Open data have the potential to improve the governance of universities as public institutions. In addition, open data are likely to increase the quality, efficacy and efficiency of the research and analysis of higher education systems by providing a shared empirical base for critical interrogation and reinterpretation. Drawing on research conducted by the Emerging Impacts of Open Data in Developing Countries project, and using an ecosystems approach, this research paper considers the supply, demand and use of open data as well as the roles of intermediaries in the governance of South African public higher education. It shows that government's higher education database is a closed and isolated data source in the data ecosystem; and that the open data that are made available by government is inaccessible and rarely used. In contrast, government data made available by data intermediaries in the ecosystem are being used by key stakeholders. Intermediaries are found to play several important roles in the ecosystem: (i) they increase the accessibility and utility of data; (ii) they may assume the role of a "keystone species" in a data ecosystem; and (iii) they have the potential to democratize the impacts and use of open data. The article concludes that despite poor data provision by government, the public university governance open data ecosystem has evolved because intermediaries in the ecosystem have reduced the viscosity of government data. Further increasing the fluidity of government open data will improve access and ensure the sustainability of open data supply in the ecosystem.


This might have been a very significant little book. It appears to be written for all who are involved in religious teaching -' in churches, colleges, and seminaries. Its style is nontechnical, the footnotes are gathered at the end, and no bibliography or index is given. The author, an Associate Professor in the Dept. of Religious Studies at the University of Santa Clara, divides the work into the following five parts: (l) Teaching Models in the First Century, (2) Jesus the Teacher, (3) The Teacher in the Early Church, (4) The Teacher in the New Testament and the Teacher Today, and (5) Woman's Liberation and the Female Teacher in the Modern WorId. Throughout the book, the author develops the theses that imitation, association, and participation were central in the teaching methods of Jesus and the early church. Hence, today "the church itself must be a 'scale-model' of the new world it would like to help create" (p. 108).


Background: Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the prevalent disorders in child psychiatry with the potential of damage to mental talent evolution process and socio-emotional skills. This study aimed to examine the effect of an aerobic running program on ADHD among the primary school girls. Materials and Methods: In this clinical trial study, 120 female students with ADHD were purposefully selected from the primary schools in Kashan during 2011-12. The child symptom inventory-DSM-IV version (CSI-4) was completed by the students' teachers and parents and then 30 students with the severe ADHD were divided into the control and experimental groups using the randomized block method. The experimental group performed a 12-week interval running program, 3 times per week, with a maximum heart rate of 6085%. Data were analyzed using covariance analysis. Results: Results showed that a 12-week interval running program had beneficial effects on ADHD in the experimental compared to the control group (P<0.001). Conclusion: It seems that an aerobic training as a non-invasive and non-drug alternative has a positive effect on the alleviation of ADHD.


This paper discusses user involvement in a Living Lab based on the call for research regarding the following challenges: How to select the appropriate users?; How to organize user involvement?; and How to motivate users? We discuss these questions based on empirical experiences from about 100 user involvement activities from the media and health technology application domains of Halmstad Living Lab. We conclude by summarizing our experiences as guidelines addressing these challenges, e.g. User selection criteria specifically derived for each case; Mix between traditional and virtual activities; Facilitate instead of categorize; Acknowledge that motivational factors might differ between users and domain fields.


Corona virus sickness has become a big public health issue in 2019. Because of its contact-transparent characteristics, it is rapidly spreading. The use of a face mask is among the most efficient methods for preventing the transmission of the Covid-19 virus. Wearing the face mask alone can cut the chance of catching the virus by over 70%. Consequently, World Health Organization (WHO) advised wearing masks in crowded places as precautionary measures. Because of the incorrect use of facial masks, illnesses have spread rapidly in some locations. To solve this challenge, we needed a reliable mask monitoring system. Numerous government entities are attempting to make wearing a face mask mandatory;this process can be facilitated by using face mask detection software based on AI and image processing techniques. For face detection, helmet detection, and mask detection, the approaches mentioned in the article utilize Machine learning, Deep learning, and many other approaches. It will be simple to distinguish between persons having masks and those who are not having masks using all of these ways. The effectiveness of mask detectors must be improved immediately. In this article, we will explain the techniques for face mask detection with a literature review and drawbacks for each technique.


The discussion about workers' control or the general extension of industrial democracy raises for most socialists some fundamental problems of power in society; but not, it should be noted, for some of the more recent advocates of the idea. When Anthony Wedgwood Benn, for example, came forward last year with his contribution he was quite explicit in his view that "real workers' control" would fit comfortably within the existing relations of power.


Event simulation (ES) is the situational inference process in which perceived event features such as objects, agents, and actions are associated in the brain to represent the whole situation. ES provides a common basis for various cognitive processes, such as perceptual prediction, situational understanding/prediction, and social cognition (such as mentalizing/trait inference). Here, functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to elucidate the neural substrates underlying important subdivisions within ES. First, the study investigated whether ES depends on different neural substrates when it is conducted explicitly and implicitly. Second, the existence of neural substrates specific to the future-prediction component of ES was assessed. Subjects were shown contextually related object pictures implying a situation and performed several picture–word-matching tasks. By varying task goals, subjects were made to infer the implied situation implicitly/explicitly or predict the future consequence of that situation. The results indicate that, whereas implicit ES activated the lateral prefrontal cortex and medial/lateral parietal cortex, explicit ES activated the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and medial/lateral temporal cortex. Additionally, the left temporoparietal junction plays an important role in the future-prediction component of ES. These findings enrich our understanding of the neural substrates of the implicit/explicit/predictive aspects of ES-related cognitive processes.


Tuberculosis is a contagious disease induced by Mycobacterium species, acid-fast bacilli. These are mostly human type--Mycobacterium tuberculosis, less often cattle type--mycobacterium bovis or other: mycobacterium avium, kansasii, marinom, scrofulaceum, heamophilium, gordonae. The infection can affect all organs, but pulmonary tuberculosis is the most common form. The importance of tuberculosis is definitely rising in the context of massive population migrations in regions affected by its higher incidence, increased HIV infections and AIDS development. Cutaneous tuberculosis is a particular tuberculosis form with differentiated clinical picture. Non-typicalness of skin changes and oligobacilleous course of extrapulmonary tuberculosis forms are repeatedly causing difficulties in adequate diagnosis and early treatment. In differential diagnostics of cutaneous tuberculosis one must take leishmaniasis, actinomycosis, leprosy, syphilis and deep mycosis (among others) into consideration. The study is presenting a case of lupus vulgaris as a complication of past pulmonary tuberculosis. In bacteriological diagnostics of skin changes bioptates, no tuberculosis mycobacteria were found. The disease was diagnosed based on specific granulation presence in histopathology test, tuberculin hypersensivity, bacilli DNA presence in polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test and skin changes regression after anti-mycobacterium treatment. According to authors of the study, the described case confirms the usefulness of PCR nucleonic acids amplification test in cutaneous tuberculosis diagnosis.


Land reform development in China has experienced three great reforms, and new policy of rural land circulation in new period was an inevitable trend of rural economic development. SWOT analytical method was adopted to study the influences of the new policy on rural tourism development, which led to new opportunities, including developing rural tourism in scale and realizing capitalization of the resources. However, there were many problems and challenges, which were showed in neglecting the guarantee of farmers' interests and lacking the protection of rural landscape. Hence, the measures for rural tourism development under new situations should be taken as follows. To begin with, it should give full play to government function; secondly, it must strengthen management of rural tourism land; thirdly, overall planning was essential; fourthly, it was necessary to protect farmers' interests; finally, efforts should be devoted to protect and reconstruct rural tourism landscape. These measures could not only promote the industrialization development of rural tourism, but also advance the development of urban-rural integration.


This research is entitled The Signification of Good and Bad Day Based on Wewaran in Caka Bali Calendar. Specifically, this research aimed to describe the signification of sign of ala ayuning dewasa (good and bad day) based on Wewaran (a certain system of balinese day) on Caka Bali Calendar. This research was a qualitative research. The object of this research was verbal data in the form of the terms of good and bad day in Caka Bali Calendar. Data collection methods selected was a method of referring and assisted with the technique of note taking. Method of data analysis chosen was method of intralingual equivalent. Informal method was chosen in presenting the results of this study. The results of this study showed that the signification of good and bad day on Caka Bali Calendar are denotation, connotation, and denotation-connotation.


