Amyloid oligomers are suspected as toxic agents in neurodegenerative disease, and are transient and often heterogeneous, making them difficult to detect. Here we show an approach to track the development of amyloid oligomers in situ by room temperature, continuous wave (cw) 9 and 95 GHz EPR. Three amyloid peptides with the 2,2,6,6-tetramethyl-N-oxyl-4-amino-4-carboxylic acid (TOAC) spin label were synthesized by solid phase peptide synthesis: T0EZ (TKVKVLGDVIEVGG) with TOAC (T) at the N-terminus, T5EZ with TOAC in the middle (KVKVTGDVIEVG) and T12EZ with TOAC at the C-terminus (KVKVLGDVIEVTG). These sequences are derived from the K11V (KVKVLGDVIEV) amyloid peptide, which self-aggregates to oligomers with a β-sheet configuration (A. Laganowsky, et al., Science, 2012, 335, 1228-1231). To monitor oligomerization, the rotational correlation time (τr) is measured by cw-EPR. For the backbone-fixed TOAC label that is devoid of local mobility τr should reflect the rotation and thereby the size of the peptide, resp. oligomer. For T5EZ a good match between the measured τr and the size of the peptide is obtained, showing the validity of the approach. One of the three peptides (T0EZ) aggregates (circular dichroism), whereas the other two do not. Since also the respective MTSL (S-(1-oxyl-2,2,5,5-tetramethyl-2,5-dihydro-1H-pyrrol-3-yl)methyl methanesulfonothioate) labelled peptides fail to aggregate, molecular crowding due to the label, rather than the helix-inducing properties of TOAC, seems to be responsible. Following in situ oligomer formation of T0EZ by the change in rotational correlation time, two oligomers are observed, a 5-6 mer and a 15-18 mer. The EPR approach, particularly 95 GHz EPR, enables following oligomerization of one monomer at a time, suggesting that the cw-EPR approach presented is a novel tool to follow amyloid oligomerization with high resolution.


Abstract LSD1 is one of the important proteins which help transcriptional machine to access to DNA though open or close DNA around histone. It can also demethylate p53 at specific lysines altering the p53-mediated transcriptional process which could lead to the inhibition of the role of p53 in promoting apoptosis. Thus, inhibition of LSD1 activity by small compounds becomes a promising cancer therapy. Combining the Lipinski's rule with docking and steered molecular dynamics simulation we have found from the traditional Chinese medicine database four compounds that are good candidates for inhibiting LSD1 activity.


Children and youth with Disorders of Consciousness (DoC) present with highly complex medical, physical, and behavioral needs. Additionally, involving such children and young people in meaningful activities with caregivers can be challenging due to the combined motor, sensory, cognitive and communication impairments. Authoritative guidelines for engaging children and youth in meaningful sensory experiences that can enhance social and emotional experiences are lacking due to the minimal research with this population. Music is a medium that optimizes sensory stimulation using salient stimuli in the auditory modality. Furthermore, music experiences require minimal physical demands and offer opportunities for social interactions in line with developmental milestones. The primary objective of this paper is to offer best-practice recommendations for musical stimulation with children and youth with DoC, including its use in leisure and relaxation activities. These recommendations are synthesized from the existing evidence and combined with expert opinion. They are intended for caregivers of children and young people with DoC, which include paid healthcare professionals and providers, as well as non-paid caregivers such as family, friends, and volunteers. These practical suggestions may be applicable in a variety of settings, including hospitals, educational and residential care settings, family homes, and rehabilitation units.


Risk factors for delirium were studied, an overview of long-term cognitive impairment and mental health problems after ICU stay was given, and the association between intensive care unit (ICU) delirium and long-term cognitive impairment, as well as mental health problems, was explored.
In part I of the thesis, we searched for etiological risk factors for delirium during critical illness. Psychopathology prior to hospital admission did increase the risk of developing a delirium during critical illness. No association between exposure to anticholinergic medication and delirium could be demonstrated, neither a significant effect of age or inflammation on this association was present. Yet, age and the presence of inflammation were both individually independent risk factors for transitioning to delirium. Subsequently, no association between corticosteroid exposure and the occurrence of delirium could be demonstrated.
Part II of the thesis assessed the occurrence of long-term brain dysfunction after critical illness and evaluated the association with ICU delirium and this long-term dysfunction. A systematic review showed that a substantial number of patients experience cognitive problems after critical illness, although a wide range was reported (4–62%) and follow-up duration was diverse (2–156 months). Elaborating on these cognitive problems after ICU stay, we evaluated the association with delirium during ICU stay. An association between (multiple days of) ICU delirium and long-term self-reported cognitive problems was found in one year ICU survivors. Since systemic inflammation is both a risk factor for delirium during ICU stay, and for long-term cognitive problems, a mediation analysis was conducted to explore the potential mediating effect of exposure to systemic inflammation in the association between ICU delirium and long-term cognitive problems. No mediating effect was found, suggesting that the effect of ICU delirium on long-term cognitive problems was not merely driven by the exposure to systemic inflammation. Additionally whether delirium was associated with long-term mortality and worse health-related quality of life (HRQoL) was evaluated. After adjustment for confounding, the association between ICU delirium and these outcomes did not remain, which showed that ICU delirium itself might not be etiologically related to these long-term outcomes.
The occurrence of symptoms of the postintensive care syndrome, with a focus on symptoms of anxiety, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), three months after critical illness in patients and their families visiting an outpatient clinic was described. A substantial number of family members of former ICU patients seem to have mental health problems. Also a lot of former ICU patients experience mental health problems, three months after ICU discharge. The association between delirium during ICU stay and symptoms of anxiety, depression and PTSD was assessed one year after ICU stay. High frequencies of symptoms of anxiety, depression and PTSD in former ICU patients were demonstrated, even one year after ICU discharge. However, no association between ICU delirium and an increased risk for symptoms of anxiety, depression or PTSD after one year was demonstrated.


The authors present a case of spinal dural arteriovenous fistula with fluctuations in symptoms following embolization. Superselective injection of 33% N-butyl cyanoacrylate into the feeding vessel resulted in the complete occlusion of the fistula with traversal of the nidus. The subsequent venous congestion was progressive and treatable with anti-thrombin therapy. Extended medication with dual antiplatelet therapy was required because dose reduction to aspirin monotherapy worsened symptoms. In this case, it took > 2 months for the patient's symptoms to stabilize. The duration of progressive venous thrombosis after embolization of a spinal dural arteriovenous fistula is not well known, nor is the most adequate treatment. Although it is presumed that prevention of venous thrombosis is best achieved with anticoagulation, dual antiplatelet therapy can be a substitute for patients with poor compliance.


In the vanishing learning rate regime, stochastic gradient descent (SGD) is now relatively well understood. In this work, we propose to study the basic properties of SGD and its variants in the non-vanishing learning rate regime. The focus is on deriving exactly solvable results and discussing their implications. The main contributions of this work are to derive the stationary distribution for discrete-time SGD in a quadratic loss function with and without momentum; in particular, one implication of our result is that the fluctuation caused by discrete-time dynamics takes a distorted shape and is dramatically larger than a continuous-time theory could predict. Examples of applications of the proposed theory considered in this work include the approximation error of variants of SGD, the effect of minibatch noise, the optimal Bayesian inference, the escape rate from a sharp minimum, and the stationary covariance of a few second-order methods including damped Newton's method, natural gradient descent, and Adam.


Is the long-term volatility anomaly a function of risk measure choice? Using such symmetric risk measures as beta and variance, the volatility anomaly is apparent in the United States and 21 other global equity markets. This study finds less support for the volatility anomaly when symmetric risk measures are replaced with their asymmetric risk counterparts: relative variance (negative semivariance minus variance) and relative beta (downside beta minus beta). When relative variance is the sorting variable, the expected positive risk–return relationship is restored. Strategies of buying low-variance or low-beta stocks and shorting high-variance or high-beta stocks generate positive monthly risk-adjusted returns in nearly one-third of the sample. These results reverse or disappear, however, when relative variance or relative beta are the sorting variables. Portfolio matching shows that portfolios sorted on variance versus relative variance are truly different portfolios, and the same result holds true for portfolios sorted on beta versus relative beta.


Features of an explicitly parallel programming language targeted for reconfigurable parallel processing systems, where the machine's N processing elements (PEs) are capable of operating in both the SIMD and SPMD modes of parallelism, are described. The SPMD (single program-multiple data) mode of parallelism is a subset of the MIMD mode where all processors execute the same program. By providing all aspects of the language with an SIMD mode version and an SPMD mode version that are syntactically and semantically equivalent, the language facilitates experimentation with and exploitation of hybrid SIMD/SPMD machines. Language constructs (and their implementations) for data management, data-dependent control-flow, and PE-address-dependent control-flow are presented. These constructs are based on experience gained from programming a parallel machine prototype and are being incorporated into a compiler under development. Much of the research presented is applicable to general SIMD machines and MIMD machines. >


The repetition of droughts in France has led to a growing demand for irrigation water and consequently to an increase in requests for the construction of small farm dams. Although such dams are small, their accumulation in a basin affects river flows, because the water collected in these small farm dams is used for irrigation and thus does not contribute to river flow. In order to gain more insight into their impact on the annual and monthly discharges, especially during dry years, a small farm dam model was built and connected to a hydrometeorological model. Several scenarios with different volume capacities, filling catchment sizes and filling periods were tested for such dams. The results were analysed in a small basin in western France, where the pressure for building such dams is high, and then extended to the entire country. It was found that, due to the hydrometeorological conditions (mainly low precipitation compared to other regions in France), the development of small farm dams in north-western France would result in greater decreases in river flows and less efficient filling of small farm dams than in other regions. Therefore, such dams might not be as efficient as expected in supplying water to farmers when needed. Moreover, the ability to fill small farm dams is projected to decrease in a context of climate change, despite the uncertainty on the evolution of precipitation, thus worsening the situation.


