An anonymous survey of university accounting faculty was conducted to assess current perceptions of the peer review process in accounting journals. The responses revealed that (a) most respondents are fairly positive about the peer review process, especially the process being fair/unbiased and improving the quality of research; (b) the most serious perceived threats to review process integrity involve reviewer misconduct (e.g., delaying reviews for self-interest or rejecting papers for revenge); (c) editors allowing excessive delays in the process and institutional favoritism by editors are seen as the most prevalent issues; (d) editors/associate editors of high-level or top-tier journals are most positive about the review process, while assistant professors, those at doctoral-granting institutions, and those submitting to top-tier journals are least positive; and (e) respondents' suggestions for improving the review process emphasize improving timeliness, reducing favoritism, and reconsidering the notion of blind reviews (some consider blind reviews to be impossible, but others want to ensure that reviews are blind). Based on the results and other sources, we offer a proposed starting point for a peer review code of conduct for accounting journals.


Online advertising is an important tool that can be utilized by charities to elicit attention and funding. A critical examination of advertisement strategies is thus necessary to increase the efficacy of fundraising efforts. Previous studies have shown that individuals' moral views and perceptions of social norms can play important roles in charitable behavior. Thus, the current protocol describes a study to examine whether framing charitable advertisements in line with participants' morality and increasing the salience of descriptive social norms increases subsequent charitable behavior. We describe experimental, online methods, whereby participants are provided with a framed call-to-action and normative information within a custom-developed application or existing survey platform. Furthermore, in the exploratory fashion, we discuss the possibility of collecting participants' Facebook data and predicting moral profiles from this data. If there is an increased rate of donations as a result of moral compatibility and/or increased norm salience, charities can leverage this knowledge to increase the donations by tailoring their campaigns in a more appealing way for their prospective donors. Moreover, if it turns out to be possible to predict one's moral profile from Facebook footprints, charities can use this knowledge to find and target people that are more likely to support their cause. However, this introduces important ethical questions that are discussed within this protocol.


Certification organisations have become important players in the monitoring of compliance with social and environmental standards. This is particularly the case in relation to corporate operators producing in or sourcing from developing countries. At the same time, some of the worst industrial disasters in recent years, such as the Ali Enterprises factory fire in Pakistan or the collapse of the Rana Plaza building in Bangladesh, occurred after the relevant operators had been certified for their compliance with standards. This raised doubts about the care that the relevant certification organisation had exercised. This article explores potential grounds on which corporate social responsibility (CSR) certification organisations may incur liability towards third parties, in particular employees of subsidiaries or suppliers. To this end, it discusses the functions of certification generally before it analyses the potential liability of certification bodies under German and English law. It considers various circumstances under which certification takes place, including certification that is required by law, certification that is required to obtain certain benefits, such as tax reductions, certification within private CSR schemes and the entirely voluntary use of CSR certification as an instrument of supply chain control.


Many tunnels are built below the ground water level. In case of a fire or oil spill there is a risk of environmental contamination of ground water supplies or sensitive recipients. Successful treatment of extinguishing water or spills needs rapid attention in such cases. This paper discusses the environmental consequences of a tunnel fire or an oil spill inside the tunnel. It is suggested from the present study of existing technologies, that the work of development within this field be divided into three different areas where two are pro-active while the last requires the development of new technologies for on-site collection and treatment of water. In sensitive areas, this treatment could be combined with in-situ surveys and treatments both prior to and after an incident. The two pro-active steps are characterization and categorization of tunnels along with the development of a digital system where site specific properties can be modeled. Additionally, at the fire scene, new mobile technologies are needed for effective treatment.Finally the paper discusses the environmental challenges the fire officer has to with deal during an incident and the need for further education of first responders on how to deal with these issues both in terms of short term and long term incident management priorities.


The numerical analysis of the output voltage of the electric generators based on the electromagnetic induction equation has been carried out using the conjugate-gradient method. The physical parameters used as constant numbers are from the experimental results of the electric generator with lower frequency, i.e.: the permanent magnet, cross-sectional area, and the angle between the magnetic field and the magnetic moment. The others parameter considered in the conjugate gradient-method are the number of coils of the solenoid and the output voltage which is generated from the kinetic energy. The results of the calculation show that the error rate of the method is approximately 5%. Overall, this numerical analysis shows that the output voltage can be balanced through the adjustment of the number of coils of the solenoid and the rotational speed of the generator.


The ability of seedlings to tolerate temperature extremes is important in determining the distribution of perennial plants in the arid south-western USA, and the manner in which elevated CO2 impacts the ability of plants to tolerate high temperatures is relatively unknown. Whereas the effects of chronic high temperature (30‐38 °C) and elevated CO2 are comparatively well understood, little research has assessed plant performance in elevated CO 2 during extreme (> 45 °C) temperature events. We exposed three species of Yucca to 360 and 700 μmol CO2 mol ‐1 for 8 months, then 9 d of high temperature (up to 53 °C) to evaluate the impacts of elevated CO2 on the potential for photosynthetic function during external high temperature. Seedlings of a coastal C3 species (Yucca whipplei), a desert C3 species (Yucca brevifolia), and a desert CAM species (Yucca schidigera), were used to test for differences among functional groups. In general, Yuccas exposed to elevated CO2 showed decreases in carboxylation efficiency as compared with plants grown at ambient before the initiation of high temperature. The coastal species (Y. whipplei) showed significant reductions (33%) in CO2 saturated maximum assimilation rate (Amax), but the desert species (Y. brevifolia and Y. schidigera) showed no such reductions in Amax. Stomatal conductance was lower in elevated CO2 as compared with ambient throughout the temperature event; however, there were species-specific differences over time. Elevated CO2 enhanced photosynthesis in Y. whipplei at high temperatures for a period of 4 d, but not for Y. brevifolia or Y. schidigera. Elevated CO2 offset photoinhibition (measured as Fv/Fm) in Y. whipplei as compared with ambient CO2, depending on exposure time to high temperature. Stable Fv/Fm in Y. whipplei occurred in parallel with increases in the quantum yield of photosystem II (ΦPSII) at high temperatures in elevated CO2. The value of ΦPSII remained constant or decreased with increasing temperature in all other treatment and species combinations. This suggests that the reductions in Fv/Fm resulted from thermal energy dissipation in the pigment bed for Y. brevifolia and Y. schidigera. The greater efficiency of photosystem II in Y. whipplei helped to maintain photosynthetic function at high temperatures in elevated CO2. These patterns are in contrast to the hypothesis that high temperatures in elevated CO2 would increase the potential for photoinhibition. Our results suggest that elevated CO2 may offset high-temperature stress in coastal Yucca, but not in those species native to drier systems. Therefore, in the case of Y. whipplei, elevated CO2 may allow plants to survive extreme temperature events, potentially relaxing the effects of high temperature on the establishment in novel habitats.


A novel write bitline (BL) charge sharing write driver (CSWD) and a half-V
 DD
 read BL (RBL) pre-charge scheme is presented for a single-ended 8T static random access memory (SRAM). Before write enable (WE) signal assertion, CSWD equalises the write BLs by allowing their charge sharing. Both write BLs are equalised at the middle value of supply voltage using leakage current compensation block. Afterwards, as WE signal is asserted, CSWD produces the rail-to-rail levels at write BL pair. Charging of a BL from half-V
 DD
 to V
 DD
 essentially reduces the write dynamic power dissipation by 50%. Half-V
 DD
 precharging is used for RBL to achieve low-power read operation. Read port is powered by virtual ground rail to improve the RBL leakages. The authors compare the proposed 8T design (P8T) with conventional 6T (C6T) and 8T (C8T) designs in a 45 nm technology node. Write power dissipation is reduced by 42% and dynamic read power is reduced by more than 39%. Overall leakages are reduced by more than 18% compared with C6T and I
 on
/I
 off
 ratio of the RBL is improved by more than two orders of magnitude compared with conventional 8T (C8T).


Antihyperlipidemic activity of aqueous extract of Fagonia cretica L. (Zygophyllaceae) whole plant was evaluated in male Wistar albino rats. After induced hyperlipidaemia by high fat diet, the aqueous extract of Fagonia cretica L. 250 & 500mg/kg (AEFC) and standard drug atorvastatin were administered orally to different group of rats for two times at an interval of 12 hours and continued for 15 days. After termination of the study, all group animals were sacrificed and lipid profile such as Total Cholesterol (TC), Triglycerides (TG), Low Density Lipoproteins (LDL) and High Density Lipoproteins was estimated. High fat diet showed significant increase in LDL, TG, TC and a significant decrease in HDL in serum. The aqueous extract of Fagonia cretica L. and atorvastatin treated groups showed significantly increased HDL levels and decreased TC, TG and HDL-LDL ratio. The Aqueous extract of Fagonia cretica L. has showed significant antihyperlipidemic activity.


In this paper, we present a new generative model for learning latent embeddings. Compared to the classical generative process, where each observed data point is generated from an individual latent variable, our approach assumes a global latent variable to generate the whole set of observed data points. We then propose a learning objective that is derived as an approximation to a lower bound to the data log likelihood, leading to our algorithm, WiSE-ALE. Compared to the standard ELBO objective, where the variational posterior for each data point is encouraged to match the prior distribution, the WiSE-ALE objective matches the averaged posterior, over all samples, with the prior, allowing the sample-wise posterior distributions to have a wider range of acceptable embedding mean and variance and leading to better reconstruction quality in the auto-encoding process. Through various examples and comparison to other state-of-the-art VAE models, we demonstrate that WiSE-ALE has excellent information embedding properties, whilst still retaining the ability to learn a smooth, compact representation.


