More and more coffee-producing countries establish geographical indications (GIs) for their coffees. GIs are not only considered to be a useful tool for protecting an established reputation against misuse by imitators but also being a useful strategic tool to enter the growing specialty coffee market. Whereas the importance of regional reputation is quite well-documented in the empirical literature on wine, empirical evidence for regional reputational effects on coffee prices is rather scarce. Hence, the objective of the present paper is to shed light on the relevance of regional reputation in the coffee market by representing results for Honduran coffees. A hedonic pricing model based on internet auction data is presented including current quality proxied by a quality score and reputation via regional dummies. The results indicate that up to now the region Marcala, for which a Denomination of Origin was established in 2005, has not yet established such a reputation that after controlling for quality differences higher auction prices are paid for coffees coming from this region.


OBJECTIVES: Surgical repair is the most effective treatment for stress urinary incontinence (SUI) currently. Nevertheless, this method is not without complications. The objective of this work is to compare the incidence of complications between different groups of surgical techniques employed for the treatment of SUI in our patients. METHODS: We performed a retrospective analysis of patients diagnosed of SUI who underwent surgery at our department between January 1991 and December 1999, grouping patients in three categories depending on the procedure: abdominal technique, abdomino-vaginal techniques, and sling procedures. Complications were grouped into two categories: major and minor complications. Chi-square and Fisher's test were used for the association analysis of complications' frequencies. All confidence intervals and level of statistical significance were calculated for a p value <0.05. RESULTS: 5.16% of the patients undergoing surgery for SUI suffered major complications. Globally, the most frequent complications were suprapubic pain (33%), wound seromaand/or infection (20%), postoperative acute urinary retention (AUR) (26%), and presence of significant post void residual (24%), being the sling procedure with a greater number of postoperative complications, as much in postoperative pain, as in AUR, as in presence of post void residual (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Sling procedures present a significantly higher percentage of complications when compared with abdominal and combined techniques.


Laparoscopic living donor nephrectomy is the standard of care at high volume transplant centers. Despite this there is still reticence to harvest the right kidney laparoscopically because of concerns regarding the shorter renal vein, higher complexity of dissection and potentially higher complication rates and worse renal allograft outcomes. The aim of this single-center study of 72 consecutive laparoscopic donor nephrectomies was to compare left versus right-sided laparoscopic donors in terms of surgical difficulty, complication rates and outcomes. There were 56 left-sided and 16 right-sided donors. There was no significant difference in surgical outcomes or complication rates. Similarly, the recipient surgery complication rates and allograft outcomes were no different between kidneys procured laparoscopically from the left or the right. This single center study shows comparable donor operative parameters and recipient post-operative outcomes in left and right laparoscopic donor nephrectomies. Procuring the right kidney laparoscopically is safe and does not have a negative impact on donor recovery or long term graft function in the recipient.


This paper deals with the reconstruction of spatial coordinates of an arbitrary point in a scene using two images scanned by a 3D camera or two displaced cameras. Calculations are based on the perspective geometry. Accurate determination of corresponding points is a fundamental step in this process. The usually used methods can have a problem with points, which lie in areas without sufficient contrast. This paper describes our proposed method based on the use of the relationship between the selected points and area feature points. The proposed method finds correspondence using a set of feature points found by SURF. An algorithm is proposed and described for quick removal of false correspondences, which could ruin the correct reconstruction. The new method, which makes use of pseudo color image representation (pseudo coloring) has been proposed subsequently. By means of this method it is possible to significantly increase the color contrast of the surveyed image, and therefore add more information to find the correct correspondence. Reliability of the found correspondence can be verified by reconstruction of 3D position of selected points. Executed experiments confirm our assumptions.


Provides an up–to–date introduction to the subject examining the relationship between energy and our global environment. The book covers the fundamentals of the subject, discussing what energy is, why it is important, as well as the detrimental effect on the environment following our use of energy. Energy is placed at the front of a discussion of geo–systems, living systems, technological development and the global environment, enabling the reader to develop a deeper understanding of magnitudes. Learning is re–enforced, and the relevance of the topic broadened, through the use of several conceptual veins running through the book. One of these is an attempt to demonstrate how systems are related to each other through energy and energy flows. Examples being wind–power, and bio–mass which are really solar power via another route; how the energy used to evaporate sea water must be related to the potential for hydropower; and where a volcano's energy really comes from. With fermi–like problems and student exercises incorporated throughout every chapter, this text provides the perfect companion to the growing number of students taking an interest in the subject.


Abstract Doxorubicin (DOX), a highly active chemotherapeutic drug, faces limitations in clinical application due to severe cardiotoxic effects (mainly through increased oxidative stress). Therefore, its effect is exacerbated in subjects with ischemic heart disease. We have recently reported that saffron extract (SAF), a natural compound mainly consisting of safranal and corcins, exerts a protective effect against DOX oxidative cytotoxicity in isolated rabbit hearts. Here, we aimed to investigate whether SAF exerts cardioprotection against combined ischemia-reperfusion (I/R) and DOX toxicity in H9c2 cardiomyocytes. H9c2 were subjected to simulated I/R, with or without DOX treatment at reperfusion, in the presence or absence of SAF prior to ischemia or at reperfusion. We evaluated the effects of these treatments by MTT, LDH and western blot analysis. Apoptosis was assessed by Hoechst 33258 staining, tetramethyl rhodamine methyl ester fluorescence and caspase activity. The results showed that I/R and DOX significantly decreased cardiomyocytes viability, inhibited reperfusion injury salvage kinase cardioprotective pathway, reduced contractile proteins (α-Actinine, Troponine C and MLC), increased caspase-3 expression and induced loss of mitochondrial membrane potential. These effects were remarkably inhibited by treatment with SAF (10 μg/mL) at reperfusion. SAF activated AKT/P70S6K and ERK1/2, restored contractile proteins expression, inhibited mitochondrial permeability transition pore and decreased caspase-3 activity. In conclusion, our findings indicate that SAF treatment exerted cardioprotection against I/R and DOX toxicity by reducing oxidative stress (LDH assay). Thereby, SAF offers a potential novel antioxidant therapeutic strategy to counteract I/R and DOX cardiotoxicity, paving the way for future clinical trials.


The aim of this work is to study the mechanical properties of alloy AA7075 in both T6 and O temper states, in terms of visco-plastic and fracture behavior. Tension and compression tests were carried out starting from the quasi-static loading condition 10-3 up to strain rates as high as 2 x 103 s-1. The high strain rate tests were performed using a Split Hopkinson Tension-Compression Bar (SHTCB) apparatus. The tensile specimens were also subjected to micro-fractography analysis by Scanning Electronic Microscope (SEM) to evaluate the characteristics of the fracture. The results show a different behavior for the two temper states: AA7075-O showed a significant sensitivity to strain rate, with a ductile behavior and a fracture morphology characterized by coalescence of microvoids, whilst AA7075-T6 is generally characterized by a less ductile behaviour, both as elongation at break and as fracture morphology. Brittle cleavage is accentuated with increasing strain rate. The Johnson-Cook viscoplastic model wad also used to fit the experimental data with an optimum matching.


Most information systems research until now has focused on information systems in organizations and their use by digital immigrants. Digital immigrants are those who were not born into the digital world---they learnt to use information systems at some stage in their adult lives. An underlying assumption of much of this research is that users "resist" technology or at least have some difficulty in accepting it. Digital natives, conversely, are those who have grown up in a world where the use of information and communications technology is pervasive and ubiquitous. These ubiquitous technologies, networks, and associated systems have proliferated and have woven themselves into the very fabric of everyday life. This article suggests that the rise of the digital native, along with the growth of ubiquitous information systems (UIS), potentially represents a fundamental shift in our "paradigm" for IS research. We propose a research agenda that focuses on digital natives and UIS.


ABSTRACT Regulatory T cells (Tregs) are immunosuppressive cells of the immune system that control autoimmune reactivity. Tregs also respond during immune reactions to infectious agents in order to limit immunopathological damage from potent effectors such as CD8+ cytolytic T lymphocytes. We have used the Friend virus (FV) model of retroviral infection in mice to investigate how viral infections induce Tregs. During acute FV infection, there is significant activation and expansion of thymus-derived (natural) Tregs that suppress virus-specific CD8+ T cell responses. Unlike conventional T cells, the responding Tregs are not virus specific, so the mechanisms that induce their expansion are of great interest. We now show that B cells provide essential signals for Treg expansion during FV infection. Treg responses are greatly diminished in B cell-deficient mice but can be restored by adoptive transfers of B cells at the time of infection. The feeble Treg responses in B cell-deficient mice are associated with enhanced virus-specific CD8+ T cell responses and accelerated virus control during the first 2 weeks of infection. In vitro experiments demonstrated that B cells promote Treg activation and proliferation through a glucocorticoid-induced receptor superfamily member 18 (GITR) ligand-dependent mechanism. Thus, B cells play paradoxically opposing roles during FV infection. They provide proliferative signals to immunsosuppressive Tregs, which slows early virus control, and they also produce virus-specific antibodies, which are essential for long-term virus control. IMPORTANCE When infectious agents invade a host, numerous immunological mechanisms are deployed to limit their replication, neutralize their spread, and destroy the host cells harboring the infection. Since immune responses also have a strong capacity to damage host cells and tissues, their magnitude, potency, and duration are under regulatory control. Regulatory T cells are an important component of this control, and the mechanisms that induce them to respond and exert immunosuppressive regulation are of great interest. In the current report, we show that B cells, the cells responsible for making pathogen-specific antibodies, are also involved in promoting the expansion of regulatory T cells during a retroviral infection. In vitro studies demonstrated that they do so via stimulation of the Tregs through interactions between cell surface molecules: GITR interactions with its ligand (GITRL) on B cells and GITR on regulatory T cells. These findings point the way toward therapeutics to better treat infections and autoimmune diseases. When infectious agents invade a host, numerous immunological mechanisms are deployed to limit their replication, neutralize their spread, and destroy the host cells harboring the infection. Since immune responses also have a strong capacity to damage host cells and tissues, their magnitude, potency, and duration are under regulatory control. Regulatory T cells are an important component of this control, and the mechanisms that induce them to respond and exert immunosuppressive regulation are of great interest. In the current report, we show that B cells, the cells responsible for making pathogen-specific antibodies, are also involved in promoting the expansion of regulatory T cells during a retroviral infection. In vitro studies demonstrated that they do so via stimulation of the Tregs through interactions between cell surface molecules: GITR interactions with its ligand (GITRL) on B cells and GITR on regulatory T cells. These findings point the way toward therapeutics to better treat infections and autoimmune diseases.


