Abstract. The Nile Delta is an important agricultural area with a fast-growing population. Though traditionally irrigated with surface water, the delta increasingly relies on groundwater. However, saline groundwater extends far land inward, rendering groundwater close to the coastal zone useless for consumption or agriculture. To aid groundwater management decisions, hydrogeologists reconstructed this saline and brackish groundwater zone using variable-density groundwater models with very large dispersivities. However, this approach cannot explain the observed freshening of this zone as observed by hydrogeochemists, who hypothesize that the coastal saline zone is the effect of the Holocene transgression. Here, we investigated physical plausibility of this hypothesis by conducting a palaeo-reconstruction of groundwater salinity for the last 32 ka with a complex 3D variable-density groundwater flow model, using state-of-the-art model code that allows for parallel computation. Several scenarios with different lithologies and hypersaline groundwater provenances were simulated, of which five were selected that showed the best match with the observations. Amongst these selections, total fresh water volumes varied strongly, ranging from 1526 to 2659 km3, mainly due to uncertainties in the lithology offshore and at larger depths. This range is smaller (1511–1989 km3) when we consider the volumes of onshore fresh groundwater within 300 m depth. Regardless of the variance, in all cases the total volume of hypersaline groundwater exceeded that of sea water. We also show that during the last 32 ka, the total fresh groundwater volumes significantly declined, with a factor ranging from 1.9 to 5.4, due to the rising sea-level. Compared to a steady-state solution with present-day boundary conditions, the palaeo-reconstruction improved our validation for the saline zone (5 g/L–35 g/L TDS). Also, under highly permeable conditions the marine transgression simulated with the palaeo-reconstruction led to a steeper fresh-salt interface compared to its steady-state equivalent, while low permeable clay layers allowed for the preservation of volumes of fresh groundwater. This shows that long-term transient simulations are needed when estimating present-day fresh-salt groundwater distribution in large deltas. The insights of this study are also applicable to other major deltaic areas, given the wide-range of lithological model scenarios used in this study and since many deltas also experienced a Holocene marine transgression.


This paper reports findings from a multi-method set of four studies that investigate why we continue to fall for phish. Current security advice suggests poor spelling and grammar in emails can be signs of phish. But a content analysis of a phishing archive indicates that many such emails contain no obvious spelling or grammar mistakes and often use convincing logos and letterheads. An online survey of 224 people finds that although phish are detected approximately 80% of the time, those with logos are significantly harder to detect. A qualitative interview study was undertaken to better understand the strategies used to identify phish. Blind users were selected because it was thought they may be more vulnerable to phishing attacks, however they demonstrated robust strategies for identifying phish based on careful reading of emails. Finally an analysis was undertaken of phish as a literary form. This identifies the main literary device employed as pastiche and draws on critical theory to consider why security based pastiche may be currently very persuasive.


The purpose of this article is to investigate the relationship between EU state aid policy and local self-government. This policy prohibits public authorities on all lev-els from distorting competition by granting economic support to individual market actors. Over time, it has developed into a complex regulatory framework, making it sometimes difficult to know when and how it becomes applicable. In this article, we tease out the basic principles of state aid regulation from EU policy documents and court cases in order to discuss how it impacts on local authorities, with exam-ples from a Swedish context. We conclude that state aid regulation has placed new restrictions on local self-government, but also opened up new opportunities for action to those who know how to use the framework to their advantage. We point to the need for comparative research on how local governments choose to act within this new framework, in order to understand the effects of state aid policy in the member states.


We discuss an effect of dc current and dc voltage (stopping bias) generation in a semiconductor superlattice subjected by an ac electric field and its phase-shifted n-th harmonic. In the low field limit, we find a simple dependence of dc voltage on a strength, frequency, and relative phase of mixing harmonics for an arbitrary even value of n.
We show that the generated dc voltage has a maximum when a frequency of ac field is of the order of a scattering constant of electrons in a superlattice. This means that for typical semiconductor superlattices at room temperature operating in the THz frequency domain the effect is really observable.
We also made a comparison of a recent paper describing an effect of a directed current generation in a semiconductor superlattice subjected by ac field and its second harmonic (n=2) [K.Seeger, Appl.Phys.Lett. 76(2000)82] with our earlier findings describing the same effect [K.Alekseev et al., Europhys. Lett. 47(1999)595; cond-mat/9903092 ].
For the mixing of an ac field and its n-th harmonic with n>=4, we found that additionally to the phase-shift controlling of the dc current, there is a frequency control. This frequency controlling of the dc current direction is absent in the case of n=2. The found effect is that, both the dc current suppression and the dc current reversals exist for some particular values of ac field frequency. For typical semiconductor superlattices such an interesting behavior of the dc current should be observable also in the THz domain.
Finally, we briefly review the history of the problem of the dc current generation at mixing of harmonics in semiconductors and semiconductor microstructures.


Cardiac auscultation that is a still widely used technique to diagnose heart murmurs induced by heart disorders. Due to the fact that this method is quite subjective and time consuming, the enhancement of diagnosis techniques would contribute significantly to clinical auscultation. Development of computer-aided auscultative diagnosis systems, which provide more objective, reliable and faster results, would reduce the classification errors that may be occurred in the cardiovascular disorder diagnosis. Such an automated auscultative diagnostic software can be implemented by using signal processing and machine learning algorithms. The presented study uses a combination of the Walsh-Hadamard transform (WHT) and Hidden Markov Model (HMM) techniques. This study clearly shows that; successful automatic murmur diagnosis kits can be developed for assisting the doctors in clinical decision making process.


Heterogeneous computing utilizing both CPU and FPGA requires access to data in the main memory from both devices. While a typical system relies on software executing on the CPU to orchestrate all data movements between the FPGA and the main memory, our demo presents a complementary FPGA-centric approach that allows gateware to directly access the virtual memory space as part of the executing process without involving the CPU. A caching address translation buffer was implemented alongside the user FPGA gateware to provide runtime mapping between virtual and physical memory addresses. The system was implemented on a commercial off-the-shelf FPGA add-on card to demonstrate the viability of such approach in low-cost systems. Experiment demonstrated reasonable performance improvement when compared to a typical software-centric implementation; while the number of context switches between FPGA and CPU in both kernel and user mode was significantly reduced, freeing the CPU for other concurrent user tasks.


The EU directive on the promotion of the use of energy from renewable sources (Directive 2009/28/EC) sets a mandatory minimum target for the use of fuels produced using renewable energy sources of 10% of total petrol and diesel consumption in the transport sector by the year 2020. In addition, it states that production of renewable fuels should be consistent with sustainable development and must not endanger biodiversity. In the INTERREG IVA Southern Finland – Estonia Sub-programme, efforts towards finding solutions to the tasks set by the EU were undertaken in co-operation with Finnish and Estonian researchers. The purpose of the "From Waste to Traffic Fuel" (W-Fuel) project was to promote the sustainable production and use of biogas using locally-sourced biodegradable waste materials from the food and beverage industry and the agricultural and municipal sectors. The ultimate aim of the project was to upgrade the biogas (produced based on anaerobic digestion of biodegradable wastes, sludge, manure, slurry and energy crops) to biomethane with a methane content similar to natural gas, to be further used as transport fuel with the aim of reducing traffic-borne emissions, in particular CO2. The project combined waste, energy and traffic solutions in order to decrease emissions, costs and the use of materials. Six case areas in southern Finland and northern Estonia were selected. The two case areas in Estonia were the counties of Harju and Laane-Viru in northern Estonia. The project aimed to promote waste and sludge prevention and to commence biogas production and its subsequent upgrading to biomethane for use as a renewable fuel. The project promoted regional businesses and employment in waste treatment and 'green energy' production. On basis of the gathered data, the biogas potentials and prerequisites of each case county were analysed. Furthermore, the environmental, economic and other regional effects of the different options were compared. By developing research-based feasibility plans, the project partners provided solutions for public and private companies, local governments and research institutes. The project was implemented in close co-operation with municipal waste and sewage companies as well as stakeholders in industry and the agricultural and transport sectors. This report presents the project results for Estonia.


The etiology of schizophrenia and other
psychiatric disorders is characterized by a strong genetic
influence which was confirmed in family, twin and adoption studies.
Within genome wide coupling and association studies certain
chromosomal regions with an increased risk for psychiatric
diseases, in particular for schizophrenia, could be discovered,
such as the susceptibility genes DTNBP-1, NRG-1, DISC-1 and G72.
Certain allelic variations of these genes, so-called SNP (single
nucleotide polymorphisms), are associated with an increased risk
for the disorder.
These susceptibility genes are believed to influence brain regional
volumes of grey matter. Hippocampal volume reduction is one of the
major neuropathological findings in schizophrenia. Further
so-called endophenotypes are reduced volume of temporal lobes,
frontal lobes, ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) as well as
dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC).
In the present study 161 patients with schizophrenia (n= 44),
bipolar disorder (n= 42), compulsive disorder (n= 31) as well as a
healthy control group (n= 44) were examined. All study participants
were genotyped with respect to the single nucleotide polymorphisms
and submitted to imaging of T1-weighted MRI on a 1,5 Tesla system.
The analysis of the images was carried out using voxel-based
morphometry (VBM). The statistical evaluation was based on SPM5
(statistical parametric mapping).
According to the previous findings, structural changes of grey
matter were found in region of hippocampus, frontal and temporal
lobes and other structures. Interestingly, the risk SNP of all
examined susceptibility genes showed an increased grey matter
volume instead of volume deficits.
In DTNBP-1 the SNP rs2619522 (P1763) with the risk allele guanine
and the SNP rs1018381 (P1578) with the allele thymine were
examined. In both gene variants, volume alterations were found in
the left hippocampus, the frontal and temporal cortex. Effects of
frontal and temporal increased grey matter volumes were found in
the SNP rs4733263 of the risk gene NRG-1 with respect to the
guanine variant. The risk allele adenine encoding for the amino
acid serine in the SNP rs821616 (exon11 / ser704cys) of the DISC-1
is responsible for alterations of the frontal and temporal cortex.
The risk gene G72 with regard to the SNP rs1935058 and the cytosine
variant is associated with grey matter changes in area of left
hippocampus, frontal and temporal lobe. With respect of the SNP
rs778294 (M19) an increased grey matter volume in the region of
frontal and temporal lobe can be found in carriers of the risk
allele thymine.
In contrast to prior findings this study shows an increase of grey
matter volume. While this might be compensatory due to disturbed
feedback-loops, it could also reflect a relative volume increase
due to a mismatch between grey and white matter. Chronic
neuroleptic medication has also been described to cause this
effect. It seems likely that the multifactorial etiology of
schizophrenia with its genetic heterogeneity is reflected in a
large variety of phenotypes- not only with regard to clinical
presentation but also in terms of morphologic alterations at the
CNS level.


