Judicious structural design employing 2-quinolinecarboxaldehyde and 4-methylaniline was used to generate the Schiff base ligand (E)-4-methyl-N-((quinolin-2-yl)ethylidene)aniline (L). Five IIB complexes, namely, [ZnLCl2] (1), [ZnL(NO3)2] (2), [ZnL(OAc)2]3 (3), [CdL(OAc)2]3 (4), and [HgLCl2] (5) have been synthesized based on L. Single-crystal X-ray diffraction analysis indicates that complexes 1, 3 and 4 exhibit 3D networks, whereas 2 and 5 form 2D layers and 1D chains, respectively. TD-DFT calculations show a good correlation with the UV-vis absorption assigned to π → π* intraligand transitions. Furthermore, complexes 1-5 displayed strong greenish luminescent emissions (518-524 nm) in the aggregate state but weak emissions in solution (aggregation-induced emission enhancement), which may be due to the existence of C-HCl/O hydrogen bonding and ππ stacking interactions, resulting in restriction of intramolecular rotation (RIR). Variable-concentration 1H NMR studies suggested that the aggregates undergo intramolecular changes in conformation due to intermolecular interactions. Moreover, the emission intensity and lifetime exhibited obvious increases induced by mechanical grinding and temperature reduction, which were also attributed to AIEE properties. Subsequently, complex 1 was incorporated into poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA), whereby 1-PMMA exhibited enhanced emission intensity (20-fold increase in comparison with that of 1), which offers opportunities for use in plastic greenhouses to increase leaf photosynthesis.


Rhodobacter sphaeroides is chemotactic to glutamate and most other amino acids. In Escherichia coli, chemotaxis involves a membrane-bound sensor that either binds the amino acid directly or interacts with the binding protein loaded with the amino acid. In R. sphaeroides, chemotaxis is thought to require both the uptake and the metabolism of the amino acid. Glutamate is accumulated by the cells via a binding protein-dependent system. To determine the role of the binding protein and transport in glutamate taxis, mutants were created by Tn5 insertion mutagenesis and selected for growth in the presence of the toxic glutamine analogue gamma-glutamyl-hydrazide. One of the mutants, R. sphaeroides MJ7, was defective in glutamate uptake but showed wild-type levels of binding protein. The mutant showed no chemotactic response to glutamate. Both glutamate uptake and chemotaxis were recovered when the gltP gene, coding for the H(+)-linked glutamate carrier of E. coli, was expressed in R. sphaeroides MJ7. It is concluded that the chemotactic response to glutamate strictly requires uptake of glutamate, supporting the view that intracellular metabolism is needed for chemotaxis in R. sphaeroides.


The principles underlying a new method of refractometry of living cells are discussed. The method was evolved from the chance observation that the amoebocytes of the blood of the earthworm, examined in their own blood, appeared bright instead of dark by positive phase-contrast microscopy. This was shown to be due to the presence of dissolved haemoglobin which raised the refractive index of the medium above that of the cytoplasm. In order to determine the refractive index of the latter it was only necessary to dilute the blood until the cytoplasm became virtually invisible. Non-pigmented proteins and other high molecular weight substances have now been substituted for haemoglobin. The nature of the initial observations suggested that if the cell could be regarded to a first approximation as being composed entirely of proteins, the cytoplasmic protein concentration could be equated to the protein concentration of the immersion medium which made the cell appear with minimum contrast. This would only be true if equal concentrations of different proteins in solution had the same refractive index. The nature of refractive index and its relationship to density are discussed and it is shown that for nearly all unconjugated proteins so far investigated the specific refraction increments (i.e. the increase in refractive index per i per cent, increase in concentration) have almost the same values ( 'OoiSsiz per cent.). The effects of many factors such as pH, salts, temperature, wavelength, concentration, and nature of the solvent are discussed. Since living cells contain substances other than proteins the specific refraction increments of protein derivatives, lipides, carbohydrates, and salts are considered and it is shown that the presence of moderate amounts of such substances is unlikely to affect the refractive index of cells to any great extent. It is suggested that the mean specific refraction increment of protoplasm should be taken as •0018 and that this value can be used in order to calculate the solid and water content of protoplasm from values of refractive index.