In Musicophilia, the eminent neurologist Dr Oliver Sacks explores the important role that music plays in our lives and in the lives of our patients. He does this by sharing his own personal history, followed by a series of clinical vignettes. He writes about the experience of feeling emotionally numb after his mother died. One day he was walking down the street and heard a radio playing Schubert through an open basement window. The music triggered many happy childhood memories, and he started to feel alive again. He writes about common everyday phenomena (eg, "earworms," in which a catchy tune keeps going through one's mind). He discusses the neuropathology of various medical conditions related to music, such as musician's focal dystonia. He presents fascinating case histories; for example, the case of the orthopedic surgeon who was struck by lightning and subsequently became obsessed with music, to the point where he was constantly listening, playing, and even composing music (so-called musicophilia). He writes about the emergence of musical talent in patients with frontotemporal dementia, and the musical talents of children and adults with Williams syndrome. He makes a plea for the use of music therapy for patients with dementia, aphasia, parkinsonism, and stroke. He illustrates the neuroanatomic substrate of various musical symptoms, such as musical auras, musical hallucinations, and amusia. With frequent references to classical literature and historical figures, Dr Sacks provides a compendium of interesting facts and figures. There is an extensive bibliography for anyone interested in further reading. However, the too-frequent use of footnotes occasionally interrupts the narrative flow. There was a paucity of literature on the neuroscience of music before the 1980s, but in recent years a number of books on this subject have emerged. Musicophilia is highly recommended for clinicians. —Manuel Matas MD


Background: Elevated tumor marker levels have been reported in heart failure patients with left ventricular (LV) systolic dysfunction and enlargement. The levels of several tumor markers, including CA 125, CA 19-9, CA 15-3 and CEA, in rheumatic mitral stenotic patients were compared to the control group. Materials and Methods: Tumor markers were measured in 60 mitral stenotic patients and in 30 normal subjects who served as the control group. Mitral stenotic patients were classified into two categories of cardiac dysfunction based on the classification of the New York Heart Association (NYHA). Group I consisted of 31 patients in NYHA class 3–4 and group II of 29 patients in NYHA class 1–2. Echocardiographic examinations and invasive hemodynamic monitoring were performed in all patients. Results: Group I patients had decreased mitral valve area (p = 0.004) and higher left atrial diameter (p = 0.003) than group II patients. Right atrial, mean pulmonary artery and pulmonary capillary wedge pressures and transmitral gradient were higher in group I than in group II (p = 0.010, 0.0001, 0.0001 and 0.0001, respectively). CA 125 levels were statistically higher in mitral stenotic patient groups than in the control group (p < 0.0001). No statistically significant differences were shown for the other tumor markers. Group I patients had higher CA 125 levels compared to group II (p < 0.0001). Conclusion: Elevated CA 125 levels may be due to venous congestion and activation of peritoneal mesothelium or increased signal peptides.


This work investigates the dynamics of electromagnetically-actuated and sensed microresonators. These resonators consist of a silicon microcantilever and a current-carrying metallic wire loop. When placed in a permanent magnetic field, the devices vibrate due to Lorentz interactions. These vibrations, in turn, induce an electromotive force, which can be correlated to the dynamic response of the device. The nature of this transduction process results in an intrinsic coupling between the system's input and output, which must be analytically and experimentally characterized to fully understand the dynamics of the devices of interest. This paper seeks to address this need through the modeling, analysis, and experimental characterization of the nonlinear response of electromagnetically-transduced microcantilevers in the presence of inductive and resistive coupling between the devices' input and output ports. A complete understanding of this behavior should enable the application of electromagnetically-transduced microsystems in practical contexts ranging from resonant mass sensing to micromechanical signal processing.Copyright © 2012 by ASME


This study explores the Open Access phenomenon from the perspective of the commercial scientific publishing industry. Open Access has been appropriated by commercial publishers, once sceptical opponents of the concept, as a means among others of distributing scholarly publications. The aim of this study is to highlight a possible explanation as to how this has come about by looking at the internal and external communication of two of the main scholarly publishing industry organizations, the STM Association and the PSP division of the AAP. Via a thematic analysis of documents from these organizations, the dissertation aims to explore how the publishers' communication regarding Open Access has changed over time. Furthermore, the study takes on how these questions are interlinked with notions of power and legitimacy within the system of scholarly communication. The analysis shows two main themes, one that represents a coercive course of restoring legitimacy, where publishers' value-adding is stressed and at the same time warning of dangerous consequences of Open Access. The other theme represents a collaborative course of action that stresses the importance of building alliances and reaching consensus. Results show that there has been a slight change in how the publishing industry answers to public policies that enforce Open Access. One conclusion is that this is due to the changing nature of said policies. (Less)


An analog sinusoidal frequency-to-voltage (F/V) converter, based on the use of nonlinear analog circuits, is introduced. The realization is composed of a differentiator, an integrator, and a translinear divider and square-rooter circuit. The proposed F/V converter can accurately and linearly convert a sinusoidal signal frequency into an output voltage, with fast response and low error, over more than two decades of frequency range. The method can also be implemented in monolithic integrated form. >


Background: Nausea and vomiting are common discomforts experienced by 50% of pregnant women.  Emesis gravidarum will gain weight into hyperemesis gravidarum.  Management to overcome the discomfort of nausea and vomiting in the first trimester of pregnancy is to use pharmacological and non-pharmacological therapies including ginger drink and green beans.  The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of ginger drink and green beans on the frequency of nausea and vomiting in trimester pregnant women. Methods: Used in this study was quasy experiment with a time series pretest-posttest design approach.  The population in this study was TM I pregnant women in the Ngawen II health center. The sample in this study was first trimester pregnant women who experienced nausea and vomiting. The analysis of this study used the Wilcoxon and Kruskal-wallis test. Results: Showed there was an effect of giving ginger drink and green beans to the frequency of nausea vomiting in first trimester pregnant women with p value 0.01 <α with ginger drink being the most influential in post hoc nausea frequency of vomiting 6.67 compared to green beans and standard drugs. Conclusion: Administration of ginger drink and green beans has an effect on reducing the frequency of nausea and vomiting in first trimester pregnant women.


Medicinal plants are important sources of new bioactive compounds with potential anticancer activity. Parvifloron D (ParvD) is an abietane diterpenoid, isolated in high amounts from Plectranthus ecklonii Benth. Previous reports have suggested potential therapeutic properties for ParvD. ParvD has shown pro-apoptotic and cytotoxic effects in leukemia and melanoma cell lines. However, to the best of our knowledge, there are no studies in triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC) models. TNBC is a breast cancer subtype characterized by an aggressive behavior with poor clinical outcomes and weak overall therapeutic responses to the current treatment options. This work aimed at evaluating the anticancer effect of ParvD in MDA-MB-231 cells, a model of human TNBC. To obtain sufficient amounts of purified ParvD the efficiency of several extraction methods was compared. ParvD (0.1–10 µM) decreased cell viability in a concentration-dependent manner. Treatment with ParvD (5 µM) significantly increased the percentage of apoptotic nuclei and exposure to 3 µM ParvD increased the sub-G1 population. Since altered cell adherence, migration, and invasion are determinant processes for the formation of metastases, the effect of ParvD on these cellular processes was tested. Although treatment with ParvD (1 µM) had no effect on cell-substrate attachment, ParvD (1 µM) significantly reduced cell chemotaxis and invasion. This is the first report describing the proapoptotic effect of ParvD in TNBC cells. Moreover, for the first time we have shown that ParvD reduces cell motility, unraveling potential anti-metastatic properties.


This dissertation presents stochastics-based methods enabling testing related to three different aspects of the transition towards Smart Grids: the overall increase in sources of uncertainty, the need for studying the effects of higher shares of distributed generation on distribution grids, and the focus on single consumers through concepts such as demand side management. A nonintrusive Polynomial Chaos approach is developed for fast uncertainty analysis. It is shown that by combining Polynomial Chaos and numerical integration, black box use of Polynomial Chaos can be achieved. Additionally, by using a single polynomial basis, the procedure is automated for parameters with arbitrary probability distributions, avoiding adjustments traditionally performed in Polynomial Chaos. It is shown that the results of 10000 Monte Carlo simulations can be achieved by post-processing as little as 6 simulations per random parameter, using deterministic integration points as inputs. In order to allow for robust testing of distribution grid-related methods with several different topologies, an algorithm based on concepts from Graph Theory is designed for generating random distribution grid models. The algorithm separately generates medium voltage grid and low voltage grid models. A geographical reference is used in order to facilitate the assignment of distances and electrical properties, and through these the construction of admittance matrices for further use. The algorithm is validated by comparing the statistics of real grids with those of generated grids. Finally, a framework is developed for the random generation of single load profiles for arbitrary types of consumers, based on standard load profiles as a reference for user activity. The generated profiles represent realistic challenges for simulation and testing thanks to the abrupt consumption behaviour, contrary to the smooth standard load profiles which can only be considered realistic for large numbers of consumers. It is shown through an implementation for households that a large number of generated load profiles behave similarly as the original standard load profile, thereby demonstrating their statistical correctness.