The increased amount of contracting in many agricultural markets continues to be a source of considerable controversy. Some research indicates that increased levels of contracting lead to better prices for processors/users while other research is inconclusive. This article uses an experimental economics approach to study the effects on prices of systematic variations in contracting levels using an experimental model of the fed cattle market. Using experimental economics allowed the control of contracting levels and other variables (e.g. supply levels) that are not possible using industry data. Pricing dynamics changed considerably with increased levels of contracting, but the mean price level was found to be not related to contracting levels. The response of price to a given supply was found to increase as contracting levels increase. In addition, price variability with high levels of contracting showed long periods with relatively little adjustments followed by short periods of abrupt changes.


This letter presents a dual-mode dual-band bandpass filter using a patch resonator with a cross slot and two different groups of stubs loaded. The cross slot with different orthogonal lengths excites orthogonal modes in the passbands and reduces the patch size. Meanwhile, the two sets of stubs can modify the filter's input impedance at different frequencies and control the even and odd modes in the passbands, respectively. Utilizing these two kinds of elements, transmission poles can be realized easily in both passbands. For demonstration, a dual-band patch resonator filter working at 2.4 and 5.2 GHz is designed. The theoretical analysis is given and the simulated and measured results are presented. The good agreement verifies the proposed method.


Given a finite locally free resolution of a coherent analytic sheaf $\mathcal
F$, equipped with Hermitian metrics and connections, we construct an explicit
current, obtained as the limit of certain smooth Chern forms of $\mathcal F$,
that represents the Chern class of $\mathcal F$ and has support on the support
of $\mathcal F$. If the connections are $(1,0)$-connections and $\mathcal F$
has pure dimension, then the first nontrivial component of this Chern current
coincides with (a constant times) the fundamental cycle of $\mathcal F$. The
proof of this goes through a generalized Poincar\'e-Lelong formula, previously
obtained by the authors, and a result that relates the Chern current to the
residue current associated with the locally free resolution.


Wastewater land application has been considered as one of pathways to reduce the pressure on fresh water resources for irrigation use throughout the world. Two concerns with land application of wastewater are the potential of nitrogen contamination of groundwater and salt accumulation in soils. Current design procedures of surface application systems are required to be optimized to protect groundwater from potential pollution and protect soils from degradation. This research provides a new model design for surface application systems under common climate and soil conditions for safe disposal of wastewater while saving fresh water resources. The procedure is developed based on water, nitrogen, and salt balances to restrict leaching while meeting the salt leaching requirements of the plant used. Another objective of this research is to model the quality and quantity of leachate water passing through root zone in a land application system based on this proposed design approach. Data were collected from a local land application site where Bermuda grass is grown using a solid set irrigation system and wastewater from an aerobic pond treatment system. Deep percolate water is collected in lysimeter type samplers and analyzed approximately monthly. Soil samples have also been collected for analysis in the mass balance analyses. The data shows that the total nitrogen concentration in the leachate is less than 5 mg/L and typically less than 2 mg/L. Salt concentration varies with designed leaching ranging from 1100 to 2500 µS/cm.


Abstract– This paper summarizes the test data obtained from an experimental investigation of reinforced concrete (RC) wide beams reinforced with lattice girders, which can also be described as one-way slabs, under low-rate (static) concentrated loading applied at their mid-span. Tests were conducted on lattice girder reinforced and traditionally reinforced beam-type specimens to investigate the effect of lattice girder on load carrying capacity. Key aspects of structural response such as the load–deflection behavior, crack patterns, strength and failure modes of the tested beams were recorded and given in this paper. A total of 6 beams with two different reinforcement arrangements were tested. Tested beams were simply supported at a span of 2250 mm. All specimens were tested under static loading and midspan deflections were recorded using a displacement transducer. Similar stiffness was displayed by the lattice girder reinforced and traditionally reinforced beams, but higher resistant capacity was shown by the lattice girder reinforced beams.


P152

 Background:
 Leukoaraiosis (LA) is a frequent finding on CT scans of patients with vascular risk factors and cerebrovascular disease, particularly in those with lacunar stroke. Both conditions appear to be linked by a common pathophysiological mechanism, namely small vessel disease.
 Objective:
 To characterize the relationship between lacunar stroke and LA, and to correlate with the risk of recurrent lacunar stroke. Patients &
 Methods:
 Baseline CT scans of NASCET participants with stroke as the index event were assessed for the presence and severity of LA by two readers independently unaware of clinical data.
 Results:
 Four groups based on the type of index stroke and on the presence of LA were formed: a) no lacunar stroke & no LA (n=437), 2) non lacunar stroke & LA (n=153), c) lacunar stroke & no LA (n=365), d) lacunar stroke & LA (n=76). Baseline characteristics different among the groups were: age >65 years (53, 76, 56, 63% respectively p<0.001), hyperlipidemia (30, 20, 37, 29% respectively p=0.002), smoking (42, 28, 41, 45, 42% respectively p=0.02) and degree of carotid stenosis 50–99% (52, 44, 45, 34% respectively p=0.01). Patients with LA were 2.9 times more likely to have multiple lacunes on CT (p=0.001). The risk of lacunar stroke at 5 years increased across the four groups (5, 8, 10 and 11% respectively p=0.02), after adjusting for all baseline characteristics.
 Conclusions:
 The presence of leukoaraiosis in lacunar stroke patients is associated with higher number of lacunar infarcts and strongly predicts the likelihood of developing a subsequent lacunar stroke. Our findings support the hypothesis that both conditions are caused by the same pathological entity in this patient population.


Networked materials and micro-architectured systems gain increasingly importance in multi-scale physics and engineering sciences. Typically, computational intractable microscopic models have to be applied to capture the physical processes and numerous transmission conditions at singularities, interfaces and borders. The topology of the periodic microstructure governs the effective behaviour of such networked systems. A mathematical concept for the analysis of microscopic models on extremely large periodic networks is developed. We consider microscopic models for diffusion–advection–reaction systems in variational form on periodic manifolds. The global characteristics are identified by a homogenization approach for singularly perturbed networks with a periodic topology. We prove that the solutions of the variational models on varying networks converge to a two-scale limit function. In addition, the corresponding tangential gradients converge to a two-scale limit function for vanishing lengths of branches. We identify the variational homogenized model. Complex network models, previously considered as completely intractable, can now be solved by standard PDE-solvers in nearly no time. Furthermore, the homogenized coefficients provide an effective characterization of the global behaviour of the variational system.


In most characteristic form the profile of Houston Black clay (the type specimen of the new group of Grumusols as proposed by Oakes and Thorp) consists of a (1) a very thick, much darkened, uneluviated A horizon of black calcareous clay 2 to 4 feet chick, (2) a slightly darkened transition several feet thick, and (3) substratum of marine clay or marl. Thickness of the black layer varies between ½ and 5 feet with position in the original pit-and-mound gilgai microrelief. All parts of the solum are equally clayey and, where exposed to thorough drying and moistening without confinement of volume, naturally crumble to a mulch of discrete grains. Volume change on moistening, plasticity, and stickiness approximate the maximum that occurs in soil. Free carbonates are present but lowest in the upper few feet, intermediate in total amount but partially segregated into concretions between depths of about 3 and 8 feet, highest in the relatively unaltered substrata. This soil type, with an aggregate area of some 2½ million acres, is the most extensive of its kind in the United States and exemplifies the blackest, most plastic, and more crumbly (self mulching) variety of neutral to calcareous dark clay soils high in montmorillonite. Developed under prairie vegetation on smooth erosional upland in moist-subhumid parts of the Gulf Coastal Plain, its occurrence is confined to outcrops of argillaceous limey rocks and related to a climate that gives alternating moistening and desiccation of the profile to depths of as much as 10 feet. Relations to some of the important closely related soil series are given. Total extent of such dark clays in the United States is a minor fraction of that in some tropical countries.


In this study, 5 fish species caught from Kumlutarla, Tabanbuku and Gemici region of Karakaya Dam Lake were examined. A total of 595 fish; 200 Alburnus mossulensis, 117 Chondrostoma regium, 103 Capoeta trutta, 98 Capoeta umbla and 79 Acanthobrama marmid were used as study materied. In terms of endohelminthes. Three parasite species were found in 405 fish host Diplostomum sp. Metacercaria (Trematoda) was found in the eyes of. Alburnus mossulensis, Chondrostoma regium, Capoeta trutta, Capoeta umbla and Acanthobrama marmid. Neoechinorhynchus rutili (Acanthocephala) was found in abdominal cavity of Capoeta trutta. Khawia sinensis (Cestoda) was found in the intestine of Alburnus mossulensis and Acanthobrama marmid.