INTRODUCTION A police officer makes a routine traffic stop of a vehicle with a cracked windshield? He questions the driver about the windshield and asks for the driver's license and registration. (2) While the officer checks the documentation, he asks the driver whether he has any illegal narcotics in the car. (3) The driver says 'no,' and the officer asks for consent to search the vehicle. (4) After the driver consents, the officer discovers cocaine on the driver's side of the car. (5) In the prosecution for the possession of cocaine, the defendant argues that his consent was tainted by the officer's question about illegal narcotics because it was outside the scope of the original justification for the stop--the cracked windshield. (6) The defendant claims that the officer violated his Fourth Amendment rights (7) because the question about illegal narcotics gave rise to an unreasonable seizure. (8) A court agrees and rules that the consent was invalid and that the evidence must be suppressed. (9) The situation described above occurs frequently, with many courts ruling similarly to this one. (10) Accordingly, the issue this Note addresses is whether a police officer, during a routine traffic stop, violates a person's Fourth Amendment rights when the officer's questions stray from the original reason for the stop. Resolution of the issue pits privacy concerns against the state's interest in effective law enforcement. (11) With circuits split over the issue, (12) and the Supreme Court not yet plainly ruling on it, (13) this Note aims to provide a narrow solution to the problem. Part I of this Note explains the Fourth Amendment reasonableness standard and discusses the line of Supreme Court cases from Terry v. Ohio (14) to Florida v. Bostick (15) that deal with the permissible scope of questioning during a stop. Part II introduces the split between the Fifth and Seventh Circuits and the Eighth, Ninth, and, Tenth Circuits, highlighting the reasoning of the Seventh Circuit in United States v. Childs. (16) Further, Part II discusses the balance between privacy concerns and effective law enforcement and shows that the arguments are important because the Supreme Court has not yet directly ruled on the issue) (7) Part III of this Note proposes that courts consider the narrow holding in Childs. This Note concludes that in the routine traffic stop situation, effective police work outweighs the minimal privacy interest. I. THE FOURTH AMENDMENT REASONABLENESS STANDARD The Fourth Amendment provides, "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated." (18) To trigger the protection of the amendment, an officer must commit an unreasonable search or seizure. (19) Problems arise, however, in determining whether an unreasonable search or seizure has occurred. (20) This Note centers on the seizure component within the context of a routine traffic stop. Put simply, a seizure occurs if a police officer causes a reasonable person to feel as though he cannot walk away or terminate the encounter. (21) Within this definition, a routine traffic stop of a motor vehicle constitutes a limited seizure and may trigger the Terry doctrine. (22) Under the Terry doctrine, an officer may stop a suspect and detain her briefly to investigate reasonable suspicion of criminal activity. (23) Because the Terry doctrine may apply to motor vehicle stops as well, if, as in the introductory situation, a driver commits a traffic violation, a police officer may stop the driver for as long as it takes to write a ticket for the violation. (24) Moreover, the Terry doctrine provides that in determining whether a search or seizure was unreasonable, courts consider whether the original reason for the officer's actions was justifiable and whether it was reasonably related in scope to the original circumstances. …


Mercurial reagents inhibit the water permeability of erythrocytes and proximal renal tubule. We examined the effect of two such agents on vasopressin-induced water transport across toad urinary bladder. Water flows were measured in unfixed tissues and in tissues fixed either with N-ethylmaleimide (NEM) or with glutaraldehyde. When added concurrently with 20 mU/ml vasopressin, 1 mM mucosal p-chloromercuribenzene-sulfonic acid (p-CMBS) inhibited water flow within 1 h. p-CMBS also inhibited flow in tissues that had been fixed with mucosal NEM after stimulation with vasopressin. However, p-CMBS did not affect flow in glutaraldehyde-fixed tissues. In contrast, HgCl2 inhibited water flow and urea permeability even in tissues that had been fixed with glutaraldehyde after stimulation with vasopressin. Inhibition was more pronounced when HgCl2 was added to the mucosal rather than the serosal bathing medium and was not reversed by dithiothreitol. HgCl2 did not diminish the frequency or area of luminal membrane aggregates observed by freeze-fracture electron microscopy. HgCl2 also did not affect amphotericin-induced water permeability in glutaraldehyde-treated tissues, suggesting that it did not diminish the permeability of cellular barriers to flow. Our results parallel closely those reported by other investigators for water flow across erythrocytes and proximal renal tubule and suggest that mercurial reagents can directly block the vasopressin-induced water channel. The water channel at the apical membrane of the toad bladder may prove to share structural similarity with that constantly present in erythrocytes and proximal renal tubule.


The 2022 meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Denver featured a book panel on Dana W. Logan's Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America (University of Chicago Press, 2022). This essay introduces a forum based on the panel, featuring four scholars representing diverse subfields in religious studies: Ian MacCormack, Charles McCrary, Constance Furey, and Marko Geslani. It argues that Awkward Rituals, though embedded in ritual studies and the historiography of American religion, is a generative theoretical text for many areas of inquiry in the wider study of religion: the disjunctures and incoherences in religions; the practical applications of a mind/body dualism; the uses of the personal experiences of the scholar; and the endurance of comparison as a method.


In the present study, a methanolic extract of Ecklonia cava and its solvent-partitioned fractions were evaluated for their antiadipogenic effect in 3T3-L1 adipocytes. One of them, the n-BuOH fraction, effectively reduced lipid accumulation and glucose consumption. In addition, the presence of the n-BuOH fraction in adipocytes suppressed the regulations of adipogenic transcription factors, PPARγ and SREBP1c, and adipogenic specific genes, FABP4, FABP1, FAS, LPL, HSL, and ACS1. Further purification of n-BuOH fractions led to the isolation of six phlorotannins (1-6). The six phlorotannins effectively suppressed triglyceride accumulation. Comparative analysis showed that lipid accumulation in adipocytes was dramatically attenuated in the presence of eckstolonol (4).


The last few years witnessed a great and increasing interest in the field of intelligent classification techniques which rely on Machine Learning. In recent times Machine Learning one of the areas in Artificial Intelligence has been widely used in order to assist medical experts and doctors in the prediction and diagnosis of different diseases. In this paper, we applied two different machine learning algorithms to a problem in the domain of medical diagnosis and analyzed their efficiency in prediction the results. The problem selected for the study is the diagnosis and factors affecting Chronic Kidney Disease. The dataset used for the study consists of 153 cases and 11 attributes of CKD patients. The objective of this research is to compare the performance of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) and Logistic Regression (LR) classifier on the basis of the following criteria: Accuracy, Sensitivity, Specificity, Prevalence, and Area under curve (ROC) for CKD prediction. From the experimental results, it is observed that the performance of ANNs classifier is better than the Logistic Regression model. With the accuracy of 84.44%, sensitivity of 84.21%, specificity of 84.61% and AUC ROC of 84.41%. Also, through the final fitted models used, the most important factors that have a clear impact on chronic kidney disease patients are creatinine and urea. classifier, Quadratic Discriminant classifier, Linear SVM, Quadratic SVM, Fine KNN, Medium KNN, Cosine KNN, Cubic KNN, Weighted KNN, Feed Forward Back Propagation Neural Network using Gradient Descent and Feed Forward Back Propagation Neural.


BACKGROUND
The value of antibiotic prophylaxis before insertion of an intrauterine device (IUD) remains uncertain. We undertook a triple-masked, randomised, placebo-controlled trial to find out whether such prophylaxis reduces the rate of IUD removal within 90 days.

METHODS
11 clinic sites in southern California enrolled women who requested IUD insertion and were at low risk of sexually transmitted infection according to self-reported medical history. We randomly assigned 1985 participants either 500 mg azithromycin or placebo capsules of identical appearance taken about 1 h before insertion of a Copper T 380A IUD. 118 women did not have an IUD inserted. We followed up 1833 of the remaining 1867 (98%) participants for at least 90 days after insertion.

FINDINGS
The rate of IUD removal for any reason other than partial expulsion was 3.8% (35/918) in the antibiotic group and 3.4% (31/915) in the placebo group (relative risk 1.1 [95% CI 0.7-1.8]). The two treatment groups sought medical attention with equal frequency (mean 38 visits per 100 women). During the 90 days after IUD insertion, only one woman from each assignment group had salpingitis, as defined by established criteria.

INTERPRETATION
Prophylaxis with azithromycin did not affect the likelihood that a woman would retain her IUD at 90 days or the frequency of postinsertion medical attention. In appropriately screened women, the risk of upper-genital-tract infection is negligible after IUD insertion, with or without the administration of prophylactic antibiotics.


In the era of big data, eXtreme Multi-label Classification (XMC) has already become one of the most essential research tasks to deal with enormous label spaces in machine learning applications. Instead of assessing every individual label, most XMC methods rely on label trees or filters to derive short ranked label lists as prediction, thereby reducing computational overhead. Specifically, existing studies obtain ranked label lists with a fixed length for prediction and evaluation. However, these predictions are unreasonable since data points have varied numbers of relevant labels. The greatly small and large list lengths in evaluation, such as Precision@5 and Recall@100, can also lead to the ignorance of other relevant labels or the tolerance of many irrelevant labels. In this paper, we aim to provide reasonable prediction for extreme multi-label classification with dynamic numbers of predicted labels. In particular, we propose a novel framework, Model-Agnostic List Truncation with Ordinal Regression (MALTOR), to leverage the ranking properties and truncate long ranked label lists for better accuracy. Extensive experiments conducted on six large-scale real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that MALTOR significantly outperforms statistical baseline methods and conventional ranked list truncation methods in ad-hoc retrieval with both linear and deep XMC models. The results of an ablation study also shows the effectiveness of each individual component in our proposed MALTOR.


Recent years have seen rapid progress in identifying predefined relationship between entity pairs using neural networks (NNs). However, such models often make predictions for each entity pair individually, thus often fail to solve the inconsistency among different predictions, which can be characterized by discrete relation constraints. These constraints are often defined over combinations of entity-relation-entity triples, since there often lack of explicitly well-defined type and cardinality requirements for the relations. In this paper, we propose a unified framework to integrate relation constraints with NNs by introducing a new loss term, Constraint Loss. Particularly, we develop two efficient methods to capture how well the local predictions from multiple instance pairs satisfy the relation constraints. Experiments on both English and Chinese datasets show that our approach can help NNs learn from discrete relation constraints to reduce inconsistency among local predictions, and outperform popular neural relation extraction (NRE) models even enhanced with extra post-processing. Our source code and datasets will be released at https://github.com/PKUYeYuan/Constraint-Loss-AAAI-2020.


Background
Somalia reported repeated cholera outbreaks between 2017 and 2019. These outbreaks were attributed to multiple risk factors which made response challenging.

Aims
To describe lessons from the preparedness and response to the cholera outbreaks in Somalia between 2017 and 2019.

Methods
We reviewed outbreak response reports, surveillance records and preparedness plans for the cholera outbreaks in Somalia from January 2017 to December 2019 and other relevant literature. We present data on cholera-related response indicators including cholera cases and deaths and case fatality rates for the 3 years. Qualitative data were collected from 5 focus group discussions and 10 key informant interviews to identify the interventions, challenges and lessons learnt from the Somali experience.

