Television watching is a social experience. People watch the same TV programs and they are talking about shows and movies, discussing, analyzing and recommending. With the rise of the SmartTV platforms the domain of Augmented Entertainment is changing. There are new ways to watch and discuss about television shows, to integrate the web experience with the TV one. There is an opportunity to involve the user and make it an active entity during or after the show.
A second-screen platform focused on education is an innovative concept. The challenge is to define a coherent environment involving classroom and residential setups, SmartTV and mobile devices, web applications and educational content management systems.
The human knowledge sustains the complexity of the society. A man's knowledge development occurs through social interaction, from an early age. It has multiple dimensions, argumentation being an essential component. By argumentation, the knowledge is consolidated and transferred between people. The common debates involve relevant assumptions and conclusions for a problem that needs to be analyzed. Argumentation is essential for the human condition. Each and every day we are confronted with conflicting information and we are forced to deal with the resulting inconsistencies. Often, we weigh and select information according to our personal preferences. For these we have a list of pros and cons for each option and argument. And when we are not sure about the information, we can try to look better for information or advice in order to be able to make a decision.
EduSOFA is a second-screen educational platform. It provides a debate like system for encouraging more valuable discussions. Using the platform, the viewer is involved in critical thinking activities, building communities of learning around concepts and educational information. The debate engine is implemented as a multi-agent system similar to a debate tree. The software implementation uses the actors paradigm and it is based on AKKA distributed framework. The debate engine computes automatically, from the debate tree structure, two measures: Degree of Interest and Degree of Confidence.


Achieving zero hunger in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) without minimizing postharvest losses of agricultural products is impossible. Therefore, a holistic approach is vital to end hunger, simultaneously improving food security, diversity, and livelihoods. This review focuses on the African nightshades (ANS) Solanum spp. contribution to improving food and nutrition security in SSA. Different parts of ANS are utilized as food and medicine; however, pests and diseases hinder ANS utilization. African nightshade is rich in micronutrients such as β-carotene, vitamins C and E, minerals (iron, calcium, and zinc), and dietary fiber. The leaves contain a high amount of nutrients than the berries. Proper utilization of ANS can contribute to ending hidden hunger, mainly in children and pregnant women. Literature shows that ANS contains antinutritional factors such as oxalate, phytate, nitrate, and alkaloids; however, their quantities are low to cause potential health effects. Several improved varieties with high yields, rich in nutrients, and low alkaloids have been developed in SSA. Various processing and preservation techniques such as cooking, drying, and fermentation are feasible techniques for value addition on ANS in SSA; moreover, most societies are yet to adopt them effectively. Furthermore, promoting value addition and commercialization of ANS is of importance and can create more jobs. Therefore, this review provides an overview of ANS production and challenges that hinder their utilization, possible solutions, and future research suggestions. This review concludes that ANS is an essential nutritious leafy vegetable for improving nutrition and livelihoods in SSA.


All organisms host a diversity of associated viruses, bacteria, and protists, collectively defined as the holobiont. While scientific advancements have enhanced the understanding of the functional roles played by various components of the holobiont, there is a growing need to integrate multiple types of molecular data into spatially and temporally resolved frameworks. To that end, we mapped 16S and 18S rDNA metabarcoding, metatranscriptomics, and metabolomic data onto three-dimensional reconstructions of coral colonies to examine microbial diversity, microbial gene expression, and biochemistry on two colonies of the ecologically important, reef-building coral, Orbicella faveolata and their competitors (i.e., adjacent organisms interacting with the corals: fleshy algae, turf algae, hydrozoans, and other corals). Overall, no statistically significant spatial patterns were observed among the samples for any of the data types; instead, strong signatures of the macroorganismal hosts (e.g., coral, algae, hydrozoa) were detected, in the microbiome, the transcriptome, and the metabolome. The 16S rDNA analysis demonstrated higher abundance of Firmicutes in the coral microbiome than in its competitors. A single bacterial amplicon sequence variant from the genus Clostridium was found exclusively in all O. faveolata samples. In contrast to microbial taxa, a portion of the functionally annotated bacterial RNA transcripts (6.86%) and metabolites (1.95%) were ubiquitous in all coral and competitor samples. Machine learning analysis of microbial transcripts revealed elevated T7-like cyanophage-encoded photosystem II transcripts in O. faveolata samples, while sequences involved in bacterial cell division were elevated in turf algal and interface samples. Similar analysis of metabolites revealed that bacterial-produced antimicrobial and antifungal compounds were highly enriched in coral samples. This study provides insight into the spatial and biological patterning of the coral microbiome, transcriptome, and metabolome.


This volume derives from a workshop held at the University of Kalmar (now Linnaeus University), Sweden between the 20-24 of October 2008. The aim of this gathering was to provide a forum for rock art researchers from different parts of northern Europe to discuss traditional as well as current interpretative trends within rock art research. Changing Pictures aims to return to traditional interpretative notions regarding the meaning and significance of rock art to investigate if and why any information had been left behind to recover and rethink. During the last decades, there has been an immense global interest among archaeologists and anthropologists in studying rock art. Research in northern Europe, as elsewhere, has intensely explored a manifold of methodological and theoretical perspectives. Most of these studies however, have been published in languages that seldom reach beyond the native speakers of Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish, Russian or Finnish. Therefore an important motivation for this volume is to try to apprise some of the current movements within this field of research and present it for an international audience. These papers explore the relevance of older ideas, such as notions about prehistoric religion, ritual performance, sympathetic magic, animism and totemism, the mindscapes of landscapes etc., as well as the present "state of the art" in order to develop a broader understanding of the phenomenon we call rock art. This aspiration can be seen as a common thread linking the different chapters in this book. Saying that, some, if not all, of the articles presented in this volume challenge the notion "rock art" itself, arguing that sometimes the rock, the "canvas" and rather intangible but equally important sensual encounters, such as sound, echoes, touch and temporal phenomenological changes and the perception of decorated rock art panels, should be regarded, at least, as important as the "art" itself. By reassessing traditional approaches to Scandinavian rock art and creatively reworking these ideas, whilst also addressing significant new concepts such as the agency of rock and the performativity of rock art, this anthology of papers offers not only a snapshot of current debates, but also reflects pivotal changes in the study of rock art.


Chemistry digitization requires an unambiguous link between experiments and the code used to generate the experimental conditions and outcomes, yet this process is not standardized, limiting the portability of any chemical code. What is needed is a universal approach to aid this process using a well-defined standard that is composed of syntheses that are employed in modular hardware. Herein we present a new approach to the digitization of organic synthesis that combines process chemistry principles with 3D printed reactionware. This approach outlines the process for transforming unit operations into digitized hardware and well-defined instructions that ensure effective synthesis. To demonstrate this, we outline the process for digitizing 3 MIDA boronate building blocks, an ester hydrolysis, a Wittig olefination, a Suzuki-Miyaura coupling reaction, and synthesis of the drug sulfanilamide.


The absorption of light by bound or diffusible chromophores causes conformational rearrangements in natural and artificial photoreceptor proteins. These rearrangements are coupled to the opening or closing of ion transport pathways, the association or dissociation of binding partners, the enhancement or suppression of catalytic activity, or the transcription or repression of genetic information. Illumination of cells, tissues, or organisms engineered genetically to express photoreceptor proteins can thus be used to perturb biochemical and electrical signaling with exquisite cellular and molecular specificity. First demonstrated in 2002, this principle of optogenetic control has had a profound impact on neuroscience, where it provides a direct and stringent means of probing the organization of neural circuits and of identifying the neural substrates of behavior. The impact of optogenetic control is also beginning to be felt in other areas of cell and organismal biology.


The propagation of light within a semiconductor Faraday-active Fabry-Perot resonator is investigated theoretically and experimentally. It is shown that an external magnetic field radically changes the angular and spectral characteristics of transmission, reflection, and emissivity of the resonator not only for polarized, but also for unpolarized, light. Suppression of interference patterns and phase inversion of the interference extrema were observed in both monochromatic and polychromatic light. The investigations were carried out for the plane-parallel plates of n-InAs in the spectral range of free charge carrier absorption. The results can be used to create new controllable optical and spectroscopic devices for investigation of Faraday-active material properties and for control of parameters of plane-parallel layers and structures.


Recent research advances in charge-conducting materials have enabled the transformation of the naturally-occurring materials into crucial components in many technologies, including renewable energy storage devices or bioelectronics. Among various candidates, eumelanins are promising charge storage materials, exhibiting hybrid electronic ionic conductivity in a hydrated environment. The chemical and electrochemical properties of eumelanins are relatively well studied; however, the structure-property relationship is still elusive up to date. Herein, we reported the mesoscale structure of eumelanins and its impact on the charge transport. X-ray scattering suggests that eumelanin pigments exhibit the semi-crystalline structure with ordered d-spacings. These unique mesoscale structures further influence the charge transport mechanism with the cations of various sizes. Understanding the structures with consequent electrochemical properties suggest that eumelanins can further be tuned to serve as high-performance naturally-occurring charge storage materials.


Charlemagne's Jihad. YITZHAK HEN. The so-called Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae is commonly associated with Charlemagne's brutal campaign in Saxony during the years 782-785. This article reexamines the evidence concerning the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae, arguing that it should be associated with Charlemagne's final campaign in Saxony (around 795), and that in order to understand the unusual policy it prescribes one should consider the Capitulatio against a broader political and cultural background. As suggested by the author, the Capitulatio's policy did not emerge ex nihilo; it was deeply rooted in the political as well as the religious ideology that characterized Muslim Spain (al-Andalus) at the time.