Dalit writing is the adventure of opposition against the authority of Brahmanic writing which claims to be omniscient and widely inclusive while displaying a thin, uneven, bent and one-sided perspective on the real world. Society is evolving. So clearly the job of writing and articulation must be changed as needs be. A feeling of inadequacy appended with 'being Dalit' is diminished significantly. It is time taking process and will go with time. So it is fundamental that our methodology towards Dalit writing must be changed. There is an uncommon change in dalit awareness in decades ago. The discouraged awareness of dalits is evolving. It is supplanted by standing up for themselves in each field. Dalits, who were essentially undetectable from socio-political field, are making their essence all over the place. They are giving their commitment to society. So our writing must include the changing job of dalits.


Pheochromocytoma [PHEO] and Cushing syndrome [CS] may sometimes coexist and very rarely originate from the same adrenal gland. There were 12 cases in the literature in which corticomedullary involvement has been reported. A few cases of primary aldosteronism coexisting with Pheochromocytomahave been reported so far. Also there is very little information about pheochromocytoma associated with Cushing's syndrome. Cushing's syndrome secondary to ectopic adrenocorticotropic hormone [ACTH] secretion has been frequently reported nowadays. Our literature search revealed no previous reports of a patient with PHEO and CS originating from the same adrenal gland and coexistent with acromegaly.


In this work, we introduce a diffusion-based text-to-speech (TTS) system for accent modelling. TTS systems have become a natural part of our surroundings. Nevertheless, because of the complexity of accent modelling, recent state-of-the-art solutions mainly focus on the most common variants of each language. In this work, we propose to address this issue with a newly proposed diffusion generative model (DDGM). We first show how we can adapt DDGMs to the problem of accent modelling. We evaluate and compare this approach with a recent state-of-the-art solu-tion, showing its superiority in modelling six different English accents. On top of our TTS system, we introduce a novel accent conversion method, where using the saliency map technique, we remove source accent-related features and replace them with the target ones through the diffusion process. We show that with this approach, we can perform accent conversion without a need for any additional speech information such as phonemes or text.


Motivated by the design of high speed switching fabrics, in this paper we propose a \emph{bit-stuffing} algorithm for generating forbidden transition codes to mitigate the crosstalk effect between adjacent wires in long on-chip buses. We first model a bus with forbidden transition constraints as a forbidden transition channel, and derive the Shannon capacity of such a channel. Then we perform a worst case analysis and a probabilistic analysis for the bit-stuffing algorithm. We show by both theoretic analysis and simulations that the coding rate of the bit stuffing encoding scheme for independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) Bernoulli input traffic is quite close to the Shannon capacity, and hence is much better than those of the existing forbidden transition codes in the literature, including the Fibonacci representation.


Strong effects of the Faraday instability on suspensions of rodlike colloidal particles are reported through measurements of the critical acceleration and of the surface wave amplitude. We show that the transition to parametrically excited surface waves displays discontinuous and hysteretic features. This subcritical behaviour is attributed to the shear-thinning properties of our colloidal suspensions thanks to a phenomenological model based on rheological data under large amplitude oscillatory shear. Birefringence measurements provide direct evidence that Faraday waves induce local nematic ordering of the rodlike colloids. While local alignment simply follows the surface oscillations for dilute, isotropic suspensions, permanent nematic patches are generated by surface waves in samples close to the isotropic-to-nematic transition and above the transition large domains align in the flow direction. This strong coupling between the fluid microstructure and a hydrodynamic instability is confirmed by numerical computations based on the microstructural response of rodlike viruses in shear flow.


Production, sustainment and repair technologies for light alloy components in the defence applications account for a significant proportion of Defence Materials Technology Centre (DMTC) activities. Key challenges in this regard include the affordable manufacture and repair & sustainment of Titanium components for new and legacy platforms. The DMTC research program portfolio incorporates collaborative technology development activities between industry and the research sector within a framework of a partnership model that includes input from the Defence customer on likely procurement opportunities for industry, and longer term strategic requirements of Defence. The technological focus is particularly on the benchmarking of strategies, technologies and manufacturing techniques associated with the manufacture of aerospace components via high speed machining. Developing affordable, cost-effective and best of breed machining processes and practices among a broad range of Australian manufacturing organisations is a key goal of the DMTC. This paper describes an initiative of the DMTC focused on developing and optimising engineering capability in metals manufacturing for aerospace applications. Data generated from a range of participating sources conducting machining trials of identical titanium and stainless steel components is compared and contrasted in the context of best practice development.


in several of the ''cysts''. MRI at 23 wks confirmed normal fetus and placenta with thick, high-signal myometrium and abnormal blood pooling on GRE sequences. The diagnoses of molar twin and triploidy were dismissed. In a case reported by Uotila et al. (massive multicystic dilatation of the uterine wall with myometrial venous thrombosis) maternal anemia, marked uterine enlargement, and abdominal discomfort occurred necessitating Cesarean delivery at 30 wks complicated by > 3L blood loss. Our patient was counseled re the risk of similar complications. She was managed conservatively and, although the uterus was abnormally large, she was not anemic or otherwise symptomatic. Spontaneous labor at 39 weeks resulted in vaginal delivery with manual extraction of the placenta for delayed third stage. There was no postpartum hemorrhage. Placental pathology was normal. Although the US and MR appearances are almost identical to Uotila's case, our patient had a benign course and a NSVD. It is important to differentiate this appearance from GTN as an excellent pregnancy outcome is possible. Careful clinical and ultrasound surveillance is a reasonable management strategy.


In this paper we present an interaction design method that starts from the user and his task. This implies that the designer has to develop perceivable actions for the user, based on the task to perform and the perceptual-motor skills of the user. Technical or time constraints of the design project must not hamper the natural performance of the task. Finally, the interaction designer should design a HCI system by extensively performing user tests with low fidelity prototypes with high (inter)action relevance. We tested this interaction design method for virtual clay modelling. The results support our belief that this method is of use in developing intuitive systems.


In the Swedish context, the discursive regime about linguistic phenomena is characterized by a 'matrix of intelligibility' (Butler 1999 [1990]) that promotes images of linguistic practices among adolescents in the suburbs not only as deviant and incomprehensible, but also as essentialized traits of ethnic Otherness, social and educational problems and, more recently, of an aggressive masculinity embodied in sexist and homophobic behaviour. Unlike dominant media representations which depict such linguistic practices as unintelligible as well as inherently sexist and homophobic, the aim of the present article is to take a queer stance and illustrate how ethnic insults, gay innuendos and misogynist talk are meaningful in the sense that they constitute a rich pool of interactional resources that allow the young men in our study to actively partake in the negotiation of a 'local masculine order' (Evaldsson 2005) in which positions of power, authority and solidarity are enacted and/or contested.


To the Editor: Providing medical care for Ebola virus–infected patients entails physical and psychological stress, extended shift times, and risk for infection. In addition, the wearing of personal protective equipment impairs communication and performance of diagnostic and therapeutic procedures. Lessons learned from outbreaks of other infectious diseases indicate that such challenging treatment environments require the monitoring of health care professionals for psychological distress (e.g., anxiety, depression, fatigue, and social isolation) to prevent personal exhaustion and reduced job performance (1).

In August 2014, the first patient in Germany known to have Ebola virus disease was admitted to the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (2) and received treatment in the isolation facility for 18 days. We hypothesized that health care professionals working in the isolation unit who had direct contact with the Ebola patient would show more signs of psychological distress than those not working in the isolation unit.

To test our hypothesis, we conducted a cross-sectional controlled study by using validated self-report scales (1,3–5) and open-response questions. Seven days after the Ebola patient was admitted, we distributed questionnaires to the 46 health care professionals (17 physicians, 29 nurses) who had direct contact with the patient (Table).

Table

Demographic characteristics, self-reported symptoms, and evaluation of working conditions of health care professionals with and without direct contact with an Ebola patient, Germany, 2014*

Of the 46 health care professionals, 30 participated in the study. During patient contact, these staff members wore Astro-Protect pressurized suits (Asatex, Bergheim, Germany). As a control group, 40 health care professionals from other wards in the same department were recruited and participated in the study. Providers in the control group cared for terminally ill patients and for patients with reduced consciousness, but they had no direct contact with the Ebola patient. The control participants were not recruited from intensive care units because, at the time of the study, the patient was not receiving intensive care treatment. The 2 groups were balanced with respect to age and occupational characteristics (Table). There was no special psychological support service for health care workers in this hospital. Staff members had received mandatory biweekly training, which included decontamination procedures, technical aspects of diagnostic procedures, and emergency care.

In contrast to our hypothesis, no significant differences emerged between the 2 groups with respect to the severity of somatic symptoms, anxiety, depression, and fatigue (Table). Moreover, mean total scores for both groups were at a comparable level to mean scores for the general population (3–5). However, health care professionals who had direct contact with the Ebola patient reported significantly greater social isolation and felt significantly more need for shorter shift hours. The open responses of participants who experienced social isolation suggested that their spouses, children, and other relatives had infection-related concerns. Additionally, half of the participants who did not have direct patient contact reported feeling a need for psychological preparation (Table). Nevertheless, almost all health care professionals (97% of those with direct patient contact, 93% of those without direct patient contact) believed that the health care facilities of the hospital were safe.

Our investigation of the psychological stress of health care professionals in a Western tertiary care center showed that a well-trained and dedicated team can cope well with the stress of caring for a severely ill Ebola patient. Of note, the direct patient contact group tended to comprise more male participants and more participants living with partners, which may have influenced the experience of psychological stress. No staff member refused to participate in the treatment of the Ebola patient, which underlines the high level of motivation within the team and may render direct comparison to other centers difficult.

