Nursery experiment
was carried out at Ibadan, Nigeria between May 2004 and October 2005 to
evaluate the use of plantain as a permanent cocoa nursery shade crop. Ibadan is
located between latitude 07?10'N and longitude 03?52'E and lies at
an altitude of about 122 metres above the sea level. The treatments consisted
of six shade regimes provided by plantain spaced at 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5 and, 3.1
m apart, the control had no shade at all (open planted cocoa). Each treatment
had one hundred cocoa seedlings planted in polythene bag filled with topsoil
and laid out in a randomized complete block design (RCBD) in three
replications. Data on vegetative growth of cocoa seedlings were taken on
monthly basis, while plantain height, girth, number of leaves, bunch weight, number
of fingers and market value of each treatment were evaluated. Light intensity
under each of the treatment was taken using light meter. Result showed that
cocoa seedlings under plantain shade planted at 1.0 m and 1.5 m apart were
higher in height relative to control and other treatments considered, shade
regimes provided by spacing at 3.1 × 3.1 m and 2.5 m × 2.5 m apart on the
other hand produced higher values for stem diameter and leaf area respectively
compared to other treatments, the least values were recorded under 1.0 m × 1.0 m apart.
Seedlings under 2.5 m and 3.1 m spacing were significantly (p > 0.05) higher
for these parameters than other treatments. Higher incidence of weed was also
recorded from the control. Plantain bunch obtained from 2.5 m and 3.1 m apart was
higher than other treatments in terms of weight, number of fingers and market
value, while the control (no plantain shade) did not give any economic returns.
Hence, plantain planted at spacing of 2.5 m or 3.1 m apart could be recommended
to the cocoa farmers in Nigeria as nursery shade instead of conventional method
of using bamboo and palm fronds yearly without any additional economic return.


1 Abstract: Background and aims: AIDS as a re-emergent disease and Viral hepatitis (B and C) as one of the five Top Infective causes of premature death ,confront the world to many economic and psychosocial consequences. Beauty salons and hairdressers if doný't practice properly to Infection control techniques may help to HIV,HBV and HCV transmission as revealed by many studies. Methods: This study Aimed to assess the knowledge and performance of beauty salons regarding to HIV,HBV , HCV and infection control before and after training. By this cross sectional study that was conducted from August 2008 to May 2009 ,125 beauty salons of Shiraz - Iran selected by cluster randomized sampling Among 625 salons .One person of each salon interviewed by filling Valid and Reliable Questionnaire before and 2-3 months after training them about above Items. Results: All interviewed persons were female by mean age 38 ±11 years.89( 72%) had education higher than intermediate school .Their mean of occupation period was13 ± 9 years . Mean score knowledge about HIV,HBV and HCV transmission was 30.81± 4.6 and 38.7 ± 2.06 ( of total 41) before and after education respectively and knowledge toward Infection control changed from 9.77 ± 3.36 before to 12.73 ± 0.42 ( of total 13) after training. Practice to Infection control changed to 12.35 ± 0.78 (of total 13) after education in comparison with 9.82 ± 2.15 before that. Conclusion: Continuous education and training of all hairdressers and employers and employees of beauty salons regarding HIV,HBV,HCV and Infection control is necessary and should be monitored regularly.


The Late Cretaceous Buzios Island alkaline massif intrudes Precambrian charnockites and consists dominantly of syenitic rocks that are cut by a large number of dikes, mostly NE-trending, and representing two distinct suites, a felsic one and a mafic-ultramafic one. Alkali feldspar is the most abundant mineral; other constituents are clinopyroxene, commonly replaced by amphibole/ biotite, and opaques. Accessory minerals include occasionally rare phases bearing Zr, Ti, Nb and Rare Earth Elements (REE). The felsic dikes may also have nepheline (sodalite). The mafic-ultramafic suite, in particular the lamprophyres, shows a primary mineral assemblage with olivine, clinopyroxene and amphibole in addition to a groundmass having glassy material and carbonates (ocelli). The Buzios rocks are chemically evolved, mostly of potassic affinity and mainly belong to the miaskitic series. Variation diagrams for major and trace elements show a bimodal distribution, suggesting an origin from different magmatic pulses. The rocks are interpreted as having been derived by fractional crystallization processes from a basanitic parental magma. The SiO2 -undersaturated and SiO2 -oversaturated associations present in the massif are apparently not linked to a single magmatic source, and in the petrogeny residual system two trends are evident: the first one towards the phonolitic minimum and the second one towards the rhyolitic minimum, possibly pointing to amphibole fractionation.


The purpose of this research is to figure out the effectiveness toward problem solving skill in thematic course by using Board Game as the medium of Teams Games Tournament learning discourse. Pre experimental design which applies in this research is using one group pretest - post test pattern. The collecting data done by using test, observation, and interview. The effectiveness by using Board Game can be seen in the result of pretest and posttest about problem solving skill by Paired Sample testing and assisted with SPSS 25.0 for windows program. Paired T-Test result obtained from Sig score. (2-tailed) same to 0,000 or less than 0,05 with the pretest average 65% and 79% for the post test. Furthermore, Board Game is effective to enhance the problem solving skill


In this work, gold-silica core-shell (Au@silica) nanoparticles (NPs) with various silica-shell thicknesses are incorporated into P3HT:PCBM/ZnO nanorod (NR) hybrid solar cells. Enhancement in the short-circuit current density and the efficiency of the hybrid solar cells is attained with the appropriate addition of Au@silica NPs regardless of the silica-shell thickness. Compared to the P3HT:PCBM/ZnO NR hybrid solar cell, a 63% enhancement in the efficiency is achieved by the P3HT:PCBM/Au@silica NP/ZnO NR hybrid solar cell. The finite difference time domain simulations indicate that the strength of the Fano resonance, i.e., the electric field of the quasi-static asymmetric quadrupole, on the surface of Au@silica NPs in the P3HT:PCBM/ZnO NR hybrid significantly decreases with increasing thickness of the silica shell. Raman characterization reveals that the degree of P3HT order increases when Au@silica NPs are incorporated into the P3HT:PCBM/ZnO NR hybrid. The charge separation at the interface between P3HT and PCBM as well as the electron transport in the active layer are retarded by the electric field of the Fano resonance. Nevertheless, the prolongation of the electron lifetime and the reduction of the electron transit time in the P3HT:PCBM/ZnO NR hybrid solar cells, which result in an enhancement of electron collection, are achieved by the addition of Au@silica NPs. This may be attributed to the improvement in the degree of P3HT order and connectivity of PCBM when Au@silica NPs are incorporated into the P3HT:PCBM active layer.


Image completion is an important photo-editing task which involves synthetically filling a hole in the image such that the image still appears natural. State-of-the-art image completion methods work by searching for patches in the image that fit well in the hole region. Our key insight is that image patches remain natural under a variety of transformations (such as scale, rotation and brightness change), and it is important to exploit this. We propose and investigate the use of different optimisation methods to search for the best patches and their respective transformations for producing consistent, improved completions. Experiments on a number of challenging problem instances demonstrate that our methods outperform state-of-the-art techniques.


This Article explores intertwined contemporary crises via the Critical Legal Research framework ("CLR"), as initially developed by the critical legal scholars Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. CLR as conceived of in this Article entails a truly radical approach to the legal research and analysis regime. While the traditional research regime—i.e., as taught in law schools and utilized in practice—functions to homogenize research outcomes towards hegemonic ends, a critically "reconstructed" approach to legal and broader socio-legal research permits more transformative futures. Specifically, CLR as deployed within such modes as radical cause lawyering can help engender genuine systemic "re-formations" of the ecological political economy beyond mere law "reform."

Next, this Article applies the CLR framework to three intertwined crises: climate change and the broader ecological crisis (i.e., termed the "Capitalocene" by critical commentators); the COVID-19 global pandemic and accompanying social and economic catastrophe, and; the racial state violence and intersecting oppressions along lines of class, gender, LGBTQ+ status, immigrant status, etc. that catalyzed the mass 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising. This illustrative CLR application demonstrates that such crises ultimately emanate from the unjust and ecologically unsustainable white patriarchal capitalist paradigm—and that, correspondingly, CLR-influenced radical cause lawyering modes could help drive transformative futures beyond this paradigm in its entirety.


Background Several studies suggest that airborne particulate matter (PM) is associated with infant mortality; however, most focused on short-term exposure to larger particles. Objectives We evaluated associations between long-term exposure to different sizes of particles [total suspended particles (TSP), PM ≤ 10 μm in aerodynamic diameter (PM10), ≤ 10–2.5 μm (PM10–2.5), and ≤ 2.5 μm (PM2.5)] and infant mortality in a cohort in Seoul, Korea, 2004–2007. Methods The study includes 359,459 births with 225 deaths. We applied extended Cox proportional hazards modeling with time-dependent covariates to three mortality categories: all causes, respiratory, and sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS). We calculated exposures from birth to death (or end of eligibility for outcome at 1 year of age) and pregnancy (gestation and each trimester) and treated exposures as time-dependent variables for subjects' exposure for each pollutant. We adjusted by sex, gestational length, season of birth, maternal age and educational level, and heat index. Each cause of death and exposure time frame was analyzed separately. Results We found a relationship between gestational exposures to PM and infant mortality from all causes or respiratory causes for normal-birth-weight infants. For total mortality (all causes), risks were 1.44 (95% confidence interval, 1.06–1.97), 1.65 (1.18–2.31), 1.53 (1.22–1.90), and 1.19 (0.83–1.70) per interquartile range increase in TSP, PM10, PM2.5, and PM10–2.5, respectively; for respiratory mortality, risks were 3.78 (1.18–12.13), 6.20 (1.50–25.66), 3.15 (1.26–7.85), and 2.86 (0.76–10.85). For SIDS, risks were 0.92 (0.33–2.58), 1.15 (0.38–3.48), 1.42 (0.71–2.87), and 0.57 (0.16–1.96), respectively. Conclusions Our findings provide supportive evidence of an association of long-term exposure to PM air pollution with infant mortality.