Mulder and colleagues [Mulder, T., Hochstenbach, J., Dijkstra, P. U., Geertzen, J. H. B. (in press). Born to adapt, but not in your dreams. Consciousness and Cognition.] report that a majority of amputees continue to experience a normallylimbed body during their night dreams. They interprete this observation as a failure of the body schema to adapt to the new body shape. The present note does not question this interpretation, but points to the already existing literature on the phenomenology of the phantom limb in dreams. A summary of published investigations is complemented by a note on phantom phenomena in the dreams of paraplegic patients and persons born without a limb. Integration of the available data allows the recommendation for prospective studies to consider dream content in more detail. For instance, ''adaptation" to the loss of a limb can also manifest itself by seeing oneself surrounded by amputees. Such projective types of anosognosia (''transitivism") in nocturnal dreams should also be experimentally induced in normally-limbed individuals, and some relevant techniques are mentioned. 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.


This special issue (SI) includes papers related to some recent efforts on geoid modeling in the Asia-Pacific region. In total, twelve papers were submitted to this SI, covering geoid models in Australia, mainland China, India, Indonesia, South Korea, Malaysia, Nepal, the Philippines, Taiwan and Thailand. The methods for geoid modeling are rather diversified, with different considerations in gravity data processing and terrain effects. It is suggested that a mechanism for gravity data sharing should be developed and software packages can be freely distributed to geoid modelers. Observed GNSS/leveling along a route over varying terrains across Taiwan are released for testing geoid modeling methods and for accuracy assessments.


A worst-case approach is adopted to tackle optimal channel equalization for multirate filterbank transceivers, which are widely used in data communication networks, such as discrete wavelet multitone (DWMT) systems in digital subscriber lines (DSL), orthogonal frequency multiplexing division (OFMD) in frequency division multiple access (FDMA) systems, applicable to direct-sequence/spread-spectrum (DS/SS) code division multiple access (CDMA) networks. It is assumed that the observation noise is nonwhite with bounded power-norm or root-mean-squared (RMS) value. Our objective is to design the optimal receiving filterbanks that not only achieve the zero-forcing (ZF) condition or channel equalization but also minimize the RMS error between the transmitted symbols and the received symbols in the presence of the worst-case nonwhite noise. All ZF receiving filterbanks will be parameterized, and optimal design for channel equalization will be converted into an equivalent optimal H/sub /spl infin// filtering problem for the augmented receiving filterbanks with RMS error preserved. Our main results cover computation of the optimal RMS error achievable for the worst-case noise and an explicit design algorithm for suboptimal channel equalizers with the performance index arbitrarily close to the optimal one. A simulation example is used to illustrate the proposed optimal channel equalization algorithm.


From a contemporary perspective on cognition, the between-persons variables in traitbased arguments in educational assessment are absurd over-simplifications. Yet, for a wide range of applications, they work. Rather than seeing such variables as independently-existing characteristics of people, we can view them as summaries of patterns in situated behaviors that could be understood at the finer grainsize of sociocognitive analyses. When done well, inference through coarser educational and psychological measurement models suits decisions and actions routinely encountered in school and work, yet is consistent with what we are learning about how people learn, act, and interact. An essential element of test validity is whether, in a given application, using a given model provides a sound basis for organizing observations and guiding actions in the situations for which it is intended. This presentation discusses the use of educational measurement models such as those of item response theory and cognitive diagnosis from the perspective of model-based reasoning, with a focus on validity.


Anthocyanins of Macedonian grape pomace from three varieties "Pinot noir", "Merlot" and "Vranec" were isolated by high speed countercurrent chromatography. After purification of the fractions by means of preparative high performance liquid chromatography the structures of isolated pigments were elucidated by electrospray ionization multiple mass spectrometry (ESI-MSn) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. The major anthocyanin malvidin-3-glucoside and the minor pigments delphinidin-3-glucoside, cyaniding-3-glucoside, petunidin-3-glucoside, and malvidin-3-p-coumarоyl-glucoside were isolated. The "Color activity concept" was applied and visual detection thresholds of isolated anthocyanins were determined. The results of the "color activity value" of the isolated pigments and their detection thresholds were in good agreement with the color shade of the different varieties of red grape pomace.


Webcomics 2.0: An Insider's Guide to Writing, Drawing, and Promoting Your Own Webcomics is your comprehensive guide to webcomics creation, from initial concept to publication, and everything in between. Beginning with a brief introduction to get you familiar with webcomics-a comic book or comic strip that can be found on the internet-you?ll learn about both the creative and the business aspects and come away with the information you need to write, draw, publish, and market your own webcomics. You?ll be introduced to three popular types-humor, adventure, and manga-that incorporate the most common features found in many webcomics. Each example includes a web address so you can view the actual webcomic online, to see how it progresses in real time. And throughout the book you?ll find tips and advice from experienced webcomic artists and writers. After you?ve seen the webcomics in action, you?ll go in-depth with both the written and illustrated elements of story creation, exploring different story structures and approaches as well as storyboarding techniques including drawing, coloring, and lettering. The next step is exploring the available types of online hosting services as well as the benefits of self-publishing versus collectives. You?ll also learn about a variety of low- and no-cost promotional ideas and how you can make money from your published webcomics. Whether you?ve dabbled in webcomic creation before or you?re a novice, Webcomics 2.0: An Insider's Guide to Writing, Drawing, and Promoting Your Own Webcomics will teach you everything you need to publish your very own webcomics.


Fault-tolerant frameworks provide highly available services by means of fault detection and fault recovery mechanisms. These frameworks need to meet different constraints related to the fault model strength, performance, and resource consumption. One of the factors that led to this work is the observation that current fault-tolerant frameworks are not always adapted to existing Internet services. In fact, most of the proposed frameworks are not transport-level- or session-level-aware, although the concerned services range from regular services like HTTP and FTP to more recent Internet services such as multimodal conferencing and voice over IP. In this work we give a comprehensive overview of fault tolerance concepts, approaches, and issues. We show how the redundancy of application servers can be invested to ensure efficient failover of Internet services when the legitimate processing server goes down.


In order to provide dynamic adaptation of the performance/energy tradeoff, systems today rely on heterogeneous multicore architectures (different micro-architectures on a chip). These systems are limited to single-ISA approaches to enable transparent migration between the different cores. To offer more tradeoff, we can integrate statically scheduled micro-architecture and use dynamic binary translation (DBT) for task migration. However, in a system where performance and energy consumption are a prime concern, the translation overhead has to be kept as low as possible. In this paper, we present Hybrid-DBT, an open-source, hardware accelerated DBT system targeting VLIW cores. Three different hardware accelerators have been designed to speed-up critical steps of the translation process. Experimental study shows that the accelerated steps are two orders of magnitude faster than their software equivalent. The impact on the total execution time of applications and the quality of generated binaries are also measured.


Silicon neurons designed using subthreshold analog-circuit techniques offer low power and compact area but are exponentially sensitive to threshold-voltage mismatch in transistors. The resulting heterogeneity in the neurons' responses, however, provides a diverse set of basis functions for smooth nonlinear function approximation. For low-order polynomials, neuron spiking thresholds ought to be distributed uniformly across the function's domain. This uniform distribution is difficult to achieve solely by sizing transistors to titrate mismatch. With too much mismatch, many neuron's thresholds fall outside the domain (i.e. they either always spike or remain silent). With too little mismatch, all their thresholds bunch up in the middle of the domain. Here, we present a silicon-neuron design methodology that minimizes overall area by optimizing transistor sizes in concert with a few locally-stored programmable bits to adjust each neuron's offset (and gain). We validated this methodology in a 28-nm mixed analog-digital CMOS process. Compared to relying on mismatch alone, augmentation with digital correction effectively reduced silicon area by 38%.


