Numerous papers report a negative association between parental divorce and child outcomes. To provide evidence whether this correlation is driven by a causal effect, we exploit idiosyncratic variation in the extent of sexual integration in fathers' workplaces: Fathers who encounter more women in their relevant age-occupation-group on-the-job are more likely to divorce. This results holds also conditioning on the overall share of female co-workers in a firm. We find that parental divorce has persistent, and mostly negative, effects on children that differ significantly between boys and girls. Treated boys have lower levels of educational attainment, worse labor market outcomes, and are more likely to die early. Treated girls have also lower levels of educational attainment, but they are also more likely to become mother at an early age (especially during teenage years). Treated girls experience almost no negative employment effects. The latter effect could be a direct consequence from the teenage motherhood, which may initiate an early entry to the labor market.


BACKGROUND & AIMS
In patients who have undergone surgery for colorectal cancer (CRC), 3% have recurrence of (metachronous) CRC. We investigated whether tumor seeding during colonoscopy (iatrogenic implantation of tumor cells in damaged mucosa) increases risk for metachronous CRC.

METHODS
In a proof of principle study, we collected data from Dutch National Pathology Registry for patients with a diagnosis of CRC from 2013 through 2015, with a second diagnosis of CRC within 6 months to 3.5 years after surgery. We reviewed pathology reports to identify likely metachronous CRC (histologically proven adenocarcinoma located elsewhere in the colon or rectum from the surgical anastomosis). For 22 patients fulfilling the inclusion criteria, we ascribed the most likely etiology to tumor seeding when endoscopic manipulations, such as biopsies or polypectomy, occurred at the location where the metachronous tumor was subsequently detected, after endoscopic manipulation of the primary tumor. We collected clinical data from patients and compared molecular profiles of the primary and metachronous colorectal tumors using next-generation sequencing. We then examined the source of seeded tumor. We tested whether tumor cells stay behind in the working channel of the endoscope after biopsies of colorectal tumors, and whether these cells maintain viability in organoid cultures.

RESULTS
In total, tumor seeding was suspected as the most likely etiology of metachronous CRC in 5 patients. Tumor tissues were available from 3 patients. An identical molecular signature was observed in the primary and metachronous colorectal tumors from all 3 patients. In 5 control cases with a different etiology of metachronous CRC, the molecular signature of the primary and metachronous tumor were completely different. Based on review of 2147 patient records, we estimated the risk of tumor seeding during colonoscopy to be 0.3%-0.6%. We demonstrated that the working channel of the colonoscope becomes contaminated with viable tumor cells during biopsy collection. Subsequent instruments introduced through this working channel also became contaminated. These cells were shown to maintain their proliferative potential.

CONCLUSIONS
In an analysis of primary and secondary tumors from patients with metachronous CRC, we found that primary tumor cells might be seeded in a new location after biopsy of the primary tumor. Although our study does not eliminate other possibilities of transmission, our findings and experiments support the hypothesis that tumor seeding can occur during colonoscopy via the working channel of the endoscope. The possibility of iatrogenic seeding seems low. However, our findings compel awareness on this potentially preventable cause of metachronous CRC.


Information technology has a tremendous impact on the work of HR professionals which is often referred to as Electronic Human Resource Management (e-HRM) (Bondarouk & Ruel, 2009). E-HRM can be found in every field of work of HRM - for example, digitalization of training and development (Tatli, 2009), the possibility for employees to access personal records and payroll information online (Legnick-Hall & Moritz, 2003) or searching for possible job candidates via the internet (Lievens, Van Dam & Anderson, 2002). Another important aspect of e-HRM are Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) which nowadays nearly every medium to large-sized company uses to digitally govern data information of their employees (Kavangh, Thite & Johnson, 2011). This influence of technology on HRM does not remain without consequences for the skill requirements for HR professionals and their daily work, so it has been proposed to take account of these recent developments in the contents of teaching in HR curricula.
In 2004 Hempel conducted a research on the contents of HR curricula in the US to examine if the contents of these curricula take account of the impact of technology on HR. The result was clear – e-HRM/HRIS - related topics were underrepresented in HR curricula in the US. The present paper replicates Hempels' (2004) research in the European context for the – according to the Eduniversal University Ranking – fifty best HRM masters in Western Europe. The results show that also in Western Europe and nearly ten years after the research of Hempel (2004) e-HRM/HRIS related content is rare in HR curricula. However, although a majority of HR curricula include IT-content, in most of the curricula this content is not directly related to HRM. On the basis of a series of interviews with program directors reasons for this have been identified and discussed. The program directors acknowledged the tremendous influence of IT on the work of HR professionals and argued that this influence will increase in the future. However, it was also argued that e-HRM should not be taught as a single course – mainly due to the fact that the field is very broad and difficult to cover in a single module. On the basis of these results, recommendations for a proper integration of e-HRM/HRIS in HR curricula have been made.


This paper o¤ers a formal analysis of the relationship between changes in government primary balance and debt-to-GDP ratio. it establishes the conditions under which a …scal consolidation increases instead of decreasing the stock of government liabilities relative to aggregate output. A crucial role is played by the relationship between the elasticities of average cost of debt and nominal output to primary balance: while the former depends on debt maturity and risk premia dynamics, the latter relates to the well-known controversy on the size of government spending multipliers. The paper shows an application to the ongoing …scal consolidation process in the Eurozone. JEL Classi…cation: E62, H62


This paper reports on the fatigue performance of an ultrafine-grained (UFG) interstitialfree (IF) steel deformed at various mean stress levels. The UFG microstructure was achieved using equal channel angular extrusion processing at room temperature (RT) and along an "efficient" route, giving way to the formation of high angle grain boundaries (HAGBs) with a high volume fraction. The current study not only confirms the previous finding that a high volume fraction of HAGBs promotes cyclic stability, but also inquires into the role of mean stress level on the cyclic stability. It is shown that the UFG IF steel exhibits a stable cyclic deformation response in the lowcycle fatigue regime within the medium applied mean stress range of -75 to 75 MPa. The corresponding fatigue lives can still be predicted with the Smith-Watson-Topper approach within this range. Furthermore, the present study demonstrates that the evolution of mean strains with cyclic deformation can be linked to the evolution of mean stresses in strain-controlled loading.


Eight physically trained subjects underwent three experimental conditions on separate occasions between 1400 and 1800 h. Two conditions acted as controls for a high-intensity exercise (HI) condition of treadmill running at 80% VO2 max for a total of 80 min. The rate of body heating was modelled in a no-exercise passive heating condition (PH), and the total exercise load was replicated in a low-intensity condition (LI) at 40% VO2 max for 160 min. LI produced no slow-wave sleep (SWS--stages 3 + 4 sleep) changes, but was the only condition to produce significant increases in sleep length and in non-rapid eye movement (REM) sleep (stages 1 + 2 + 3 + 4), and a significant decrease in sleep onset time. Although HI and PH produced similar SWS increases, these consisted of significant increases in stage 3 sleep for HI and in stage 4 sleep for PH. No REM sleep parameter was affected under any condition. Self-estimates of presleep tiredness produced no significant findings. It was concluded that a high and sustained rate of body heating for 1-2 h, particularly the inherent rapid rates of core temperature increase and of body dehydration, may trigger a SWS response, and that exercise may simply be a vehicle for these effects.


Background: The Uppsala and Network Models of Internationalization belong to the Nordic School and were created based on Swedish companies. Is that possible to apply these models to a Brazilian context? Brazilian companies are becoming more international and expanding to foreign markets, and this study is going to exam if the Nordic schools models can be used to explain the internationalization process of a Brazilian company. Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to exam if the proposition, that states that the Uppsala and the Network Models combined can explain the internationalization process of a Brazilian company, is correct. Method: To collect material for this thesis an interview with the case company was done and also secondary data was used from the company. Results: It is possible to state that the combination of the two models is able to explain the internationalization process of the studies Brazilian company. It is also possible to state that where the Uppsala Models lacks explanation value, the Network Model can be applied.


We all use our associative memory constantly. Words and concepts form paths that we can follow to find new related concepts; for example, when we think about a car we may associate it with driving, roads or Japan, a country that produces cars. In this paper we present an approach for information modelling that is derived from human associative memory. The idea is to create a network of concepts where the links model the strength of the association between the concepts instead of, for example, semantics. The network, called association network, can be learned with an unsupervised network learning algorithm using concept co-occurrences, frequencies and concept distances. The possibility to create the network with unsupervised learning brings a great benefit when compared to semantic networks, where the ontology development usually requires a lot of manual labour. We present a case where the associations bring benefits over semantics due to easier implementation and the overall concept. The case focuses on a business intelligence search engine where we modelled its query space using association modelling. We utilised the model in information retrieval and system development.


Background Although a genetic component in schizophrenia is well established, it is likely that the contribution of genetic factors is not constant for all cases. Several recent studies have found that the relatives of female or early onset schizophrenic patients have an increased risk of schizophrenia, compared to relatives of male or late onset cases. These hypotheses are tested in the current study. Method A family study design was employed; the probands were 195 patients with functional psychosis admitted to three south London hospitals, diagnosed using Research Diagnostic Criteria (RDC), and assessed using the Present State Examination (PSE). Information on their relatives was obtained by personal interview of the mother of the proband, and from medical records. Psychiatric diagnoses were made using Family History – Research Diagnostic Criteria (FH-RDC), blind to proband information. Results There was a tendency for homotypia in the form of psychosis within families. The lifetime risk of schizophrenia in the first degree relatives of schizophrenic probands, and the risk of bipolar disorder in the first degree relatives of bipolar probands, were 5–10 times higher than reported population risks. Relatives of female and early onset (<22 years) schizophrenic probands had higher risk of schizophrenia than relatives of male and late onset schizophrenic probands. However, this effect was compensated in part by an excess of non-schizophrenic psychoses in the relatives of male probands. Conclusions These results suggest a high familial, possibly genetic, loading in female and early onset schizophrenia, but do not resolve the question of heterogeneity within schizophrenia.