Deep learning methods have shown considerable potential for hyperspectral image (HSI) classification, which can achieve high accuracy compared with traditional methods. However, they often need a large number of training samples and have a lot of parameters and high computational overhead. To solve these problems, this article proposes new network architecture, LiteDepthwiseNet, for HSI classification. Based on 3-D depthwise convolution, LiteDepthwiseNet can decompose standard convolution into depthwise convolution and pointwise convolution, which can achieve high classification performance with minimal parameters. Moreover, we remove the ReLU layer and batch normalization layer in the original 3-D depthwise convolution, which is likely to improve the overfitting phenomenon of the model on small-sized data sets. In addition, focal loss is used as the loss function to improve the model's attention on difficult samples and unbalanced data, and its training performance is significantly better than that of cross-entropy loss or balanced cross-entropy loss. Experiment results on five benchmark hyperspectral data sets show that LiteDepthwiseNet achieves state-of-the-art performance with a very small number of parameters and low computational cost.


Population size structure provides information on demographic characteristics, such as growth and decline, enabling post-hoc assessment of spatial differences in susceptibility to disturbance. Nevertheless, very few studies have quantified size data of scleractinian corals along a shallow-mesophotic gradient, partly because of previously inaccessible depths. Here, we report the coral size-frequency distributions at the morphology level (six growth forms) and at the species level for ten representative locally abundant species along a broad depth gradient (5–100 m) in the Gulf of Eilat/Aqaba (GoE/A). A total of 18,865 colonies belonging to 14 families and 45 genera were recorded and measured over four reef sites. Colonies were found to be 11.2% more abundant at mesophotic (40–100 m; 55.6%) depths compared with shallow (5–30 m; 44.4%). The coral taxa exhibited heterogeneity in their size-structure, with marked differences among depths, morphological growth forms, and species. Branching and corymbose corals were more prevalent in shallow waters, while encrusting and laminar forms comprised the majority of mesophotic corals. Nevertheless, massive morphology was the most abundant growth form across all sites and depths (39%), followed by laminar (26%) and encrusting (20%). Corymbose corals (primarily Acroporidae) revealed constrained size at all depths; with the lack of small-size groups indicating populations at risk of decline. Depth-generalist species belonging to massive and laminar morphologies generally exhibited a larger colony size at the mesophotic depths, but were typified by a higher number of small colonies. Furthermore, we refute the widely and long-accepted assertion that Stylophora pistillata is the most abundant coral in the northern GoE/A, and assert that Leptoseris glabra is the one. Here, we provide a baseline for future monitoring of coral population structures, insights to recent ecological dynamics, retrospective assessment of coral community recovery following disturbances and grounds for conservation assessments and management actions.


Tertiary lymphoid structures (TLS) are lymph node-like structures that form at sites of inflammation, and their presence in cancer patients is predictive of a better clinical outcome. One significant obstacle to TLS formation is reduced immune cell infiltration into the tumor microenvironment (TME), resulting from aberrant vasculature within the TME. Recent studies have shown that low doses of vasculature normalizing (VN) agents may override this defect, leading to improved tissue perfusion and increased immune cell entry into the TME. While the effect of VN agents on vascular endothelial cells has been well documented, their effects on immune cell and tumor cell phenotype remain understudied. We hypothesized that treating immune cells with VN agents would induce a pro-inflammatory phenotype in T cells and dendritic cells (DCs), while treating tumor cells would reduce their immunosuppressive phenotype and promote production of chemokines that recruit immune cells and foster TLS formation. To test this, a mouse melanoma cell line, primary murine T cells, and DCs were treated overnight with VN agents. The next day, treated and control cells were harvested for analyses to measure transcript levels of target genes as well as levels of surface markers. Overall, VN agents were observed to have differential but predominantly immune-supportive effects on immune and tumor cell phenotypes. These findings will guide future experiments which may result in an effective clinical treatment.


A survey of 164 area departments of chest diseases in England and Wales presents details of 321 consultants and 176 chest physicians in other career grades. During the past 10 years there have been 99 consultant and 76 senior hospital medical officer vacancies, with 61 and 23 replacements, respectively, of which only 22 and 8 were whole-time in chest diseases. Of the total, 119 consultants and 45 in other career grades are now aged 55 and over. In most chest clinics the slowly diminishing work load from tuberculosis has been more than offset by increasing admission of other chest diseases, usually to fewer beds. Many areas need an increase in senior establishment and many require improved clinical facilities; some need both to bring them into line with official policy based on the recommendations of the Scadding report. During the next five years there will be 52 consultant and 11 other senior career posts in chest diseases vacated through retirement. At least eight consultant appointments a year, in terms of whole-time equivalents, will be mandatory for at least five years and probably for 10 years to maintain existing standards without allowance for essential improvements or the development of regional thoracic centres. Present training schemes in the specialty cannot produce more than two or three trained candidates a year for these eight vacancies. The description of prospects in the specialty as "uncertain" deters young doctors from entering it and discovering how broad a spectrum of medicine it embraces. It is urgently necessary for schemes of training to be set up immediately in conjunction with a considerable increase in training posts at senior registrar level embracing both general and chest medicine.


We consider a decision-making problem where the environment varies both in space and time. Such problems arise naturally when considering, e.g., the navigation of an underwater robot amidst ocean currents or the navigation of an aerial vehicle in wind. To model such spatiotemporal variation, we extend the standard Markov decision process (MDP) to a new framework called the time-varying Markov decision process (TVMDP). The TVMDP has a time-varying state transition model and transforms the standard MDP that considers only immediate and static  uncertainty descriptions of state transitions, to a framework that is able to adapt to future time-varying transition dynamics over some horizon. We show how to solve a TVMDP via a redesign of the MDP value propagation mechanisms by incorporating the introduced dynamics along the temporal dimension. We validate our framework in a marine robotics navigation setting using spatiotemporal ocean data and show that it outperforms prior efforts.


Numerous novel spectroscopy techniques have been developed to perform detection and characterization at molecular level. Nevertheless, the resolution of spectroscopy remains to be the bottleneck, and local electric field is involved to solve this issue. Localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) occurred at the surface of noble metal nanoparticles is a major source of enhanced local electric field which provide notable enhancement factor of spectroscopy applying fluorescence and the Raman scattering. In this chapter, we will firstly present the physics of localized surface plasmon resonance to gain a basic understanding. Several current techniques to prepare a wide variety of nanoparticles and localized surface plasmon resonance detector are subsequently introduced. We further illustrate two examples taking advantage of experiments and modeling to elaborate the effect of localized surface plasmon resonance on spectroscopy under different circumstances. The combination of experimental and theoretical approaches elucidates the influence of each factor and promotes the design of localized surface plasmon resonance detector used in spectroscopy.


We investigate how high seas closure will affect the availability of commonly consumed food fish in 46 fish reliant, and/or low income countries. Domestic consumption of straddling fish species (fish that would be affected by high seas closure) occurred in 54% of the assessed countries. The majority (70%) of countries were projected to experience net catch gains following high seas closure. However, countries with projected catch gains and that also consumed the straddling fish species domestically made up only 37% of the assessed countries. In contrast, much fewer countries (25%) were projected to incur net losses from high seas closure, and of these, straddling species were used domestically in less than half (45%) of the countries. Our findings suggest that, given the current consumption patterns of straddling species, high seas closure may only directly benefit the supply of domestically consumed food fish in a small number of fish reliant and/or low income countries. In particular, it may not have a substantial impact on improving domestic fish supply in countries with the greatest need for improved access to affordable fish, as only one third of this group used straddling fish species domestically. Also, food security in countries with projected net catch gains but where straddling fish species are not consumed domestically may still benefit indirectly via economic activities arising from the increased availability of non-domestically consumed straddling fish species following high seas closure. Consequently, this study suggests that high seas closure can potentially improve marine resource sustainability as well as contribute to human well-being in some of the poorest and most fish dependent countries worldwide. However, caution is required because high seas closure may also negatively affect fish availability in countries that are already impoverished and fish insecure.


This study examines the impact of a series of workshops intended to assist elementary interns in meeting the needs of mainstreamed students whose first language is not English. Throughout this dissertation, students whose first language is not English and who are in the process of learning English at school will be referred to as English learners or ELs. (Diaz-Rico, 2008). Selected elementary certification candidates enrolled in the University of Pittsburgh's internship program participated in the workshop series. The workshops were designed to be collaborative following a sociocultural perspective on learning. The workshops focused on two major issues. First, the workshops addressed English learners' socio-affective issues. Secondly, the workshops addressed teaching strategies designed for teachers with mainstreamed English learners. Interns were asked to participate in a series of eight workshops and to incorporate instructional strategies presented in the workshops into their lesson plans. During the workshop series, qualitative data were collected and analyzed. The primary tools of data collection in this study were surveys, a questionnaire, videotaped classroom observations and workshop sessions, interns' lesson reflections and workshop reflections, interns' lesson plans, and writing samples from the English learners. The data were analyzed for evidence of change in the interns' understanding of their English learners and change in interns' lesson planning and instruction. The results of this study show that the interns learned to identify their English learners, learned about their English learners' cultural background and developed a deeper sense of empathy for the socio-affective issues encountered by English learners. The interns also learned to identify content vocabulary relevant to their lessons and use visuals to teach vocabulary; however, the interns did not learn to modify their teaching practices in ways that specifically meet the needs of English learners, such as teaching linguistic structures. Various implications on the field of teacher preparation can be made as a result of this study including the importance of training teachers to think linguistically and training teachers to have a positive view of culturally and linguistically diverse students.


OBJECTIVE
Significant numbers of younger persons with stroke should be given the opportunity to return to work. The aim of this study was to investigate factors of importance for return to work among persons after first ever stroke, in the age range 18-55 years.

