OBJECTIVE
To describe the (changes in) incidence, treatment and prognosis of thyroid cancer (TC) in the period 1970-89 in the South-east of the Netherlands.

SETTING
Eindhoven Cancer Registry, Comprehensive Cancer Centre South (I.K.Z.), Eindhoven.

DESIGN
Retrospective.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
Data were collected from al TC patients (ICD-O code 193 and non-Hodgkin lymphoma originating from the thyroid) diagnosed in the period 01.01.1970-31.12.1989. Histological, treatment and survival (on 01.07.1991) data were collected. The standardised incidence, prevalence, (relative) survival and mortality were calculated for men and women.

RESULTS
The mean age of the 297 TC patients was 52 years; the male-female ratio was 1:2.3. 46% Of the TC patients had papillary TC, 35% follicular TC. The incidence of TC increased from 1.4 to 3.0/100,000/yr for females, the incidence remained unchanged for males (1,1/100,000/yr). The point prevalence (01.07.1991) was 25.6/100,000 for females and 8.2/100.000 for males. TC patients were treated in all hospitals in the region and were increasingly first seen bij an internist. There was a trend to more extensive surgical treatment and iodine-131 treatment in differentiated TC. For all TC patients the crude 10-year survival rate was 61%, the relative 10-year survival rate was 74%. Survival was related with sex, age and histological type. Mortality from TC remained very low.

CONCLUSIONS
The incidence and prognosis of TC were similar to the surrounding countries. In general the recommendations from the consensus meetings for treatment of TC in 1985 and 1987 appear to be followed.


Size dependence of spin dynamics in colloidal CdSe quantum dots (QDs) are investigated with circularly polarized pump-probe transmission spectroscopy at room temperature. The excitation energy is tuned to resonance with the lowest exciton (1S(h)1S(e)) energy of the CdSe QDs. The exciton spin dynamics of CdSe QD with the diameter of 5.2 nm shows monoexponential decay with a typical time constant of about 1-3 ps depending on the excitation energy. For the cases of CdSe QDs with smaller size (with the diameter of 4.0 and 2.4 nm), the exciton spin relaxation shows biexponential decay, a fast component with time constant of several ps and a slow one with time constant of hundreds of ps to nanosecond time scale. The fast spin relaxation arises from the bright-dark transition, i.e., J = ±1 ↔ -/+2 transition. This process is dominated by the hole spin flips, while the electron spin conserves. The slow spin relaxation is attributed to the intralevel exciton transitions (J = ±1 ↔ -/+1 transition), which is relevant to the electron spin flip. Our results indicate that the exciton spin relaxation pathways in CdSe QD are controllable by monitoring the particle size, and polarized pump-probe spectroscopy is proved to be a sensitive method to probe the exciton transition among the fine structures.


Coprecipitation of proteins from whole‐cell extracts is a valuable approach to test for physical interactions between proteins of interest. This unit describes basic approaches to immunoprecipitating tagged proteins from whole‐cell extracts. The approaches described can be adapted for other systems. In a typical experiment, as described here, cells are lysed and a whole‐cell extract is prepared under nondenaturing conditions. The protein is precipitated from the lysate with a solid‐phase affinity matrix, and the precipitate is tested for the presence of a second specifically associated protein. The approach can be used for native or epitope‐tagged proteins for which antibodies are available, or for recombinant proteins that have been engineered to bind with high affinity to a molecule that can be coupled to a solid‐phase matrix.


Wavelets have gained considerable popularity within the statistical arena in the context of nonparametric regression. When modeling data of the form y = f + , the objective is to estimate the unknown 'true' function f with small risk, based on sampled data y contaminated with random (usually Gaussian) noise . Wavelet shrinkage and thresholding techniques have proved to be quite effective in recovering the true function f , particularly when f is spatially inhomogeneous. Recently, Johnstone and Silverman (2005b) proposed using empirical Bayes methods for level-dependent threshold selection in wavelet shrinkage. Using the posterior median estimator, their approach amounts to a random thresholding procedure with impressive mean squared error (MSE) results. At each level, their approach considers a two-component mixture prior for each of the wavelet coefficients independently. This mixture prior inherently assumes that the wavelet coefficients are symmetrically distributed about zero. Depending on the choice of wavelet filter and the interesting attributes of the true function, it may be the case that neither the magnitude nor the number of positive coefficients are equal to the those of the negative coefficients. Inspired by the work of Zhang (2005) and Zhang et al. (2007), this thesis introduces a random generalized thresholding procedure in the wavelet domain that does not require the symmetry assumption; it uses a three-component mixture prior that handles the positive and negative coefficients separately. It is demonstrated that the proposed generalized wavelet thresholding procedure performs quite well when estimating f from a single sampled realization y. As in Johnstone and Silverman (2005b), the performance of the Maximal Overlap Discrete Wavelet Transform (MODWT) is substantially better than that of the standard Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) in terms of MSE and visual quality. An additional advantage for MODWT is that it is well-defined for any number of sampled points N , i.e., N need not be a power of two. The proposed procedure also performs well when estimating f from multiple noisy realizations yi, i = 1, . . . , n. In most, if not all, of the shrinkage and generalized shrinkage techniques considered, the noise standard deviation is assumed to be known and constant across the length of the function. In reality, it is typically not known and must be estimated. In the single realization setting, the estimate is usually taken to be a constant based on the median absolute deviation of the empirical wavelet coefficients at the finest decomposition level. With multiple realizations, there are more estimation options available. Various estimation options for a constant variance are examined via simulation. The results indicate that three of the six estimates considered are reasonable choices. The case of heterogeneous variances across the length of the function is also briefly explored via simulation. Finally, an inferential procedure is proposed that first removes noise from individual observations via the generalized wavelet thresholding procedure, and then uses newly proposed F -like statistics (Cui et al., 2005; Hwang and Liu, 2006; Zhou, 2007) to compare populations of sampled observations. To demonstrate its applicability, the aforementioned statistical work is applied to datasets generated from Array Comparative Genomic Hybridization (aCGH) experiments.


The high level of trade and financial integration reached by Europe both today and under the late 19th century gold standard suggests that important lessons can be learned by looking at past record to inform current issues. In this article, we draw a fresh picture of the European gold standard, and use it to derive a number of useful implications. The paper's basic finding is that the stability of the European gold standard depended on the stance of the common monetary policy. Under the gold standard, this stance was disturbingly deflationary prior to 1895. As a result, debts became exceedingly heavy and monetary standards crumbled under their weight, not so much because fiscal policies became looser, but rather because debt burdens became unsustainable in the wake of continued deflation. Once gold was discovered and deflation gave way to inflation, real interest rates fell and debt grew more slowly. This study's clear implication for the EMU zone, is that stability will hinge on the European Central Bank's (ECB) policy not being too restrictive.


Whale watching has become increasingly popular as an ecotourism activity around the globe and is beneficial for environmental education and local economies. Southern Resident killer whales (Orcinus orca) comprise an endangered population that is frequently observed by a large whale watching fleet in the inland waters of Washington state and British Columbia. One of the factors identified as a risk to recovery for the population is the effect of vessels and associated noise. An examination of the effects of vessels and associated noise on whale behavior utilized novel equipment to address limitations of previous studies. Digital acoustic recording tags (DTAGs) measured the noise levels the tagged whales received while laser positioning systems allowed collection of geo-referenced data for tagged whales and all vessels within 1000 m of the tagged whale. The objective of the current study was to compare vessel data and DTAG recordings to relate vessel traffic to the ambient noise received by tagged whales. Two analyses were conducted, one including all recording intervals, and one that excluded intervals when only the research vessel was present. For all data, significant predictors of noise levels were length (inverse relationship), number of propellers, and vessel speed, but only 15% of the variation in noise was explained by this model. When research-vessel-only intervals were excluded, vessel speed was the only significant predictor of noise levels, and explained 42% of the variation. Simple linear regressions (ignoring covariates) found that average vessel speed and number of propellers were the only significant correlates with noise levels. We conclude that vessel speed is the most important predictor of noise levels received by whales in this study. Thus, measures that reduce vessel speed in the vicinity of killer whales would reduce noise exposure in this population.


There is now significant evidence that erectile dysfunction (ED) can be a symptom of cardiovascular disease, and can act as a marker for disease progression. National Health Service (NHS) prescribing restrictions on treatments for ED have recently been reviewed by the Department of Health, and current arrangements will not change. Unrestricted availability of licensed treatments for ED on the NHS, irrespective of the cause of the ED, may encourage men to present for investigation, enabling early detection of cardiovascular disease. Sildenafil citrate (Viagra), an effective treatment for ED, can also have a direct beneficial effect on cardiovascular disease. Unrestricted NHS availability of ED treatments such as sildenafil could facilitate greater achievement of National Service Framework targets for coronary heart disease.


The article focuses on The School@Work project (Project Number: 2014-1-IT02-KA201-003985; Programme: Erasmus+ KA2 - Strategic Partnership), developed by partners from Belgium, France, Italy, Lithuania, Romania and Spain. The project underlying principle is the collaboration across Europe between schools and labour market with a view to joining all efforts in order to facilitate students' entrance in the labor market smoothly and easily. The article presents the project main objectives, activities and outcomes. The project aims at providing teachers and counsellors with the necessary e-tools in order to design guidance services for students and enhance their motivation to complete their studies and identify suitable jobs for them on the market. The aim of the project is to give evidence to the importance that companies and job market are giving when recruiting staff resources, to specific professional and sectoral skills and competences, but also to qualification and transversal knowledge that can be achieved only successfully completing the educational process. The collection of tests, which can be used by both schools and students to assess skills and aptitudes, the solid and reliable data base with aptitude and skill tests created in previous European projects as well the profiles of the most researched jobs in the six project countries will definitely enable teachers to improve quality of the job orientation services and experiences in their schools. The article examines the most recent project output: its collection of interviews with successful entrepreneurs. It highlights the role that examples play in choosing one's career and explores their persuasive power of their life lessons.