Right heart thrombus is a slightly detectable condition. In patients presenting with acute pulmonary embolism, the finding of thrombus in transit has been associated with high in-hospital mortality. We present a case of a 50-year-old male patient with acute pulmonary embolism and a thrombus in transit in the right atrium. We took the decision to perform fibrinolysis with tenecteplase, presenting significant improvement in the clinical condition, without any complications related to the therapy. Our case demonstrates the effectiveness of thrombolytic therapy in cases of pulmonary embolism and thrombus in transit in right chambers.


An electronic device, preferably in the form of a mobile phone, comprising a support structure and a camera carried by the support structure. An orientation detector is connected to the camera. The orientation detector is configured to identify images features in an image captured by the camera, such as the eyes and the mouth of the user, and to determine rotation orientation of the image relative to a reference orientation. A display carried by the support structure is configured to display a data representation, and further to display this data representation in an orientation dependent on the determined rotation orientation. This way a data presentation can e.g. be displayed in a portrait orientation or in a landscape orientation in dependence of which rotational orientation the device is currently held in when the data representation is viewed by a user of the electronic device.


This paper describes the results or several years' work in designing and implementing a probabilistic production costing methodology in the model for seasonal operations planning at the Swedish State Power Board (SSPB). The probabilistic production costing methodology can handle a detailed representation of the thermal system and the interchange of power to neighbouring systems. The nuclear units are modelled as a multistate and multiblock unit in combination with certain regulating rules for the off-loading process. The fossil fired units are in general multiblock units and the successive blocks for a given unit are not sequentially merit order loaded. The load is represented by three duration curves for one week. The probabilistic production costing simulation is based on a two-stage approach using the cumulant method. The first stage works in an iterative mode with the optimizer and the second stage is employed when the optimizer has converged. The model of seasonal planning including the probabilistic production costing model has been implemented in an information system (POP) at the SSPB.


The American Psychiatric Association has never officially recognized extreme racism (as opposed to ordinary prejudice) as a mental health problem, although the issue was raised more than 30 years ago. After several racist killings in the civil rights era, a group of black psychiatrists sought to have extreme bigotry classified as a mental disorder. The association's officials rejected the recommendation, arguing that because so many Americans are racist, even extreme racism in this country is normative—a cultural problem rather than an indication of psychopathology.

The psychiatric profession's primary index for diagnosing psychiatric symptoms, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), does not include racism, prejudice, or bigotry in its text or index.1 Therefore, there is currently no support for including extreme racism under any diagnostic category. This leads psychiatrists to think that it cannot and should not be treated in their patients.

To continue perceiving extreme racism as normative and not pathologic is to lend it legitimacy. Clearly, anyone who scapegoats a whole group of people and seeks to eliminate them to resolve his or her internal conflicts meets criteria for a delusional disorder, a major psychiatric illness.

Extreme racists' violence should be considered in the context of behavior described by Allport in The Nature of Prejudice.2 Allport's 5-point scale categorizes increasingly dangerous acts. It begins with verbal expression of antagonism, progresses to avoidance of members of disliked groups, then to active discrimination against them, to physical attack, and finally to extermination (lynchings, massacres, genocide). That fifth point on the scale, the acting out of extermination fantasies, is readily classifiable as delusional behavior.

More recently, Sullaway and Dunbar used a prejudice rating scale to assess and describe levels of prejudice.3 They found associations between highly prejudiced people and other indicators of psychopathology. The subtype at the extreme end of their scale is a paranoid/delusional prejudice disorder.

Using the DSM's structure of diagnostic criteria for delusional disorder,4(p329) I suggest the following subtype:

Prejudice type: A delusion whose theme is that a group of individuals, who share a defining characteristic, in one's environment have a particular and unusual significance. These delusions are usually of a negative or pejorative nature, but also may be grandiose in content. When these delusions are extreme, the person may act out by attempting to harm, and even murder, members of the despised group(s).

Extreme racist delusions can also occur as a major symptom in other psychotic disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Persons suffering delusions usually have serious social dysfunction that impairs their ability to work with others and maintain employment.

As a clinical psychiatrist, I have treated several patients who projected their own unacceptable behavior and fears onto ethnic minorities, scapegoating them for society's problems. Their strong racist feelings, which were tied to fixed belief systems impervious to reality checks, were symptoms of serious mental dysfunction. When these patients became more aware of their own problems, they grew less paranoid—and less prejudiced.

It is time for the American Psychiatric Association to designate extreme racism as a mental health problem by recognizing it as a delusional psychotic symptom. Persons afflicted with such psychopathology represent an immediate danger to themselves and others. Clinicians need guidelines for recognizing delusional racism in all its forms so that they can provide appropriate treatment. Otherwise, extreme delusional racists will continue to fall through the cracks of the mental health system, and we can expect more of them to explode and act out their deadly delusions.


A set of questionnaires for the assessment (screening) of psychological and social problems in cardiac rehabilitation patients is analyzed for its psychometric properties. The test battery had before been consented by a task force of the German Association for the Prevention and Rehabilitation of Cardiovascular Disease, DGPR. It integrates generally approved and well-tried assessments for depression/anxiety, social isolation (vocational) stress, and subjective vocational disability. The questionnaire was administered to a convenience sample of 426 patients undergoing inpatient cardiac rehabilitation. Results on the psychometric properties, a comparison of the cardiac sample to the general population, as well as distributions of quartile ranges are reported. Also, a preliminary appraisal of the need for further assessment or treatment is made. The results confirm that the short test battery is suited for assessing psychological and social problems in cardiac rehabilitation patients.


Background. Treatment benefits and harms are often communicated as relative risk reductions and increases, which are frequently misunderstood by doctors and patients. One suggestion for improving understanding of such risk information is to also communicate the baseline risk. We investigated 1) whether the presentation format of the baseline risk influences understanding of relative risk changes and 2) the mediating role of people's numeracy skills. Method. We presented laypeople (N = 1234) with a hypothetical scenario about a treatment that decreased (Experiments 1a, 2a) or increased (Experiments 1b, 2b) the risk of heart disease. Baseline risk was provided as a percentage or a frequency. In a forced-choice paradigm, the participants' task was to judge the risk in the treatment group given the relative risk reduction (or increase) and the baseline risk. Numeracy was assessed using the Lipkus 11-item scale. Results. Communicating baseline risk in a frequency format facilitated correct understanding of a treatment's benefits and harms, whereas a percentage format often impeded understanding. For example, many participants misinterpreted a relative risk reduction as referring to an absolute risk reduction. Participants with higher numeracy generally performed better than those with lower numeracy, but all participants benefitted from a frequency format. Limitations are that we used a hypothetical medical scenario and a nonrepresentative sample. Conclusions. Presenting baseline risk in a frequency format improves understanding of relative risk information, whereas a percentage format is likely to lead to misunderstandings. People's numeracy skills play an important role in correctly understanding medical information. Overall, communicating treatment benefits and harms in the form of relative risk changes remains problematic, even when the baseline risk is explicitly provided.


Cantang grouper (Epinephelus fuscogutattus lanceolatus) is one of the most important economical fish species but it's growth is slower than other fish. The addition of enzymes to artifical feed is done to maximize the protein for fish growth. Papain enzymes are exogenus enzymes that aid in the process of protein hydrolysis. This research aims to determine the effect of papain crude enzyme extract (PCEE) on daily growth rate, feed efficiency, number and length of villy. This research was conducted on June November 2017 at floating net cage Pangandaran Coastal– West Java. The test fish used is cantang grouper with average weight of each 15 gr and length of 7 8 cm as much as 900 fishes. The research method used was Completely Randomized Design (CRD) consisting of 5 treatments: A (5% PCEE), B (3,75% PCEE), C (2,5% PCEE), D (1,25% PCEE) and E (without PCEE) with 3 replications. The data analysis with F test is followed by Duncan multiple range test. The results of this research show that the 5 % PCEE can increasing the daily growth rate (3.16 %), feed efficiency ( 71.56 % ), number of villy (53 pieces) and length of villy 523 mm.


This note revisits the classical orthogonal Procrustes problem and investigates the norm-dependent geometric behavior underlying Procrustes alignment for subspaces. It presents generic, deterministic bounds quantifying the performance of a specified Procrustes-based choice of subspace alignment. Numerical examples illustrate the theoretical observations and offer additional, empirical findings which are discussed in detail. This note complements recent advances in statistics involving Procrustean matrix perturbation decompositions and eigenvector estimation.


Female circumcision is a relatively understudied topic in the Malaysian context. It is also a topic that is considered sensitive due to its strong association with culture and religion. This paper explores the challenges and lessons learned from a larger project that focuses on the discourse analysis of female circumcision in Malaysia. The project involves collaborative work with a local NGO that works on the advancement of Muslim women's rights in Malaysia. This paper outlines the processes involved in data collection via focus group discussions and is written as a reflexive exercise based on the recommendations proposed by Olmos-Vega et al. (2023). This reflexive paper on the methodological challenges and lessons learned from the collaboration offers insights that can help other researchers make a more informed research choices on working on collaborative research and on the use of focus groups as a method of data collection.


This conceptual article examines the intersection between immigration law enforcement and education. We explore the following questions: How have immigration and education policy intersected in the last decade, and particularly after the 2016 presidential election? To examine this question, we make use of the interdisciplinary nature of our own academic backgrounds as a political scientist and an education policy scholar to ground our article using sociologist Herbert Blumer's sense of group position theory, Critical Race Theory (CRT), and Latina/o Critical Race Theory (LatCrit). Guided by this theoretical frame, we discuss the notion of education being used as a bargaining tool and a weapon with implications for Latino communities given the current political and anti-immigrant context. We highlight examples that represent various levels of government and that on the surface have a target population of immigrant adults or young adults—however, we argue that regardless of the target population, if a policy has direct implications for adult immigrants and immigration, it will have direct implications for educational institutions and the children of immigrants.