Level set method is a boundary tracking method that uses an implicit function to define the boundary location. By using the implicit function to define the structural boundary the level set method can be used for topology optimisation. The level set method has previously been used to solve a range of structural optimisation problems. The aim of this thesis is to extend the application of the level set method to additional applications of structural optimisation. A robust method of 3D level set topology optimisation is developed and tested. The use of a hole insertion method was found to be advantageous, but not vital, for 3D level set topology optimisation. The level set method is used to optimise the internal structure of a proximal femur. Similarities between the optimal structure and real internal trabecular bone architecture suggest that the internal bone structure may be mechanically optimal. Stress constrained level set topology optimisation is performed in 2D. Stress shape sensitivities are derived and interpolated to obtain smooth boundary sensitivity, resulting in feasible stress constrained solution in numerical examples. A new generic objective hole insertion method is used to reduce dependence on the initial solution. A level set method for optimising the design of fibre angles in composite structures is also introduced. Fibre paths are implicitly defined using the level set function. Sensitivity analysis is used to update the level set function values and optimise the fibre path. The method implicitly ensures continuous fibre paths in the optimum solution, that could be manufactured using advanced fibre placement.


This article seeks to develop transformative social and emotional learning (SEL), a form of SEL intended to promote equity and excellence among children, young people, and adults. We focus on issues of race/ethnicity as a first step toward addressing the broader range of extant inequities. Transformative SEL is anchored in the notion of justice-oriented citizenship, and we discuss issues of culture, identity, agency, belonging, and engagement as relevant expressions of the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning 5 core competencies. We also point to programs and practices that hold promise for cultivating these competencies and the importance of adult professional development in making these efforts maximally effective for diverse children and youth. We conclude by offering a few next steps to further advance transformative SEL research and practice.


ABSTRACT Greipsson, S., 2022. Spatiotemporal patterns of Leymus arenarius nebkhas during early primary succession on the subArctic coastal sand plains of Iceland. Journal of Coastal Research, 38(2), 269–278. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. A spatiotemporal analysis of phytogenic mounds (nebkhas) of the pioneer dune building grass Leymus arenarius was assessed during primary succession on three coastal sand plains in Iceland. Extensive sand plains were formed on the study sites due to catastrophic glacial river floods associated with sub-glacial volcanic activities. Present and past spatial patterns of Leymus-nebkhas were examined by the use of satellite images and high resolution aerial photographs and confirmation through field work. The colonization patterns of the nebkhas were studied from the initial phases and up to a maximum period of 54 years on the sand plains Skeidararsandur, Myrdalssandur, and Skogarsandur. The hypothesis was that nebkhas would be clustered and nonrandom in early phases of the primary succession but would have random configurations at later stages. Average density of nebkhas was low within 10 years of colonization on Skeidararsandur (0.55–0.67 dunes ha–1) and the spatial configuration was found to be highly nonrandom (clumped). Following the initial colonization of L. arenarius, the increase of nebkha density with time followed a similar nonrandom pattern on Myrdalssandur with final average density of 6.12 nebkha ha–1. On Skogarsandur, the spatial configuration of nebkhas was random with final average density of 7.08 nebkha ha–1. Nonlinear cubic polynomial regression analysis showed a very strong relationship (R2 = 0.989) for the average density of nebkha for 60 years on Skogarsandur. On the coastal sand plains, the spatial configuration of nebkha was observed to progress with time from nonrandom towards random distribution. This study supports the view of deterministic spatiotemporal pattern of nebkhas during early primary succession on the coastal sand plains. The nebkha density was most likely a function of sand drift on the plains, significantly decreasing (R2 = 0.93) away from the sand source of the glacier river Jökulsa on Skogarsandur. The results are discussed in relation to ecological restoration.