While the patient was in the isolation unit, working shifts lasted up to 12 hours, consisting of 2 periods with 3–4 hours of work while wearing personal protective equipment in addition to time spent disinfecting. Most respondents felt that these shifts were too long. We therefore suggest that shift durations should be decreased to 8 hours comprising 2 blocks of 2 hours each for direct patient contact. Shorter shifts should improve staff satisfaction with the working conditions and potentially increase the personal safety of all health care personnel involved in direct patient contact.


The main thrust of this paper is to investigate the multi-scale retinex (MSR) approach to image enhancement to explain the effect of the processing from a theoretical standpoint. This leads to a new algorithm with fewer arbitrary parameters that is more flexible, maintains colour fidelity, and still preserves the contrast-enhancement benefits of the original MSR method. To accomplish this we identify the explicit and implicit processing goals of MSR. By decoupling the MSR operations from one another, we build an algorithm composed of independent steps that separates out the issues of gamma adjustment, colour balance, dynamic range compression, and colour enhancement, which are all jumbled together in the original MSR method. We then extend MSR with colour constancy and chromaticity-preserving contrast enhancement.


Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is a weakly supervised learning problem where the aim is to assign labels to sets or bags of instances, as opposed to traditional supervised learning where each instance is assumed to be independent and identically distributed (IID) and is to be labeled individually. Recent work has shown promising results for neural network models in the MIL setting. Instead of focusing on each instance, these models are trained in an end-to-end fashion to learn effective bag-level representations by suitably combining permutation invariant pooling techniques with neural architectures. In this paper, we consider modelling the interactions between bags using a graph and employ Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to facilitate end-to-end learning. Since a meaningful graph representing dependencies between bags is rarely available, we propose to use a Bayesian GNN framework that can generate a likely graph structure for scenarios where there is uncertainty in the graph or when no graph is available. Empirical results demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed technique for several MIL benchmark tasks and a distribution regression task.


The importance of online reviews continues to grow for both retailers and consumers. Typically, online reviews are summarised in terms of an average review score and the number of reviews. However, some retailers choose to additionally reveal information about the number of product or service sales. The current research investigated how consumer were influenced by this additional information – in particular, the ratio between the number of reviews and number of sales. As part of the investigation, we distinguish between two forms of product popularity: "purchase popularity", which relates to how often people are buying the product, and "word-of-mouth" (WoM) popularity, which relates to how often people are talking about the product. Across three online experiments, we found s a positive association between both types of popularity and purchase intentions. Factors influencing perceptions of purchase popularity were the number of sales, number of reviews, average product rating, and time the product had been on the market. Factors influencing perceptions of WoM popularity were the number of reviews, average product rating, and the ratio between the number of reviews and number of sales (the "reviewer percentage"). In light of these findings, retailers could strategically present review profile information such as the "reviewer percentage" contingent on the product's review profile.


Objective To characterize selective α1-aadrenergic blockers as antihypertensive agents, particularly doxazosin. Characteristics of α-blockers These agents lower elevated blood pressure by reducing peripheral arterial resistance without increasing the heart rate or reducing cardiac output. They also reduce left ventricular hypertrophy; improve an atherogenic lipid profile; reduce the risk of thrombotic complications; reduce the formation of fatty streaks, the precursor of advanced athersclerosis; have no adverse metabolic effects in diabetic hypertensives; have a comparable side-effect profile to that of other antihypertensive drugs; and are cost-effective. Conclusions In addition to reducing high blood pressure, the α-blockers reduce a number of other cardiovascular risk factors. In attempts to solve the hypertension-coronary dilemma, these additional effects may prove to be of crucial importance.


Despite the emerging morphological evidence that luminous quasar-like active galactic nuclei
(AGN) are triggered in galaxy mergers, the natures of the triggering mergers and the order
of events in the triggering sequence remain uncertain. In this work, we present a detailed
study of the stellar populations of the host galaxies of 21 type II quasars, with the aim of
understanding the sequence of events between the onset of the merger, the triggering of the
associated starburst and the initiation of the quasar activity. To this end, we model highquality,
wide spectral coverage, intermediate-resolution optical spectra of the type II quasars.
We find that of the 21 objects, the higher order Balmer absorption lines, characteristic of
young stellar populations (YSPs), are directly detected in ∼62 per cent of the sample. We also
fit these spectra using a number of combinations of stellar and/or power-law components,
representative of viable formation histories, as well as including the possibility of scattered
AGN light. We find that ∼90 per cent of the type II quasar host galaxies require the inclusion of
a YSP to adequately model their spectra, whilst 71 per cent of the sample require the inclusion
of a YSP with age <100 Myr. Since the ages of the YSP in most type II quasar host galaxies
are comparable with the expected lifetimes of the AGN activity, these results provide strong
evidence that the quasars are triggered close to the peaks of the merger-induced starbursts.


While a large number of studies have described animal social networks, we have a poor understanding of how these networks vary with ecological and social conditions. For example, reproductive periods are an important life-history stage that may involve changes in dominance relationships among individuals, yet no study to date has compared social networks of do- minance interactions (i.e. dominance networks) across reproductive contexts. We first analyzed a long-term dataset on captive so- cial groups of the cooperatively breeding cichlid Neolamprologus pulcher, and found that eviction events were significantly more common around reproduction than expected by chance. Next, we compared the structure of dominance networks during early pa- rental care and non-reproductive periods, using one of the first applications of exponential random graph models in behavioral biology. Contrary to our predictions, we found that dominance networks showed few changes between early parental care and non-reproductive periods. We found no evidence that dominance interactions became more skewed towards larger individuals, became more frequent between similar-sized individuals, or became more biased towards a particular sex during parental care. However, we did find that there were relatively more dominance interactions between opposite-sex dyads in the early parental care period, which may be a by-product of increased sexual interactions during this time. This is the first study in behavioral ecology to compare social networks using exponential random graph modeling, and demonstrates a powerful analytical frame- work for future studies in the field (Current Zoology 61 (1): 45-54, 2015).


Social media provides more opportunity for libraries to reach the user community, target specific audiences, and give them a chance to interact with the library. The whole business of library is about connecting people with information and this is what social media is really all about. Social media helps in reaching out to user communities and providing them with needed information in an accessible way. Social media marketing of libraries is a way of advertising the library and its brand products and services via web technologies. By using social media in marketing, libraries can engage with their clienteles and enable them utilize library products and services effectively. Social media includes networking web sites like Facebook, Myspace, microblogging web sites like Twitter and other media like YouTube, wikis, blogs, podcasts, etc. By posting library materials on library page via social media, users can access these resources from various locations on the Web. This research paper gives brief explanation on various key concepts associated with the topic of discussion, the types of social media tools use for marketing are highlighted and discussed, the perceived benefits of marketing library and information resources and services using social media platforms, challenges and strategies to overcome the challenges of marketing library and information resources and services using social media platforms were clearly highlighted and finally, recommendations were provided based on the challenges highlighted in this paper.


The design of rounded-edge optical waveguide lenses is presented. The lenses constructed by this method are aberration-free, rotationally symmetric geodesic lenses, where the radius and the focal length are arbitrarily given initial parameters. The rounding section of these lenses is a part of the lens; that is, without the rounding, the lens would not be aberration free. The design involves conversion of uniform refractive index rounding sections of depression lenses into outer annuli of generalized Luneberg lenses. The inner part of each generalized Luneberg lens is constructed with a technique called the annulus technique. Finally, these generalized Luneberg lenses are converted into uniform index depression lenses. The profiles of lenses so constructed are at least one-time continuously differentiable.


OBJECTIVE
The aim of this study was to evaluate the clinical and microbiological results of treatment with the Er:YAG laser and topical gaseous ozone application as adjuncts to initial periodontal therapy in chronic periodontitis (CP) patients.

BACKGROUND DATA
Although many studies have evaluated the effectiveness of the Er:YAG laser as an adjunct to initial periodontal therapy, few studies have focused on the use of gaseous ozone as an adjunct.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Thirty patients with CP were randomly divided into three parallel groups, each composed of 10 individuals with at least four teeth having at least one approximal site with a probing depth (PD) of ≥5 mm and a sulcus bleeding index (SBI) ≥2 in each quadrant. Groups of patients received: (1) Scaling and root planing (SRP)+Er:YAG laser; (2) SRP+topical gaseous ozone; or (3) SRP alone. The microbiological and clinical parameters were monitored at day 0 and day 90.

RESULTS
At the end of the observation period, statistically significant improvements in clinical parameters were observed within each group. Parallel to the clinical changes, all treatments reduced the number of total bacteria and the proportion of obligately anaerobic microorganisms. Although intergroup comparisons of microbiological parameters showed no significant differences, clinical findings, including attachment gain and PD reduction, were found to be statistically significant in favor of the SRP+Er:YAG laser group.

CONCLUSIONS
Although statistically nonsignificant, the fact that the obligate anaerobic change was mostly observed in the SRP+Er:YAG laser group, and a similar decrease was noted in the SRP+topical gaseous ozone group, shows that ozone has an antimicrobial effect equivalent to that of the Er:YAG laser.