Defining treatment guidelines for polyarteritis nodosa (PAN) is complicated by the evolving definition and classification of this vasculitis, and because clinical trials have included patients with PAN, microscopic polyangiitis or, sometimes, Churg-Strauss syndrome. Nonetheless, clinical trial data support that the 'idiopathic generalised' form of PAN benefits from a severity-adapted treatment strategy, implying that cases with life-threatening manifestations require a regimen combining high-dose glucocorticoids and cyclophosphamide, whereas a non-severe disease may be treated with glucocorticoids alone. Results of uncontrolled studies indicate that hepatitis B virus-associated PAN management should include an antiviral agent, short-term glucocorticoids and plasma exchanges. No robust scientific evidence is available to guide the treatment of the limited variant 'cutaneous PAN'. Most experts recommend a less aggressive therapy with non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or other agents, such as colchicine or dapsone. PAN has become an even more uncommon disease, probably due to classification changes and, perhaps also to a genuine modification of the epidemiology of this vasculitis. Although more data are needed to resolve outstanding questions, it is unclear whether all these matters can be studied in the future in large, sufficiently powered trials.


Purpose. This study applies a Bayes analysis to the probability of a particular STATIC-99 score and its associated re-offence probability with recidivating for a sexual offence. We examine this probability over three time frames: within 5 years; within 10 years; and within 15 years.

Methods. This study was conducted using the same data from Hanson and Thornton (1999). This dataset is constituted from four different samples: Institut Philippe Pinel (Canada) sample; Millbrook Recidivism Study (Canada) sample; Oak Ridge Division of the Penetanguishene Mental Health Center (Canada) sample; and Her Majesty's Prison Service (UK) sample. The final sample for which sufficient information was available to score the STATIC-99 includes 1,086 sexual offenders. Bayes statistic has been used to analyse the data.

Results. Results are consistent with the STATIC-99 as a useful assessment tool. The Bayes-generated probabilities as well as odds ratios show a consistent increase in increased likelihood of re-offence as the score value increases.

Conclusions. The Bayesian analysis of the STATIC-99 shows that this method is very interesting in the context of risk assessment tools. This approach to risk assessment instruments may be more appropriate in the communication of analytic results as it can offer clinicians a combination of probabilities and likelihood ratios resulting a readily accessible profile of risk.


With the development of the city of LONGYEARBYEN in SVALBARD, the exposure of the people and the infrastructures to snow avalanches is becoming a concern. The cold, dry and windy climate of SVALBARD produces a very dense snowpack with frequent occurrences of avalanches. There is currently a consensus in the scientific community that the prospect of climate change with predictions of higher temperatures and precipitation levels will probably affect the size and number of avalanches released in the Arctic. To allow for a better understanding of these anticipations, the intricate relationship between the snowpack temperatures, the layering, and the snow mechanical properties needs to be investigated with regard to the release mechanisms of spontaneous avalanches.Temperature influences both the weak layer development and slab mechanical properties, and therefore it plays a key role in the formation of unstable snow profiles. A monitoring of the snow temperature profiles has been used in order to investigate the global role of temperature on the snowpack development and its stability. Three avalanches have occurred close to the instrumented site. This led to the development of avalanche release scenarii in light of the temperature field evolution.The key role of the dependency of slab mechanical properties to air temperature on the initiation of failure has been pointed out. Indeed, the data collected before the three avalanche releases suggests that the last event leading to an avalanche release is a modification of the slab temperature. In order to specify the relative influence of the processes taking place in the slab during a temperature change, a series of triaxial tests on snow were performed in the cold laboratory. The goal of those experiments was to evaluate the relative influence of temperature and snow grains shape on the viscous properties of the snow. Results have shown a clear distinction between the viscous flow rates of rounded and faceted grains. They implied that faceted snow slabs tend to exhibit a more fragile behavior than rounded grained snow slabs, thus promoting the weak layer failure propensity. This weak layer failure propensity needs to be measurable in order to understand the development of an unstable snowpack.Traditional methods provide results closer to indexes than usable parameters values, so an innovative testing device has been developed with the intention of being able to accurately measure the weak layers shear strength. This method allows us to measure the shear stress - displacement curve at a given strain rate and at different depths along the snow profile. It is based on the vane test which is more well known in soil testings, and is used to measure the strength of thin layers (down to 1 mm). It has been tested in high arctic conditions and the first results are correlated with snow pits and rammsonde data. The tested geometry has been modeled, providing some first insights towards the validation of the test. The results presented and the shear measurement device developed may be used as a basis for further tests in order to better understand the evolution of the weak layer mechanical properties during its development and the role of the slab's microstructure on the stability of the snow slope.The insights, and analyses presented in this thesis are used as a basis for discussion on the role of climate change and its most probable effects on the stability of snow slopes.


Insomnia or sleeplessness is a disorder characterized by a personal incapability to falling or staying asleep for a desirable period of time. Apart from Valeriana officinalis and Ziziphus jujuba most of the ethnobotanicals used for sleep disorders have not been evaluated for pharmacological or clinical efficacy against insomnia. Chinese herbal medicines involving polyherbal formulations are yet to be characterized and long-term side effects are yet to be evaluated. Anti insomniac phytotherapy opens up an exciting aspect of research which might benefit a large number of patients suffering from different degrees of insomnia.


We describe a machine learning approach to the development of several key components in a question answering system and the way they were used in the UIUC QA system. A unified learning approach is used to develop a part-of-speech tagger, a shallow parser, a named entity recognizer and a module for identifying a question's target. These components are used in analyzing questions, as well as in the analysis of selected passages that may contain the sought after answer. The performance of the learned modules seems to be very high, (e.g., mid 90% for identifying noun phrases in sentences), though evaluating those on a large number of passages proved to be time consuming. Other components of the system, a passage retrieval module and an answer selection module, were put together in an ad-hoc fashion and significantly affected the overall performance. We ran the system only over about 60% of questions, answering a third of them correctly.


Many theoretical and empirical accounts of representation argue that primary elections are a polarizing influence. Likewise, many reformers advocate opening party nominations to nonmembers as a way of increasing the number of moderate elected officials. Data and measurement constraints, however, have limited the range of empirical tests of this argument. We marry a unique new data set of state legislator ideal points to a detailed accounting of primary systems in the United States to gauge the effect of primary systems on polarization. We find that the openness of a primary election has little, if any, effect on the extremism of the politicians it produces.


A search for the resonant production of high-mass photon pairs is presented. The search focuses on spin-0 and spin-2 resonances with masses between 0.5 and 4.5 TeV, and with widths, relative to the mass, between 1 . 4 × 10 − 4 and 5 . 6 × 10 − 2 . The data sample corresponds to an integrated luminosity of 12 . 9 fb − 1 of proton–proton collisions collected with the CMS detector in 2016 at a center-of-mass energy of 13 TeV. No significant excess is observed relative to the standard model expectation. The results of the search are combined statistically with those previously obtained in 2012 and 2015 at √ s = 8 and 13 TeV, respectively, corresponding to integrated luminosities of 19.7 and 3 . 3 fb − 1 , to derive exclusion limits on scalar resonances produced through gluon–gluon fusion, and on Randall–Sundrum gravitons. The lower mass limits for Randall–Sundrum gravitons range from 1.95 to 4.45 TeV for coupling parameters between 0.01 and 0.2. These are the most stringent limits on Randall–Sundrum graviton production to date.


In dairy cattle, genetic selection for milk yield was generally based on 305 days lactation records that were calculated from available monthly test-day milk yield records. A test-day milk yield record, multiplied by the number of days between the current and following test-day, was the monthly milk yield and summed to all other monthly milk yields represented a 305 days lactation yield. Cows that for any reason did not complete their lactation got a 305 days yield via correction factors assuming a common lactation curve. Random regression models allow individual deviation from a common curve. The objective of this study was to estimate genetic parameters for daily milk yield using a random regression model (RRM) in Chilean dairy cows. A data set containing 97,683 monthly test-day records of 10,528 cows from 15 commercial dairy herds of Los Rios Region in southern Chile was used. Days in milk (DIM) were modelled using the fourth-order Legendre polynomials and the model also included, as fixed effects, contemporary group and cow age at test-day as a covariate. The average daily milk yield was 17.83 ± 5.25 kg. Average estimated heritability and repeatability from five to 305 DIM was 0.26 ± 0.02 and 0.61 ± 0.04, respectively. The heritability estimate varied from 0.23 to 0.31. Both parameters did not vary dramatically except after 270 DIM when repeatability increased while heritability decreased. Although the estimated genetic parameters did not seriously depart from the most recent results available in the Chilean literature, they are mathematically more precise for estimating the true parameters than those calculated using adjustment factors, suggesting that the model used could be the starting point to develop a genetic evaluation system for dairy cattle in Chile.


The increasing presence of dispersed generators in utility networks creates problems with regards to the operation and control of the distribution system. In many cases a large part of dispersed generation is not included in communication based control systems making it difficult to coordinate the operation of these generators. This paper introduces an automatic and autonomous control strategy for intelligent control of the excitation system of the dispersed generator. It uses an expert system technique to provide voltage support and voltage following modes of excitation control as necessary. The implication of the control strategy is that the dispersed generator can be used to support the network during power system perturbations but is operated as a voltage follower under normal conditions when the network is grid connected. The expert system also makes it possible for the dispersed generator to operate isolated from the grid following the sudden loss of the connection. Simulation studies are used to demonstrate the effectiveness of the expert system under a variety of abnormal operating conditions.