Results
In 2017, a total of 78 701 cholera cases and 1163 related deaths were reported (case fatality rate 1.48%), in 2018, 6448 cholera cases and 45 deaths were reported (case fatality rate 0.70%), while in 2019, some 3089 cases and 4 deaths were reported in Somalia (case fatality rate 0.13%). The protracted conflict, limited access to primary health care, and limited access to safe water and proper sanitation among displaced populations were identified as the main drivers of the repeated cholera outbreaks.

Conclusions
Periodic assessment of response to and preparedness for potential epidemics is essential to identify and close gaps within the health systems. Somalia's experience offers important lessons on preventing and controlling cholera outbreaks for countries experiencing complex humanitarian emergencies.


The caring behaviors and self-efficacy of nurses can influence their intentions to leave an organization and the quality of their nursing care. Job involvement is a crucial predictor of nurse turnover. Evidence-based data shown caring behavior and self efficacy are the optimum available evidences of the factors that support nurses' job involvement. A cross-sectional and correlation research design was adopted for this study. Overall, 405 clinical nurses employed at a hospital in southern Taiwan were recruited for this study. Of these nurses, 338 completed the questionnaire, for an effective response rate of 83.4%. The results showed that the postulate model fit the data in this study well. Caring behaviors are positive and significantly directly related to self-efficacy. Additionally, nurses' self-efficacy was not significantly correlated to their job involvement. By contrast, caring behaviors exerted a significant influence on job involvement. Nurses who perceive that their caring behaviors are recognized and rewarded are more likely to be involved in their work environment. Self-efficacy can be used as a screening variable when predicting job involvement. Further research should adopt a longitudinal research design to understand how caring behaviors and self-efficacy change over time, and how job involvement develops as a factor in the model.


Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text. Background: The 2018 US Physical Activity Guidelines recommend reducing sedentary behavior (SB) for cardiovascular health. SB's role in heart failure (HF) is unclear. Methods: We studied 80 982 women in the Women's Health Initiative Observational Study, aged 50 to 79 years, who were without known HF and reported ability to walk ≥1 block unassisted at baseline. Mean follow-up was 9 years for physician-adjudicated incident HF hospitalization (1402 cases). SB was assessed repeatedly by questionnaire. Time-varying total SB was categorized according to awake time spent sitting or lying down (≤6.5, 6.6–9.5, >9.5 h/d); sitting time (≤4.5, 4.6–8.5, >8.5 h/d) was also evaluated. Hazard ratios and 95% CI were estimated using Cox regression. Results: Controlling for age, race/ethnicity, education, income, smoking, alcohol, menopausal hormone therapy, and hysterectomy status, higher HF risk was observed across incremental tertiles of time-varying total SB (hazard ratios [95% CI], 1.00 [referent], 1.15 [1.01–1.31], 1.42 [1.25–1.61], trend P<0.001) and sitting time (1.00 [referent], 1.14 [1.01–1.28], 1.54 [1.34–1.78], trend P<0.001). The inverse trends remained significant after further controlling for comorbidities including time-varying myocardial infarction and coronary revascularization (hazard ratios: SB, 1.00, 1.11, 1.27; sitting, 1.00, 1.09, 1.37, trend P<0.001 each) and for baseline physical activity (hazard ratios: SB 1.00, 1.10, 1.24; sitting 1.00, 1.08, 1.33, trend P<0.001 each). Associations with SB exposures were not different according to categories of baseline age, race/ethnicity, body mass index, physical activity, physical functioning, diabetes, hypertension, or coronary heart disease. Conclusions: SB was associated with increased risk of incident HF hospitalization in postmenopausal women. Targeted efforts to reduce SB could enhance HF prevention in later life.


Background Emerging data suggest that young women with coronary heart disease (CHD) are disproportionally vulnerable to the adverse cardiovascular effects of psychological stress. We hypothesized that younger, but not older, women with stable CHD are more likely than their male peers to develop mental stress‐induced myocardial ischemia (MSIMI). Methods and Results We studied 686 patients (191 women) with stable coronary heart disease (CHD). Patients underwent 99mTc‐sestamibi myocardial perfusion imaging at rest and with both mental (speech task) and conventional (exercise/pharmacological) stress testing. We compared quantitative (by automated software) and visual parameters of inducible ischemia between women and men and assessed age as an effect modifier. Women had a more‐adverse psychosocial profile than men whereas there were few differences in medical history and CHD risk factors. Both quantitative and visual indicators of ischemia with mental stress were disproportionally larger in younger women. For each 10 years of decreasing age, the total reversibility severity score with mental stress was 9.6 incremental points higher (interaction, P<0.001) and the incidence of MSIMI was 82.6% higher (interaction, P=0.004) in women than in men. Incidence of MSIMI in women ≤50 years was almost 4‐fold higher than in men of similar age and older patients. These results persisted when adjusting for sociodemographic and medical risk factors, psychosocial factors, and medications. There were no significant sex differences in inducible ischemia with conventional stress. Conclusions Young women with stable CHD are susceptible to MSIMI, which could play a role in the prognosis of this group.


Efficient defect classification is one of the most important preconditions to achieve online quality inspection for hot-rolled strip steels. It is extremely challenging owing to various defect appearances, large intraclass variation, ambiguous interclass distance, and unstable gray values. In this paper, a generalized completed local binary patterns (GCLBP) framework is proposed. Two variants of improved completed local binary patterns (ICLBP) and improved completed noise-invariant local-structure patterns (ICNLP) under the GCLBP framework are developed for steel surface defect classification. Different from conventional local binary patterns variants, descriptive information hidden in nonuniform patterns is innovatively excavated for the better defect representation. This paper focuses on the following aspects. First, a lightweight searching algorithm is established for exploiting the dominant nonuniform patterns (DNUPs). Second, a hybrid pattern code mapping mechanism is proposed to encode all the uniform patterns and DNUPs. Third, feature extraction is carried out under the GCLBP framework. Finally, histogram matching is efficiently accomplished by simple nearest-neighbor classifier. The classification accuracy and time efficiency are verified on a widely recognized texture database (Outex) and a real-world steel surface defect database [Northeastern University (NEU)]. The experimental results promise that the proposed method can be widely applied in online automatic optical inspection instruments for hot-rolled strip steel.


. To be competitive, it is widely recognized that manufacturing companies need attention on sustainability aspects. However, there is still a lack of knowledge about how to combine requirements on sustainability and profitability to achieve long-term competitive manufacturing. Furthermore, there is a need for knowledge on how to develop resilient and sustainable production systems. This paper aims to explore the state-of-the art and state-of-practice associated with development of resilient and sustainable production systems, with focus on challenges and enablers. To achieve the aim of the paper, a traditional literature review was carried out, combined with results from knowledge creation workshops with five manufacturing companies striving towards resilient and sustainable production systems. In the paper, initial results from a three-year research project are included. The research project aims at developing knowledge that can support development of resilient and sustainable production systems, including the value chain, for the future. The industrial relevance of the project lies in ensuring a future-proof adaptable factory in an efficient industrial value chain, based on circularity in terms of minimum waste and long-term overall sustainability with a triple bottom line perspective, including social, ecological, and long-term economic values.


Although species extinction has become a global concern during the last decade, our knowledge of species distribution patterns remains limited. If we don't know where a species has existed historically, we cannot determine if its range is contracting or expanding. This can make it difficult to identify a species as endangered until it is close to extinction. One way to address this problem is to try to predict which species may be at risk based on their habitat distributions.


In this article we review the instruments most commonly used in clinical practice and research to assess the pain and anxiety experienced by children with cancer undergoing painful medical procedures. Issues such as the prevalence of pain in childhood cancer, the psychologic impact of medical procedures in children, and the efforts some institutions are making to implement pediatric pain assessment programs are also reviewed, bearing in mind that pain is a subjective and multidimensional experience. Behavioral measures, self-reports, multidimensional assessment tools and physiological measures are included, emphasizing the importance of self-reports, which are considered the gold standard in pediatric pain assessment. This literature review indicates the need for research and for the education of health care professionals in pediatric pain assessment. Finally, recommendations for pediatric pain assessment are suggested.


Despite human geographers' growing recognition of the need to explore how digital technologies are increasingly co‐producing geographies, the methodological implications of such forms of data production are rarely discussed. This paper explores how smartphones co‐constitute fieldwork when they are used as research instruments. Drawing from a research project on young people's nightlife in Switzerland, we use Ahmed's ideas of emotions to show how smartphones are not inert research tools but emotionally entangled in the field. We argue that doing research with smartphones visibly in fieldwork has an effect on the relationships between the people, practices, and places of the field site. More specifically, we propose that these effects of emotions call for a renewed scrutiny of research ethics, particularly as smartphones increasingly become part of research designs.


Periodontal plastic procedures are performed to prevent or correct anatomical, developmental, traumatic or plaque-induced defects of the gingiva, alveolar mucosa or bone. The majority of these procedures are performed in combination with restorative and/or orthodontic therapy, with the primary goal of enhancing esthetics. In this review, some of the more prominent techniques currently available to address mucogingival deficiencies, including pedicle grafts, free soft tissue grafts and combination grafts, are illustrated. In addition, potential complications associated with periodontal plastic procedures will be discussed.


BACKGROUND
Surgical treatment of chordoma involving multiple level in cervicothoracic spine is clinically rare and extremely challenging. It is not only because of complicated adjacent anatomy and the wide extension, but also due to the complex biomechanical reconstruction. However, the revolutionary application of individualized 3D-printed implant has provided a feasible and effective solution.