Purpose

Islamic banks are obliged to carry out transactions that only comply with Islamic commercial laws. Malaysia has been championing the Sharīʿah-based banking system, and so, continuous improvement on the compliance level of the institutions offering Islamic financial services is key to its global recognition in this industry. One of the issues that can affect deposit products is existence of a sale contract and loan facility in one transaction. Famous prophetic tradition prohibits this. Hence, this paper aims to examine the linkage between bayʿwa salaf (combination between a sale contract and loan in one transaction) and deposits accounts in Malaysia.

Design/methodology/approach

The subject matter of this paper is one that is researchable within library-based research. It is on this premise the research used the non-empirical qualitative research methodology. It used inductive method of analysis of both Islamic and policy documents on Islamic banking in Malaysia. Literature from Islamic jurisprudence, websites of some of the Islamic banks in Malaysia and relevant resolutions from the Shariah Advisory Council of Central Bank of Malaysia were consulted.

Findings

Based on the methodology mentioned above, the researchers arrived at the following findings: that, although there is no juristic disagreement about the prohibition of bayʿwa salaf, disagreement, however, occurs in results of some contracts. The most notable area of agreement on the existence of bayʿwa salaf is when there is express stipulation of sale or rendering of service and express or implied stipulation of loan alongside of the sale or service rendering. In an organized reversed tawarruq, the use of these deposits by the banks is regarded as loan from the depositors to the banks, who will soon put the money into sale that will generate profit to be divided between the banks and their depositors. However, this study finds that this is not bayʿwa salaf prohibited by the prophetic tradition.

Originality/value

The originality of this topic is proven by the new banking regulation regime of Malaysia, which compels Islamic banks to guarantee all deposits under them. As Islamic banks carry out their banking activities through trading, there is need to conduct a research such as this. This is to examine whether Islamic banks' unilateral use of depositors' funds in non-investment accounts which is translated, constructively, as loan from the depositors to Islamic banks amounts to bayʿwa salaf before the future tawarruq. Here there is loan and sale, which is the tawarruq. Hence, the need to do this research.


This article reviews a range of ways in which issues of national identity have been shown to be linked with the topic of language. We suggest that there is scope for development both of the theoretical underpinning to claims made about the nature of these links, and also, in consequence, to the methodological approaches appropriate to empirical investigations of them. Here, we explore the ways in which aspects of the social world such as those summarised above are understood theoretically. The first part of the paper argues that debates about the relationship of languages to forms of social identity, particularly those associated with nationalisms, often make a number of assumptions – about languages, about collectivities and about social agency. The second part interrogates these assumptions and proposes the utility of realist theory in evaluating claims in this area. In the final part of the paper, we outline the methodological implications of our argument.


Most developed countries have compulsory insurance programs for temporary disability, that is, cash benefits for non‐work‐related sickness. Despite the economic significance of these programs, little is known about their effects on work absenteeism or labor supply. We exploit a policy reform that consisted of the abolishment of a waiting day together with an increase of cash benefits for short sick leaves. We find that the total number of days of sickness absence was reduced by the reform, which is likely due to the fact that the abolishment of the waiting period made it less costly for workers to be absent for short periods.


 Abstract — NiTi alloys possess magnificent superelastic, shape memory, high strength and biocompatible properties. For improving mechanical properties, foremost, superelasticity behavior, heat treatment process is carried out. In this paper, two different heat treatment methods were undertaken: (1) solid solution, and (2) aging. The effect of each treatment in a constant time is investigated. Five samples were prepared to study the structure and optimize mechanical properties under different time and temperature. For measuring the upper plateau stress, lower plateau stress and residual strain, tensile test is carried out. The samples were aged at two different temperatures to see difference between aging temperatures. The sample aged at 500 °C has a bigger crystallite size and lower amount of Ni which causes the mentioned sample to possess poor pseudo elasticity behaviour than the other aged sample. The sample aged at 460 °C has shown remarkable superelastic properties. The mentioned sample's higher plateau is 580 MPa with the lowest residual strain (0.17%) while other samples have possessed higher residual strains. X-ray diffraction was used to investigate the produced


Labour turnover is one of the major complications that industry faces on a daily basis. Turnover is particularly harmful to serial assembly lines. The learning process that a new operator must undergo when first introduced to an assembly line station generates blockage and starvation in the previous and successive stations, causing a reduction in the line's throughput. In this paper, we analyse different work allocation strategies for serial assembly line designs in order to determine which designs perform best under the presence of labour turnover and a task-learning process. In particular, we compare the traditional balanced line with two other assembly line designs, a variant of the bucket brigades (BB) and a hybrid method – the modified work sharing (MWS) method. By making a judicious use of control buffers, the MWS method seeks to combine the positive characteristics of both the BB and traditional balanced lines to naturally adapt to different levels of labour turnover. The results presented in this paper show that the MWS outperforms the BB and the balanced designs.


Medical studies frequently require to extract the relationship between each covariate and the outcome with statistical confidence measures. To do this, simple parametric models are frequently used (e.g. coefficients of linear regression) but usually fitted on the whole dataset. However, it is common that the covariates may not have a uniform effect over the whole population and thus a unified simple model can miss the heterogeneous signal. For example, a linear model may be able to explain a subset of the data but fail on the rest due to the nonlinearity and heterogeneity in the data. In this paper, we propose DDGroup (data-driven group discovery), a data-driven method to effectively identify subgroups in the data with a uniform linear relationship between the features and the label. DDGroup outputs an interpretable region in which the linear model is expected to hold. It is simple to implement and computationally tractable for use. We show theoretically that, given a large enough sample, DDGroup recovers a region where a single linear model with low variance is well-specified (if one exists), and experiments on real-world medical datasets confirm that it can discover regions where a local linear model has improved performance. Our experiments also show that DDGroup can uncover subgroups with qualitatively different relationships which are missed by simply applying parametric approaches to the whole dataset.


This document calculates and discusses circular groove angle (CGA) affects on journal bearing performance. CFD method has been used for calculate N-S equations and cavitation effect has been considered. The results show that as CGA increases, the maximum pressure is decreased, the capacity and friction moment are also decreased. The maximum pressure position is increased from 1 to 2 when CGA is 180°. This paper will provide a theoretical basis for journal bearing groove optimal design.


Copper nanoparticles were synthesized using lithium ions to increase the aqueous electrical conductivity of the solution and precisely control the size, shape, and size distribution of the particles. In this study, the conventional approach of increasing particle size by the concentration of copper ions and PGPPE in a copper chloride solution was compared to increasing the concentration of lithium chloride when the copper chloride concentration was held constant. Particle size and shape were characterized by TEM, and the size distribution of the particles at different concentrations was obtained by particle size analysis. Increasing the concentration of copper ion in the solution greatly increased the aqueous electric conductivity and the size of the particles but led to a wide size distribution ranging from 150 nm to 400 nm and rough particle morphology. The addition of lithium ions increased the size of the particles, but maintains them in a range of 250 nm. In addition the particles exhibited spherical shape as determined by TEM. The addition of lithium ions to the solution has the potential to synthesize nanoparticles with optimal characteristics for printing applications by maintaining a narrow size range and spherical shape.


woman to keep her legs flexed at the moment of delivery. Left to herself, she will always straighten them out and separate them widely. This is, in fact, the way to provide the greatest relaxation of the perineum and so ease the delivery of the head. It took me nearly thirty years to realize these simple facts, and in the succeeding ten I have proved time and time again how right Nature is and how wrong is so much obstetric practice. The greatest difficulty is to get nurses to let the legs extend properly, and sometimes to hyperextend, as in the old-fashioned Walcher position. But when it is done the ease of delivery is often astonishing. Labour is hard enough without obstetricians and nurses putting unnecessary strains on the perineum that may lead to permanent weakness later on. It is often forgotten how easy it is to overstrain ligaments under anaesthesia, and much backache after labour is not due to internal derangements but to overflexion under the anaesthetic. In the same way, I fear, many women go into hospital to have a dilatation and curettage for backache due to some gynaecological condition, and come out with one due to over-zealous production of the lithotomy position. In fact, the way patients' backs are often treated under anaesthetic-whether overflexed, or hyperextended, or no provision made to support the lumbar curve-horrifies me, and I hope this statement of elementary anatomical facts may do something to change the ordinary run of obstetric (and gynaecological and surgical) practice and reduce the toll of suffering due to traditional or thoughtless teaching.I am, etc.,


For safety-critical systems, the safety constraints are required to be satisfied through control design. To describe and apply system safety constraints, controlled invariant set (CIS) and control barrier function (CBF) are effective methods. In many applications, safety constraints may change dynamicly in operation environment and thus are not always continuous. However, such discontinuity and switching problems of CIS and CBF were well-addressed in the literature. In this paper, to tackle the issues, novel definitions of switched CIS (SCIS) and switched CBF (SCBF) are proposed. To address the undifferentiability issue in SCBF, a novel relaxation function that connects different SCISs is proposed. Sufficient conditions for selecting the relaxation function are proposed with a rigorous proof. In the application of vehicle safety control for an obstacle avoidance problem, a relaxation function is selected and demonstrated in the safety control design. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed definitions and control design, simulation results are presented and discussed.


