodies to either GABA, glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD), calbindin, or parvalbumin prior to autoradiographic processing. Under these conditions, autoradiographically labeled neurons displayed positive immunoreactivity for GABA, GAD, or calbindin. Autoradiographic label did not colocalize with parvalbumin immunoreactivity. The colocalization of anatomical markers of GABAergic and glutamatergic neurotransmission raises the possibility that both neurotransmitters are functionally expressed within single striatal projection neurons. © 1994 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


The controlled introduction of defects in semiconductors has contributed to the development of electronic devices and technologies. Recently, chemical control over defects, formation of new hybrid materials and multifunctional nanostructures have been sought in energy, health, and environment related technologies. Surface-disordered anatase-TiO2 has received wide attention due to its exceptional photocatalytic performance. Herein, we demonstrate, for the first time, a one-step aqueous-phase synthesis of a surface-disordered rutile TiO2–graphene quantum dot (TG) hybrid material. The TG-hybrid is a rutile-TiO2 matrix in which homogeneous in situ insertion of GQDs occurs during the growth of the TiO2 particles. The TG-hybrid material showed superior photocatalytic performance with ∼98% solar light driven photo-degradation of methylene blue (MB) dye within 6 min and ∼86% of rhodamine-B (RhB) within 4 min which is much better than the photocatalytic performance shown by the rutile-TiO2 (∼30% and ∼20%, respectively) and GQDs (∼15% and ∼8%, respectively), themselves. Moreover, the TG-hybrid also showed enhanced toxicity to Gram-positive (S. aureus) as well as Gram-negative (E. coli, P. aeruginosa) bacterial cells. The growth-curves of E. coli cells, after incubating them with increasing concentrations of the TG-hybrid, showed that the TG-hybrid could effectively inhibit the growth of E. coli cells at a concentration of 60 μg mL−1. The effect of UV-light exposure on the bacterial-biofilm disruption by the TG-hybrid material was also investigated. It was observed that in the presence of UV-light, the biofilm disruption done by the TG-hybrid was larger in comparison to the TiO2 and GQDs alone, under the same conditions. The increase in the formation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) in the presence of sunlight for the TG-hybrid may be the reason behind its superior antibacterial and biofilm eradication properties. We believe that the TG-hybrid material will have applications in energy, health and environment related technologies.


Gravesian ophthalmopathy was described first by Means. 1 His classification of subtypes of Graves' disease ranges from no ophthalmopathy and severe hyperthyroidism to severe infiltrative ophthalmopathy and minimal hyperthyroidism. Ten euthyroid patients with the early eye signs of Graves' disease have been described by Werner. 2 Some of these patients were actually in the early stages of hyperthyroidism, while others remained euthyroid during prolonged follow-up. In a more recent attempt to explain why hyperthyroidism does not develop, Liddle studied five patients with infiltrative ophthalmopathy and euthyroidism. 3 All showed a failure to respond to thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH). It was concluded that hyperthyroidism did not develop because of a limited thyroid reserve, due to some prior insult to the gland. We are reporting five patients with Graves' disease without hyperthyroidism, four of whom responded normally to exogenous TSH. Materials and Methods Five patients were studied in the Nuclear Medicine Laboratory


Abstract:This article analyzes a crucial aspect of the #MeToo phenomenon overlooked in all the commentary: the sign under which this activism has been taking place. Our premise is that to comprehend the novel politics that #MeToo incites, we need to understand the political grammar of the sign. #MeToo hails individuals to recognize their serial collectivity and assembles them into a fluid yet cohesive group. Straddling the particular and universal, the sign allows for a range of genres of speaking out and joining in, thereby reconfiguring the possibilities of feminist political assemblage. We begin by providing an overview of the arguments summoned in opposition to #MeToo that have dominated public discourse. Next, we examine #MeToo in the context of debates within feminism, demonstrating how #MeToo addresses enduring tensions over the terms of coalitional politics. Finally, we analyze the sign itself, focusing first on the distinctive grammar #MeToo deploys, and then on the politics it facilitates. We argue that #MeToo allows feminists to grapple with the challenges of difference in innovative ways—not only contextually or with respect to the varying positionalities of individuals assembled under the sign, but also in upholding a continuum of sexual violation.


Galactic Cosmic Rays (GCRs) are an intrinsic part of the heliospheric radiation environment, and an inevitable challenge to long-term space exploration. Here we show solar cycle induced GCR modulation at Mars in the period 2005-2020, along with GCR radial gradients, by utilising Mars Express and Rosetta engineering parameters compared to sunspot number time series. The engineering parameter used is called EDAC (Error Detection And Correction), a cumulative counter which is triggered by charged energetic particle causing memory errors in on-board computers. EDAC data provides a new way of gaining insight into the field of particle transport in the heliosphere, allowing us to circumvent the need for dedicated instrumentation as EDAC software is present on all spacecraft.