Patients with incurable cancer face lots of problems before they expire. Complications resulting from cancer or its treatment are a significant determinant of the quality of life of cancer patients. It is of outmost importance to make use of all treatment options in order to improve their survival and quality of life. Nowadays, available are a number of Interventional Radiology procedures that are minimally invasive, can be performed under local anesthesia or conscious sedation and are indispensable in helping patient through the cancer disease process. These techniques can be broadly classified into drainage of fluid collections, decompression and relief of obstruction, pain and tumor burden reduction, vascular and gastrointestinal tract access as well as hemostasis. The purpose of this article is to describe the basic concepts of minimally invasive techniques applied as palliative care therapies in the cancer patients. Controversies concerning techniques and products and the need for patient-centered tailored approaches will be discussed.


This article considers the controversial issue of the admission of sexual experience evidence in sexual offence trials. The discussion begins with an assessment of the shortcomings of the current Irish approach to the regulation of the admissibility of sexual experience evidence. It is argued that Irish discretionary approach, which allows trial judges a wide discretion to introduce such evidence, is not the most appropriate method of regulation in this area. The article thus examines English and Canadian rules in this area in order to determine which of these two jurisdictions differing approaches to the regulation of sexual experience evidence represents the most suitable advancement on discretionary regimes such as that which applies in Irish law. Having examined the approach of both of these jurisdictions, it is concluded that Canadian law epitomises the best practice model for controlling the admission of sexual experience evidence in sexual offence trials.


Temporomandibular disorders (TMD) is a term used to embrace pain and dysfunction in the jaw-, face- and temple region. Myofascial pain is considered the most common condition included in TMD. The diagnostic criteria for myalgia are based on the patient's symptoms and clinical signs, where pain to palpation of the jaw muscles is vital. The aim of this experimental trial was to examine whether pain perception is influenced by topical anesthesia in patients with local myalgia of the jaw muscles. Our hypothesis was that the pressure pain thresholds (PPT) at jaw muscle sites are affected after topical application of anesthesia in patients with local myalgia.Ten women (median age 36 years) with TMD related to myalgia participated in the study. The PPT at masseter muscle and temporal muscle sites bilaterally and the first dorsal intraossei on the dominant hand were measured using an electronic algometer. After a baseline registration, EMLA or placebo cream was applied on the chosen sites in a randomized order. A new registration was carried out five minutes after the application. The values for each participant before and after the application were compared using Wilcoxon rank sum test. A P-value < 0.05 was considered statistically significant.The PPT increased significantly after application of topical anesthesia, but not placebo cream. The results indicate that the superficial nociceptors were sensitized and sensitive to topical anesthesia in patients with TMD related to myalgia. The interpretation of a pain response to pressure thus seems to be complex and warrant further studies.


When modelling a cutting operation, the constitutive model of the machined material is one of the key parameters to obtain accurate and realistic results. Up to now, the Johnson-Cook model is still the most used, even if an increasing number of models, such as the Hyperbolic TANgent (TANH) model, were introduced last years to overcome its limitations and come closer to the actual material behaviour. Experimental tests on dedicated equipment are usually required to identify the parameters of the constitutive models. This paper introduces the Coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian (CEL) formalism to model in 3D the Taylor impact test, one of the common tests to perform that parameters identification. Indeed, one identification way involves modelling the test to determine the constitutive model parameters by comparing the experimental and the numerical samples geometries. The developed CEL model is validated against a Lagrangian reference model for a steel alloy and the Johnson-Cook constitutive model. The main goal of using the CEL method is to get rid of the elements distortion due to the high strains and strain rates during the test. Mesh dependence of the results is highlighted and a recommendation is provided on the mesh to adopt for future work. The CEL model of the 3D Taylor impact test is then extended to the use of the TANH model. The results are finally compared with that of the Johnson-Cook constitutive model.


: We analyzed the accuracy and time efficiency of the FilmArray blood culture identification (FA-BCID) panel in identifying the pathogens in positive blood cultures. Two-hundred and seventy-two individuals were randomly assigned as the control ( n = 212) and FA-BCID ( n = 60) groups participating in this study. Matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS) was used to assess the control group. Meanwhile, the FA-BCID group was evaluated using both FA-BCID and MALDI-TOF, and the results were compared. The identification results from 73% (44/60) of the blood samples demonstrated agreement between FA-BCID and MALDI-TOF. The FA-BCID panel detected mecA genes in seven Staphylococcus species; six cases were confirmed using antimicrobial susceptibility testing. In addition, KPC genes were detected in one Escherichia coli and one Klebsiella pneumoniae , although only the latter corresponded with the result from antimicrobial susceptibility testing. The turnaround time (TAT) for identification through FA-BCID was shorter, with a median of 3.6 [2.4–4.6] hours ( p < 0.05). No significant differences in the clinical and microbial outcomes following the ASP were observed between FA-BCID and MALDI-TOF. These results suggest that the FA-BCID panel provides an identification result that is as reliable as that provided by the routine identification procedure but with shorter TAT; thus, the FA-BCID method is considered an effective and beneficial method for therapeutic decision making and the improvement of the ASP for patients with bloodstream infection.


One of the central concepts in human-computer interaction (HCI) is usability. Interestingly, in spite of its brief history as a scientific and applied discipline, HCI has already produced several different views on usability. These views are, in turn, interrelated with how research and systems development are seen. This paper identifies five different perspectives on usability: general theory, usability engineering, subjectivity, flexibility and sociality. Their interrelations and implications for usability-oriented systems development are discussed.


Abstract A melissopalynological study of Omani honeys was undertaken to determine floral sources, and identify pollen types, that would indicate the ecological origins. The study comprised the analysis of 48 honey samples collected during 2001–2003 from 14 locations in the Muscat and Al Batinah regions of Oman. The beehives and nests examined were either those of Apis florea or Apis mellifera bee colonies. A total of 122 pollen types, representing 50 plant families, were identified. Each taxon was categorized as representing a major or minor source of nectar and pollen. Thirty-two honey samples are unifloral types, and the remaining 16 are multifloral. Honey is harvested twice a year in Oman, once in the summer and again in the winter. The pollen data indicate that Ziziphus spina-christi, Prosopis juliflora, Prosopis cineraria and constitute the chief nectar and pollen sources for honeybees in this area during the winter. By contrast during the summer, Acacia tortilis, Citrus sp., Maerua crassifolia, Phoenix dactylifera, Prosopis cineraria, and Prosopis juliflora are the more important nectar sources. This study has identified a wide range of foraging plant sources for honeybees and demonstrates adequate potential for expanding and sustaining beekeeping in Muscat, and in the Al Batinah region. A modern pollen reference collection of 105 local floral species enabled the identification of the pollen types. Seventy-four pollen types were found in the 48 honey samples. The identifications of pollen types are based on both light and scanning electron microscope (SEM) studies of the pollen in the honey and reference samples.


Despite the large I/O capabilities in modern cluster architectures with local disks on each node, applications mostly are not enabled to fully exploit them. This is especially problematic for data intensive applications which often suffer from low I/O performance. As one solution for this problem, a distribution I/O management (DIOM) system has been developed to manage a transparent distribution of data across cluster nodes and to then allow applications to access this data purely from local disks. In order to be effective, however, this distribution process requires semantic information about both the application and the input data. This work therefore extends DIOM to include independent specifications for both data formats and application I/O patterns and thereby decouples them. This work is driven by an application from nuclear medical imaging, the reconstruction of PET images, for which DIOM has proven to be an adequate solution enabling truly scalable I/O and thereby improving the overall application performance.


This paper studies mechanism design by a seller privately informed of the quality of an indivisible object. The privacy of the seller's information matters for mechanism design: selecting a mechanism that maximizes the seller's profit when her information is public is not incentive compatible for the seller when her information is private, as a lower-quality seller has an incentive to mimic a higher-quality seller. I show that reserve prices are the least costly device to separate higher-quality sellers from lower-quality ones. In equilibria that maximize the expected profit of every type of the seller among all separating equilibria, the lowest-quality seller adopts her public-information optimal mechanism, and each higher-quality seller adopts a mechanism that differs from her public-information optimal mechanism only in that the reserve prices are higher.


This thesis consists of four self-contained essays on the impact of taxation on wage formation,unemployment and welfare.Essay I (with Bertil Holmlund) examines how a progressive tax system affects wageformation. When there is bargaining over wages, a rise in tax progressivity is likely to lead towage moderation because it makes real labour costs, and thereby employment, more sensitiveto changes in the real wage. Increased tax progressivity may therefore reduce the equilibriumunemployment rate. Our empirical analyses of wage determination exploits two Swedish datasets. One data set contains time series on wages among workers in different skill categories;the other data set is a panel for 1989-92 with detailed information on individual workers. Theresults from the two data sets are broadly consistent with the theory, implying that taxprogression contributes to wage moderation.Essay II investigates the impact of payroll taxes on unemployment and welfare in a two-sectoreconomy characterised by imperfect competition in product and labour markets. The twosectors differ in market competitiveness. It turns out that only the relative tax pressure affectsunemployment and welfare. Unemployment can be reduced by having the less competitivesector pay higher taxes. Moreover, differentiated payroll taxes will, in general, improveefficiency. Which sector to tax relatively more is, however, not clear. The government face a trade-off in the sense that employment is increased only at the expense of reduced efficiency inthe output mix. An explicit expression for the optimal degree of tax differentiation is derived.Essay III (with Bertil Holmlund) examines the effects of an environmental tax reform in amodel of a small open economy with decentralised wage bargaining and monopolisticallycompetitive firms. The economy includes a tradable sector and a non-tradable sector andfeatures unemployment in equilibrium. Firms in both sectors use labour and an importedpolluting factor of production ("energy"). A tax on energy, recycled to reduce the payroll tax,will in general affect equilibrium unemployment in this economy. The effect works through areallocation of employment from the tradable to the non-tradable sector. Total employmentincreases if unions in the non-tradable sector possess less market power than the unions in thetradable sector. Parameterised versions of the model suggest that the tax reform has smalleffects on employment and that it typically reduces real GDP.Essay IV investigates the impact of payroll taxes on unemployment and welfare in a modelwith household production and union-firm wage bargaining. It turns out that differentiatedpayroll taxes can be justified on both employment and efficiency grounds. Reduced taxation inthe sector producing household substitutes financed with higher taxes in the rest of theeconomy reduces unemployment if the former sector is more, or equally, labour intensive asthe rest of the economy. Moreover, welfare increases with the differentiation if the sectorproducing household substitutes is equally labour intensive as the rest of the economy.