Aurora/Ipl1‐related kinases are a conserved family of proteins that are essential for the regulation of chromosome segregation and cytokinesis during mitosis. Aberrant expression and activity of these kinases occur in a wide range of human tumours and have been implicated in mechanisms leading to mitotic spindle aberrations, aneuploidy, and genomic instability. Previous studies of our group have shown that Aurora B expression is restricted to specific germinal cells. In this study, we have evaluated by immunohistochemical analysis Aurora B expression in post‐puberal testicular germ cell tumours (22 seminomas, 2 teratomas, 15 embryonal carcinomas, 5 mixed germinal tumours with a prominent yolk sac tumour component and 1 choriocarcinoma). The Aurora B protein expression was detected in all intratubular germ cell tumours, seminomas and embryonal carcinomas analysed but not in teratomas and yolk sac carcinomas. The immunohistochemical data were further confirmed by Western blot analysis. In addition, the kinase Aurora B was vigorously expressed in GC‐1 cells line derived from murine spermatogonia. The block of Aurora B function induced by a pharmacological inhibitor significantly reduced the growth of GC‐1 cells suggesting that Aurora B is a potential therapeutic target. J. Cell. Physiol. 221: 435–439, 2009. © 2009 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


Abstract Political scientists use expert surveys to assess the latent features of political actors. Experts, though, are unlikely to be equally informed and assess all actors equally well. The literature acknowledges variance in measurement quality but pays little attention to the implications of uncertainty for aggregating responses. We discuss the nature of the measurement problem in expert surveys. We then propose methods to assess the ability of experts to judge where actors stand and to aggregate expert responses. We examine the effects of aggregation for a prominent survey in the literature on party politics and EU integration. Using a Monte Carlo simulation, we demonstrate that it is better to aggregate expert responses using the median or modal response, rather than the mean.


In the present study, the extrusion process for the AZ31B magnesium alloy was simulated using a DEFORM-3D software package to establish a database in order to provide input data for artificial neural networks (ANN). The network model was trained by taking extrusion ratio, ram speed, shape complexity and ram displacement as the input variables and the extrusion load and exit temperature as the output parameters. The data from FEM simulations were submitted for ANN as a training file and then ANN built were used to predict the target parameters. The ANN predicted results were found to be in agreement with the FEM simulated and experimental measured ones.


With endovascular treatment of the aorta a folded covered stentgraft is introduced in the aorta via the femoral arteries. Adequate pre-operative planning is necessary to allow for proper stentgraft sizing. Stentgrafts should be adequately oversized to ensure good apposition to the aortic wall and provide sufficient fixation. An adequate proximal seal and fixation prevents complications such as endoleakage and stentgraft migration. Stentgrafts are most commonly sized on static computed tomographic (CT) images. However, as a result of cardiac contraction and aortic compliance the aorta exhibits pulsatile shape changes throughout the cardiac cycle. With the high speed acquisition of the current CT scanners, the sealing and fixation zones of the aorta are scanned within a fraction of the cardiac cycle. Images might be obtained in systole, diastole or anywhere in between. With ECG-synchronized imaging we visualized the aortic shape changes in the thoracic and abdominal aorta. We used ECG-synchronized CT and Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan protocols, which, respectively, resulted in 8 and 16 images throughout the cardiac cycle. Subsequent image post-processing techniques allowed for quantification of the aortic distention and the asymmetry therein. In some patients with aortic aneurysms, diameter changes were over 10% at relevant endograft sealing zones. In these patients endograft oversizing of 10% might not be sufficient. Aortic distention at the endograft sealing zones might be a predictor for proximal neck problems and compromised endograft durability. After endografting of the thoracic aorta the pulsatile aortic distention was preserved and this may have serious consequences for endograft durability. We observed an asymmetric distention of the aorta. Endograft design should be able to adapt to and withstand this continuous and pulsatile asymmetric distention. The aorta of young healthy volunteers also exhibited an asymmetric pulsatile distention, with pronounced radius changes ranging from 14% to 41%. In general, the orientation of distention was anterior-posterior. There might be a relation between the direction of distention and development and localization of vascular pathology. A valuable non-invasive tool for future research into aortic distention, development and localization of vascular pathology is provided. In addition, we validated the concept of a new and fast method to measure post-operative aortic aneurysm volume on CTA data. Using this method we showed that volumetry is more sensitive for detecting aneurysm sac growth or shrinkage than diameter alone. Volume measurements should have a place in the follow-up after endovascular aneurysm repair.


Two fundamental quantities for characterizing nonlinear wave phenomena in plasmas are the spectral energy transfer associated with the energy redistribution between Fourier modes, and the linear growth rate. It is shown how these quantities can be estimated simultaneously from dual spacecraft data using Volterra series models. We consider magnetic eld data gathered upstream the Earth's quasiparallel bow shock, in which Short Large Amplitude Magnetic Structures (SLAMS) supposedly play a leading role. The analysis attests the dynamic evolution of the SLAMS and reveals an energy cascade toward high frequency waves. These results put constraints on possible mechanisms for the shock front formation. 3


In innovation work that spans various professional contexts, there is an overreliance upon verbal explanations and one-way presentations, as opposed to demonstrating, trying and performing. Organizing project teams across organizations and professional competencies relies upon creating active collaborative activities that allow participants to both move forward with the project, while reflecting upon how they work together. Innovation work involves not only discovering what could be possible, but also bringing novel solutions into practice, and driving the business to get them there. This contribution seeks to explore how staged role-play activities can raise practice-specific issues. The authors argue that by staging prospective project trajectories, especially at the outset of a project, the partner team members have the opportunity to orient their future actions according to potential desired and undesired futures.


As universities worldwide begin to appreciate the value of authentic learning experiences, so they struggle with methods of assessing the outcomes from such experiences. This chapter describes the application of an assessment matrix developed by Queensland University of Technology(QUT) in Australia, to the assessment requirements and practices relating to work integrated learning at the University of Surrey in the UK. Despite the very different institutional contexts and independent way in which the assessment regimes have developed, it was found that the values and outcomes being assessed and the methods used to assess them were similar. The most important feature of assessing work integrated learning experiences is fitness for purpose, hence the learning objectives and assessment of outcomes for a WIL experience must be explicitly aligned to this objective.As universities worldwide begin to appreciate the value of authentic learning experiences, so they struggle with methods of assessing the outcomes from such experiences. This chapter describes the application of an assessment matrix developed by Queensland University of Technology (QUT) in Australia, to the assessment requirements and practices relating to work integrated learning at the University of Surrey in the UK. Despite the very different institutional contexts and independent way in which the assessment regimes have developed, it was found that the values and outcomes being assessed and the methods used to assess them were similar. The most important feature of assessing work integrated learning experiences is fitness for purpose, hence the learning objectives and assessment of outcomes for a WIL experience must be explicitly aligned to this objective.


Abstract Negative polarization resistance can be induced by a negative ionic conductance in membranes. In an electrochemical cell, where an ionic membrane coats the electrode, the existence of multiple steady states, i.e. multiple current densities for a given applied voltage, is analyzed as being caused by the opposing effects of potential on charge transfer and on diffusion in the case of an anion being reduced or a cation being oxidized. The effects of diffusivity, concentration, supporting electrolyte, and fixed space charge on the conductance in the ionic membranes are also studied. An inverse concentration gradient may form as a result of the interaction between the ionic migration and the stoichiometric flux according to the reaction kinetics.


Many consider the insider threat to represent the greatest vulnerability and exposure to enterprise resources. Database attacks are on the rise even as the risks of data breaches are increasing. Several industries must deal with legislation and regulation on data privacy. This paper will review how to protect sensitive data wherever the data resides: at application-level; within databases, files and operating systems; and in storage. We will address the management of associated encryption keys, access control and reporting - helping organizations mitigate risk and reduce costs, while protecting consumer, employee and partner information. The approach safeguards information by cryptographic protection from point-of-creation to point-of-deletion, to keep sensitive data locked down across applications, databases, and files - including ETL data loading tools, FTP processes and EDI data transfers. This design principle optimizes placement of functions for encryption and security enforcement among the modules of a distributed computer system. The guiding concept, continuous protection of data, suggests that encryption functions placed at low levels, and typically implemented with native platform-based toolkits, may be redundant and of little value when compared with the cost of supporting them at that low level. The principle suggests that Enterprise levels of Data Protection and Key Management may be cost effective in many configurations. We also include a set of best practices that ensure not only a successful PCI audit, but a sustained improvement in the security and protection of sensitive data, and the limiting of theft and its costly aftermath. We introduce a system-solution example that complies with these requirements and provides a cost-effective implementation.


Privacy is of the utmost concern when it comes to releasing data to third parties. Data owners rely on anonymization approaches to safeguard the released datasets against re-identification attacks. However, even with strict anonymization in place, re-identification attacks are still a possibility and in many cases a reality. Prior art has focused on providing better anonymization algorithms with minimal loss of information and how to prevent data disclosure attacks. Our approach tries to tackle the issue of tracing re-identification attacks based on the concept of honeytokens, decoy or "bait" records with the goal to lure malicious users. While the concept of honeytokens has been widely used in the security domain, this is the first approach to apply the concept on the data privacy domain. Records with high re-identification risk, called AnonTokens, are inserted into anonymized datasets. This work demonstrates the feasibility, detectability and usability of AnonTokens and provides promising results for data owners who want to apply our approach to real use cases. We evaluated our concept with real large-scale population datasets. The results show that the introduction of decoy tokens is feasible without significant impact on the released dataset.