The North Eastern Region (NER) possesses ecological and strategic significance for India. Hence, socio- economic stability of the region is of utmost importance. However, the NER is critical from the climate change perspective due to the majority of the rural population and the economy based on natural resources and climate-sensitive sectors - agriculture, water resource, and forestry. The region is not properly equipped to handle the adversities of climate change impacts. Analysis of climate change impacts and vulnerabilities at the state level of North-East India is, therefore, necessary to develop adaptation strategies. In this backdrop, the present study assesses the climate change vulnerability of eight North-Eastern states - Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, and Tripura to climate change impacts, using the Vulnerability-Resilience Indicators Model (VRIM after Moss et al. 2001). For this purpose, proxies have identified and used for various sectors of climate sensitivities and coping-adaptive capacity. The outcome has analyzed at the state level regarding relating the values of VRIM with the respective socio-economic situation to find out the sources of vulnerability. This methodological framework will help policymakers, analysts and stakeholders to systematically evaluate individual as well as sets of indicators to identify the vulnerable areas and sectors. Concluding section of this study offers some practical policy measures that would substantially reduce vulnerability to climate change and improve long-term resilience in the NER. Keywords: Climate Change, Coping-Adaptive Capacity, North Eastern Region, Sensitivities, Vulnerability- Resilience Indicators Model


Background: Radiotherapy is used in the treatment of over 50% of cancer patients and bar surgery, is the most effective cancer intervention. However, in the clinic secondary malignancies have been observed following radiotherapy and in vitro increased cell migration and invasion have been seen following radiation. The Src/FAK signalling pathway is known to play an important role in the metastatic phenotype through its involvement in cell adhesion, migration and invasion and we have previously demonstrated that radiotherapy can activate this pathway along with the phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI3K) pathway, also associated with tumour metastases and an aggressive phenotype. Using pharmacological inhibitors, we have investigated combination approaches to evaluate whether Src and PI3K targeting is beneficial in a radiotherapy context, especially focusing on metastatic phenotype. We wished to relate pathway activation to cellular phenotype and increase understanding of the metastatic cascade, the processes involved and the signalling pathways taking the lead.Method: Using thyroid carcinoma cell lines FTC133 and 8505c the effects of Src inhibition using AZD0530, FAK inhibition using FAKi and PI3K inhibition using GDC-0941 were studied. The effects of radiotherapy alone, and in combination with the above inhibitors, were also studied. In vitro MTT, apoptosis and clonogenic assays were used to assess cell proliferation and cell survival and scratch assays, cell adhesion and cell spreading assays were used to assess the effects of the drugs on metastatic characteristics. In vivo tumour growth, survival and ex vivo clonogenics were used to measure the effects of AZD0530 and GDC-0941. Western blotting, immunofluorescence and immunohistochemistry was used to observe the effects on pathway activation and protein localisation.Results: Src and FAK inhibition reduced metastatic characteristics of thyroid carcinoma cell lines in vitro such as cell spreading and migration. FAK inhibition showed a greater effect on cell survival by MTT, clonogenic and apoptosis. In the thyroid carcinoma cell lines radiotherapy enhanced the metastatic phenotype. This was seen by enhanced activation of the Src and PI3K pathways, increased migration and invasion in vitro and enhanced tumour metastasis in vivo. By combining Src inhibition with radiation a reduction in metastatic characteristics was observed and by combining PI3K inhibition with radiotherapy radiosensitivity could be improved. With the triple combination of Src and PI3K inhibition with radiotherapy a significant reduction in cell survival was demonstrated in vitro compared to radiation alone and either inhibitor combined with radiation, with a corresponding significant reduction in tumour growth being observed in vivo. With the combination of Src and PI3K inhibition significant reductions in metastatic characteristics were also observed both in vitro and in vivo seen by a reduction in cell migration and tumour metastasis. Finally combined inhibition of the Src and PI3K pathway reduced the radiation enhanced activation of several pathways in vivo including Src and PI3K.Conclusions: Together these results suggest that the Src and PI3K pathways play a role in radiation enhanced metastatic characteristics in thyroid carcinoma and through combined inhibition of the pathway the negative effects of radiation, enhanced migration and invasion, can be inhibited and the cells can be made more radiosensitive. Full characterisation of the pathways involved in radiation induced motility and radioresistance will provide further rationale for combination therapies and provide potential for application of these therapies in the clinic.


Catalysts with bidisperse pore structures are extensively used in chemical industries. In such catalysts, diffusion and reaction in the microporous particles are preceded by diffusion in the macropores. The relative significance of macro- and micropore diffusion resistances on the observed reaction rates with linear and nonlinear rate forms, heat effects, catalyst deactivation and selectivity problems in bidisperse catalysts are investigated in number of published works. In this article, a review of the models proposed in the literature is presented together with a critical analysis of assumptions involved. Criteria are presented to test the relative significance of transport limitations. Also, a review of experimental techniques and experimental values of micro- and macropore effective diffusivities of gases in solids with bidisperse pore structures, such as zeolite pellets and supported porous catalysts, is given.


The genus Geopsammodius Gordon and Pittino is revised. Eight new species are described: G. atlantida (Honduras: Atlantida), G. fuscus (Martin Co. and Palm Beach Co., Florida), G. morrisi (eastern Polk Co., Florida), G. ohoopee (Tattnall Co., Georgia), G. rileyi (coastal Louisiana and Texas), G. subpedalis (northern coastal Gulf of Mexico), G. unsidensis (inland Texas), and G. withlacoochee (Citrus Co. and Hernando Co., Florida), bringing the number of described species to 11. A key and illustrations are provided to aid in identification of taxa.


Self-induced mechanical oscillation of nose landing gears designated as shimmy is a major safety challenge for aircrafts. The rotational-lateral shimmy vibrations can occur during takeoff, taxiing, and landing and needs to be sufficiently controlled to avoid escalation and catastrophic failure of the landing gear system. Existing solutions for shimmy problem are largely passive control strategies known as shimmy dampers. Despite numerous studies on the source of shimmy and its trends, investigations on the design and performance analysis of shimmy dampers are scarce. From a design perspective, it is crucial to quantify the effective stiffness and damping supplied by the shimmy damper to the system in different operation states. Furthermore, the sensitivity of the damper performance to its design parameters needs to be thoroughly investigated in order to optimize the design for a particular aircraft. In this study, core relationships for three shimmy dampers are presented and used to perform sensitivity studies. These dampers are concepts by Boeing, Collins Aerospace (formerly UTAS), and a new one designated as the Symmetric Torque Link Damper (STLD). The influence of design parameters on the dampers' performance is studied and observed trends are discussed in the light of inherent trade-offs. Subsequently, a nonlinear Multibody Dynamic model of the landing gear is utilized to obtain sample time histories of oscillations for each shimmy damper in order to highlight the performance differences and to demonstrate the influence of design parameters. Directions for designing future shimmy dampers and recommendations for optimizing them are offered.


Medical schools that value the moral integrity of their students and that wish to graduate ethical professionals ought to provide a clear process for conscientious objection during clinical rotations. During clerkship year, medical students are confronted with ethical dilemmas that are complicated by the most profound questions of human existence, including the definition of personhood, the terms that govern creation of a new life, the meaning of suffering, and the finality of death. In these situations, students may draw upon personal experience, prior analysis, cultural beliefs, or religious frameworks in order to decide the most ethical action. These various influences may cause the student to reach a moral conclusion that is at odds with the wish of the patient or the consensus of the medical team. As a current clerkship student, I have personally found myself in several such situations. Conscientious objection in medicine is the concept that allows providers to refrain from participating in practices that, despite careful study and thoughtful reflection, cannot be reconciled with their moral judgement. This protection also applies – in theory – to medical students, who often find themselves in these same clinical situations. However, students are not well positioned to practice conscientious objection because: medical schools do not always make students aware of this option, students may be afraid to challenge more senior members of the team, and clerkship success and residency applications rely heavily on subjective evaluations. Without institutional support, students may repress strong moral intuitions for these and other reasons. In these instances, medical schools not only miss an opportunity to encourage students to stand up for what they believe to be right, but in fact teach students to ignore the guidance of their conscience in ethically fraught situations. Schools that wish to encourage the development of ethical professionals should provide a clear and transparent protocol for conscientious objection that empowers students to act in a way consistent with their beliefs, encourages them to think critically about ethical dilemmas, and shows them how to navigate ethical disagreements with compassion and professionalism Figure 1.


Fenton and Photo-Fenton processes are attractive alternate treatment method for to thiol compounds. The degradation of 4-mercaptobenzoic acid by Fenton and photo-Fenton processes was studied. The effect of various reaction parameters such as substrate, hydrogen peroxide, ferrous ion, pH, polarity of solvent and catalyst was studied. Photoproduct was characterized by physical, chemical and spectral methods. A tentative mechanism has been proposed with overall reaction.


Waterfowl industry is an essential part of modern agricultural industry system. Enterprises and breeding farmers in waterfowl industry are new agricultural business entities, backbones for development of waterfowl industry, and main undertakers of business risks and major promoters of industry development. From the survey and analysis of several enterprises, farmers and business organizational form of waterfowl industry, it concluded that the business organizational form and the relationship between interested parties exert great influence on the development of waterfowl industry. According to these, it came up recommendations including optimizing business organizational form and reasonably selecting logistics mode according to profits and risks of business entities in the industry chain and main points of input and technological progress, in the hope of helping enterprises to resist risks, conduct scientific management, so as to promote stable development of waterfowl industry.