In this work, we present RAMBAM, a novel concept of designing countermeasures against side-channel attacks and the Statistical Ineffective Fault Attack (specifically SIFA-1) on AES that employs redundant representations of finite field elements. From this concept, we derive a family of protected hardware implementations of AES. A fundamental property of RAMBAM is a security parameter d that along with other attributes of the scheme allows for making trade-offs between gate count, maximal frequency, performance, level of robustness to the first and higher-order side-channel attacks, and protection against SIFA-1. We present an analytical model that explains how the scheme reduces the leakage and how the design choices affect it. Furthermore, we demonstrate experimentally how different design choices achieve the required goals. In particular, the compact version exhibits a gate count as low as 12.075 kGE, while maintaining adequate protection. The performance-oriented version provides latency as low as one round per cycle, thus combining protection against SCA and SIFA-1 with high performance which is one of the original design goals of AES. Finally, we assess the leakage of the scheme for the first and the second (bivariate) orders using TVLA methodology on an FPGA implementation and observe resilience to at least 348M traces with 16 Sboxes.


Abstract Wong, K. M. & M.H. Diep (2015). Bambusa gurgandii K. M. Wong & M. H. Diep (Poaceae, Bambusoideae), a new species of bamboo from Vietnam. Candollea 70: 211–218. In English, English abstract. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.15553/c2015v702a6 Bambusa Schreb. (Poaceae, Bambusoideae) is a large and complex tropical and subtropical Asian genus that is currently being taxonomically remodeled through morphological and molecular phylogenetic approaches. The type and type alliance of the genus is, however, morphologically well distinguished. Preliminary documentation suggests there could be some 60–70 species of Bambusa in Vietnam, although confirmation requires more rigorous herbarium-based vouchering. A new species of bamboo belonging to the type alliance, Bambusa gurgandii K. M. Wong & M. H. Diep, is described, known only from cultivated specimens in Vietnam. It belongs to the group of unarmed Bambusa species including Bambusa burmanica Gamble, Bambusa farinacea K. M. Wong, Bambusa nutans Wall, ex Munro, Bambusa polymorpha Munro, Bambusa teres Buch.-Ham. ex Munro and Bambusa tulda Roxb. but is distinguished by details of the pseudospikelets and flowers.


The latest CLIC damping ring lattice is based on magnets with longitudinally variable dipole fields in order to achieve ultralow beam emittance while keeping the ring circumference small. These magnets need to provide a focusing gradient of 11 T/m as well. The good field region radius is 5 mm. The field harmonics shall be in the order of 1E-4 of the main one. Since only a small variation of the field is requested, permanent magnets are the most cost-effective solution. Beam dynamics calculations have provided idealized field profiles, and magnetic calculations have been performed to check their feasibility. FEM electromagnetic computations are complicated because the cross-section of the magnet is not constant. Therefore, iron poles cannot be modeled by extrusion, and only 3-D computations are meaningful. Finally, this paper shows that small variations of field strength are possible by using movable parts


The prevalence of domestic violence is described as pervasive with a majority of victims being females and perpetrators being males. Often females who experienced domestic violence had been previously exposed to family violence during childhood. The aim of the study was therefore to investigate the perceived childhood exposure to domestic violence as a predisposing factor for revictimisation in adulthood. The study used a quantitative approach with a cross-sectional correlation design. The sample consisted of 77 female participants from shelters across Cape Town, Western Cape. The study employed an adapted version of the Child Exposure to Domestic Violence (CEDV) Scale. The questionnaire was divided into three sections, namely demographic details, types of exposure to domestic violence the adult may have experienced as a child, and current adult experiences of domestic violence. The data was analysed using the Statistical Package for Social Sciences V21 (SPSS). Results suggest that there is a significant positive relationship between past perceived experiences of domestic violence and present perceived experiences of domestic violence. Limitations and recommendations are stipulated for proposed intervention strategies and further study expansion on this topic.


Art and the Challenge of Markets Volumes 1 & 2 examine the politics of art and culture in light of the profound changes that have taken place in the world order since the 1980s and 1990s. The contributors explore how in these two decades, the neoliberal or market-based model of capitalism started to spread from the economic realm to other areas of society. As a result, many aspects of contemporary Western societies increasingly function in the same way as the private enterprise sector under traditional market capitalism.

This second volume analyses the relationships of art with contemporary capitalist economies and instrumentalist cultural policies, and examines several varieties of capitalist-critical and alternative art forms that exist in today's art worlds. It also addresses the vexed issues of art controversies and censorship. The chapters cover issues such as the culturalization of the economy, aesthetics and anti-aesthetics, the societal benefits of works of art, art's responsibility to society, 'artivism', activist arts as protest and capitalism-critical works, and controversies over nudity in art, as well as considering the marketization of emerging visual arts worlds in East Asia. The book ends with a concluding chapter suggesting that even in today's marketized and commercialized environments, art will find a way.

Both volumes provide students and scholars across a range of disciplines with an incisive, comparative overview of the politics of art and culture and national, international and transnational art worlds in contemporary capitalism.


Surface and subsurface contact damage in dental ceramics and the influence of microstructure on damage tolerance were investigated in this study through indentation methods. The dependence of the damage tolerance on common materials properties was discussed. A simple expression to estimate quantitatively the damage tolerance via basic material parameters, based on the features of damage tolerance and fracture mechanics is confirmed. And the residual strength of damaged specimen was measured via three-point bending tests.


Urbanization is the land-use process that most significantly impacts flora and fauna. We conducted a multiple city comparison of two taxa to assess whether richness patterns are similar across cities and taxa. This study aimed to examine the effects socioecological factors, namely open area size, socioeconomic status and the built-up cover, on species richness and composition of plants and butterflies in five adjacent Mediterranean cities in Israel's coastal plain. Vegetation surveys were conducted in 170 open area sites in various urban settings. In 34 of them, the presence of butterfly species was also recorded. Mixed-effect generalized linear models were used to examine the site's characteristics effect on the species richness. The identity of each city was included as a random effect in the models. Results indicated that overall plant species richness increased with patch size, whereas butterfly richness was not associated with this factor. Plant and butterfly species richness in all categories decreased with the increase in building cover, except for endemic plant species. The results demonstrate the complex contribution of urban open area patches to the biodiversity of different taxa, being conditional on their size, surrounding built-up area and socioeconomic values.


Caching content at the edge of mobile networks is considered as a promising way to deal with the data tsunami. In addition to caching at fixed base stations or user devices, it has been recently proposed that an architecture with public or private transportation acting as mobile relays and caches might be a promising middle ground. While such mobile caches have mostly been considered in the context of delay tolerant networks, in this paper we argue that they could be used for low cost video streaming without the need to impose any delay on the user. Users can prefetch video chunks into their playout buffer from encountered vehicle caches (at low cost) or stream from the cellular infrastructure (at higher cost) when their playout buffer empties while watching the content. Our main contributions are: (i) to model the playout buffer in the user device and analyze its idle periods which correspond to bytes downloaded from the infrastructure; (ii) to optimize the content allocation to mobile caches; and to minimize the expected number of non-offloaded bytes. We perform trace-based simulations to support our findings showing that up to 60 percent of the original traffic could be offloaded from the main infrastructure.


A series of five different oils from Turkish black cumin ( Nigella sativa ) used in foods mainly for their flavour, preservation and natural therapies were screened for their antibacterial effects at 0.5 %, 1.0 % and 2.0 % concentrations using the agar diffusion method against twenty four pathogenic, spoilage and lactic acid bacteria (LAB). All tested oils showed antibacterial activity against all the bacteria used in the assay. The oils at 2.0 % concentration were more effective than of the other concentrations. The most sensitive bacterium against all of the oil concentrations was Aeromonas hydrophila , while the most resistant was Yersinia enterocolitica . Generally, lactic acid bacteria had more resistance than pathogenic and spoilage bacteria against black cumin oils. Consequently, black cumin oil may be used as an antimicrobial agent in food products to prevent spoilage.


ABSTRACT Background: This study investigated whether individuals with aphasia (IWA) retain verb biases in expressive language. Verb biases refer to the likelihood that a given verb will occur in different sentence structures. We focused on the likelihood of verbs occurring in transitive and intransitive structures. Aims: The main goal of this study was to determine whether IWA and controls show similar verb biases or whether IWA show a preference for transitive or intransitive structures that supersedes individual verb biases. We also investigated whether IWA show a preference for intransitively or transitively biased verbs, whether verb biases differ as a function of aphasia type, and how verb bias affects errors in IWA's speech production. Methods & Procedures: The current study analysed 236 transcribed interviews of IWA from AphasiaBank. All uses of 54 verbs were coded based on the sentence structure and the presence of errors. We report data from 11 transitively biased and 11 intransitively biased verbs. Outcomes & Results: IWA's transitivity biases were indistinguishable from controls' biases. In addition, IWA produced more intransitively biased verbs than transitively biased verbs overall. In ungrammatical productions, IWA's error rates were higher in sentence structures that conflicted with verb bias and highest when an intransitively biased verb was attempted in a transitive structure. Conclusions: These findings indicate that IWA are sensitive to verb bias and verb complexity within expressive language. The effects are consistent with previous literature concerning IWA's sensitivity to verb bias in receptive language tasks and to verb complexity in verb retrieval tasks.