This thesis investigates how entrepreneurial marketing (EM) can foster suppliers' adoption of smart micro-grid (SMG) technology. Previous studies have emphasized the technical aspects of this new area of power systems industry. However, there is a need to understand the market adoption, especially that of resellers who act as intermediaries between suppliers and end-customers. An online survey based on the technology acceptance model (TAM) and EM literature was used to gather data from 99 resellers. The data were analyzed using the partial least squares method to validate a model of the relationships between resellers' antecedents and intention to adopt SMG technology, and the role of suppliers' EM for the adoption. The results suggest that TAM can only partially be applied to the reseller context. Moreover, suppliers need to demonstrate EM, particularly entrepreneurial orientation, to increase resellers' performance expectancy and to decrease effort expectancy to foster the diffusion of novel SMG technology.


THE TOP-DOWN INFLUENCES OF CHARACTERISTIC SOUNDS ON VISUAL SEARCH PERFORMANCE IN REALISTIC SCENES by Ghazaleh Mahzouni The purpose of this experiment was to investigate whether meaningful sounds can facilitate visual search performance in the context of realistic scenes. It also aimed to determine whether the stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of sound and picture is a significant factor in enhancing performance. A 3 X 4 X 2 within subject design was used with independent factors sound congruency (congruent, incongruent and white noise), SOA (-1000, -500, 0, 300 ms), and target presence (present and absent). Participants were 55 (34 female and 21 male) college aged students at San Jose State University. On each trial participants were presented with a word cue indicating the target object, then depending on the condition they either 1) heard a sound and saw a picture simultaneously (SOA 0), 2) heard a sound followed by a scene (negative SOA), or 3) viewed a scene followed by a sound (positive SOA). The results indicated a congruency effect only at the negative SOAs, when the sound preceded the picture by 1000 or 500 ms. However, we did not observe a significant advantage of -1000 SOA over -500 SOA. Moreover, performance was significantly degraded at the positive SOA 300. Overall, these results suggest that congruent characteristic sounds can enhance visual search performance in realistic scenes, provided that they are presented at least 500 ms before the picture.


Abstract Barley (Hordeum vulgare) was domesticated from its wild ancestral form ca. 10,000 years ago in the Fertile Crescent and is widely cultivated throughout the world, except for in tropical areas. The genome size of both cultivated barley and its conspecific wild ancestor is approximately 5 Gb. High-quality chromosome-level assemblies of 19 cultivated and one wild barley genotype were recently established by pan-genome analysis. Here, we release another equivalent short-read assembly of the wild barley accession "OUH602." A series of genetic and genomic resources were developed for this genotype in prior studies. Our assembly contains more than 4.4 Gb of sequence, with a scaffold N50 value of over 10 Mb. The haplotype shows high collinearity with the most recently updated barley reference genome, "Morex" V3, with some inversions. Gene projections based on "Morex" gene models revealed 46,807 protein-coding sequences and 43,375 protein-coding genes. Alignments to publicly available sequences of bacterial artificial chromosome (BAC) clones of "OUH602" confirm the high accuracy of the assembly. Since more loci of interest have been identified in "OUH602," the release of this assembly, with detailed genomic information, should accelerate gene identification and the utilization of this key wild barley accession.


The collision‐induced subduction transference is a composite dynamic process including both the terrane collision/accretion and the subduction initiation (SI) at the neighboring passive margin. This process occurred repeatedly during the evolution of Tethyan systems, with multiple ribbon‐like continents or microcontinents drifting from Gondwana in the southern hemisphere and accreting to the Eurasian continent since Paleozoic. In the previous numerical studies, the dynamics of terrane collision and induced SI are investigated individually, which however need to be integrated to study the controlling factors and time scales of collision‐induced subduction transference. Systematic numerical models are conducted with variable properties of converging plates and different boundary conditions. The model results indicate that the forced convergence, rather than pure free subduction, is required to trigger and sustain the SI at the neighboring passive margin after terrane collision. In addition, a weak passive margin can significantly promote the occurrence of SI, by decreasing the required boundary force to reasonable value of plate tectonics. The lengths of subducted oceanic slab and accreting terrane play secondary roles in the occurrence of SI after collision. Under the favorable conditions of collision‐induced subduction transference, the time required for SI after collision is generally short within 10 Myr, which is consistent with the general geological records of Cimmerian collision and the following Neo‐Tethyan SI. In contrast, the stable Indian passive margin and absence of SI in the present Indian Ocean may be due to the low convergent force and/or the lack of proper weak zones, which remains an open question.


ABSTRACT Many researchers have proposed special treatments for outlet boundary conditions owing to lack of information at the outlet. Among them, the simplest method requires a large enough computational domain to prevent or reduce numerical errors at the boundaries. However, an efficient method generally requires special treatment to overcome the problems raised by the outlet boundary condition used. For example, mass flux is not conserved and the fluid field is not divergence-free at the outlet boundary. Overcoming these problems requires additional computational cost. In this paper, we present a simple and efficient outflow boundary condition for the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations, aiming to reduce the computational domain for simulating flow inside a long channel in the streamwise direction. The proposed outflow boundary condition is based on the transparent equation, where a weak formulation is used. The pressure boundary condition is derived by using the Navier–Stokes equations and the outlet flow boundary condition. In the numerical algorithm, a staggered marker-and-cell grid is used and temporal discretization is based on a projection method. The intermediate velocity boundary condition is consistently adopted to handle the velocity–pressure coupling. Characteristic numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the robustness and accuracy of the proposed numerical scheme. Furthermore, the agreement of computational results from small and large domains suggests that our proposed outflow boundary condition can significantly reduce computational domain sizes.


Edward John Russell was born on 31 October 1872 at Frampton-onSevern into a large but poor family. His father Edward Thomas Russell was at first a schoolmaster and later became a Unitarian Minister. His mother came from a west country family and her father Captain Samuel Hallet owned a wharf at Lambeth and ran a coastal shipping service. The family in fact had no scientific or agricultural background, but John Russell's father was a man of wide culture, which included physics, chemistry and biology. He read widely in these subjects, made experiments in his home and gave lectures in popular science. So great was his enthusiasm that he gave up a teaching post he later held in Sheffield on obtaining a small bursary to attend a week's course under T. H. Huxley. The young Russell was undoubtedly influenced by his father's interests and help; the schools available to him as a child did not, however, teach scientific subjects. In 1885 the family moved to Birmingham where he went to the recently opened Technical School. Here he was taught mathematics and also some chemistry, in which subject he became so keenly interested that he decided to take it up as a career. Unfortunately, after only two years the family moved to London and at the age of 14, John Russell was obliged to give up his school education and find work. In his book The land called me he recalls that 'thinking that chemistry was practised in chemists' shops I decided to try to get into one, and save up money to go to college'. He obtained employment at a homoeopathic chemist in Threadneedle Street, at a salary of 7 shillings a week, but to his intense disappointment, he soon found that no chemistry was done at the shop, nor did any of the assistants have any knowledge of it. His duties were to label bottles of pills and to run errands.


The present study investigates the relationship between the foreign policy orientation of Irish neutrality and national identity using a social representations approach (Elcheroth, Doise, & Reicher, 2011; Moscovici, 1961/76). In four focus groups conducted in the Republic of Ireland, 22 participants discussed vignettes in which hypothetical conflicts were described. The findings pointed towards the dynamic relationship between neutrality and Irish national identity and more generally to the importance of macropolitical phenomena for identity construction. The process of categorization was key to participants' decision making regarding the hypothetical conflicts; the decision to support or oppose the Irish state's involvement in the conflicts frequently revolved around a reconsideration of the boundaries of the ingroup. Furthermore, social representations were laden with the possibility of social change; the construction of neutrality as morally ambivalent, motivated by pragmatism rather than principles, opened up a space for younger participants to resist dominant, pragmatic interpretations of the policy and offer alternatives. Theoretical and empirical implications of the findings are discussed. Taken together, the findings demonstrate the critical potential of extending a social representations approach to issues of political psychological significance.


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Thank you very much for reading structural engineers handbook. As you may know, people have look numerous times for their chosen novels like this structural engineers handbook, but end up in infectious downloads. Rather than enjoying a good book with a cup of coffee in the afternoon, instead they cope with some infectious virus inside their laptop. structural engineers handbook is available in our book collection an online access to it is set as public so you can download it instantly. Our books collection hosts in multiple countries, allowing you to get the most less latency time to download any of our books like this one. Kindly say, the structural engineers handbook is universally compatible with any devices to read.


This publication is part of a series that provides an overview of the presence of invasive plant species monitored on an extensive systematic network of plots measured by the Forest Inventory and Analysis (FIA) program of the U.S. Forest Service, Northern Research Station (NRS). Each research note features one of the invasive plants monitored on forested plots by NRS FIA in the 24 states of the midwestern and northeastern United States. Japanese honeysuckle (Lonicera japonica) is native to east Asia and arrived in Long Island, NY, in 1806. In 1862, a horticultural variety of Japanese honeysuckle, called Hall's honeysuckle, was found in Flushing, NY. This vigorous invader was promoted for wildlife habitat and erosion control as well as for a landscape plant; its sale is now illegal in some states (Kaufman and Kaufman 2007).