This paper examines the empirical effect of corporate Income tax on GDP growth rate using historical data from 1951-2010 for Sweden. Economic theory postulates that corporate tax rates should significantly negatively affect GPD growth rate. Some past empirical works on cross-country panel data also supports this significantly negative correlation between growth rate and corporate tax. However, empirical works using country specific time-series data show deviations and contradictions to this conventional wisdom. Using time series data, I find that corporate income tax rates have no significant effect on Swedish economic growth.


ABSTRACTBoric acid is a weak inorganic acid type which is generally being used in glass, ceramics, detergents, agriculture, nuclear energy, and medicine fields, which has white crystal color and which can easily dissolve in water. Boric acid is being produced from colemanite which is a boron mineral having wide reserves in Turkey. In recent years, intense studies have been performed on the alternative usage areas of boric acid in Turkey. In this study, boric acid was used as a leaching reagent for the demineralization of coal with high ash content. For the accurate determination of the success of boric acid in dissolving mineral matter, first a series of leaching tests were performed with boric acid, and then studies for removing mineral matter with strong acids such as hydrofluoric acid (HF), HCl, and H2SO4 were performed.


Preparation of gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) by pulsed fiber laser (PFL) laser generated nanomaterial (LGN) with the use of 2D galvo-scanner (2D GS) is described. The procedure of covering of custom-made stainless steel MALDI targets containing studied objects via nebulization is also presented. Examples of application of new method (PFL-2D GS LGN and nebulization) in laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (LDI MS) analyses are shown. These include tests with amino acids and also low molecular weight polymer.


This paper focus on hardware representation and implementation of graph algorithms in Reconfigurable Hardware (FPGAs) to speeding up the execution. Generally, Software implementations of graph algorithms in high level languages such as C or C++ are lack of speed and efficiency, although they are flexible and cost effective. Moreover, since FPGA is used to implement the algorithms, it can be modify and programmed to the desired application or functionality requirements. Three candidate graph algorithms have been selected for this purpose and their dynamic graph representation, modeling and simulation in VHDL using Cadence and Xilinx design tools have been presented.


The use of rigid overlays has become increasingly popular. The main purpose of an overlay is to extend the service life of the structure and increase the structural performance and durability of a wearing surface. The superior ductility and durability characteristics of engineered cementitious composites (ECC) suggest that they could be used as an attractive alternative to conventional concrete overlay materials. In this study, the performance of ECC overlay designed at different thicknesses is investigated by laboratory experiments. Micro-silica concrete (MSC), generally used as an overlay material, is also prepared as a control mixture. The test results show that, for the same geometry and loading conditions, layered ECC beams have significantly increased both load-carrying capacity and deformability, and show better crack width control in comparison with MSC composite beams. As the overlay material, ECC is also found to be effective in eliminating the reflective cracking and delamination failure in rep...


This paper describes one of projects undertaken at Ryerson Polytechnic University to integrate emerging trends in control engineering into the undergraduate curriculum. An intelligent control scheme based on fuzzy-logic, and developed for an experimental setup, is discussed. The process is a highly coupled 8th-order, multi-input multi-output, 3 degrees-of-freedom simulator of a helicopter. Currently the setup is used to develop control strategies for undergraduate thesis students. Eventually, the process will also be accessible to students remotely over the World Wide Web. The controller performance with the fuzzy-logic control (FLC) is benchmarked against that of a conventional controller. The simulations show that the system performance under FLC does not deteriorate away from the equilibrium point and remains comparable with, or superior to, the performance under the linear control, over the whole range of operating conditions of this setup.


An experiment examined performance on a speeded comparison verification task with accelerated speech (spearcons), visual text, and auditory tones (sonifications). ParticipantsÕ task was to encode the state (increasing or decreasing) of a stock depicted in the first (study) stimulus for comparison with the state depicted in the second (verification) stimulus. We also instructed participants to remember the study stimulus according to a prescribed encoding strategyÑeither as words (a verbal working memory processing code) or tones (a tonal, auditory imagery working memory processing code). Results generally offered evidence that the accelerated speech stimuli assumed the same verbal working memory code as the visual text stimuli. Interestingly, however, both speech and tones also exhibited lingering, stimulus-specific perceptual effects during verification despite recoding in working memory. Results are discussed in terms of auditory imagery in working memory, and the relevance of results to auditory interface design is discussed.