In this paper, an adaptive recognition model (ARM) is proposed for image annotation. The ARM consists of an adaptive classification network (CFN) and a nonlinear correlation network (CLN). The adaptive CFN aims to annotate an image with keywords, and the CLN is used to unveil the correlative information of keywords for annotation refinement. Image annotation is carried out by an ARM in two stages. In the first stage, the features extracted from regions of the input image are fed to a CFN to produce classification labels. In the second stage, the CLN uses keyword correlations learned from the training images to refine the classification result. The ARM works in a forward-propagating manner, resulting in high efficiency in image annotation. Furthermore, the computational time of an ARM is insensitive to the number of regions of the input image and the vocabulary size. In this paper, the effect of keyword correlation in image annotation is, comprehensively, investigated on a real image dataset and a synthetic image dataset. The exploitation of a controllable synthetic dataset helps to systematically study the function of keyword correlation and effectively analyze the performance of the ARM. Experimental results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the ARM.


Plant defensins are basic proteins synthesized as part of innate immune response against the attack of fungal pathogens. These defensins show strong antimicrobial activity which is specifically directed towards the invading pathogen. Diverse defensins have been overexpressed in model transgenic plants to show their efficacy in heterologous systems. There are more than 350 plant defensins known today which have occurred due to convergent and divergent evolution over time. Although most of these peptides generally do not react with the host plant cells, some may have deleterious effect on plant organs. As a consequence plants build up advance strategy to nullify the effect by targeting the peptides to vacuoles, preventing its expression in sensitive organs and changing the amino acids composition. The C-terminal propeptide (CTPP) domains probably prevented any lethal effects of plant defensins while simultaneously enabling vacuolar sorting. In order to study the role of CTPP of two Petunia floral defensins (PhDef1-T and PhDef2-T), banana embryogenic cells were transformed with PhDef1-T and PhDef2-T without the CTPP domain region. The results obtained from this study clearly demonstrated that the absence of CTPP in Petunia floral defensins caused significant reduction in the number of embryos and its poor growth. Regenerated shoots were considerably slow in growth signifying the relevance and the importance of the prodomain region in floral defensins.


This paper presents an estimate of the phylogeny of all 203 species of primate. The composite tree is derived by applying a parsimony algorithm to over a hundred previous estimates, and is well resolved, containing 160 nodes. The ages of over half the clades in the tree have been estimated from information in the literature. Bootstrapping has been used to indicate the degree of certainty associated with each clade. The tree will be a useful framework for comparative biologists and shows which areas of primate phylogeny are still only sketchily known.


44 year old female with multiple coronary artery disease (CAD) risk factors presented with chest pain and ECG showing anterior ST elevations. Urgent cardiac catheterization revealed thrombotic occlusion of the Left anterior descending artery (LAD) and a 90% lesion was noted in the left Circumflex artery (LCx). Instead of the traditional drug eluting stents, both lesions were fixed with bioresorbable vascular scaffolds (BVS). BVS technology is a new promising alternative to Drug eluting stent (DES). The idea of less permanence and" leaving nothing behind" after interventional procedure is a very exciting concept. Post procedure day 5, the patient developed recurrent chest pain and ST elevations in anterior chest leads. Coronary angiography showed LAD scaffold thrombosis, and a patent BVS in LCx. Flow was restored in the LAD by placing a DES inside the BVS. Coronary angiogram done three years later shows both devices to be patent.


OBJECTIVE
This study aimed to research the effect of miR-202-5p-mediated ATG7 on autophagy and apoptosis of degenerative nucleus pulposus cells.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
The intervertebral disc nucleus pulposus (NP) tissue of patients with intervertebral disc degenerative disease and normal intervertebral disc nucleus pulposus (NP) tissue of patients with spinal fractures was collected as the research object. Normal NP cells and degenerative NP cells were isolated. Low expression of miR-202-5p and overexpression of ATG7 were carried out in degenerative NP cells. The expression of miR-202-5p and ATG7 mRNA was detected by RT-PCR. The expression of ATG7, LC3-II, Bax, and Bcl-2 proteins was detected by Western blot. The autophagy of cells was detected by MDC staining. The apoptosis of NP cells was detected by flow cytometry. The targeting relationship between miR-202-5p and ATG7 was detected by Dual-Luciferase reporter.

RESULTS
In the degenerative NP tissues, miR-202-5p was highly expressed and ATG7 was low expressed. The inhibition of miR-202-5p expression can effectively promote autophagy of NP cells, increase the expression of ATG7 and LC3-II, inhibit the apoptosis of NP cells, inhibit the expression of pro-apoptotic proteins Bax, and promote the expression of pro-apoptotic proteins Bcl-2 proteins. The upregulation of ATG7 expression in degenerative NP cells alone had the same effect as the downregulation of miR-202-5p. The assay of the Dual-Luciferase reporter confirmed the targeting relationship between miR-202-5p and ATG7.

CONCLUSIONS
MiR-202-5p can affect the autophagy and apoptosis of degenerative nucleus pulposus cells through targeted adjustment of ATG7, which may be a new therapeutic target for intervertebral disc degenerative diseases.


This article scrutinizes souvenirs as highly significant, but underexplored material objects of contemporary travel and tourism. It adopts a reflexive interpretive approach to explore the relationship between materiality, tourism and constructions of self-identity and examines how individuals reflexively use souvenirs as touchstones of memory, (re)creating polysensual tourism experiences, self-aware of their roles of 'tourists'. It pays particular attention to the ways in which souvenirs are objects mediating experiences in time and space and argues for more experiential and reflexive study of the roles of materiality and memory in the construction of tourist identities and performances. It concludes by suggesting how further interpretive studies could offer unique insights into how the absorption of souvenirs into the realm of the mundane and the domestic transforms the home space, fusing tourism and contemporary everyday life.


A new genus of cellulolytic, gram-negative, nonsporeforming, anaerobic bacteria is described. The colonies produced by these bacteria on cellulose agar were round, clear, translucent, and cream-colored and had an undulate margin. Single cells of the bacterium were straight to slightly curved rods 0.5 to 0.8 μm wide by 4 to 10 μm long and were motile by means of a single flagellum located one-third of the distance from the end of the cell. Among the various substrates tested, only cellulose, cellobiose, and salicin were able to support growth. The major fermentation products of cellobiose or cellulose degradation were acetic acid, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide. The deoxyribonucleic acid base composition of the type species was 38 mol% guanine plus cytosine. The name Acetivibrio is proposed for this new genus, which is placed in the family Bacteroidaceae. The type species, Acetivibrio cellulolyticus sp. nov., is named on the basis of its cellulolytic activity. The type strain of A. cellulolyticus is CD2 (= NRC 2248).


LaTeX is a typesetting program useful for mathematical and scientific writings or publications. This guide provides an overview of how to get started with LaTeX, as well as resources and exercise to help new users of the program.


The article explains the importance of standardization, the development and maintenance of rules and recommendations regulating the conditions and order of implementation of particular parts of preanalytical stage. The order of these conditions is noted including the rules stated and published in such normative documents as national standards GOST R 15 189-2009, GOST R 53079.4-2008, GOST R ISO 6710-209 and in the recommendations of foreign National societies ofclini-cal chemistry and laboratory medicine. These requirements concern all the analytes, enzymes included. The cited data have a practical significance for acquisition of reliable results in everyday functioning of laboratories. Enough to mention data concerning the anticoagulants influence on catalytic concentration of enzymes, the most often measured concentrations of alpha-amylase, lipase, amynotransferase, alkaline and acid phosphatase, creatine kinase, lactate dehydrogenase, choline esterase, hemolysis impact, the increased concentration of bilirubin and hyperlipemia in samples and significance of measurement of indices of serum and plasma as well. The possible mechanisms of impact of these interferents on the results of measurement of catalytic concentration of enzymes are discussed.


Nasotracheal intubation is a useful technique for intubating the conscious, active patient. This can be accomplished blindly without sedation or muscle relaxation and without the trauma of laryngoscopy. The method is not new but is not well known in proportion to its usefulness. Attention to detail renders the procedure safe, certain and atraumatic for patient and physician alike.


Effective mission critical installations must address the known problems and challenges relating to current and past data center designs. This paper presents a categorized and prioritized collection of power system challenges and requirements as obtained through systematic user interviews.