We examine the institutional drivers of International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS) adoption in Africa. The study covers all 54 African countries and relies on data from 2010 to 2015. Our results support the neo-institutional theoretical predictions that coercive, mimetic, and normative isomorphism influence IFRS adoption in Africa, although the circuits of isomorphic pressures differ from previous studies investigating adoption at the worldwide level and in emerging economies. Specifically, we find evidence of the influence by the World Bank and International Monetary Fund on African countries made subject to the Report on Observance of Standards and Codes — Accounting and Auditing program of assessment. We also found that the presence of global audit firms and the years of membership in the International Federation of Accountants are strongly associated with a country's decision to adopt IFRS. Also, countries with a more structured and active professional accounting organization (PAO) are more likely to adopt IFRS. Our findings provide insights into the significant role played by local PAOs in the promotion of IFRS. Furthermore, we provide empirical evidence that the nature of the isomorphic pressures in Africa is different from those suggested in prior studies, reinforcing the view that IFRS adoption is primarily driven by social and political dimensions, rather than the economic dimension usually professed by IFRS proponents.


1. Immunocytochemically identified magnocellular neurosecretory cells (MNCs) in the guinea‐pig supraoptic nucleus (SON) were studied using the in vitro intracellular recording technique. Cells were identified as containing arginine vasopressin (AVP) or oxytocin (OT) following recordings made with biocytin‐filled electrodes. Both AVP and OT MNCs demonstrated a fusiform or pyramidal shape (15‐20 microns by 26‐39 microns), with two to three processes. There were no significant differences in the proportion of AVP and OT cells in the retrochiasmatic (caudal) versus the rostral slices. 2. No significant differences in passive membrane properties were observed between AVP and OT cells, except that AVP cells exhibited a significantly broader action potential width (1.51 +/‐ 0.1 ms, n = 11) than did OT cells (1.01 +/‐ 0.08 ms, n = 7). 3. Firing patterns were recorded for 100 MNCs, 41% of which fired in a phasic manner (repeated clustering of action potentials into bursts). Of the seventy‐seven cells which were immunocytochemically identified, only AVP‐containing MNCs displayed phasic firing. Phasic firing occurred only in MNCs demonstrating a depolarizing potential which followed hyperpolarizing after‐potentials (HAPs). The presence of the depolarizing potential was not always associated with phasic firing, however, as both OT cells and non‐phasic AVP cells sometimes exhibited a depolarizing potential. 4. In 160 MNCs examined for the presence of the time‐dependent inward rectification (TDR in current clamp, or Ih in voltage clamp), a significant difference in the proportion of cells expressing the Ih was observed in the two cell types. The Ih was expressed in forty‐five of fifty‐four AVP MNCs (83%) and in six of fifteen OT MNCs (40%). No significant association was found with firing pattern. 5. The Ih exhibited properties similar to those found in other CNS and peripheral tissues. It appeared on steps to potentials more hyperpolarized than ‐65 mV. It was augmented by raising the extracellular potassium concentration, blocked by 2 mM CsCl, and insensitive to 100‐500 microM BaCl2. Activation followed a single exponential, and the time constant of activation was voltage dependent. 6. The adenylate cyclase activator forskolin increased the Ih and shifted its activation curve to more depolarized levels. In cells recorded for several hours, the Ih varied in amplitude, suggesting intrinsic modulation, possibly by intracellular second messenger systems. The Ih in guinea‐pig SON MNCs appears to serve an excitatory role, bringing cells closer to firing threshold.


We consider a housekeeping domain with static or movable objects, where the goal is for multiple autonomous robots to tidy a house collaboratively in a given amount of time. This domain is challenging in the following ways: commonsense knowledge (e.g., expected locations of objects in the house) is required for intelligent behavior of robots; geometric constraints are required to find feasible plans (e.g., to avoid collisions); in case of plan failure while execution (e.g., due to a collision with movable objects whose presence and location are not known in advance or due to heavy objects that cannot be lifted by a single robot), recovery is required depending on the cause of failure; and collaboration of robots is required to complete some tasks (e.g., carrying heavy objects). We introduce a formal planning, execution and monitoring framework to address the challenges of this domain, by embedding knowledge representation and automated reasoning in each level of decision-making (that consists of discrete task planning, continuous motion planning, and plan execution), in such a way as to tightly integrate these levels. At the high-level, we represent not only actions and change but also commonsense knowledge in a logicbased formalism. Geometric reasoning is lifted to the high-level by embedding motion planning in the domain description. Then a discrete plan is computed for each robot using an automated reasoner. At the mid-level, if a continuous trajectory cannot be computed by a motion planner because the discrete plan is not feasible at the continuous-level, then a different plan is computed by the automated reasoner subject to some (temporal) conditions represented as formulas. At the low-level, if the plan execution fails, then a new continuous trajectory is computed by a motion planner at the mid-level or a new discrete plan is computed using an automated reasoner at the high-level. We illustrate the applicability of this formal framework with a simulation of a housekeeping domain.


Some twenty years ago, Harvard Business School economist and strategy professor Michael Porter challenged conventional wisdom about the impact of environmental regulation on business by declaring that well-designed regulation could actually enhance competitiveness. The traditional view of environmental regulation held by virtually all economists until that time was that requiring firms to reduce an externality like pollution necessarily restricted their options and thus by definition reduced their profits. After all, if profitable opportunities existed to reduce pollution, profit-maximizing firms would already be taking advantage of them. Over the past twenty years, much has been written about what has since become known simply as the Porter Hypothesis. Yet even today, we continue to find conflicting evidence concerning the Porter Hypothesis, alternative theories that might explain it, and oftentimes a misunderstanding of what the Porter Hypothesis does and does not say. This article examines the key theoretical foundations and empirical evidence concerning the Porter Hypothesis, discusses its implications for the design of environmental regulations, and outlines directions for future research on the relationship between environmental regulation, innovation, and competitiveness.


BACKGROUND
 SARS-CoV-2, the virus that caused the global COVID-19 pandemic, has severely impacted Central Asia; in spring 2020, high numbers of cases and deaths were reported in this region. The second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic is currently breaching the borders of Central Asia. Public health surveillance is necessary to inform policy and guide leaders; however, existing surveillance explains past transmissions while obscuring shifts in the pandemic, increases in infection rates, and the persistence of the transmission of COVID-19.

 OBJECTIVE
 The goal of this study is to provide enhanced surveillance metrics for SARS-CoV-2 transmission that account for weekly shifts in the pandemic, including speed, acceleration, jerk, and persistence, to better understand the risk of explosive growth in each country and which countries are managing the pandemic successfully.

 METHODS
 Using a longitudinal trend analysis study design, we extracted 60 days of COVID-19–related data from public health registries. We used an empirical difference equation to measure the daily number of cases in the Central Asia region as a function of the prior number of cases, level of testing, and weekly shift variables based on a dynamic panel model that was estimated using the generalized method of moments approach by implementing the Arellano-Bond estimator in R.

 RESULTS
 COVID-19 transmission rates were tracked for the weeks of September 30 to October 6 and October 7-13, 2020, in Central Asia. The region averaged 11,730 new cases per day for the first week and 14,514 for the second week. Infection rates increased across the region from 4.74 per 100,000 persons to 5.66. Russia and Turkey had the highest 7-day moving averages in the region, with 9836 and 1469, respectively, for the week of October 6 and 12,501 and 1603, respectively, for the week of October 13. Russia has the fourth highest speed in the region and continues to have positive acceleration, driving the negative trend for the entire region as the largest country by population. Armenia is experiencing explosive growth of COVID-19; its infection rate of 13.73 for the week of October 6 quickly jumped to 25.19, the highest in the region, the following week. The region overall is experiencing increases in its 7-day moving average of new cases, infection, rate, and speed, with continued positive acceleration and no sign of a reversal in sight.

 CONCLUSIONS
 The rapidly evolving COVID-19 pandemic requires novel dynamic surveillance metrics in addition to static metrics to effectively analyze the pandemic trajectory and control spread. Policy makers need to know the magnitude of transmission rates, how quickly they are accelerating, and how previous cases are impacting current caseload due to a lag effect. These metrics applied to Central Asia suggest that the region is trending negatively, primarily due to minimal restrictions in Russia.

 CLINICALTRIAL


This paper explores the idea that redundant operations, like type errors, commonly flag correctness errors. We experimentally test this idea by writing and applying four redundancy checkers to the Linux operating system, finding many errors. We then use these errors to demonstrate that redundancies, even when harmless, strongly correlate with the presence of traditional hard errors (e.g., null pointer dereferences, unreleased locks). Finally we show that how flagging redundant operations gives a way to make specifications "fail stop" bydetecting dangerous omissions.


Three polycyclic aromatic cations, 2-ammonium fluorene (AF), 2-ammonium anthracene (AA) and 2,7-diammonium fluorene (DAF) are successfully assembled with inorganic PbBr6 octahedra to synthesize (AF/AA)2PbBr4 and (DAF)PbBr4 one-dimensional (1D) hybrid perovskites. The synthesis of the perovskites is performed via an environmentally-friendly mechanochemical approach involving a solid-state solventless reaction. The analysis of the X-ray powder diffraction (XRD) data revealed that the crystal structure of these materials consisted of quasi-linear wires of PbBr42− separated by polycyclic cations with alternating positions of NH3+ groups. DFT calculations have shown a remarkable contribution of the orbitals of 2-ammonium fluorene to both the valence band maximum (VBM) and conduction band minimum (CBM) of the (AF)2PbBr4 structure. Moreover, the same hybrid materials were effectively prepared as thin films by using the spin-coating method from a solution containing the precursors. Although these hybrid perovskites are not intrinsically emissive, the strong fluorescence signal from the organic cation is preserved.