METHODS
A questionnaire was sent to all persons who had experienced a first ever stroke, 18-55 years of age, registered in the Swedish national quality register for stroke care, Riks-Stroke. Of the 1068 who answered the questionnaire, 855 (539 men and 316 women) were in paid employment before their stroke, and were included in this study.

RESULTS
Sixty-five percent returned to work and, of these, an equal proportion were men and women. Significant factors associated with return to work were the perceived importance of work (odds ratio (OR) 5.10), not perceiving themselves as a burden on others (OR 3.33), support from others for return to work (OR 3.66), retaining the ability to run a short distance (OR 2.77), and higher socioeconomic codes (OR 2.12). A negative association was found between those rehabilitated in wards intended for younger persons and return to work (OR 0.37).

CONCLUSION
External support from others, and positive attitudes towards return to work, were factors associated with successful return to work after stroke. Contrary to what was expected, independence in personal activities of daily living and cognitive factors were not associated with return to work to the same extent as persistent higher level of physical functions, such as ability to run a short distance.


The small business sector is recognized as an integral component of economic development and a crucial element to lift countries out of poverty as it drives economic growth, creates employment, and has been found to improve livelihood in developing countries. Yet, the sector is under-financed in Nigeria where 65 percent of economically active population, mostly women, is excluded from accessing credit in formal financial institutions. Although actors in this sector received financing support from money-lenders, friends, relatives and credit unions, low level of loanable funds and lack of regulation make them problematic. The study examined the accessibility of credit facilities to women traders at Agbeni Market by assessing the credit facilities available to them, constraints in accessing funds and strategies adopted to sustain their businesses. Max Weber's Social Action theory guided the inquiry and the study adopted a descriptive design, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches. While structured questionnaire was used to gather quantitative data from 300 respondents selected through stratified and systematic sampling techniques, 12 in-depth interviews and 2 FGDs of 6 participants each were used to generate qualitative data from purposively selected respondents. Respondents were drawn from Agbeni Market in Ibadan where a large concentration of women traders exists. Quantitative data were analyzed and interpreted through simple frequency and chi-square, while qualitative data were subjected to content analysis and reported through direct quotations. Socio-demographic characteristics of respondents showed that they aged between.


Theoretical predictions within the Born approximation of the expected differential light scattering of circularly polarized light (CIDS) were made for the 300‐Å chromatin fiber, modeled as a helical array of dielectric ellipsoids. Computed CIDS values were strongly dependent on the exact geometry of the solenoid model, depending particularly on parameters relaed to the chiral nature of the fiber and the orientation of the nucleosomes within the helix, in contrast to the values of the total light scattering, which mainly probed size and shape. In particular, both a superbead model and a strict linear 110‐Å nucleosome filament would be predicted as giving rise to zero CIDS (in disagreement with the finite values observed). At the same time, helical models in which the normal vectors to the nucleosome faces were exactly parallel to the helical axis also yielded zero CIDS. Confirming earlier expectations, CIDS values were significantly less dependent on helical length than total light scattering. Finally, comparison of these calculated results from those extrapolated from available experimental data indicates that predicted CIDS values, based on currently accepted models of solenoid structure, are within an order of magnitude of those experimentally observed. Together, these results indicate the potential of differential light scattering measurements as a probe of chromatin higher‐order structure, complementary to existing scattering measurements.


This paper examines how one higher education institute (HEI) in the Northwest of England has devised and developed an innovative Master of Arts (MA) in Education practice with a curriculum designed to meet the needs of newly and recently qualified teachers. The research considers that in the early stages of initial teacher education (ITE), learning to teach may involve an apprenticeship model where the teacher educator must model learning, teaching and assessment strategies and inspire their mentees to find out those that will work for them through models of reflection and policy in practice. Later, successful teachers must be able to choose and critically evaluate strategies and pedagogies for themselves, a defining factor in the design of the programme and curriculum. Emerging from a course review, we consider evidence based practice and practitioner research through a progression route (MA) from ITE. Furthermore we determine that the research focus of early career teachers in this context enables research at a personal level for professional development of emerging and focused targets for context dependent research. This paper concludes that the current programme does indeed meet serving teachers' needs, and represents the move from reflection on practice to research informed practice evident through a consideration of the contemporary issues facing beginning teachers and their foci of study. This research also informs how we develop our recruitment strategy and next steps for the future to encourage a more sustained approach to research as teachers. It highlights clear steps for taking this research further and tracking beginning teachers' research journey over time.


Image processing algorithms related to remote sensing have been tested and utilized on the Hadoop MapReduce parallel platform by using an experimental 112-core high-performance cloud computing system that is situated in the Environmental Studies Center at the University of Qatar. Although there has been considerable research utilizing the Hadoop platform for image processing rather than for its original purpose of text processing, it had never been proved that Hadoop can be successfully utilized for high-volume image files. Hence, the successful utilization of Hadoop for image processing has been researched using eight different practical image processing algorithms. We extend the file approach in Hadoop to regard the whole TIFF image file as a unit by expanding the file format that Hadoop uses. Finally, we apply this to other image formats such as the JPEG, BMP, and GIF formats. Experiments have shown that the method is scalable and efficient in processing multiple large images used mostly for remote sensing applications, and the difference between the single PC runtime and the Hadoop runtime is clearly noticeable.


In the context of an increasing clinical need to better support self-management for people living with long-term health conditions an interest in the role of social networks has emerged. Given that sport participation often provides opportunities for social engagement, a space to explore self-management at the intersection of medical sociology and the sociology of sport has opened up. This article presents findings from an exploratory qualitative study with organ transplant recipients who have participated in Transplant Games events – national and international multi-sport competitions for organ transplant recipients. Our findings illustrate how sport-based social networks serve as resources for health-related knowledge, provide participants with additional affective support and help shape health expectations for the future. Although sport-based social networks were seen as an overwhelmingly positive resource for our participants, it is plausible that harmful unintended consequences could arise for patients with existing self-management issues. As such, it is recommended that people seeking to use sport as a tool to enhance illness self-management should consider the various and powerful ways that social networks can be impactful and anticipate the potential consequences accordingly.


The proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs) has posed significant challenges to the existing power grid infrastructure. It thus becomes of vital importance to efficiently manage the Electro-Mobility for large demand from EVs. Due to limited cruising range of EVs, vehicles have to make frequent stops for recharging, while long charging period is one major concern under plug-in charging. We herein leverage battery swapping (BS) technology to provide an alternative charging service, which substantially reduces the charging duration (from hours down to minutes). Concerning in practice that various battery is generally not compatible with each other, we thus introduce battery heterogeneity into the swapping service, concerning the case that different types of EVs co-exist. A battery heterogeneity-based swapping service framework is then proposed. Further with reservations for swapping service enabled, the demand load can be anticipated at BS stations as a guidance to alleviate service congestion. Therefore, potential hotspots can be avoided. Results show the performance gains under the proposed scheme by comparing to other benchmarks, in terms of service waiting time, etc. In particular, the diversity of battery stock across the network can be effectively managed.


In wireless sensor networks, the maximum lifetime routing problem has received increasing attention among researchers. There are several critical features that need to be considered while designing a wireless sensor networks such as cost, network lifetime and Quality of service. Due to the limitation on the energy of sensor nodes, energy efficient routing is a very important issue in sensor networks. Therefore, to prolong the lifetime of the sensor nodes, designing efficient routing protocols is critical. One solution is to formulate the routing problem as a linear programming problem by maximizing the time at which the first node runs out of battery. In this paper, with the notion of maximizing the system lifetime, we implemented a new heuristic and evaluated the performance of it with the existing algorithm called flow augmentation algorithm. Further, our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm significantly outperform FA algorithm, in terms of system lifetime.


BACKGROUND
Glycan-binding proteins are widely distributed in human and play an essential role in biological processes. Their involvements in inflammatory and immune responses make it increasingly likely that the glycan-binding proteins may represent valuable therapeutic targets.

OBJECTIVE
The current review aims to provide information on recent advancements in clinical developments of antibodies against glycan-binding proteins as potential targets.

RESULTS AND CONCLUSION
There are several therapeutic antibodies being developed targeting glycanbinding proteins, including CD22, CD33, DEC-205, and CD62P, for different diseases. The clinical investigations demonstrated benefits of treatments with one antibody-drug conjugate against CD22 being approved by the regulatory agencies. The recent progresses in clinical developments of these antibodies have provided great promises in therapeutic targeting of more glycan-binding proteins for treating multiple diseases, including inflammation, autoimmune diseases, and hematological malignancies.


Generating a large caloric effect under a low applied field is critical for realizing high performance solid state caloric cooling. Here, we report that a large enhancement in the electrocaloric response at a moderate electric field level over a relatively broad temperature range can be achieved in the relaxor poly(vinylidenefluoride-trifluoroethylene-chlorofluoroethylene) [P(VDF-TrFE-CFE)] polymers by including the minor normal ferroelectric phase. We show that the terpolymer of P(VDF-TrFE-CFE) 69.7/30.3/6 mol. % which contains a minor normal ferroelectric phase, under a moderate electric field of 90 MV/m, can reach an adiabatic temperature change ΔT = 11 K, compared with ΔT = 6 K of the terpolymers with a pure relaxor phase under the same field. The results reveal that the presence of the minor ferroelectric phase facilitates the polarization switch in a temperature range near the ferroelectric transition while the relaxor phase maintains a large electrocaloric effect (ECE) over a broad temperature range, resulting in a large ECE over a relatively broad temperature range in the material.