In connection with my presentation for the Showcase Session on "Creating Community and a Sense of Belonging in Your Course," this On Demand presentation will be discuss using learning communities in large classes – especially online asynchronous classes - to foster a sense of community and connection. This is a strategy I used this year when I combined my 4 sections of English 302 into one large Blackboard shell. I created learning communities within the larger class to give students the small-class experience. Doing so improved discussion board participation and peer review, as group members demonstrated a higher level of investment and engagement. Students also reported feeling more supported in navigating the course and their assignments. This On Demand presentation will include strategies for forming groups (deciding on size, characteristics for group formation, logistics of group formation), how to use the groups during the semester, and a little bit of the feedback from students on how being a part of a learning community impacted their experience of the course.


of the former. The postulates stipulate (1) that if is a complete atomic Boolean algebra with respect to < ; (2) that K is closed with respect to |; (3) that | is associative; (4) that if x<yand u<v, then x|u < y\v; (5) that, if xy*0, then l|(x|l) — 1; (6) that, if p be an atom such that p < x\y, then there are atoms q, r such that q<x, r<y, and p — q\r; and (7) that, if p, q, r are atoms such that p\q jt o, q\p jt 0, p|r ^ 0, r\p ^ 0, then g—r. Then thirty theorems are derived, which state in the main properties of atoms and homogeneous atoms, the latter being those atoms p such that p|p ^ 0. In the section on "Meta-theoretic considerations" McKinsey proves (1) that every two realizations of the set, which contain the same number of homogeneous atoms, are isomorphic; and (2) that, if the set be supplemented by the axiom of choice and the generalized continuum hypothesis, then every two realizations having the same number of elements are isomorphic, and hence that the set thus supplemented is semi-categorical. After presenting consistency and independence proofs of the usual type employing examples, the paper concludes with two demonstrations, the first showing by means of theorems already derived that < is definable in terms of |; and the second proving that | is not definable in terms of < , by setting up two matrices which satisfy the postulates and agree in their tables for < but differ in their tables for |. EVERETT J. NELSON


Solar cells with active layers, partially or fully based on organic materials, are the subject of large interest, both from R&D-actors as from large investors. This interest is fuelled by the rapid developments in the field of organic based devices with certified efficiencies between 5 and 6% for full-organic devices and 11% for dye sensitized solar cells, the potentially very low cost of these devices, mechanical flexibility and light weight. The low cost potential is based on the use of low-cost materials and substrates and the very high production speeds which could be reached by roll-to-roll processing. In addition, organic photovoltaic devices take profit of the developments in neighbouring fields like Organic LED's and thin-film transistors, which could create synergetic effects similar to what was observed for crystalline Si solar cells which took benefit from the large knowledge and equipment base, built up in the micro-electronics sector. Notwithstanding all these promises, there is a strong need to define correctly the technical and scientific challenges, to outline the way these challenges have to be tackled and to define the markets in which these organic photovoltaic devices could create large impact. This is done in the frame of the European Project ORGAPVNET. The paper aims at bringing this information in a concise form to the broader PVcommunity to improve the understanding of this emerging field, to explain how this information is going to be used to build a dedicated roadmap and to explain the synergies which exist with other fields of organic devices.


Reference genome assemblies are essential for high-throughput sequencing analysis projects. Typically, genome assemblies are stored on disk alongside related resources; for example, many sequence aligners require the assembly to be indexed. The resulting indexes are broadly applicable for downstream analysis, so it makes sense to share them. However, there is no simple tool to do this. To this end, we introduce refgenie, a reference genome assembly asset manager. Refgenie makes it easier to organize, retrieve, and share genome analysis resources. In addition to genome indexes, refgenie can manage any files related to reference genomes, including sequences and annotation files. Refgenie includes a command-line interface and a server application that provides a RESTful API, so it is useful for both tool development and analysis. Availability https://refgenie.databio.org


Drug-related genes are defined as the genes which encode enzymes, transporters, and targets related to drug absorption, distribution, and metabolism to excretion. The studies on drug-related genomics in cancer and immunological diseases could enhance the understanding of the role of drug-related genes in the occurrence and development of cancer or immunological diseases. Pharmacogenomics research can help clinicians predict the efficacy of drugs in the body and avoid some side effects. In this respect, this special issue will add a few new points in the picture of drug-related genomics in cancer and immunological diseases.

C. Liu et al. in "A promoter region polymorphism in PDCD-1 gene is associated with risk of rheumatoid arthritis in the Han Chinese population of Southeastern China" provide an association between PDCD-1 polymorphism rs36084323 and rheumatoid arthritis (RA) risk. The potential mechanism might be related to the association between unregulated expressions of PDCD-1 on activated CD4+T cells in RA patients. They showed that the SNP rs36084323 could be a biomarker of early diagnosis of RA and a suitable indicator of utilizing PDCD -1 inhibitor for the treatment of RA.

In the study "Upregulated PD-1 expression is associated with the development of systemic lupus erythematosus, but not the PD-1.1 allele of the PDCD1 gene," Q. Jiao et al. found that the PD-1 expression levels of systemic lupus erythematosus (SLE) patients were significantly increased compared with those of the healthy controls. Furthermore, the unregulated PD-1 expression levels in SLE patients were greatly associated with SLEDAI scores. These results suggest that increased expression of PD-1 may correlate with the pathogenesis of SLE, unregulated PD-1 expression may be a biomarker for SLE diagnosis, and PD-1 inhibitor may be useful for SLE treatment.

The association between cytokines and cytokine receptors and psoriasis is discussed in "Genetic variations of cytokines and cytokine receptors in psoriasis patients from China" by X.-L. Li et al. They genotyped seven SNPs in candidate genes of six ILs and only the rs3212227 in the IL12B gene was found to be associated with psoriasis at genotypic level in the studied population. Furthermore, the studied Chinese population has extremely low minor allele frequency for IL23R. Together, the author discussed the unique genetic patterns in the Chinese population that may be in part responsible for the lower risk for psoriasis in this population.

Nuclear factor-κB was found to be associated with the pathogenesis of numerous malignancies. In the review article "Association between NFKB1 −94ins/del ATTG promoter polymorphism and cancer susceptibility: an updated meta-analysis," X. Yang et al. showed that the SNP was significantly associated with cancer risk in four genetic models. The stratified analyses revealed that the polymorphism can exert race- and cancer-specific effects on cancer risk.

Polo-like kinase 1 (PLK1), one of serine/threonine-protein kinases, has been demonstrated to play pivotal roles in malignant transformation. "High expression of polo-like kinase 1 is associated with early development of hepatocellular carcinoma" by W. Sun et al. showed that expression of PLK1 was increased significantly in HCC tissues than that of corresponding normal liver tissues and PLK1 was related to the HCC cell differentiation or capsule invasion. Their results also indicated that the potential mechanisms of PLK1 inhibition regulated cell growth involving the dysregulated expression of caspase, Bcl, and p53. Therefore, the PLK1 expression might be an independent prognostic factor for HCC and targeting PLK1 might be a useful strategy for diagnosis and treatment of human HCC.

In the study "Molecular evolution of the vertebrate FK506 binding protein 25," F. Liu et al. calculated the nonsynonymous and synonymous substitution rates, suggesting that FKBP25 undergoes purifying selection throughout the whole vertebrate evolution. Moreover, the result of site-specific tests showed that no sites were detected under positive selection. Only one PPIase domain was detected by searching FKBP25 sequences at Pfam and SMART domain databases. The result of this study suggests that the purifying selection triggers FKBP25 evolutionary history, which allows us to discover the complete role of the PPIase domain in the interaction between FKBP25 and nuclear proteins.

The house dust mites are major sources of indoor allergens for humans. X. Li et al. discussed the relation between Der f 25 and dermatophagoides farinae in "In silico prediction of T and B cell epitopes of Der f 25 in dermatophagoides farinae." The sequence and structure analysis by them identified that Der f 25 belongs to the triosephosphate isomerase family and exhibited a triosephosphate isomerase pattern (PS001371). Eight B cell epitopes (11–18, 30–35, 71–77, 99–107, 132–138, 173–187, 193–197, and 211–224) and five T cell epitopes including 26–34, 38–54, 66–74, 142–151, and 239–247 were predicted in this study. These results can be used to benefit allergen immunotherapies and reduce the frequency of mite allergic reactions.

Ji-Fu Wei

Yong-Qing Wang

Huai-Rong Luo


SHORT SUMMARY As a teacher, are you ever frustrated over being asked to create an extra exam for only one student, when "your" course is the only thing stopping this student from receiving their degree? I will provide one suggestion to help both you and the student, before creating this final re-exam. Together, we will discuss how else we can help the students best, in similar situations, without an unreasonable workload for the teachers. ABSTRACT Intended audience: This round table discussion is mainly keyed for examiners, leaders of programs, and department vice-heads for undergraduate education. It will possibly also be relevant for student counsellors. Problem statement: When only one course remains before receiving their degree, Chalmers students have the right to request an extra exam (see link below, Reference 1, in Swedish). The examiner decides whether or not to provide this. Often, the last course remaining for the student is the one that the student has most trouble with. Sometimes, the student will have a long history of failed exams in this course. In such a case, the student needs support in finding a better way of learning before it is useful to provide an extra re-exam. Suggested solution: The student can fill out a learning plan document, where previous exam attempts in this course are analyzed in a structured format. For each failed exam attempt, at least three specific "learning aspects" with identified "room for improved learning" and "plan to achieve learning" are noted. Each identified learning aspect is then keyed (by the student) to the learning goals and course content. Finally, a time schedule with checkpoint actions is created, with a plan for self-guidance and progress reporting to the examiner. The learning plan document used in my recent pilot study (one student) is available for download at the address listed below under Reference 2. Single student pilot study: This method has be tested by me in an obligatory course within one of Chalmers master programs. The student for whom I designed this learning support tool had asked me to create another re-exam, after failing six exams in a row in this course. This was the only exam left before the degree could be requested. I provided the student with the instructions and template for the above mentioned learning plan. Results: The student's interpretation of the learning plan document differed substantially from that intended. After several rounds of returns, and pledged "proper" studying, the student was given a chance to be re-examined with a single-student written exam. The results of the seven exams, including the final one which has now been passed, as well as the student's subjective reflection on the usefulness of this learning support tool will be presented at the onset of the round table discussion. Discussion: It should be useful to get input from other Chalmers teachers as to how best to support student learning in challenging final re-exam situations. A revised version of this document, after the round table discussion at KUL would likely be a useful tool to make available to other teachers, possibly via the Education pages on Chalmers Insidan. References: 1. in English: Instructions for planning and implementation of First and Second-cycle Examinations academic year 2016/17, see page 8 section 2.3 Extra examination dates, available at: http://document.chalmers.se/download?docid=91ce6170-5578-40e9-bdc1-830175233655&lang=en in Swedish: Foreskrifter for planering och genomforande av examination pa grund- och avancerad niva lasaret 2016/17, se sidan 10, rubriken "2.3 Extra tentamenstillfallen" pa lanken: http://document.chalmers.se/download?docid=91ce6170-5578-40e9-bdc1-830175233655&lang=sv 2. Learning plan before single-student-exam, available as pdf and Word document at PingPong activity: https://pingpong.chalmers.se/courseId/3024/content.do?id=3365566