The Computer Security Division at the National Institute of Standards and Technology is interested in promoting the security of implementations of cryptographic primitives. This security depends not only on the theoretical properties of the primitives but also on the ability to withstand attacks on their implementations. It is thus important to mitigate breakdowns that result from differences between ideal and real implementations of cryptographic algorithms. This document overviews the possibility of implementing cryptographic primitives using threshold schemes, where multiple components contribute to the operation in a way that attains the desired security goals even if f out of n of its components are compromised. There is also an identified potential in providing resistance against side-channel attacks, which exploit inadvertent leakage from real implementations. Security goals of interest include the secrecy of cryptographic keys, as well as enhanced integrity and availability, among others. This document considers challenges and opportunities related to standardization of threshold schemes for cryptographic primitives. It includes examples illustrating security tradeoffs under variations of system model and adversaries. It enumerates several high-level characterizing features of threshold schemes, including the types of threshold, the communication interfaces (with the environment and between components), the executing platform (e.g., single device vs. multiple devices) and the setup and maintenance requirements. The document poses a number of questions, motivating aspects to take into account when considering standardization. A particular challenge is the development of criteria that may help guide a selection of threshold cryptographic schemes. An open question is deciding at what level each standard should be defined (e.g., specific base techniques vs. conceptualized functionalities) and which flexibility of parametrization they should allow. Suitability to testing and validation of implementations are also major concerns to be addressed. Overall, the document intends to support discussion about standardization, including motivating an engagement from stakeholders. This is a step towards enabling threshold cryptography within the US federal government and beyond.


The author describes application of intraoperative neurophysiologic monitoring to surgical treatment of lumbar stenosis. Benefits of somatosensory and motor evoked potential studies during surgical correction of spinal deformity are well known and documented. Free-running and evoked electromyographic studies during pedicle screw implantation is an accepted practice at many institutions. However, the functional integrity of spinal cord, cauda equina, and nerve roots should be monitored throughout every stage of surgery including exposure and decompression. Somatosensory evoked potentials monitor overall spinal cord function. Intraoperative electromyography provides continuous assessment of motor root function in response to direct and indirect surgical manipulation. Electromyographic activities observed during exposure and decompression of the lumbosacral spine included complex patterns of bursting and neurotonic discharge. In addition, electromyographic activities at distal musculature were elicited by impacting a surgical instrument or graft plug against bony elements of the spine. All electromyographic events provided direct feedback to the surgical team and were regarded as a cause for concern. Simultaneously monitored evoked potential and electromyographic studies protect spinal cord and nerve roots during seemingly low-risk phases of a surgical procedure when neurologic injury may occur and the patient is placed at risk for postoperative myelopathy or radiculopathy.


Understanding secondary successional processes in Amazonian terrestrial ecosystems is becoming increasingly important as continued deforestation expands the area that has become secondary forest, or at least has been through a recent phase of secondary forest growth. Most Amazonian soils are highly weathered and relatively nutrient poor, but the role of nutrients as a factor determining successional processes is unclear. Soils testing and chronosequence studies have yielded equivocal results regarding the possible role of nutrient limitation. The objective of this paper is to report the first two years' results of a nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) fertilization experiment in a 6-yr-old secondary forest growing on an abandoned cattle pasture on a clayey Oxisol. Growth of remnant grasses responded significantly to the N 1 P treatment, whereas tree biomass increased significantly following N-only and N 1 P treatments. The plants took up about 10% of the 50 kg P/ha of the first year's application, and recovery in soil fractions could account for the rest. The trees took up about 20% of the 100 kg N/ha of the first year's application. No changes in soil inorganic N, soil microbial biomass N, or litter decomposition rates have been observed so far, but soil faunal abundances increased in fertilized plots relative to the control in the second year of the study. A pulse of nitric oxide and nitrous oxide emissions was measured in the N-treated plots only shortly after the second year's application. Net N mineralization and net nitrification assays demonstrated strong immobilization potential, indicating that much of the N was probably retained in the large soil organic-N pool. Although P availability is low in these soils and may partially limit biomass growth, the most striking result of this study so far is the significant response of tree growth to N fertilization. Repeated fire and other losses of N from degraded pastures may render tree growth N limited in some young Amazonian forests. Changes in species composition and monitoring of long-term effects on biomass accumulation will be addressed as this experiment is continued.


Secure search techniques over encrypted cloud data allow an authorized user to query data files of interest by submitting encrypted query keywords to the cloud server in a privacy-preserving manner. However, in practice, the returned query results may be incorrect or incomplete in the dishonest cloud environment. For example, the cloud server may intentionally omit some qualified results to save computational resources and communication overhead. Thus, a well-functioning secure query system should provide a query results verification mechanism that allows the data user to verify results. In this paper, we design a secure, easily integrated, and fine-grained query results verification mechanism, by which, given an encrypted query results set, the query user not only can verify the correctness of each data file in the set but also can further check how many or which qualified data files are not returned if the set is incomplete before decryption. The verification scheme is loose-coupling to concrete secure search techniques and can be very easily integrated into any secure query scheme. We achieve the goal by constructing secure verification object for encrypted cloud data. Furthermore, a short signature technique with extremely small storage cost is proposed to guarantee the authenticity of verification object and a verification object request technique is presented to allow the query user to securely obtain the desired verification object. Performance evaluation shows that the proposed schemes are practical and efficient.


The aim of this study was to characterize the preparation of hollow colloidosomes using two
steps preparation by Shahidan et al. (2013) method with different structural polymers and
different surfactant which are biocompatible and biodegradable. In this study, two structural
polymers were used; polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) and polycaprolactone (PCL). The surfactants
used were sucrose stearate (S1570) and polyvinyl alcohol (PVA). There are three different
parameters used in preparation of PVA/PCL hollow colloidosomes; speed homogenizer,
evaporation temperature and feeding rate of oil phase. In S1570/PCL hollow colloidosomes
preparation, an effect of polymer surfactant concentration and a brief study on the preparation
scale were proposed. There are two different scales used in S1570/PCL hollow colloidosomes
preparation which are small scale and large scale preparation. In this study, hollow
colloidosomes were prepared using an oil-in-water (O/W) emulsion solvent evaporation method.
Another study proposed is S1570/PHA hollow colloidosomes. PHA is a structural polymer that
does not affect the environment because it is a biodegradable material. The physical properties of
hollow colloidosomes prepared using different parameters, surfactant and polymer was
characterized and analyzed. The interesting phenomenon in this study is the birefringence
phenomenon of hollow colloidosomes which confirmed the colloidosomes shell was made of
small particles.


The Asiatic swamp buffalo ( Bubalus bubalis ) is an important livestock species in the Lao People's Democratic Republic (Laos), with smallholder farmers owning the majority of an estimated 774,200 buffalo. Of the estimated 226,400 farm households with buffalo, 78% have a herd size of four or fewer, kept as a storage of wealth, sale for beef, for manure as fertilizer, and decreasingly, draught power. The total meat consumption in Laos and China was approximately 21 kg and 58 kg per capita in 2009, with an annual growth rate forecast of 4.5% and 3.1%. Increasing demand for meat in both domestic and neighboring markets offers opportunities for smallholders to gain more income from their livestock, particularly buffalo. However improving buffalo production requires numerous management constraints to be addressed, including: health issues (parasites and endemic diseases, particularly Toxocara vitulorum and Haemorrhagic Septicaemia control), biosecurity and transboundary disease (Foot and Mouth Disease control), nutritional deficits, low reproductive performance, high slaughter rates of pregnant cows, undeveloped trade and marketing systems, limited veterinary and extension service capacity, and potentially climate change and policy impacts. This paper reviews available information on these constraints to identify remaining gaps in knowledge and offer potentially suitable strategic interventions aimed at increasing the supply of buffalo in Laos. With the current rapid rate of economic development expected to continue in Laos and the Greater Mekong Subregion, expansion of the domestic and regional markets for food requires a more biosecure and sustainable supply of safe meat. Improving livestock health, productivity, processing and marketing, particularly of buffalo, is critical to ensuring poor smallholder communities can participate in and access these growing markets, providing improved rural livelihoods, poverty reduction and increased food security.


Intimate-partner violence (IPV), also known as domestic violence, is a pervasive personal and public health problem in the United States. Factors affecting the risks of suffering IPV have been widely researched as have the symptoms of battered woman syndrome, a forerunner of posttraumatic stress disorder or PTSD. Much of this line of research has sought to study the problems of abused women rather than their strengths. This qualitative study looks at the phenomenology (subjective reality) of six women, ages 23 to 48, who participate in support groups at a domestic violence prevention agency in the northeastern United States. By their own definition, all six have overcome the difficulties of IPV and moved on to new lives free from abuse. Interviews with the participants revealed childhood themes that might have aided in the development of resiliency factors in adulthood. Broad themes identified were Trust, Insight, Boundaries, and Independence. Specifically, the active presence of at least one trusted adult, the ability to make meaning and solve problems, the setting of boundaries and expectations at home, and the entity of a powerful biological mother appear to be related to the participants' development of resiliency. Overlaying this scenario is the construction of each individual's phenomenology, which continues to develop throughout the lifespan. The participants' responses to IPV appear to first function as coping mechanisms and then resiliency factors, transforming victims into survivors. FACTORS OF FREEDOM 4 Table of


Recent years have witnessed a rapid growth of applying deep spatiotemporal methods in traffic forecasting. However, the prediction of origin-destination (OD) demands is still a challenging problem since the number of OD pairs is usually quadratic to the number of stations. In this case, most of the existing spatiotemporal methods fail to handle spatial relations on such a large scale. To address this problem, this paper provides a dynamic graph representation learning framework for OD demands prediction. In particular, a hierarchical memory updater is first proposed to maintain a time-aware representation for each node, and the representations are updated according to the most recently observed OD trips in continuous-time and multiple discrete-time ways. Second, a spatiotemporal propagation mechanism is provided to aggregate representations of neighbor nodes along a random spatiotemporal route which treats origin and destination as two different semantic entities. Last, an objective function is designed to derive the future OD demands according to the most recent node representations, and also to tackle the data sparsity problem in OD prediction. Extensive experiments have been conducted on two real-world datasets, and the experimental results demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method. The code and data are available at https://github.com/Rising0321/HMOD.