It is unthinkable today not to promote or encourage intercultural communication, it being the only alternative to conflict: a dialogic interaction designed to promote all the instances in the game and to achieve equilibrium points that are recognized by the parties involved. It is necessary to activate transformation processes in the subjects' cognitive system, so that they experience occurrences as a synthesis and reinterpretation of several cultures. Indeed, the presence of different cultures leads to the construction of new cultural identities, either multi- or trans-ethnic ones, and multiculturalism is a multidimensional process of interaction between people with different cultural identities, who, through the meeting of cultures, live a deep and complex conflict/reception experience, as a valuable opportunity for their personal growth, from the standpoint of changing everything that creates an obstacle to the construction of a new civil society.


The experiments reported here show that the resistance of mice to spontaneous neoplastic diseases can be increased by means of oleic acid injections. This is demonstrated (1) by the greatly reduced incidence of local recurrences at the site of operation, and the lessened incidence (2) of primary tumors developing at other locations, (3) of metastases as encountered at autopsy, and (4) of takes of autoplastic tumor grafts, while finally, (5) there is an appreciable increase of the average postoperative longevity. Supplementary to the above results is the finding that in the treated mice the reaction about the implanted cancer graft differs from that encountered in untreated animals.


Public health officers have to write a medical certificate for public authorities requesting them to do so. This certificate is to contain all the results of medical examinations required for the respective purpose, thus enabling the recipient authorities to take the decisions incumbent on them, such as those judging fitness for service or entitlement to claim. In case the persons concerned agree, a transmission of data is admissible independent of statutory provisions. However, this should always be oriented towards minimum data transmission. Nevertheless, lack of consent or even an adverse intention of the person concerned cannot serve as a blockade in so far as the public health officer has complied with current criminal and data privacy regulations.


Abstract This paper advances a way of thinking about the quality of Japan's democratic polity by reviewing a set of constitutive attributes that define and contribute to its governing structure and processes. In Japan, the basic characteristics that accompany modern democracy, such as rule of law, accountability, responsiveness, individual freedom, and fundamental rights, can be taken for granted. This paper addresses more nuanced features of these characteristics, their historical origins, and how they are born out in the actual working of Japan's democracy today. In particular, it highlights various aspects of "hybrid" institutions and their political consequences, including the coexistence of conflicting governing principles and the unusual procedure for the selection of the prime minister as stipulated in the constitution. Also discussed are inconsistencies in the electoral rules used for various levels of governments and how they have inhibited the development of political parties and stable party systems.


Rats have been treated for 6 weeks with thioacetamide (0.1% in drinking water). The biochemical changes in liver microsomal metabolism of estradiol which are similar to those observed in human liver cirrhosis become already apparent after one week of treatment. These are diminishment of hepatic microsomal cytochromes P-450 and b5, comparable decrease of 2-hydroxylation and increase of formation of estrone from estradiol. The alterations of estrogen metabolism are reversible within two weeks after ending thioacetamide treatment. These data correspond to the already well established histological response of rat liver to thioacetamide, and its reversibility.


DJ Dolores' artistic path (codenamed Helder Aragão) arises during the manguebeat movement in the 1990s, in Recife, the capital of Pernambuco state, in northeastern Brazil. In addition to working with multimedia production, in music his work consists of experimental albums of electronic music and also soundtracks for films, theatre play and dance performances. This article analyzes the cultural diversity and mixtures organized by the DJ, which shift the boundaries of hegemonic musical genres articulated by the phonographic industry. Rather, Dolores values underground texts in the memory of media pop music, such as regional traditions rhythms (embolada, coco, maracatu and frevo). As of the hybridisms present on the albums Contraditório? (2002) and Frevotron (2015), respectively first and last discs, otherness and difference policies are identified on the musical language as well as cultural texts and memory, the symbiosis between, on one hand, DJ and technology, and, on the other, tradition and acoustic instrumentation. On the first album, Dolores plays with the Orchestra Santa Massa, which brings together instruments such as rabeca, percussion, wind instruments, electric guitar and the Isaar França's voice. On the last one, the DJ plays with Maestro Spok, frevo saxophonist, one percussionist and a guitarist.


Introduction: Adequate nutrition during infancy and early childhood is fundamental to the development of child's full human potentials. Malnutrition is recognized as one of the major causes of morbidity and mortality among the children under- five years and developing countries are the worst affected.
Objectives: To assess the nutritional status of under-five children of selected area of Chattogram hill tracts of Bangladesh.
Material and Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted among 300 children with age between 6 months to 5 years, reported to the outpatients department of selected hospitals were included purposively. All the data were collected by interviewing the mothers of the children by using a pretested semi-structured questionnaire. Nutritional status was assessed by using WHO recommended height for age Z-score (HAZ) for stunting, weight for age Z-score (WAZ) for underweight, height for weight Z-score (HWZ) for wasting and mid upper am circumference (MUAC) for overall nutritional status.
Results: Out of 300 children 53.3% were boys and 48.4% were aged less than 2 years. About 50.7% children were tribal and 49.3% were bengali. Majority (56.45%) of the children's mothers' age was below 25 years, 36.7% was illiterate, 92.7% were housewives and 85.6% had monthly family income less than 10,000 taka. Regarding children nutritional status 15.6% was moderate stunted, 30.7% was mild stunted; severe, moderate and mild underweight was 4.3%, 13.3% and 24.7% respectively. About 1.7% was found severe wasted and 15.3% was moderate wasted. By MUAC 20.3% were of moderate acute malnutrition and 3.3% were of severe acute malnutrition.
Conclusion: This study result revealed a high prevalence of malnutrition among under-five children in the study area. Considering the acute and long-term consequences of malnutrition special interventions program is needed to overcome the situation.
Journal of Armed Forces Medical College Bangladesh Vol.14(1) 2018: 21-23


In Ethiopia, land tenure insecurity is one of the major factors that affect the productivity of smallholder agriculture and sustainable development. The present government of Ethiopia designed and implemented rural land registration and certification program in the four major regions to enhance the land tenure security of peasants. The aim of this study was to investigate factors that affect land tenure security of farmers after the implementation of the program in Hulet Eju Enese District, Amhara region. Identifying the main factors affecting land tenure security and investigating the extent of each factors were the specific objectives of the study. The research designs were both quantitative and qualitative research method and the data were collected by questionnaire and interview. Stratified, random and purposive sampling methods were employed to select sub districts, farmer households and key informants, respectively. Binary logistic regression model and narration were used as method of data analysis and interpretation. The result shows that from the stated factors, some of them still affect the land tenure security of the farmer households in the study area. Therefore, in the implementation of the second stage of the program, emphasis should be given to minimize the influence of those factors and to attain sustainable land use practice.

 Key words: Land, tenure, security, registration, certification, rural, possession.


Origin and dismantling of Paleogene laterites from southwest Uruguay (Asencio Formation). The Asencio Formation is a thin sequence of dark red beds bearing indurated paleosols with a very rich insect ichnofauna, exposed on the west margin of the Rio de la Plata Craton. Two interfingering facies, having transitional to sharp contacts, were recognized: ferruginized duricrusts and nodular beds. The pedogenized structure of the duricrusts ranges from prismatic to angular blocky (peds) with frequent insect ( Palmiraichnus and Teisseirei) and root traces, to massive-alveolar without discrete traces. The composition is quartzitic and the microstructure is spongy, with a ground mass composed of argillic-hematitic microgranules, showing argiloferrans and pedotubules. These features correspond to Bt (argillic) horizons of well-developed Ultisols. The nodular beds are clay-matrix, disorganized massive conglomerates. Nodule composition and texture are similar to the crusts. Trace fossils are also frequent ( Uruguay , Coprinisphaera, Monesichnus ) and commonly rotated. A residual origin by duricrust weathering and disintegration is suggested for these deposits. The facies association can be compared to the lateritic profiles of the tropical savannahs. The bio-geochemical metabolism of these profiles, controlled by climatic (hidrologic) changes, produced two constructive/destructive stages, transforming iteratively mature Ultisols into laterites: 1) The ferruginuous duricrusts correspond to ferricretes, which would have developed in a warm and highly contrasted climate, where intense dryness would have produced dehydration and induration of the soils. 2) Subsequent solubilization because of increasing precipitation (rehydratation), would have produced ferricrete dismantling and the residual nodular beds. Such climatic conditions for middle latitudes would be expectable for the Paleogene climate optimum. Thus, an early Eocene age is proposed, in accordance to the paleosol insect ichnofauna.


Antithymocyte serum (ATS) is a kind of hetero-antiserum, many actions of which have been proved since 1974. Recently, we have transplanted several kinds of cell lines, including the diploid cells from human embryo lung (KMB 17,2BS) heteroploid cells (BHK21, FL) and malignant cells (BEL7404, Hela). Our experiments showed that malignant and heteroploid cells could be introduced into new born rats or mice under the effect of ATS and became transplanted tumour. However, in the rats or mice treated with ATS, the diploid cells could produce only necrotic or inflammatory nodules but not transplanted tumors. In recent years, a baby hamster kidney cell line (BHK21) has been applied in transformation assay. However, the experiments show that BHK21 cells, at 237 generations, have already become malignant cells, therefore, it can not be used for transformation assay. For BHK21 cell line, it is better to do the tumorigenicity test or to use earlier cells before the transformation assay. ATS method, used routinely to detect the malignant or normal cell lines, is worth extensive application.