This paper presents a machine learning strategy that tackles a distributed optimization task in a wireless network with an arbitrary number of randomly interconnected nodes. Individual nodes decide their optimal states with distributed coordination among other nodes through randomly varying backhaul links. This poses a technical challenge in distributed universal optimization policy robust to a random topology of the wireless network, which has not been properly addressed by conventional deep neural networks (DNNs) with rigid structural configurations. We develop a flexible DNN formalism termed distributed message-passing neural network (DMPNN) with forward and backward computations independent of the network topology. A key enabler of this approach is an iterative message-sharing strategy through arbitrarily connected backhaul links. The DMPNN provides a convergent solution for iterative coordination by learning numerous random backhaul interactions. The DMPNN is investigated for various configurations of the power control in wireless networks, and intensive numerical results prove its universality and viability over conventional optimization and DNN approaches.


Introduction:
Neisseria mucosa colonizes mucosal surfaces in humans and can serve as a reservoir for resistance and virulence determinants for Neisseria meningitidis and Neisseria gonorrhoeae, but only on rare occasions has this species been documented as a cause of invasive infection. The host and pathogen factors that predispose to invasive infection with this organism are unknown.
Case presentation:
A healthy 27-year-old female presented with fever. N. mucosa was isolated from two sets of blood cultures drawn on arrival. Transoesophageal echocardiogram revealed mitral valve vegetation. The patient was diagnosed with endocarditis by modified Duke's criteria. Genome sequencing was performed on the isolate and comparison was made with previously published Neisseria resistance and virulence determinants. Although putative virulence factors were present in this isolate, there is not a sufficient database of genetic information for this species to reach conclusions about the role of these virulence factors in predisposing to invasive disease.
Conclusions:
For rare infections, like this case, only through reporting of the clinical course and pathogen genome can a sufficient dataset accumulate to make statistically significant inferences and to motivate hypothesis-based confirmatory experiments. This is the first report of whole genome sequencing for this species to be accompanied by a description of invasive clinical disease, and sets the precedent for future studies.


Inhibition of γ-secretase, one of the enzymes responsible for the cleavage of the amyloid precursor protein (APP) to produce the pathogenic β-amyloid (Aβ) peptides, is an attractive approach to the treatment of Alzheimer disease. In addition to APP, however, several other γ-secretase substrates have been identified (e.g. Notch), and altered processing of these substrates by γ-secretase inhibitors could lead to unintended biological consequences. To study the in vivo consequences of γ-secretase inhibition, the γ-secretase inhibitor LY-411,575 was administered to C57BL/6 and TgCRND8 APP transgenic mice for 15 days. Although most tissues were unaffected, doses of LY-411,575 that inhibited Aβ production had marked effects on lymphocyte development and on the intestine. LY-411,575 decreased overall thymic cellularity and impaired intrathymic differentiation at the CD4-CD8-CD44+CD25+ precursor stage. No effects on peripheral T cell populations were noted following LY-411,575 treatment, but evidence for the altered maturation of peripheral B cells was observed. In the intestine, LY-411,575 treatment increased goblet cell number and drastically altered tissue morphology. These effects of LY-411,575 were not seen in mice that were administered LY-D, a diastereoisomer of LY-411,575, which is a very weak γ-secretase inhibitor. These studies show that inhibition of γ-secretase has the expected benefit of reducing Aβ in a murine model of Alzheimer disease but has potentially undesirable biological effects as well, most likely because of the inhibition of Notch processing.


A bench friction test system for piston ring and liner contact, which has high stroke length and large contact width has been used to verify the analytical mixed lubrication model presented in a companion paper (Part 1). This test system controls the speed, temperature and lubricant amount and records the friction force, loading force, crank angle signal and contact temperature data simultaneously. The effects of running speed, applied normal load, contact temperature and surface roughness on friction coefficient have been investigated for conventional cast-iron cylinder bores. Friction coefficient predictions are presented as a function of crank angle position and results are compared with bench test data. Analytical results correlated well with bench test results.


Purpose Percutaneous liver biopsy (PLB), a diagnostic procedure to identify several hepatobiliary disorders, is considered safe with low incidence of associated complications. While postoperative monitoring guidelines are suggested for adults, selection of procedural recovery time for children remains at the discretion of individual operators. We aim to determine if differences exist in frequency of surgical complications, unplanned admissions, and healthcare cost for children undergoing outpatient PLB for cohorts with same-day vs. overnight observation. Methods We performed a retrospective cohort study in children 1 month to 17 years of age undergoing ultrasound-guided PLB from January 2009 to August 2017 at a tertiary care, pediatric referral center. Cohorts were defined by postprocedural observation duration: same-day (≤8 hours) vs. overnight observation. Outcomes included surgical complications, medical interventions, unscheduled hospitalization within 7 days, and total encounter costs. Results One hundred and twelve children met study criteria of which 18 (16.1%) were assigned to same-day observation. No differences were noted in demographics, anthropometrics, comorbidities, biopsy indications, or preoperative coagulation profiles. No major complications or acute hospitalizations after PLB were observed. Administration of analgesia and fluid boluses were isolated and given within 8 hours. Compared to overnight monitoring, same-day observation accrued less total costs (US $992 less per encounter). Conclusion Same-day observation after PLB in children appears well-tolerated with only minor interventions and complications observed within 8 hours of procedure. We recommend a targeted risk assessment prior to selection of observation duration. Same-day observation appears an appropriate recovery strategy in otherwise low-risk children undergoing outpatient PLB.


A new hybrid model which combines wavelets and Artificial Neural Network (ANN) called wavelet neural network (WNN) model was proposed in the current study and applied for time series modeling of river flow. The time series of daily river flow of the Malaprabha River basin (Karnataka state, India) were analyzed by the WNN model. The observed time series are decomposed into sub-series using discrete wavelet transform and then appropriate sub-series is used as inputs to the neural network for forecasting hydrological variables.The hybrid model (WNN) was compared with the standard ANN and AR models. The WNN model was able to provide a good fit with the observed data, especially the peak values during the testing period. The benchmark results from WNN model applications showed that the hybrid model produced better results in estimating the hydrograph properties than the latter models (ANN and AR).


Author(s): Dodge, Ellen Kirsten | Advisor(s): Lakoff, George | Abstract: Goldberg's (1995) recognition that, in addition to various word-level constructions, sentences also instantiate meaningful argument structure constructions enables a non-polysemy-based analysis of various verb `alternations' (Levin 1993). In such an analysis, meaning variations associated with the use of the same verb in different argument realization patterns are analyzed as resulting from composition of the same verb meaning with different meaningful argument structure constructions. This compositional analysis raises some important semantic questions: Which specific elements of verb and argument structure construction meanings motivate their composition? And what is the precise nature of the meaning that results from this composition? I argue that to answer these questions, it is essential that we look more closely at the underlying conceptual systems utilized by these constructions. In this dissertation, I examine a set of simple single clause sentence examples which describe a variety of basic experiences involving motion, change of location, action, force, causation, and affectedness. One key assumption that the Neural Theory of Language (NTL) makes about language understanding concerns simulation semantics, the idea that the neural circuitry we use to understand descriptions of experiences is closely similar to that which is activated by the experiences themselves (Feldman 2006). Accordingly, I use linguistic, neuroscientific, and other forms of evidence to define a lattice of interconnected schemas that represent schematic structures and interrelations associated with the types of experiences described in these examples, and use these schemas in the meaning representations of the verb and argument structure constructions instantiated in these examples. In addition, the grammar described in this dissertation includes various word-level, phrasal and clause-level constructions, along with schemas to represent their meanings, all of which are represented using the Embodied Construction Grammar (ECG) formalism (Bergen and Chang 2005, Feldman et al. 2010). Significantly, use of this formalism has made it possible to utilize many of the schemas and constructions in this grammar in a computational implementation of a compositional constructional analysis of sentence meaning. This implementation, called the Constructional Analyzer (Bryant 2008) determines the best-fitting interpretation of an utterance in context based on a consideration of syntactic, semantic, and contextually-specified constraints. The composed meanings of the constructions instantiated in this best fit interpretation serve as a semantic specification for the simulation of the event described by the utterance (simulation is not carried out as part of this implementation). Through simulation, the relatively schematic meanings specified by the constructions instantiated in a given utterance give rise to a much richer and fuller understanding of that utterance, via activation of additional conceptual structure related to an understander's experiences, beliefs, etc.The schemas and constructions that comprise the grammar discussed in this dissertation have many complex interrelations. One important benefit of using the ECG formalism is that computational implementations facilitate the development of an internally consistent, wide-coverage, complex grammar. In this respect, it is similar to other unification grammars, such as HPSG (Pollard and Sag 1994) and LFG (Dalrymple 2001). However, unlike these other grammars, ECG has a deep commitment to embodied semantics, and is consistent with the NTL theoretical framework. Moreover, as the schemas and constructions presented in this dissertation illustrate, this formalism makes possible the integrated expression of several important cognitive linguistic insights, including those related to recurrent schematic conceptual structure such as: (1) image schemas (Johnson 1987, Lakoff 1987) and frames (Fillmore 1982); (2) basic patterns of cognitive organization such as prototypes (Rosch 1975, 1978) and radial categories of A-S constructions (Lakoff 1987, Goldberg 1995), and; (3) different attention-related phenomena such as perspective and profiling (Talmy 1996; Langacker 1987, 1991). Together, the different elements described above enable the development of a grammar that supports compositional constructional analyses of a range of different sentence examples that instantiate various combinations of different verb and argument structure constructions. Significantly, these analyses capture the sometimes subtle similarities and differences in the event conceptualizations described by these examples. Moreover, this compositional account of sentence meaning also provides a compositional account of semantic roles that enable us to recognize a variety of cross-cutting generalizations that can be made about these roles.