PURPOSES
To describe the surgical planning, manufacturing and implantation of an individualized 3D-printed prosthesis for cervicothoracic reconstruction in a six-level recurrent chordoma.

METHODS
A 40-year-old female patient with recurrent cervicothoracic chordoma was admitted in our center. One-stage tumorectomy through combined anterior and posterior approach was performed, and a customized 3D-printed prosthesis was anatomically installed on the defect with vertebral screws from C2 to T2.

RESULTS
The whole procedure took 13 hours, and intraoperative blood loss was 7500 ml. The patient recovered uneventfully and symptoms of pain and weakness of right upper extremity were significantly diminished postoperatively. No local recurrence was found at 9-month follow-up, and no subsidence, displacement or fracture of the prosthesis was observed radiographically.

CONCLUSION
To our best knowledge, this is the first report of biomechanical reconstruction using an individualized 3D-Printed artificial vertebral body in a six-level recurrent chordoma. Customized design of the prosthesis enables us to overcome the difficulty in fixation and simplify the surgical procedure. Especially in the spinal transition point where solid fusion is difficult to achieve, an individualized 3D-printed implant may provide excellent primary stability. Therefore, we believe that this burgeoning technique represents a promising prospect in complicated spinal oncology surgery.


Freedom of religion and belief and the manifestation of those beliefs can clash with working life in a number of ways including time away from work for religious observance, the prohibition on religious clothing and jewellery in an employer's dress code, or a request for a variation of duties based on a particular religious belief. Section 20 of the Equality Act 2010 already allows for reasonable adjustments to be made to working practices and the physical working environment for disabled employees. The question is could this be expanded to include religion and belief and would this prevent a hierarchy of protected characteristics from developing, if such a hierarchy actually exists?
Guidance issued by the EHRC following Eweida and others v UK (2013) 57 EHRR 213 seems to suggest that employers in the UK should consider the 'reasonable accommodation' of religion and belief in the workplace and in particular how an individual chooses to manifest that belief. Lady Hale, Deputy President of the Supreme Court, has called for the 'accommodation' of religious beliefs where this would do no harm to others. This paper will examine arguments for and against the principle of 'reasonable accommodation' of religious belief in UK workplaces.


Abstract. A long term record of water chemistry, consisting of twenty years of weekly spot samples, from three sub-catchments draining into a loch and the loch outflow in Galloway, S.W. Scotland have been analysed. The analysis undertaken consisted of a three component statistical trend model. The technique allows the identification of long-term, seasonal and short-term trends, as well as differentiation between base flow and high flow responses. The land usage in the three sub-catchments is moorland, forest and forest plus lime. The results show that, since the mid-1980s, there has been a gradual decline in stream-water sulphate of the same order as reductions in the deposition of non-marine sulphate. Superimposed on this trend are somewhat random but considerable perturbations to this decline, caused by sea-salt deposition. There is no evidence of changes in surface water nitrate concentrations. The influence of different land management is evident in the sulphate, nitrate and pH data, whilst variations in calcium concentrations are also a product of differences in hydrological routing and the impact of sea-salt episodes. Keywords: trend analysis, acid deposition, land management, water quality, sea-salts, Galloway, S.W. Scotland


Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) is a fundamental framework for planning and decision making under uncertainty. POMDP is known to be intractable to solve or even approximate when the planning horizon is long (i.e., within a polynomial number of time steps). Constrained POMDP (C-POMDP) allows constraints to be specified on some aspects of the policy in addition to the objective function. When the constraints involve bounding the probability of failure, the problem is called Chance-Constrained POMDP (CC-POMDP). Our first contribution is a reduction from CC-POMDP to C-POMDP and a novel Integer Linear Programming (ILP) formulation. Thus, any algorithm for the later problem can be utilized to solve any instance of the former. Second, we show that unlike POMDP, when the length of the planning horizon is constant, (C)C-POMDP is NP-Hard. Third, we present the first Fully Polynomial Time Approximation Scheme (FPTAS) that computes (near) optimal deterministic policies for constant-horizon (C)C-POMDP in polynomial time.


Catharanthus roseus produces a large array of terpenoid indole alkaloids (TIAs) that are an important source of natural or semisynthetic anticancer drugs. The biosynthesis of TIAs is tissue specific and induced by certain phytohormones and fungal elicitors, indicating the involvement of a complex transcriptional control network. However, the transcriptional regulation of the TIA pathway is poorly understood. Here, we describe a C. roseus WRKY transcription factor, CrWRKY1, that is preferentially expressed in roots and induced by the phytohormones jasmonate, gibberellic acid, and ethylene. The overexpression of CrWRKY1 in C. roseus hairy roots up-regulated several key TIA pathway genes, especially Tryptophan Decarboxylase (TDC), as well as the transcriptional repressors ZCT1 (for zinc-finger C. roseus transcription factor 1), ZCT2, and ZCT3. However, CrWRKY1 overexpression repressed the transcriptional activators ORCA2, ORCA3, and CrMYC2. Overexpression of a dominant-repressive form of CrWRKY1, created by fusing the SRDX repressor domain to CrWRKY1, resulted in the downregulation of TDC and ZCTs but the up-regulation of ORCA3 and CrMYC2. CrWRKY1 bound to the W box elements of the TDC promoter in electrophoretic mobility shift, yeast one-hybrid, and C. roseus protoplast assays. Up-regulation of TDC increased TDC activity, tryptamine concentration, and resistance to 4-methyl tryptophan inhibition of CrWRKY1 hairy roots. Compared with control roots, CrWRKY1 hairy roots accumulated up to 3-fold higher levels of serpentine. The preferential expression of CrWRKY1 in roots and its interaction with transcription factors including ORCA3, CrMYC2, and ZCTs may play a key role in determining the root-specific accumulation of serpentine in C. roseus plants.


Two novel Fenestin A analogs (1 and 2) containing a phthalimide moiety are prepared by photoinduced cyclization. Their absolute configurations were determined by experimental ECD with the aid of theoretical calculations. The resulting compounds are active in HeLa (IC50 = 28.2 μM for 1 and 36.5 μM for 2) and HepG-2 cell lines (IC50 = 33.5 μM for 1 and 40.3 μM for 2).


The application of multifunction digital relays to protect medium voltage power transformers has become a common industrial practice. Industrial transformers, unlike utility transformers, frequently use neutral grounding resistors to limit ground current during faults to 200–400A range on medium voltage systems. This paper will discuss why these types of transformers require sensitive ground differential protection. The paper will also discuss the basics of transformer protection including: phasing standards, through-fault withstand capability, differential/fusing/overcurrent protection, slope, CT requirements, harmonic restraint, and communicating these requirements properly when programming and commissioning new digital relays. The rationale for providing transformer overexcitation protection on all major transformers within industrial facilities is also addressed. Advancements in digital technology have allowed relay manufacturers to include more and more relay functions within a single hardware platform as well as address more and more transformer winding configurations. This has resulted in digital transformer relays requiring an experienced protection engineer to set and an experienced relay testing technician to commission. Since there are fewer experienced professionals among us now, the next generation of transformer relays needs to concentrate on this complexity issue in addition to technical improvements. This paper addresses these issues that the author believes are the major shortcomings of existing digital transformer protective relays.


Free evangelical Churches emphasize the unity of the children of God. Let me put it in a nutshell: The Founder of the first Free Evangelical Church in Germany Hermann Heinrich Grafe (1818-1869) has performed an ecclesiological balancing act in order to make the unity of the children of God visible: as an expression of the universal Church, he has founded a particular Church. The Free evangelical Churches came to life with a creed that preceded the ecumenical word of John 17:21. Their founders were aware that even a Protestant particular Church must continue to pursue the goal of reducing confessional egoism through prayer, personal encounters, common ministry, and serious theological discourses, and to discern the unity already existing in Christ "for the world to believe." This goal remains, even though the numerical growth and confessional fragmentation of the one Church of Jesus Christ over the last two centuries make the visualization of their unity seem impossible. This article shows ecumenical chances and obstacles of the free-evangelical perspective on unity and identity, which are somewhat typical for ecumenical dialogues between free and other Churches.
Keywords: Unity, Identity, Free Evangelical Churches, International Federation of Free Evangelical Churches


Modern healthcare has moved to a focus on providing patient centric care rather than disease centred care. This new approach is provided by a unique care team which is formed to treat a patient. At the start of the treatment, the care team decide on the treatment pathway for the patient. This is a series of treatment stages where at the end of each stage, the care team use the patient's current condition to decide whether the treatment moves to the next stage, continues in the treatment stage, or moves to an unanticipated stage. The initial treatment pathway for each patient is based on the clinical guidelines in an Integrated Care Pathway (ICP) [1] modified to suit the patient state. This research mapped a patient ICP decided by the healthcare providers into a Workflow Management System (WFMS) [2]. The clinical guidelines reflect the patient-centric flow to create an IT system supporting the care team. In the initial stage of the research the IT development team at Velindre Hospital identified that team communication and care coordination were obstacles hindering the implementation of a patient-centric delivery model. This was investigated to determine the causes, which were identified as difficulty in accessing the medical information held in dispersed legacy systems. Moreover, a major constraint in the domain is the need to keep legacy systems in operation and so there is a need to investigate approaches to enhance their functionalities. These information systems cannot be changed across all healthcare organisations and their complete autonomy needs to be retained as they are in constant use at the sites. Using workflow technology, an independent application representing an ICP was implemented. This was used to construct an independent layer in the software architecture to interact with legacy Clinical Information Systems (CISs) and so evolve their offered functionalities to support the teams. This was used to build a Virtual Organisation (VO) [3, 4] around a patient which facilitates patient-centric care. Moreover, the VO virtually integrates the data from legacy systems and ensures its availability (as needed) at the different treatment stages along the care pathway. Implications of the proposal include: formalising the treatment process, filtering and gathering the patient's information, ensuring care continuity, and pro-acting to change. Evaluation of the proposal involved three stages; First, usefulness evaluation by the healthcare providers representing the users; Second, setup evaluation by developers of CISs; and Finally, technical evaluation by the community of the technology. The evaluation proved; the healthcare providers' need for an adaptive and a proactive system, the possibility of adopting the proposed system, and the novelty and innovation of the proposed approach. The research proposes a patient-centric system achieved by creating a version of an ICP in the system for each patient. It also provides focussed support for team communication and care coordination, by identifying the treatment stages and providing the care team requirements at each stage. It utilises the data within the legacy system to be proactive. Moreover, it makes these required data for the actions available from the running legacy system which is required for patient-centred care. In the future the worth could be extended by mapping other ICPs into the system. This work has been published in four full papers. It found acceptance in the health informatics community [5, 6, 7] as well as the BPM community [8, 9]. It is also the winner of the 2011 "Global Award of Excellence in Adaptive Case Management (ACM)" in "Medical and Healthcare" [10] of the Workflow Management Coalition (WFMC) [11].