Background: Strong evidence supports beginning stroke rehabilitation as soon as the patient's medical status has stabilized and continuing following discharge from acute care. However, adherence to rehabilitation treatments over the rehabilitation phase has been shown to be suboptimal. Objective: The aim of this study is to assess the impact of a telerehabilitation platform on stroke patients' adherence to a rehabilitation plan and on their level of reintegration into normal social activities, in comparison with usual care. The primary outcome is patient adherence to stroke rehabilitation (up to 12 weeks), which is hypothesized to influence reintegration into normal living. Secondary outcomes for patients include functional recovery and independence, depression, adverse events related to telerehabilitation, use of services (up to 6 months), perception of interprofessional shared decision making, and quality of services received. Interprofessional collaboration as well as quality of interprofessional shared decision making will be measured with clinicians. Methods: In this interrupted time series with a convergent qualitative component, rehabilitation teams will be trained to develop rehabilitation treatment plans that engage the patient and family, while taking advantage of a telerehabilitation platform to deliver the treatment. The intervention will be comprised of 220 patients who will take part in stroke telerehabilitation with an interdisciplinary group of clinicians (telerehabilitation group) versus face-to-face standard of care (control group: n=110 patients). Results: Our Research Ethics Board approved the study in June 2020. Data collection for the control group is underway, with another year planned before we begin the intervention phase. Conclusions: This study will contribute to the minimization of both knowledge and practice gaps, while producing robust, in-depth data on the factors related to the effectiveness of telerehabilitation in a stroke rehabilitation continuum. Findings will JMIR Res Protoc 2021 | vol. 10 | iss. 10 | e32134 | p. 1 https://www.researchprotocols.org/2021/10/e32134 (page number not for citation purposes) Gaboury et al JMIR RESEARCH PROTOCOLS


A neural network is a mathematical model that is able to perform a task automatically or semi-automatically after learning the human knowledge that we provided. Moreover, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is a type of neural network that has shown to efficiently learn tasks related to the area of image analysis, such as image segmentation, whose main purpose is to find regions or separable objects within an image. A more specific type of segmentation, called semantic segmentation, guarantees that each region has a semantic meaning by giving it a label or class. Since CNNs can automate the task of image semantic segmentation, they have been very useful for the medical area, applying them to the segmentation of organs or abnormalities (tumors). This work aims to improve the task of binary semantic segmentation of volumetric medical images acquired by Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) using a preexisting Three-Dimensional Convolutional Neural Network (3D CNN) architecture. We propose a formulation of a loss function for training this 3D CNN, for improving pixel-wise segmentation results. This loss function is formulated based on the idea of adapting a similarity coefficient, used for measuring the spatial overlap between the prediction and ground truth, and then using it to train the network. As contribution, the developed approach achieved good performance in a context where the pixel classes are imbalanced. We show how the choice of the loss function for training can affect the final quality of the segmentation. We validate our proposal over two medical image semantic segmentation datasets and show comparisons in performance between the proposed loss function and other pre-existing loss functions used for binary semantic segmentation.


Abstract There is very little information regarding the testis structure and function in domestic cats, mainly data related to the cycle of seminiferous epithelium and sperm production. The testis weight in cats investigated in the present study was 1.2 g. Compared with most mammalian species investigated, the value of 0.08% found for testes mass related to the body mass (gonadosomatic index) in cats is very low. The tunica albuginea volume density (%) in these animals was relatively high and comprised about 19% of the testis. Seminiferous tubule and Leydig cell volume density (%) in cats were approximately 90% and 6%, respectively. The mean tubular diameter was 220 μm, and 23 m of seminiferous tubule were found per testis and per gram of testis. The frequencies of the eight stages of the cycle, characterized according to the tubular morphology system, were as follows: stage 1, 24.9%; stage 2, 12.9%; stage 3, 7.7%; stage 4, 17.6%; stage 5, 7.2%; stage 6, 11.9%; stage 7, 6.8%; and stage 8, 11 %. The premeiotic and postmeiotic stage frequency was 46% and 37%, respectively. The duration of each cycle of seminiferous epithelium was 10.4 days and the total duration of spermatogenesis based on 4.5 cycles was 46.8 days. The number of round spermatids for each pachytene primary spermatocytes (meiotic index) was 2.8, meaning that significant cell loss (30%) occurred during the two meiotic divisions. The total number of germ cells and the number of round spermatids per each Sertoli cell nucleolus at stage 1 of the cycle were 9.8 and 5.1, respectively. The Leydig cell volume was approximately 2000 μm3 and the nucleus volume 260 μm3. Both Leydig and Sertoli cell numbers per gram of testis in cats were approximately 30 million. The daily sperm production per gram of testis in cats (efficiency of spermatogenesis) was approximately 16 million. To our knowledge, this is the first investigation to perform a more detailed and comprehensive study of the testis structure and function in domestic cats. Also, this is the first report in the literature showing Sertoli and Leydig cell number per gram of testis and the daily sperm production in any kind of feline species. In this regard, besides providing a background for comparative studies with other felids, the data obtained in the present work might be useful in future studies in which the domestic cat could be utilized as an appropriate receptor model for preservation of genetic stock from rare or endangered wild felines using the germ cell transplantation technique.


ABSTRACT Mixtures of Zellner's g-priors have been studied extensively in linear models and have been shown to have numerous desirable properties for Bayesian variable selection and model averaging. Several extensions of g-priors to generalized linear models (GLMs) have been proposed in the literature; however, the choice of prior distribution of g and resulting properties for inference have received considerably less attention. In this article, we unify mixtures of g-priors in GLMs by assigning the truncated Compound Confluent Hypergeometric (tCCH) distribution to 1/(1 + g), which encompasses as special cases several mixtures of g-priors in the literature, such as the hyper-g, Beta-prime, truncated Gamma, incomplete inverse-Gamma, benchmark, robust, hyper-g/n, and intrinsic priors. Through an integrated Laplace approximation, the posterior distribution of 1/(1 + g) is in turn a tCCH distribution, and approximate marginal likelihoods are thus available analytically, leading to "Compound Hypergeometric Information Criteria" for model selection. We discuss the local geometric properties of the g-prior in GLMs and show how the desiderata for model selection proposed by Bayarri et al., such as asymptotic model selection consistency, intrinsic consistency, and measurement invariance may be used to justify the prior and specific choices of the hyper parameters. We illustrate inference using these priors and contrast them to other approaches via simulation and real data examples. The methodology is implemented in the R package BAS and freely available on CRAN. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.


Abstract : Use of capability maturity models has become commonplace among software development organizations, especially defense contractors. Government program offices, however, have lagged behind contractors in implementing their own process improvement programs. The difference in relative maturity between program offices and contractors sometimes makes it difficult for program offices to gauge the state of their programs. In 2004, the Office of the Secretary of Defense announced the creation of the CMMI (trademark) Acquisition Module (CMMI-AM), Version 1.0. The module aids program offices in developing a level of parity with their suppliers in terms of process maturity. Version 1.1, released in 2005, is an incremental refinement. The first step in any process improvement endeavor is to determine the baseline state. A program office can undergo an external appraisal, but that is not a cost-effective solution for an organization that is still a novice in process improvement. For organizations with little process improvement experience, a better choice is to begin with a self-assessment. This guide provides program managers with general information about the CMMI-AM, details about the self-assessment technique, and the questions used in a self-assessment. After reading this guide, program managers can evaluate whether a self-assessment fits their needs, and if so, conduct one. Since its initial release, this report has been revised to reflect information contained in the CMMI-AM, Version 1.1. This revision was released on August 1, 2005.


The rate at which ingested fluid is emptied from the stomach is influenced by a number of factors. Exercise at intensities greater than 70% VO2max has been shown to reduce gastric emptying rates in healthy individuals,1 but to date, no studies have reported the effects of differing exercise intensities on gastric emptying characteristics after the cessation of exercise. Five males and three females participated in this investigation following prior ethical approval. Each subject undertook a measurement of VO2max and a familiarisation trial before participating in three randomly assigned experimental trials. These included 30 min of rest, continuous cycling at 33% of peak power obtained during the VO2max test (LI) and ten 1-min sprints at peak power separated by rest periods of 2 min (HI). 30 min after completion of rest or exercise, a gastric tube was inserted and the stomach emptied before ingestion of 595 ml of a 5% glucose solution. Stomach volumes were determined at 10-min intervals for 1 h using the double sampling technique.2 3 Subjective feelings of hunger were determined before and after rest or exercise, before drinking and at 10-min intervals after drink ingestion. No differences (p>0.05) in subjective feelings of hunger were observed from pre-exercise or pre-ingestion values at any time during the rest or LI trial. Subjective feelings of hunger were significantly reduced (p=0.005) from pre-exercise values during the HI trial but returned to pre-exercise values before fluid ingestion. Mean±SD half emptying times for the test drink were similar (p=0.999) during the three trials: rest 22±10 min; LI 22±8 min HI 22±7 min. Subjective feelings of hunger in the hour after fluid ingestion were negatively correlated with total stomach volume (R2 (rest) −0.655, p=0.110, LI:−0.897, p=0.006, HI−0.833, p=0.02). Previous investigations have observed that gastrointestinal function appears to be affected during high intensity exercise, but the results of the present study show that gastric emptying was not impaired 30 min after high intensity exercise. Perceived feelings of hunger and gastrointestinal function appear to be closely linked.


This paper presents a high-throughput and size efficient buffer design method for an application specific NoC. The method firstly configures on chip buffer according with the mapping position of IP and the routing path of communication pairs, then computes the minimum value of buffer's size under NoC performance guarantee. Under the same buffer size, the experiments show that the method results in the 40% improvement of the throughput when compared the common input buffer design method.