This comprehensive volume explores the relationship between sex and the fantastic in science fiction and fantasy literature. More than a dozen scholars have contributed essays in which they discuss almost two hundred novels, short stories, tales, plays, poems, myths, and nearly one hundred authors--from Aldiss to Zelazny. The collection is divided into three main sections, the first of which is devoted to the theoretical analysis of the relationship between sexuality and the fantastic. This section contains essays on sexuality and the allure of fantasy, and sexuality and knowledge in science fiction. The second section turns to thematic analyses and includes essays that explore such themes as sexuality and death, forbidden sexuality, sexual attitudes and the search for ethics in contemporary culture, sex and technology, sexual encounters with aliens, sexuality and comedy, and homosexuality in fantasy and science fiction. The third section, devoted to feminist views of sexuality in fantastic literature, includes several studies of the depiction of sexuality in the works of female fantasists, and focuses most closely on Russ, Piercy, LeGuin, and Carter. Examined here is the potential use of science fiction as a vehicle for theorizing about women and for questioning their condition in society. The volume also includes an introductory overview and critical commentary on the literature and a comprehensive, contributor-compiled bibliography of primary works and scholarship on sexuality and related issues in fantastic literature.


ABSTRACT This article targets action formation in multimodal sequences. It shows how nonpolar interrogatives in Estonian are used for noticing breaches in others' embodied conduct, focusing on kes ("who")-interrogatives. In contrast to information questions with kes, a "noticing of a breach" does not seek an informative answer, which would be an identification of the grammatical actor of the action depicted in the interrogative. The actor is instead the addressee of the turn, often called by name, and thus clear to everyone present. These "rhetorical" kes-interrogatives formulate a just-observed conduct as problematic, and attribute responsibility for it. Since they call for either a remedy of the (embodied) conduct or a contesting of the blame as the next action, noticing breaches marginally qualify as directive actions. At the same time, they do not explicitly provide any guidelines for the future. The study argues that to determine function in language, it is necessary to study grammatical structures in their temporally emerging and embodied activity contexts. The data are Estonian with English translation.


Based on the assumption of thin plate of elastic foundation and vibration theory, a method for calculating the fundamental natural frequency of cement slab is presented and the influence of slab dimension and foundation reaction modulus on the fundamental natural frequency of cement slab is discussed. As well, according to the analysis results of fundamental natural frequencies of typical cement pavements of China, the selected proposals of the excitation frequency of the resonant rubblization machine are presented. The research results provide a theory support to popularize resonant rubblization technology in overlaying and rebuilding engineering of the existed cement pavements in China.


Until the beginning of the last decade, the Internet was primarily used by
scientific, educational, and military organisations for the exchange of
information such as data files and electronic mail. The introduction of the
easy-to-use hypertext system World Wide Web (WWW) has, however, begun a new
era of the world-spanning computer network.

In this paper we examine a part of the Information Marketplace (Dertouzos,
1997) that will give users of the WWW a wide range of new possibilities for
gathering information, a task that is predominantly carried out using
index-based (e.g., www.google.com, www.metacrawler.com) or catalogue-based
search engines like www.yahoo.com, for example. One of the major shortcomings
of search engines is the lack of semantic certainty that results from both the
absence of structure in the indexed documents as well as insufficient methods
of information extraction and information retrieval regarding a generalized
conceptual level (vs. the statistics-based word level that is still the most
common method in search engine technology). For this reason, the user of a
search engine is very often confronted with lots of documents that are
beyond the scope of his or her search query.

The aforementioned lack of explicit structure in web documents will be
overcome in the next few years by an augmented use of XML (Extensible Markup
Language, Bray et al., 1998) and a simultaneous turning away from HTML
(Hypertext Markup Language, Raggett et al., 1997) that only allows an
annotation of rather coarse textual elements. However, this new structural
variety and liberty of XML bears certain dangers: As XML allows a free
definition of concrete markup languages like HTML, a lot of proprietary
XML-based annotation schemata could emerge that, in turn, make the process
of automatic information extraction by search engines not easier but even
more difficult, as a large part of the Internet's and especially the World
Wide Web's success is based on the standardization of concrete markup
languages.