Ghana faces tremendous challenges in education with a national focus on replicating the conditions and processes for improving student learning throughout the country. High drop out rates, low scores on international tests, and lack of resources plague the educational system, contributing to quantity producing educational practices instead of quality. A network analysis approach and assessments of classroom climate provided the means to map and determine conditions and processes that can be replicated for quality educational improvement. Applying ontological modes of network complexity compositionally, structurally, and functionally allowed for organizing classroom interactions and processes into fundamental relational properties of learning environments, which include instructional, emotional, and behavioral interactions. The classroom network structures supported a positive environment and high number of instructional and emotionally supportive interactions, as well as demonstrated how classrooms can be complex in substantially varied ways compositionally, structurally, and functionally.


Moringa oleifera (Family- Moringaceae) is a well-known vegetable for its health benefits for thousands of years having diverse nutritional bioactive constituents. Phytochemical analysis of ethanolic extract of this plant indicated the presence of carbohydrate, reducing sugar, combined reducing sugar, glycosides, tannins (absent in seeds), alkaloids, flavonoids, saponins and steroids. In diuretic activity test, the extract showed a significant (p<0.001) effect at the dose of 200 & 400 mg/kg body weight in production of total urine volume in comparison with standard drug furosemide (5 mg/kg). Upon electrolyte analysis of excreted urine, the extract was found to increase Na+, K+, Clexcretion and may act as loop diuretics. The pods and seeds extract showed significant (p<0.01) laxative effects in mice in terms of stool production with soft consistency at the dose of 200 & 400 mg/kg in comparison with standard drug bisacodyl (10 mg/kg). The most edible part of this plant is pods which showed better diuretic and laxative effects than seeds. So, the pods may be a good source of bioactive constituents which may be used as parent compound(s) for discovering better diuretic or laxative drugs.


Traditional calculations of the acute:chronic workload ratio (ACWR) are 'mathematically coupled', as the most recent week is included in estimates of both the acute and chronic workloads. As Lolli and colleagues rightly point out, this induces a spurious correlation between the acute and chronic loads of ~0.50 (r=0.52 in their simulated data of 1000 athletes).1 They suggest that the simplest solution is to use uncoupled ACWRs (where the acute load is not part of the chronic load) instead (figure 1).

Figure 1
The distinction between traditional 'coupled' and 'uncoupled' estimates of the acute:chronic workload ratio. The inclusion or exclusion of the most recent week in 'chronic load' calculations is the key distinction.

Notably, at least two studies have already used uncoupled ACWR calculations, both demonstrating that rapid workload increases are associated with higher injury risks.2 3 To this end, Lolli and colleagues' suggestion warrants consideration—should we use 'uncoupled' ACWRs instead of 'coupled'? We have two aims in this editorial: (1) to further comment on how mathematical coupling affects ACWR estimates and (2) to encourage researchers and practitioners to use a critical approach to load management, wherein ACWRs may play a part.

### Defining coupled and uncoupled ACWRs

We define mathematical coupling in the same manner as Lolli et al , where a number is represented in both the numerator and denominator of a ratio, contributing to a spurious correlation. In the case of the ACWR, both …


Proceedings: AACR 104th Annual Meeting 2013; Apr 6-10, 2013; Washington, DC

Aberrant activation of the PI3-K/Akt pathway is found in approximately 70% of breast cancers. We recently identified a recurrent rearrangement that produces an in-frame fusion protein containing Akt3 and the scaffolding protein MAGI3 ([1][1]). MAGI3-Akt3 is the first fusion protein that has been identified in the PI 3-K pathway. We propose that MAGI3-Akt3 is a novel oncogene in breast cancer and that the oncogenic activity of the fusion protein results from disruption of the PI 3-K/Akt pathway. Within the fusion, Akt3 has a disrupted PH domain prior to glutamate 17 (E17). As a result the fusion protein is constitutively phosphorylated in the Akt3 kinase domain and expression of MAGI3-Akt3 in breast cancer cells enhances Akt substrate phosphorylation. Constitutive MAGI3-Akt3 kinase activity can be inhibited by ATP-competitive small molecule Akt inhibitors but is resistant to the allosteric Akt inhibitor MK2206 which is currently in phase II clinical trials. Our results indicate that ATP competitive Akt inhibitors should be evaluated in clinical trials for the treatment of fusion-positive breast cancers.

The fusion protein also contains a severely truncated portion of the scaffolding protein MAGI3. In particular, the fusion lacks the second PDZ domain of MAGI3 that has been reported to bind to PTEN and be required for the inhibitory effect of PTEN on PI 3-K pathway activity. We have demonstrated that disruption of MAGI3 in breast cancer cell lines does indeed promote PI 3-K pathway hyperactivity in a PTEN-dependent manner. In addition, the fusion lacks the fifth PDZ domain of MAGI3 and our studies indicate that this disrupts the interaction of MAGI3 with PHLPP2, a phosphatase that directly dephosphorylates Akt at pS473.

Our studies therefore demonstrate that the MAGI3-Akt3 translocation significantly perturbs PI 3-K pathway activity via activation of an oncogene (Akt3) and dysregulation of two tumor suppressors (PTEN and PHLPP2). We are currently continuing studies to elucidate the oncogenic mechanism(s) of MAGI3-Akt3 in breast cancer.

Citation Format: Kristin Brown, Alex Toker. MAGI3-Akt3, a novel fusion protein in the PI 3-K pathway in cancer. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the 104th Annual Meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research; 2013 Apr 6-10; Washington, DC. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Res 2013;73(8 Suppl):Abstract nr 549. doi:10.1158/1538-7445.AM2013-549

 [1]: #ref-1


Estimating the generalization performance is practically challenging on out-of-distribution (OOD) data without ground truth labels. While previous methods emphasize the connection between distribution difference and OOD accuracy, we show that a large domain gap not necessarily leads to a low test accuracy. In this paper, we investigate this problem from the perspective of feature separability, and propose a dataset-level score based upon feature dispersion to estimate the test accuracy under distribution shift. Our method is inspired by desirable properties of features in representation learning: high inter-class dispersion and high intra-class compactness. Our analysis shows that inter-class dispersion is strongly correlated with the model accuracy, while intra-class compactness does not reflect the generalization performance on OOD data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our method in both prediction performance and computational efficiency.


Abstract: A number of different studies have shown a clear reduction in the quality of life of hepatitis C virus (HCV)‐related liver‐disease patients. Quality of life can be assessed by means of both generic and specific instruments, depending on the aim of the study and the population being studied. The application of a specific instrument to patients with liver diseases provides a broader assessment of different parameters related to hepatic disorders. In hepatitis C, alterations such as the stigma of liver disease, concerns about the disease and symptoms of the disease could be demonstrated with this type of instrument. The impact of the diagnosis of hepatitis C, a potentially serious disease, and the presence of comorbidities such as alcohol and drugs may lead to lower quality of life. Longitudinal studies have proved that, following diagnosis, the stigma of liver disease becomes more apparent over time. Women report worse quality of life than men, supporting that gender differences in hepatitis are also important when assessing quality of life. Alterations in the quality of life of patients submitted to treatment are mainly related to the somatic side effects of Interferon and Ribavirin and are most noticeable in the first weeks of therapy. Early improvement in the quality of life of patients who become HCV‐RNA negative suggests that the virus itself plays a biological role. There is no doubt that liver transplantation leads to an improvement in quality of life. Nevertheless, a major concern is the relapse of HCV, with the associated lower quality of life.


Agricultural waste materials have been explored in the preparation of activated carbon and carbon black employing chemical activation using H3PO4 and physical activation method respectively. Various biomasses based carbon blacks and activated carbons derived from bamboo stem, coconut shell and oil palm empty fiber bunch were characterized, compared and used as filler in epoxy composites. The microscopic structure, thermal properties and mechanical properties of the composites were studied. Incorporation of biomass based carbon blacks and activated carbons resulted in significant increases in thermal and flexural properties of the epoxy composites. The microstructure of the composites indicated that the addition of 5% filler greatly improved the properties of the composites and increased the fillers adhesion unto the epoxy matrix. This work provides new opportunities for advanced applications bioresource based materials in high performance composites applications.


Inter-cell interference (ICI) from nearby cells can substantially degrade the sum-rate in WLAN systems. To improve the sum-rate in actual WLAN systems, some papers have investigated distributed multi-cell beamforming to mitigate ICI by zero forcing beamforming. All most of these approaches consider single-user multiple input multiple output (SU-MIMO) systems. In this paper, we present three techniques for distributed multi-cell beamforming for multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO) systems with the same total number of transmit and receive antennas. The first technique is distributed multi-cell beamforming using receiver selection. The second one is antenna selection at the receiver. The last one is an iterative technique in which transmitter weight is updated at the transmitter to correspond to receiver weight. The sum-rate of these techniques with imperfect channel state information at transmitter (CSIT) is evaluated. We clarify the effectiveness of these techniques for MU-MIMO systems.


There is increasing literature demonstrating the link between building indoor environmental quality, and occupant health and productivity, driving the corporate real estate industry to investigate how to integrate wellness features in both new and existing building stock. Meanwhile, new voluntary standards to promote occupant health are becoming adopted alongside sustainability standards. As commercial building owners and tenants seek to improve occupant conditions and incorporate wellness, apparently conflicting priorities must be balanced, particularly improving indoor environmental conditions has the potential to increase energy. This paper presents a framework to consider retrofits holistically and considering the benefit of improved conditions both qualitatively and quantitatively. Where poor conditions exist, published literature demonstrates a lost productivity cost that exceeds typical building energy costs, and this is quantified in the financial analysis presented. Energy retrofits provide a unique opportunity to integrate wellness-enabling features because the energy savings can offset marginal energy or operating cost increases for particular wellness interventions. This paper presents a flexible, customizable framework to develop potential retrofit bundles and evaluate them considering economic, sustainability, wellness, risk and occupant experience factors to identify the optimal zone of retrofit. An illustrative case study using real building data demonstrates how the framework might be applied to a real project and customized to achieve unique stakeholder priorities.