An environmental agreement in an oligopolistic market may violate the competition rules, as described in Articles 81 and 82 of the Treaty. Ordinarily, some collusion among firms is necessary for an environmental agreement to be successful. This collusion may be acceptable when it relates to the development of technologies or processes, as opposed to the classic hypothesis of collusion regarding prices or the division of the market. One must also consider the goals of competition policy. Thus, factors such as tangible benefits to the consumer or a substantial technological advance (for example, an environmental agreement that brings firms together to conduct R&D) could outweigh potential anti-competitive effects of the agreement. Accordingly, while an environmental agreement can act as an entry barrier to a market, it can also lead to the development of new technologies. This paper presents the general aspects of competition law and policy and then discusses how competition law and policy can be applied to environmental agreements in an oligopolistic market. This paper argues that while competition policy can sometimes be relaxed with regard to environmental agreements in a competitive market, it should remain strict when applied to agreements in an oligopolistic market, as this type of market structure so often leads to anti-competitive behaviour. competition law, competition policy, European law


Heterogeneous multi-core platforms that contain different types of cores, organized as clusters, are emerging, e.g., ARM's big.LITTLE architecture. These platforms often need to deal with multiple applications, having different performance requirements, executing concurrently. This leads to the generation of varying and mixed workloads (e.g., compute and memory intensive) due to resource sharing. Run-time management is required for adapting to such performance requirements and workload variabilities and to achieve energy efficiency. Moreover, the management becomes challenging when the applications are multi-threaded and the heterogeneity needs to be exploited. The existing run-time management approaches do not efficiently exploit cores situated in different clusters simultaneously (referred to as inter-cluster exploitation) and DVFS potential of cores, which is the aim of this paper. Such exploitation might help to satisfy the performance requirement while achieving energy savings at the same time. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a run-time management approach that first selects thread-to-core mapping based on the performance requirements and resource availability. Then, it applies online adaptation by adjusting the voltage-frequency (V-f) levels to achieve energy optimization, without trading-off application performance. For thread-to-core mapping, offline profiled results are used, which contain performance and energy characteristics of applications when executed on the heterogeneous platform by using different types of cores in various possible combinations. For an application, thread-to-core mapping process defines the number of used cores and their type, which are situated in different clusters. The online adaptation process classifies the inherent workload characteristics of concurrently executing applications, incurring a lower overhead than existing learning-based approaches as demonstrated in this paper. The classification of workload is performed using the metric Memory Reads Per Instruction (MRPI). The adaptation process pro-actively selects an appropriate V-f pair for a predicted workload. Subsequently, it monitors the workload prediction error and performance loss, quantified by instructions per second (IPS), and adjusts the chosen V-f to compensate. We validate the proposed run-time management approach on a hardware platform, the Odroid-XU3, with various combinations of multi-threaded applications from PARSEC and SPLASH benchmarks. Results show an average improvement in energy efficiency up to 33 percent compared to existing approaches while meeting the performance requirements.


Neural speech synthesis models can synthesize high quality speech but typically require a high computational complexity to do so. In previous work, we introduced LPCNet, which uses linear prediction to significantly reduce the complexity of neural synthesis. In this work, we further improve the efficiency of LPCNet – targeting both algorithmic and computational improvements – to make it usable on a wide variety of devices. We demonstrate an improvement in synthesis quality while operating 2.5x faster. The resulting open-source1 LPCNet algorithm can perform real-time neural synthesis on most existing phones and is even usable in some embedded devices.


A novel aperture-coupled, asymmetrical C-shaped slot, square microstrip antenna is proposed for circular polarisation (CP). A narrow and asymmetrical C-shaped slot, microstrip antenna is fed at the centre using an aperture coupling to obtain a CP operation. The compactness of the antenna is easily obtained by inserting a C-shaped slot. Wide CP radiation is achieved simply by making the C-shaped slot asymmetrical. With this antenna, the measured 3 dB AR bandwidth is around 3.3% and the 10 dB return loss bandwidth achieved is 16.0%. The overall antenna size is 0.48lambda
 o
 times 0.48lambda
 o
 times 0.092lambda
 o
 at 2.4 GHz. The proposed slot microstrip patch technology is useful to design compact, broadband, circularly polarised antennas and arrays.


In the digital world, whether it is a novel product or a decade old wine, most products and brands have a presence on social media (SM) to keep up with the dynamic trends of the business environment (Berthon et al., 2012; Vries et al., 2012). While the literature does not provide sufficient evidence with regards to the use and the effects of internet and SM on the wine sector (Thach, 2009), luxury wines are one of the few industries that have failed to adopt internet and SM into their marketing strategies and consistently failed to enjoy profits from such opportunity (Arana, 2016). Grounded on that, the aim of this research is to examine the influence of internet and SM on luxury wine brands' consumers' purchase intentions. Following the critical examination of the literature review, to achieve the research objectives, this study employed a mixed-method approach in the data collection.

For the qualitative research, four semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with leading luxury wine brand managers to deliver insights into the phenomena. The qualitative data revealed that the managers see internet and SM as an important opportunity for better communication, internalisation and an exceptional source of information. However, the authenticity of the luxury wine brands has elevated questions with regards to the suitability of the digital platforms and managers advocated that SM activities should be handled with extreme care. With some reservations, the managers further suggest that effective use of digital platforms can prove direct return for luxury wine brands in terms of brand visibility and awareness, but an indirect return in terms of brand loyalty, brand equity, purchase intentions and sales.

The quantitative phase of the research was achieved via an online survey with 282 respondents. The survey aims to analyse the influence of internet and SM on luxury wine brand consumers' purchase intentions. The regression analysis result shows that consumers' positive attitudes towards SMM activities of luxury wine brands impact the overall consumers' purchase intentions for luxury wine brands positively (β=0.499, t=9.150, p<0.0005).

The interpretation of the findings focusses on the relationship between internet, SM and luxury wine brands' consumers' purchase intentions. The interviews revealed that considering the speciality of the product type of wine, luxury wine brands are imperturbable with regards to their presence and use of the SM. The survey has supported this by pointing out that more than half of the luxury wine consumers have never experienced a luxury wine brand advertisement on digital platforms before.

The conclusions indicate that digital platforms are an important opportunity to create a competitive advantage in the market that will soon to be a must. A critical management of SM activities has been stressed. The finding suggests that luxury wine firms should work innovatively and create practical solutions to eliminate excuses like the authenticity of the product does not match SM; via better content management and demanded more marketing research from the brands to aid them in their long-term sustainable marketing strategies. The study's main limitation has emerged as the lack of generalisation of the results, whereas, the study demanded further researches such as a focus on FGC and UGC, and on different characteristics of wine (still, sparkling, champagne).


There is an essentially circular interaction between the human social system and the marine ecosystem. The Oceans Past V Conference "Multidisciplinary perspectives on the history of human interactionswith life in the ocean" held in Tallinn, Estonia, inMay 2015was an opportunity for the presentation and discussion of papers on a diverse array of topics that examined this socio-ecological system from a historical perspective. Here we provide background to the disciplines participating in the conference and to the conference itself. We summarize the conference papers that appear in this special volume of the ICES JMS and highlight issues which arose during general discussion. We make two conclusions. First, to have greater impact and ensure more efficient use of knowledge gained frommarine historical ecology (MHE) and marine environmental history (MEH) in ecosystem-basedmanagement and relatedpolicy development, practitioners need toworkmore routinelywith population andecological modellers and statisticians. This will allow greater processing of the available historical data to derive ecologically meaningful properties that can then be used to assess the ecological impact of long-term changes of affected species and define appropriate and realistic management targets. Second, increased multiand trans-disciplinary effort is required to better understand the relative importance of different human demographic, technological, economic, and cultural drivers on the patterns, intensities and trajectories of human activities affecting marine ecosystems.


Introduction: This paper reports on a 47-year-old Caucasian female who presented to a chiropractic college teaching clinic with pain and unresolved functional deficits from an untreated traumatic calcaneal fracture of 10 years duration diagnosed by radiograph. Case Presentation: The patient had altered gait, range of motion deficits in the right ankle, hypesthesia and weakness in the right lower leg, and sacroiliac joint pain provoked with lumbar ranges of motion and orthopedic testing. The chiropractic diagnosis was traumatic right ankle arthropathy, pain in the right ankle, myalgia of the right lower extremity, as well as lumbosacral joint dysfunction. Intervention and Outcomes: Conservative treatment included chiropractic manipulation of the lower extremity and lumbosacral spine, acupuncture in the right ankle region for pain control, soft tissue techniques including myofascial release and instrument-assisted soft tissue mobilization, adjunctive therapies (heat, interferential current and ice massage) and rehabilitative exercises. Outcome measures included the numerical rating scale (NRS) for pain, the Lower Extremity Functional Scale (LEFS), and the Revised Oswestry. The patient attained clinically significant improvement in her NRS and LEFS scores.


The study of skin mechanical impedance is a clue to analyse its health. We use a Langevin Transducer at 60kHz to excite the skin. In return we observe the acoustic forces generated by the interaction. To achieve that, the system is identified and presented in the rotating reference frame, and we describe the design of two PI controllers that accurately control the vibration velocity. However, in vivo analysis can be tricky when it comes to safety and duration of tests. Thus, phantom tissues are used as substitute to simulate skin behaviour. Due to its mechanical properties similar to skin, and its simple manipulation, Dragon Skin ®, a silicone rubber type of phantom, was chosen. The paper presents the characterisation of the mechanical impedance of three silicon phantoms with different properties based on force observation. The results show that the phantoms can be indeed identified based on this method.