Universities have an important role in social education in many aspects. In terms of creating awareness and convincing public about social issues, universities take a leading position for public. The best way to provide public support for social education is to develop public communication campaigns. The aim of this study is to present a public communication model which will be guided in social education practices. The study titled "Importance of public communication campaigns and art activities in Social Education "is based on the following topics: Effects of public communication campaigns on social education, Public relations techniques for education, communication strategies, Steps of public relations campaigns in social education, making persuasive messages for public communication campaigns, developing artistic messages and organizing art activities in social education. In addition to these topics, media planning for social education, forming a team as campaign managers, dialogues with opinion leaders in education and preparing creative communication models for social education will be taken into consideration. This study also aims to criticize social education Case studies in Turkey. At the same time, some communicative methods and principles will be given in the light of communication campaigns within the context of this notice. Keywords—Art activities in social education, Persuasive communication, Public communication campaigns, Public relations techniques for education


Introduction There is currently limited information about bronchiectasis available to patients. We co-developed a novel patient and carer information resource, based on needs identified in previous work.1 The resource was evaluated in the BRIEF study with the following objectives:- 1. To establish the feasibility of carrying out a multi-centre randomised controlled trial (RCT) to determine effect on understanding, self-management and health outcomes. 2. To evaluate and refine the intervention. Methods This was a feasibility study with a single-centre RCT design, comparing use of the resource to usual care in bronchiectasis.2 Adults with bronchiectasis were recruited from respiratory clinics in the North of England. Those randomised to the intervention received the information resource (website www.bronchiectasis.me and booklet). Outcome measures (resource satisfaction, bronchiectasis knowledge, quality of life, unscheduled healthcare visits, exacerbation frequency, and lung function) were recorded at baseline, 2 weeks and 3 months. Feasibility outcomes included recruitment, retention and study form completion rates. A patient and carer focus group was held to discuss the intervention and the trial process. Results Recruitment rate was 50% of those assessed for eligibility (See Figure). Questionnaire completion rates were excellent with very few missing data. 24 participants were male and 38 female. Median age was 63 years (range 18–82). Participants reported using the information provided, and feedback was positive, particularly highlighting the usefulness of the video clips and self-management information. The most popular pages of the website included diet and lifestyle advice, advice for carers, and symptoms and prognosis. Focus group data reinforced users' positive experiences of the resource and the trial process. Full analysis is ongoing. Discussion and conclusions We have co-developed a multi-format, accessible information resource that could be made widely available outside of the specialist clinic setting. The BRIEF study suggests larger, definitive studies using interventions to improve understanding, compliance and self-management are warranted. Full results of the feasibility study are expected by December 2016. Abstract M15 Figure 1 References Hester KLM, Newton J, De Soyza A, et al. Living your life with bronchiectasis: an exploration of patients and carers information needs informing development of a novel information resource. Thorax 2015;70(suppl. 3):A178. Hester KLM, Newton J, Rapley T, et al. Evaluation of a novel information resource for patients with bronchiectasis: study protocol for a randomised controlled trial. Trials 2016;17:210.


BACKGROUND
A fiber-optic periodontal endoscope was developed to aid in the visualization of subgingival structures and to improve the diagnosis and management of periodontal diseases. The purpose of this study was to determine whether use of the periodontal endoscope with scaling and root planing (SRP) resulted in a decrease in residual calculus compared to SRP alone.

METHODS
Fifteen subjects with 50 tooth pairs participated in this study. Each tooth per pair was randomized to receive SRP with or without the endoscope. Teeth were extracted, and a stereomicroscope and digital image analysis was used to determine percent residual calculus present in a masked fashion.

RESULTS
There was 2.14% (P < 0.001) more residual calculus at control versus test sites. At buccal/lingual and interproximal surfaces, mean differences in residual calculus were 1.30% (P <0.015) and 2.93% (P < 0.001), respectively. Test treatment time decreased significantly as operator experience increased. There were no statistically significant differences between residual calculus for test and control teeth at shallower probing depths; however, at deeper probing depths, the use of the endoscope resulted in significantly less residual calculus.

CONCLUSIONS
The use of the periodontal endoscope resulted in a statistically significant overall improvement in calculus removal during SRP, which was most evident in deeper probing depths. The clinical significance of this level of improvement is unknown.


Measurements were made of energy-dependent quenching of atebrin fluorescence in membrane particles prepared from Escherichia coli grown anaerobically with glycerol as carbon source in the presence of either nitrate or fumarate. It is concluded that this technique can be used to study the functional organization of the anaerobic proton-translocating electron-transport chains that use nitrate or fumarate as terminal electron acceptor.


Objectives: To investigate the factors associated with snuff usage and its neurocognitive effects among women.
 Design: A cross sectional study encompassing a sample of 73 females with an average age range between 18 and 60 years was employed. Participants in this study came from three townships namely Masala having 28 (38.4%), Mushili with 25 (27.4%) and Kabushi with 20 (34.2%) and primary as their education level.
 Measures: Validated snuff questionnaire was used to determine the factors to snuff usage then Trail Making test and WAIS-III Symbol Search test were used to measure attention and working memory. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20 computer software was used to analyse quantitative data in order to generate simple descriptive statistics in form of frequencies and tables. An analysis of the correlation with Pearson analysis was conducted to find out the relationship between the frequency of snuff usage with attention and working memory among women.
 Results: From the Trail Making test administered, 62 (84 %) had deficits on attention and 56 (77%) had severe memory impairment according to WAIS III Symbol Search test. Concurrently, most women use snuff for physical (body weight loss /gain, sexual pleasure whitening of teeth, energy for ADL etc) and Pharmacology (Cure for headache, toothache, flu, regulate Bp, siphoning vagina fluid, boost immune system etc ) factors.
Conclusion: The analysis from this study showed a statistically significant relationship between frequency of snuff usage (1-10 times per day) with attention and working memory as snuff impairs both attention and memory. The more one uses snuff the more impairment in memory and attention. In addition, the study revealed social, pharmacology and physical as most factors leading to the use of snuff among women. It is hoped that the results of this study will open research prospects on women using snuff and policy makers to come up with intervention measures in order to arrest this mushrooming problem among women.


This research is devoted to focussing on the influence of different learning style on the performance of undergraduate students in various parts of calculus.
In carrying out the study, calculus materials were classified into four main categories (Z4,Z5,Z6,Cals) and, for the Iranian students, the results of their mathematical performance in the university entrance examination is labelled (En) to identify their grounding in high school mathematics at the beginning of the calculus course in higher education. Also, in the present study, students' performance (weakness) in the manipulation of mathematical notation and logical discussion is called (Z1) category and (Cal) indicates students' total achievement in calculus examination which is, in fact, the students' performance on the combination of the categories (Z4,Z5,Z6). These calculus categories are described in Chapter 5. However in short term, multi-conceptual and procedural tasks are classified as (Z4). The (Z5) category is defined as the translation processes between mathematical abstraction (analytic/symbolic) and (pictorial/visual) forms of calculus materials. Moreover, multi-skilled, transferable and procedural skills are labelled as (Z6) category. It should be noted that these categories are interrelated in a scheme to exhibit activities in calculus.

572 students participated in the experimental part of this study and were selected from two Iranian universities (Sabzvar University and Mashhad University) and Glasgow University in Scotland, U.K.

During the period of the study, the samples of students were subjected to some psychological tests in order to assign their Field-dependent/Field-independent and Convergent/Divergent learning styles.

It was found throughout the study that the most effective combination of learning styles which emerged from the interacting picture of all the psychological factors used in the research, were field-independent/convergent (F1+Con) in Iran, and field-independent/divergent (FI+Div) in Scotland in performing on the calculus. On the other hand, the combination of field-dependent and convergent styles (FD+Con) could lessen achievement in calculus by mathematics/physics students, and field-dependent and divergent styles (FD+Div) would lessen attainment in calculus by engineering students.

In addition, when the mean scores in calculus categories were calculated for various groups of students with different learning styles, the convergent thinkers (Con) were found to be best in (Z6), while divergent thinkers (Div) exhibited higher performance in (Z5). These findings demonstrate that the Con/Div way of thinking is the most effective in influencing performance in different areas of calculus, the FI/FD factor takes the second position. All these findings have been combined to form a model which emerges at the end of this thesis.

Moreover, in Chapters 3 and 4, a comparison is made between calculus in secondary (high school) and higher education in Iran and Scotland, focussing on content, teaching order, learning objectives and teaching methods.


Abstract Scholtzicoris linnavuorii, new genus and new species of Miridae, is described from Western Australia. This taxon is placed in the Phylinae: Semiini: Exocarpocorina on the basis of male and female genitalic structure and in the Melaleucoides group on the structure of the pretarsus. All known specimens were taken on the plant family Myrtaceae, most of those on the genus Scholtzia (tribe Chamelaucieae), with a lesser number of specimens taken on the genus Melaleuca (tribe Melaleuceae).


The paper will focus on the challenges of institutionalizing the new planning instrument – Integrated Urban Development Strategy (IUDS).1 It starts with a discussion on fostering innovations in urban governance, the impact of European urban development policies and the implementation of new planning instrument. Driven by demand for more effective and flexible planning, urban governance influenced the use of different instruments in practice. One of them is IUDS. The strategy development processes in three Serbian cities are the first examples of operationalization of the collaborative approach and IUDS in Serbia as the post socialist context which is adapting and adjusting to market oriented model. As such it holds endogenous character and meaning within the local planning practice. The key challenges of the strategy implementation are identified as understanding of the expected outcomes of its application and the existence of potential for change. With regards to the indicators of institutionalization of this new instrument, local planners have pointed out at the importance of providing further technical support, steps towards the implementation of the strategy, further capacity development, introduction of better communication as well as the establishment of relations. As a new instrument for urban development planning and supporting urban governance, the strategy has become the subject of analysis in the field of administration, professional and the academic community.