In this paper, we outline a possible development that may counteract this XML
babel. The main impetus for our prognosis is a paradigm in software development
which has been successful for almost 20 years now. This paradigm, called
Open Source (DiBona et al., 1999; Raymond, 1999), made possible, among other
software packages, the free operating system Linux. The impetus behind Open
Source will give new and decisive impulses for the use of quasi standardized
XML-based markup languages and concrete schemata for related standards. These
impulses will result in what we want to call Open Information.


Regardless of who wins the Nobel Peace Prize tomorrow, the controversy over a previous recipient should prompt revision of the award's future selection criteria. As the atrocity crimes perpetrated by the Myanmar military against the Rohingya escalate (possibly amounting to genocide), so too does criticism of the country's state counsellor and de facto leader, 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi. And rightfully so. She is inflaming anti-Rohingya sentiment and blaming "terrorists" for "misinformation" about the crisis, and the government she leads is refusing to grant visas to members of a United Nations probe investigating the horrific violence and preventing international organizations from delivering vital aid.
A growing chorus, including an online petition with over 425,000 signatures, is now calling for Aung San Suu Kyi's Nobel Peace Prize or other recognitions — such as honorary Canadian citizenship, "Freedom of the City" awards from Dublin and Oxford, and a distinction from Harvard — to be stripped. The problem isn't just that Aung San Suu Kyi's recent conduct makes her undeserving of the Nobel Peace Prize, but that the imprimatur of the Nobel on Aung San Suu Kyi may have made the Rohingya crisis worse. For too many and for too long, the award has cloaked Aung San Suu Kyi's deplorable actions in presumed benevolence and credibility.
The Norwegian Nobel Institute has stated that it has no authority or procedure to revoke a Nobel Peace Prize. But even if it is unable or unwilling to respond to the criticism of Aung San Suu Kyi specifically, the institute should revise its regulations going forward. Since 1974, the Nobel Foundation's statutes have stipulated that a Nobel Prize cannot be awarded posthumously, unless the awardee died after being announced as the winner. To protect its integrity, the Peace Prize should instead now be awarded only posthumously.


The level of a bank's capitalization can effectively transmit information about its riskiness and therefore support market discipline, but asymmetry information may induce exaggerated or distortionary behavior: banks may vie with one another to signal confidence in their prospects by keeping capitalization low, and banks' creditors often cannot distinguish among them - tendencies that can be seen across banks and across time. Prudential policy is warranted to help offset these tendencies.


Purpose:The goal of this project is to document the epidemiological characteristics of chronic dacryocystitis cases assisted in a public hospital. Methods: This is a retrospective study of medical records of patients who developed chronic dacryocystitis assisted in the period of january 12 th , 2009 to june 9 th , 2010 .The patients were ophthalmologist evaluated: ocular inspection, biomicroscopy, Milder Test, Test of Jones I and II. Results: The gender with chronic dacryocystitis belonged to 55 years. There were 73 % female and 27 % male.The unilateral involvement occurred in 95% of the cases and only 5 % were bilateral. In this work, the side of this pathology was on the right in 45% and on the left in 55%. Negroid races have a lower rate of illness than caucasians.Regarding the chronic dacryocystitis ethiology, there was a predominance of the idiopathic in 95% of the cases and only 5% of trauma. Conclusion: The dacryocystitis is more frequent in women, rare in blacks and presents hereditary predisposition, increasing the incidence from the 6th decade