The low temperature synthesis of TiO2 / SrTiO3 films on Ti substrate was examined focusing on the thickness, the adherence and the surface morphology of the films. The Ti substrate is superior to other ones such as glass, ITO etc from the viewpoint of electrical conductivity and formability. An amorphous-like (amo.) TiO2 film was prepared on the surface of Ti substrate by chemical treatment with H2O2/HCl aqueous solution. The thickness of the amo.TiO2 film increased almost linearly with the period of the chemical treatment, it had ranges of up to 1.5-2.0µm by the 120min treatment. When the period of chemical treatment was shorter than 60min, which corresponded to the thickness of about 1µm, the uniform and adhesive amo.TiO2 film could be obtained on the substrate. The chemical treatment longer than 60min resulted in inducing cracks in the amo.TiO2 film, they became clear by extending the treatment time. By annealing at 773-873K for 60min in air, the amo.TiO2 transformed mainly to the anatase-type TiO2 showing high crystallinity while a small amount of the rutile-type also appeared. On the other hand, the SrTiO3 film could be obtained on the Ti substrate by annealing the amo.TiO2 coated with Sr(NO3)2 above 773K in Ar. The adherence of the films was also kept after the heat treatments. The synthesis of such films hardly changed the thickness and the surface morphology. Thus, the TiO2, SrTiO3 films could be easily synthesised at low temperature on the Ti substrate by using the amo.TiO2 film prepared by the chemical treatment. In addition, the formation of TiO2 thin films on the SrTiO3 phase was also discussed.


: Bilobalide is a naturally-occurring sesquiterpene trilactone with therapeutic potential in the management of ischemia and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease. In the present study, we investigated the effect of bilobalide on the activity of rat constitutive androstane receptor (rCAR) and rat pregnane X receptor (rPXR) and compared that with human CAR (hCAR) and human PXR (hPXR). Bilobalide activated rCAR in a luciferase reporter gene assay and increased rCAR target gene expression in cultured rat hepatocytes, as determined by the CYP2B1 mRNA and CYP2B enzyme activity (benzyloxyresorufin O -dealkylation) assays. This increase in hepatocyte CYP2B1 expression by bilobalide was not accompanied by a corresponding increase in rCAR mRNA level. In contrast to the activation of rCAR, the activity of rPXR, hCAR, and hPXR was not influenced by this chemical in cell-based reporter gene assays. Consistent with these results, bilobalide did not alter rPXR, hCAR, or hPXR target gene expression in rat or human hepatocytes, as evaluated by the CYP3A23, CYP2B6, CYP3A4 mRNA assays and the CYP3A (testosterone 6 β -hydroxylation) and CYP2B6 (bupropion hydroxylation) enzyme activity assays. Bilobalide was not an antagonist of rPXR, hCAR, or hPXR, as suggested by the finding that it did not attenuate rPXR activation by pregnenolone α -carbonitrile, hCAR activation by 6-(4-chlorophenyl)imidazo[2,1- b ][1,3]thiazole-5-carbaldehyde O -(3,4-dichlorobenzyl)oxime, or hPXR activation by rifampicin in reporter gene assays. In conclusion, bilobalide The primary goal of the present study is to investigate the effect of bilobalide on the activity of rCAR and rPXR and compare that with hCAR and hPXR. The experiments, which were performed in a hepatoma cell line and primary cultures of hepatocytes, involved reporter gene assays and CAR/PXR target gene expression assays. The results are discussed in the context of the species-dependent and receptor-selective effect of bilobalide. with DMSO (0.1% v/v; vehicle), rifampicin (1 µM), both rifampicin (1 µM) and bilobalide (30, 60, or 100 µM), or both rifampicin (1 µM) and ketoconazole (30 µM; positive control). Firefly luciferase and R. reniformis luciferase activities were measured and normalized. Each independent experiment was performed in triplicate. Data are expressed as a percentage of the normalized luciferase activity in the group treated with DMSO and CITCO (A), DMSO and PCN (B), or DMSO and rifampicin (C). Data are shown as mean ± S.E.M. for three or four independent experiments.


This study explores the rhetorical structure of university lecture introductions and its linguistic specificities. Applying genre, corpus and contrastive analyses, it aims to identify which moves and steps are used in lecture introductions in English and Montenegrin, as well as to reveal differences and similarities in their structure between the two languages. Drawing upon the Swalesean move approach (1981, 1990) and referring to the models already established in the literature, the study examines academic lectures in the linguistics discipline taken from the electronically available British corpora, and a specially compiled corpus of Montenegrin linguistic lectures. The results show the major difference lying in a more elaborate British lecture introductions framework. It consists of three moves – Move 1: Orienting the students, Move 2: Setting-up lecture framework and Move 3: Putting topic in context, compared to a two-move structure of Montenegrin lecture introductions composed of Move 2 and Move 3. Some specific differences are also noticed in the composition of these two moves. The main similarity exists in the presence of two obligatory moves in both corpora, Move 2 and Move 3 respectively, reflecting the influence of the lecture as an established academic genre in university settings regardless of the language lectures were delivered in. In addition, compared to the established models in the literature, the findings have yielded three steps original to this study.


Small ruminant lentiviruses (SRLV) are economically important viral pathogens of sheep and goats. SRLV infection may interfere in the innate and adaptive immunity of the host, and genes associated with resistance or susceptibility to infection with SRLV have not been fully recognized. The presence of animals with relatively high and low proviral load suggests that some host factors are involved in the control of virus replication. To better understand the role of the genes involved in the host response to SRLV infection, RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) method was used to compare whole gene expression profiles in goats carrying both a high (HPL) and low (LPL) proviral load of SRLV and uninfected animals. Data enabled the identification of 1130 significant differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between control and LPL groups: 411 between control and HPL groups and 1434 DEGs between HPL and LPL groups. DEGs detected between the control group and groups with a proviral load were found to be significantly enriched in several gene ontology (GO) terms, including an integral component of membrane, extracellular region, response to growth factor, inflammatory and innate immune response, transmembrane signaling receptor activity, myeloid differentiation primary response gene 88 (MyD88)-dependent toll-like receptor signaling pathway as well as regulation of cytokine secretion. Our results also demonstrated significant deregulation of selected pathways in response to viral infection. The presence of SRLV proviral load in blood resulted in the modification of gene expression belonging to the toll-like receptor signaling pathway, the tumor necrosis factor (TNF) signaling pathway, the cytokine-cytokine receptor interaction, the phagosome, the Ras signaling pathway, the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase (PI3K)/protein kinase B (AKT) (PI3K-Akt) signaling pathway and rheumatoid arthritis. It is worth mentioning that the most predominant in all pathways were genes represented by toll-like receptors, tubulins, growth factors as well as interferon gamma receptors. DEGs detected between LPL and HPL groups were found to have significantly enriched regulation of signaling receptor activity, the response to toxic substances, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH) dehydrogenase complex assembly, cytokine production, vesicle, and vacuole organization. In turn, the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway tool classified DEGs that enrich molecular processes such as B and T-cell receptor signaling pathways, natural killer cell-mediated cytotoxicity, Fc gamma R-mediated phagocytosis, toll-like receptor signaling pathways, TNF, mammalian target of rapamycin (mTOR) signaling and forkhead box O (Foxo) signaling pathways, etc. Our data indicate that changes in SRLV proviral load induced altered expression of genes related to different biological processes such as immune response, inflammation, cell locomotion, and cytokine production. These findings provide significant insights into defense mechanisms against SRLV infection. Furthermore, these data can be useful to develop strategies against SRLV infection by selection of animals with reduced SRLV proviral concentration that may lead to a reduction in the spread of the virus.


Nonenzymatic posttranslational glucosylation of the free amine of lysine residues can occur in hyperglycemic diabetic subjects. Using monoclonal antibodies that specifically bind the reduced conjugate of glucose covalently bound to the epsilon amine of lysine, glucitollysine, plasma lipoprotein glucosylation was demonstrated by radioimmunoassays in all subjects tested. Lipoproteins isolated from the plasma of diabetic subjects in poor metabolic control contained up to 33-fold increases in glucitollysine residues/mg of isolated lipoprotein protein, and on an absolute basis contained between 36 and 383 nmol of glucitollysine in their total lipoprotein fraction compared with normals, who had a mean of 2.9 ± 0.06 nmol. The majority of the glucosylated protein in the d < 1.125 g/ml fraction was present in the triglyceride-rich lipoproteins of hyperglycemic subjects, whereas the majority of the glucosylated protein in the d < 1.125 g/ml fraction of euglycemic subjects was present in the high-density lipoproteins (HDL). A number of immunochemical approaches were used to demonstrate that, in diabetic plasma, apo Al, apo All, apo B, apo Cl, apo E, and albumin were glucosylated. Detailed studies of the apoproteins of a d ≤ 1.019 g/ml lipoprotein fraction and of an HDL fraction isolated from a hyperglycemic diabetic subject indicated that glucitollysine-specific antibodies can be sed to preparatively isolate proteins containing glucosylated amino acid residues so that the extent of glucosylation in specific proteins can be measured. The results indicate that some of the lysine residues of the apoproteins can be modified in hyperglycemic diabetic subjects by the covalent attachment of glucose. The possible significance of these observations is discussed.