We report an uncommon case of bilateral impending central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO) in a young girl with newly diagnosed chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) and its successful reversal with leukapheresis. A young girl presented with vomiting and fever. Examination revealed hepatosplenomegaly and multiple enlarged lymph nodes. Investigations show severe hyperleukocytosis and anaemia. Bone marrow aspirate and trephine biopsy confirmed CML in the chronic phase. She was promptly referred to the ophthalmology team for assessment of vasculopathy. Bilateral fundus showed swollen and hyperaemic optic discs. There were dilated and tortuous retinal venules with perivascular white cell extravasation, scattered intraretinal haemorrhages, and Roth spots at mid-periphery. She received four cycles of leukapheresis and, consequently, her leukocytes reduced dramatically with associated significant improvement in fundus findings.
This case highlights uncommon impending CRVO in a young girl and the dramatic improvement in fundus signs following leukapheresis that halted and reversed the progression of impending CRVO.


Skin painting studies on transgenic mice have recently been approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for carcinogenicity testing. Data consist of serial skin tumor counts on the backs of shaved mice in each of several dose groups. Current methods for assessing the tumorigenicity of test compounds are based on generalized estimating equations and require large samples. This paper proposes a new framework for modeling of the change over time in the papilloma burden in each mouse. A latent variable underlying the observed papilloma response is assumed to follow a generalized linear mixed-effects transition model. The model accounts for heterogeneity among animals and serial dependency in the skin tumor counts. Extensions of existing Markov chain Monte Carlo procedures for Bayesian estimation in generalized linear mixed models are proposed. The methods are applied to data from a National Toxicology Program short-term carcinogenicity study of lauric acid.


In this study, the phenotype and allele frequencies of five enzyme systems were determined in a total of 611 unrelated Turkish individuals and analyzed by using the exact and the chi 2 test. The following five red cell enzymes were identified by cellulose acetate electrophoresis: phosphoglucomutase (PGM), adenosine deaminase (ADA), phosphoglucose isomerase (PGI), adenylate kinase (AK), and 6-phosphogluconate dehydrogenase (6-PGD). The ADA, PGM and AK enzymes were found to be polymorphic in the Turkish population. The results of the statistical analysis showed, that the phenotype frequencies of the five enzyme under study are in Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium. Statistical analysis was performed in order to examine whether there are significant differences in the phenotype frequencies between the Turkish population and four American population groups. This analysis showed, that there are some statistically significant differences between the Turkish and the other groups. Moreover, the observed phenotype and allele frequencies were compared with those obtained in other population groups of Turkey.


The performance of the banking sector depends on the ability of a range of banking products to meet customer needs in a timely and complete manner. Due to the specific features of the banking sector, technological capabilities to accumulate a massive pool of customer information about banking services, the German banking sector has more capacity than other industries to launch and sell banking services that will be in high demand among users. The author points out that innovative methods and solutions were developed on the basis of mathematical and statistical models. It is stated that a progressive tool for providing customer-oriented services and products, in the banking sector, is currently defined as "Big Data & Analytics".
The main purpose of the study is to identify the peculiarities of the use in the banking practice of the analytical tool "Big Data & Analytics" and the functional ability of this tool to ensure stable customer loyalty in the course of using banking services.
The study empirically confirmed (based on a survey conducted in the fall of 2019) and theoretically proved that there is a strong relationship between the use of the Big Data & Analytics tool and the provision of key principles of customer loyalty in the following areas of the banking sector: advice to clients by banking employees systems must be objective and comprehensive, be individualized and be provided in a timely and comprehensive manner. Emphasis is placed on the need for further research on the effectiveness of internal and external business coaching, which is particularly relevant in the context of a total digital transformation of all spheres of society and entrepreneurship.
Keywords: big data and analytics, corporate social responsibility, customer loyalty tool, business ethics.


Several . . . films [Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Field of Dreams, and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, 1989] send their heroes searching for hints of God's presence in the universe, on quests for spiritual meaning. . . . And like many New Age approaches that cloak self-absorption in a veneer of spirituality, the films are not really about God and faith. In every case, the religious quest masks a more human concern, a reconciliation with the hero's own father. (Caryn James) What seems to us so grandiose about ethics, so mysterious and, in a mythical fashion, so self-evident, owes these characteristics to its connection with religion, its origins from the will of the father. (Sigmund Freud 370) Thomas McCaskerville, the Scottish psychoanalyst in Iris Murdoch's The Good Apprentice (1985), is meticulously ethical, constantly concerned with doing what is right, always thinking of the effects of his words and actions on others, and also religious in a way, practicing what Harold Bloom calls Murdoch's "astringent post-Christian Platonism," a kind of "negative theology." "Let's say that God is a permanent non-degradable love object," Thomas says to young Stuart Cuno. "Must we not imagine something of the sort?" Then, running through a typical, even stereotypical, Murdochian litany, Stuart eventually says that he wants to go it alone, without a god, "Just to try to be good, to be for others and not oneself. . . . [The good is] all, everywhere, as if everything spoke it and showed it - and it's so deep that it's entirely me, and yet it's entirely not me too -." "Steady on," says Thomas. "All that sounds like God. You say there is no God, then you aspire to be God yourself, you take over his attributes. Perhaps that is the task of the present age" (140-41). John Updike, himself a religious quester in his fiction, writes that Murdoch, "unable in good conscience to locate depth in the external cosmos where God once reigned, turns, in the paradoxical gesture of Christian humanism, toward Man himself to supply the depth that Man demands. . . . Murdoch's central male triangle of Harry [Cuno], Edward [Baltram, Harry's stepson], and Stuart [Harry's son] . . . does not illustrate much in the way of depth" (126). However, Thomas, the artistic "saint," and Jesse Baltram, the saintly artist (Edward's biological father), supply plenty, maybe too much.(1) "The esthetic puzzle," Bloom writes, "is whether the comic story and the spiritual kernel can be held together by Miss Murdoch's archaic stance as an authorial will." Pearl K. Bell argues that the novel is "peculiarly disjointed and uneven" (36); Gillian Wilce calls it "a moral soap opera" (30). The Good Apprentice, however, does include a realistic, sensitive portrayal of an analyst - the first and only such portrayal in her canon - and, as in A Fairly Honourable Defeat (1971), itself a social and psychological comedy, and of equal rank with this one, here Murdoch creates characters and landscapes that come to life, colorful and vibrant people and settings. Further, in showing Stuart beating everyone over the head with his heavy-handed ethical message, Murdoch is lampooning the didactic side of herself (undercutting her usual moral agenda), a tactic that allows the surface of the novel to have a light and airy feel, even as dark, mysterious forces seem to be at work. Her command of detail and her painterly descriptions invest the book with what Peter J. Conradi calls her "luminous, lyrical accuracy" (4). The moral agenda is allowed to drift and grow beneath the surface, as it often does in good literature. Ironically, by blatantly calling attention to morality with the naive character Stuart, Murdoch manages to push her own moral philosophy into the shadows awhile, where it becomes even more effective. Stuart is portrayed as a good person, but unintentionally a clown, not a saint. Thomas is the saint figure, but although he is presented as an almost ideal man (resembling Murdoch's father in his intelligence, steadiness, and success),(2) he nonetheless has faults as both man and analyst, which are used indirectly to criticize Freudianism once again (as Murdoch often does in both her fiction and nonfiction). …


The promastigote form of Leishmania donovani and Leishmania tropica, the etiologic agents of visceral and cutaneous leishmaniasis, respectively, readily parasitize unstimulated J774G8 macrophage-like cells, whereas 80-95% of the same promastigotes are killed within resident macrophages from normal BALB/c mice. This striking difference in intracellular anti-leishmanial activity correlated closely with the capacity to generate toxic oxygen intermediates. Thus, after triggering with phorbol myristate acetate or phagocytosis of zymosan or promastigotes, 90% of the J774G8 cells failed to reduce nitroblue tetrazolium, and released 5-10-fold less O2- and H2O2 than BALB/c macrophages. Exposure to concanavalin A-stimulated lymphokine, however, effectively enhanced the oxidative response of J774G8 cells, and, similarly, induced intracellular anti-leishmanial activity. Inhibiting macrophage H2O2 production consistently decreased the killing of Leishmania by lymphokine-treated J774G8 cells. These observations illustrate the usefulness of examining homogeneous macrophage cell lines that are deficient in a particular effector function, and also serve reemphasize the important role of oxygen intermediates in the microbicidal response of mononuclear phagocytes to intracellular parasites.


This article compares an ETA shooting incident in the Basque lands with an IRA bombing in Northern Ireland with the aim of examining the often overlooked role of symbolism in ethnic terrorists acts. The study of symbolism is important because it plays a part in impelling the terrorist to act and then in defining the targets of their actions. And one of the most important symbolic acts is that of sacrifice, particularly the blood sacrifice whereby acts of violence link with religion and with man's collective being. The article examines how the importance of symbolism to ethnic nationalist terrorist arises from the particular cultural, social and religious milieu in which they live. This analysis suggests that the terrorist act itself is symbolic of the terrorist cause and should not be only understood in purely rational 'means-ends' terms.


Severe disabled children have little chance of environmental and social exploration and discovery, and due to this lack of interaction and independency, it may lead to an idea that they are unable to do anything by themselves. Trying to help these children on this situation, educational robotics can offer and aid, once it can give them a certain degree of independency in exploration of environment. The system developed in this work allows the child to transmit the commands to a robot. Sensors placed on the child's body can obtain information from head movement or muscle signals to command the robot to carry out tasks. With the use of this system, the disabled children get a better cognitive development and social interaction, balancing in a certain way, the negative effects of their disabilities.