This data set can be used to capture variations of GCRs in both space and time, yielding the same qualitative information as ground-based neutron monitors. Our analysis of the Mars Express EDAC parameter reveals a strong solar cycle GCR modulation, yielding an anticorrelation coefficient of -0.5 at a time lag of ~5.5 months. By combining Mars Express with Rosetta data, we calculate a 5.3% increase in EDAC count rates per astronomical unit, attributed to a radial gradient in GCR fluxes in accordance with established literature.

The potential of engineering data for scientific purposes remains mostly unexplored. The results obtained from this work demonstrates, for the first time for heliophysics purposes, the usefulness of the EDAC engineering parameter, data mining and the utility of keeping missions operational for many years, providing complimentary data to nominal science instruments.


Background The Edmonton Symptom Assessment Scale (ESAS), created by the Edmonton Group in 1991, is an instrument assessing symptom control commonly used in palliative care. It asks patients to rate nine items on an eleven-point numeric rating scales. Objective The aim of this study was to translate the ESAS to Thai and validate its final version with transcultural adaptation for Thai palliative care patients. The original ESAS was translated into Thai with the Edmonton group`s permission. The translation process followed the cross-cultural adaptation of self-report measures` standard guidelines, including forward translation, synthesis of the translation, back translation, cross-cultural adaptation and pre-testing. Methods This cross-sectional study was first undertaken with 44 end-stage cancer patients in the inpatient setting, which led to the final version. The reliability and validity of the final version, with a sample of 37 end-stage cancer patients, was then examined in the out-patient department at Ramathibodi hospital. The face validity was evaluated through patient interviews, using guide questions. The internal-consistency reliability was calculated by using SPSS program. Results 91.8% of patients declared that the ESAS-Thai questionnaire was generally clear. It yielded a Cronbach's α of 0.7458 in the inpatient setting. After modifying the words 'appetite' and 'well-being,' 37 cancer patients, who were cared for by the Departments of Medicine, Surgery, Gynaecology and Otolaryngology, self-administered the questionnaire in the out-patient department. The mean age was 52.2 (10.8) with a 0.8904 Cronbach's α in the validation sample. Conclusion After the translation and cross-cultural adaptation, the Thai version of the ESAS achieved good levels of face validity and internal-consistency reliability. It is now available as a patient-administered instrument to evaluate symptoms among palliative care patients in Thailand.


Classical planners have traditionally made the closed world assumption — facts absent from the planner's world model are false. Incomplete-information planners make the open world assumption — the truth value of a fact absent from the planner's model is unknown, and must be sensed. The open world assumption leads to two difficulties: (1) How can the planner determine the scope of a universally quantified goal? (2) When is a sensory action redundant, yielding information already known to the planner?

This paper describes the fully-implemented XII planner, which solves both problems by representing and reasoning about local closed world information (LCW). We report on experiments utilizing our UNIX softbot (software robot) which demonstrate that LCW can substantially improve the softbot's performance by eliminating redundant information gathering.


Animal pose estimation and tracking (APT) is a fundamental task for detecting and tracking animal keypoints from a sequence of video frames. Previous animal-related datasets focus either on animal tracking or single-frame animal pose estimation, and never on both aspects. The lack of APT datasets hinders the development and evaluation of video-based animal pose estimation and tracking methods, limiting real-world applications, e.g., understanding animal behavior in wildlife conservation. To fill this gap, we make the first step and propose APT-36K, i.e., the first large-scale benchmark for animal pose estimation and tracking. Specifically, APT-36K consists of 2,400 video clips collected and filtered from 30 animal species with 15 frames for each video, resulting in 36,000 frames in total. After manual annotation and careful double-check, high-quality keypoint and tracking annotations are provided for all the animal instances. Based on APT-36K, we benchmark several representative models on the following three tracks: (1) supervised animal pose estimation on a single frame under intra- and inter-domain transfer learning settings, (2) inter-species domain generalization test for unseen animals, and (3) animal pose estimation with animal tracking. Based on the experimental results, we gain some empirical insights and show that APT-36K provides a valuable animal pose estimation and tracking benchmark, offering new challenges and opportunities for future research. The code and dataset will be made publicly available at https://github.com/pandorgan/APT-36K.