Aims. Interplanetary dust particle (IDP) matter probably evolved under irradiation in the interstellar medium (ISM) and the solar nebula. Currently IDPs are exposed to irradiation in the Solar System. Here the effects of UV and proton processing on IDP matter are studied experimentally. The structure and chemical composition of the bulk of carbon matter in IDPs is characterized. Methods. Several IDPs were further irradiated in the laboratory using ultraviolet (UV) photons and protons in order to study the effects of such processing. By means of infrared and Raman spectroscopy, IDPs were also compared to different materials that serve as analogs of carbon grains in the dense and diffuse ISM. Results. The carbonaceous fraction of IDPs is dehydrogenated by exposure to hard UV photons or 1 MeV protons. On the other hand, proton irradiation at lower energies (20 keV) leads to an efficient hydrogenation of the carbonaceous IDP matter. The dominant type of carbon in IDPs, observed with Raman and infrared spectroscopy, is found to be either a form of amorphous carbon ( a -C) or hydrogenated amorphous carbon ( a -C:H), depending on the IDP, consisting of aromatic units with an average domain size of 1.35 nm (5-6 rings in diameter), linked by aliphatic chains. Conclusions. The D- and 15 N-enrichments associated to an aliphatic component in some IDPs are probably the result of chemical reactions at cold temperatures. It is proposed that the amorphous carbon in IDPs was formed by energetic processing (UV photons and cosmic rays) of icy grains, maybe during the dense cloud stage, and more likely on the surface of the disk during the T Tauri phase of our Sun. This would explain the isotopic anomalies and morphology of IDPs. Partial annealing, 300-400 °C, is required to convert an organic residue from ice photoprocessing into the amorphous carbon with low heteroatom content found in IDPs. Such annealing might have occurred as the particles approached the Sun and/or during atmospheric entry heating.


Abstract:  The parasite Peroderma cylindricum uses its host Sardina pilchardus to meet its own needs. The parasite can have many harmful effects on its host. The present study aims at investigating the impact of the parasite on the composition of fatty acids and the quality of the lipids of the sardine. Peroderma cylindricum reduces the total lipid content of its host by about 25% and decreases the content of saturated fatty acid and polyunsaturated acid. However, it increases the amount of monounsaturated fatty acids. The parasite induced a selective diversion of some fatty acids, which are dominated by the docosahexaenoic acid. Consequently, lower n-3 fatty acid content and omega-3/omega-6 ratio were recorded in parasitized sardines. Furthermore, both atherogenic and thrombogenic indices were found to be higher than those of unparasitized specimens. Nevertheless, these alterations do not lead to an important reduction of the nutritional value of the fish.


This uses Wattch and the SPEC 2000 integer and floating-point benchmarks to explore the role of branch predictor organization in power/energy/performance trade offs for processor design. Even though the direction predictor by itself represents less than 1 percent of the processor's total power dissipation, prediction accuracy is nevertheless a powerful lever on processor behavior and program execution time. A thorough study of branch predictor organizations shows that, as a general rule, to reduce overall energy consumption in the processor, it is worthwhile to spend more power in the branch predictor if this results in more accurate predictions that improve running time. This not only improves performance, but can also improve the energy-delay product by up to 20 percent. Three techniques, however, can reduce power dissipation without harming accuracy. Banking reduces the portion of the branch predictor that is active at any one time. A new on-chip structure, the prediction probe detector (PPD), uses predecode bits to entirely eliminate unnecessary predictor and branch target buffer (BTB) accesses. Despite the extra power that must be spent accessing it, the PPD reduces local predictor power and energy dissipation by about 31 percent and overall processor power and energy dissipation by 3 percent. These savings can be further improved by using profiling to annotate branches, identifying those that are highly biased and do not require static prediction. Finally, we explore the effectiveness of a previously proposed technique, pipeline gating, and find that, even with adaptive control based on recent predictor accuracy, pipeline gating yields little or no energy savings.


This paper proposes an easy and simple method for constructing a super-structure on the Web which provides current Web contents with new value and new means of use. The super-structure is based on external annotations to Web documents. We have developed a system for any user to annotate any element of any Web document with additional information. We have also developed a proxy that transcodes requested contents by considering annotations assigned to them. In this paper, we classify annotations into three categories. One is linguistic annotation which helps the transcoder understand the semantic structure of textual elements. The second is commentary annotation which helps the transcoder manipulate non-textual elements such as images and sounds. The third is multimedia annotation, which is a combination of the above two types. All types of annotation are described using XML, and correspondence between annotations and document elements is defined using URLs and XPaths. We call the entire process "semantic transcoding" because we deal with the deep semantic content of documents with annotations. The current semantic transcoding process mainly handles text and video summarization, language translation, and speech synthesis of documents including images.


Professor Gideon Yaffe's recent, intricately argued book, The Age of Culpability: Children and the Nature of Criminal Responsibility, argues against the nearly uniform position in both law and scholarship that the criminal justice system should give juveniles a break not because on average they have different capacities relevant to responsibility than adults, but because juveniles have little say about the criminal law, primarily because they do not have a vote. For Professor Yaffe, age has political rather than behavioral significance. The book has many excellent general analyses about responsibility, but all are in aid of the central thesis about juveniles, which is the central focus of this essay review. After addressing a few preliminary issues, the essay discusses Professor Yaffe's negative argument against the validity of the behavioral difference rationale for giving juveniles a break. If the negative case fails, which the essay argues it does, then the only issue is whether the book's alternative is desirable. Again, the essay argues that it is not, and concludes by offering three positive arguments for the traditional rationale: 1) coherence and simplicity; 2) a benignly definitional argument that survives the negative argument and supports giving juveniles a break in the exceedingly unlikely event that the empirical assumptions of the traditional rationale are proven incorrect; and 3) a proposal for individualization of the culpability assessments of juveniles so that the criminal justice system blames and punishes them proportionately to their culpability.


By means of first-principles calculations based on the ab initio pseudopotential and plane wave basis, we present self-consistent molecular dynamic calculations to determine a clean TiO2 crystal (001) surface geometry and surface electronic states structure. All calculations were performed for both rutile and anatase phases. Using a total energy minimization strategy, we acquired the general inward relaxations. The s-like surface states just above the lower valence band at (001) surfaces both in the rutile and anatase phases are found. The band bending effect occurs both in rutile and anatase (001) surfaces. It reduces the band gap by ac. 0.4 eV in rutile and ac. 0.8 eV in anatase, elevating the Fermi energy levels. Besides the band bending of the valence band, surface states also lie near the bottom of the conduction band. The lower surface energy of anatase makes nanocrystalline TiO2 is often in the anatase phase below a critical size. Our results are in good agreement with the previous work and experimental data.


Modern corporations face enormous digital transformation challenges in order to incorporate digital content into its corporate memory. At the same time over the last decade and a half, there is growing evidence of the advent of different types of mechanisms to manage digital organizational content. The management of digital content is particularly important to support knowledge worker practices to access, share, and reuse content in knowledge intensive organizations. Despite the availability of technological solutions in the marketplace to integrate content, managers are often overwhelmed by the choices they need to make to effectively manage digital content in their organizations. Extant literature indicates that in an increasingly digitized world, there is no clear understanding of the digital content considerations for informed decision making in organizations. Based on our research experiences in knowledge management, particularly knowledge codification in digital infrastructures, we provide certain perspectives on the four considerations for effective management of digital content in large organizations. We present four short exhibits to illustrate these four core considerations, which we label as the "4Cs" (i.e., content contribution, categorization, control, and centralization) for effective digital content management in large organizations.


Crime and gentrification represent hot button issues in racially diverse neighborhoods. Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork, this book provides a detailed analysis of community conflict in Rogers Park and Uptown, two Chicago neighborhoods. The book shows how competing views about neighborhood change divided residents into two political camps, which prioritized either the fight against crime or the fight against gentrification. This division frequently materialized as a type of racial conflict, because antigentrification activists and their allies charged that grassroots anticrime initiatives were, in truth, barely covert racist practices that were meant to foster racial displacement and marginalization. Chapter by chapter, the book traces these conflicts in different areas of community life. It examines the strategies of public safety work that residents used to fight crime and how their efforts contributed to gentrification; how antigentrification activists resisted criminalization and gentrification; how politicians sought to actively use or downplay community divisions in their electoral campaigns; and how residents of different racial and ethnic backgrounds positioned themselves in these battles.


This technical compendium was developed to serve as a reference document for development organizations, researchers, government officials, and cooperating partners working in Zambia. It uses nationally representative survey data to provide descriptive trends and analysis relevant to the agricultural sector. It is also specifically targeted for organizations tasked with implementing programs associated with USAID's Feed the Future (FtF) initiative. As such, a special section is dedicated to Eastern Province, with data disaggregation based on FtF requirements.