Manuscript Type. Empirical. Research Question/Issue. A contentious and prominent research question in the management literature is whether publicly listed family firms (FFs) outperform other types of corporations. Through a research synthesis of all available studies on the performance of US FFs, we address this question directly. We also extend the debate by raising three salient follow‐up questions. First, is the performance differential between FFs and non‐FFs attributable to a unique set of strategic choices? Second, do FF performance effects persist across generational transitions in FF control? Third, are performance differentials across generations attributable to intergenerational shifts in corporate governance and strategy?Research Findings/Insights. With respect to our primary research question, we find that the balance of evidence indicates that (US) FFs outperform other types of public corporations. We also evaluate competing narratives regarding which strategies are characteristic of FFs, and demonstrate that their diversification, internationalization, and financing strategies mediate the FF‐performance relationship in manners consistent with the narratives advanced by certain leading FF scholars, but not others. Further, we find that the performance of (US) FFs drops dramatically after the first generation and show that this negative performance differential is due to the much more conservative patterns of strategic decision making enacted by successor generations. Theoretical/Academic Implications. In addition to providing the most comprehensive evidence to date regarding the performance attributes of FFs, we nuance several theoretical debates concerning the propensity of FFs to diversify, internationalize, and leverage their equity capital. Practitioner/Policy Implications. We identify value‐creating strategic choices of FFs related to internationalization, diversification, and capital structure. We also identify strategic choices often made in successor‐led FFs which reduce value. Both sets of findings are relevant to FF executives and consultants. The policy implications of the study are that in advanced liberal market economies high‐quality capital market institutions are likely to contribute to FF outperformance vis‐a‐vis other types of publicly listed firms, but these findings may not hold in other types of national governance systems or in emerging markets.


This Essay, an adaptation of my 2018 Donahue Lecture, argues that acts of police violence and overreach should be viewed as systems failures. Researchers who study error in aviation, medicine, and other complex organizations agree that errors are the product of human failings and poorly designed systems. When tragedies occur, human error almost always plays a role — people misperceive information, process it incorrectly, make careless mistakes, and sometimes act recklessly or maliciously. But faulty systems also play a role — technologies can be confusing, rigorous schedules can fatigue workers, organizational culture can stifle productive communication, and policies can put workers in situations where they have to make difficult decisions under conditions of high stress. A key insight of this body of research is that it is impossible to cure limitations of human perception, cognition, and decisionmaking. Instead of focusing exclusively on training people to change their behavior — and threatening them with criminal, civil, or department sanctions if they fail to do so — the systems approach adjusts equipment, schedules, protocols, and policies in ways that can make it harder for people to err and can reduce the impact of error when it inevitably occurs.

A focus on systems contributors to error has been used for decades to improve the safety of aviation, nuclear power, and other complex industries. Over the past thirty or so years, medicine has adopted some of aviation's strategies. It is time for law enforcement to embrace a systems approach. When a person is shot by the police we must still examine whether the shooting was justified, and officers should continue to be disciplined, sued, and prosecuted when they violate department policy or the law. But then conversation must turn to whether the shooting was preventable, and the ways in which technology, schedules, protocols, and policies could be adjusted to prevent another shooting in the future. The shift in perspective will likely be harder in policing than it has been in medicine or aviation, but is necessary if we want to make policing safer.


The modification of a general purpose code for quantum mechanical calculations of molecular properties (Q-Chem) to use a graphical processing unit (GPU) is reported. A 4.3x speedup of the resolution-of-the-identity second-order Møller-Plesset perturbation theory (RI-MP2) execution time is observed in single point energy calculations of linear alkanes. The code modification is accomplished using the compute unified basic linear algebra subprograms (CUBLAS) library for an NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 graphics card. Furthermore, speedups of other matrix algebra based electronic structure calculations are anticipated as a result of using a similar approach.


Centrifuges used to enrich uranium utilize an electric motor to spin the rotors to high speeds. The current flowing in these motors emits electromagnetic radiation. This article presents a model that estimates the strength of the radiation as a function of distance from the centrifuge plant. It discusses the dependence of the radiative power on the size of the plant, the noise sources at the frequencies at which the motors operate, and means of detecting the signal from a centrifuge enrichment facility. According to the findings, a plant running 1,000 P-2 type centrifuges emits electromagnetic radiation that should be detectable in a 0.5–3 kilometer range in the absence of shielding.