Gyrokinetic simulations are extensively used as a tool to describe various phenomena in magnetically confined plasmas. Among others, turbulent transport induced by drift-wave type instabilities such as Ion Temperature Gradient (ITG), Trapped Electron Mode (TEM) and Electron Temperature Gradient (ETG) plays a central role in fusion research. While the ITG mode in first approximations can be modeled using a reduced adiabatic electron model, the TEM and ETG modes require a kinetic description. The global delta-f PIC code ORB5 [1] currently implements three electron models: in the first, all the electrons are treated adiabatically, in the second they are all treated as kinetic and finally, in the so-called hybrid model the trapped electrons are treated as kinetic while the passing ones are considered to have an adiabatic response. Although the hybrid model is very useful to simulate electron driven modes such as the TEM at a lower numerical cost as compared to the fully kinetic electron model, in its standard form it does not ensure the ambipolarity condition and toroidal angular momentum conservation, which is clearly problematic for long nonlinear simulations. Recently, an improved hybrid electron model was proposed [2] to solve the ambipolarity problem while avoiding the electrostatic limit of the shear Alfven mode (so-called ωH mode) that constrains the time step to small enough values so as to resolve this high frequency mode. This new model treats the trapped electrons as kinetic but separates the passing contribution into a zonal contribution that is treated kinetically and a non-zonal contribution that has an adiabatic response. Finally, all the zonal modes with a poloidal mode number m ≠ 0 are filtered out. Although this model clearly satisfies the ambipolarity condition, it affects the GAM frequency, which is problematic, for example for comparisons with the experiment [3]. In this work, we propose a further improved hybrid electron model based on [2]. This version considers the zonal contribution of the passing electrons as kinetic but contrarily to the reference, it also includes the zonal modes with m ≠ 0 as an adiabatic response. In addition to verifying the ambipolarity condition, it affects less the GAM frequency. Zonal flows damping (Rosenbluth-Hinton) tests are used to validate the linear regime of this improved hybrid electron model and comparison with other models and theory will be shown to assess the GAM properties. Nonlinear simulations confirm the ambipolarity condition and show a richer physics that will be discussed. In particular, the zonal flow dynamics is affected by the proximity of mode rational surfaces.


Abstract We investigate the effects of discretionary changes in government spending and taxes using a medium-scale nonlinear vector autoregressive model with policy shocks identified via sign restrictions. Tax cuts and spending increases have larger stimulative effects when there is excess slack in the economy, while they are much less effective, especially in the case of government spending increases, when the economy is close to potential. We find that contractionary shocks have larger effects than expansionary shocks across the business cycle, but this is much more pronounced during deep recessions and sluggish recoveries than in robust expansions. Notably, tax increases are highly contractionary and largely self-defeating in reducing the debt-to-GDP ratio when the economy is in a deep recession. The effectiveness of discretionary government spending, including its state dependence, appears to be almost entirely due to the response of consumption. The responses of both consumption and investment to discretionary tax changes are state dependent, but investment plays the larger quantitative role.


An experimental method to determine the complete stress versus deformation relation for a thin adhesive layer loaded in shear is presented. The work is based on a classical specimen geometry, i.e. the end-notch flexure specimen (ENF-specimen) and the experiments are evaluated based on an inverse method. By studying the energy balance at the crack tip an expression for the energy release rate is derived. The theory considers the effects of a flexible adhesive layer and is based on beam theory. From the energy release rate the stressdeformation relation is derived using the inverse method. Quasi-static experiments are performed using a servo-hydraulic testing machine. The deformation process at the crack tip is monitored during the experiments by use of a CCDcamera attached to a microscope. The method requires differentiation of the energydeformation relation, therefore a Monte-Carlo simulation is performed to investigate how small errors in the data acquisition system affects the final stress-deformation relation. Small errors in the measurement of the force and shear deformation give small effects on the final stress-deformation relation. Experiments on three different geometries of the specimen are performed. The experiments give consistent results. It is shown that if the process zone in front of the crack tip is large, than the stress-deformation relation does not depend on the dimensions of the adherends. Thus, the constitutive relation can be considered to be a property of the adhesive layer.


This study investigated the thermal diffusivity behaviours of spark plasma sintered (SPS) multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs) reinforced Ti6Al4V composites containing 0, 1, 2 and 3 wt. % of the reinforcement respectively, over a range of 50 – 300 °C. The MWCNTs were dispersed into the Ti6Al4V matrices by high-energy ball milling (HEBM) technique and the milled composite powders were consolidated by SPS under a vacuum atmosphere. The sintering conditions employed were heating rate (100 °C/min), holding time at temperature (5 min), sintering temperature (850 °C) and applied pressure of 50 MPa. The relative densities of the composite discs were measured according to Archimedes' principle while the thermal diffusivities of as-sectioned composite samples were measured using the Laser Flash equipment. Relative densities of the synthesized nanocomposites deteriorated with increase in the weight fraction of MWCNTs added to Ti6Al4V. The thermal diffusivities of the composites containing 1 and 2 wt. % MWCNTs improved with increase in temperature and weight fraction of MWCNTs contents. A reverse trend was observed in the composite containing 3 wt. % MWCNTs, as the measured thermal diffusivities continued to drop with increase in temperature. Although this composite exhibited the best thermal diffusivities compared to the other composites up to 200 °C, a significant drop in thermal diffusivity was recorded between 250 and 300 °C respectively with the values lower than that of the unreinforced Ti6Al4V alloy. However, the thermal diffusivities of MWCNTs/Ti6Al4V composites were generally not dependent on their densification as the composites with higher weight fractions of the reinforcement had higher thermal diffusivities in spite of their lower relative densities.


This paper presents a numerical model for predicting the evolution of the pattern of ionospheric convection in response to general time-dependent magnetic reconnection at the dayside magnetopause and in the cross-tail current sheet of the geomagnetic tail. The model quantifies the concepts of ionospheric flow excitation by Cowley and Lockwood (1992), assuming a uniform spatial distribution of ionospheric conductivity. The model is demonstrated using an example in which travelling reconnection pulses commence near noon and then move across the dayside magnetopause towards both dawn and dusk. Two such pulses, 8min apart, are used and each causes the reconnection to be active for 1min at every MLT that they pass over. This example demonstrates how the convection response to a given change in the interplanetary magnetic field (via the reconnection rate) depends on the previous reconnection history. The causes of this effect are explained. The inherent assumptions and the potential applications of the model are discussed. Ionosphere (ionosphere-magnetosphere interactions; plasma convection) - Magnetospheric physics (magnetosphere-ionosphere interactions; solar wind-magnetosphere interactions)


Many have written about the way in which a "family romance" connects embodied daily life with the imagined community of the nation, and naturalizes the nation so that it appears not as a novel, fragile contingent creation, but as something ancient, robust and real. This book goes beyond such metaphoric associations of families and nations by looking at the central significance of planning families to promoting state development. It also considers the way that state power is accommodated and resisted, complicit with and contested by other powers grounded in relations of kinship, ethnicity, religion, and class.Through an exploration of richly varied national histories, the authors highlight the common recurring intimacies between marking the borders of states and remolding the bodies of women as reproductive citizens. The tensions between past and present, between local, national and international concerns, and between men and women's interests in reproduction are all graphically revealed.Surveying the relationship between the emerging models of citizenship and state population projects in several Asian states--India, China, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, and the Pacific states of Papua New Guinea, Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu--"Borders of Being" will attract readers in the several disciplines of anthropology, demography, and history as well as the cross disciplinary fields of gender and development studies.Margaret Jolly is Professor and Convenor of the Gender Relations Project, Australian National University. Kalpana Ram is Research Fellow, Australian Research Council, Macquarie University.


Economic growth is a phenomenon that has been subjected to many studies by economists. The overriding consideration o f the many studies on economic growth has been to analyse how economic growth can be influenced positively for the improved welfare of society and the wealth of nations. Economic growth is a key variable for gauging the economic and social wellbeing of nations. This research paper had an objective o f assessing whether manufactured exports have been influencing economic growth overtime in Kenya. Other variables studied in relation to their influence on economic growth were; other exports other than manufactured exports, imports and terms o f trade. The period of study was 1970 -2007. Data on manufactured exports, non-manufactured exports, imports and terms of trade for the period 1970-2007 was used to test their causality on real GDP. Unit roots tests on the data were conducted using Augmented Dickey-Fuller method while the Engle-Granger method was used to test for cointegration. The causality test was conducted using the Granger causality method. The findings revealed that manufactured exports have not had significant impact on economic growth and therefore Kenya's manufactured exports have not Granger-caused economic growth over the period of study. However there was found to be bi-directional causality between imports and manufactured exports. These findings do not suggest that manufactured exports are less important in influencing and determining the direction o f economic growth. Manufactured output and exports are important in the matrix of growth as has been demonstrated by many world economies. It is therefore critical for the government of Kenya and policy makers to work towards initiating and accelerating policies that will improve the quantity, quality and value of manufactured output and exports in the overall GDP contribution, while drawing lessons from the Asian Tigers.