Background: Mosquitoes are type of insect that acts as a disease vector. One of them is Culex sp mosquitos which their existence is many around us. In Indonesia there are still a lot of disease cases that caused by Culex sp mosquitos, one of them is filariasis disease. The efforts to control the current population of Culex sp mosquitoes mostly use chemical insecticides. The control becomes difficult because of the resistance to chemical insecticides and adversely affects the environment. This study aims to determine the potential of jackfruit leaf extract as biolarvasida against Culex sp.Methods: The type of this study was post test only controlled group design, using 625 larvae Culex sp instar III, divided into 5 groups (negative control group, 0.25% extract, 0.50% extract, 0.75% extract, extract and 1% extract). Observation was performed 24 hours after the treatment and counted the number of larvae death. The data were analyzed by Kruskal Wallis test followed by Post Hoc Mann-Whitney U test to determine the killing power of leafy leaf extract using Probit analysis.Results: The results of data analysis in this study were the death rate percentage of larvae after 24 hours treatment was 0% in control, 44% in 0.25% extract, 52% in 0.50% extract, 60% in 0.75% extract, while in the extract group of 1%, the number of larval deaths was 72%. It obtained results with significant difference in some treatment groups that were concentrations of 0.25% - 1%. Probit analysis showed that LC50 was at 0.382% concentration.Conclusion: From results of the study it can be concluded that jackfruit leaf extract (Artocarpus heterophyllus Lamk) was potential as Culex sp mosquito biolarvacide. So it is necessary to conduct further research on the effects of compounds that contained in other plant parts such as flowers, stems and roots which will be expected to have a function as biolarvasida.


Background: Oenothera biennis (evening primrose) seed extract (OBSE) is known to contain polyphenols, which may possess antioxidant activities. Polyphenols extracted from several plants are reported to exhibit cariostatic activities by inhibiting mutans streptococcus growth and glucosyltransferase activities. The purpose of the present study was to examine the inhibitory effects of OBSE on the development of dental caries, both in vitro and in vivo. Methods: OBSE was investigated for its inhibitory effects on cellular aggregation, hydrophobicity, sucrose-dependent adherence and insoluble glucan synthesis. Furthermore, biofilm formation was examined in the presence of OBSE, using confocal microscopic imaging. An animal experiment was also performed to examine the in vivo effects. Results: OBSE induced a strong aggregation of Streptococcus mutans MT8148 cells, while cell surface hydrophobicity was decreased by approximately 90% at a concentration of 0.25 mg/ml. The sucrose-dependent adherence of the MT8148 cells was also reduced by addition of OBSE, with a reduction rate of 73% seen at a concentration of 1.00 mg/ml. Additionally, confocal microscopic observations revealed the biofilm development phase to be remarkably changed in the presence of OBSE. Furthermore, insoluble glucan synthesis was significantly reduced when OBSE was present at concentrations greater than 0.03 mg/ml. In an animal experiment, the caries scores in rats given OBSE (0.05 mg/ml in drinking water) were significantly lower than those in rats given water without OBSE. Conclusion: Our results indicate that OBSE has inhibitory activity on dental caries.


Environmental planners often propose tourism as a means of financing programmes to protect significant environmental areas. Surveys of tourists can provide useful information about the significance of environmental problems, trade-offs among policy objectives, willingness to pay (WTP) for protection programmes and preferences for different payment mechanisms. In Khanh Hoa Province, the provincial People's Committee, the Ministry of Fisheries and the World Conservation Union are working to implement Viet Nam's first marine protected area (MPA) in Nha Trang Bay. This paper reports the results of a survey of local and other Vietnamese and foreign tourists to islands that will be included in the MPA. The majority of respondents thought rubbish on the beaches, water pollution and vendors on beaches were problems and that the MPA was a good idea. Foreign tourists were significantly more likely to perceive environmental problems than were Vietnamese tourists, and persons who agreed there were environmental problems were significantly more likely to support the concept of an MPA, despite the potential for possible economic effects with distributive consequences. WTP for protection was modest and positively correlated with education and income. Although foreign tourists were on average willing to pay more, a larger proportion of Vietnamese tourists were willing to pay some amount to support the MPA. Analyses indicate that changes in income and education expected with economic development will increase both awareness of problems and WTP for protection. The results of this analysis are both encouraging and cautionary. The need for an MPA is clearly recognized by most tourists, and most tourists are willing to pay small fees to support the MPA. Given that education has significant impacts on both perceptions of problems and WTP, educational programmes may be an effective strategy for managing the competing objectives of protection and use.


Enabling students to experience authentic stakeholder meetings as part of their requirements engineering education is a challenging task. To be authentic, involved stakeholders need to be affected by what students deliver. However, this is usually not the case. Trying to provide students authentic stakeholder interactions, we already specified two distinct settings suitable for recruiting real stakeholders by providing a benefit for them in return. However, scalability issues of these settings remained. In this paper, we present two ideas to overcome this issue. By cooperating with software companies which are building a product line, we gain access to many diverse stakeholders. Further, we propose to rely on course alumni to supervise stakeholder interactions to increase the scalability by reducing the lecturers' supervision effort. These ideas are explained using a currently running course setting in collaboration with a software start-up which builds a product line of sports club management applications.


Following the mature liquid crystals (LCs) display technology, there is a significant interest in implementing these devices into other non-display applications. Hence the emerging field of LC photonics is becoming increasingly active in which the strong electrooptic properties of LCs are harnessed for these applications particularly for imaging such as the use of SLMs, tunable focus lenses, tunable filters and polarization control devices. In this paper we review our recently developed LC devices integrated into full field optical coherence tomography system, into multi-spectral skin diagnosis system and in extended depth of focus imaging system.


From 1995 through 1996, 163 fecal specimens of children aged under 5 years were analysed, 91 being from diarrhea feces and 72 without diarrhea. The material was collected in transport medium and submitted to the enrichment procedure at 4 degrees C for 7 days. For the primary isolation starch ampicillin agar was used and incubated at 35 degrees C for 18 to 24 hours. Twenty (20.9%) from the following specimens were isolated: Aeromonas (A.) caviae (7.7%), A. salmonicida salmonicida (6.6%), A. sobria (4.3%), A. hydrophila (2.2%) and Salmonicida achromogenes (1.1%). No Aeromonas spp. was isolated from the 72 control subjects. The Aeromonas spp. susceptibility to antimicrobial was greater with ciprofloxacin, being this susceptibility gradually diminished with chloranphenicol, gentamicin, ampicillin and erythromycin.


Abstract Sustainable commercial use of native wildlife is an alternative economic means of land use by Indigenous people in remote rural areas. This situation applies within large tracts of land owned by Indigenous people across northern Australia. The commercial use of saltwater crocodiles Crocodylus porosus is a growing industry in Australia's Northern Territory. Although Indigenous people sell crocodile eggs and hatchlings, the majority of harvesting and incubation is done by non-indigenous people from less remote areas. One Indigenous community has been heavily involved in this industry and now manages its own harvest and incubation programme. We present a case study of this programme, which has transitioned from outside agencies managing the harvest, to complete local ownership and management. Egg harvests and incubation success rates declined by 40% following the switch to local management. Income increased, as did production costs; in particular, royalty payments made to Indigenous landowners. The declines reflect the community's motives for engaging in the industry, which have been socially rather than commercially driven, and damage to nesting habitat by feral animals. The increase in royalties reflects the need to compete with non-indigenous harvesters from outside the township, who are strictly commercially driven. Harvesting, incubation and trade in crocodile eggs and hatchlings can form a viable and sustainable enterprise for remote Indigenous communities. However, efficiency needs to be improved to fulfil the need for a reliable and dependable supply chain, and regulatory institutions should give Indigenous harvesters sufficient freedom to pursue innovative and viable livelihood options.


Abstract:The contribution will attempt to reflect on the interplay in recent theories of populism and crowd psychology between the ideas of mob and crowd on the one hand, and those of mass and people on the other. Using an approach deriving from the history of ideas, it will outline two fundamental aspects of the complex and ambivalent interaction between the concepts of people, crowds, masses and mob: first, the transformation of the protesting crowd or mob into "the people," the legitimate source of sovereignty; second, the distinction between regressive crowds and mobs and progressive masses and peoples, stated both explicitly and implicitly in crowd psychology and populist theory. This article will also aim to highlight an idea that has come to the fore in much of the recent literature on populism. It has long been observed that populism opposes "corrupted" elites and the "honest" people. But it has recently been observed that a major source of populist mobilization is a distinction, within "the people," between a "positive" people and the "others," the plebs who are left outside the dynamics of any kind of political representation. The article will show that this distinction is fundamental in order to understand not only the construction of populist political identity, but also the dynamics of the mobilization of new movements, which claim to take charge of the political processes and change the rules of the game.


Two patients had automatonlike movements of their left hands and arms (alien hand syndrome) following damage to the brain. Autopsy findings in one patient demonstrated gunshot wound damage to the medial frontal white matter bilaterally, as well as the corpus callosum, right basal ganglia, internal capsule, and thalamus. The other patient had a ruptured anterior communicating aneurysm, with subsequent resection of the right frontal gyrus rectus. We postulate that this syndrome is due to the combination of a partial callosectomy and mesial frontal lesions.


This paper presents an architecture for 2-D image decomposition of discrete wavelet transform. In order to avoid the memory transpose problem, we use non-separable approach instead of separable one. Besides, based on the input data reuse concept, a parallel-pipelined architecture is proposed The main characteristics of this architecture include: (1) needless memory transposition; (2) lower hardware cost; (3) shorter latency; (4) suitable VLSI implementation. Finally, all components in our architecture are simulated based on the accuracy requirement and realized as a single chip physically.


IEEE 802.15.4 slotted carrier-sense multiple access with collision avoidance (CSMA-CA) adopts periodic sleeping for energy efficiency support. However, such a periodic sleeping mechanism, especially with contention-based medium access, tends to cause additional sleep delay due to heavy contention. In this letter, we propose a priority-based scheme, comprising Frame Tailoring and Priority Toning, in order to relax such a problematic delay and guarantee time-bounded delivery of high priority packets in event-monitoring networks.