The aim of this study is to find out whether intelligence distributions differ or not according to gender and departmental variables by determining the dominant intelligence (Multiple Intelligence) distributions of prospective teachers studying at Yildiz Technical University Education Faculty. The population of the research constitutes the prospective teachers majoring at Yildiz Technical University Education Faculty in 2014-2015 academic year. The study group contains a total of 254 prospective teachers selected by random cluster sampling method who have been educated in preschool teaching of primary education department (64 people), mathematics teaching (64 people), science teaching (92 people) and CITE (34 people). In this research conducted based on the screening model, Multiple Intelligence Scale developed by Celikoz et al. (2008) and composed of 11 different situations and 88 questions was used in order to determine the dominant intelligence areas of the prospective teachers. According to the results obtained from the research, respectively the mathematical-logic, verbal, interpersonal and intrapersonal intelligences of YTU prospective teachers are found to be more dominant and their naturalist and visual intelligence are among the lowest intelligence areas. On the other hand, the sex of prospective teachers is an effective factor on the areas of intelligence and while females have more visual intelligence than males, males are more kinesthetic (bodily). The departments or branches in which the prospective teachers are educated also affect the dominant intelligence areas; Math-logic and bodily-kinesthetic intelligences of prospective teachers in the department of CITE and Mathematics are more dominant than prospective teachers in the department of preschool teaching. On the basis of the results obtained in the research, suggestions have been made for education system, higher education and learning-teaching processes. Key words: Multiple intelligence theory, prospective teachers


STUDY DESIGN
Prospective cohort study.

BACKGROUND
Although lumbar radiculopathy is regarded as a specific diagnosis, the most effective treatment strategy is unclear. Commonly used treatments include transforaminal epidural steroid injections (TESIs) and Mechanical Diagnosis & Therapy (MDT), but no studies have investigated the effectiveness of this combination. MDT differentiates pain centralization (C) from non-centralization (NC), which indicates good vs. poor prognostic validity respectively.

OBJECTIVE
The main aims were 1) to determine changes in Mechanical Diagnosis and Therapy (MDT) pain response classifications after transforaminal epidural steroid injections (TESIs) in candidates for lumbar herniated disc surgery and 2) to evaluate differences in short and long term outcomes for patients with different pain response classifications.

METHODS
Candidates for lumbar herniated disc surgery were assessed with a MDT protocol and their pain response classified as centralizing or peripheralizing. For this study,only patients were eligible who showed a peripheralizing pain response at intake. All patients then received TESIs and were reassessed and classified using the MDT protocol, into groups according to pain response (resolved, centralizing, peripheralizing with less pain and peripheralising with severe pain). After receiving targeted treatment based on pain response after TESIs, ranging from advice, MDT or surgery, follow-up assessments were completed at discharge and at 12 months. The primary outcomes were disability (Roland-Morris Disability Questionnaire [RMDQ] for Sciatica), pain severity in leg (visual analogue scale [VAS], 0-100) and global perceived effect (GPE). Linear mixed-models were used to determine between-groups differences in outcome.

RESULTS
A total of 77 patients with lumbar disc herniation and peripheralizing symptoms were included. Patients received an average of 2 (SD 0.7) TESIs. After TESIs, 17 patients (22%) were classified as peripheralizing with continuing severe pain.These patients underwent surgery and were not further evaluated. Eleven (14%) patients were classified as resolved, 37 (48%) as centralizing with significant less pain, and 12 (16%) as peripheralizing with significant less pain. None of these patients underwent surgery. Resolved and centralizer subgroups had better outcomes in terms of VAS and RMDQ than the non-operated peripheralizers at discharge and at 12 months. The succes rates (GPE) for the resolved, centralizing, and peripheralizing with less pain patients were 100%, 100% and 33% respectively at short term, and 100%, 92% and 50% respectively at long term.

CONCLUSION
After TESIs, a peripheralizing pain pattern changed to resolved or centralizing in 62% of the patients. For the non-operated patients, those with a centralising pattern after TESIs reported better pain and disability outcomes than those with peripheralizing pattern at short and long term.


SUMMARY: Bacillus cereus organisms growing exponentially have a stable length distribution. This length distribution can be analysed by the method described to give the mean rate of increase in length of organisms at any given length. The validity of the method was confirmed by observing the growth of clones of B. cereus in the culture chamber. Both methods showed that the rate of increase in length increased as the organisms got longer, and that there was no hesitation before or after division. Possible applications of this general method to other parameters that can be measured in samples of bacteria taken from stable populations are suggested.


Most of the previous researches assume that each mobile client needs only one data item. However, in many situations, a mobile client might need more than one data item. In this paper, we propose an efficient scheduling method for query-set-based broadcasting, which integrates with query expansion method (QEM) and the mining association rules technique. The mining association rules can globally find the data item sets (large itemsets) which are requested by clients frequently. From our simulation results, we show that, as compared to the local optimal approach in the previous methods, our improved-QEM can construct the schedule with the smaller TQD than QEM and modified-QEM, where TQD denotes total query distance and is proportional to the average access time.


Two of the major proteins secreted by the prostate epithelium secretory cells are PSA (prostate-specific antigen) and PSAP (prostatic-specific acid phosphatase). The molecules involved in the secretory machinery of PSA and PSAP, and the regulation of this machinery, remain unknown. In the present paper, we provide evidence that JFC1 [synaptotagmin-like protein (slp1)], a Rab27a- and PtdIns(3,4,5)P3-binding protein, regulates the androgen-dependent secretion of PSAP and PSA in human LNCaP prostate carcinoma cells. Androgen-dependent PSAP secretion was significantly inhibited in cells that expressed the C2A domain of JFC1 [PtdIns(3,4,5)P3-binding-domain], but was unaffected by JFC1 overexpression. Conversely, PSA secretion was not inhibited by the C2A domain of JFC1. We show, using immunofluorescence analysis, that JFC1 co-localizes with PSAP, but rarely with PSA, in prostate granules, suggesting that JFC1 is part of the PSAP secretory machinery. However, PSA secretion was significantly increased in LNCaP cells that overexpressed JFC1, indicating that the secretion of PSA is susceptible to variations in the intracellular concentration of JFC1. Both PSAP and PSA secretion was increased by overexpression of wild-type Rab27a or the constitutively active Rab27aQ78L. The secretion of PSA was partially inhibited in the presence of LY294002, while the secretion of PSAP was completely abolished by the PI3K (phosphoinositide 3-kinase) inhibitor. This supports the view that PI3K plays a differential role in the secretion of prostate secretory markers. In conclusion, we present evidence that JFC1 differentially regulates the secretion of PSAP and PSA, and that Rab27a and PI3K play a central role in the exocytosis of prostate-specific markers.


Current state-of-the-art saliency detection models rely heavily on large datasets of accurate pixel-wise annotations, but manually labeling pixels is time-consuming and labor-intensive. There are some weakly supervised methods developed for alleviating the problem, such as image label, bounding box label, and scribble label, while point label still has not been explored in this field. In this paper, we propose a novel weakly-supervised salient object detection method using point supervision. To infer the saliency map, we first design an adaptive masked flood filling algorithm to generate pseudo labels. Then we develop a transformer-based point-supervised saliency detection model to produce the first round of saliency maps. However, due to the sparseness of the label, the weakly supervised model tends to degenerate into a general foreground detection model. To address this issue, we propose a Non-Salient Suppression (NSS) method to optimize the erroneous saliency maps generated in the first round and leverage them for the second round of training. Moreover, we build a new point-supervised dataset (P-DUTS) by relabeling the DUTS dataset. In P-DUTS, there is only one labeled point for each salient object. Comprehensive experiments on five largest benchmark datasets demonstrate our method outperforms the previous state-of-the-art methods trained with the stronger supervision and even surpass several fully supervised state-of-the-art models. The code is available at: https://github.com/shuyonggao/PSOD.


The lateral pterygoid muscle is a craniomandibular muscle that plays a crucial role in the craniofacial system. It is the key muscle of the inferior temporal region. The Lateral pterygoid muscle is active during mastication and during mandibular movements such as protrusion (forward movement of the mandible), abduction (depression of the mandible), mediotrusion (movement of the mandibular condyle towards the midline) and particularly during speaking, singing and clenching. Among all the muscles of mastication, it is the only muscle with fibers arranged horizontally.[1] Functionally, the muscle is analogous to the temporalis muscle. The fan-shaped temporalis muscle exhibits a continuous range of movements anteroposteriorly, while the lateral pterygoid muscle exhibits a continuous range of functional movements mediolaterally as well as superoinferiorly.[2] The lateral pterygoid muscle has two heads or bellies. The inferior belly is three times larger than the superior belly.


Introduction: To determine whether unilateral prostate cancer diagnosed at 12-core prostate biopsy harbours relevant prostate cancer foci in contralateral lobe in cases eligible for hemiablative focal therapy. Material and Methods: We analysed 112 radical prostatectomies of unilateral Gleason 6/7 prostate cancer based on prostate biopsy information. The presence of significant prostate cancer foci and/or the index lesion in the contralateral lobe is described. A subanalysis is performed in cases of Gleason score 6 and in cases of very-low-risk prostate cancer. Results: Contralateral prostate cancer was present in 69.6% of cases, fulfilling significant prostate cancer criteria in 33% and being the index lesion in 32%. No significant differences were found when analysing the Gleason 6 group (73% contralateral prostate cancer, 34% significant prostate cancer and 35% index lesion) or the very-low-risk prostate cancer group (80% contralateral prostate cancer, 29% significant prostate cancer and 45% index lesion). Conclusions: The assumption of unilateral prostate cancer based on 12-core template prostate biopsy information is unreliable. In about one third of the cases, there will be focus of significant prostate cancer or the index lesion in the contralateral lobe. This information should be taken into account when hemiablative focal therapies are considered.