Background Digital mental health interventions may help middle-aged and older adults with depression overcome barriers to accessing traditional care, but few studies have investigated their use in this population. Objective This pilot study examines the feasibility, acceptability, and potential efficacy of the Meru Health Program, an 8-week mobile app–delivered intervention. Methods A total of 20 community-dwelling middle-aged and older adults (age: mean 61.7 years, SD 11.3) with elevated depressive symptoms participated in a single-arm pilot study investigating the Meru Health Program, an app-delivered intervention supported by remote therapists. The program primarily uses mindfulness and cognitive behavioral skills to target depressive symptoms. A semistructured interview was completed at the baseline to establish current psychiatric diagnoses. Depressive symptoms were measured using the Patient Health Questionnaire and Patient-Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) depression measures. Anxiety symptoms were measured using the Generalized Anxiety Disorder Scale and the PROMIS Anxiety measure. User experience and acceptability were examined through surveys and qualitative interviews. Results In total, 90% (18/20) of the participants completed the program, with 75% (15/20) completing at least 7 of the 8 introductory weekly lessons. On average, participants completed 60 minutes of practice and exchanged 5 messages with their therapists every week. The app was rated as helpful by 89% (17/19) participants. Significant decreases in depressive (P=.03) and anxiety symptom measures (P=.01) were found; 45% (9/20) of participants showed clinically significant improvement in either depressive symptoms or anxiety symptoms. Conclusions The findings suggest that the commercially available Meru Health Program may be feasible, acceptable, and potentially beneficial to middle-aged and older adults. Although larger controlled trials are needed to demonstrate efficacy, these findings suggest that digital health interventions may benefit adults of all ages.


Background: To determine the association of ELISA based serological markersNS1 antigen, IgM, IgG antibodies and RT-PCR in the diagnosis of dengue virus infection
Methods: In this descriptive cross sectional study 420 serum samples from patients with suspicion of dengue fever were tested for detection of dengue by NS1 antigen ELISA, IgG, IgM ELISA. RT-PCR for dengue was carried out in all NS1 antigen ELISA positive cases for confirmation of dengue.
Results: Out of 420 cases , 249 cases were positive for either one of the three markers NS1, IgM,IgG. Males constituted 71.66%.Two hundred and two (48.09%) were positive for NS1 only,13 (3.09%) were positive for NS1 and IgG, 07 (1.66%) were NS1, IgM and IgG positive,16 (3.80%) were positive for IgG only ,11 (2.61%) were positive for NS1 and IgM whereas 171 (40.17%) samples were reported negative for NS1, IgM and IgG.RT-PCR was conducted on 233 NS1 positive cases out of which 80.06% cases turned out positive. Maximum number of cases belonged to DEN-2 genotype.
Conclusion: Early diagnosis helps in improved patient care, suitable treatment, prevents severe complications and helps limit the spread of the disease. RT PCR is  a reliable test for the  diagnosis of acute dengue fever.


There has been considerable activity in breeding orchardgrass (Dactylis glomerata L.) cultivars in North America during the latter half of the 20th century, but little effort devoted to quantification of breeding progress. The objectives of this study were to quantify changes in mean cultivar performance for that time compared with the progress achieved from one cycle of half-sib progeny selection within the USDA population of orchardgrass accessions. Forty-two cultivars (32 North American cultivars and 10 European cultivars) were tested at three locations (Arlington, WI and Rock Springs, PA, and Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) in 1995 through 1997. Cultivars were grouped into three experiments by maturity class: early, medium, and late. North American cultivars averaged 3,9, and 12 % higher in forage yield than European cultivars for early, medium, and late maturity groups, respectively. Between 1955 and 1997, forage yield and ground cover of early-maturity cultivars increased by 2.5 Mg ha -1 decade -1 and 4.0% decade -1 , respectively. Forage nutritional value of medium-maturity cultivars increased during that time, although this was probably not due to direct selection. Significant gains were made in forage yield and Drechslera spp. leafspot reaction of cultivars derived from two individual breeding programs, although the majority of orchardgrass cultivars lack improvements in forage traits.


ATP-citrate lyase (ACLY) catalyzes the conversion of citrate and CoA into acetyl-CoA and oxaloacetate, coupled with the hydrolysis of ATP. In humans, ACLY is the cytoplasmic enzyme linking energy metabolism from carbohydrates to the production of fatty acids. In situ proteolysis of full-length human ACLY gave crystals of a truncated form, revealing the conformations of residues 2–425, 487–750, and 767–820 of the 1101-amino acid protein. Residues 2–425 form three domains homologous to the β-subunit of succinyl-CoA synthetase (SCS), while residues 487–820 form two domains homologous to the α-subunit of SCS. The crystals were grown in the presence of tartrate or the substrate, citrate, and the structure revealed the citrate-binding site. A loop formed by residues 343–348 interacts via specific hydrogen bonds with the hydroxyl and carboxyl groups on the prochiral center of citrate. Arg-379 forms a salt bridge with the pro-R carboxylate of citrate. The pro-S carboxylate is free to react, providing insight into the stereospecificity of ACLY. Because this is the first structure of any member of the acyl-CoA synthetase (NDP-forming) superfamily in complex with its organic acid substrate, locating the citrate-binding site is significant for understanding the catalytic mechanism of each member, including the prototype SCS. Comparison of the CoA-binding site of SCSs with the similar structure in ACLY showed that ACLY possesses a different CoA-binding site. Comparisons of the nucleotide-binding site of SCSs with the similar structure in ACLY indicates that this is the ATP-binding site of ACLY.


We conducted physical therapy for patients suffering from lumbago (n=37) with highfrequency hyperthermia equipment by a capacitive electric transfer method, MD-303 (0.65 ± 0.05 MHz), which is employed in Europe and America. The 37 patients comprised 13 with lumbar spondylosis deformans, 7 with lumbar spinal canal stenosis, 5 with lumbar disc herniation, 4 with lumbar spondylolysis/spondylolisthesis, 4 with lumbar discopathy, and 4 with other diseases accompanied by lumbago. The electricity was used 10 times in total, for 20 minutes per time. A rise in skin temperature was observed even 15 minutes after treatment, with no occurrence of adverse reactions, and this therapy was highly effective in relieving pain, with an efficacy rate of 81.1%. This paper reports the results of the use of this therapy.


ABSTRACT Introduction: There is a growing body of evidence highlighting the applications of computational modeling in the field of biomedicine. It has recently been applied to the in silico analysis of cancer dynamics. In the era of precision medicine, this analysis may allow the discovery of new molecular targets useful for the design of novel therapies and for overcoming resistance to anticancer drugs. According to its molecular behavior, melanoma represents an interesting tumor model in which computational modeling can be applied. Melanoma is an aggressive tumor of the skin with a poor prognosis for patients with advanced disease as it is resistant to current therapeutic approaches. Areas covered: This review discusses the basics of computational modeling in melanoma drug discovery and development. Discussion includes the in silico discovery of novel molecular drug targets, the optimization of immunotherapies and personalized medicine trials. Expert opinion: Mathematical and computational models are gradually being used to help understand biomedical data produced by high-throughput analysis. The use of advanced computer models allowing the simulation of complex biological processes provides hypotheses and supports experimental design. The research in fighting aggressive cancers, such as melanoma, is making great strides. Computational models represent the key component to complement these efforts. Due to the combinatorial complexity of new drug discovery, a systematic approach based only on experimentation is not possible. Computational and mathematical models are necessary for bringing cancer drug discovery into the era of omics, big data and personalized medicine.


It is important to constitute a detailed, easily understandable, and visually appealing database related to rail freight transportation for carrying out various analyses, making more effective the operational plans, and finding solutions for many management problems. Therefore, the rail freight transportation in Turkey is analyzed in this paper, with special attention to Geographic Information Systems (GIS). In order to carry out the study, at first, the origin and destination (O-D) matrices for 20 different kinds of commodities carried by the Turkish State Railways (TCDD) in the year 2000 were determined by using the statistical data provided by TCDD. Afterwards, the railway network was coded, and O-D matrices obtained for these 20 different commodities were assigned onto this network based on an all-or-nothing assignment. Consequently, the commodity flows on the railway links resulting from assigning these matrices onto the railway network were found. Finally, these matrices and the commodity flows on the railway links were transferred into the GIS environment to enable the full range capability needed for this research. In other words, GIS were adopted for capture, storage, manipulation, and analysis of information related to the O-D matrices for different commodities transported by rail and commodity flows on railway links resulting from assigning these matrices onto the railway network, Consequently, this study places identification of the O-D matrices for various commodity types carried by rail and the commodity flows on railway links in a broader perspective by using GIS.