This article aims at desribing foreign language learning strategies which should be possessed by each foreign language learner because their success or failure doesn't depend only on the lecturer's language teaching but also very much on the foreign language learning strategies. There are a lot of foreign language learning strategies; however, at least, there are fourteen foreign language learning strategies that they should possess and apply if they really want to succeed in learning a foreign language. The strategies will be enough for foreign language learners to reach their learning targets if they can possess and apply them as well as possible in learning whatever foreign language, like English for example.  In addition to the fourteen strategies, how they will find or get them will also be presented and discussed in the article. It is advisable that a foreign language teacher or lecturer save a small amount of time of his/her teaching hours to teach those strategies, and that a learner apply them as well they can or make his/her own effort to find and apply them. Key words/phrases: foreign language learner, strategy, and foreign language learning strategy


Motivated behaviors are mediated by a neuronal circuit that includes the amygdala, prefrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens. The amygdala signals the affective significance of cues in the environment, and the prefrontal cortex and accumbens contribute to planning and selecting actions. Thus, the physiological interactions within this circuit may be neural correlates for the interface between motivation and voluntary movement. Using in vivo electrophysiological recordings, we measured the effects of amygdala activation on excitatory transmission in the prefrontal cortex-to-nucleus accumbens pathway. In the prefrontal cortex, a subset of neurons that projected to the accumbens was excited by amygdala stimulation. Prefrontal-to-accumbens projecting neurons were also excited by Pavlovian conditioned odors, suggesting a role for this pathway in the expression of conditioned fear. In neurons of the accumbens, amygdala input facilitated and shifted the latency of spikes elicited by prefrontal cortex stimulation. Facilitation was greatest when amygdala and prefrontal cortex were stimulated nearly synchronously at subthreshold intensities, suggesting that accumbens neurons integrate both the timing and strength of their afferent inputs. In additional accumbens recordings, high intensity amygdala activation induced an activity-dependent depression of prefrontally elicited spiking; thus, the amygdala is able to modulate prefrontal-to-accumbens transmission by several mechanisms. Taken together, these findings show that the amygdala can influence neuronal transmission at two critical motor-related sites in the brain. In this way, affective information may constrain and gate action, resulting in optimal behavioral responses to salient motivational stimuli.


This study explores the lived experiences of four elderly Chinese immigrant women in Toronto. Using a combination of the socialist feminist theory and an anti-oppressive theory as the framework, this study analyzes how these women's "dual role"- domestic labour and waged labour and the state pension policies cause them to live in poverty. The findings of this study indicate that these women lack power and are oppressed in almost every interaction that they have within the public sphere - the labour market and the private sphere – the home. Therefore, their poverty is far beyond their personal control. It is strongly associated with social structure injustice based on gender, class, race, immigrant status, age, and state policies. The strategies developed by these women to deal with the oppressive environment and the challenges that they encounter enable them to regain a sense of comfort and connection so that they are empowered and are not feeling alone.


This article examines the effect that being complained about has on public service employees. The volume of complaints about public bodies is significant: an estimated 543,000 complaints a year are made about central government, while the English NHS was subject to 208,415 complaints in 2016-2017. Despite the significant expansion of complaint procedures following the Citizen's Charter reforms in the 1990s, there has been no empirical research into the way in which complaints affect employees outwith the healthcare sector. Most scholarly debate has focused on whether complaints procedures within government have improved customer service or been useful for service improvement. Little attention has been paid to the experience of being subject to a complaint and the influence this has on work practice. In this respect, the public accountability literature suggests that significant dysfunctional effects may result from accountability regimes, including: defensive practices, tick-box compliance, excessive formality, and reduced innovation. In the healthcare setting, negative effects arising from being complained about include defensive medical practice, avoidance behaviours, wariness towards service users, and reduced wellbeing. While some positive effects have been reported, the thrust of healthcare studies is that complaints have harmful effects on professionals. To date, however, the effects of complaint systems outwith the healthcare context remain uncharted: we do not know whether other public services are affected in similar ways.


The unique omni-directional motion stereo method featuring robust epipolar estimation and hybrid use of the feature/area based matching, and the change-region recognition technique which uses dense color-textured depth map and 3D-GIS data for segmentation, are presented. The dense stereo imaging data, which is acquired by the coupled use of an ODV (omni-directional vision) and a GPS/INS (Inertial Navigation Systems) by the motion stereo method, is classified in "change region" or "registered region" by the D-GIS's geometric model of the building. Hence, the changeable region like a parking-vehicle on the road is modeled as a hexahedron through surface recognition process, the position of vertexes and the image texture of three surfaces are measured, and are additionally registered in the spatial temporal GIS (Geographic Information System) as new object data. The proposed method can be applicable to a mobile robot surveillance system which is used in a site immediately after a disaster.


Diesel particle filters (DPFs) are standard equipment on heavy-duty diesel trucks with 2007 and newer engines in the U.S. This study evaluates the performance and durability of these filters. Black carbon (BC) emission rates from several thousand heavy-duty trucks were measured at the Port of Oakland and Caldecott Tunnel over multiple years as California regulations accelerated the adoption of DPFs. As DPF use increased, fleet-average BC emissions decreased, and emission factor distributions became more skewed. Relative to 2004-2006 engines without filters, DPFs reduced BC emission rates by 65-70% for 2007-2009 engines and by >90% for 2010+ engines. Average BC emission rates for 2007-2009 engines increased by 50-67% in 2015 relative to measurements made 1-2 years earlier. Some trucks in this cohort have become high-emitters, indicating that some DPFs are no longer working well. At the Port, where DPFs were universal in 2015, high-emitting 2007-2009 engines (defined here as emitting >1 g BC kg-1) comprised 7% of the fleet but were responsible for 65% of the total BC emitted. These observations raise concerns about DPF durability and the prospects for fully mitigating adverse effects of diesel particulate matter on human health and the environment.


One of the goals of the Precision Medicine Initiative launched in the United States in 2016 is to use innovative tools and sources in data science. We realized this goal by implementing a use case that identified patients with heart failure at Veterans Health Administration using data from the Electronic Health Records from multiple health domains between 2005 and 2013. We applied a regularized logistic regression model and predicted 30-day readmission risk for 1210 unique patients. Our validation cohort resulted in a C-statistic of 0.84. Our top predictors of readmission were prior diagnosis of heart failure, vascular and renal diseases, and malnutrition as comorbidities, compliance with outpatient follow-up, and low socioeconomic status. This validated risk prediction scheme delivered better performance than the published models so far (C-Statistics: 0.69). It can be used to stratify patients for readmission and to aid clinicians in delivering precise health interventions.


The techniques of micro and nano structurization of surfaces of various materials are utilized in electronics and medicine. Such procedure as wet and dry etching allows to fabricate protruded or recessed micro and nanostructures on the surface. In the paper some examples of utilization of a surface structurization, known from literature, are described. Some structurization methods and experimental results for fabrication of the arrays of sharp microtips are presented. Wet and/or dry etching, and thermal oxidation process were used to form the arrays of sharp gated and non-gated, protruded or recessed silicon microtips on silicon wafer. For the first time, the arrays of silicon carbide (SiC) microtips on glass wafer have been produced by use of the transfer mold technique. Arrays of sharp microtips are used as field electron emission cathodes for vacuum microelectronics devices. Some electron emission measurements for these cathodes have been carried out. New application of silicon microtips array in biochemistry has been tested with satisfactory results.


ABSTRACT A growing proportion of youth in the Global North are of migration background, many of whom engage in mobility across countries, through which they establish and maintain transnational networks of peers. While young people's local peer relationships have been established as a source of social capital, studies have to date ignored the role of transnational peers. This is largely because young people's mobility has been over-simplified, obscuring mechanisms that enable transnational peer relationships to emerge and thrive. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic, multi-sited fieldwork in Germany and Ghana with 20 young people of Ghanaian background (aged 15-25), this paper employs a mobility lens to show how transnational peer relationships provide social capital to migrant youth. We find that, through these relationships, migrant youth gain (1) educational motivation, as has been found in the literature on local peer relationships, and (2) transnational frames of reference, which is particular to transnational peer relationships. As such, we argue for an expansion of the concept of peer relationships to include those built and maintained through transnational mobility in order to generate a more comprehensive understanding of migrant youth's support systems and the valuable social capital that transnational peer relationships provide.


This paper studies the selection and ordering of in-stream ads in videos shown in online content publishers. We propose an allocation algorithm that uses a collective measure of price and quality for each ad and factors in slot-specific continuation probabilities to maximize publisher revenue. The algorithm is based on cascade models and uses a dynamic programming method to assign linear (video) ads to slots in an online video. The approach accounts for the negative externality created by lower quality ads placed in a video, leading to viewer exit and thereby preventing the publisher from showing the subsequent ads scheduled in that session. Our algorithm is scalable and suited for real-time applications. A large log of viewer activity from a video ad platform is used to empirically test the algorithm. A series of simulations show that our algorithm, when compared to other algorithms currently practiced in industry, generates more revenue for the publisher and increases viewer retention.


This study aims at predicting the effects of selected process parameters on nips stability and number of nips by using different artificial intelligence methods. Partially oriented polyester yarn with 283 dtex linear density and different numbers of filaments are intermingled with different speed and pressure levels. The feed forward neural network with multi-hidden layers (ML-FFNN) and general regression neural networks (GRNN) have been selected as artificial intelligence methods. The number of filaments, intermingling speed and pressure values are used as input variables on the artificial neural networks. The effects of number of hidden layers on the ML-FFNN and number of nodes in the hidden layer are investigated. Based on comparative results, the ML-FFNN is found to give better performance (at most 6%) than by GRNN in terms of prediction accuracy on train and test data sets. It can be concluded from this study that the neural networks has great ability to predict intermingling process parameters.