Algae in the dinoflagellate family Symbiodiniaceae are endocellular photosymbionts of corals and other cnidarians. This close relationship is disrupted when seawater temperature increases, causing coral bleaching eventually affecting entire coral reefs. Although the relationship between animal host and photosymbiont has been well-studied, little is known about the bacterial community associated with Symbiodiniaceae in culture. We compared the microbial communities of three isolates from different species of the genus Symbiodinium (formerly known as Symbiodinium clade A) with different ecophysiology, levels of interaction with the animal host, and thermal adaptations. Two species, Symbiodinium microadriaticum and Symbiodinium necroappettens, exhibit intermediate thermotolerance, with a decrease of both growth rate and photochemical efficiency with increased temperature. The third species, Symbiodinium pilosum, has high thermotolerance with no difference in growth rate or photochemical efficiency at 32°C. Microbial communities were characterized after 27 days of growth under control (26°C) and high temperature (32°C). Data shows stronger grouping of bacterial assemblages based on Symbiodinium species than temperature. Microbial communities did not group phylogenetically. We found a shared set of fifteen ASVs belonging to four genera and three families that remained in all three Symbiodiniaceae species. These included Labrenzia, Phycisphaeraceae (SM1A02), Roseovarius, and Muricauda, which are all commonly associated with corals and Symbiodiniaceae cultures. Few ASVs differed significantly by temperature within species. S. pilosum displayed significantly lower levels of microbial diversity and greater individual variability in community composition at 32°C compared to 26°C. These results suggest that bacteria associated or co-cultured with thermotolerant Symbiodinium might play an important role in thermotolerance. Further research on the functional metabolic pathways of these bacteria might hold the key to understanding Symbiodinium's ability to tolerate thermal stress.


life and is not inherently good or bad. Stress can originate from an upcoming exam, disagreement with a roommate, grad school applications, unrealistic expectations (our own and others), transitioning to a new experience, etc. While stress may not be pleasant, a certain level of it can actual motivate us to work harder and do better in a given situation. However, when stress is not managed effectively or when it gets to be too intense, our ability to handle situations can be reduced.


New perspectives in prostate cancer genesis and putative clinical management have emerged in recent years . Apoptosis plays a major role in this environment. Proteasome inhibitors block the action of a multicatalytic proteinase complex involved in the degradation of intracellular proteins, particularly with regard to cell cycle regulation and apoptosis. Numerous in vitro studies have demonstrated the ability of these compounds to induce apoptosis and enhance the activity of conventional tumoricidal agents in many cancer cell types, including prostate cancer cells. They point out the use of these potent inhibitors as a new potential molecular approach to the therapeutic management of prostate cancer. Furthermore, the action of proteasome inhibitors has been tested in animal models and in patients with hormone refractory prostate cancer, resulting in both PSA and tumor volume decrease. PS-341 (bortezomib, Velcade) is the first proteasome inhibitor with clinical application in cancer therapy that has been used in clinical trials to date. This report reviews the current status of those papers that have tried to analyze the connection between the proteasome pathway and apoptosis. We present our results of proteasome inhibition in individual prostate cancer cell lines. Proteasomal inhibition may offer a new therapeutic access in "molecular targeting" of prostate cancer.


Discusses the deterministic analysis of oversampled A/D conversion (ADC), the properties derivable from such an analysis, and the consequences on reconstruction using nonlinear decoding. Given a band-limited input X producing a quantized version C, the authors consider the set of all input signals that are band-limited and produce C. They call any element of this set a consistent estimate of X. Regardless of the type of encoder (simple, predictive, or noise-shaping), they show that this set is convex, and as a consequence, any nonconsistent estimate can be improved. They also show that the classical linear decoding estimates are not necessarily consistent. Numerical tests performed on simple ADC, single-loop, and multiloop /spl Sigma//spl Delta/ modulation show that consistent estimates yield a mean square error (MSE) that decreases asymptotically with the oversampling ratio faster than the linear decoding MSE by approximately 3 dB/octave. This implies an asymptotic MSE of the order of /spl Oscr/(R/sup /spl minus/(2n+2/)) instead of /spl Oscr/(R/sup /spl minus/(2n+1/)) in linear decoding, where R is the oversampling ratio and n the order of the modulator. Methods of improvement of nonconsistent estimates based on the deterministic knowledge of the quantized signal are proposed for simple ADC, predictive ADC, single-loop, and multiloop /spl Sigma//spl Delta/ modulation. >


Word familiarity is an important factor in word recognition and lexical access for hearing individuals. Subjective word familiarity ratings are hypothesized to reflect experience with words irrespective of the modality (i.e., spoken or written) through which exposure has taken place, and to provide an estimate of the size of the mental lexicon. To investigate how word familiarity is related to lipreading proficiency, 450 printed words were presented for rating on a seven‐point scale to 50 deaf and 50 hearing participants. Preliminary results revealed that the deaf participants produced lower mean familiarity ratings than did the hearing participants, for high‐, medium‐, and low‐familiarity words (hearing means= 6.7, 4.8, 3.0; deaf means= 6.0, 3.8, 2.6). Among the deaf participants, correlations between established familiarity ratings and individuals' ratings were reliably higher for excellent than for good lipreaders, a possible indication that perceptual experience influences the structure of the lexicon. At the same time, the performance of the excellent lipreaders provides support for the hypothesis that lexical organization does not depend on the perceptual input modality (i.e., vision versus hearing). [Work supported by NIH Grant No. DC00695.]


In building emergency evacuation, the perception of hazards can stress crowds, evoke their competitive behaviors, and trigger disorder and blocking as they pass through narrow passages (e.g., a small exit). This is a serious concern threatening evacuees' survivability and egress efficiency. How to optimize crowd guidance while considering such effects is an important problem. Based on advanced microscopic pedestrian models and simulations, this paper establishes a new macroscopic network-flow model where fire, smoke, and psychological factors can evoke a crowd's desire to escape—the desired flow rate. Disorder and blocking occur when the desired flow rate exceeds the passage capacity, resulting in a drastic decrease of crowd movement in a nonlinear and random fashion. To effectively guide crowds, a divide-and-conquer approach is developed based on groups to reduce computational complexity and to reflect psychological findings. Egress routes for individual groups are optimized by using a novel combination of stochastic dynamic programming and the rollout scheme. These routes are then coordinated so that limited passage capacities are shared to meet the total need for joint movement. Numerical testing and simulation demonstrate that, compared with a strategy of merely using nearest exits, our solution can evacuate more people more rapidly by preventing or mitigating potential disorder and blocking at bottleneck passages.


Abstract Background: Barriers to mealtime insulin include complexity, fear of injections, and lifestyle interference. This multicenter, randomized controlled trial evaluated efficacy, safety, and self-reported outcomes in adults with type 2 diabetes, inadequately controlled on basal insulin, initiating and managing mealtime insulin with a wearable patch versus an insulin pen. Methods: Adults with type 2 diabetes (n = 278, age: 59.2 ± 8.9 years), were randomized to patch (n = 139) versus pen (n = 139) for 48 weeks, with crossover at week 44. Baseline insulin was divided 1:1 basal: bolus. Using a pattern-control logbook, subjects adjusted basal and bolus insulin weekly using fasting and premeal glucose targets. Results: Glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c) change (least squares mean ± standard error) from baseline to week 24 (primary endpoint) improved (P < 0.0001) in both arms, −1.7% ± 0.1% and −1.6% ± 0.1% for patch and pen (−18.6 ± 1.1 and −17.5 ± 1.1 mmol/mol), and was maintained at 44 weeks. The coefficient of variation of 7-point self-monitoring blood glucose decreased more (P = 0.02) from baseline to week 44 for patch versus pen. There were no differences in adverse events, including hypoglycemia (three severe episodes per arm), and changes in weight and insulin doses. Subject-reported treatment satisfaction, quality of life, experience ratings at week 24, and device preferences at week 48 significantly favored the patch. Most health care providers preferred patch for mealtime insulin. Conclusions: Bolus insulin delivered by patch and pen using an algorithm-based weekly insulin dose titration significantly improved HbA1c in adults with type 2 diabetes, with improved subject and health care provider experience and preference for the patch.


Graph analysis algorithms such as PageRank and HITS have been successful in Web environments because they are able to extract important inter-document relationships from manually-created hyperlinks. We consider the application of these algorithms to related document networks comprised of automatically-generated content-similarity links. Specifically, this work tackles the problem of document retrieval in the biomedical domain, in the context of the PubMed search engine. A series of reranking experiments demonstrate that incorporating evidence extracted from link structure yields significant improvements in terms of standard ranked retrieval metrics. These results extend the applicability of link analysis algorithms to dierent environments.


Hemorrhagic fever with renal syndrome (HFRS), also known as mice fever is an acute viral zoonosis and it appears in the natural focus after the human contact with Hantaan virus infected mice. The objective (purpose) of this study was to investigate the prevalence of specific antibodies in HFRS, in convalescent persons (collective immunity in endemic hearths). In this project we applied the epidemiological method of studying with retrospective-perspective, the serological method for determination and detecting antibodies from the persons of epidemical focus and statistical methods. The disease diagnosis is based on the epidemiological, clinical and serological records. The collected samples have been sent to referral laboratory in Medical Faculty-Institute of Microbiology Ljubljana for laboratory confirmation. From the results we came to conclusion that in the territory of Republic of Kosovo, the HFRS is still a serious health, economic and biological problem. The lethality rate from HFRS in 1986 was 15.4%, 1986-89 10.8%, from 1995-2006 8.70%. The lowest rates of morbidity, mortality and lethality of HFRS compared with the previous periods of time, prove collective immunity growth in Dukagjini valley. For collective immunity research and to conduct the persistence of antibodies for viral corresponding (relative) antigen, after the disease, the samples were collected in the time period of May-June 2008, with 203 persons that were tested with serological method IIF (Indirect immune fluorescence) from which 187 cases (92.1%) resulted sero-negative and 16 cases (7.9%) resulted sero-positive with HFRS. This proves the collective immunity increase for HFRS. From 13 recovered patients previously diagnosed with HFRS (1986-1989-1995), levels of antibodies were screened in 2008 with IIF. Out of 13 persons, positive antibodies were found in 10 cases, while 3 cases were negative for antibodies (HTN, PUU, and DOB). After 13, 19 and 22 years HTN, PUU and DOB antibodies persisted in level (1:16-1:512). Based on the gathered results, we came to conclusion that it is necessary to compile the National Strategy of Surveillance for the Kosovo Health System for a 5 year period, for avoiding this high risk disease.