We present large-eddy simulation (LES) of flow past different airfoils with $Re_{c}$ , based on the free-stream velocity and airfoil chord length, ranging from $10^{4}$ to $2.1\times 10^{6}$ . To avoid the challenging resolution requirements of the near-wall region, we develop a virtual wall model in generalized curvilinear coordinates and incorporate the non-equilibrium effects via proper treatment of the momentum equations. It is demonstrated that the wall model dynamically captures the instantaneous skin-friction vector field on arbitrary curved surfaces at the resolved scale. By combining the present wall model with the stretched-vortex subgrid-scale model, we apply the wall-modelled LES approach to three different airfoil cases, spanning different geometrical parameters, different attack angles and low to high $Re_{c}$ . The numerical results are verified with direct numerical simulation (DNS) at low $Re_{c}$ , and validated with experiment data at higher $Re_{c}$ , including typical aerodynamic properties such as pressure coefficient distributions, velocity components and also more challenging measurements such as skin-friction coefficient and Reynolds stresses. All comparisons show reasonable agreement, providing a measure of validity that enables us to further probe simulation results into aspects of flow physics that are not available from experiments. Two techniques to quantify hitherto unexplored physics of flows past airfoils are employed: one is the construction of the anisotropy invariant map, and the second is skin-friction portraits with emphasis on flow transition and unsteady separation along the airfoil surface. The anisotropy maps for all three $Re_{c}$ cases, show clearly that a portion of the flow field is aligned along the axisymmetric expansion line, corresponding to the turbulent boundary layer log-law behaviour and the appearance of turbulent transition. The instantaneous skin-friction portraits reveal a monotonic shrinking of the near wall structure scale. At $Re_{c}=10^{4}$ , the interaction between the primary separation bubble and the secondary separation bubble contributes to turbulent transition, similar to the case of flow past a cylinder. At higher $Re_{c}=10^{5}$ , the primary separation breaks into several small separation bubbles. At even higher $Re_{c}=2.1\times 10^{6}$ , near the turbulent separation, the skin-friction lines show small-scale reversal flows that are similar to those observed in DNS of the flat plate turbulent separation. A notable feature of turbulent separation in flow past an airfoil is the appearance of turbulence structures and small-scale reversal flows in the spanwise direction due to the vortex shedding behaviour.


Objectives The aim is to determine the influencing factors of orthostatic hypotension (OH) in inpatients of cardiology. Methods A total of 200 patients hospitalised in cardiology of Peking University People's Hospital from July 2012 to August 2012 were included. The orthostatic blood pressures were measured in supine position after resting for more than 5 minutes and at 0 min, 1 min, 2 min and 3 min after standing. OH was defined as fall in systolic BP below 20 mmHg and/or diastolic BP below 10 mmHg of baseline within 3 min in upright position. Subjects were divided into OH positive and OH negative group. Compare the baseline data, comorbidities and treatment medication differences of OH group with non-OH group, and analyse the influencing factors of OH. Results The prevalence of OH in subjects was 24%. Both the supine systolic and diastolic blood pressure were higher in OH positive group than OH negative group (P = 0.001). The prevalence of diabetes (31.3% vs. 10.5%, P = 0.001) and stroke (27.1% vs. 9.9%, P = 0.003) was higher in OH positive group than OH negative group. The proportion of application of α receptor blockers (12.5% vs. 2.6%, P = 0.014), psychotropic drugs (16.7% vs. 5.3%, P = 0.011), Hypoglycemic drugs (27.1% vs. 10.5%, P = 0.005) and antiplatelet drugs (68.8% vs. 52%, P = 0.041) were higher in OH positive group than OH negative group. Logistic regression found that the risk of OH was related to diabetes (OR = 3.84, 95% CI 1.63∼9.043), stroke (OR = 3.469, 95% CI 1.409∼8.542),application of α receptor blockers (OR = 5.537, 95% CI 1.354∼22.643) and psychotropic drugs (OR = 3.292, 95% CI 1.035∼10.471). Conclusions OH was very common in hospitalised patients. Diabetes mellitus, stroke, and the application of α receptor blockers and psychotropic drugs may increase the risk of OH.


The aim of this study was to identify the pace of learning for learners with visual impairment in St. Francis School for the Blind in Pokot County. The study adopted a case study research design that used the mixed method that utilized both qualitative and quantitative techniques. The target population comprised learners with visual impairment (VI), teachers and the school headteacher, total of 170 participants. A sample size of 35.30% of the total population was used. The headteacher and the teachers were purposively selected, while random sampling was used to select the learners with visual impairment. Structured questionnaires, interviews and observational schedules were used to collect data. The research instruments were pretested to establish their validity and reliability using the expertise of university supervisors. The qualitative data collected were analyzed in themes, while quantitative data were analyzed fully by using the descriptive statistics and, coded in statistical package for social sciences (SPSS). The findings indicated that more extra time was required to enable learners with visual impairments to complete academic tasks and the learners to be taught at a slower pace because of having diverse needs. Due to visual challenges they complete schooling later than the sighted, as their academic transitional ladder was hindered by determinants brought by severity of visual loss; therefore, they end up repeating classes. The teachers teaching learners reiterated that there was no content coverage due to the learners pace of learning. Therefore, the study recommended that the field officers had to do early screening for appropriate referrals and placement. Also, the Kenya Institute of Education to slot in clearly extra time in the time-table and even to come up with a Special a Needs Education syllabus rather than relying on the regular one. Likewise, the Teachers" Service Commission to reduce the teacherlearner ratio from 1:15 to 1:5 in order for a teacher to assist a learner with visual impairment effectively.


Cryptography and error correction codes are widely used for information security and data integrity services in modern digital computing and communications systems. A number of standardized and published cryptography, and error correction algorithms utilize arithmetic operations over <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text {GF}(2^{m})$ </tex-math></inline-formula>. The polynomial basis (PB) representation of <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text {GF}(2^{m})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> elements is suitable for the support of multiple <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text {GF}(2^{m})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> fields (that is, versatility). This article considers the problem of reduced hardware efficiency of versatile <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text {GF}(2^{m})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> PB multipliers as a result of increased loading latency of the inputs and irreducible polynomial. In this context, to the best of our knowledge, this article proposes the first input-latency free versatile bit-serial <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\text {GF}(2^{m})$ </tex-math></inline-formula> multiplier using PB. The superiority of the proposed versatile PB multiplier is demonstrated for the case where the multiplication's inputs arrive serially in terms of higher output throughput and hardware efficiency compared to existing versatile PB and Gaussian normal basis (GNB) counterparts based on the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) realizations, respectively. The proposed versatile PB multiplier improves hardware efficiency by factors of 1.8 and 2.5, respectively, compared to the versatile PB and versatile GNB counterparts.


This is the seventh part of the successful series which provides art historians and students with primary-source materials relating to the Western reception of Japanese arts from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century. It is now common knowledge that art collectors in Europe around the end of the nineteenth century played a very important role in the development of Japanese influence on Western art, in particular on the Impressionists who became acquainted with Ukiyoe by Hokusai, or other Japanese artefacts, many of which were imported from Japan by art dealers for their clients in Europe. The majority of those collections of Japanese art held by individual art lovers were dispersed on their deaths, but some were acquired by museums in Europe and America and are now valued as treasures which often form the core of their collections of Japanese art. It is not easy to trace precisely what objects were brought from Japan to the West and in what way some of them are housed today by Western institutions, but one of the most useful tools for art historians are the auction catalogues of those pioneer Japanese art collectors through which they are able to assess the very early phase of Western reception of Japanese arts. However, as such catalogues are mostly published by auction houses for their customers only and are not widely available, very few of them are held or systematically collected by academic libraries. To remedy this omission, this collection brings together sixteen catalogues of auctions which took place around the turn of the century for the sale of collections by eight leading French collectors. Together, they provide academics and students in the subject with a unique and rare primary source. All the catalogues are reproduced with numerous pictures and plates, together with foldouts as originally published.


The interest in diffusion imaging with nuclear magnetic resonance techniques has increased during the last few years. The main reason is the possibility of early diagnosis of acute ischaemic stroke, at a time when conventional MR techniques and computerised tomography fail. The purpose of this study was to develop and evaluate methods for the measurement of water self-diffusion in vivo using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The main objective was to design pulse sequences that allow quantification of the diffusion coefficient, and provide diffusion-weighted (DW) images of high quality. DW-MRI is highly sensitive to macroscopic motion, which causes severe image artifacts and makes quantification difficult. This problem was addressed through pulse sequence design and image post-processing techniques. The use of first-order motion-compensating diffusion-encoding gradients in combination with DW spin-echo (SE) imaging proved to increase image quality and accuracy in quantitative data. Further more, quantitative diffusion imaging was found to be possible with fast-SEs, a method that does not require any high-performance gradient systems. Using a segmented echo-planar imaging (SEPI) technique high-resolution DW-images and ADC maps were obtained, showing no proof of susceptibility artifacts or geometrical distortions, problems normally associated with EPI. Navigator-echo phase-corrections were found to reduce motion artifacts present in images obtained with SE, FSE and SEPI techniques. The use of electro-cardiographic triggering for DW-EPI was also evaluated, and found to be relevant in quantitative measurements. Assessment of the perfusion fraction in vivo from DW-images might be helpful in diagnosis and characterisation of acute stroke and can be performed whenever enough data are available. Finally, the performance of DW-SE and DW-EPI for diagnosis of ischaemic stroke in the acute phase was evaluated. DW-EPI and DW-SE in combination with ADC maps were compared with respect to diagnostic accuracy. It was found that although DW-SE methods suffer from limited diffusion sensitivity and limited numbers of slices, it can be used for diagnosis of acute stroke, but ADC maps are essential in discriminating between acute and chronic infarcts. (Less)


We design, fabricate, and experimentally demonstrate an ultrathin, broadband half-wave plate in the near-infrared range using a plasmonic metasurface. The simulated results show that the linear polarization conversion efficiency is over 97% with over 90% reflectance across an 800 nm bandwidth. Moreover, simulated and experimental results indicate that such broadband and high-efficiency performance is also sustained over a wide range of incident angles. To further obtain a background-free half-wave plate, we arrange such a plate as a periodic array of integrated supercells made of several plasmonic antennas with high linear polarization conversion efficiency, consequently achieving a reflection-phase gradient for the cross-polarized beam. In this design, the anomalous (cross-polarized) and the normal (copolarized) reflected beams become spatially separated, hence enabling highly efficient and robust, background-free polarization conversion along with broadband operation. Our results provide strategies for creating compact, integrated, and high-performance plasmonic circuits and devices.