Climate change needs us to look at various alternatives for more drought tolerant and tougher strains. Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is the most important food crop of the world; drought stress is a serious limiting factor to rice production and yield stability in rainfed areas. In order to design efficient varieties with virtues of drought tolerance and high yielding ability is necessary. A set of 33 rice genotypes including four checks viz., Sahbhagidhan, Vandana, Rasi and APO were evaluated under vegetative and reproductive stage, drought stress and normal conditions during kharif 2011-12 with objectives to estimate genetic variability, character association and path analysis for various traits to identify stress tolerant genotypes. Analysis of variance revealed highly significant variation among the genotypes for all the characters under study in both conditions (stress and normal). The effects of water deficit on various morpho-physiological traits associated with drought tolerance were also studied. Result revealed that significant yield decline was observed almost in all rice genotypes grown under water stress condition compared to normal irrigated situation. Out of these 33 rice genotypes, RAU-1428-31-5-4 (8.39*),RAU1428-54-35-5-5 (8.38*) and 21284-BAU445-06 (8.38*) under stress condition, whereas under normal condition, the genotypes namely RAU-1428-31-5-4-3-2-2-2 (14.82*), RAU-1428-31-5-4 (14.31*) and RAU-1451-66-1-1-5-2 (13.69*) showed superior in terms of grain yield and yield attributes. Significant variation was also observed among the genotypes for drought susceptibility index, canopy temperature, relative water content, leaf rolling at vegetative stage, leaf drying at vegetative stage, chlorophyll content, days to fifty percent flowering, days to maturity, plant height and seed yield per plant under both stress and normal (irrigated) condition. The tolerant lines maintained high leaf water status and plant biomass under vegetative and reproductive stage drought condition. Based on yield and yield attributes results under drought and irrigated condition, rice genotypes RAU-1428-31-5-4 (8.39*), RAU-1428-54-35-5-5 (8.38*) and 21284-BAU445-06 (8.38*) under stress condition, whereas under normal condition, the genotypes namely RAU-1428-31-5-4-3-2-2-2 (14.82*), RAU-1428-31-5-4 (14.31*) and RAU-1451-661-1-5-2 (13.69*) were recommended for use in drought breeding programme as well as adoption in rainfed lowland ecosystem. The present study also indicates the agro-morphological and physiological traits that have direct and indirect effect on yield performance of rice genotypes under drought stress condition.


The main purpose of this paper is to clarify the category of the aesthetic in
 context of Adorno's critique of the philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard. Adorno's
 principal thesis is that Kierkegaard's famous doctrine of existence and his
 individualism contain an implicit ontology, despite the fact that he intends
 to overcome objective ontology of absolute idealism. However, this reversal
 is hidden from Kierkegaard, and can only be deciphered in the posthumous
 history of his work. Adorno's method is critique of ideology synthetised with
 Benjamin's rather esoteric theory of allegory. His intent is twofold: not
 only to expose the abstract character of Kierkegaard's doctrine of
 "objectless" inwardness, but to decipher an implicit historical truth of his
 philosophy, the social relations of bourgeois society. In the course of his
 argument, Adorno shows that Kierkegaard's philosophy comes closest to its
 truth not in the realm of religious experience and faith, as Kierkegaard
 himself believed, but in the sphere of melancholy and aesthetic semblance.
 The category of the aesthetic plays an important role in Adorno's later
 philosophy of art, as well as his critique of knowledge in general.


Despite all the eminent advantages of silicon photonics, other materials need to be integrated to fulfill the functions that are difficult to realize with silicon alone. This is because silicon has a low light emission efficiency and a low electro-optic coefficient, limiting the use of silicon as a material for light sources and modulators. A strong two-photon absorption (TPA) at high intensities also limits the use of silicon in applications exploiting nonlinear effects. In addition, signal amplification is needed to compensate the insertion and propagation losses in silicon nanowaveguides. To address these issues we have demonstrated the integration of atomic layer deposited nanolaminates on silicon waveguides. Firstly we demonstrate slot waveguide ring resonators patterned on a silicon-on-insulator (SOI) wafer coated with an atomic layer deposited organic/inorganic nanolaminate structure, which consists of alternating layers of tantalum pentoxide (Ta2O5) and polyimide (PI) [1]. These materials were selected since the ALD process for depositing Ta2O5/PI nanolaminate films is already available [2] and both materials exhibit high third order nonlinearities [3-4]. In our nanolaminate ring resonators, the optical power is not only confined in the narrow central air slot but also in several parallel sub-10 nm wide vertical polyimide slots. This indicates that the mode profiles in the silicon slot waveguide can be accurately tuned by the atomic layer deposition (ALD) method. Our results show that ALD of organic and inorganic materials can be combined with conventional silicon waveguide fabrication techniques to create slot waveguide ring resonators with varying mode profiles. Secondly we demonstrate the integration of atomic layer deposited erbium-doped aluminum oxide (Al2O3) nanolaminates on silicon waveguides. This method provides an efficient way for controlling the concentration and distribution of erbium ions. We have applied this method on silicon strip and slot waveguides and show signal enhancement. Our results show that atomic layer deposited nanolaminates can potentially open new possibilities for various photonic applications, such as silicon photonic devices for light emission and amplification, optical sensing and all-optical signal processing. References [1] A. Autere, L. Karvonen, A. Säynätjoki, M. Roussey, E. Färm, M. Kemell, X. Tu, T.Y. Liow, G.Q. Lo, M. Ritala, M. Leskelä, S. Honkanen, H. Lipsanen, and Z. Sun, "Slot waveguide ring resonators coated by an atomic layer deposited organic/inorganic nanolaminate," Opt. Express 23, 26940-26951 (2015) [2] L. D. Salmi, E. Puukilainen, M. Vehkamäki, M. Heikkilä, and M. Ritala, "Atomic layer deposition of Ta2O5/polyimide nanolaminates," Chem. Vap. Deposition 15, 221–226 (2009). [3] S. Morino, T. Yamashita, K. Horie, T. Wada, and H. Sasabe, "Third-order nonlinear optical properties of aromatic polyisoimides," React. Funct. Polym. 44, 183–188 (2000). [4] C.-Y. Tai, J. Wilkinson, N. Perney, M. Netti, F. Cattaneo, C. Finlayson, and J. Baumberg, "Determination of nonlinear refractive index in a Ta2O5 rib waveguide using self-phase modulation," Opt. Express 12, 5110–5116 (2004).


Background HIV/AIDS represents one of the major health challenges of Ethiopia, despite a proven record of universal access to HIV care and treatment. Long-term antiretroviral therapy (ART) retention is a key factor for personal and public health benefits. Identification of determinants of attrition is needed to design appropriate interventions. Methods We used data from the CASA project, a prospective, multisite study of a cohort of HIV-infected patients who started ART in seven urban and rural health facilities located in the Tigray. We analysed the retention in care and its associated determinants in over 1000 patients followed for two years. The main outcome measure was the retention in care rate, defined as the proportion of patients alive and receiving ART at the same health facility as at ART initiation. Kaplan-Meier method was used to estimate the probability of retention at different time points. Cox Proportional Hazards model with robust sandwich estimates to account for within health facility correlation was used to identify factors associated with retention. Results Kaplan–Meier estimates of retention in care were 83.9%, 80.6% and 77.6% at 12, 18 and 24 months of follow-up, respectively. Attrition was mainly due to lost-to-follow-up and transferred-out patients. Multivariate Cox proportional hazard model showed that being male (HR 1.35, 95% CI: 1.04–1.75), CD4 count<200 (HR 1.49, 95% CI: 1.13–1.96), haemoglobin level <= 10 (HR 1.40, 95% CI: 1.11–1.76), the presence of active TB co-infection at ART initiation (HR 1.47, 95% CI: 1.04–2.08) and the type of health facility were significantly associated with attrition. Conclusions According to our prospective data, combined interventions aimed to improve ART retention shall include expansion of HIV testing and earlier initiation of therapy, nutrition supplementation, early detection and treatment of TB. Observed retention differences among health facilities and according to gender suggest that innovative models of HIV care shall also be explored.


Abstract It is now believed that magnetohydrodynamic equilibria can exist in stably stratified stars due to the seminal works of Braithwaite & Spruit (2004) and Braithwaite & Nordlund (2006). What is still not known is whether magnetohydrodynamic equilibria can exist in a barotropic star, in which stable stratification is not present. It has been conjectured by Reisenegger (2009) that there will likely not exist any magnetohydrodynamical equilibria in barotropic stars. We aim to test this claim by presenting preliminary MHD simulations of barotropic stars using the three dimensional stagger code of Nordlund & Galsgaard (1995).