AbstractFault-related displacements impact oil and gas flow predictions at reservoir scales. We have integrated a quantitative description of fault-related deformation directly embedded into the structural modeling workflow. Consistent fault displacements are produced using numerical fault operators that deform horizons in accordance with theoretical isolated fault displacement models to generate kinematically consistent structural models. We compare structural modeling approaches based on such fault operators with those relying on interpolation. Several synthetic cross sections are generated from a reference high-resolution structural model of the Santos Basin, Brazil. Models are reconstructed from this 2D synthetic sparse data set using both methods. Their ability to produce consistent structural models is assessed by comparing reconstructed and reference models. On this example, kinematic modeling improves the quality of automatically generated models when only few or poor-quality observations are avai...


Abstract This paper focuses on protecting the cellular paging protocol — which balances between the quality-of-service and battery consumption of a device — against security and privacy attacks. Attacks against this protocol can have severe repercussions, for instance, allowing attacker to infer a victim's location, leak a victim's IMSI, and inject fabricated emergency alerts. To secure the protocol, we first identify the underlying design weaknesses enabling such attacks and then propose efficient and backward-compatible approaches to address these weaknesses. We also demonstrate the deployment feasibility of our enhanced paging protocol by implementing it on an open-source cellular protocol library and commodity hardware. Our evaluation demonstrates that the enhanced protocol can thwart attacks without incurring substantial overhead.


We show that the braid group representations associated with the $(3,6)$-quotients of the Hecke algebras factor over a finite group. This was known to experts going back to the 1980s, but a proof has never appeared in print. Our proof uses an unpublished quaternionic representation of the braid group due to Goldschmidt and Jones. Possible topological and categorical generalizations are discussed.


An oil dielectric helical pulse line to demonstrate the principles of a Pulse Line Ion Accelerator (PLIA) has been designed and fabricated. The simulation of the axial electric field of an accelerator with CST code has been completed and the simulation results show complete agreement with the theoretical calculations. To fully understand the real value of the electric field excited from the helical line in PLIA, an optical electric integrated electric field measurement system was adopted. The measurement result shows that the real magnitude of axial electric field is smaller than that calculated, probably due to the actual pitch of the resister column which is much less than that of helix.


This paper presents the performance investigation and FPGA implementation aspects of a real-time adaptive MIMO DFE system. MIMO communication systems have been a strong research topic for several years because of spectral efficiency advantages, and are starting to see adoption in real-time communication systems. The group research department in Tait Electronics has a reconfigurable platform for MIMO research. In particular, the platform has an adaptive multivariate DFE, utilizing LMS, currently implemented. The LMS algorithm has been simulated and optimized for implementation on the FPGA. The main objective of the paper is to present the investigative work for an alternative RLS algorithm by comparing its performance and implementation to the LMS algorithm. RLS is known to be more complex but offers a potentially faster convergence speed. Stability and complexity issues are also discussed


Allergic rhinitis is one of the common allergic diseases. Symptoms of allergic rhinitis are pruritus (itching) of the nose, sneezing, nasal congestion and rhinorrhea. Rhinorrhea is a result of an increase in nasal secretion and is one of the fundamental components of allergic rhinitis. The first aim of this thesis was to quantitatively analyse this parameter of the nasal response following nasal challenge with synthetic inflammatory mediators. In order to quantitatively measure the amount of nasal secretion, a simple and relatively non-traumatic method for collecting the secretion was developed. Insertion of a cotton bud into each nostril proved to be an efficient method for quantitatively analysing an increase in nasal secretion produced following exogenous application of synthetic inflammatory mediators. Secondly, the mechanism by which mediators induced nasal secretion was also examined by analysis of protein content in nasal lavage after mediator administration. An increase in albumin concentration indicated an increase in vascular permeability whereas glandular secretion was evaluated by an increase in lysozyme and lactoferrin (serous cell origin) and fucose for mucous glycoprotein secretion (mucous cell origin). This thesis presents an investigation on the secretory activity of human nasal mucosa and the source of the secretion induced by increasing concentrations of methacholine, histamine and bradykinin in normal human subjects, and substance P in atopic and normal subjects.
An increase in nasal secretion was observed following nasal challenge with methacholine, histamine and bradykinin. Methacholine- and histamine-induced nasal secretion was a mixture of both vascular and glandular proteins while bradykinin-induced nasal secretion contained protein of vascular origin. The antihistamine, cetirizine, and the bradykinin B2 receptor antagonist, Hoe 140, inhibited histamine- and bradykinin-induced increases in nasal secretion of albumin, respectively. Cetirizine had no effect on histamine-induced glandular secretion. Challenge of one nostril with 1000 lig histamine induced reflex albumin secretion in the opposite, non-challenged nostril. This indicated that histamine may induce neuronal reflexes in normal subjects but a high concentration was needed. The effects of the neuropeptide, substance P, were examined in normal and atopic subjects. Substance P induced a vascular response but not a glandular response. Atopic subjects produced greater responses, albumin release and facial cutaneous blood flow, than in normal subjects.


This study reports the manufacture, microstructure, and tribological behaviour of carbon nanotube reinforced aluminium composites against pure aluminium. The specimens were fabricated using powder metallurgy method. The nanotubes in weight percentages of 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 were homogeneously dispersed and mechanically alloyed using a high energy ball milling. The milled powders were cold compacted and then isothermally sintered in air. The density of all samples was measured using Archimedes method and all had a relative density between 92.22% and 97.74%. Vickers hardness increased with increasing CNT fraction up to 1.5 wt% and then reduced. The microstructures and surfaces were investigated using high resolution scanning electron microscope SEM. The tribological tests showed that the CNT reinforced composites displayed lower wear rate and friction coefficient compared to the pure aluminium under mild wear conditions. However, for severe wear conditions, the CNT reinforced composites exhibited higher friction coefficient and wear rate compared to the pure aluminium. It was also found that the friction and wear behaviour of CNT reinforced composites is significantly dependent on the applied load and there is a critical load beyond which CNTs could have adverse impact on the wear resistance of aluminium.


Regions in the Czech Republic, the same as in most European countries, show in their rural areas a considerable difference rate from points of view demographic, social and economic as well as from point of view of infrastructure. The paper deals with an assessment of NUTS 4 in Kralovehradecky region in light of rural development and agriculture indicators. The methodological approach is based on multivariate statistical analysis using composite indicators. Identification and a subsequent analysis of these differences and a determination of a certain sequence of regions and their categorization can be beneficial for definition of trouble shooting regions and better support aiming. In the paper is also evaluated current regional policy applied in observed NUTS 4 in relation with disparity analysis results and categorization.


In this study, four species of Thymus (T. leptobotrys Murb. , T. pallidus Batt. , T. broussonetti Boiss. and T. maroccanus Ball.) were studied. The phytochemical screening revealed that leaves and steams of the four species, in general, contain tannins, flavonoids, coumarins, saponins, carotenoids, reducing sugars, quinones, terpenoids, steroids and triterpenoids. The antioxidant effects of methanolic extracts from Moroccan Thymus species were studied using two experiments having different mechanisms. The antioxidant activity was measured by 1,1-diphenyl-2picrylhydrazyl (DPPH) reduction spectrophotometric method and ferric reducing antioxidant power (FRAP). The results of antioxidant activity were different for each species depending on the applied test. The highest activity is presented by DPPH in the stems methanolic extract of T. broussonetti Boiss. (IC50=0.132±0.034 mg/mL). However, the test of FRAP showed that T. pallidus Batt. has the highest antioxidant activity (EC50=0.095±0.001 mg/mL).


CdTe/CdS/ZnS core-shell-shell (CSS) quantum dots (QDs) were synthesized in aqueous solution via water-bathing combined hydrothermal method using L-cysteine (L-Cys) as a stabilizer. This method possesses both the advantages of water-bathing and hydrothermal methods, and thus can prepare CSS QDs with markedly reduced synthesis time than previously reported methods. The as-prepared QDs display a higher fluorescent intensity than bare CdTe or CdTe/CdS. After co-cultured with yeast at different growth phase, the as-prepared L-Cys capped CdTe/CdS/ZnS QDs showed much less toxicity than the other CdTe or CdTe/CdS QDs. Our results demonstrate that the CSS QD would have a promising potential in fields of bio-labeling and cell imaging.


Building on earlier research in forecasting acceptance of electric vehicles three marketing communication strategies are compared. The strategies are information acceleration, show room visits and free trials. In the first a computerised marketing program, M-EV99, which simulates web-based marketing, is developed and used. The second strategy, show room visits, simulates the traditional car dealer situation while the third, free trials, is an extension of the second. Seen with the eyes of a potential customer, the electric vehicles represent a new, and unknown, technology, which mainly removes one of many non-market disadvantages of traditional vehicles, local emissions, and reduces significantly the second, greenhouse gas emissions. However, these benefits come at high costs to the individual owner/user of the electric vehicle: higher price, limited driving range, long recharging times, and lower top speed and acceleration. A product like this hardly sells itself. Hence, skilful marketing is needed in order for it to be accepted and diffused. For the covering abstract and the URL of the conference see ITRD E205769. (A)


The mixture proportions of pretraining data domains (e.g., Wikipedia, books, web text) greatly affect language model (LM) performance. In this paper, we propose Domain Reweighting with Minimax Optimization (DoReMi), which first trains a small proxy model using group distributionally robust optimization (Group DRO) over domains to produce domain weights (mixture proportions) without knowledge of downstream tasks. We then resample a dataset with these domain weights and train a larger, full-sized model. In our experiments, we use DoReMi on a 280M-parameter proxy model to find domain weights for training an 8B-parameter model (30x larger) more efficiently. On The Pile, DoReMi improves perplexity across all domains, even when it downweights a domain. DoReMi improves average few-shot downstream accuracy by 6.5% points over a baseline model trained using The Pile's default domain weights and reaches the baseline accuracy with 2.6x fewer training steps. On the GLaM dataset, DoReMi, which has no knowledge of downstream tasks, even matches the performance of using domain weights tuned on downstream tasks.