Generating counterfactual test-cases is an important backbone for testing NLP models and making them as robust and reliable as traditional software. In generating the test-cases, a desired property is the ability to control the test-case generation in a flexible manner to test for a large variety of failure cases and to explain and repair them in a targeted manner. In this direction, significant progress has been made in the prior works by manually writing rules for generating controlled counterfactuals. However, this approach requires heavy manual supervision and lacks the flexibility to easily introduce new controls. Motivated by the impressive flexibility of the plug-and-play approach of PPLM, we propose bringing the framework of plug-and-play to counterfactual test case generation task. We introduce CASPer, a plug-and-play counterfactual generation framework to generate test cases that satisfy goal attributes on demand. Our plug-and-play model can steer the test case generation process given any attribute model without requiring attribute-specific training of the model. In experiments, we show that CASPer effectively generates counterfactual text that follow the steering provided by an attribute model while also being fluent, diverse and preserving the original content. We also show that the generated counterfactuals from CASPer can be used for augmenting the training data and thereby fixing and making the test model more robust.


Quantum entanglement, and the resulting peculiar non-classical correlations are one of the most counter-intuitive aspects of quantum mechanics.
The formalism of interactive games from computational complexity theory provides a useful framework in which to understand the power of entanglement. In an interactive game, a verifier interacts with a number of infinitely powerful provers who are allowed to share quantum entanglement but otherwise can't communicate. The ability of the verifier to extract useful information from the provers, whom he does not trust, provides an interesting measure of the ability of the provers to coordinate using their shared entanglement. Two particular interactive games we'll look at are Magic Square and 3SAT.
The Magic Square game is the iconic example of a game where two classical provers cannot perfectly coordinate their strategies using shared randomness, but quantum provers with shared entanglement can win with probability 1. We show that by adding an extra prover, we disallow perfect cheating. For 3SAT with three provers we also show that perfect cheating is not possible.
We then generalize the results for Magic Square and 3SAT by looking at non-commuting provers, a superset of entangled provers (communication is allowed, but operators applied by different provers must commute). Using this method, we obtain a generalized Tsirelson inequality that we apply to the Magic Square. Hence, we are able to give provably optimal strategies for the general Magic Square with n players. We also recover a similar result for 3SAT as with entangled provers, and we improve on it by showing that the gap is inverse exponential in the input size.
The no-signaling principle, which forbids faster than light communication, is a fundamental constraint on the non-local correlations resulting from quantum entanglement. However, no-signaling allows distributions that are more general than those arising from quantum mechanics. In particular, using a specific "unit" of general non-local correlation (the Popescu-Rohlich box), we show that there are classes that are equal to NEXP classically, but collapse to AM once such correlations are allowed. We also show that MIP where the verifier only looks at the XOR of the answers collapses to PSPACE. For the second approach, we show that by writing general non-local correlations as linear constraints, MIP is included in EXP under such correlations (vs NEXP classically).
We can extend these results to entangled quantum provers, by formulating an artificial MIP-like class built on a promise problem, that classically is equal to NEXP, but that also collapses to AM when quantum correlations are present.


The federal Liberal Party's 2004 general election platform heavily emphasized issues that are mainly subject to provincial competence under the constitution (e.g. health care, child care, cities). Since the federal government lacks the authority to implement detailed regulatory schemes in these areas, acting on these election commitments frequently requires federalprovincial-territorial (FPT) agreements.


NOTCH pathway proteins, including the transcriptional factor HES1, play crucial roles in the development of the inner ear by means of the lateral inhibition mechanism, in which supporting cells have their phenotype preserved while they are prevented from becoming hair cells. Genetic manipulation of this pathway has been demonstrated to increase hair cell number. The present study aimed to investigate gene expression effects in hair cells and supporting cells after Hes1-shRNA lentivirus transduction in organotypic cultures of the organ of Corti from postnatal-day-3 mice. Forty-eight hours after in vitro knockdown, Hes1 gene expression was reduced at both mRNA and protein levels. Myo7a (hair cell marker) and Sox2 (progenitor cell marker) mRNA levels also significantly increased. The modulation of gene expression in the organ of Corti upon Hes1 knockdown is consistent with cell phenotypes related to lateral inhibition mechanism interference in the inner ear. The lentivirus-based expression of Hes1-shRNA is a valuable strategy for genetic interference in the organ of Corti and for future evaluation of its efficacy in protocols aiming at the regeneration of hair cells in vivo.