The present study aims to investigate the therapeutic effects of LXM-10 by intragastric administration in both acute and chronic inflammatory models, and to explore the underlying molecular mechanisms. The results showed that LXM-10 produced significant anti-inflammatory effects on carrageenan induced paw edema and complete Freund's adjuvant (CFA) induced arthritis, in which LXM-10 inhibited paw swelling in a dose- and time-dependent manner. ELISA analysis showed the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines including TNF-α and IL-6 was decreased by LXM-10. Western blot analysis showed that LXM-10 significantly reduced phosphorylation of Janus kinase 2 (JAK2) and further blunted phosphorylation of signal transducer and activator of transcription-3 (STAT3). The effects that LXM-10 had shown were attenuated by methyllycaconitine citrate (an α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor antagonist) or tropicamide (an M4 muscarinic acetylcholine receptor antagonist) in vivo. In conclusion, the studies showed that intragastric administration of LXM-10 exerted significant anti-inflammation effects in acute and chronic models, which may be attribute to the activation of α7 nicotinic acetylcholine receptor and M4 muscarinic acetylcholine receptor, thereby inhibiting the JAK2/STAT3 signal pathway, and ultimately reducing the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines of TNF-α and IL-6.


Introduction In developed countries, the population ages with increasing cancer survival rates, the proportion of working-age cancer survivors is expected to increase. In Japan, it seems that there has been more interest in follow up for employees who returned to work after sick leave due to cancer. The aim of this study is to investigate work sustainability of cancer survivors after RTW and to make 'Evidence Book for work among cancer', 'Guidance for work among cancer survivors, stratified by cancer type', 'Card between clinics and companies, stratified by cancer type'. Methods We collected sick leave data of 1278 cancer survivors in a registered Health Data. This is supported by a Health Labour Sciences Research Grant, Japan (Endo-Han). As for 'Evidence Book', we collected our previous studies and others. As for 'Guidance' and 'Card', we made six project team by cancer type (breast cancer, colon cancer, gastric cancer, genitals malignancies, lung cancer etc). Result According to our previous studies, 47.1% returned to work full time within 6 months of their initial day of sick leave absence, and 62.3% by 12 months. The cumulative RTW rate varied significantly by cancer type. Of workers who returned to work after their first episode of leave after cancer, more than 50% continued to work after 5 years in large-scaled companies. There was a steep decrease in work continuance rates during the first year after RTW, with considerable differences according to cancer site. Discussion It is very important for companies (especially small- and medium-sized companies) to establish and improve their RTW support system for employees with cancer.


Dear Readers, Dear Friends and Colleagues, It is a pleasure to deliver at your hand the next (already the fourth!) issue of your quarterly Journal of Rare Cardiovascular Diseases. We are happy that, with your continued submissions, we are able to publish the journal regularly, and that the Journal has established its natural presence in the family of cardiovascular journals. Fulfilling the principal aim of the Journal, the submissions to this issue have been accepted on a key basis of their relevance to your expanding knowledge and management of your Rare Cardiovascular Disease (RCD) patients. We begin with a review on Ebstein anomaly by a prominent paediatric cardiac surgeon, Dr Jacek Pajak, who performed complex surgeries in a some key centers in the world prior to taking the position of the Head of Paeditric Cardiac Sugery in the Medical University of Silesia in Katowice. Ebstein anomaly patients pose significant decision‑making challenges in every‑day clinical practice of RCD. We encourage you to consul this review for several helpful treatment‑type selection indicators that include patient‑specific features, and for a contemporary discussion of some novel surgical correction techniques. The original contribution that follows is on another clinical trouble‑maker – arrhythmias in adult patients after total correction of tetralogy of Fallot (Agnieszka Żygadlo and colleagues from the Krakow RCD Centre, CRCD). Having studied a relatively large cohort of adult patients with corrected tetralogy of Fallot, the authors have come up with several predictors of ventricular and artial arrhythmias in this group; they also suggest some management options that we hope you will find useful in managing your patients. Case reports include (i) successful pregnancy in a patient with Turner syndrome (no, not a mistake) after surgery for coarctation of the aorta but now with a large ascending aorta aneurysm (Lidia Tomkiewicz‑Pająk and colleagues); (ii) decision‑making in a young man with double‑chambered left ventricle (KatarzynaMizia‑Stec and colleagues); (iii) challenges of ablating repetitive, non‑tolerated, supraventricular tachycardia of 190 bpm in a 4‑month pregnant woman following in‑vitro fertilization (Marek Jastrzebski and colleagues), and (iv) a series of myxomas of the heart (Hanna Dziedzic‑Oleksy and colleagues). The case reports published in this issue reflect, again, one fundamental and much‑welcomed feature of the RCD field: multi‑specialty collaboration that enables some clinical successes that, until recently, remained unimaginable. The final article in this issue is a report by Dr Pawel Rubiś on the annual ESC Congress (Amsterdam) RCD‑dedicated Symposium that the Krakow CRCD organized this year, similar to the events in 2011 and 2012. The symposium, this year again, was not a "Krakow" event – it included lectures and discussions by leading European experts (such as Professor Ottavio Alfieri, Professor John GF Cleland, Professor Deddo Moertl, Professor Sabine Pankuweit), and was very highly‑attended by cardiologists from Europe and other corners of the world. The network of RCD centers is expanding bringing more understanding, better mutual support and –ultimately– consistent high‑quality care for Patients affected by rare cardiovascular diseases and improved support for their Families. I am pleased to tell you that our efforts to continue with a traditional ESC Symposium in 2014 in Barcelona are already underway. Thus, when making your 2014 congress plans, please make bear in mind that your RCD interests will be high on the horizon there. Finally, when reading manuscripts published in this issue, you will noticed our continued use of RCD codes closing the titles of Journal publications. While the first Krakow RCD classification is receiving more and more favorable reviews, its implementation, aimed to introduce clarity and facilitate grouping of experts, is – as you can witness – continued! Please continue your support to your Journal. We look forward to your submissions in the form of original articles, reviews or RCD case reports that will not only highlight your work and experience to your colleagues in the field and will make it highly‑referenced. Piotr Podolec Editor‑in‑Chief Journal of Rare Cardiovascular Diseases


ABSTRACT/RESUME Food has long been regarded as a useful ethnic marker, a way of defining who we are. The connection of food to ethnic identity, however, is far from self-evident. This paper examines a number of Canadian literary works which deal with food, looking at the ways in which food, ethnicity, literature and cross-cultural spaces are treated. Canadian writers, the paper argues, see food hot only as defining who we are, but where we are in the diverse multicultural society of Canada. It locates us across "spacialized discourses," physically or geographically, in particular bodies, buildings, neighbourhoods, communities, regions, nations and the world as a whole; it also locates us in particular cultural spaces with important and sometimes problematic cultural boundaries. For these writers, food becomes yet another way of engaging the complex issues of individual belonging, group relations, gender, class, race and ethnicity, and the state of Canadian society and of the world as a whole. De quelle maniere peut-on employer la nourriture comme une indication d'identite ethnique? Le lien entre la nourriture et l'identite ethnique n'est pas evident. Cet article se penche sur divers oeuvres litteraires canadiennes et examine comment la nourriture, l'ethnicite, la litterature et les espaces interculturels y sont traites. Selon les auteurs canadiens, la nourriture est liee a notre identite interieure et nous situe dans la societe multiculturelle du Canada. Elle determine des espaces physiques, geographiques et culturels tels que des edifices, des quartiers, des communautes, des regions, des nations et le monde entier. Elle nous situe aussi dans des espaces culturels avec des frontieres importantes et parfois problematiques. Selon ces ecrivains, la nourriture est un autre element du questionnement portant sur l'identite, les relations de groupe, les sexes, les classes sociales, les races, l'ethnicite ainsi que sur l'etat de la societe canadienne et du monde entier. INTRODUCTION The study of food, its production and consumption, and its symbolic, cultural, economic, social, and psychological meaning is, of course, not a new topic. As Counihan and Van Esterik note, "The development of research interests in food is as old as anthropology" (1997, 1), and in recent years, a host of other disciplines--sociology, history, philosophy, geography, literary criticism, women's studies, cultural studies, ethnic studies, and others--have joined in the feast. With these new studies has come a variety of theoretical approaches, from early structuralist to semiotic, interactionalist, post-structuralist, class-oriented, gender-oriented, post-colonial, and cultural studies-oriented perspectives. While it is impossible to summarize the range of topics in this literature, it is worth noting that the growing tendency is to examine the consumption side of food, from the McDonaldization of the world to how food is gendered in popular sociocultural representations. I am thinking here not only of Sherrie Inness's Kitchen Culture in America, but of the whole body of feminist material that looks historically and synchronically at food and women in the social construction of gender. These studies look at topics such as sex in food ads and cookbooks (so-called "gastro-porn"), cooking in sex books (for example, Neuhaus's "Women and Cooking in Marital Sex Manuals, 1920-1963"), breast-feeding, anorexia, representations of race in food texts, cannibalism, sexual politics, and combinations of these (for example, Patnaik's essay "The Succulent Gender: Eat Her Softly"). In all these areas, the field of literary criticism has been very active. In 1992, for example, the journal Mosaic devoted an entire issue to "Diet and Discourse: Eating, Drinking and Literature," including a fifty page bibliography on literary sources for "Food in Literature." Other notable literary collections include Bevan's Literary Gastronomy (1988), Schofield's Cooking by the Book: Food in Literature and Culture (1989), Sceats's Food, Consumption and the Body in Contemporary Women's Fiction (2000), Atwood's Canlit Foodbook (1987), and Alford and Harris's Kitchen Talk (1992). …


Over the past 18 months, inflation in New Zealand has been surprisingly low, even as GDP has strengthened and many measures of excess capacity in the economy have tightened largely as expected. Unexpected strength in the New Zealand dollar, which has reinforced strong domestic and international competitive pressures, has been a key part of the story. Falls in inflation expectations and softness in wage inflation have also contributed.