The development and application of fluorescence in-situ hybridization (FISH) has opened the way for comprehensive studies on numerical chromosome abnormalities in human spermatozoa. FISH can be rapidly applied to large numbers of spermatozoa and thus overcomes the major limitation of karyotyping spermatozoa after penetration of zona-free hamster oocytes. The simultaneous hybridization of two or more chromosome-specific probes to spermatozoa and subsequent detection of the bound probes using different fluorescent detection systems enables two or more chromosomes to be localized simultaneously in the same spermatozoon and provides a technique for undertaking reasonable estimates of aneuploidy. The most commonly used probes are those which bind to the centromeric region of specific chromosomes. Most studies to date have concentrated on estimating aneuploidy in spermatozoa from normospermic men, although reports are beginning to appear on aneuploidy in spermatozoa from subfertile and infertile men. Multi-probe FISH studies have generally reported disomy (hyperhaploidy) estimates of 0.05-0.2% per chromosome. There is preliminary evidence that some chromosomes such as X, Y and 21 are predisposed towards higher rates of non-disjunction during spermatogenesis. There are also suggestions of inter-donor variability in aneuploidy frequencies for specific chromosomes, although this requires confirmation in larger studies. While FISH is clearly a powerful technique that has many applications in reproductive medicine, it must also be realized that it does have limitations and the technology itself is still evolving and has yet to be fully validated on spermatozoa.


One of the most critical problems in multihop wireless networks is the fair allocation of bandwidth among different nodes. Although there are significant researches on the fairness issues in single-hop wireless networks, research on multihop fairness rarely found in the literature. A user in multi-hop network, besides the contention with other nodes to obtain the channel in physical layer, must find a solution for the inevitable contention between its own and the relayed traffic in the network layer. Accordingly, a suitable mechanism is needed to schedule data flows in network layer fairly. In this paper, a new algorithm is proposed which tries to allocate node's bandwidth fairly between different contention traffic flows. The main purpose of this algorithm, named HBPQ (History Based Priority Queuing) is the prevention of starvation occurrence for any active flow in the network. HBPQ uses a satisfaction function to measure the user's gratifications and tries to bring close the satisfaction of users. If HBPQ is used for flow scheduling in multihop wireless ad-hoc networks, the simulation results show that each active network's flow, receives a throughput proportional to distance between its source and destination and existing traffic load on its traversed path.


HYPOPLASIA of the maxilla may cause a facial malformation, called "dishface deformity," which is characterized by saddle nose, shortening of the columella, flattening of the alar flares, and depression of the malar eminences. This configuration is associated with lack of development of the anterior nasal spine and the inferior orbital rim. The defect may encompass the alveolar rims and thus result in dental malocclusion. Radiographically, there is shortening of the normal distance from the anterior nasal spine to the nasion and to the posterior nasal spine. In addition, the anterior nasal spine may be absent or rudimentary, as often is true in patients with bilateral cleft lips. 1 At birth the facial bones constitute one eighth of the cranial bulk, yet at maturity they account for one half. 2 This equilibration is accomplished by anterior inferior growth of the maxilla and mandible with eruption of the teeth and the development


Direct reflux and TLC methods were used to isolate and identify de-aristolochic acid Aristolochia tuberosa C. F. Liang et S. M. Hwang (DAACS). Different doses of DAACS were administered intragastricly (i.g) and methods of hotplate, writhing, hot-bathing and tail-flick method were used to observe anti-nociceptive effects of DAACS; β-Endorphin (β-EP) and prostaglandin E2 (PGE2) contents of mice were detected with radioimmunoassay (RIA) to explore the anti-nociceptive mechanisms of DAACS. The results showed that DAACS (0.4, 0.8, 1.6 g·kg-1) could prolong mice' responsive latencies to hotplate significantly compared with those in the control group, delay writhing latencies of mice and reduce their writhing times, delay tail-flick latencies of mice, and reduce contents of β-EP in brain and PGE2 in liver tissue of formalin-treated mice significantly. DAACS would produce anti-nociceptive effects and its anti-nociceptive mechanism may be related to its effect on β-EP in brain and PGE2 in liver tissue of mice.


Cryogenic Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, being an effective technique in improving the spectral resolution and signal-to-noise ratio, is utilized in our group. However, we have found the traditional cryogenic apparatus inconvenient in the following aspects: (1) The system does not work very well in preventing moisture/frost from condensing on the salt windows or samples. (2) The indirect way of cooling using a metal cold finger limits the efficiency of the system. We have designed a new cryogenic apparatus. The apparatus is composed of a cooling stage and a measuring stage. In the cooling stage, the sample is directly immersed in liquid nitrogen. In the measuring stage, the sample is lifted just above the surface of liquid nitrogen, and the FT-IR spectrum is recorded. The dry cold nitrogen gas evaporated from liquid nitrogen forms a protective layer surrounding the sample and prevents moisture from condensing on the sample. Thus, neither vacuum nor salt windows are needed in cryogenic spectroscopic experiments using this method. The experimental results show that our method is effective in cryogenic FT-IR spectroscopic studies.


Social communication is important for success at home, school, work, and in the community. Lacking the ability to effectively process and convey information to others can lead to deficits in maintaining personal relationships and academic failure in school. Deficits in social communication skills can include a broad array of verbal and nonverbal behaviors important for reciprocal social interaction. In this dissertation, we are interested in how children use and integrate verbal and multiple channels of non-verbal behaviors in the context of a naturalistic social interaction. To best capture how children communicate during this social interaction, we have devised a micro-analytic coding scheme that will reveal which channels children use to convey information, as well as how they integrate these different channels. In the following studies, different components of communication will be assessed in individuals with typical development and children with neurodevelopmental disorders of different natures and origins. Our groups include: Typically Developing (TD) children, children with High Functioning Autism (HFA), children with Williams Syndrome (WS), and children with Perinatal Stroke (PS). The majority of research regarding communication in these groups has focused on infants, toddlers, and younger pre- school children, before the children are proficient language users. In studying school age children, we can determine how communication is distributed across multiple communicative channels, now that language has become their primary communicative system. Studying TD children can provide a greater understanding of the range and nature of typical development and can help identify and create more appropriate therapeutic interventions for individuals exhibiting abnormal social and emotional behaviors. Individuals with neurodevelopmental disorders often have significant impairments in social communication that impact their relationships with others. In Chapter 2, a literature review on the communicative behaviors regarding each of our groups of children is presented. Chapter 3 is devoted to an investigation of social communication in TD school age children. Chapter 4 focuses on the social and affective components of communication in children with HFA and children with WS. Chapter 5 investigates the use and integration of language and emotional expression in school age children with PS. These studies make a significant contribution toward understanding the interrelationships of the social and affective components of communication in school age children


The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a large-scale cross-national study that measures academic competencies of 15-year-old students in mathematics, reading, and science from more than 50 countries/economies around the world. PISA results are usually aggregated and presented in so-called "league tables," in which countries are compared and ranked in each of the three scales. However, to compare results obtained from different groups/countries, one must first be sure that the tests measure the same competencies in all cultures. In this paper, this is tested by examining the level of measurement equivalence in the 2009 PISA data set using an item response theory approach (IRT) and analyzing differential item functioning (DIF). Measurement in-equivalence was found in the form of uniform DIF. In-equivalence occurred in a majority of test questions in all three scales researched and is, on average, of moderate size. It varies considerably both across items and across countries. When this uniform DIF is accounted for in the in-equivalent model, the resulting country scores change considerably in the cases of the "Mathematics," "Science," and especially, "Reading" scale. These changes tend to occur simultaneously and in the same direction in groups of regional countries. The most affected seems to be Southeast Asian countries/territories whose scores, although among the highest in the initial, homogeneous model, additionally increase when accounting for in-equivalence in the scales.


The synthesis of new series of PPH (poly(phosphorhydrazone)) dendrimers with amino-PEG phosphonates or the corresponding amino-PEG phosphonic acids as terminal groups is presented, from generations 1–3. The size of PEG-terminated dendrimers is experimentally measured by diffusional NMR, and by means of dynamic light scattering. Classical molecular dynamics and well-tempered metadynamics simulations are used to assess or confirm the formation of aggregates in some cases. The influence of PEG capping on the cytotoxicity profiles of the dendrimers is evaluated on human peripheral blood mononuclear cells by means of LIVE/DEAD assays, and confirms the importance of PEG capping to ensure low cytotoxicity. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J. Polym. Sci., Part A: Polym. Chem. 2015, 53, 761–774


Recently, the world is dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic, something that has changed daily routines and requires us to take more careful security measures, such as using safety equipment. However, using safety equipment is not an everyday behavior, and both access and correct use can be an effortful task for the general public. This paper briefly explores some of the response-cost factors regarding the use of safety equipment in preventing COVID-19 spread. We propose that the manipulation of response-cost factors can affect the probability of the use of safety equipment. Nevertheless, response-cost is only one of several aspects (e.g., cultural aspects) involved in the use of safety equipment. Further research could extend and test the suggestions we make and propose other aspects that should be analyzed. We hope that understanding the response-costs factors involved in preventive behavior can contribute to public-policy planning and  increase the daily use of safety equipment, and  decrease the probability of transmission during health hazards such as the COVID-19 pandemic.Keywords:  COVID-19; response cost; public health; pandemic


This research investigates opportunities for Service Design in Education. The focus is on a particular type of change happening within education that of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) where Service Design has little presence and limited knowledge. This research has been carried out through grounded theory and contextualised in English institutions of primary education. As a result it identified Service Design as an approach to enable transformational change within educational institutions that seek to move towards ESD. To establish the basis for the research, a literature review has been carried out on Service Design, the vision of ESD and its application in the context of English schools. As a result, Service Design capability to re-design services at organisational level was linked to the gap in normative re-educative change processes towards ESD in English schools. The rest of the research sought to build on these findings. In-depth case studies with five primary schools and a cross-case analysis have been carried out to establish an understanding of ESD change at organisational level. It focused on elements relevant to normative re-educative change processes, which included social and personal norms and values residing within organisational systems. From the case studies, principles, concepts and processes were identified that enabled schools to engage with ESD at the deepest level. The knowledge derived from the case studies was further developed in order to relate the ESD phenomenon to Service Design. Service thinking and organisational change theory were applied to develop a Sustainable Education as a Service Model (SES MODEL) to understand ESD as a phenomenon in a service system. A SES Model was presented back to Service Design community. The sense-making of ESD was undertaken with seven service design practitioners by conducting semi-structured interviews during which they explored the SES Model. The outcome of the interviews showed the model to build service designer s capacity to engage with ESD, while the use of the model showed that designers could envision using it at a normative re-educative change level. The research shows that ESD is a new concept, which is relevant to Service Design. It therefore offers opportunities for further service design research and practical applications.