Objective: To introduce the calcitonin and methylprednisolone percutaneous intralesional injection method, which results in the promotion of primary aneurysmal bone cyst (ABC) healing.
Materials and methods: A retrospective cohort study involving 76 patients diagnosed with ABC was performed between 2005 and 2014. Patients treated with calcitonin and methylprednisolone injection and who underwent more than 2 years of follow-up were considered eligible for the study (n=47). The Enneking staging system and Capanna classification were used during the initial evaluation. Treatment response was assessed by Rastogi radiographic grading based on the degree of healing. X2 and Wilcoxon signed-rank tests and odds ratio calculations were used in the statistical analysis with a 5% significance level.
Results: The proximal tibia extremity was the most commonly affected site (17.0%). Thirty-three (70.3%) ABC cases were staged as B3 and 28 (59.7%) were classified as type II. The average number of injection performed was 2.8 per patient, with an average reduction of the initial lytic area of 83.7% (p-value=0.00001). Satisfactory results for 91.4% (n=43; p-value=0.00001) were obtained and 5 recurrences occurred. No side effects were observed.
Conclusion: Calcitonin and methylprednisolone percutaneous intralesional injection is a minimally invasive, effective, and safe method for promoting primary ABC healing.


Background Parental verbal communication may influence the sexual knowledge of senior secondary school students in Enugu State, Nigeria. Methods This study utilized a school based cross-sectional study design and was conducted across the six education zones of Enugu State using three-stage sampling technique. A total of 400 respondents completed the interviewer administered questionnaires on their socio-demographics, sexual knowledge and parents' information on verbal communication skills. Obtainable knowledge scores for sexuality ranged between 0–10; scores of 1–5 were classified as poor and 6–10 as good. Data analysis for the quantitative data was done using IBM SPSS; version 22. Chi square test of statistical significance and multivariate analysis using binary logistic regression were used in the analysis, and the level of significance was set at a p value of less than 0.05. Results Out of the 400 respondents, 55.5% were girls. The mean age (SD) of the respondents was 15.9 ± 1.3 years. Although 15.5% and 8.8% of the respondents were very comfortable discussing sexually related matters with their mothers and fathers only 34.8% and 16.0% of mothers and fathers were comfortable discussing such matters with the respondents. Less than half of the respondents (42.5%) had good sexual knowledge. Verbal sexual communication between parents and respondents and age above 16 years were found to be predictors of good sexual knowledge. Conclusions Poor parental verbal communication led to the poor knowledge of sexuality among the respondents. Parents should be encouraged to discuss sexuality matters with their children.


We have cloned the cellular sequence termed box DNA from the enhancer region of polyomavirus F9 mutant fPyF9. Box DNA functions as a negative transcriptional element (silencer) in undifferentiated F9 cells but not in differentiated L cells. Plasmid DNAs containing the origin and enhancer of polyomavirus were used to measure simultaneously transcriptional and replication activities in transfected cells. DNA replication activity was significantly reduced under conditions in which the silencer was able to reduce enhancer activity in F9 cells. On the other hand, when the silencer could not repress enhancer activity in MOP-8 cells, which are mouse NIH 3T3 cells producing polyomavirus T antigen constitutively, replication activity was still intact. The silencer itself had no effect on DNA replication or transcription in either type of cells. Furthermore, the insertion of a 6-base oligonucleotide within a consensus sequence of box DNA abolished the repressive effect of the silencer on DNA replication and enhancer activities. These results suggest that enhancer factors, interacting with silencer factors, may be closely associated with the mechanism of replication.


Background: Neurofibromatosis type 1 is an autosomal dominant neurocutaneous disorder in which the coexistence of autoimmune thyroiditis and thyroid gland tumours has been reported previously. Aims: To determine the thyroid function and autoimmune thyroid diseases in neurofibromatosis type 1 patients in order to identify the possible association between neurofibromatosis type 1 and thyroid diseases. Study Design: Case-control study. Methods: The study includes 78 consecutive patients diagnosed with neurofibromatosis type 1 between June 2010 and June 2014 and 50 healthy controls. Baseline demographic data were generated from patient examination record forms, including age, sex, height, and weight, as well as levels of free triiodothyronine, free thyroxine, thyroid-stimulating hormone, anti-thyroid peroxidase and anti-thyroglobulin levels. Results: Mean age, sex, and body mass index were similar in both groups (p>0.05). The mean levels of free triiodothyronine, free thyroxine, and thyroid-stimulating hormone were not statistically different between the neurofibromatosis type 1 and control groups. Similarly, no statistically significant difference was observed between the neurofibromatosis type 1 and control groups for anti-thyroid peroxidase and anti-thyroglobulin positivity (2.5% vs 0%, p>0.05). Conclusion: Screening for autoimmune thyroid disease and thyroid function seems to be unnecessary in patients with neurofibromatosis type 1.


This paper presents the development and illustration of a numerical model of reaction‐based geochemical and biochemical processes with mixed equilibrium and kinetic reactions. The objective is to provide a general paradigm for modeling reactive chemicals in batch systems, with expectations that it is applicable to reactive chemical transport problems. The unique aspects of the paradigm are to simultaneously (1) facilitate the segregation (isolation) of linearly independent kinetic reactions and thus enable the formulation and parameterization of individual rates one reaction by one reaction when linearly dependent kinetic reactions are absent, (2) enable the inclusion of virtually any type of equilibrium expressions and kinetic rates users want to specify, (3) reduce problem stiffness by eliminating all fast reactions from the set of ordinary differential equations governing the evolution of kinetic variables, (4) perform systematic operations to remove redundant fast reactions and irrelevant kinetic reactions, (5) systematically define chemical components and explicitly enforce mass conservation, (6) accomplish automation in decoupling fast reactions from slow reactions, and (7) increase the robustness of numerical integration of the governing equations with species switching schemes. None of the existing models to our knowledge has included these scopes simultaneously. This model (BIOGEOCHEM) is a general computer code to simulate biogeochemical processes in batch systems from a reaction‐based mechanistic standpoint, and is designed to be easily coupled with transport models. To make the model applicable to a wide range of problems, programmed reaction types include aqueous complexation, adsorption‐desorption, ion‐exchange, oxidation‐reduction, precipitation‐dissolution, acid‐base reactions, and microbial mediated reactions. In addition, user‐specified reaction types can be programmed into the model. Any reaction can be treated as fast/equilibrium or slow/kinetic reaction. An equilibrium reaction is modeled with an infinite rate governed by a mass action equilibrium equation or by a user‐specified algebraic equation. Programmed kinetic reaction rates include multiple Monod kinetics, nth order empirical, and elementary formulations. In addition, user‐specified rate formulations can be programmed into the model. No existing models to our knowledge offer these simultaneous features. Furthermore, most available reaction‐based models assume chemical components a priori so that reactions can be written in basic (canonical) forms and implicitly assume that fast equilibrium reactions occur only for homogeneous reactions. The decoupling of fast reactions from slow reactions lessens the stiffness typical of these systems. The explicit enforcement of mass conservation overcomes the mass conservation error due to numerical integration errors. The removal of redundant fast reactions alleviates the problem of singularity. The exclusion of irrelevant slow reactions eliminates the issue of exporting their problematic rate formulations/parameter estimations to different environment conditions. Taking the advantage of the nonuniqueness of components, a dynamic basis‐species switching strategy is employed to make the model numerically robust. Backward basis switching allows components to freely change in the simulation of the chemistry module, while being recovered for transport simulation. Three example problems were selected to demonstrate the versatility and robustness of the model.


Image sequence processing methods were applied to study the effect of elevated CO2 on the diel leaf growth cycle for the first time in a dicot plant. Growing leaves of Populus deltoides, in stands maintained under ambient and elevated CO2 for up to 4 years, showed a high degree of heterogeneity and pronounced diel variations of their relative growth rate (RGR) with maxima at dusk. At the beginning of the season, leaf growth did not differ between treatments. At the end of the season, final individual leaf area and total leaf biomass of the canopy was increased in elevated CO2. Increased final leaf area at elevated CO2 was achieved via a prolonged phase of leaf expansion activity and not via larger leaf size upon emergence. The fraction of leaves growing at 30–40% day−1 was increased by a factor of two in the elevated CO2 treatment. A transient minimum of leaf expansion developed during the late afternoon in leaves grown under elevated CO2 as the growing season progressed. During this minimum, leaves grown under elevated CO2 decreased their RGR to 50% of the ambient value. The transient growth minimum in the afternoon was correlated with a transient depletion of glucose (less than 50%) in the growing leaf in elevated CO2, suggesting diversion of glucose to starch or other carbohydrates, making this substrate temporarily unavailable for growth. Increased leaf growth was observed at the end of the night in elevated CO2. Net CO2 exchange and starch concentration of growing leaves was higher in elevated CO2. The extent to which the transient reduction in diel leaf growth might dampen the overall growth response of these trees to elevated CO2 is discussed.


Background: Lack of social support during and after miscarriage can greatly affect mental wellbeing. With miscarriages being a common experience, there remains a discrepancy in the social support received after a pregnancy is lost. Method: 42 people who had experienced at least one miscarriage took part in an Asynchronous Remote Community (ARC) study. The study involved 16 activities (discussions, creative tasks, and surveys) in two closed, secret Facebook groups over eight weeks. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse quantitative data, and content analysis was used for qualitative data. Results: There were two main miscarriage care networks, formal (health care providers) and informal (friends, family, work colleagues). The formal care network was the most trusted informational support source, while the informal care network was the main source of tangible support. However, often, participants' care networks were unable to provide sufficient informational, emotional, esteem, and network support. Peers who also had experienced miscarriage played a crucial role in addressing these gaps in social support. Technology use varied greatly, with smartphone use as the only common denominator. While there was a range of online support sources, participants tended to focus on only a few, and there was no single common preferred source.Discussion: We propose a Miscarriage Circle of Care Model (MCCM), with peer advisors playing a central role in improving communication channels and social support provision. We show how the MCCM can be used to identify gaps in service provision and opportunities where technology can be leveraged to fill those gaps.