An explanation is presented which covers most of the experimental data about the mechanisms by which the periodicity of microfilariae is maintained: During the night-time (with Wuchereria bancrofti and similar filariae) the microfilariae are evenly distributed throughout the blood and they are thus available for ingestion and transmission by mosquitoes. During the day-time they accumulate in the small vessels of the lungs, and hence they are few in the peripheral blood; this phase is probably adapted to allow the microfilariae to enjoy favourable physiological conditions in the lungs. The accumulation is due to an active reflex by the microfilariae themselves; and it probably depends on a sideways migration through the precapillary network of arterioles. The factor in the lungs which holds up the passage of the microfilariae so that they accumulate there (in preference to the capillaries of other organs), is the great increase in oxygen tension, which may be termed the 'oxygen barrier'. The 24 h cycle of the microfilariae is orientated to the 24 h cycle of the host; and some rhythmic change in the host acts as a cue to the microfilariae. Each microfilaria has a weak endogenous circadian rhythm of its own, but the rhythms of the individual microfilariae are dominated by that of the host, so that all the different individuals do approximately the same thing at the same time, and they do it at the right time (i.e. right for transmission). Different species of microfilariae respond differently to the same stimuli, and they depend on different arrangements for the maintenance of their rhythms. Three main groups of periodic microfilariae may be recognized. (а) W. bancrofti, Brugia malayi, etc. These depend upon the absolute size of the venousarterial (VA) difference in oxygen tension ('oxygen barrier') which is lower by night (e.g. 40 mmHg) than it is by day (e.g. 55 mmHg) and so the microfilariae pass through the lungs by night but accumulate there by day. If at night the patient is caused to breathe oxygen, the arterial oxygen rises; or if he is caused to take vigorous muscular exercise, the venous oxygen tension falls; in both cases the VA difference becomes greater and the microfilariae accumulate in the lungs. (b) Loa loa of man, Edesonfilaria malayensis of monkeys in Thailand and Monnigofilaria setariosa of East African mongooses. In this group the sensitivity of the microfilariae to the oxygen barrier is greatly increased or decreased by the 24 h changes in the body temperature of the host. Accordingly, the cycle of microfilariae of this group indirectly depends upon the temperature cycle of the host. (c) Dirofilaria immitis, D. repens of dogs, D. aethiops (corynodes) of monkeys, etc. These microfilariae are probably sensitive only to the lower range of oxygen tensions, e.g. 30 to 60 mmHg. On the whole their cycle depends on day-night changes in the oxygen barrier as with W. bancrofti, but under special circumstances (as explained in the text) administration of oxygen may cause liberation of microfilariae from the lung instead of accumulation. The mechanism controlling the Pacific type of W. bancrofti cannot yet be identified, since the experimental evidence is insufficient. The behaviour of microfilariae is adapted to promote transmission by arranging the maximum number of microfilariae in the peripheral blood at times when the arthropod vector is likely to bite. The most sophisticated arrangement to achieve this is by a 24 h rhythm—the classical 'periodicity'. A less sophisticated arrangement is illustrated by various filariae of rodents, e.g. Litomosoides carinii and Dipetalonema witei, in which the parasites are transmitted by mites or ticks which suck blood in the nest or burrow, and the microfilariae are stimulated to swarm in the peripheral blood by a fall in body temperature when the animal sits quietly in its nest. Filariae which are still less sophisticated, e.g. Acanthocheilonema perstans and Dipetalonema gracile, do not possess any arrangements for adjusting the supply of microfilariae in the peripheral blood to the feeding habits of the vectors. Furthermore, some microfilariae, e.g. those of D. immitis and D. repens, are adjusted to their vectors on an annual variation as well as on a 24 h one and they are most numerous in the blood during July and August (when mosquitoes are most numerous in temperate zones). Some hosts (e.g. dogs) have a less marked 24 h rhythm than other hosts (e.g. man and monkey) and the cycles of their microfilariae are similarly less marked.