This paper begins with a list of commonly recognized forms of play and a discussion of definitions of play. This is followed by an overview of the ontogeny, phylogeny, mechanisms, and possible functions of human play. Next the question of whether or not play should be regarded as a separate emotion from interest is addressed. Play resembles the emotion of interest (or curiosity) in its affects and cognitive elicitors. Play differs from interest in exhibiting somewhat distinctive behavioral, visceral, and expressive emotional properties. This evidence, together with phylogenetic information, suggests that interest, exploration, and play constitute the same basic emotion, with exploration being an evolutionary offshoot of interest and play an offshoot of exploration.


: Knowledge of peripheral nerve anatomy, coupled with available clinical tools for examination, provides the foundation for initial evaluation. Use of this information may be related to the specific injury and a reconstructive plan formulated to maximize the potential for recovery. Realistic expectations can be presented to the patient based on information from summarized clinical experience. The field of nerve repair continues to change rapidly, and clinicians must utilize all resources available for planning, evaluation, and management. As the cellular behaviors of nerve regeneration are delineated, new avenues of research will open.


Background The Greenwich Care Partnership (GCP) was born out of the Marie Curie Delivering Choice Programme (DCP). Three service providers were asked to develop the service, the Hospice acts as the prime contractor and sub-contracts others to deliver specific elements of the service. Aim The service aims to increase the number of people who die in their place of choice by ensuring that appropriate health and personal care services are available and that their families have sufficient support. Approach used The service operates alongside core services to support high quality care across four areas: Care co-ordination Rapid Response Service Personal care and support Night care Although the elements of service are provided by different providers, they work together to ensure care is seamless 24/7. Outcomes The GCP was commissioned as a "test and learn project"; now in it's 3rd year, the service has developed in response to local need and resources have been flexibly allocated to provide responsive, high quality care. Each provider has signed up to the success of the project and each has an equal stake in ensuring that the service meets its key performance indicators. The project has succeeded in supporting an increase in home and hospice deaths and a reduction in hospital admissions, length of stay and deaths. Application to hospice practice The model and contracting arrangements have attracted National interest amongst Hospices and commissioners, and has been cited as a model of good practice for others to build on. Thinking strategically about the role of hospices The GCP model is a natural extension of the Hospice service, producing efficiencies and quality improvements. With the current proposed model for palliative care funding, Hospices will need to take on the role as prime contractors in order to survive.


Climate change and energy crises require the development of new sustainable materials to realise reliable electrochemical energy storage devices. Spinel-type Li4Ti5O12 (LTO) is one of the most promising anode materials not only for Li-based batteries, but also for those relying on sodium. While Li+ ion dynamics at the early stages of lithiation has been studied already previously, almost no data on the diffusion properties of Na+ ions can be found in the literature. Here, we used nucleus-specific 7Li and 23Na nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to quantify the motional processes in mixed-conducting Li4Na x Ti5O12 with x = 0.1, 0.5 and 1.5 on the angstrom length scale. Most importantly, our results reveal a strong increase in Li+ diffusivity in the early stages of chemical sodiation that is accompanied by a sharp decrease in activation energy when x reaches 0.5. The two-component 7Li NMR spectra point to the evolution of an interfacial solid solution at very low sodiation levels (x = 0.1). At x = 0.5, these regions emerge over almost the entire crystallite area, enabling rapid 8a-16c-8a Li+ exchange (0.4 eV), which leads to facile long-range ion transport. We direct the attention of the reader towards the initial formation of solid solutions in LTO-based anode materials and their capital impact on overall ion dynamics. In contrast to macroscopic electrochemical testing, NMR is uniquely positioned to detect and to resolve these exceptionally fast ion dynamics during the initial stages of sodiation. As these processes crucially determine the fast-charging performance of LTO-type batteries, our study lays the atomistic foundations to establish a general understanding of why two-phase materials such as LTO can act as an impressive insertion host for both Li and Na ions.


Diabetes mellitus is considered to be a chronic disease that makes millions of lives miserable. Type I and Type II diabetes mellitus are caused depending upon the insulin level. Detection and diagnosis of diabetes mellitus has been performed effectively by various plasma glucose tests in the current medical systems including A1C test, fasting plasma glucose test (FPG) and oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT). Though the current diagnosis systems provide better results, the problems like imperfect concordance between the tests reduces the diagnosis accuracy. Another method of diagnosis is from the retinal images as diabetes causes retinal blindness, but these type of systems generally requires specialists to perform operation and also slightly expensive. Hence in this paper, the mobile based diabetes diagnosis system is proposed by obtaining the features from the real time inputs of glucometer with multiple measurement clinical data and retinal image features. The optimal features are selected using an optimization technique while the statistical measures are calculated for the time series data features. These features are fused together and trained using neural networks called hierarchical extreme learning machines (HELM) NN for the generation of dataset with minimum error samples. Then the association rule mining algorithm called FP-growth is employed to generate rules for determining the associations between the different sets of data. Thus the type I and type II diagnosis mellitus is diagnosed effectively with better accuracy using the proposed mobile based diabetes diagnosis system.


Women in Print is a collection of essays in two related volumes which considers the diversity of roles occupied by women in the design, authorship, production, distribution and consumption of printed material from the fifteenth century onwards.
Women in Print I: Design and Identities demonstrates women's multi-layered contribution to design, printing and publishing history through eleven case studies of women artists, compositors, editors, engravers, photographers, printers, publishers, scribes, stationers, typesetters, widows in business, and writers. It offers an examination of women as active participants and contributors in the many and varied aspects of design and print culture, including the production of illustrations, typefaces, periodical layouts, photographic prints and bound volumes.
Women have often participated in design and print culture throughout history, yet their impact has typically been neglected and undervalued, or deliberately obscured from historical accounts. This collection of essays covers, and recovers, the lives and work of women in print, emphasizing how their contributions brought positive change not only to the industries they contributed to, but also to the wider social and cultural settings of their time.


in combination with the quality of the environment during childhood was predictive of individual differences on reported measures of attention. The authors suggest that their findings support the use of a multidimensional approach to the measurement of attention due to the meaningful correlations among the tasks, behavior ratings and parental report measures. These findings appear to hold clinical implications for the early identification of low birth weight children at risk to receive diagnoses of ADHD. Within this group of children, risk factors for a diagnosis of ADHD appear to include characteristics of the child as well as characteris-


Abstract Purpose: To identify the existing evidence evaluating the cost-effectiveness of physiotherapy treatments for people with neurological disorders. Methods: Multiple databases were searched from database inception until July 2018. Studies estimating the cost-effectiveness as incremental cost-effectiveness ratios, cost per quality-adjusted life year, cost per disability-adjusted life year and cost per other measurable results were included. Physiotherapy Evidence Database scale, and Consensus on Health Economic Criteria list were used for rating the quality of the evidence. Results: Ten studies involving 1462 participants were included. Aerobic training, progressive strength training, and a pragmatic physiotherapy program (combination of stretching, strength, and balance training) were reported as potentially cost-effective for older adults with vascular cognitive impairment, falls prevention in Parkinson's disease and multiple sclerosis respectively. Physiotherapy as an adjuvant for pain control was also reported as cost-effective for reflex sympathetic dystrophy. One study testing extra physiotherapy-by-physiotherapy assistant in cerebral palsy and two studies testing extra therapy using a robotic arm and Wii therapy for hand rehabilitation in stroke were reported as not cost-effective. Conclusions: There are limited studies that have evaluated the cost-effectiveness of physiotherapy treatments in neurological disorders. Three studies that combined extra physiotherapy-by-physiotherapy assistant and novel interventions with conventional physiotherapy were found not cost-effective. Implications for Rehabilitation Progressive muscle strengthening exercise over a period of 6-month is reported to be cost-effective for falls prevention in people with Parkinson's disease Aerobic training is reported as potentially cost-effective for older adults with vascular cognitive impairment Physiotherapy given as an adjuvant treatment is reported to be potentially cost-effective for reflex sympathetic dystrophy of less than 1-year duration One study reported physiotherapy involving static stretching, aerobic exercise, strengthening exercise, and balance training as cost-effective for people with multiple sclerosis Additional physiotherapy-by-physiotherapy assistant or family member for improving motor development in cerebral palsy and the use of novel physiotherapy techniques such as robotics or Wii plus conventional physiotherapy for improving arm function in stroke are found not cost-effective Group therapy for improving physical activity in mild Alzheimer's disease is found not cost-effective.


Using historical analysis and practice, this paper finds that the past many years structural modifications and adaptations by world cities have generally followed the mayor-council and council-manager cities theories, increasing their administrative efficiency more or later. At the same time, fewer cities are now either distinctly mayor-council or council-manager in form, but most cities using in the many case a fuzzy structures, constituting a hybrid model of local government or the type III city. What is it the model? What new elements or components and philosophy have this model? And, what is a new in this model? Are the cities of the type III - the "smart cities" ? The answer is, there is no universally accepted definition as a smart city, so and the city of the III model. The search of these answers is very important for Ukraine, where the initiative to build smart cities comes mainly from the local community of active young people, for whom the smart city is seen as a tool that allows them to take part in the government, to solve the issues of life of the city together. The focus of the study and representation of the results in this paper is search of answers on the main questions of the construction of the city governance model based on the researches and experience of the world' cities leaders. Raising the questions and searching for the answers will serve as a guide to some researchers and the search for other possible answers, encourage scientific research by young researchers, students. More important than the science abstractions, there are possible application results and conclusion of this paper to city governments that hold potential for improving the quality of city governance.