This study explores the regulatory setting in Taiwan and examines the association between academic directors and corporate social responsibility (CSR) reporting. We find that firms with academic directors on their boards are more likely to issue standalone CSR reports and to obtain third-party assurance on such reports. We also demonstrate that an academic director's university prestige as well as industry expertise both have incremental positive effects on CSR reporting. Additional analysis further suggests that a firm's CSR reporting is better valued by the capital market when the firm has academic directors, consistent with academic directors strengthening investors' perceptions regarding the credibility of voluntarily disclosed CSR information. Our finding that the presence of academic directors can promote better CSR reporting indicates that academic directors contribute not only to shareholder value, but also to wider stakeholder interests.


The Mexican honey industry is composed by around of 40,000 honey producers with 2 million of beehives. It has been the result that Mexico is the fourth producer and exporter in the world. In the year 2004, Delicias had 14,115 beehives which produced 443.3 tons of honey with a value of 14.8 millions of Mexican pesos. The honey producers have been collected individually and rustic their honey. It has caused that intermediaries joint the honey and sell mainly to the United States marketing. A marketing research was conducted in which 150 questionnaires were applied to a same families, after this a data base was done by using the SPSS version12. 0. As a result, the regional market demand calculated by the year 2011 was 167,397 liters of honey. The bottle center was designed to monthly process 8,000 liters of honey with a capacity of 200 liters/hour. The project was evaluated and indicators were positive as indicated in the next table.


It is gratifying to the author that his paper has stimulated such interest, and he wishes to thank the discussers for their contributions. In reply to Professor Hutchinson, it is agreed that the summary plot of residual strength data presented as Fig. 10 of the original paper was not a complete 'state-of-the-art' picture, although, in retrospect, the phrasing of the summary would tend to suggest that it should have been. This (apparent) claim is a relic of the first draft of the paper, which as it evolved, had to be made shorter, and material not central to the case shear, is accepted. In the context of the original paper, however , the phrasing is correct, since the 'blue' London clay is generally so much more deeply buried than the 'brown', and is subject to much higher levels of effective stress. Dunbaven describes an interesting experiment. However, the author would like to point out that the 'weak layer' in the Herne Bay case is not the Oldhaven Beds, but a basal layer in the London Clay. Failure was in every case confined to the London Clay. This need not alter the general conclusions of the discusser, of course. At Herne Bay, the underlying Oldhaven Beds are stronger than the London Clay, and the shape of the field failure surfaces appear to be controlled to a large extent by the depth of the Oldhaven Beds/London Clay interface below sea level. It would be extremely interesting to see whether this effect could be


Several meta-analyses imply that rosiglitazone increases the risk of myocardial infarction. However, the studies included were small and not designed to study the effect on cardiovascular risk. The Rosiglitazone Evaluated for Cardiac Outcomes and Regulation of glycaemia in Diabetes study (RECORD) was specifically designed to assess the effect of rosiglitazone on cardiovascular outcomes. After a mean follow-up of 5.5 years, the study showed no increase in cardiovascular hospitalisation or cardiovascular mortality with rosiglitazone and either metformin or sulphonylurea versus metformin/sulphonylurea combination therapy. There was a non-significant increase in myocardial infarction with rosiglitazone, but this did not result in increased mortality rates. Moreover, the Bypass Angioplasty revascularisation Investigation 2 Diabetes study (BARI 2D) showed no increase in myocardial infarction or cardiovascular death in type 2 diabetic patients with coronary disease who received insulin-sensitising therapy including rosiglitazone. Therefore, rosiglitazone can be prescribed as long as the indications are followed and the patients concerned do not have heart failure or an increased risk for this.


In this paper, we propose WearVis, a generic framework for human-machine hybrid recognition based on wearable visual computing. The chief objective of WearViS is to help human complete the complex recognition task and let user flexibly interact with the visual assistant system. The framework process can be described in four steps. First, the behavior of human's attention drivers WearVis search region of interest. Second, WearVis selects the most abundant features in image sequence. Then, WearVis detects and localizes task-related interest objects. Finally, WearVis select the natural interaction strategy according to the priority of recognition task. We describe the goals and architecture of WearViS, a prototype implementation that validates its design.


LPCVD polysilicon films exhibit tensile or compressive residual stresses and stress gradients, depending on deposition temperature. The stresses, which are a result of an "intrinsic" growth eigenstrain, εg, produce undesired curvatures in released structures. A combined experimental/computational design procedure is presented for controlling the curvature of thin films comprised of tensile layers, deposited at 570◦C, alternated with compressive layers deposited at 615◦C. Experimental measurements are first used to calculate the through-the-thickness variation of εg for both temperatures. This information is in turn incorporated into a mechanical model that predicts, for prescribed parameters that define the geometry, elastic moduli, and eigenstrain distribution, the stress distribution before release, and the curvature upon release, of multilayered films. Comparisons of predicted and measured average stress before release of a number of films, and of the curvature upon release of a circular micromirror device, provide a preliminary assessment of the semi-empirical model, which when combined with optimization algorithms can be used to develop recipes (thicknesses of the individual layers of a multiplayer device) that will achieve prescribed curvature according to given constraints.


Synopsis of Authors' Case. —Woman, aged 22 years, seized with sudden pain in the left loin, radiating forward into the left hypochondrium; rigidity of lumbar muscles with tenderness in costovertebral angle; fever, rapid pulse; leukocytosis; in urine albumin, hyaline and granular casts, red blood-cells and pus-cells. Patient moderately septic; nephrectomy; kidney the seat of disseminated, suppurative nephritis. Patient made a good recovery although some weeks later it was necessary to remove the submaxillary gland for calculous inflammation. Pathological and clinical studies have caused the belief to prevail that acute hematogenous inflammation of the kidney is always bilateral. This is, however, not the case; but exceptions to the rule are so rare and so little understood that reports of single instances are not without value. Acute unilateral inflammations differ from the commoner types of acute nephritis in that they are of an interstitial character; rather inflammatory than degenerative, and


Leproma material from a female patient with a previous diagnosis of lepromatous leprosy underwent clinical, histopathological and electrone microscope studies. Following a year under rifampicin treatment it was found that the histic lesions corresponded to those described by Ridley (1974) within the clinical picture of regressive subpolar lepromatous leprosy. Electrone microscope studies of the cells composing the lesions were conducted; their ultrastructural appearance does not markedly differ from that reported for the polar form, but regarding the lack of acid phosphatase reaction for the giant multinucleated and vacuolated cells.


A runoff-sequence contains many frequencies, from the point of the wavelet transfor- mation, they are included in different wavelet coefficients. Therefore, when a smooth wavelet function is used, changes in multi-time scale and jump characteristics of precipitation time series have been probed the tendency. Wavelet transform can clearly demonstrate all kinds of characteristics of precipitation runoff series: the strength and distribution of time scales. The monthly data used in this paper comes from Guidei hydrology station of Yellow River (1919-1994) and Yichang hydrology station of Yangtze River (1946-1976), and the yearly ones from Yichang hydrology station (1882-1984).


Abstract The purpose of this article is to investigate how (dis)connection with place influences immigrant and refugee women's experiences of family violence in regional/remote and metropolitan southern Australia. We draw on research from the ASPIRE project (Analysing Safety and Place in Refugee Experience) in the states of Victoria and Tasmania. A participatory research approach was used to interview immigrant and refugee women who had experienced violence, and providers of family violence services from eight locations in the two states. Both inner urban, regional and remote locations were included in the study. The findings present new insight into how geographic isolation and the scarcity of specialized services affected the experiences of immigrant and refugee women in regional/remote areas. Across all settings, participants described experiences of social isolation associated with both distance from community networks and being ostracized or seeking to avoid the proximity of perpetrators and their social networks. Notably, the experiences of women living in regional Tasmania and regional Victoria shared more similarities than did those of immigrant and refugee women in regional Victoria and inner-urban Melbourne despite the different legislative environments in the two states.


This is an introduction to the Special Issue: 'Surgery and Embodiment: Carving out Subjects'. The collection of articles in the special issue demonstrates how surgery, as a set of discourses and practices, has become central to the mediation between body and psyche in cultural understandings and individual experiences of embodied subjectivity. This is achieved by examining, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, a range of historical and contemporary examples of surgical practice. The contributors share common concerns about embodied subjectivity, gender and sexuality, and the complex relationships between medical practice, normativity and consumerist pressures that are brought to bear on practices of body modification. We are concerned with how surgical processes are variously employed by individuals, as well as imposed upon them, in the attainment and negotiation of an embodied sense of self. Attentive also to the ways in which surgery produces and reinscribes bodies as normative and non-normative, the contributors seek to challenge the power of surgery to define the body by exploring alternative epistemologies, as well as providing possibilities for negotiating clinical practices in the construction
of self and subjectivity.


Catalysis is central to contemporary synthetic chemistry. There has been a recent recognition that the rates of photochemical reactions can be profoundly impacted by the use of Lewis acid catalysts and co-catalysts. Herein, we show that Brønsted acids can also modulate the reactivity of excited-state organic reactions. Brønsted acids dramatically increase the rate of Ru(bpy)32+-sensitized [2 + 2] photocycloadditions between C-cinnamoyl imidazoles and a range of electron-rich alkene reaction partners. A combination of experimental and computational studies supports a mechanism in which the Brønsted acid co-catalyst accelerates triplet energy transfer from the excited-state [Ru*(bpy)3]2+ chromophore to the Brønsted acid activated C-cinnamoyl imidazole. Computational evidence further suggests the importance of driving force as well as geometrical reorganization, in which the protonation of the imidazole decreases the reorganization penalty during the energy transfer event.