BACKGROUND
Immune-mediated skin diseases encompass a variety of pathologies that present in different forms in the body.

OBJECTIVE
The objective of this study was to establish the prevalence of the principal immune-mediated skin diseases affecting the oral cavity.

METHODS
A total of 10,292 histopathology reports stored in the archives of the Anatomical Pathology Laboratory, Department of Oral Pathology, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, covering the period from 1988 to 2009, were evaluated. For the cases diagnosed with some type of disease relevant to the study, clinical data such as the gender, age and ethnicity of the patient, the anatomical site of the disease and its symptomatology were collected.

RESULTS
Of all the cases registered at the above-mentioned service, 82 (0.8%) corresponded to immune-mediated skin diseases with symptoms affecting the oral cavity. The diseases found in this study were: oral lichen planus, pemphigus vulgaris and benign mucous membrane pemphigoid. Oral lichen planus was the most common lesion, comprising 68.05% of the cases analyzed. Of these cases, 64.3% were women and the cheek mucosa was the anatomical site most commonly affected (46.8%).

CONCLUSION
Immune-mediated skin diseases affecting the oral cavity continue to be rare, the prevalence found in this study being similar to that reported for the majority of regions worldwide. Nevertheless, early diagnosis is indispensable in the treatment of these diseases, bearing in mind that systemic involvement is possible in these patients.


The Delphi methodology involved survey questions and qualitative interviews with a panel of CEOs from 14 not-for-profit housing organisations. Expansion in the not-for-profit housing sector over the last three years was due mainly to Government programs, such as the Social Housing Initiative (SHI) and National Rental Affordability Scheme (NRAS); new specialised regulatory arrangements; transfers of former government owned and/or managed stock to not-for-profit organisations; and restructuring of social housing rents to capture Commonwealth Rent Assistance to improve rent revenue. Social purpose is a very strong internal driver of decision making and strategic positioning for all organisations. However other widely shared values include having a professional approach, being entrepreneurial, setting one's own priorities and adopting a private sector ethos. Over the last three years, Australian not-for-profit housing organisations have undertaken a range of strategies to pursue expansion including broadening their service remit to include moderate income households. In this sense Australian not-for-profit organisations appear to be following in the footsteps of other countries in pursuing models that use commercial real estate ventures to cross-subsidise social housing. However, the example of places like the Netherlands shows that if the sector becomes too independent of government it could be adversely affected if there was declining government support or deteriorating housing and capital market conditions. Future development of the sector in Australia will remain dependent upon: longer-term certainty of government policy settings; funding to support a pipeline of housing production; an inter-governmental policy framework; governments co-funding arrangements to attract a predictable stream of private finance; and increasing interaction between governments and the not-for-profit housing sector.


Sputter-deposited FePt films exhibit an in-plane magnetic anisotropy when they use MgO as capped layer. The perpendicular magnetic anisotropy of FePt films are enhanced by introducing Ag capped layer instead of MgO capped layer. Although the in-plane coercivity (Hc⊥ ) of FePt films decreases slightly after introducing an Ag capper layer instead of a MgO capped layer, the perpendicular coercivity (Hc⊥ ) is increased significantly from 3169 Oe to 6726 Oe. The Auger electron spectroscopy analysis confirms that the Ag atoms diffuse from capped layer into the FePt magnetic layer and the Ag atoms mainly distribute at the grain boundary of FePt. This phenomenon results in the grain boundary energy enhancement and the grain growth inhibition and therefore increases the perpendicular coercivity and decrease the grain size of the FePt film.


Both the maximum agreement forest problem and the multicut on trees problem are NP-hard, thus cannot be solved efficiently if P ≠ NP. The maximum agreement forest problem was motivated in the study of evolution trees in bioinformatics, in which we are given two leaf-labeled trees and are asked to find a maximum forest that is a subgraph of both trees. The multicuton trees problem has applications in networks, in which we are given a forest and a set of pairs of termianls and are asked to find a cut that separates all pairs of terminals.
We develop combinatorial and algorithmic techniques that lead to improved parameterized algorithms, approximation algorithms, and kernelization algorithms for these problems. For the maximum agreement forest problem, we proceed from the bottommost level of trees and extend solutions to whole trees. With this technique, we show that the maximum agreement forest problem is fixed-parameterized tractable in general trees, resolving an open problem in this area. We also provide the first constant ratio approximation algorithm for the problem in general trees. For the multicut on trees problem, we take a new look at the problem through the eyes of vertex cover problem. This connection allows us to develop an kernelization algorithm for the problem, which gives an upper bound of O(k3) on the kernel size, significantly improving the previous best upper bound O( k6). We further exploit this connection to give a parameterized algorithm for the problem that runs in time O* (1.62k), thus improving the previous best algorithm of running time O*(2k).
In the protein complex prediction problem, which comes directly from the study of bioinformatics, we are given a protein-protein interaction network, and are asked to find dense regions in this graph. We formulate this problem as a graph clustering problem and develop an algorithm to refine the results for identifying protein complexes. We test our algorithm on yeast protein- protein interaction networks, and we show that our algorithm is able to identify complexes more accurately than other existing algorithms.


Decoding and information theoretic techniques were used to analyze the predictions that can be made from functional magnetic resonance neuroimaging data on individual trials. The subjective pleasantness produced by warm and cold applied to the hand could be predicted on single trials with typically in the range 60-80% correct from the activations of groups of voxels in the orbitofrontal and medial prefrontal cortex and pregenual cingulate cortex, and the information available was typically in the range 0.1-0.2 (with a maximum of 0.6) bits. The prediction was typically a little better with multiple voxels than with one voxel, and the information increased sublinearly with the number of voxels up to typically seven voxels. Thus the information from different voxels was not independent, and there was considerable redundancy across voxels. This redundancy was present even when the voxels were from different brain areas. The pairwise stimulus-dependent correlations between voxels, reflecting higher-order interactions, did not encode significant information. For comparison, the activity of a single neuron in the orbitofrontal cortex can predict with 90% correct and encode 0.5 bits of information about whether an affectively positive or negative visual stimulus has been shown, and the information encoded by small numbers of neurons is typically independent. In contrast, the activation of a 3 x 3 x 3-mm voxel reflects the activity of approximately 0.8 million neurons or their synaptic inputs and is not part of the information encoding used by the brain, thus providing a relatively poor readout of information compared with that available from small populations of neurons.


The total population-based material of 426 ovarian malignancies in the Southeast Health Care Region of Sweden during 1984-1987 was surveyed. It seems that with a program of cytoreductive surgery followed by a cisplatinum chemotherapy combination in the metastasizing cases the overall survival figures have improved. A relative overall 5-year survival of 43% was recorded. Age and stage were independent prognostic factors for survival, while histology (epithelial vs, non-epithelial tumors) did not add prognostic information.384 patients with ovarian carcinomas were analyzcd separately. An overall relative survival of 40% was recorded. Tite overall corrected 5-yearsurvival for patients prescribed protocol treatment was 49 % compared to 33 % for those treated otlJCrwise. The corrected 5-year survival for patients with FIGO stage Ill -IV tumorswas 35 % if optimal primary cy~oreductive surgery wasperfonned.Patientswith residual tumors greater than 1cm had 13% corrected5-yearsurvival. Patients that underwent intestinal surgery as a part of initial surgical debulking had a very poor survival, even compared with 1l1e group of patients with greater than 3 cm residual tumors left after initial surgery ( 4 vs. 13 %). The secondary laparotomy gave prognostic information only in stages I and ll. Eighteen of 68 patients (26 %) who had macroscopic turn or left at the secondary surgery cmdd be rendered tumor free at the secondary laparotomy. This group had about the same survival as those who were foi.Uld to be in complete response at the secondary laparotomy. It was not possible to ~iatc that this was caused by the ~urgeryper se.Geometrical measurements oftumor nuclei on the diagnostic tissue sections generated powerful prognostic factors for survival after secondary laparotomy in 65 patients with advanced ovarian cancer. The existence of very large nuclei seemed to cl1aracterize patients with a bad prognosis.The half-life of the turn or marker CA 125 in serum during induction chemothrapy gave equally good prognostic information regarding the survival after secondary laparotomy in 72 patients with advanced ovarian cancer as registering the response to therapy at the secondary laparotomy.In 33 ovarian cancer patients monitoring with monthlyscrum CA 125 determinations during follow-up was a reliable method to diagnose a recurrence with very few (0.9%) false positive values.


Effect of duckweed supplementation as fish feed to polyculture system was investigated. Fish were reared for 90 days with or without duckweed supplementation. The ponds were fertilized with cowdung, urea and triple super phosphate. All the important physico-chemical factors including temperature, transparency, dissolved oxygen, total alkalinity, phosphate-phosphorus and nitrate-nitrogen were within productive ranges for fish culture. Ponds were stocked with silver carp, Thai sharputui, tilapia, common carp and mrigel. After a 90 days rearing period, net fish production was found to be significantly higher in fish fed duckweed at a rate of 20% of body weight compared to fish without duckweed supplement. It was concluded that duckweed can effectively be used as feed for polyculture of fish. Key words: Duckweed; polyculture; feed. DOI: 10.3329/jard.v7i1.4437 J Agric Rural Dev 7 (1&2), 157-160, June 2009