BACKGROUND
 Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a chronic neurodegenerative disease. Current monitoring practices predominantly rely on brief and infrequent assessments, which may not be representative of the real-world patient experience. Smartphone technology provides an opportunity to assess people's daily-lived experience of MS on a frequent, regular basis outside of episodic clinical evaluations.

 OBJECTIVE
 The objectives of this study were to evaluate the feasibility and utility of capturing real-world MS-related health data remotely using a smartphone app, "elevateMS," to investigate the associations between self-reported MS severity and sensor-based active functional tests measurements, and the impact of local weather conditions on disease burden.

 METHODS
 This was a 12-week, observational, digital health study involving 3 cohorts: self-referred participants who reported an MS diagnosis, clinic-referred participants with neurologist-confirmed MS, and participants without MS (controls). Participants downloaded the elevateMS app and completed baseline assessments, including self-reported physical ability (Patient-Determined Disease Steps [PDDS]), as well as longitudinal assessments of quality of life (Quality of Life in Neurological Disorders [Neuro-QoL] Cognitive, Upper Extremity, and Lower Extremity Function) and daily health (MS symptoms, triggers, health, mobility, pain). Participants also completed functional tests (finger-tapping, walk and balance, voice-based Digit Symbol Substitution Test [DSST], and finger-to-nose) as an independent assessment of MS-related cognition and motor activity. Local weather data were collected each time participants completed an active task. Associations between self-reported baseline/longitudinal assessments, functional tests, and weather were evaluated using linear (for cross-sectional data) and mixed-effects (for longitudinal data) regression models.

 RESULTS
 A total of 660 individuals enrolled in the study; 31 withdrew, 495 had MS (n=359 self-referred, n=136 clinic-referred), and 134 were controls. Participation was highest in clinic-referred versus self-referred participants (median retention: 25.5 vs 7.0 days). The top 5 most common MS symptoms, reported at least once by participants with MS, were fatigue (310/495, 62.6%), weakness (222/495, 44.8%), memory/attention issues (209/495, 42.2%), and difficulty walking (205/495, 41.4%), and the most common triggers were high ambient temperature (259/495, 52.3%), stress (250/495, 50.5%), and late bedtime (221/495, 44.6%). Baseline PDDS was significantly associated with functional test performance in participants with MS (mixed model–based estimate of most significant feature across functional tests [β]: finger-tapping: β=–43.64, P<.001; DSST: β=–5.47, P=.005; walk and balance: β=–.39, P=.001; finger-to-nose: β=.01, P=.01). Longitudinal Neuro-QoL scores were also significantly associated with functional tests (finger-tapping with Upper Extremity Function: β=.40, P<.001; walk and balance with Lower Extremity Function: β=–99.18, P=.02; DSST with Cognitive Function: β=1.60, P=.03). Finally, local temperature was significantly associated with participants' test performance (finger-tapping: β=–.14, P<.001; DSST: β=–.06, P=.009; finger-to-nose: β=–53.88, P<.001).

 CONCLUSIONS
 The elevateMS study app captured the real-world experience of MS, characterized some MS symptoms, and assessed the impact of environmental factors on symptom severity. Our study provides further evidence that supports smartphone app use to monitor MS with both active assessments and patient-reported measures of disease burden. App-based tracking may provide unique and timely real-world data for clinicians and patients, resulting in improved disease insights and management.


OBJECTIVE Using intraoperative electrocorticography (ECoG) to identify epileptogenic areas and improve postoperative seizure control in patients with low-grade gliomas (LGGs) remains inconclusive. In this study the authors retrospectively report on a surgery strategy that is based on intraoperative ECoG monitoring. METHODS A total of 108 patients with LGGs presenting at the onset of refractory seizures were included. Patients were divided into 2 groups. In Group I, all patients underwent gross-total resection (GTR) combined with resection of epilepsy areas guided by intraoperative ECoG, while patients in Group II underwent only GTR. Tumor location, tumor side, tumor size, seizure-onset features, seizure frequency, seizure duration, preoperative antiepileptic drug therapy, intraoperative electrophysiological monitoring, postoperative Engel class, and histological tumor type were compared between the 2 groups. RESULTS Univariate analysis demonstrated that tumor location and intraoperative ECoG monitoring correlated with seizure control. There were 30 temporal lobe tumors, 22 frontal lobe tumors, and 2 parietal lobe tumors in Group I, with 18, 24, and 12 tumors in those same lobes, respectively, in Group II (p < 0.05). In Group I, 74.07% of patients were completely seizure free (Engel Class I), while 38.89% in Group II (p < 0.05). In Group I, 96.30% of the patients achieved satisfactory postoperative seizure control (Engel Class I or II), compared with 77.78% in Group II (p < 0.05). Intraoperative ECoG monitoring indicated that in patients with temporal lobe tumors, most of the epileptic discharges (86.7%) were detected at the anterior part of the temporal lobe. In these patients with epilepsy discharges located at the anterior part of the temporal lobe, satisfactory postoperative seizure control (93.3%) was achieved after resection of the tumor and the anterior part of the temporal lobe. CONCLUSIONS Intraoperative ECoG monitoring provided the exact location of epileptogenic areas and significantly improved postoperative seizure control of LGGs. In patients with temporal lobe LGGs, resection of the anterior temporal lobe with epileptic discharges was sufficient to control seizures.


Innovation is essential for agricultural and economic development, especially in today's rapidly changing global environment. While farmers have been recognised as one of the key sources of innovation, many studies on agricultural innovations continue to consider farmers as adopters of externally-driven innovations only. Based on cross-sectional data from 409 farm households, this study, in contrast, analyses the innovation-generating behaviour among rural farmers in northern Ghana. Inspired by two innovation theories – induced innovation and innovation systems – we focus on the determinants of innovation behaviour. Employing recursive bivariate probit and endogenous treatment-regression models which control for selection bias, we find that participation in Farmer Field Fora, a participatory extension approach with elements of the innovation systems perspective, is a key determinant of innovation behaviour in farm households. Other important determinants are education, climate shocks and risk preferences. These results are robust to alternative specifications and estimation techniques. We conclude that policies for the generation of innovations among farmers should focus on education, and on building innovation capacity through institutional arrangements that permit interactions and learning between stakeholders.


We have earlier shown that passive immunization against differentiation‐inducing factor/leukemia‐inhibitory factor (D factor) activity improves the survival of endotoxemic mice, suggesting that D factor may contribute to the systemic toxicity associated with tumor necrosis factor (TNF). In the current experiments, TNF induced D‐factor gene expression in various tissues of non‐tumor‐bearing female C57B1/6 mice. Passive immunization against D‐factor significantly improved survival after a lethal TNF challenge in both non‐tumor‐bearing (p2 < 0.02) and tumor‐bearing mice (p2 < 0.01). In mice bearing 10‐days.c. MCA 105 sarcomas, D‐factor antibody alone had no effect on tumor growth as compared with control IgG. Tumor regression and regrowth in mice treated i.v. with TNF was not affected by pre‐treatment with D‐factor antibody, as compared with pre‐treatment with IgG. However, TNF‐treatment‐related mortality was abrogated by pre‐treatment with D‐factor antibody (0% vs. 36% for IgG‐pre‐treated controls). These results indicate that endogenous D‐factor activity contributes to the toxicity but not to the anti‐tumor effects of TNF therapy. With renewed interest in the use of TNF for the treatment of patients with cancer, improved understanding of the role of D factor in mediating the effects of TNF may have important clinical benefits.


Serrated polyposis syndrome (SPS), also known as hyperplastic polyposis, is a syndrome of unknown genetic basis defined by the occurrence of multiple serrated polyps in the large intestine and associated with an increased risk of colorectal cancer (CRC). There are a variety of SPS presentations, which may encompass a continuum of phenotypes modified by environmental and genetic factors. To explore the phenotype of SPS, we recorded the histologic and molecular characteristics of multiple colorectal polyps in patients with SPS recruited between 2000 and 2010 from genetics clinics in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Three specialist gastrointestinal pathologists reviewed the polyps, which they classified into conventional adenomas or serrated polyps, with various subtypes, according to the current World Health Organization criteria. Mutations in BRAF and KRAS and mismatch repair protein expression were determined in a subset of polyps. A total of 100 patients were selected for the study, of whom 58 were female and 42 were male. The total polyp count per patient ranged from 6 to 150 (median 30). The vast majority of patients (89%) had polyposis affecting the entire large intestine. From this cohort, 406 polyps were reviewed. Most of the polyps (83%) were serrated polyps: microvesicular hyperplastic polyps (HP) (n=156), goblet cell HP (n=25), sessile serrated adenoma/polyps (SSA/P) (n=110), SSA/P with cytologic dysplasia (n=28), and traditional serrated adenomas (n=18). A further 69 polyps were conventional adenomas. BRAF mutation was mainly detected in SSA/P with dysplasia (95%), SSA/P (85%), microvesicular HP (76%), and traditional serrated adenoma (54%), whereas KRAS mutation was present mainly in goblet cell HP (50%) and in tubulovillous adenoma (45%). Four of 6 SSA/Ps with high-grade dysplasia showed loss of MLH1/PMS2 expression. CRC was diagnosed in 39 patients who were more often found to have a conventional adenoma compared with patients without CRC (P=0.003). Patients with SPS referred to genetics clinics had a pancolonic disease with a high polyp burden and a high rate of BRAF mutation. The occurrence of CRC was associated with the presence of conventional adenoma.