Assessment and management of risk constitute the subject of many researches. Nevertheless, many more specific factors are applicable during the implementation of innovative technological projects. On the article identified risk factors, which have been supplemented, systematized and assigned to the individual risk categories. The risk assessment methods for R&D projects have been analysed, as well as the risk sheets have been developed for the R&D project through the use of dotProject application. Also shown that networking and clustering is a change for fruitful cooperation within difference EU projects, which create trust between business and sciences and reduce the risk.


Abstract There are at least 3 different sources of data on births and/or deliveries in Poland, namely the National Health Fund, the Department of Screening Tests and Metabolic Diagnostics at the Institute of Mother and Child, and Statistics Poland (formerly the Central Statistical Office). Even though they contain complementary data, it is not possible to obtain comprehensive statistics based on any of the sources alone, while combining them is not obvious. Although this is possible for the first 2 sources – and only to a limited extent (as individual data are reported according to the mother's identifiers), the statistical data from Statistics Poland are available in aggregated form only. Moreover, even after combining the data from the National Health Fund and the Department of Screening Tests and Metabolic Diagnostics at the Institute of Mother and Child and, hence, the acquisition of more comprehensive information on mothers and their newborns, these newborns are still not uniquely identifiable as they lack personal identification numbers, e.g., the Polish national identification number (PESEL). As a result, the statistics prepared for this paper are based on the estimated number of delivered newborns. Also, the data are not without certain flaws and errors because they are reported ambiguously, while labour and delivery data are not available for every single birth.


Due to its richness in fossil localities and Fossil-Lagerstatten, France played a major role in the 18th and 19th centuries in establishing paleontology and biostratigraphy as scientific disciplines. The French naturalist and zoologist Cuvier (1769-1832) established the fields of comparative anatomy and paleontology, and proposed the concept of 'catastrophism' in geology. The naturalist Lamarck (1744-1829) is considered the founder of invertebrate paleontology and biostratigraphy and an early pioneer in the studies of evolution, developing the idea of 'transformism' and creating the word 'fossil', while his successor Blainville (1777-1850) was the first to use the word 'paleontology'. Based on this rich heritage, numerous French scientists strengthened paleontology as an important discipline during the 19th and 20th centuries. Paleontology was present at the universities of most major French cities, as documented by the rich collections in over 50 natural history museums and university collections. The most significant paleontological collection is that housed in the Museum National d'Histoire Naturelle (MNHN) at Paris that currently hosts the largest research unit in paleontology of France with over 100 scientists, curators and technicians. The second largest collection (and the largest in terms of invertebrate fossils) is housed at the University of Lyon1, where the most important university paleontology research team is present. About 250 professional paleontologists are currently working in research units that are mostly affiliated to the Centre National de Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), in public or private museums, or in the numerous natural parcs. A significant generation change took place in the early 2000s, with the retirement of the paleontologists recruited in the 1960s and 1970s, that were often specialized in alpha-taxonomy and stratigraphy, and the arrival of a young generation of scientists that attempts to answer more 'modern' questions, such as global (climate) change, biodiversity, or evolution. This new generation of paleontologists faces modified funding schemes with project-based supporting structures in a more and more competitive environment. In the present paper we attempt to summarize the current situation of paleontology as a discipline in the very complex academic and scientific context of France. After a short overview on the history of French paleontology in the last centuries, a synopsis on institutions and funding agencies is presented briefly. The major research departments and their research themes are then described, together with the most important collections, the paleontological associations, journals, and databases, etc. Paleontological training possibilities and job opportunities, in particular in academia, are next documented, concluding with a summary of the prospects of the discipline.


Noise from ground roll on common-shot records can be suppressed by the application of windowing in both
the time-offset (t-x) domain and the frequency-wavenumber (f-k) domain. The shot record is split into two regions by a reject window which isolates the ground roll and an accept window which selects the remaining data. The data in the reject region are filtered by suitable windowing in the f-k domain. The process is completed by summing the data from the two regions back together. Windowing noise in t-x prior to f-k filtering provides two distinct advantages when compared to filtering the whole record: only those data contaminated by the noise are filtered, and the f-k filter tends to perform better on the restricted data region. The improved performance, although dependent upon filter design and implementation, is due largely to increased zero-padding. Field data examples show improved character of the stack section when only the data in the reject windoware filtered. Ground roll, that propagates on a direct path from source to receivers, gives rise to noise which occupies a fan on seismic records. The reject region is defined to include this noise fan. Synthetic and field data show that event continuity is preserved across the boundary of this reject region after windowing the noise in both domains. Distortion from edge effects is reduced by prior windowing in t-x, because data outside the reject window are available during f-k filtering, while only filtered data inside the reject region are retained.


Background:
 Composite endpoints were used in the Carotid Revascularization Endarterectomy Versus Stenting Trial (CREST) and Stenting and Angioplasty with Protection in Patients at High Risk for Endarterectomy (SAPPHIRE) trials to compare outcomes between those who underwent carotid artery stent (CAS) placement and those who underwent carotid endarterectomy (CEA) for treatment of carotid artery disease (CAD). However, using composite endpoints assumes that each individual outcome is of equal clinical importance.

 Objective:
 To determine if there was a difference in effectiveness between CAS and CEA in treating CAD if weighted composite endpoints were used in the two randomized trials.

 Methods:
 Long-term results were examined for each trial (3 years for SAPPHIRE and 4 years for CREST). Each outcome was given a weighted measure based on a point system [death=5; major stroke=4; minor stroke=2; and myocardial infarction=1]. Study populations were amplified by using a constant coefficient (sum of all points=12). Results were then compared between the CAS and CEA groups to determine statistical significance.

 Results:
 At 3 years, there were a total of 56 and 67 adverse outcomes in the CAS and CEA groups, respectively, in the SAPPHIRE trial. At 4 years, there were a total of 215 and 190 adverse outcomes in the CAS and CEA groups, respectively, in the CREST trial. Based on weighted composite endpoints, the CAS group had a significantly lower rate of adverse outcomes compared to the CEA group in the SAPPHIRE trial (p<0.0001) but a significantly higher rate of adverse outcomes in the CREST trial (p<0.0001).

 Conclusion:
 With the use of weighted composite endpoints, one can provide more clinically relevant information by discriminating among adverse outcomes and describing differences with greater discriminatory power. Based on weighted composite endpoints, there is clear superiority of CAS over CEA in the SAPPHIRE trial, but the converse is true of results from the CREST trial.


Background Over 34 million people in the United States have diabetes, with 1.5 million diagnosed every year. Diabetes self-management education and support (DSMES) is a crucial component of treatment to delay or prevent complications. Rural communities face many unique challenges in accessing DSMES, including geographic barriers and availability of DSMES programs that are culturally adapted to rural context. Objective Boot Camp Translation (BCT) is an established approach to community-based participatory research used to translate complex clinical and scientific information into concepts, messages, and materials that are understandable, meaningful, and relevant to community members and patients. This study aimed to utilize BCT to adapt an existing DSMES program for delivery in rural primary care for English- and Spanish-speaking people with diabetes. Methods The High Plains Research Network (HPRN) Community Advisory Council (C.A.C.) partnered with researchers at the University of Colorado and University of Utah to use BCT to aid in translating medical jargon and materials from an existing DSMES program, called "Diabetes One Day (D1D)." BCT consisted of 10 virtual meetings over a 6-month period among the C.A.C., which included 15 diverse community stakeholders. Both English-speaking and bilingual Spanish-English–speaking C.A.C. members were recruited to reflect the diversity of the rural communities in which the adapted program would be delivered. Results The BCT process guided adaptations to D1D for use in rural settings (R-D1D). R-D1D adaptations reflect both content and delivery to assure that the intervention is appropriate and likely to be accepted by rural English- and Spanish-speaking people with diabetes. Additionally, BCT informed the design of recruitment and program materials and identification of recruitment venues. During the BCT process, the importance of tailoring materials to reflect culture differences in English- and Spanish-speaking patients was identified. Conclusions BCT was an effective strategy for academic researchers to partner with rural community members to adapt an existing DSMES intervention for delivery in rural areas to both English- and Spanish-speaking patients with diabetes. Through BCT, adaptations to recruitment materials and methods, program content and delivery, and supplemental materials were developed. The need to culturally adapt Spanish materials with input from stakeholders rather than simply translate materials into Spanish was highlighted. The importance of increasing awareness of the connection between diabetes and depression or diabetes distress, adaptations to include local foods, and the importance of the relationship between people with diabetes and their primary care practices were identified.