Online survey results for a university sample population indicated that both male (n=361) and female (n=764) participants had a mean desired lifetime fertility of 2.2 offspring. For females, desired fertility had a significant negative relationship with level of interest in life course goals associated with a rewarding career, acquiring fame, and making contribution to ideas and discoveries, but a significant positive relationship with the goal of inspiring others with one's religious beliefs. In contrast for males, none of these life goals was related to variation in lifetime fertility preference. We interpret these data in the context of the 'transmission competition' hypothesis—an evolutionary explanation for decreasing fertility in developed countries, where for females, gene transmission is limited by competition from 'meme transmis-sion', the latter represented in modern times by the pursuit and achievement of life course goals perceived as providing an enduring personal legacy. This accounts, we suggest, for the origin of the now popular 'childfree' culture. Attraction to accomplishment-based memetic legacy and the childfree lifestyle will eventually be eclipsed, we predict—again because of the effects of natural selection—by an emerging culture driven to a large extent by an intrinsic attraction to parenthood—'parenting drive'.


Purpose: To evaluate the views of ophthalmologists about referral and treatment of retinal disorders by vitreo-retinal (VR) surgeons
Study Design: Cross Sectional Study.
Place and duration of study: National Ophthalmic Conferences in Lahore, Karachi and Nathiya Gali (2014-2016) and Ophthalmological Society of Pakistan, Lahore Branch Monthly clinical Meetings (2014-2016).
Material and Methods: A questionnaire based survey, involving 610 ophthalmologists was conducted through random sampling. The questionnaire was structured to evaluate the views about prescribing and treating with anti vascular endothelial growth factors (anti-VEGFs) and retinal lasers among random population of ophthalmologists. Survey was conducted during three national congresses and ophthalmological society monthly meetings and in different ophthalmology departments of the city.
Results: Among 610 ophthalmologists from different parts of Pakistan enrolled for the survey, 200 were female and 410 male. Responses from all participants showed that 479 (78.5%) ophthalmologist were in favor that patients with vitreo-retinal disease should be referred to VR surgeons for treatment. Moreover, 472 (77.3%) ophthalmologists among 610 were in favor of intravitreal Anti-VEGF advise by vitreo-retinal surgeons. And 469(76.8%) ophthalmologist agreed that intravitreal anti-VEGF should be injected by vitreo- retinal surgeon. Only 279(45.73%) ophthalmologists among 610 thought that focal or PRP laser can be performed safely by general ophthalmologists.
Conclusion: Ophthalmologists believe that retinal disorders should be referred to and treated by vitreo-retinal surgeons.
Key words: Survey, Anti vascular endothelial growth factor, Intravitreal injections, Laser


The paper deals with an application within the STERPS project (Source Term Indicator Based on Plant Status) which is part of the 5th Euratom Framework Program. The project aims at developing a computer based tool for the rapid and early diagnosis of plant status and for the prediction of environmental releases. The approach is based on a probabilistic plant model using the Bayesian Belief Network (BBN) methodology. A BBN models relations between variables which are relevant to some problem. In this way, meaningful results can be obtained in spite of incomplete or uncertain information. In the STERPS application, the outcome is typically a number of possible plant states ranked according to probability, each with an associated environmental source term. The paper describes the development of a BBN for the Swedish boiling water reactor (BWR) Oskarshamn 3. The analysis used the generic BBN software Netica (developed by Norsys Inc.), with the user interface SPRINT, which was developed within the project for handling of the BBN. The user interface includes a set of questions and background information, which are used in order to gain information about crucial plant parameters during the course of a severe accident. SPRINT also includes graphical presentation of analysis results, both in terms of node probabilities and as characteristics for radioactive releases (amount, composition, and timing). The customization to the Oskarshamn 3 nuclear power plant included identification of key plant parameters for inclusion in the BBN, through a systematic consideration of fission product transport and retention phenomena in plant. Plant systems for mitigation of accidents as well as implemented severe accident management strategies at the plant were also considered. The functionality and practicability of the SPRINT software is being demonstrated in the recently started EU project EURANOS (European approach to nuclear and radiological emergency management and rehabilitation strategies). For the Oskarshamn 3 plant, SPRINT has been tested in connection with an emergency exercise at Oskarshamn 3. Preliminary results and conclusions show that the project has successfully demonstrated the suitability of the BBN technique for modeling the complex conditions after a severe accident in a nuclear power plant. The user interface is simple, and after some adaptation SPRINT will be suitable for use in plant technical support centers and at national emergency centers. The plant BBN models will also be a very useful tool for training and education. The prediction capabilities of the resulting models can be efficiently verified using results from plant PSA quantification and from accident analysis codes. In conclusion, the described technique has proved to be a very promising prediction tool for plant status diagnosis and estimation of the source term in severe accident situations.


The organization of public clinical lab- oratories is experiencing changes without, how- ever, an organizational assessment of its effective- ness. The study aimed to determine a parameter of effectiveness for public clinical laboratories of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais State, and set cut-off points for the sections of these laboratories. In or- der to do so, the total production and number of hours worked during a period of 7 months in the year 2008 were consolidated. Due to the entrance of the workers in the mode of production in the laboratories network, it could be observed a vari- ability regarding the performance of these work- ers. The effectiveness parameter of the network was established in 29.90 tests per hour. As a conse- quence of this first analysis, the cut-off points are: 15.50 for the hematology section; 67.29 for chemes- try; 6.45 for parasitology; 11.35 for urinalysis; 4.94 for microbiology and 19.03 for immunology. From these results, it was concluded that the working process in laboratories can generate a decrease in effectiveness.


Vacuum in the arcs of the LHC is crucial to minimize beam – gas interactions and to assure thermal insulation of cryostats and helium distribution lines. Several hundred of sensors with their associated conditioning electronics are installed across the arcs for both beam and insulation vacuum measurements. Calculations predict that radiation levels will greatly increase during the HL-LHC era. Therefore, new radiation tolerant conditioning electronics for vacuum measurements are required to withstand such conditions. This paper describes the design of these new electronics, their qualification tests and implementation within the vacuum controls architecture foreseen during the long shutdowns of the LHC.


In contrast to previous incursions of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAIV) H5 viruses, H5N8 clade 184.108.40.206b viruses caused numerous cases of lethal infections in white-tailed sea eagles (Haliaeetus albicilla) affecting mainly young eagles (younger than five years of age) in Germany during winter 2016/2017. Until April 2017, 17 HPAIV H5N8-positive white-tailed sea eagles had been detected (three found alive and 14 carcasses) by real-time RT-PCR and partial nucleotide sequence analyses. Severe neurological clinical signs were noticed which were corroborated by immunohistopathology revealing mild to moderate, oligo- to multifocal necrotizing virus-induced polioencephalitis. Lethal lead (Pb) concentrations, a main factor of mortality in sea eagles in previous years, could be ruled out by atomic absorption spectrometry. HPAIV H5 clade 220.127.116.11b reportedly is the first highly pathogenic influenza virus known to induce fatal disease in European white-tailed see eagles. This virus strain may become a new health threat to a highly protected species across its distribution range in Eurasia. Positive cloacal swabs suggest that eagles can spread the virus with their faeces.


Research into Stolen Babies in Spain has tended to study the cases through a legal/historical perspective. Given that the topic of Stolen Babies has only recently appeared in the media, there are no previous analyzes ofthe advocacy of Stolen Babies'motherson YouTube and in the media. This document aims to provide an overview of a Media Psychology approach towards the results obtained through the media campaign "Te Estamos Buscando" (We Are Looking for You) known as TEB and the disruption in the Spanish and international media.


Activation energies for solute diffusion along dislocations are difficult to measure experimentally. The aim of this work is to provide insight into pipe diffusion with the help of atomistic simulations. The distribution of vacancy formation energy and the activation energy for copper migration are determined in the core of an edge dislocation in aluminum. The Dimer method is used to find activation energies for vacancy migration. The activated region around the dislocation where a very high diffusivity is observed and the activation energy for copper diffusion associated with this region are interpreted with regard to the contribution of the dislocation and the contribution of the alloying.


Documentation is the written and legal recording of the interventions that concern the patient and it includes a sequence of processes. Documentation is established with the personal record of the patient, which constitutes a base of information on the situation of his health. The importance of nursing documentation is neuralgic, provided that without it, there cannot be a complete qualitative nursing intervention and not even an effective care for the patient. In the purposes of nursing documentation are included the research on a more effective care of the already detected problems, the programming of care through the organization and modification of the plan on patient's care and the more direct communication between the professionals of the health system, who collaborate on the patient's care. The methods of documentation are multiple and among the most basic ones are the method directed towards the source or the problem, the system problem-intervention-evaluation, the focused registration, the focusing diagram, the registration by exception, the electronic files and the home documentation


A tunable dispersion compensating filter based on a multistage optical all-pass filter with a microelectromechanical (MEM) actuated variable reflector and a thermally tuned cavity is described. A two-stage device was demonstrated with a tuning range of /spl plusmn/100 ps/nm, 50-GHz passband and a group delay ripple less than /spl plusmn/3 ps. The device has negligible polarization dependence and is suitable for single or multiple channel compensation. An off-axis, two-fiber package with an excess loss <2 dB/stage avoids the need for a circulator. By cascading four stages, a passband to channel spacing ratio of 0.8 is obtained that allows both 40 Gb/s nonreturn-to-zero (NRZ) and return-to-zero (RZ) signals to be compensated.