ABSTRACT Background: There is limited research on how well the American College of Surgeons/Center for Disease Control and Prevention Guidelines for Field Triage of Injured Patients assist EMS providers in identifying children who need the resources of a trauma center. Objective: To determine the accuracy of the Physiologic Criteria (Step 1) of the Field Triage Guidelines in identifying injured children who need the resources of a trauma center. Methods: EMS providers who transported injured children 15 years and younger to pediatric trauma centers in 3 mid-sized cities were interviewed regarding patient demographics and the presence or absence of each of the Field Triage Guidelines criteria. Children were considered to have needed a trauma center if they had non-orthopedic surgery within 24 hours, ICU admission, or died. This data was obtained through a structured hospital record review. The over- and under-triage rates and positive likelihood ratios (+LR) were calculated for the overall Physiologic Criteria and each individual criterion. Results: Interviews were conducted for 5,610 pediatric patients; outcome data were available for 5,594 (99.7%): 5% of all patients needed the resources of a trauma center and 19% met the physiologic criteria. Using the physiologic criteria alone, 51% of children who needed a trauma center would have been under-triaged and 18% would have been over-triaged (+LR 2.8, 95% CI 2.4–3.2). Glasgow Coma Score (GCS) < 14 had a +LR of 14.3 (95% CI 11.2–18.3), with EMS not obtaining a GCS in 4% of cases. 54% of those with an EMS GCS < 14 had an initial ED GCS < 14. Abnormal respiratory rate (RR) had a +LR of 2.2 (95% CI 1.8–2.6), with EMS not obtaining a RR in 5% of cases. 41% of those with an abnormal EMS RR had an abnormal initial ED RR. Systolic blood pressure (SBP) < 90 had a +LR of 3.5 (95% CI 2.5–5.1), with EMS not obtaining a SBP in 20% of cases. SBP was not obtained for 79% of children <1 year, 46% 1–4 years, 7% 5–9 years, and 2% 10–15 years. A total of 19% of those with an EMS SBP < 90 had an initial ED SBP < 90. Conclusions: The Physiologic Criteria are a moderate predictor of trauma center need for children. Missing or inaccurate vital signs may be limiting the predictive value of the Physiologic Criteria.


Impaired glucose tolerance is a well documented consequence of absolute bedrest in man. Previous studies have shown a decrease in forearm glucose uptake during intravenous glucose infusion after fourteen days of bedrest. Bedrest is associated not only with physical inactivity but with a change in gravitational vector. This study was designed to examine the individual contributions of these factors to the glucose intolerance of bedrest. Thus, glucose tolerance tests were carried out in exercising subjects at bedrest and in rhesus monkeys immobilized in the vertical plane. Exercise in man improved glucose tolerance during bedrest, and vertically immobilized monkeys demonstrated significant glucose intolerance. It is concluded that the glucose intolerance of bedrest is a function of the decrease in physical activity.


Objectives Intrahepatic cholangiocarcinoma (ICC) is the second most common primary hepatic malignancy after hepatocellular carcinoma. ICC can be divided into 2 types according to their location: peripheral and hilar types. Intense 18F-FDG uptake on PET was reported in peripheral ICC. However, the usefulness of PET/CT in detecting tumors and predicting prognosis in peripheral ICC has not been fully evaluated. In this study, we evaluated the clinical role of 18F-FDG PET/CT to predict the recurrence after the curative resection in patients with surgically indicated peripheral ICC. Methods Eighteen patients with ICC underwent preoperative CT and 18F-FDG PET/CT scans. SUVmax of tumor, tumor to normal liver SUV ratio (TNR), lymph node status evaluated by 18F-FDG PET/CT, tumor and lymph node size measured by CT, vascular invasion confirmed by pathology, and satellite nodules found on CT were compared between 1-year recurrence group and recurrence-free group by chi-square test. Results Of total 23 measurable lymph nodes, 4 nodes were positive and other 19 nodes were negative or equivocal on CT. Among those 23 nodes, 9 nodes were positive and other 14 nodes were negative on 18F-FDG PET/CT. The sensitivity and specificity of CT were 20.0% and 86.4%, and those of 18F-FDG PET/CT were 80.0% and 92.3%. In the comparison between 1-year recurrent and nonrecurrent groups, lymph node metastasis detected on 18F-FDG PET/CT had statistically positive correlation with the 1-year recurrence after surgical resection (P = 0.02). Other factors showed no statistically significant difference between the groups. Conclusion We found that lymph node metastasis detected on 18F-FDG PET/CT correlated positively with 1-year recurrence after surgical resection in patients with peripheral ICC.


A network emulator is a software in its environment mimicking the functions and habits of the original network. Problems often encountered in doing research on computer networks is a problem of design and trial scenarios that require software and hardware enough to implement such a network scenario similar to a real scenario. Using virtual machine technology is expected to solve the problem. Netkit supports experiments with various network technologies and can support other technologies necessary for certain network experiments. This study uses a network emulator with netkit, where it is freely available and built based on Linux User Mode. Netkit allows users to experiment with complex computer network scenarios that can be easily implemented using linux. The experimental research is done by making the design first. The design is used to implement the routing process, to connect 4 different network addresses. On the Netkit implementation of the design, it is implemented by creating a virtual routing lab based on data from computer network topologies. The virtual laboratory implementation of this research routing is based on a network topology scenario. The results of these virtual routing lab experiments, the routing process runs well on the network based on predetermined test scenarios, with the occurrence of connections between different network addresses. In the end the virtual routing lab implementation works well, with performance analysis results from the netkit emulator on the use of computer resources showing Usage CPU usage of 0% and Memory Usage averaging 20942.8k test time for 12 minutes. The results of this trial is very helpful for administrators before the implementation on the real network


Since The Empty Space (1968) Peter Brook has consistently declined to write another book, as though print might fossilize his creativity into a system'; and, when one considers the fate of Stanislavsky and Brecht as A-level texts, one can sympathize with his decision to compile a collection of retrospective statements articles, interviews, programme notes — rather than codify his aesthetic philosophy. Nevertheless, readers may feel frustrated by the lack of conclusions to be drawn from a lifetime of exhilarating theatre. The gist of the book is in its title, The Shifting Point, because Brook sees theatre as a volatile, co-operative, ephemeral art, and his approach is one of continual enquiry. Though a vivid and elegant writer, he is primarily not a theorist but a practitioner, who demands a fresh, unprejudiced response from audiences, despising those who think they know what to expect those who create the deadly theatre. To deserve such an audience is the demand he makes of his actors and artistic collaborators. But although he works with these artists for months, even years, audiences are Brook's for only a few hours, so it is no wonder his strategies have continually changed. He claims that the International Centre of Theatre Research has discovered certain simplicities, which, though difficult to attain, could be adopted by other companies; but the range of the Centre's work Shakespeare, Chekhov, the Mahabharata, Carmen is so eclectic that the real unifying factor seems to be Brook himself. Unlike the theatres of Stanislavsky, Copeau, Brecht, or Barba, all of whom were or are great teachers, Brook's theatre has remained essentially personal. The viewpoint is indeed continually shifting, but it is always Brook's point of view, and the fact that he chooses to declare his artistic creed by quoting statements from the past reveals not only the richness of his imagination but also its limitations, because it is so personal. This does not mean he is selfish or autocratic and his range of vision is staggeringly broad but aspiring directors will find no 'method' in this book, only a challenge and an inspiration, and that, perhaps, is the hallmark of the greatest teachers. GEORGE TAYLOR


The purpose of this paper is to estimate the gasoline demand function via the state-space model and the implications for its price liberalization by using the Kalman filter method in the framework of time-varying coefficients model. For this purpose, data from the Energy Balance Sheet and the National Iranian Oil Refining and Distribution Company were used during the years 1374-1396. The results of the estimation of the model indicate that the price elasticity of gasoline varies in the studied period and after the implementation of subsidy targeting (1389 to 1396), in some of the seasons of the year, absolute value of the price elasticity of gasoline increased and decreased in some seasons. With three different scenarios, it is anticipated that with the increase of 10% in the price of gasoline in the sixth development plan, the demand for gasoline does not decrease unlike expectations. Also, because absolute value of the elasticity of the price of gasoline at the beginning of the sixth of developmental program is greater and lower at the end of the program, increasing of the price of the gasoline should not be the same over the program. It is recommended that planners and policymakers to control gasoline demand are advised to increase the price of gasoline in the sixth of developmental plan by more than 10 %, and this price increase from the beginning of the program to the end of the program is ascending


To determine the usefulness of recombinant Sendai virus (SeV) for ocular gene transfer, the authors characterized SeV-mediated gene transfer to the retinal tissue of adult rats via subretinal injection. Recombinant SeV encoding the lacZ gene achieved frequent transgene expression in the retinal pigment epithelium (RPE) (mean=38.76%), while gene transfer to other retinal cells was rare. These findings are similar to those of previous reports using adenoviruses. Peak reporter gene expression of SeV in cultured RPE cells was similar to that of adenovirus at the same titer; however, SeV achieved high levels of expression after a brief vector-cell contact time, while adenovirus required over 3hr for efficient gene transfer. This finding was also observed in vivo following a brief SeV filling in the subretinal space, and may therefore provide a clinical advantage in avoiding retinal damage due to prolonged detachment. The observed SeV-mediated gene expression in the rat retina was transient. The initial phase of the decrease in luciferase activity could be prevented by daily eye drops of dexamethasone, suggesting that the corticosteroid-sensitive host reaction may affect early clearance of the virus. The late decline of transgene expression (2 weeks) was inhibited by the immunosuppressant, cyclosporin A, in a dose-dependent manner, suggesting that the cytotoxic T-lymphocyte response may be important in this phase. This work represents the first report of SeV-mediated gene transfer to ocular tissue, and identifies recombinant SeV as a new tool for studies of retinal gene transfer and gene therapy.