Inference in Conditional Random Fields and Hidden Markov Models is done using the Viterbi algorithm, an efficient dynamic programming algorithm. In many cases, general (non-local and non-sequential) constraints may exist over the output sequence, but cannot be incorporated and exploited in a natural way by this inference procedure. This paper proposes a novel inference procedure based on integer linear programming (ILP) and extends CRF models to naturally and efficiently support general constraint structures. For sequential constraints, this procedure reduces to simple linear programming as the inference process. Experimental evidence is supplied in the context of an important NLP problem, semantic role labeling.


In the past decade and a half, the criminalization of MS-13 gang members in public discourse has operated to further marginalize and criminalize underprivileged urban youth, a segment of the populace already ridden by high levels of socio-economic exclusion. Using Fairclough's critical discourse analysis method, this study explores the social construction MS-13 gang affiliated youth in mainstream media in Canada, the United States, and El Salvador. This study indicates that while the current gang research is becoming more critical, conceptualizing gangs as a crystallization of broader societal problems, the social construction of MS-13 gang members as permanent criminals is still predominant, as it circulates through all of the selected media. The criminalizing representation of MS-13 gang members has significant implications, as it justifies increasingly punitive policing strategies, which in turn validate the vilified construction of gang-affiliated youth, thus creating a vicious cycle in which gang members are deemed irremediable criminals.


It is well established that neural networks respond to a wide variety of modulatory substances by which they can become reconfigured, yet few studies have examined the effects of neurotransmitter mixtures on such networks. In a previous study of the medicinal leech using triple intracellular recordings, we found that stimulation of identified mechanosensory neurons activated both the serotonergic cell 21 (a swimgating neuron) and the dorsal lateral octopamine (DLO) cell. Because these findings suggested that serotonin (5-HT) and octopamine (OA) may be released together, we investigated the effects of 5-HT and OA mixtures on isolated nerve cords of Hirudo medicinalis (which contained both head and tail brains). Fifty micromolar OA, 50 microM 5-HT, or a mixture of 50 microM OA and 50 microM 5-HT was bath applied to the nerve cord under constant perfusion conditions. Additional experiments were performed with combinations of either 25 or 100 microM OA and 5-HT. Neural activity was examined specifically in the segmentally repeated dorsal posterior (DP) nerve because it has been shown to contain identified swim motor units. Nonadditive effects of amine combinations were most apparent in their ability to decrease overall activity in the DP nerve and to alter patterned motor activity in the form of fictive swimming. Whereas swim burst activity has been previously shown to increase in nerve cords bathed in either 5-HT or OA solutions alone, we demonstrated that a mixture of the two amines resulted in a robust decrease in the number of swim bursts expressed and an inhibition of swim activity in preparations already swimming. Most compelling was the observation that when the amine mixture was replaced with normal saline, swim burst activity increased dramatically. We discuss that the effects of amine mixtures may be due to their interaction with descending interneurons known to trigger and inhibit swimming as the mixture-induced effects were not observed in nerve cords lacking the head and tail brains. Because the net effect of the two amines was not simply additive (i.e., 5-HT or OA is known to activate swimming, yet the mix inhibits swimming), this result reveals yet another layer of complexity inherent in "simpler" invertebrate nervous systems.


Background
Scientific advances have improved longevity in cystic fibrosis (CF) patients and many of these patients can expect to experience age-related gastrointestinal co-morbidities. We aimed to assess the extent to which age might impact gastroesophageal reflux (GER) in patients with CF.

Methods
Our esophageal pH-multichannel intraluminal impedance monitoring database was searched for tracings belonging to CF patients ≥2 years old without prior fundoplication and not taking anti-reflux medications immediately prior (within 7 days) and during the study. Tracings were retrospectively analyzed; Impedance and pH variables were evaluated with respect to age and pulmonary function.

Results
Twenty-eight patients were enrolled; 16 children (3.1-17.7 years) and 12 adults (18.2-48.9 years). Among pH probe parameters, correlation analysis showed DeMeester score (P=0.011) and number of acid reflux events lasting >5 minutes (P=0.047) to be significantly correlated with age. Age was not significantly correlated with any of the impedance parameters. Age was negatively correlated with baseline impedance (BI) in the distal esophagus (r=-0.424, P=0.023) and BI was negatively correlated with several pH parameters, including reflux index (r=-0.553, P=0.002), number of total acid reflux events (r=-0.576, P=0.001), number of acid reflux events lasting >5 minutes (r=-0.534, P=0.003), and DeMeester score (r=-0.510, P=0.006). Pulmonary function (percent predicted forced expiratory volume in one minute; ppFEV1) was negatively correlated with age (r=-0.494, P=0.0007). The interaction of age and ppFEV1 and any of the reflux parameters, however, was not significant (P>0.05); the strongest evidence for an interaction was found for the number of acid reflux events reaching the proximal esophagus, but this interaction still did not reach statistical significance (P=0.070).

Conclusions
In a small cohort, we found evidence that age may be associated with increased acid exposure and that both age and increased acid exposure are associated with reduced BI in the distal esophagus. The negative relationship between pulmonary function and age in our cohort is not related to GER. This pilot study supports the need for esophageal assessment and treatment of GER as standard components of clinical care for an aging CF population.


SINCE James Paget first noted and described the cases of areolar eczema followed by female breast cancer in 1874, many reports on this condition have been published. Fifteen years after Paget's report, Darier found the cells to have a histologically characteristic appearance in the epidermis of the nipple and the concept of "Paget's disease" was then established. However, this condition in the male breast is extremely rare. In 1964, Hutchin and Houlihan1collected only 12 cases of Paget's disease in men from the world literature, and added one of their own. This paper presents an additional case of Paget's disease in the male breast. Report of Case A 56-year-old married man had been in perfect health up to one year prior to admission, when he first noticed a small, hard, painless mass in the right breast. Eight months later, the patient had trauma on the nipple, where the covering


We present a richly annotated and genre-diversified language resource, the Prague Dependency Treebank-Consolidated 1.0 (PDT-C 1.0), the purpose of which is - as it always been the case for the family of the Prague Dependency Treebanks - to serve both as a training data for various types of NLP tasks as well as for linguistically-oriented research. PDT-C 1.0 contains four different datasets of Czech, uniformly annotated using the standard PDT scheme (albeit not everything is annotated manually, as we describe in detail here). The texts come from different sources: daily newspaper articles, Czech translation of the Wall Street Journal, transcribed dialogs and a small amount of user-generated, short, often non-standard language segments typed into a web translator. Altogether, the treebank contains around 180,000 sentences with their morphological, surface and deep syntactic annotation. The diversity of the texts and annotations should serve well the NLP applications as well as it is an invaluable resource for linguistic research, including comparative studies regarding texts of different genres. The corpus is publicly and freely available.


In sealed technologies, performance improvements become increasingly tilted by interconnect parasitic. The increased emphasis in the literature on low-resistance replacements for, or supplements to, polysilicon-gate technologies verifies the importance of parasitic limitations. Further, the role of the series source and drain resistance as well as contact resistance in limiting device performance has also been addressed by several authors. This role is further enhanced by the actual much more rapid increase in sheet resistivity with decreasing junction depth than previously assumed by other workers. In fact, it can be anticipated that metallurgical advances, such as silicides, will be required to compensate for the increased sheet resistance of source and drain diffusions. In the present work, a theoretical development of a transmission line model for a totally silicided diffusion is presented. Both the silicide and the diffusion sheet resistivities/spl rho//sub S/ and /spl rho//sub D/, and the specific contact resistivity /spl rho//sub c/, are incorporated, unlike earlier models for contact holes only in which /spl rho//sub S/ =0. This model is applied to specific typical MOS structures, including single-section and three-section structures, to calculate the contact resistance contribution to total resistance. These results are used in conjunction with device equations addressing the device and circuit performance of small-geometry MOSFET's. Both n- and p-channel devices are considered as well as various scaling scenarios (constant field, constant voltage, etc.). These results show that for n-channel devices with a gate length of 1 /spl mu/m, a-factor-of two increase in circuit performance can be expected when using silicides. However, for p-channel devices, the expected performance gain as a result of using silicides is a factor of ten.