The neutral rate serves as a benchmark for measuring monetary stimulus and provides a medium- to long-run anchor for the real policy rate. Global neutral rate estimates have been falling over the past few decades. Factors such as population aging, high corporate savings, and low trend productivity growth are likely to continue supporting a low global neutral rate. These global factors as well as domestic factors are exerting downward pres-sure on the Canadian real neutral rate, which is estimated to be between 0.5 to 1.5 per cent. This low neutral rate has important implications for monetary policy and financial stability.


Background There is increasing evidence that both green and black tea are beneficial for cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention. Objective Determine the effects of green and black tea on the primary prevention of CVD. Methods The following electronic databases were searched with no language restrictions from their inception to October 2012: MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, Web of Science, the Cochrane Library and trial registers. Included studies fulfilled the following criteria: study design - RCTs, participants - free of CVD (includes those at high risk), intervention – Green tea, Black tea or tea extracts, comparator – no intervention or placebo, outcomes – diagnosis of CVD or change in the risk factor profile for CVD (blood pressure, lipids). Two reviewers independently screened titles and abstracts, assessed shortlisted studies for formal inclusion/exclusion, abstracted data and assessed methodological quality. Results Database searching resulted in1733 hits of which 130 went forward for formal inclusion/exclusion. Nine RCTs met the inclusion criteria. Five trials examined green tea extracts and four examined black tea extracts. No studies reported cardiovascular events. Black tea extracts were found to produce statistically significant reductions in LDL cholesterol (mean difference -0.46mmol/l [95% CI -0.54, -0.39]) and blood pressure (SBP - mean difference -1.85mmHG [-32.6, -0.44]; DBP - mean difference -1.32mmHG [-2.7, -0.06]), but only a small number of trials contributed to each analysis and studies were at some risk of bias. Green tea extracts were also found to produce statistically significant reductions in total cholesterol (mean difference -0.65 mmol/l [-0.81, -0.50]), LDL cholesterol (mean difference -0.58 mmol/l [-0.87, -0.28]) and blood pressure (SBP - mean difference -3.43 mmHG [-4.54, -2.31]), but only three studies contributed to each analysis. When both tea types were analysed together they showed favourable effects on LDL cholesterol (mean difference -0.47 mmol/l [-0.54, -0.40]) and blood pressure (SBP - mean difference -2.27 mmHG [-3.44, -1.11]; DBP mean difference -2.60 mmHG [-3.46, -1.73]). Conclusion There are very few long term studies examining the intake of green or black tea for the primary prevention of CVD. The limited evidence suggests that tea has favourable effects on CVD risk factors, but due to the small number of trials contributing to each analysis the results should be treated with caution and further high quality trials with longer term follow-up are needed to confirm this.


Our nervous systems can perform a vast variety of cognitive tasks, many involving several different senses. Although sensory systems provide a basis for the creation of mental representations, we rely on memory to form mental representations of information that is no longer present in our external world. Focussing on the initial stage of this process, working memory (WM), where information is retained actively over a short time course, experiments included in this thesis were directed toward understanding the nature of sensory representations across the senses (vision, audition and touch).
Instead of quantifying how many items one can hold in each sensory modality (all-or-none representations), new response methods were devised to capture the qualitative nature of sensory representations. Measuring quality rather than quantity of information held in WM, has led to the re-evaluation of the nature of its underlying capacity limits. Rather than assuming that WM capacity is limited to a fixed number of items, it may be more suitable to describe WM as a resource which can be shared and flexibly distributed across sensory information. Thus it has been proposed that at low loads we can hold information at a high resolution. However, as soon as memory load is increased, there is a deterioration of the quality at which each individual item can be represented in WM.
The resource model of WM has been applied to describe processes of visual WM, but has not been investigated for other sensory modalities. In the first part of my thesis I demonstrate behaviourally that the resource model can be extended to account for processes in auditory WM, associated with the storage of sound frequency (pitch, chapter 2) and speech sounds (phonemes, chapter 3). I then show that it can also be extended to account for storage of tactile vibrational frequencies (chapter 4). Overall, the results suggest that memory representations become noisier with an increase in information load, consistent with the concept that representations are coded as distributed patterns.
A pattern may code for individual object features or entire objects. As studies in chapter 2 - 4 only looked at a single type of feature each in separation, I

next examined WM information storage for auditory objects, composed of multiple features (chapter 5). Object formation involves binding of features, which become reorganized to create more complex unified representations of previously distributed information. The results revealed a clear feature extraction cost when recall was tested on individual features rather than on integrated objects. One interpretation of these findings is that, at some level in the auditory system, sounds may be stored as integrated objects.
In a final study, using fMRI with MVPA (mulitvoxel pattern analysis), memory traces represented as distributed patterns of brain activity were decoded from different regions of the auditory system (chapter 6). The major goal was to resolve the debate on the role of early sensory cortices in cognition: are they primarily involved in the perception of low-level stimulus features or also in maintenance of the same features in memory? I demonstrate that perception and memory share common neural substrates, where early auditory cortex serves as a substrate to accommodate both processes.
Overall, in this thesis memory representations were characterized across the senses in three different ways: (1) measuring them in terms of their quality or resolution, (2) testing whether the preferred format is on the feature or integrated object level; and (3) as patterns of brain activity. Findings converge along the concept that noisy representations actively held in WM are coded as distributed patterns in the brain.


This study introduces the first set of findings from the Centre for Tax Analysis in Developing Countries employment income taxes dataset (TaxDev EITD). The EITD is a new, publicly available dataset that comprises detailed information of the personal income taxes (PIT) and other mandatory taxes and social security contributions owed by employees on wage earnings in Africa, over the period 1995–2020. We begin by discussing high-level trends in PIT structure, before analysing reform episodes, effective tax rates for individuals and progressivity. We find that reform of employment income taxes (EIT) is infrequent, effective tax rates differ greatly across countries and that the taxes are, on average, progressive, although less so at higher levels of income. We also find that EIT can kick in at a very low level of income; in one in four African countries, an individual would be liable to pay employment income taxes if their wage was less than or equal to the international poverty line of $1.90 a day.


The problem studied in this paper is a wavelength allocation algorithm applied to a metropolitan optical packet-switched ring network. Existing algorithms that provide optimal wavelength allocation generally require excessive computational time even with a small network of 8 to 16 nodes. Therefore, those approaches seem to be inappropriate for providing a dynamic real time wavelength allocation, which reacts as rapidly as possible to the growth of data traffic. In this work we present an approach for real time resource allocation (the so-called R2A) algorithm applied to optical packet-switched ring networks. This is based on equivalent bandwidth methods and heuristic iterative algorithm that can be executed in real-time. We also use simulations to evaluate the performance of the network configured according to the wavelength allocation map provided by R2A.


We report on the design and manufacturing of interdigitated back contact cells based on the silicon heterojunction technology. The influence of geometry and overlap of the doped amorphous silicon layers forming the contact fingers on device performance have been investigated by simulation. Two contact formation concepts, with and without a TCO interlayer – an indium tin oxide/silver (ITO/Ag) stack, and a direct aluminum (Al) metallization – are experimentally evaluated. The former retains good passivation but leads to a too high contact resistivity, the latter shows the opposite behavior, but yields a slight benefit in terms of overall performance achieving more than 20% of efficiency. We show that in this case a contact system is formed whose properties can be tuned by annealing, enabling a trade-off between VOC and FF.

Structure of the presented solar cell; a SiNX layer covers the front side, the rear side is passivated by overlapping layer stacks of intrinsic and doped amorphous silicon, the latter are contacted by aluminum.


: Chronic pancreatitis, often with a pseudocyst, is a rare cause of a pleural exudate. A pancreatic pleural fistula is created, leading to a relapsing massive haemorrhagic pleural exudate with a very high amylase content. The diagnosis is confirmed by means of endoscopic retrograde pancreatography. Treatment is primarily conservative; surgical drainage is sometimes necessary. The prognosis is generally favourable. The case history of a young woman with this condition is presented.


Objective To assess the percent agreement between diagnostic imaging modalities for the evaluation of lymphadenopathies in HIV-infected/AIDS patients. Materials and Methods This was an open, comparative, prospective study of diagnostic imaging methods for lymphadenopathy evaluation. We evaluated 30 patients (19 men and 11 women). All underwent ultrasound and computed tomography (CT). Twenty of the patients also underwent magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). We determined the percent agreement between two examiners using the various imaging methods to evaluate lymphadenopathies. Results CT had the highest percent agreement, at 93.3%, with a kappa coefficient of 0.85, corresponding to 28 of the 30 examinations. When we compared the percent agreement between the two examiners and between CT and ultrasound, examiner 1 had an observed rate of 80.0%, with a kappa of 0.49, corresponding to 24 of the 30 examinations, whereas examiner 2 had a rate of 70.0%, with a kappa of 0.31, corresponding to 21 of the 30 examinations. Between MRI and CT, the percent agreement for examiner 1 was 50.0%, with a kappa of −0.18, corresponding to 10 of the 20 examinations, whereas that for examiner 2 was 85.0%, with a kappa of 0.69, corresponding to 17 of the 20 examinations. For MRI and ultrasound, examiner 1 had a percent agreement of 70.0%, with a kappa of 0.20, corresponding to 14 of the 20 examinations, and examiner 2 had a percent agreement of 75.0%, with a kappa of 0.38, corresponding to 15 of the 20 examinations. Conclusion This study indicates that intermethod agreement is highly dependent on the way in which the research is conducted, rather than on the level of experience of the examiner.