PurposeThe aim of this paper is to help management scholars and executives learn from the COVID-19 global crisis by analyzing if and how the level of financial literacy affected stakeholders' sensitivity to corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues during the pandemic, as well as identifying whether financial literacy is an important variable to account for in the postpandemic period. The authors test the relationship between objective (measurable) and subjective (self-assessed) financial literacy, as well as financial happiness (i.e. satisfaction with one's current financial situation) with CSR during the pandemic. High levels of financial literacy cause individuals to reward companies that implement CSR strategies and processes.Design/methodology/approachThe authors designed an online survey and obtained data on objective and subjective financial literacy, financial happiness and COVID-19 infections, as well as on the demographic and socioeconomic characteristics of a representative sample of 1,334 Italian respondents. From a methodological point of view, the authors perform a factor analysis on the CSR-related questions to extract the principal components (PCs) that were used as dependent variables in the regression models to analyze the effects of explanatory variables (financial literacy, financial happiness and COVID-19 infections) and consider the control variables (demographic and socioeconomic characteristics). The authors follow a theoretical approach merging stakeholder theory with CSR.FindingsRespondents with a high level of financial literacy and financial happiness are highly sensitive to all CSR components (ethical, philanthropic, economic and legal social responsibilities). Being infected by COVID-19 increased participants' sensitivity to ethical and philanthropic social responsibility (SR), but not to economic and legal SR. The more educated and employed respondents were, the more sensitive they were to CSR, especially compared to their less educated and unemployed counterparts.Research limitations/implicationsWhile the sample used is large and representative of the Italian population, Italy is an interesting and useful case to analyze, given that it was the first Western country to be severely hit by COVID-19; since the paper only refers to a specific country scenario, the results cannot be generalized to other countries. A cross-country comparison relating financial literacy and financial happiness to CSR during the COVID-19 pandemic period would be desirable. The research study has theoretical implications for management scholars since the authors show that, during the pandemic period, financial education and financial happiness are relevant in explaining stakeholders' greater sensitivity to CSR issues. The findings may thus help scholars to learn from the COVID-19 period, with the aim of further developing and enhancing stakeholders' theory.Practical implicationsThe research also has practical implications, both for corporate executives and for policymakers, helping them to learn from the COVID-19 global crisis concerning the role of financial literacy and financial happiness on CSR sensitivity and, consequently, how they may consider these important variables in the postpandemic era. On the one hand, executives may improve stakeholders' segmentation and eventually modify CSR policies, considering the higher sensitivity of their stakeholders' due to a higher degree of financial literacy. On the other hand, the findings suggest that policymakers should have a stronger role in supporting employment and education in general and in promoting programs to improve financial literacy to increase stakeholders' sensitivity to CSR, thus further stimulating the inclusion of CSR factors in companies' strategies. Increasing stakeholders' sensitivity to CSR will, in turn, increase the propensity of companies to include SR in their strategies. Thus, increasing financial literacy will have tangible positive effects of increasing CSR. Given the greater role played by companies during the COVID-19 period with respect to societal risk, the findings seem particularly useful.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors' knowledge, this study represents the first that links financial literacy and financial happiness with CSR during the COVID-19 crisis. The large and representative dataset, as well as the use of specific variables related to financial literacy, financial happiness and COVID-19 infections in the CSR assessment model, makes our analysis original, robust and significant by contributing to the CSR literature and to the financial literacy literature from a methodological point of view, as well as by informing corporate executives and policymakers about the role of financial literacy with regard to CSR during the pandemic, which may help them in learning how to improve their decisions and actions in the postpandemic era.


This paper describes a multi-sensor measuring system for reverse engineering applications. A sphere-plate artefact is developed for data unification of the hybrid system. With the coordinate data acquired using the optical system, intelligent feature recognition and segmentation algorithms can be applied to extract the global surface information of the object. The coordinate measuring machine (CMM) is used to re-measure the geometric features with a small amount of sampling points and the obtained information can be subsequently used to compensate the point data patches which are measured by optical system. Then the optimized point data can be exploited for accurate reverse engineering of CAD model. The limitations of each measurement system are compensated by the other. Experimental results validate the accuracy and effectiveness of this data optimization approach.


Learning functions on point clouds has applications in many fields, including computer vision, computer graphics, physics, and chemistry. Recently, there has been a growing interest in neural architectures that are invariant or equivariant to all three shape-preserving transformations of point clouds: translation, rotation, and permutation.
In this paper, we present a first study of the approximation power of these architectures. We first derive two sufficient conditions for an equivariant architecture to have the universal approximation property, based on a novel characterization of the space of equivariant polynomials. We then use these conditions to show that two recently suggested models are universal, and for devising two other novel universal architectures.


The average rate of discovery of new genes causing familial hypercholesterolemia (FH) has been ≈1 per decade since the 1970s, a meagre diversity compared with the complexity more recently discovered in familial cardiomyopathies1 and conduction disorders.2 In contrast to studies in monogenic FH, genome-wide association studies have unearthed far more than 100 genomic regions, many of unknown functionality, making small contributions to polygenic lipid traits in the general population, with many of these loci influencing low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol.3 Nonetheless, the several genes implicated in monogenic pure hypercholesterolemia (Table) have given powerful insight into the role of LDL cholesterol in cardiovascular risk and have opened new avenues in pharmaceutical development. They have also enabled a molecular classification of cardiovascular risk, enabling focused diagnostics in conjunction with cascade testing in mutation-positive families. The apparent identification of a further FH gene (dubbed FH4 by Fouchier et al4) should, therefore, be of significant interest to geneticists, lipid clinics, general doctors, and cardiologists with an interest in tracing or treating familial hypercholesterolemics. It may also be of interest to pharmaceutical companies engaged with the development of new approaches to treating hypercholesterolemia.

View this table:

Table.
Genes Implicated in Monogenic Pure Hypercholesterolemia

Article, see p 552

Monogenic hypercholesterolemia has a long history. Familial occurrence of tendon xanthomata was documented by Fagge5 in 1873. Subsequent observations led to the recognition of arterial deposits and the contribution of these atheromatous deposits to early coronary artery disease and coronary events. It was soon recognized that the familial pattern was autosomal codominant, passing from an affected parent to half of their children. In rare instances where both parents are affected, 1 in 4 of their offspring will inherit 2 defective copies, leading to an extreme hypercholesterolemia with overt vascular disease developing even during childhood years. The incidence of …


Ab initio calculations of the BST heterostructure with equiatomic constituent of Sr and Ba species has been carried out within hybrid functional B3PW involving a hybrid of non-local Fock exchange and Becke's gradient corrected exchange functional combined with the non-local gradient corrected correlation potential by Perdew and Wang. The suggested scheme of calculations reproduces experimental lattice parameters of both pure BaTiO3 and SrTiO3. The calculated optical band gap for the pure SrTiO3 (BaTiO3) is 3.56 (3.46) eV (expt. 3.25 and 3.20 eV, respectively), i.e. agreement is much better than in the standard LDA or HF calculations. In the Ba0.5Sr0.5TiO3 solid solution the gap is reduced by 0.2 eV. The BST upper valence band consists of O 2p atomic orbitals (AO) with a small admixture of Ti 3d, whereas the conduction band bottom consists mostly of Ti 3d orbitals with a small contribution of O orbitals. The Sr (Ba) atomic orbitals make a significant contribution to the higher part of the conduction band. The electron density maps demonstrate the covalency effects in the Ti-O bonding. The electron density near the Sr atoms is stronger localized, as compared with the Ba ions.


A major challenge to legislators, insurance providers and municipalities will be how to manage the reimbursement of health-care on partially open markets under increasing fiscal pressure and an aging population. Although efficiency theoretically can be obtained by private solutions using fixed-payment schemes, the informational rents and production distortions may limit their implementation. The healthcare agency problem is characterized by (i) a complex multi-input multi-output technology, (ii) information uncertainty and asymmetry, and (iii) fuzzy social preferences. First, the technology, inherently nonlinear and with externalities between factors, yield parametric estimation difficult. However, the flexible production structure in Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) offers a solution that allows for the gradual and successive refinement of potentially nonconvex technologies. Second, the information structure of healthcare suggests a context of considerable asymmetric information and considerable uncertainty about the underlying technology, but limited uncertainty or noise in the registration of the outcome. Again, we shall argue that the DEA dynamic yardsticks (Bogetoft, 1994, 1997, Agrell and Bogetoft, 2001) are suitable for such contexts. A third important characteristic of the health sector is the somewhat fuzzy social priorities and the numerous potential conflicts between the stakeholders in the health system. Social preferences are likely dynamic and contingent on the disclosed information. Similarly, there are several potential hidden action (moral hazard) and hidden information (adverse selection) conflicts between the different agents in the health system. The flexible and transparent response to preferential ambiguity is one of the strongest justifications for a DEA-approach. DEA yardstick regimes have been successfully implemented in other sectors (electricity distribution) and we present an operalization of the power-parameter p in an pseudo-competitive setting that both limits the informational rents and incites the truthful revelation of information. Recent work (Agrell and Bogetoft, 2002) on strategic implementation of DEA yardsticks is commented in the healthcare context, where social priorities change the tradeoff between the motivation and coordination functions of the yardstick. The paper is closed with policy recommendations and some areas of further work.


A common practice in operational Machine Translation (MT) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems is to assume that a verb has a fixed number of senses and rely on a precompiled lexicon to achieve large coverage. This paper demonstrates that this assumption is too weak to cope with the similar problems of lexical divergences between languages and unexpected uses of words that give rise to cases outside of the precompiled lexicon coverage. We first examine the lexical divergences between English verbs and Chinese verbs. We then focus on a specific lexical selection problem translating English change-of-state verbs into Chinese verb compounds. We show that an accurate translation depends not only on information about the participants, but also on contextual information. Therefore, selectional restrictions on verb arguments lack the necessary power for accurate lexical selection. Second, we examine verb representation theories and practices in MT systems and show that under the fixed sense assumption, the existing representation schemes are not adequate for handling these lexical divergences and extending existing verb senses to unexpected usages. We then propose a method of verb representation based on conceptual lattices which allows the similarities among different verbs in different languages to be quantitatively measured. A prototype system UNICON implements this theory and performs more accurate MT lexical selection for our chosen set of verbs. An additional lexical module for UNICON is also provided that handles sense extension.