The clade (a.k.a. twig of the Tree of Life) that includes modern humans includes all of the extinct species that are judged, on the basis of their morphology or their genotype, to be more closely related to modern humans than to chimpanzees and bonobos. Taxic diversity with respect to the hominin clade refers to evidence that it included more than one species at any one time period in its evolutionary history. The minimum requirement is that a single ancestor-descendant sequence connects modern humans with the hypothetical common ancestor they share with chimpanzees and bonobos. Does the hominin clade include just modern human ancestors or does it also include non-ancestral species that are closely related to modern humans? It has been suggested there is evidence of taxic diversity within the hominin clade back to 4.5 million years ago, but how sound is that evidence?
 The main factor that would work to overestimate taxic diversity is the tendency for paleoanthropologists to recognize too many taxa among the site collections of hominin fossils. Factors that would work to systematically underestimate taxic diversity include the relative rarity of hominins within fossil faunas, the realities that many parts of the world where hominins could have been living are un- or under-sampled, and that during many periods of human evolutionary history, erosion rather than deposition predominated, thus reducing or eliminating the chance that animals alive during those times would be recorded in the fossil record. Finally, some of the most distinctive parts of an animal (e.g., pelage, vocal tract, scent glands) are not likely to be preserved in the hominin fossil record, which is dominated by fragments of teeth and jaws.


Minimally conjoined omphalopagus twins (MCOTs) has been recognized in the last decade as a special subgroup in which omphalopagus twins have union of peritoneal cavities through anterior lower abdominal wall defect with union of distal small intestine and patent urachal structures and associating anorectal malformation. A careful review of the current literature revealed that MCOTs have usually been separated in emergency situations within the first hours of life due to ruptured omphalocele, gastroschisis, stillbirth of one of the twins, intestinal obstruction, or requirement of enterostomy for cloacal anomaly. Pediatric surgeons should be familiar with MCOTs and ready for emergency separation with thorough knowledge of the anatomical relationships of the connecting structures and the embryologic basis for this anomaly. We present a new set of MCOTs separated in emergency conditions with a review of the relevant English literature. We give special emphasis to the common surgical characteristics and a brief discussion on the embryogenesis of this rare condition.


This article describes an automatic method applicable to the segmentation of mediastinum Computerized Axial Tomography (CAT) images with tumors, by means of Alternating Sequential Filters (ASFs) of Mathematical Morphology, and connected components extraction based on continuous topology concepts. Digital images can be related to topological space structures, and then general topology principles can be straightforwardly implemented. This method allows not only to accurately determine the area and external boundary of the segmented structures but also to obtain their precise location. Throughout these last years, technological development has significantly improved diagnostic imaging, enabling renal tumor and incidental hepatic tumor detection -usually small in size- in younger people and with an eventually lower malignant potential. This has led to a remarkable advance in interventionist techniques such as cryosurgery and radiofrequency ablation, preventing, in some cases, major surgeries, decreasing morbid-mortality rate, hospital stay and total treatment costs. Notwithstanding this, both cryosurgery and radiofrequency ablation, through extremely low and high temperatures, respectively, kill tumor as well as healthy cells, rendering crucial the identification of tumors with an extraordinary spatial accuracy.


Background Proper management of HIV treatment is important because of the complexity and speed with which knowledge changes, requiring the development of guidelines for antiretroviral therapy (ART), but also frequent updating of these guidelines. In Spain, the Society of Infectious Diseases annually produces a consensus document (GESIDA) for ART. Purpose The aim of this study was to evaluate adjustment to the recommendations of the GESIDA consensus document in Spain for the prescription of ART in naïve patients between January 2014 and March 2016. Material and methods This was a retrospective observational study. The medical records of all HIV naïve adult patients were reviewed. Epidemiological and laboratory data on viral load (blood VL) and CD4+ were retrieved from the clinical management programme. Therapeutic regimens at treatment initiation and clinical data were collected. A descriptive statistical analysis was performed. A central tendency was expressed, with median and minimum and maximum values. Results Between 2014 and March 2016, 28 patients were started on ART; 18 (85.7%) were men, mean age was 43.13 years (IQR 24–64), blood VL was 94 396 copies/mL (IQR 800–749 000) and CD4 was 384.5 cells/mm3 (IQR 11–850). The treatments described in the Guide were prescribed to 27 patients (96%). 7 (25%) received a preferred treatment to the Guide, 20 (71%) an alternative treatment described from the Guide and only 1 patient received a therapeutic regimen not described in the Guide for a justified reason. Conclusion The initial prescription for a naïve HIV patient during the period of this study was conducted in accordance with the recommendations from GESIDA. References and/or acknowledgements Spanish AIDS National Plan recommended guidelines, 2014, 2015, 2016. No conflict of interest


Lentiviral vectors have become an important and efficient molecular biology tool to integrate foreign DNA into target genomes. These vectors have been previously used in our laboratory to make cloned transgenic fetuses expressing short-hairpin RNAs (shRNAs) targeting the caprine prion mRNA (Golding et al. 2006 Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103, 5285-5290) and bovine myostatin mRNA. Specially designed shRNAs have a robust ability to decrease protein expression by initiating a mRNA destruction pathway or by translational inhibition. However, initial experiments targeting foot and mouth (FMDV) viral RNA have indicated that polymerase (Pol) II promoters may be unable to produce enough mature shRNA particles to significantly knock down viral replication in vitro. The goal of this research project was to identify and utilize bovine Pol III promoters to express shRNAs in lentiviral vectors and to express multiple unique shRNAs from a single lentiviral vector using different Pol III promoters. This goal is particularly important to the successful reduction of FMDV replication in a cell, as it limits random mutations from escaping the shRNA-mediated viral genome destruction. The 3 bovine Pol III promoters we selected were 7sk, U6-2, and H1. They were individually amplified from the same genomic DNA preparation. The promoters were inserted immediately upstream of our shRNA expression sequence, resulting in lentiviral vectors designated GT-b7sk, GT-bU6-2, and GT-bH1.To confirm that the promoters were functional, a luciferase reporter assay was performed in HEK 293T cells, where each vector expressed either a shRNA targeting luciferase (luc) or a non-specific shRNA.All promoters expressing luc shRNA resulted in significant reduction of luciferase activity between 68 and 80% compared with non-targeting controls. In addition, there was no significant difference between Pol III promoters when analyzing reduced luciferase activity. In the second phase of the study, we developed 7 unique combinations of 2 or 3 Pol III shRNA expression cassettes to test individual shRNA function with one shRNA designed to target luciferase and the others non-targeting. In multiple Pol III expression constructs, the U6-2 and 7sk promoters resulted in the greatest reduction of luciferase activity at 89 and 95%, respectively. In addition, luciferase activity was reduced to the greatest extent when the luc shRNA was expressed from the second (82%) or third (87%) Pol III cassette. Overall, bovine Pol III-based promoters are effective at expressing shRNAs from a lentiviral vector. In addition, multiple Pol III shRNA expression cassettes can be inserted into a single lentiviral vector and still achieve significant reduction of target protein. These vectors will be used to create transgenic cattle and pigs that express multiple shRNAs targeting the FMDV genome with hopes of creating animals that are resistant to FMDV.


This paper talks about the effect of thermal insulation shortages brought about by poor consistence with mechanical techniques and human blunder over their time of utilization adversely influencing vitality aggregation and reserve funds. The impact is thermal extensions and less vitality reserve funds than foreseen in the venture arrangement period of the warm protection. The "critical thinking" and "relative" procedures of this work are we are taking a gander at an answer in a structure right now. Taking a gander at the two cases (with and without warm protection), it investigates the impact of the utilization of warm encasings on the pace of vitality utilization. Right now, data is gathered through Data Collection Technique. Information assortment strategies are: talk with, survey, appraisal and assessment of information both quantitatively through estimation, and subjectively through information translation. The cases investigation of this examination, are two condos in Famagusta in North Cyprus.


Fly ash and limestone powder are common admixtures in environmentally friendly concrete production. This paper proposes an optimal design method for low-carbon concrete containing fly ash and limestone powder. This design method considers the influence of strength (30, 40, and 50 MPa) and carbonization service life (50 and 100 years). The genetic algorithm was utilized to determine the optimal global solution, which satisfies different constraints and can find the decisive factor of the concrete mixture design. The analytical results are as follows: When the carbonization service life is 50 years, for ordinary-strength concrete (30 MPa), carbonation durability is the decisive factor in the mixture design, while for medium-(40 MPa) and high-strength (50 MPa) concrete, strength is the decisive factor. When the carbonation service life is 100 years, for ordinary- (30 MPa) and medium-strength (40 MPa) concrete, carbonation durability is the decisive factor for the mixture design, while for high-strength (50 MPa) concrete, compressive strength is the decisive factor. Furthermore, the CO2 emissions, compressive strength, and water–binder ratio of the optimized concrete design results are in line with the actual project, which proves the effectiveness of the proposed method.


Abstract Tracking systems have been widely used to resolve the issues of product recall and food safety. Thus far, few researches have been done on designing the tracking capability from the perspective of supply chain. In this paper, using the traceable unit size at the manufacturer level to measure the tracking capability, we propose a non-convex non-linear programming to jointly optimise the tracking capability and price considering the tracking cost and recall cost in a supply chain with endogenous pricing. Results show that, in both centralised and decentralised supply chains, there is a unique tracking capability and retailing/wholesale price with closed-form solutions to optimise the supply chain profit. When the cost ratio (unit tracking cost/unit recall cost) is sufficiently large and small, the optimal tracking strategy is barcode tracking and unit tracking, respectively, and otherwise, the optimal tracking strategy is batch tracking with an economic traceable unit size which depends on the cost ratio, quality inspection threshold, supply defection rate and the supplier's tracking capability. Furthermore, in the context of large and small cost ratio, we find that improving tracking capability will enlarge and mitigate the effect of double marginalisation, respectively. In particular, we find that the strict tracking regulation policy is more robust than the subsidy policy to improve the supply chain tracking capability.