Upper Quaternary terraces of the Ventura River, California, are uplifted, tilted, and folded over the Ventura Avenue anticline. Rates of uplift and tilting have decreased since inception of the structure over the past 200 ka. Assuming that the chronology, based on amino-acid racemization, 14C dates, and soils correlation, is approximately correct, then the minimum possible average rate of uplift in the axial region of the fold has decreased from ∼14 mm/yr to 2 mm/yr during the past 200 ka. Interval rates of uplift for the periods 200 ka to 80 or 105 ka, 80 or 105 ka to 30 ka, and 30 ka to present are, respectively, about 20 mm/yr, 9 mm/yr, and 5 mm/yr. The rate of tilting shows a similar trend, decreasing from ∼5.8 urad/yr, 2.5 urad/yr, and 1.2 urad/yr for the same time intervals, respectively. Based on the mechanics of flexural slip folds in stratified sedimentary rocks, these data suggest that the rootless Ventura Avenue anticline is a fold that has been shortening at a relatively constant rate of about 9 mm/yr since its inception.


Images have proven to be catalysts of emotions and ideals at a personal level and for collectives hoping to make change. Political mobilization can be triggered and directed by images which share ideological position, and politicians can use them to signal to followers where they position themselves within the political spectrum. As content becomes easier to create and disseminate from the populace those seeking to study the images will find themselves in need of tools to improve the efficiency and organization of their work. This study presents an analysis of the datasets that the application Tagasaurus can produce. Tagasaurus, is a cross platform application for providing semantic information as annotations for images. The annotations guide the user to input descriptions for the production of hashtags, emotional variables and memes. The export facility allows a JSON to be produced for the collection of annotations and subsequently a researcher can investigate associations. Based on a dataset of over a 100 images, a set of diagrams displays the capabilities for investigating cross community meme adoption in order to see the overlaps and distinctions in the symbolism used between groups sharing content. The investigation also shows how emotions and hashtag co-occurrences can be studied.


The in vivo action of cyclosporine A (CS) on rat renal cortical mitochondria was investigated. CS (30 mg.kg-1.day-1) given orally to rats for 30 days caused an augmentation of renal mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation. The ADP-stimulated respiratory rate was increased by 37.0% with glutamate plus malate as respiratory substrates (P less than 0.025) but not with succinate-supported respiration, indicating enhancement of mitochondrial complex I activity. This reaction may be a response to the 32.5% reduction of renal blood (P less than 0.005) in the CS-treated group, possibly serving to maximize ATP synthesis during ischemia. Ligation-induced decreases in renal blood flow also resulted in enhancement of mitochondrial complex I activity.


In this paper, the Taguchi optimization method is applied to obtain the optimal and robust design towards enhancement of board-level thermomechanical reliability of a package-on-package stacking assembly under an accelerated thermal cycling test condition. An L18(2 1times37) orthogonal array is arranged for the optimization of eight selected control factors of the assembly, including thickness of dies, molding compounds, and substrates, sizes of package and molding compound, and solder joint standoffs. The importance of each of these control factors is compared and ranked


With a descriptive and predictive ability, data mining can discover the hidden patterns of data from a large-scale data warehouse by precise mathematical means, which is valuable for decision making, especially for corporate top management. With a regression analysis based on a large survey data, this paper examines an important issue concerned to corporate acquisition. It is found that acquisition performance is positively influenced by organizational adjustment, top management turnover, buyers' experience, target firm's performance, and business relevance, and negatively influenced by region distance, shareholding ratio, state-owned shares of buyers, and relative size. The founding can have some theoretical value for corporate decision on the process of acquisitions and how to enhance acquisition performance and also indicate the practical value of data mining technology.


We study the capabilities of speech processing systems trained simply to predict large amounts of transcripts of audio on the internet. When scaled to 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervision, the resulting models generalize well to standard benchmarks and are often competitive with prior fully supervised results but in a zero-shot transfer setting without the need for any fine-tuning. When compared to humans, the models approach their accuracy and robustness. We are releasing models and inference code to serve as a foundation for further work on robust speech processing.


Understanding what mechanisms are involved in drought response in coffee plants will generate relevant information to assist breeding and/or genetic engineering to obtain new commercial varieties with drought tolerance. This research aimed at studying the effects of drought on leaf water potential, carbohydrate concentrations, and sucrose synthase and invertase activity in coffee seedlings (Coffea arabica Siriema), originating from a natural cross between C. racemosa and C. arabica Blue Mountain (Carvalho et al., 2008). Seedlings were grown in a greenhouse under non-irrigated and daily irrigated conditions. Plants were evaluated every three days until they reached the permanent wilting point or, at most. 30 days after withholding water. In addition, plants under different drought conditions (as of 30 days) were irrigated and evaluated 24 and 48 hours after water application. The non-irrigated treatment prompted a significant reduction in leaf water potential, whereas re-irrigation promoted partial recovery of plant water potential. There was a significant increase in the levels of total soluble sugars and reducing sugars, both in the leaves and roots of the non-irrigated plants. The re-irrigated plants behaved like the non-irrigated plants; however, lower levels of sugars were detected in these samples. The leaves and roots of the nonirrigated plants also showed a significant reduction in starch levels. The activity of sucrose synthase and invertase, neutral and acid enzymes, increased as a result of water stress.


Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin was identified as the apparent cause of an outbreak of poisoning in humans, horses, and other animals. Exposure was related to the spraying of contaminated waste oil on riding arenas for dust control. The contamination resulted from improper disposal of a toxic industrial waste. The pathologic effects and chemical identification of tetrachlorodibenzodioxin are described.


Environmental challenges are often marked by an intergroup dimension. Political conservatives and progressives are divided on their beliefs about climate change, farmers come into conflict with scientists and environmentalists over water allocation or species protection, and communities oppose big business and mining companies that threaten their local environment. These intergroup tensions are reminders of the powerful influence social contexts and group memberships can have on attitudes, beliefs, and actions relating to climate change and the environment more broadly. In this paper, we use social identity theory to help describe and explain these processes. We review literature showing, how conceiving of oneself in terms of a particular social identity influences our environmental attitudes and behaviors, how relations between groups can impact on environmental outcomes, and how the content of social identities can direct group members to act in more or less pro-environmental ways. We discuss the similarities and differences between the social identity approach to these phenomena and related theories, such as cultural cognition theory, the theory of planned behavior, and value-belief-norm theory. Importantly, we also advance social-identity based strategies to foster more sustainable environmental attitudes and behaviors. Although this theoretical approach can provide important insights and potential solutions, more research is needed to build the empirical base, especially in relation to testing social identity solutions.


Bona fide apoptosis in rat and human leukemia cells, rat thymocytes, and bovine endothelial cells was accompanied by limited and specific cleavage of polysome-associated and monosome-associated 28S rRNA, with 18S rRNA being spared. Specific 28S rRNA cleavage was observed in all instances of apoptotic death accompanied by internucleosomal DNA fragmentation, with cleavage of 28S rRNA and of DNA being linked temporally. This indicates that 28S rRNA fragmentation may be as general a feature of apoptosis as internucleosomal DNA fragmentation and that concerted specific cleavage of intra- and extranuclear polynucleotides occurs in apoptosis. Apoptosis-associated cleavage sites were mapped to the 28S rRNA divergent domains D2, D6 (endothelial cells), and D8. The D2 cuts occurred in hairpin loop junctions considered to be buried in the intact ribosome, suggesting that this rRNA region becomes a target for RNase attack in apoptotic cells. D8 was cleaved in two exposed UU(U) sequences in bulge loops. Treatment with agents causing necrotic cell death or aging of cell lysates failed to produce any detectable limited D2 cleavage but did produce a more generalized cleavage in the D8 region. Of potential functional interest was the finding that the primary cuts in D2 exactly flanked a 0.3-kb hypervariable subdomain (D2c), allowing excision of the latter. The implication of hypervariable rRNA domains in apoptosis represents the first association of any functional process with these enigmatic parts of the ribosomes.


Michael E. Tobar, Raymond Y. Chiao, and Maxim Goryachev ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems and ARC Centre of Excellence for Dark Matter Particle Physics, Department of Physics, University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, WA 6009, Australia. School of Natural Sciences, University of California Merced, 5200 N. Lake Rd, Merced, CA 95343, USA (Dated: January 7, 2021)


Pulse-width modulated (PWM) adjustable frequency drives (AFDs) are extensively used in industries for control of induction motors. It has led to significant advantages in terms of the performance, size, and efficiency but the output voltage waveform no longer remains sinusoidal. Hence, overshoots, high rate of rise, harmonics and transients are observed in the voltage wave. They increase voltage and thermal stresses; resulting into accelerated insulation aging. This paper presents the application of fuzzy logic to life estimation of PWM driven induction motors. Insulation stress parameters are experimentally computed for wide range of switching frequency and used in fuzzy logic based life estimation algorithms. The results obtained with the fuzzy expert system show a performance approaching that attainable for the life model based on the inverse power law.