The development of autonomous driving has brought with it requirements for intelligence, safety, and stability. One example of this is the need to construct effective forms of interactive cognition between pedestrians and vehicles in dynamic, complex, and uncertain environments. Pedestrian action detection is a form of interactive cognition that is fundamental to the success of autonomous driving technologies. Specifically, vehicles need to detect pedestrians, recognize their limb movements, and understand the meaning of their actions before making appropriate decisions in response. In this survey, we present a detailed description of the architecture for pedestrian action recognition in autonomous driving, and compare the existing mainstream pedestrian action recognition techniques. We also introduce several commonly used datasets used in pedestrian motion recognition. Finally, we present several suggestions for future research directions.


This paper was selected for presentation by an IPTC Programme Committee following review of information contained in an abstract submitted by the author(s).


The purpose of this study is to describe the profile of SMEs in East Java, which only identified a single construct
with two sides of perspective, benefits and problems. The method used is descriptive qualitative, using purposive
sampling techniques. Data collection techniques are questionnaire, deep interviews and field observations. This
research will give a huge benefit to other researchers to discover more about SMEs entrepreneur. The results also
give informations that useful for futher researcher to analyze business problems and try to solve it. The results
showed that the majority of entrepreneurs are male with average tenure of business less than three years. The most
interested business sector is food and drink with average monthly revenues of 1 - 5 million rupiahs. In addition to
having various advantages such as creativity, the courage to bear the risk, flexibility and autonomy in business
management and easiness to meet the customer needs and wants. SMEs also have a variety of problems, among
others, the difficulty of capital, poor management, wrong mind set, weak networking, lack of legal status and lack of
knowledge. All the SMEs problems must be solve immediately and integrated among three parties, entrepreneurs,
government and society. All the problems of SMEs causing them not able to compete in the AEC 2015


This article explores Pride politics in post-Maidan Ukraine from queer feminist and decolonial perspectives. It aims to understand how the location of Ukraine on the fringes of two imperial formations, namely the global West and Russian imperial-ism, shapes Pride and its consequences for LGBT communities and broader society. The authors introduce the concept of buffer periphery as an analytic lens that focuses critically on both imperial formations simultaneously, while tracing natural-ized colonial discourses. The first part of the article analyzes the material-symbolic framing of Kyiv Pride marches in the context of the NGO-ization of LGBT activism, police reform, the war in Donbas, and the corresponding militarization of Ukrainian society and the region at large. The analysis is focused on how West-cen-tered geopolitics of liberation and the Euro-oriented aspirations of the Ukrainian government work together to animate Pride politics and instrumentalize them. The second part closely examines the case of the Queer Anarcho-Feminist Block at the 2017 Kyiv Pride, considering it an attempt at decolonial resistance to neoliberaliza-tion and militarization of Pride and LGBT politics in Ukraine. The article suggests that the resulting outcome of Kyiv Pride marches with respect to broader LGBT communities in Ukraine is rather ambiguous. While acknowledging its influence on public opinion and media discourse as well as its personal significance for many community members, the authors offer a critical perspective on Kyiv Pride as a vehicle and an effect of the colonial geopolitics of liberation. It remains unclear to what extent Kyiv Pride challenged homophobia and transphobia, let alone capitalist and racist regimes of power, or if it perhaps just converted the idea of LGBT liberation into a homocapitalist project of producing loyal sexual citizens.


Many theories, techniques and strategies are concerned with the development of an ideal educational setting that enables learners to demonstrate growth and improvement. Research to date mostly envisaged the classroom setting as an external aspect of the educational medium and discussed it in terms of social interaction, communicative requirements, physical structure and services. The learner's spatial experience, however, needs to be explored from different perspectives such as spatial interaction and memory reconstruction. Moreover, the educational setting has undergone a critical change after COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. The significance of this study is that it explores the recollections of individual learners from the pre-COVID-19 classroom setting following their virtual setting (Adobe-Connect) experience.  The study focuses on the learners' personal (subjective) memories rather than the objective description of the medium and draws on the critical difference between educational "setting" and educational "space". It raises questions as to the role of the classroom setting and spatial experience in learning and memory. The study also aims to examine the participants' recollections of the pre-COVID-19 classroom experience about the setting elements and objects as well as explores to what extent the classroom setting turns into an experiential space before and after COVID-19 pandemic. Qualitative measures were used within the scope of narrative inquiry to collect data in order to validate and confer the findings. The participants were two senior BA students at a Department of English Language and Literature (ELL) in Turkey. Their spatial experiences were explored through the participants' small narrative accounts about the pre-COVID-19 classroom and online virtual classroom. The results were discussed according to the spatial practice conceptualized within the theory of postromantic education, which argues that unless educational "setting" is transformed into educational "space", there would be no ground for experience and learning. The study revealed that the participants were both narrators and focalizers when they were talking about conventional classroom settings and treating the objects as carriers of emotions and stories. The participants reported that classroom objects were still vivid in mind, restored in the memory, and reconstructed in the imagination, which showed that the participants under consideration had a spatial experience and the classroom was transformed from setting to space. As regards the Adobe Connect virtual classrooms, the participant narrators were rarely focalisers, and the small narratives changed into narrative fragments, which shows that online virtual classroom is questionable in terms of spatial experience. The study concludes that the participants' small narratives are punctuated with the references to setting elements and objects in the form of emotive spatial experience and positive episodic memories. The indicators and verbal elements were loaded with psychological and experiential implications. The study presents the implications for applied linguistics and classroom research and makes suggestions for further studies.


The phenomenology of bipolar disorder in the pediatric population is different from that seen in adults. This can present a major obstacle in the accurate diagnosis of the illness and may also hinder the initiation of appropriate treatment. Historically, the mood stabilizers lithium, divalproex, and carbamazepine have been studied in the pediatric population with varying degrees of methodologic rigor. Recently, a body of literature has grown regarding the use of atypical antipsychotics for the treatment of pediatric bipolar disorder. Atypical antipsychotics have shown promise in the treatment of young people who present with symptoms of mania, but long-term adverse effects such as weight gain and tardive dyskinesia might be a concern with these agents and may be particularly worrisome. Children and adolescents tend to be more susceptible to antipsychotic-related adverse effects than adults; therefore, the risk of adverse effects must be balanced against the potential benefits associated with these agents. (Adv Stud Med. 2004;4(10F):S974-S981)


Modern diving techniques can require the treatment of infection in an atmosphere of pressurized oxyhelium gas. The antibiotic susceptibility of 16 species and strains (eight genera) of gram-negative bacilli and 3 species and strains (two genera) of gram-positive cocci to each of 21 antimicrobial agents was assessed in air at atmospheric pressure and in oxyhelium gas at an absolute pressure of 7 bar (ca. 709 kPa). A disk diffusion technique was employed, and significantly different results were obtained in the two atmospheres. The effect of oxyhelium on diameters of growth inhibition varied significantly with the bacterium and with the antibiotic and was particularly marked with certain bacterium-antibiotic combinations. The gram-negative bacilli generally gave reduced zone diameters in oxyhelium, whereas the gram-positive cocci showed a mixture of effects.


BACKGROUND
Abnormalities in blood rheology may be factors contributing to cardiovascular complications and the progression of renal failure in kidney allograft recipients. The haemorheological variables haematocrit, fibrinogen, whole blood viscosity, plasma viscosity, erythrocyte aggregation tendency and fluidity were measured in 27 cyclosporin A (CyA)-treated patients who had received a renal graft at least 6 months previously. Their creatinine clearance was in the range of 12-92 ml/min/1.73 m2 (mean 55+/-19). The values were compared with those obtained from a control group comprising 20 healthy subjects matched according to age, sex and smoking habits.

RESULTS
The haematocrit, plasma fibrinogen, whole blood viscosity, plasma viscosity, erythrocyte aggregation tendency, body mass index (BMI), mean arterial pressure (MAP) and serum triglycerides were increased in the transplanted patients, and the serum high density lipoprotein (HDL)-cholesterol and erythrocyte fluidity decreased. The haemorheological variables were used as dependent variables in a stepwise regression analysis with age, MAP, BMI, urinary albumin excretion rate, blood CyA concentration, creatinine clearance, and serum triglycerides, cholesterol and HDL-cholesterol as independent variables. Plasma fibrinogen was positively correlated with BMI and blood CyA. The whole blood viscosity was positively correlated with blood CyA and negatively with serum HDL-cholesterol. Only serum triglycerides remained correlated with erythrocyte aggregation tendency.

CONCLUSIONS
All variables with a known impact on blood viscosity were altered in the present group of renal transplant recipients. Inappropriate regulation of erythrocyte formation, overweight, the use of CyA, high triglycerides and low HDL-cholesterol levels may be factors contributing to this. The importance of impaired flow properties of blood for the development of cardiovascular diseases and transplant glomerulosclerosis needs to be examined.