This paper presents a spreadsheet-based decision support system (DSS) for any parameter optimization problem, in the small- and medium-sized enterprises to help the managers to make better decisions. Microsoft Excel is used as a DSS development platform. The DSS application requires the quality characteristics and the level of parameters affecting the problem. The proposed system considers three multi-criteria decision-making methods: TOPSIS, VIKOR and GRA. These methods are integrated into the Taguchi method to convert the multi-response optimization problem to a single-response problem. The DSS suggests proper Taguchi experimental designs and provides the decision maker with an opportunity to use different metrics and to validate the experimental results. Several issues and an application are provided for illustrative purposes. The proposed DSS is tested on a case study (the performance of the mixed integer programming (MIP) formulation solver) and the results highlight that the system is capable of offering satisfactory outcomes. Using such a quick and flexible DSS might help to reduce the daily workload of the decision makers. The different metrics used for the response variables which results with the different parameter combination. Using the optimal parameter combination of TOPSIS (come to the fore in case MinBest metric used), the MIP formulation solver gives the best integer objective function value of 609 and a GAP value of 1.93%, both of which are less than the values obtained using the other methods. Using the optimal parameter combination of GRA (come to the fore in case OptBest metric used), the MIP formulation gives a best integer objective function value of 632 and a GAP value of 6.52%, both of which are less than the values obtained by using the other methods.


Both children and adults can learn new categories when presented with a rule about a perceptual feature. Like categorization, numerical abstraction requires the ability to ignore irrelevant (non-numeric) perceptual features when making decisions about relevant (numeric) features. The present study fuses these two lines of research by training 5-7 year olds and adults in a categorization task, in which they must form a rule about a fraction-based category. Can children form this mathematical category readily? Will they be able to do so without any formal instruction? How does this ability develop or change across the lifespan? We find that young children and adults readily form fraction-based categories, indicating that children can think about proportional information prior to formal schooling. Additionally, an ability to map between visual and symbolic representations aided both children and adults in this numeric categorization task, with children showing additional gains in traditional fraction knowledge.


The 5th edition of Swenson's text is a hybrid constructed from contributions from faculty inside and outside the Children's Memorial Hospital (Chicago, Ill). In some measure, the book reflects the philosophy and practice of the editor, John G. Raffensperger, and many chapters carry his imprimatur. Too much of the first section is devoted to generic, obligatory, and somewhat superficial considerations of topics relevant to pediatric surgery. There are notable exceptions. Wherever experts are enlisted, the book is succinct and informative. Dr Nadler's discussion of genetics, the chapters on respiratory distress, and the pharmacologic management of shock provide contemporary insights. There are distracting inconsistencies in style. The scholarly exposition correlating embryogenesis and clinical disease is in stark contrast to the purely descriptive chapter on head and neck immediately preceding it and the following anecdotal consideration of foreign bodies in the gastrointestinal tract. The fundamental pediatric surgical subjects, including gastrointestinal and oncology,


Most of the data-intensive scientific domains, e.g., life-, natural-, and geo-sciences have come up with data life cycles. These cycles feature, in various ways, a set of core data-centric steps, e.g., planning, collecting, describing, integrating, analyzing, and publishing. Although they differ in the steps they identify and the execution order, they collectively suffer from a collection of short-comings.
They mainly promote a waterfall-like model of sequentially executing the lifecycles' steps. For example, the lifecycle used by DataOne suggests that "analyze" happens after "integrate". However, in practice, a scientist may need to analyze data without performing the integration. In general, scientists may not need to accomplish all the steps. Also, in many cases, they simply jump from, e.g., "collect" to "analyze" in order to evaluate the feasibility and fitness of the data and then return to "describe" and "preserve" steps. This causes the cycle to gradually turn into a mesh. Indeed, this problem has been recognized and dealt with by the GFBio and USGS data lifecycles. The former has added a set of direct links between non-neighboring steps to allow shortcuts, while the later has factored out cross-cutting steps, e.g., "describe" and "manage quality" and argued that these tasks must be performed continually across all stages of the lifecycle. Although aforementioned lifecycles have realized these issues, they do not offer customization guidelines based on, e.g., project requirements, resources availability, priority, or effort estimations.
In this work, we propose a two-dimensional Cartesian-like plane, in that the x- and y-axes represent phases and disciplines, respectively. A phase is a stage of the project with a predefined focus that that leads the work towards achieving a set of targeted objectives in a specific timespan. We identify four phases; conception, implementation, publishing, and preservation. Phases can be repeated in a run, and do not need to have equal timespan. However, each phase should satisfy its exit criteria to be able to proceed to the next phase. A discipline, on the vertical axis, is a set of correlated activities that, when performed, makes a measurable progress in the data-centric project. We have incorporated these disciplines: plan, acquire, assure, describe, preserve, discover, integrate, analyze, maintain, and execute.
An execution plan is developed by placing required activities in their respective disciplines' lanes on the plane. Each task (activity instance) is visualized as a rectangle that its width and height respectively indicate the duration and effort estimation needed to complete it. The phases, as well as the characteristics of the project (requirements, size, team, time, and budget), may influence these dimensions.
It is possible for a discipline or an activity to be utilized several times in different phases. For example, a planning activity gains more weight in conception and fades out over the course of the project, while analysis activities start in mid-conception, get full focus on implementation, and may still need some attention during publishing phases. Also, multiple activities of different disciplines can run in parallel. However, each task's objective should remain aligned according to the phase's focus and exit criteria. For instance, an analysis task in the conception phase may utilize multiple methodologies to perform experimentation on a small sample of a designated dataset, while the same task in the implementation phase conducts a full-fledged analysis using the chosen methodology on the whole dataset


The relatively common experimental visual search task of finding a red X amongst red O's and green X's (conjunction search) presents the visual system with a binding problem. Illusory conjunctions (ICs) of features across objects must be avoided and only features present in the same object bound together. Correct binding into unique objects by the visual system may be promoted, and ICs minimized, by inhibiting the locations of distractors possessing non-target features (e.g., Treisman and Sato, 1990). Such parallel rejection of interfering distractors leaves the target as the only item competing for selection; thus solving the binding problem. In the present article we explore the theoretical and empirical basis of this process of active distractor inhibition in search. Specific experiments that provide strong evidence for a process of active distractor inhibition in search are highlighted. In the final part of the article we consider how distractor inhibition, as defined here, may be realized at a neurophysiological level (Treisman and Sato, 1990).


ABSTRACT Colistin resistance, although uncommon, is increasingly being reported among Gram-negative clinical pathogens, and an understanding of its impact on the activity of antimicrobials is now evolving. We evaluated the potential for synergy of colistin plus trimethoprim, trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (1/19 ratio), or vancomycin against 12 isolates of Acinetobacter baumannii (n = 4), Pseudomonas aeruginosa (n = 4), and Klebsiella pneumoniae (n = 4). The strains included six multidrug-resistant clinical isolates, K. pneumoniae ATCC 700603, A. baumannii ATCC 19606, P. aeruginosa ATCC 27853, and their colistin-resistant derivatives (KPm1, ABm1, and PAm1, respectively). Antimicrobial susceptibilities were assessed by broth microdilution and population analysis profiles. The potential for synergy of colistin combinations was evaluated using a checkerboard assay, as well as static time-kill experiments at 0.5× and 0.25× MIC. The MIC ranges of vancomycin, trimethoprim, and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (1/19) were ≥128, 4 to ≥128, and 2/38 to >128/2,432 μg/ml, respectively. Colistin resistance demonstrated little impact on vancomycin, trimethoprim, or trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole MIC values. Isolates with subpopulations heterogeneously resistant to colistin were observed to various degrees in all tested isolates. In time-kill assays, all tested combinations were synergistic against KPm1 at 0.25× MIC and 0.5× MIC and ABm1 and PAm1 at 0.5× MIC. In contrast, none of the tested combinations demonstrated synergy against any colistin-susceptible P. aeruginosa isolates and clinical strains of K. pneumoniae isolates. Only colistin plus trimethoprim or trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole was synergistic and bactericidal at 0.5× MIC against K. pneumoniae ATCC 700603. Colistin resistance seems to promote the in vitro activity of unconventional colistin combinations. Additional experiments are warranted to understand the clinical significance of these observations.


BACKGROUND
Protocol-based care is increasingly being used to deliver collaborative, integrated and improved patient-centred care, based on the best available evidence. This article provides an overview of key issues arising from protocol-based care literature to illustrate the research agenda for this important care delivery approach.

CONCLUSION
Protocols provide great potential to deliver best practice. However, questions remain about the benefits of protocol-based care.


How do social groups, such as Facebook groups and Wechat groups, dynamically evolve over time? How do people join the social groups, uniformly or with burst? What is the pattern of people quitting from groups? Is there a simple universal model to depict the come-and-go patterns of various groups? In this article, we examine temporal evolution patterns of more than 100 thousands social groups with more than 10 million users. We surprisingly find that the evolution patterns of real social groups goes far beyond the classic dynamic models like SI and SIR. For example, we observe both diffusion and non-diffusion mechanism in the group joining process, and power-law decay in group quitting process, rather than exponential decay as expected in SIR model. Therefore, we propose a new model come N go , a concise yet flexible dynamic model for group evolution. Our model has the following advantages: (a) Unification power: it generalizes earlier theoretical models and different joining and quitting mechanisms we find from observation. (b) Succinctness and interpretability: it contains only six parameters with clear physical meanings. (c) Accuracy: it can capture various kinds of group evolution patterns preciously, and the goodness of fit increases by 58% over baseline. (d) Usefulness: it can be used in multiple application scenarios, such as forecasting and pattern discovery. Furthermore, our model can provide insights about different evolution patterns of social groups, and we also find that group structure and its evolution has notable relations with temporal patterns of group evolution.