Ischaemia Modified Albumin- An Indicator of Widespread Endothelial Damage in Diabetes Mellitus
Hyperglycaemia in Type 2 Diabetes mellitus has been implicated in the pathogenesis and progression of the disease process with micro vascular complications as per various researches. Generation of free radicals with oxidative stress and associated ischemia leading to endothelial damage and subsequent inflammation, results in long term complications like retinopathy, neuropathy and nephropathy in type 2 Diabetes mellitus. A positive association of increased level of oxidative stress markers like Malondialdehyde (MDA) has been detected in Diabetes associated with complications.


In the classic movie "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" set in the turn-of-the-20th-century South, an ominously unstoppable lawman and his posse track escaped prisoners with bloodhounds and rifles, finally catching up with those flawed and comical heroes at an old home place. About to be summarily executed, our heroes protest that they have been recently pardoned by the governor and that their imminent lynching would be illegal. Their arguable leader Ulysses Everett McGill exclaims, "It ain't the law!" Unfazed, Sheriff Cooley, cruel eyes hidden behind lifeless black shades, juts his implacable jaw skyward and scoffs, "The law? The law is a human institution." With those immortal words, the lawman at once justifies and pardons the illegality of the looming nooses on the grounds that the law is intrinsically fallible, being a human creation, and that fallibility is an irrefutable inevitability.

Artificial intelligence is a human institution. It, machine learning, and all its algorithmic system variants (collectively, "artificial intelligence" or "AI") are flawed and are subject to the discriminatory biases of those people who and organizations that design, code, test, and use them, including the judiciary, the administrative state, and other government institutions and private companies. Much of the multitudinous Big Data upon which algorithms feed and operate are likewise flawed and reflect discriminatory biases, including the historical biases baked into and persisting in the data from redlining and systematized racism in the Jim Crow era.

AI deploys rapidly, at scale, and often worldwide. Consequently, discriminatory biases in AI has a tremendous and rapid potential for harm to the people who are the subjects of those systems, their families and communities, and to the societies of which they are a part. Because algorithmic determinations may be used, in turn, as inputs for yet other algorithmic systems, the harms propagate. The harms may be irreparable. The scale and gravity of the impact of discriminatory bias in machine learning and other artificial intelligence and algorithmic systems are enormous and represent potentially existential and global threats to a more perfect union of humanity.

Artificial intelligence is a human institution, but that does not mean that we should accept its misdesign and misuse as inevitable failings that may be simply written off as the cost of "doing business." Where people and organizations invent and seek to deploy such tools, they and public policy leaders must find ways of minimize the amplified risks of new and irreparable harms associated with those tools.

How then can discriminatory biases in machine learning and other artificial intelligence systems be detected and eradicated? How can we ensure that, despite their status as a "human institution," algorithmic systems are purged of their human-derived flaws and rendered just? These questions and others resonate, leading to the ultimate question of algorithmic justice: What is the Algorithmic State of our Nation, and how may it be ascertained and continually improved?


The analysis of electron-distribution formation in a metal irradiated with a laser pulse is given on the basis of the explicit solution of the quantum kinetic equation. The angular distributions of electrons emitted under laser irradiation of a metal surface are associated with the non-Fermi electron distribution generated by the laser action. The anisotropy of photon absorption in an electron–phonon collision causes a two-leafed distribution structure, which qualitatively distinguishes this mechanism of laser-stimulated electron emission.


Copyright © 2020 The Iron and Steel Institute of Japan Abstract: Utilization of the solid phase transformation heat of the iron-based alloy as well as its sensible heat was proposed as a Heat Storage Materials, HSM, for the rapid carbonization and pulverization process of biomass. Aluminizing of the HSM is a promising way to improve focused to improve its high temperature oxidation resistance. In this study, behavior of solid phase transformation and high temperature oxidation behavior, and wear and impact resistances of the oxide layer are examined for Fe-Mn-C alloy as a candidate of HSM. Latent heats and transformation temperatures were evaluated using a DSC. Mass change ratio of the samples were measured using a TG. Then, DSC measurements were carried out with the oxidized samples. Spherical segment samples were charged into lab-scale rotary kiln type furnace to evaluate wear and impact resistance of oxide layer formed during high temperature oxidation. Endoand exo-thermic heats of Fe-2%Mn-0.7%C showed similar with Fe-0.77%C alloy. Endoand exo-thermic temperatures deceased with increase in Mn concentration. Fe-Mn-C alloy did not show sufficient oxidation resistance at high temperature, whereas the aluminized sample showed a superior oxidation resistance due to the formation of continuous Al2O3 layer. Thinner Al2O3 layer is formed on the alloy sample by the aluminizing with lower Al concentration and shorter time and its latent heat become larger. The Al2O3 layer of the aluminized and oxidized samples were not peeled and significant weight change did not also occur after the experiment using the rotary kiln type furnace.