This paper compares the different approaches to programming taken by KERA--TV Instructional Services Division and by Israel's Instructional Television Center This study first examines the historical development of instructional television in the United States, particularly in Dallas, and in Israel, Next examined are the differences and the similarities between the stations' programming processes. Finally, the study examines the perceived achievements of programming goals set by each station. This report concludes that the stations' differences in their approach to programming are rooted in their historical developments, and discusses the opposite directions which the stations' programming processes are currently developing,


Over the past few decades public-private partnership or PPP has become a new way for delivering and fi nancing public sector projects. It may involve investment in fully economic infrastructure such as highways, railways, airports, seaports, etc. up to the investments in social infrastructure projects, such as schools, hospitals, museums and other signifi cant and historic buildings of public interest. The main objective of this article is to analyze the situation in Croatia, Poland, Slovakia and Slovenia concerning the topic of public- private partnership (PPP) in order to provide grounds for possible future investments in cultural heritage in these countries. For this purpose, a comparative analysis of legal and institutional frameworks was carried out as well as structured interviews with key stakeholders (public and private sector representatives). Special attention has been paid to the use of PPP projects in the revitalization of cultural heritage. The results of the analysis showed the lack of PPP investments in the cultural sector, and also identifi ed possible obstacles in public sector administrative procedures. The results of the analysis may be further used to stimulate both public authorities to set strategic directions for heritage revitalization plans based on PPP schemes as well as private investors who may seek feasible business models complemented with social responsibility benefits.


The traditional DSMC method is extended to simulate three-dimensional (3D) rarefied ionization flows around spacecrafts during hypervelocity reentry. The electron mass amplification is utilized and the reaction rates involving electron are modified correspondingly. A weighting factor scheme for trace species is proposed, and its impacts on collision mechanism, the realization of chemical reactions as well as the calculations of macroscopic parameters are considered. The proposed DSMC algorithm is highly efficient in simulating weakly inhomogeneous flows, and its reliability is validated by the comparisons with aerodynamics force test of Shenzhou capsule model in low density wind tunnel, the electron number densities of RAM-C II and Stardust in rarefied transitional flow regimes. The introduction of rare species weighting factor scheme can significantly improves the smoothness of the number density contours of rare species, especially for that of electron in weak ionization case, while it has negligible effect on the macroscopic flow parameters. The ionization characteristics of the Chinese lunar capsule reentry process is analyzed for the first time at the altitudes of 80km, 85km and 90km, and the predicted communication blackout altitude agrees with the actual reentry flight data. The computation reveals that, for blunt body reentry with a speed larger than the second cosmic speed, the main ionization source is the direct collision ionization, and the electron number density is high enough to cause communication blackout in traditional rarefied flow regimes. AMS subject classifications: 11K45, 35Q35, 60K40, 62P35


This paper deals with the design and test of a permanent-magnet machine based on a novel modular stator concept. The manufacturing and recycling costs are minimized thanks to the use of composite magnetic materials (plastic bonded magnets, soft magnetic composites). The main properties of composite magnetic materials, from a magnetic and mechanical point of view, are briefly presented in the first part of this paper. After focusing on their thermal properties by detailing a thermal experimental study, the proposed concept of a modular permanent-magnet machine is described. Experimental characterization of the realized prototype, in static and dynamic operating modes, demonstrates its advantages compared with conventional structures.


Brain drain is one of the important aspects of development economics/Demographic transitions. A populous country has the potential to export human capital. There are so many determinants of Human Capital Outflow (HCO). Some like economic, social, and political drivers are already discussed in the previous studies. This study compares the impact of various classes of variables on the HCO. Furthermore, it gives recommendations for controlling HCO based on such results. Data is collected in the form of questionnaires from three rural and three urban areas of Peshawar. Random sampling is used. Probit models are used for comparing the significance of variables. The study shows that not only the classic variables, i.e. economic, social and political are important but also the newly introduced religious and environmental factors have a great impact on HCO. The forthcoming researchers can do further study by considering even more factors affecting the HCO. They can conduct studies for different areas and on different scales.


Tolerance to pose variations is one of the key remaining problems in face recognition. It is of great interest in airport surveillance systems using mugshot databases to screen travellers' faces. This paper presents a novel pose-invariant face recognition approach using two orthogonal face images from mugshot databases. Virtual views under different poses are generated in two steps: shape modeling and texture synthesis. In the shape modeling step, a feature-based multilevel quadratic variation minimization approach is applied to generate smooth 3D face shapes. In the texture synthesis step, a non-Lambertian reflectance model is explored to synthesize facial textures taking into account both diffuse and specular reflections. A view-based face recognizer is used to examine the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed pose-invariant face recognition. The experimental results show that the proposed method provides a new solution to the problem of recognizing rotated faces


When composing stock portfolios, managers frequently choose among hundreds of stocks. The stocks' risk properties are analyzed with statistical tools, and managers try to combine these to meet the investors' risk profiles. A recently developed tool for performing such optimization is called full-scale optimization (FSO). This methodology is very flexible for investor preferences, but because of computational limitations it has until now been infeasible to use when many stocks are considered. We apply the artificial intelligence technique of differential evolution to solve FSO-type stock selection problems of 97 assets. Differential evolution finds the optimal solutions by self-learning from randomly drawn candidate solutions. We show that this search technique makes large scale problem computationally feasible and that the solutions retrieved are stable. The study also gives further merit to the FSO technique, as it shows that the solutions suit investor risk profiles better than portfolios retrieved from traditional methods.


Early diagnosis of Alzheimer's and epilepsy requires monitoring a subject's development of symptoms through electroencephalography (EEG) signals over long periods. Wearable devices enable convenient monitoring of biosignals, unlike complex and costly hospital equipment. The key to achieving a fit and forgettable wearable device is to increase its operating cycle and decrease its size and weight. Instead of batteries, which limit the life cycle of electronic devices and set their form factor, body heat and environmental light can power wearable devices through energy-scavenging technologies. The harvester transducers should be tailored according to on the application and the sensor placement. This leaves a wide variety of transducers with an extensive range of impedances and voltages. To realize an autonomous wearable device, the power converter energy harvester, has to be very efficient and maintain its efficiency despite potential transducer replacement or variations in environmental conditions. This thesis presents a detailed design of an efficient integrated power converter for use in an autonomous wearable device. The design is based on the examination of both power losses and power transfer in the power converter. The efficiency bound of the converter is derived from the specifications of its transducer. The tuning ranges for the reconfigurable parameters are extracted to keep the converter efficient with variations in the transducer specifications. With the efficient design and the manual tuning of the reconfigurable parameters, the converter can work optimally with different types of transducers, and keeps its efficiency in the conversion of low voltages from the harvesters. Measurements of the designed converter demonstrate an efficiency of higher than 50% and 70% with two different transducers having an open-circuit voltage as low as 20 mV and 100 mV, respectively. The power converter should be able to reconfigure itself without manual tunings to keep its efficiency despite changes in the harvesters' specifications. The second portion of this dissertation addresses this issue with a proposed design methodology to implement a control section. The control section adjusts the converter's reconfigurable parameters by examining the power transfer and loss and through concurrent closed loops. The concurrent loops working together raise a serious concern regarding stability. The system is designed and analyzed in the time domain with the state-space averaging (SSA) model to address the stability issue. The ultra-low-power control section obtained from the SSA model estimates the power and loss with a reasonable accuracy, and adjusts the timings in a stable manner. The entire control section consumes only 30 nW dynamic power at 10 kHz. The control section tunes the converter's speed or its working frequency depending on the available power. The frequency clocks the entire architecture, which is designed asynchronously; therefore, the power consumption of the system depends on the power available from the transducer. The system is implemented using 0.18 µm CMOS technology. For an input as low as 7 mV, the converter is not only functional but also has an efficiency of more than 40%. The efficiency can reach 70% with an input voltage of 50 mV. The system operates in a range of just a few of millivolts to half a volt with ample efficiencies. It can work at an optimal point with different transducers and environmental conditions.


The Internet-based World Wide Web has had an enormous impact on business and society. It has succeeded largely because of its open architecture and ease-of-use. Although it was originally designed for distributed and interactive information sharing, it has evolved into a powerful business platform in which electronic commerce is driving fundamental change in consumer buying patterns. However, because of the ubiquitous nature of electronic marketplaces on the Internet, buyers have an enormous variety of items available to them, effectively overwhelming them with choices. A new e-commerce paradigm is in high demand in which software agents can play an important role in automating many transactional activities like the discovery, comparison, selection, purchase of products or services, and the shipping of products. But so far, the Web-based marketplaces are mainly designed for human interaction and do not support efficient interaction with software agents.
This dissertation studies the current e-commerce software architecture and the special needs of transaction software agents, enhances the current e-commerce software architecture for agent support, and designs the corresponding interfaces and supporting systems. The interface design and supporting systems will accommodate the format and interface needs of the human users, while enhancing the transactional capabilities of software agents through an adaptable and robust interface. Transaction agents can operate in either a pull or push manner, which require different supporting systems and architecture. Web services are utilized that facilitate an Agent-Enabling Interface (AEI) API for exposing the business logic of an e-commerce portal by leveraging existing Internet protocols. This design is further enhanced to enable the transaction agent to react to marketplace changes and delayed transactions via callback from the server, implemented through a deviation from the current software architecture with a server-side Callback tier. The client-side supporting system is also proposed and designed to work with generic transaction agents. It features a Generic Middleware between Agents and Portals (GMAP) that insulates the transaction agent and minimizes its modification to enable e-commerce portal interoperability. The supporting systems on the client and server communicate via Web services and provide the functionality required to enable a transaction agent to address, and call the business logic of an e-commerce portal thus preserving the back-end of the portal.
In summary, this research defines solutions that improve the interoperability between transaction software agents and e-commerce portals via client and server supporting systems. Using an exposed business API, this enhancement enables agents to execute the same business logic as the human-based interface thus eliminating changes to the back-end of the portal to support transaction agents.