We evaluated all articles published by different world regions in the top 50 biomedical journals in the database of the Journal Citation Reports‐Institute for Scientific Information for the period between 1995 and 2002. The world was divided into 9 regions [United States of America (the U.S.), Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Asia, Oceania, Latin America, and the Caribbean, Eastern Europe, and Africa] based on a combination of geographic, economic and scientific criteria. The number of articles published by each region, the mean impact factor, and the product of the above two parameters were our main indicators. The above numbers were also adjusted for population size, gross national income per capita of each region, and other factors. Articles published from the U.S. made up about two‐thirds of all scientific papers published in the top 50 biomedical journals between 1995 and 2002. Western Europe contributed approximately a quarter of the published papers while the remaining one‐tenth of articles came from the rest of the world. Canada, however, ranked second when number of articles was adjusted for population size. The U.S. is by far the highest‐ranking country/region in publications in the top 50 biomedical journals even after adjusting for population size, gross national product, and other factors. Canada and Western Europe share the second place while the rest of the world is far behind.— Soteriades, E. S., Rosmarakis, E. S., Paraschakis, K., Falagas, M. E. Research contribution of different world regions in the top 50 biomedical journals (1995–2002). FASEB J. 20, 29–34 (2005)


The raise of machine learning and deep learning led to significant improvement in several domains. This change is supported by both the dramatic rise in computation power and the collection of large datasets. Such massive datasets often include per-sonal data which can represent a threat to privacy. Membership inference attacks are a novel direction of research which aims at recovering training data used by a learning algorithm. In this paper, we develop a mean to measure the leakage of training data leveraging a quantity appearing as a proxy of the total variation of a trained model near its training samples. We extend our work by providing a novel defense mechanism. Our contributions are supported by empirical evidence through convincing numerical experiments.


Copyright protection has now become a challenging domain in real life scenario. Digital watermarking scheme is an important tool for copyright protection technique. A good quality watermarking scheme should have high perceptual transparency, and should also be robust enough against possible attacks. A well-known (Lewis-Barni) Human Visual System (HVS) based watermarking model is fairly successful with respect to the first mentioned criterion, though its effectiveness in color images has not been claimed. Furthermore, it is true that although several watermarking schemes are available in literature for grayscale images, relatively few works have been done in color image watermarking, and the little that have been done, have mostly been tested in RGB, YUV, YIQ color spaces. Thus the question remains that, which is the optimal color space for color image watermarking and whether this HVS model is applicable for that color space. There are two main contributions of the present work with respect to the above. First, it claims that for color image watermarking, the YCbCr space can be used as the perceptually optimum color space, the Cb component being the optimal color channel here. Second, it also tests the effectiveness of the above-mentioned HVS model in that color space. These have been achieved by using the HVS model to propose a new non-blind (original image and the watermark logo image both are needed for extraction) image adaptive Discrete Wavelet transform and Singular Value Decomposition (DWT-SVD) based color image watermarking scheme in YCbCr color space. The multi-resolution property of DWT and stability of SVD additionally makes the scheme robust against attacks, while the Arnold scrambling, of the watermark, enhances the security in our method. The experimental results support the superiority of our scheme over the existing methods.


A Ms=8.0 earthquake striked the most of the China on May 12th, 2008, and brought about near 90,000 deaths and about 700 billion dollars of direct economic losses. This earthquake impacted all kind of transportation system including highway, railway, airline and water carriage systems in a huge area. This paper provides many records of observed damage to transportation system by site investigation. The seismic performances related to transportation system in meizoseismal zonation were described in details in this paper. Occurring in a mountainous region, this earthquake severely damaged the transportation system because of strong earthquake motion, near the active faults, trigged landslides and debris, rock and soil collapses, and large ground deformation. Transportation system performance degradation was due to not only physical damages of equipments and buildings, but also the shortage of the electric powers and supporting from other lifeline systems. some statitical laws among transportation system , slope failure and fault distance, and some valuable measures for resisting strong earthquake motion, secondary earthquake-induced geological disaster and lessons learned for damage prevention and system recovery to lifeline system were also discussed in this paper.


Introduction: Middle turbinate overlying the middle meatus is the most important anatomic area in the lateral wall of the nose. It is a thinsheet of bone which curves in different planes very similar to a dried leaf. Paradoxical Middle Turbinate (PMT) is the abnormal curvatureof middle turbinate, where the convex surface faces laterally instead of its usual medial curvature and may block the drainage pathway ofmiddle meatus. The present study aimed at observing the prevalence of the paradoxical middle turbinate in the adult population of Bihar. Subjects and Methods: This was a retrospective study being conducted on 150 patients who presented to the Department of Radiodiagnosis. Their CT scans were analysed for the presence of paradoxical middle turbinate. The results were analysed as percentage and 'p' value was calculated using Fischer's Exact Test. Results: Prevalence of Paradoxical Middle Turbinate was observed in 28 cases i.e. 18.6% cases; 16 in males and 12 in females. 'p' value was 0.677 on applying Fisher's Exact test. Conclusion: Anatomical variations of the paranasal sinus region like paradoxical middle turbinate are quite common cause of diseases involving paranasal sinuses and they must be searched for by the surgeons planning any endoscopic sinus surgery. This study attempted to provide the prevalence of the paradoxical middle turbinate which will definitely help the FESS surgery and its outcomes.


Introduction The expression of the enteric hormone FGF15 is largely restricted to the ileum in the mouse. FGF15 has also been shown to be the most BA responsive gene in mouse ileum. FGF19 is the human orthologue of FGF15 and is thought to have roles in the regulation of bile acid pool sizes and BA homeostasis. We set out to investigate the distribution of FGF19 expression in the human GI tract and FGF19 gene responses to BA in human ileum. Methods Biopsies of normal ileal mucosa were obtained from 29 patients undergoing colonoscopy. Basal ileal FGF19 expression was compared to colonic (n=9) and duodenal FGF19 expression (n=3). Ileal biopsies (explants) from 20 patients were incubated for 6h in short term tissue culture in parallel with BA (chenodeoxycholic acid [CDCA] or glyco-chenodeoxycholic acid [GCDCA]) or without (control explants). 3 Duodenal and colonic explants from were also studied. Real-time qRT-PCR was used to measure expression of transcripts for FGF19, and several other ileal BA regulatory genes (ASBT, IBABP, SHP, FXR, OSTα and OSTβ). FGF19 protein levels in culture fluid were also measured by specific ELISA. Results Transcripts for FGF19 were detected in human ileum, but not colon or duodenum. FGF19 expression was greatly induced in all ileal explants incubated with BA: geometric mean induction of 316-fold by 50 μM CDCA (n=17, p=0.0003), and 231-fold by 50 μM GCDCA (n=11, p=0.001). Measured by ELISA, the amount of FGF19 protein released into the culture media was significantly higher from the explants incubated with 50 μM of BA (CDCA 51 pg/explant, range 8–169, n=11 and GCDCA 38 pg/explant, range 3–113, n=10) compared to the matched control explants (8pg/explant, range 0–46 [p=0.0008] and 6 pg/explant, range 0–13 [p=0.0022] respectively). The EC50 for CDCA was 20 μM and 24 μM for GCDCA. Responses to both BA were similar at 50 μM and 100 μM. 6 h incubation of duodenal and colonic explants with 100 μM CDCA or GCDCA showed that FGF19 expression levels were <0.35 times the FGF19 expression seen in the control ileal explants at 6 h. In ileal explants, responses of other genes to CDCA and GCDCA at 50 μM (n=3–4) showed median increases for IBABP, OSTα, OSTβ and SHP between 2.4 and 4.0-fold, whereas ASBT and FXR showed little change. Conclusion FGF19 is expressed in human ileum but not the colon or duodenum. Ileal FGF19 expression is highly responsive to CDCA and GCDCA, compared to other BA regulatory genes. No significant induction of FGF19 expression is observed in duodenum or colon with BA. Ileal BA induced FGF19 responses could be studied in clinical conditions of dysregulated BA homeostasis. Competing interests None declared.


Background: Soft tissue rheumatological conditions are common but largely unexplored. So the objective of the present study was to see the different soft tissue rheumatological conditions presenting in OPD of a tertiary care center.
Materials and methods: Present observational study conducted on 62 patients visiting the Physical Medicine OPD, Chattogram Maa-O-Shishu Hospital for different soft tissue rheumatological conditions were included in the study. Study period was six months from January 2020 to June 2020. After informed written consent patients were introduced a questionnaire and data was collected. Non-probability sampling method was adopted for the study. Data was analyzed by SPSS-20
Results: Among 62 patients gender distributions of patients revealed male was 24(38.7%) and female was 38(61.3%) and age group showing 15(24.2%) patients were at <30 years, 15(24.2%) patients were at 31-40 years, 13(21.0%) patients were at 41-50 years, 9(14.5%) patients were at 51- 60 years, 9(14.5%) patients were at 61-70 years and 1(1.6%) patient was at >71 years age group. Regarding occupations of the study patients 35(56.5%) patients were service holder, 24(38.7%) were doing business, 1(1.6%) patients was farmer, 1(1.6%) was fisherman and 1(1.6%) patients was housewife. Among all 9(14.5%) patients had DM and same number of patients also has HTN. Diagnosis of the soft tissue rheumatological conditions revealed 13(21%) patients had panter fassitis, 1(1.6%) patient had achillis tendinitis, 4(6.5%) patients had patellar tendinitis, 6(9.7%) patients had trochantaric bursitis, 1(1.6%) had tennis elbow, 3(4.8%) had golfer elbow, 191.6%) had De Quarven's tenosinovitis, 5(8.1%) patients had trigger finger, 18(29.0%) patients had bicep tendinitis, 4(6.5%) patients had suspinatus tendinitis, 5(8.1%) patients had retrocalcaneal bursitis and 1(1.6%) patient had prepatellar bursitis.
Conclusion: Soft tissue rheumatological diseases are common in OPD visits and needs proper attention for better patients care.
Chatt Maa Shi Hosp Med Coll J; Vol.21 (1); January 2022; Page 11-13