Air pollution from DEEEs is becoming an increased international concern, and whilst attention has been primarily focused on the automotive industry, concerns have also been raised about emissions from diesel rail vehicles. The research is designed to assess the hypothesis that diesel rolling stock severely impacts air quality at Birmingham New Street station due to the station's enclosed nature. To assess this hypothesis, an extensive series of long term measurements were made at Birmingham New Street station. The monitoring campaign consisted of diffusion tube measurements, to measure NO2 at locations in and around the station, followed by measurements of NOx, PM, CO2 and BC at stationary and mobile sites at the platform level. The results illustrated that diesel trains serving the station elevated pollutant concentrations, particularly oxides of nitrogen. During the sampling campaign the average NO2 concentration in the centre of platform 10/11 was 407 μg/m3, approximately 10 times greater than the EU ambient air quality limit. NO exceed its WEL 35% of the time during the monitoring campaign for the same site. Furthermore, this research concludes that CO2 is not suitable as a surrogate for assessing DEEEs exposure. NO2 concentrations exceeded their relevant exposure limits, whilst CO2 did not exceed the ventilation system's 50% speed threshold, as a result it is unlikely that harmful pollutants were being successfully exhausted from the station. The environmental analysis identified a potential trapped vortex in the West end of the station, which could have an impact on the ventilation system in place at Birmingham New Street station. It is clear that this research has been pivotal in driving a focus towards air quality with the railway industry and has prompted further research at other enclosed railway stations.


Sm-Nd data are presented for volcanic, plutonic, and sedimentary rocks from the Late Archean North Spirit Lake greenstone belt in northwestern Ontario. The greenstone belt is divided into six lithotectonic assemblages emplaced between 2700 and 3000 Ma. The earliest assemblage, indicative of an island arc setting, is characterized by positive initial ϵ Nd values (0 to +3), whereas shales and granitoids in succeeding assemblages yield increasingly negative ϵ Nd values (as low as −3). This argues strongly that the assemblages formed in close proximity to each other because the younger assemblages likely include recycled crustal material from earlier assemblages through erosion (into younger basins) and remelting. However, even the earliest assemblage exhibits decreasing ϵ Nd values from basaltic to intermediate-felsic volcanic strata within the same assemblage. This suggests that the initial arc was itself contaminated by either a sedimentary component or remelting of older oceanic crust. Granitoid samples yield ϵ Nd values similar to the shales in the belt, indicating a common evolutionary history. These granitoids may thus represent the roots of the greenstone belt. Mantle-derived rocks such as basalts and komatiites are derived from a variably depleted mantle source with values as high as +3.8 at 2925 Ma. A 2925 +10/−8 Ma U-Pb zircon age obtained for a tonalitic pluton on the northern margin of the North Spirit Lake belt is similar to the age of a volcanic-plutonic cycle in the adjacent Favourable Lake greenstone belt, implying that the two belts may have had common orogenic episodes. The North Spirit Lake greenstone belt appears to have nucleated from an initial primitive volcanic arc and through continued volcanism was transformed into a stable platform exhibiting continental features such as intracrustal differentiation and sedimentary recycling to produce the current array of assemblages. In this respect the evolution of the North Spirit Lake greenstone belt resembles the evolution of Proterozoic and Phanerozoic continents and suggests that Archean microcontinents grew in much the same fashion as present-day continents.


The 2 nd International Workshop on Virtual, Augmented, and Mixed Reality for Human-Robot Interactions (VAM-HRI) will bring together HRI, Robotics, and Mixed Reality researchers to identify challenges in mixed reality interactions between humans and robots. Topics relevant to the workshop include development of robots that can interact with humans in mixed reality, use of virtual reality for developing interactive robots, the design of new augmented reality interfaces that mediate communication between humans and robots, comparisons of the capabilities and perceptions of robots and virtual agents, and best design practices. VAM-HRI was held for the first time at HRI 2018, where it served as the first workshop of its kind at an academic AI or Robotics conference, and served as a timely call to arms to the academic community in response to the growing promise of this emerging field. VAM-HRI 2019 will follow on the success of VAM-HRI 2018, and present new opportunities for expanding this nascent research community. Website http://vam-hri.xyz/


The arterial blood pressure waveform can be considered as the composite of a forward pressure wave, travelling from the heart to the periphery, and of a reflected pressure wave, travelling backwards towards the heart. Early return of this reflected wave boosts systolic blood pressure, increasing the load on the heart and widening the amplitude of the pressure pulse, factors that have been shown to increase cardiovascular risk.Copyright © 2008 by ASME


We present the results of an online survey of 1,221 Twitter users, comparing messages individuals regretted either saying during in-person conversations or posting on Twitter. Participants generally reported similar types of regrets in person and on Twitter. In particular, they often regretted messages that were critical of others. However, regretted messages that were cathartic/expressive or revealed too much information were reported at a higher rate for Twitter. Regretted messages on Twitter also reached broader audiences. In addition, we found that participants who posted on Twitter became aware of, and tried to repair, regret more slowly than those reporting in-person regrets. From this comparison of Twitter and in-person regrets, we provide preliminary ideas for tools to help Twitter users avoid and cope with regret.


This work investigates information retrieval methods to address the existing difficulties on the Preliminary Search, part of the law making process from the Brazilian Chamber of Deputies. For such, different preprocessing approaches, stemmers, language models, and BM25 variants were compared. Two legislative corpora from Chamber were used to build and validate the pipeline. All texts were converted to lowercase and had stopwords, accentuation, and punctuation removed. Words were represented by their stem combined with word unigram and bigram language models. Retrieving the bill that was originated from a specific job request, the BM25L with Savoy stemmer reached a R@20 of 0.7356. After removing queries with inconsistencies or which made reference exclusively to attachments, to other job requests, or to bills, the R@20 increased to 0.94.


Compelling evidence indicates that the incidence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) is increasing because of an aging population and a higher prevalence of cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and hypertension. Nutrition management of patients with CKD requires early disease recognition, appropriate interpretation of the markers and stages of CKD, and collaboration with other health care practitioners. Better management of CKD can slow its progression, prevent metabolic complications, and reduce cardiovascular related outcomes. Caring for patients with CKD necessitates specialized knowledge and skills to meet the challenges associated with this growing epidemic. The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Renal Dietitians Practice Group and the National Kidney Foundation Council on Renal Nutrition, with guidance from the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Quality Management Committee, have updated the 2009 Standards of Practice in Nutrition Care and Standards of Professional Performance as a tool for registered dietitian nutritionists working in nephrology nutrition to assess their current skill levels and to identify areas for additional professional development in this practice area. The Standards of Practice apply to the care of patients/clients with kidney disease. The Standards of Professional Performance consist of six domains of professionalism, including: Quality in Practice, Competence and Accountability, Provision of Services, Application of Research, Communication and Application of Knowledge, and Utilization and Management of Resources. Within each standard, specific indicators provide measurable action statements that illustrate how nephrology nutrition principles can be applied to practice. The indicators describe three skill levels (ie, competent, proficient, and expert) for registered dietitian nutritionists working in nephrology nutrition.


Serverless function-as-a-service (FaaS) platforms offer a radically-new paradigm for cloud software development, yet the hardware infrastructure underlying these platforms is based on a decades-old design pattern. The rise of FaaS presents an opportunity to reimagine cloud infrastructure to be more energy-efficient, cost-effective, reliable, and secure. In this paper, we show how replacing handfuls of x86-based rack servers with hundreds of ARM-based single-board computers could lead to a virtualization-free, energy-proportional cloud that achieves this vision. We call our systematically-designed implementation MicroFaaS, and we conduct a thorough evaluation and cost analysis comparing MicroFaaS to a throughput-matched FaaS platform implemented in the style of conventional virtualization-based cloud systems. Our results show a 5.6x increase in energy efficiency and 34.2% decrease in total cost of ownership compared to our baseline.


SiC doped MgB/sub 2/ polycrystalline samples were fabricated by in-situ reaction using different grain sizes (20 nm, 100 nm, and 37 /spl mu/m) of SiC and different doping levels (0, 8, 10, 12, 15 wt%). Phases, microstructures, superconductivity, critical current density and flux pinning have been systematically investigated using XRD, SEM, TEM, and magnetic measurements. Results show that grain sizes of the starting precursors of SiC have a strong effect on the critical current density and its field dependence. The smaller the SiC grains are, the better the J/sub c/ field performance is. Significant enhancement of J/sub c/ and the irreversibility field H/sub irr/ were revealed for all the SiC doped MgB/sub 2/ with additions up to 15 wt%. A J/sub c/ as high as 20,000 A/cm/sup 2/ in 8 Tesla at 5 K was achieved for the sample doped with 10 wt% SiC with a grain size of 20 nm. Results indicate that the nano-inclusions and substitution inside MgB/sub 2/ are responsible for the enhancement of flux pinning.


Summary The type of inhibition and the relative potency of aspirin and indomethacin on rat platelet malondialdehyde (MDA) formation were investigated in an in vitro system. Both drugs inhibited the production of MDA after platelet stimulation with either throm bin (10 or 25 NIH u/ml) or sodium arachidonate (0.5-2.25 mM). Inhibition by both drugs was concentration-dependent, was partially removed when platelet-rich plasma was diluted with platelet-poor plasma, was much stronger when either drug was preincubated with platelets for 10 minutes than for 1 minute and was apparently competitive when analysed by Dixon plots (1/V versus inhibitor concentrations). It is suggested that both aspirin and indomethacin may inhibit in vitro cyclo-oxygenase activity in citrated platelet-rich plasma by a similar, if not identical, partially reversible mechanism, not involving - in a first step - covalent binding of either drug to enzyme. A scheme of the interaction of both drugs with cyclo-oxygenase is presented which also takes into account the irreversible acetylation of the enzyme occurring after longer incubation times with aspirin.