The present paper analyses the challenge to redistribution programs posed by an increase in skill premium. The increase in skill premium, which we observe in most OECD countries, affects taxation through its effect on education and migration incentives. We demonstrate that in countries with a relatively egalitarian wage distribution, the response to an increased gap in wages is likely to be increased redistributive taxation, whereas the response in countries with a more inegalitarian pre-tax income distribution, is likely to be a reduction in taxation and redistribution. JEL codes: F21, H2


Image and video compression exploits the redundancy of data to create a smaller representation. Lossy compression can be considered to be a type of transform coding where the raw data is transformed to a domain. Such a transform coding stores most of image energy into very few coefficients. In this paper we propose a compression algorithm based on Set Partitioning In Hierarchical Trees (SPIHT) that exploits the Human Visual System (HVS) and its fovea. In order to increase the image quality of the reconstructed image, regions of interest (ROI) are defined around a given point of gaze. The use of a fovea combined with ROI for image compression can help to improve the quality of the perception of the image and preserve different levels of detail around the ROI. In the proposed approach, the image is compressed using the Lifting Wavelet Transform and then quantized at multiple compression ratios around the point of fixation of an observer, taking advantage of the natural aliasing of the HVS around the fovea. Such a compression delivers better image or frame reconstruction when a fixation point of an observer is given. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.itc.42.4.3076


The use of all-transretinoic acid (ATRA) in APL is a great advance in the treatment of acute leukemia, driving the maturation steps until adult form. The effect of this medication in pregnant women with APL is being a safe and effective treatment only after the first trimester of pregnancy. If used in the first three months, it can cause fetus malformations due to its potent teratogenicity. The two patients we reported here, gave birth to normal children, yet they received ATRA. After a week with ATRA treatment, fibrinogen level improved and "D" dimers decreased, so as observed slowly maturation of leukemic leucocytes. ATRA used at the same time with chemotherapy; such as Cytarabine and Idarrubicine seems highly useful for induction and long term control of disease. One short discussion about the findings and compare with those found in the literature are presented.


Proportional-integral (PI) controllers are the most common form of feedback used in industrial applications today [1][3]. The use of proportional and integral feedback also has a long history of practical applications [4]. For example, in the middle of the 18th century, centrifugal governors as the proportional feedback were applied to regulate the speed of windmills [5]. By the 19th century, it was known that using integral feedback could remove the offsets appearing in working with governors [6]. At present, PI control, still a very basic form of feedback, is also one of the first solutions often considered in the control of industrial systems [7]. On the other hand, in some applications, using the PI controller in its traditional form may not be satisfactory, and a more advanced controller is needed to achieve control objectives. In such cases, modified versions of the PI controller have been proposed to enhance the controller's performance. The fractional-order PI controller is one of these modified versions, and it is attracting increased interest in control system design uses [8], [9]. The idea of using such a controller originated with fractional calculus, known as a generalization for classical calculus [10]. The following section presents a brief review of recent fractional calculus applications in control system design.


Seismic reservoir characterization focuses on the prediction of reservoir properties based on the available geophysical and petrophysical data. The inverse problem generally includes continuous properties, such as petrophysical and elastic attributes, and discrete properties, such as lithology/fluid classes. We have developed a joint probabilistic inversion methodology for the prediction of petrophysical and elastic properties and lithology/fluid classes that combined statistical rock physics and Bayesian seismic inversion. The elastic attributes depend on continuous petrophysical variables, such as porosity and clay content, and discrete lithology/fluid classes, through a nonlinear rock-physics relationship together. The seismic model relates the elastic attributes, such as velocities and density, to their seismic response (reflectivity, traveltime, and amplitudes). The advantage of our integrated approach is that the inversion method accounts for the uncertainty associated to each step of the modeling workflow. The lithology/ fluid classes are assigned by aMarkov random field prior model to capture vertical continuity and vertical sorting of the lithology/ fluid classes. Because rock and fluid properties are in general not Gaussian, a spatially coupled Gaussian mixture prior model based on the lithology/fluid classes is constructed. The forward geophysical operator includes a lithology-/fluid-dependent rock physics model and a linearized seismic model based on the convolution of the seismic wavelet with the reflectivity coefficient series. The solution of the inverse problem consists of the posterior distributions of petrophysical and elastic properties and lithology/ fluid classes. We proposed an efficient Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm to sample from the posterior models and assess the uncertainty. Our methodology is demonstrated on a seismic cross section from a survey in the Norwegian Sea, and it shows promising results consistent with well-log data measured at the well location as well as reliable prediction uncertainties.


Heparin and heparan sulfate glycosaminoglycans are long, linear polysaccharides that are made up of alternating dissacharide sequences of sulfated uronic acid and amino sugars. Unlike heparin, which is only found in mast cells, heparan sulfate is ubiquitously expressed on the cell surface and in the extracellular matrix of all animal cells. These negatively-charged glycans play essential roles in important cellular functions such as cell growth, adhesion, angiogenesis, and blood coagulation. These biomolecules are also involved in pathophysiological conditions such as pathogen infection and human disease. This review discusses past and current methods for targeting these complex biomolecules as a novel therapeutic strategy to treating disorders such as cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, and infection.


A novel wavelength locking scheme called acousto-optic frequency modulation (AOFM) is put forward and demonstrated experimentally. The laser frequency is modulated by an acousto-optic modulator, rather than direct dithering on the laser resonator. A new optical configuration is proposed to compensate the angular deflection of the acousto-optic modulator, which is driven by a Direct Digital Synthesis generator with a frequency stability and precision on the order of Hz. This locking scheme is relatively simple and economical, and it can avoid extra frequency and intensity noise due to the direct frequency dither on the laser resonator in the conventional saturation absorption locking scheme. Our scheme provides a new way to improve the noise and stability of the tunable laser.


If executives managing civil societies or even some government agencies in Third World countries that are involved in road safety agenda were asked to list one of their key challenges, the problem of shortage of funding to carry out their activities will certainly be in their top ten list. The challenge of funding is so real and at times appears to be one of the stumbling blocks towards achieving goals and targets these countries have made when making commitments to reduce road accidents through the Decade of Action for Road Safety and the Sustainable Development Goals. At best these commitments appear to be on papers and are not reflected in the budget documents. This in in turn invites the conclusion that road safety agenda in many (if not majority) of these countries largely depend on the good will and programmes generated and planned by international organisations and foreign donating agencies. Realising these challenges and as a result of being a small organisation incapable of attracting any substantial foreign donation, one local organisation in Tanzania, entitled the Road Safety Ambassadors of Tanzania (RSA) used somewhat a different route to attract funding for its activities through crowd funding. Through crowd funding, RSA was able to marshal sufficient funding from locals and well-wishers which was used to launch road safety campaigns in both offline and digital platforms. Through crowd funding strategies targeting well-wishers who were afflicted or affected by road accidents and their associated challenges, RSA was able not only to obtain funding but also to solicit active participation from those donors leading to a substantial growth of their membership base from 20 in 2015 when it was established to 60 000 in December, 2017. From this experience by RSA, one will realise that this model can easily be replicated in other countries. By encouraging crowd funding, road safety agenda was easily made part of the local agenda and is fast becoming an issue of discussion around the table of policy makers. Conclusively, from RSA experience, it can be argued that road safety agenda can easily be made a local agenda and can partly be financed through local resources.


The essay analyzes art. 13 of the Draft Constitutional Reform Bill (n.1429-B) currently being discussed in the Italian parliament - entitled «Provisions for the reform of perfect bicameralism, reduction of the number of parliamentarians, reduction of the costs for the functioning of the institutions, abolition of CNEL and review of Chapter V of Part II of the Italian Constitution. » Art. 13, in particular, modifies articles 3 and 134 of the Constitution by introducing a form of preventative constitutional review. This preventative review is limited to electoral laws for the two chambers (Camera and Senato) and is triggered by the request of a parliamentary minority. This form of review would be completely new to the Italian constitutional system. In its first part, the paper offers a general cost benefit analysis of the new provision. In its second part, it attempts an evaluation of its impact with regard to: the level of protection of electoral rights, the objective protection of constitutional legality, possible interferences with other constitutional bodies and the coherence of the Italian system of constitutional review.


Using damage mechanics, cyclic damage evolution has been described and evaluated in a non-crimped glass epoxy fabric composite. A fundamental fatigue study has been carried out by progressively monitoring the fatigue damage modulus and crack density throughout the life of an [0,+45,90,-45]2 (antisymmetric) laminate cycled at a stress ratio R (minimum stress/maximum stress) of 0.1. Development of damage can be separated into two main stages. Initially, damage increases very quickly during the first 10% of life (Stage I). Afterwhich, it increases more slowly at a relatively constant rate to failure (Stage II). The changes in the fatigue modulus and crack density both show the same behaviour. A large amount of damage in the form of transverse matrix cracks develops during the first cycle. These then remain constant throughout life. By contrast, the number of shear matrix cracks increase continually. The crack density is cycle, not stress dependent. This behaviour is reflected by changes in the fatigue modulus. Using damage mechanics, a representative equation has been applied to express the progressive evolution of damage. The significance of which is that the amount of fatigue damage at the end of Stage I for any stress level can be used to predict fatigue life and the stress-life diagram for the laminate.