To evaluate the economic impact of osteoporosis, the cost of acute attention to the osteoporotic hip fractures recorded in Barcelona during one year was investigated. The hospital records of 8637 beds (85.64% of the overall number in the city) were reviewed and the cases seen in inhabitants aged 45 years or more during 1984 were included. The cost, days of hospital admission, operations and orthopedic material were recorded. Data from 870 fractures were recovered. During the study period 1358 hip fractures took place in Barcelona, with 1269 +/- 21 (mean +/- SEM) operations, 31219 +/- 1550 (mean +/- SEM) days of hospital admission, and 408 +/- 40 (mean +/- SEM) prostheses. Their attention generated a cost amounting to 662.5 +/- 29.5 (mean +/- SEM) million pesetas. The cost of each fracture was 488200 +/- 331700 (mean +/- SD) pesetas, with a hospital stay of 23 +/- 17 (mean +/- SD) days. This represents, for the whole of Spain, 33298 +/- 1769 (mean +/- SEM) fractures, 31160 +/- 2154 (mean +/- SEM) operations, 767853 +/- 78314 (mean +/- SEM) hospital admission days and 10042 +/- 1530 (mean +/- SEM) prostheses every year. The yearly expenditure is 16295 +/- 1598 (mean +/-SEM) million pesetas (confidence interval of the estimation 95%). Thus, osteoporotic hip fracture results in a significant expenditure in this country. The enormous cost of the attention to osteoporosis and its complications warrants a greater effort for its prevention and care.


Purpose
This paper aims to investigate the social structure of strategic management research in the hospitality management field to determine whether a strong social structure is needed and, if so, how this structure can be enriched within the hospitality field.

Design/methodology/approach
A total of 1,652 articles related to hospitality strategic management published in leading hospitality and tourism as well as business journals were analyzed using co-authorship analysis combined with social network analysis.

Findings
The study's findings demonstrate a progressive growth in collaboration. Leading authors, institutions and countries in the collaboration networks are identified. Network analysis shows that the ties in the network are too weak to build a strong social identity, although the community is broad.

Practical implications
This study provides solutions for building a strong social identity related to strategic management in the hospitality field. Moreover, this study helps leaders and managers, who need to know whom to speak to within academia to get industry-based advice, as well as scholars, junior researchers and graduate students, who must recognize the individuals producing knowledge in the academic field, to identify the key actors within the field.

Originality/value
As one of the first studies in this field, this research discusses why a strong social identity is necessary and how it can be built further while also looking at the potential for expansion in future studies.


Wine is a product whose value largely depends on the reputation associated with its region of production. China is a newcomer and latecomer to wine production and consumption. Wine consumption, especially imported wine, rarely exists outside of major urban areas. Therefore, understanding the Chinese local markets and consumer preference for wine products is important for foreign wine producers. WTP (Willingness-to-Pay), in economics, is the maximum amount a person would be willing to pay for a good, which is a useful tool to address consumers' preference. In our study, we investigate the effects of information and origin of production on Chinese consumers' WTP for wine. By using a second-price sealed-bid auction mechanism, which was first developed by Vickrey (1961), we organized experimental auctions in both Beijing and Shanghai, China. The items for auctions are four different wine products originated in China, France, USA, and Australia. And there are two comparison groups, with or without information exposure. With 436 participants in total, our experiments collected data on their WTP's and socio-demographics. Our data shows that participants would like to pay the highest price for the wine from France, while their WTP for the Chinese wine is the lowest among the four. Furthermore, we find important factors affecting their WTP for wine, including age, gender, employment status, education status, household income, and household size. Our results provide meaningful and insightful marketing suggestions for the "new world" and Chinese wine producers, such as the target consumers and pricing strategy.


(20%) postnatally diagnosed and in 13 (7%) cases the timing of diagnosis was unavailable. In 13/128 cases reported antenatally the fetus/baby did not have unilateral CDH or had been misdiagnosed. The majority of affected pregnancies were singleton (98%). Of the antenatal suspected/diagnosed cases there were 70 babies delivered alive (39 died subsequently), 4 miscarried, 8 were stillbirths, 43 had termination of pregnancy (TOP) and in 1 case this information is missing. Most cases (68%) were diagnosed between 18–23 weeks. All TOP's were performed at less than 24 weeks gestation and 28/43 (65%) fetuses had other associated structural anomalies/chromosomal problems. Conclusions: The prevalence of CDH was 3.5 per 10 000 births in this region. 27% of pregnancies diagnosed with unilateral CDH antenatally resulted in a live born infant that survived the immediate postnatal period. Majority of the cases reported to the register were diagnosed antenatally. Increased surveillance for other anomalies is required when CDH is suspected/diagnosed antenatally. Population based data should be used in counselling parents.


Blue noise error patterns are well suited to human perception, and when applied to stochastic rendering techniques, blue noise masks can minimize unwanted low-frequency noise in the final image. Current methods of applying different blue noise masks to each rendered frame result in either white noise frequency spectra temporally, and thus poor convergence and stability, or lower quality spatially. We propose novel blue noise masks that retain high quality blue noise spatially, yet when animated produce values at each pixel that are well distributed over time. To do so, we create scalar valued masks by modifying the energy function of the void and cluster algorithm. To create uniform and nonuniform vector valued masks, we make the same modifications to the blue-noise dithered sampling algorithm. These masks exhibit blue noise frequency spectra in both the spatial and temporal domains , resulting in visually pleasing error patterns, rapid convergence speeds, and increased stability when filtered temporally. Since masks can be initialized with arbitrary sample sets, these improvements can be used on a large variety of problems, both uniformly and importance sampled. We demonstrate these improvements in volumetric rendering, ambient occlusion, and stochastic convolution. By extending spatial blue noise to spatiotemporal blue noise, we overcome the convergence limitations of prior blue noise works, enabling new applications for blue noise distributions. Usable masks and source code can be found at https://github.com/NVIDIAGameWorks/SpatiotemporalBlueNoiseSDK.


Abstract. Currently, most of the high-spectral-resolution infrared limb sounders use subsets of the recorded spectra (microwindows) in their retrieval schemes to reduce the computing time of rerunning the radiative transfer model. A fast linear retrieval scheme is described which allows the whole spectral signature of the target molecule to be used. We determine that pressure and temperature retrievals can be treated linearly up to a 20% difference between the atmospheric state and the linearisation point for a 3% error margin and up to 10 K "difference" for a 3 K error margin near the stratopause and less than 0.5 K elsewhere. Assuming perfect pT knowledge, CH4 retrievals can be be treated linearly up to a 20% CH4 concentration "difference" for a 2% error margin. As an example, this technique is implemented for the Michelson Interferometer for Passive Atmospheric Sounding instrument, but it is applicable to any high-resolution limb sounder.


Global change—particularly climate change, forest management, and atmospheric deposition—has significantly altered forest growing conditions in Europe. The influences of these changes on beech growth (Fagus sylvatica L.) were investigated for the past 80 years in Belgium, using non-linear mixed effects models on ring-width chronologies of 149 mature and dominant beech trees (87–186 years old). The effects of the developmental stage (i.e., increasing tree size) were filtered out in order to focus on time-dependent growth changes. Beech radial growth was divided into a low-frequency signal (=growth rate), mainly influenced by forest management and atmospheric deposition, and into a high-frequency variability (≈mean sensitivity), mainly influenced by climate change. Between 1930 and 2008, major long-term and time-dependent changes were highlighted. The beech growth rate has decreased by about 38% since the 1950–1960s, and growth variability has increased by about 45% since the 1970–1980s. Our results indicate that (1) before the 1980s, beech growth rate was not predominantly impacted by climate change but rather by soil alteration (i.e., soil compaction and/or nitrogen deposition); and (2) since the 1980s, climate change induced more frequent and intense yearly growth reductions that amplified the growth rate decrease. The highlighted changes were similar in the two ecoregions of Belgium, although more pronounced in the lowlands than in the uplands.


Generalized Benders decomposition (GBD) is a globally optimal algorithm for mixed integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) problems, which are NP-hard and can be widely found in the area of wireless resource allocation. The main idea of GBD is decomposing an MINLP problem into a primal problem and a master problem, which are iteratively solved until their solutions converge. However, a direct implementation of GBD is time- and memory-consuming. The main bottleneck is the high complexity of the master problem, which increases over the iterations. Therefore, we propose to leverage machine learning (ML) techniques to accelerate GBD aiming at decreasing the complexity of the master problem. Specifically, we utilize two different ML techniques, classification and regression, to deal with this acceleration task. In this way, a cut classifier and a cut regressor are learned, respectively, to distinguish between useful and useless cuts. Only useful cuts are added to the master problem and thus the complexity of the master problem is reduced. By using a resource allocation problem in device-to-device communication networks as an example, we validate that the proposed method can reduce the computational complexity of GBD without loss of optimality and has good generalization ability. The proposed method is applicable for solving various MINLP problems in wireless networks since the designs are invariant for different problems.