Non-ST elevation acute coronary syndromes (NSTEACS), as defined by acute cardiac chest pain in the absence of ST elevation, is a common condition with an incidence of 3 per 1000 per year.1 Patients with ST elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) should have immediate reperfusion by either mechanical (PCI) or pharmacological (thrombolysis) means,2 but the role and optimum timing of coronary angiography in NSTEACS (whose incidence is greater than STEMI1) remains less well-defined.

Patients with NSTEACS are a heterogeneous group whose presentations are often less clear-cut and in whom comorbidities are more common.3 Current guidelines suggest urgent angiography is required only in the minority of patients with NSTEACS who have ongoing angina, clinical signs of heart failure, haemodynamic instability or life-threatening arrhythmias.1 The remaining majority can either undergo angiography within 72–96 h1 4 of presentation, or can be managed medically.

Patients with STEMI usually have an occluded coronary artery.2 Previously, NSTEACS was thought to result from partial or transient occlusion of a coronary artery. However, Wang et al have shown that around one-quarter of patients with NSTEACS have a coronary artery occlusion, particularly in arteries supplying the inferolateral territories.5 The same study showed that patients with NSTEACS with an occluded artery have higher levels of markers of myocardial injury and a higher mortality at 6 months than those patients with NSTEACS but without an occluded artery.5

There is consensus that patients presenting with STEMI should undergo treatment to ensure rapid reperfusion. In contrast, despite appearing to have an identical angiographic problem, patients with an occluded artery who present with NSTEACS may wait much longer before angiography. Delay before angiography …


Fast item recommendation based on implicit feedback is vital in practical scenarios due to data-abundance, but challenging because of the lack of negative samples and the large number of recommended items. Recent adversarial methods unifying generative and discriminative models are promising, since the generative model, as a negative sampler, gradually improves as iteration continues. However, binary-valued generative model is still unexplored within the min-max framework, but important for accelerating item recommendation. Optimizing binary-valued models is difficult due to non-smooth and nondifferentiable. To this end, we propose two novel methods to relax the binarization based on the error function and Gumbel trick so that the generative model can be optimized by many popular solvers, such as SGD and ADMM. The binary-valued generative model is then evaluated within the min-max framework on four real-world datasets and shown its superiority to competing hashing-based recommendation algorithms. In addition, our proposed framework can approximate discrete variables precisely and be applied to solve other discrete optimization problems.


Hyperuricemia (HU) often progresses to combine with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) in the clinical scenario, which further exacerbates metabolic disorders; early detection of biomarkers, if obtained during the HU progression, may be beneficial for preventing its combination with NAFLD. This study aimed to decipher the biomarkers and mechanisms of the development of steatosis in HU. Four groups of subjects undergoing health screening, including healthy subjects, subjects with HU, subjects with HU combined with NAFLD (HU+NAFLD) and subjects with HU initially and then with HU+NAFLD one year later (HU→HU+NAFLD), were recruited in this study. The metabolic profiles of all subjects' serum were analyzed by liquid chromatography quadruple time-of-flight mass spectrometry. The metabolomic data from subjects with HU and HU+NAFLD were compared, and the biomarkers for the progression from HU to HU+NAFLD were predicted. The metabolomic data from HU→HU+NAFLD subjects were collected for further verification. The results showed that the progression was associated with disturbances of phospholipase metabolism, purine nucleotide degradation and Liver X receptor/retinoic X receptor activation as characterized by up-regulated phosphatidic acid, cholesterol ester (18:0) and down-regulated inosine. These metabolic alterations may be at least partially responsible for the development of steatosis in HU. This study provides a new paradigm for better understanding and further prevention of disease progression.


Fatigue fracture is one kind of common destruction form in structure which bearing dynamic load frequently. Reinforce concrete structure's fatigue fracture behaved commonly as the reinforcing steel bar's fatigue fracture. The fatigue fracture destruction process of the reinforcing steel bar in the reinforced concrete is divided into three phases as follow: before the crack propagation stage; stable crack growth stage and instable propagation of crack phases, and the corresponding damage state for initial damage state; stable development state and structural damage fracture state. Describing every state using Markov stochastic process, and has carried out a probability analysis to the structural destruction process. The example analysis indicated that this method is accurate and convenient, while corresponding action for structural maintenance according to the above adopts can effectively avoids the accident occurrence.


We investigated the velocities Narnia would have to be moving at relative to Earth for the different lengths of time that pass in Narnia compared to on Earth in 'The Chronicles of Narnia' books. The relative velocities that were calculated at different points when the book characters visited it ranged from 295599.350 km s^(−1) to 299792.3676 km s^(−1). We then calculated the corresponding distances of Narnia from Earth, which were found to range from ∼4270 Mpc to ∼4330 Mpc.


Introduction During 2010-11, 41 Square Table events held across the UK. More than 1,500 people took part, including families of children with life-limiting and life-threatening conditions, young adults who have grown up using children's palliative care services, health, social care and education professionals as well as other community leaders. Aims The Square Table programme aimed to: Deepen understanding of children's palliative care within communities. Act as a catalyst for communities to work better together to meet the needs of children and families. Stimulate children's hospices and other providers to develop their services. Methods and results The Square Table is a structured discussion, where all sides of the table are the same length to symbolise all views as equal in merit. Most were hosted by children's hospices, enabling a better understanding of the needs of users and reach out into their communities. There were some common themes which emerged: Low awareness has a negative impact on access to services. Greater coordination of services and partnerships is needed at all levels. Key working is seen by families as a necessity for helping navigate a complex system. Serious concerns about support for young people making the transition to adulthood. The future sustainability of services is a concern, particularly in the context of a fragile economy. Follow up Progress has been made by services since the programme, particularly in Widening family support services Improving partnership working and collaboration with the statutory sector Developing new services Improving communication Conclusion The Square Table concept is a valuable tool for hospices to engage more effectively with communities and in service development, especially in response to the Commission into the Future of Hospice Care.


A lift team was implemented at an urban medical center in the Pacific Northwest to reduce employee injuries. The lift team consisted of a lift technician and a nursing assistant both trained in lifting techniques. The trial lasted 1 year. Data on employee injuries and day versus night injuries before and during lift team implementation are presented. Results do not show the same reduction in employee injuries described by previous authors. Possible explanations are related to the use of the lift team and policy development.


Abstract:This interview was conducted in 1973 with Colonel Benjamin Wilson Venable (1894–1980), who served as a captain in the same 45th Regiment in which F. Scott Fitzgerald was a lieutenant. Venable's lively recollections of Fitzgerald and Zelda Sayre in Camp Sheridan outside Montgomery, Alabama, offer insight into daily life and military protocol at the time; his claim that Fitzgerald ranked highest in IQ in the regiment helps substantiate the belief that Fitzgerald's intelligence has been highly underrated—something as true today as it was during the years Elmore spent working on his book-length study of The Great Gatsby from which this is an excerpt. It is published with the permission of both the Elmore and Venable families. We also thank John Kuhnle for his work on the manuscript.


In the implosion conjecture, coronal loops contract as the result of magnetic energy release in solar eruptions and flares. However, after almost two decades, observations of this phenomenon are still rare and most previous reports are plagued by projection effects so that loop contraction could be either true implosion or just a change in loop inclination. In this paper, to demonstrate the reality of loop contractions in the global coronal dynamics, we present four events with the continuously contracting loops in an almost edge-on geometry from the perspective of SDO/AIA, which are free from the ambiguity caused by the projection effects, also supplemented by contemporary observations from STEREO for examination. In the wider context of observations, simulations and theories, we argue that the implosion conjecture is valid in interpreting these events. Furthermore, distinct properties of the events allow us to identify two physical categories of implosion. One type demonstrates a rapid contraction at the beginning of the flare impulsive phase, as magnetic free energy is removed rapidly by a filament eruption. The other type, which has no visible eruption, shows a continuous loop shrinkage during the entire flare impulsive phase, which we suggest shows the ongoing conversion of magnetic free energy in a coronal volume. Corresponding scenarios are described that can provide reasonable explanations for the observations. We also point out that implosions may be suppressed in cases when a heavily mass-loaded filament is involved, possibly serving as an alternative account for their observational rarity.


The 1,5,6,8,10-pentamethylheptalene-4-carboxaldehyde (4b) (together with its double-bond-shifted (DBS) isomer 4a) and methyl 4-formyl-1,6,8,10-tetramethylheptalene-5-carboxylate (15b) were synthesized (Schemes 3 and 7, resp.). Aminoethenylation of 4a/4b with N,N-dimethylformamide dimethyl acetal (=1,1-dimethoxy-N,N-dimethylmethanamine=DMFDMA) led in DMF to 1-[(1E)-2-(dimethylamino)ethenyl]-5,6,8,10-tetramethylheptalene-2-carboxaldehyde (18a; Scheme 9), whereas the stronger aminoethenylation agent N,N,N′,N′,N″,N″-hexamethylmethanetriamine (=tris(dimethylamino)methane=TDMAM) gave an almost 1 : 1 mixture of 18a and 1-[(1E)-2-(dimethylamino)ethenyl]-5,6,8,10-tetramethylheptalene-4-carboxaldehyde (20b; Scheme 11). Carboxylate 15b delivered with DMFDMA on heating in DMF the expected aminoethenylation product 19b (Scheme 10). The aminoethenylated heptalenecarboxaldehydes were treated with malononitrile in CH2Cl2 in the presence of TiCl4/pyridine to yield the corresponding malononitrile derivatives 23b, 24b, and 26a (Schemes 13 and 14). The photochemically induced DBS process of the heptalenecarboxaldehydes as 'soft' merocyanines and their malononitrile derivatives as 'strong' merocyanines of almost zwitterionic nature were studied in detail (Figs. 10–29) with the result that 1,4-donor/acceptor substituted heptalenes are cleaner switchable than 1,2-donor/acceptor-substituted heptalenes.