We used fura-2 video imaging to characterize two Ca2+ influx pathways in mouse thymocytes. Most thymocytes (77%) superfused with hypoosmotic media (60% of isoosmotic) exhibited a sharp, transient rise in the concentration of intracellular free Ca2+ ([Ca2+]i). After a delay of approximately 70 s, these swelling-activated [Ca2+]i (SWAC) transients reached approximately 650 nM from resting levels of approximately 100 nM and declined from a time constant of 20 s. Peak [Ca2+]i during transients correlated with maximum volume during swelling. Regulatory volume decrease (RVD) was enhanced in thymocytes exhibiting SWAC transients. Three lines of evidence indicate that Ca2+ influx, and not the release of Ca2+ from intracellular stores, underlies SWAC transients in thymocytes. First, thymocytes swollen in Ca2+-free media failed to respond. Second, Gd3+ and La3+ inhibited SWAC influx with Kd's of 3.8 and 2.4 microM, respectively. Finally, the depletion of Ca2+ stores with thapsigargin (TG) before swelling did not inhibit the generation, nor decrease the amplitude, of SWAC transients. Cell phenotyping demonstrated that SWAC transients are primarily associated with immature CD4-CD8- and CD4+CD8+ thymocytes. Mature peripheral lymphocytes (mouse or human) did not exhibit SWAC transients. SWAC influx could be distinguished from the calcium release-activated Ca2+ (CRAC) influx pathway stimulated by store depletion with TG. In TG- treated thymocytes, [Ca2+]i rose steadily for approximately 100 s, peaked at approximately 900 nM, and then declined slowly. Simultaneous activation of both pathways produced an additive [Ca2+]i profile. Gd3+ and La3+ blocked Ca2+ entry during CRAC activation more potently (Kd's of 28 and 58 nM, respectively) than Ca2+ influx during SWAC transients. SWAC transients could be elicited in the presence of 1 microM Gd3+, after the complete inhibition of CRAC influx. Finally, whereas SWAC transients were principally restricted to immature thymocytes. TG stimulated the CRAC influx pathway in all four thymic CD4/CD8 subsets and in mature T cells. We conclude that SWAC and CRAC represent separate pathways for Ca2+ entry in thymocytes.


Glutamic acid may protect the ischemic myocardium by increasing the flux through anaerobic pathways for ATP production. We tested this in isolated rabbit hearts that were treated with 0 or 2 mM glutamate. Hearts were stabilized for 30 min, subjected to ischemia for 30 min, and then reperfused for 30 min. Cardiac performance was defined by measuring peak left ventricular pressure (PLVDP) at the apex of a Starling curve and expressed as the %PLVDP attained during the preischemia period. Glutamate improved cardiac performance (%PLVDP, treated vs. untreated) after moderate ischemia (92 vs. 67), severe ischemia (79 vs. 65), and total ischemia (61 vs. 41). During severe ischemia, improved performance was associated with enhanced release (nmol X g wet wt -1 X min -1, treated vs. untreated) of alpha-ketoglutarate (2.3 vs. 1.3), succinate (21.7 vs. 12.3), and lactate (478 vs. 386). The ischemic myocardial content (nmol/mg myocardial protein, treated vs. untreated) of alpha-ketoglutarate (1.7 vs. 1.2) was increased by glutamate. The ischemic content of ATP (25.4 vs. 21.9) and succinate (15.7 vs. 12.1) showed a slight trend toward improvement under glutamate treatment. The study shows an association between improved postischemic cardiac performance and increased production of alpha-ketoglutarate and succinate during glutamate treatment.


Effectively utilizing the vast amounts of ego-centric navigation data that is freely available on the internet can advance generalized intelligent systems, i.e., to robustly scale across perspectives, platforms, environmental conditions, scenarios, and geographical locations. However, it is difficult to directly leverage such large amounts of unlabeled and highly diverse datafor complex 3D reasoning and planning tasks. Consequently, researchers have primarily focused on its use for various auxiliary pixel- and image-level computer vision tasks that do not consider an ultimate navigational objective. In this work, we introduce SelfD, a framework for learning scalable driving by utilizing large amounts of online monocular images. Our key idea is to leverage iterative semi-supervised training when learning imitative agents from unlabeled data. To handle unconstrained viewpoints, scenes, and camera parameters, we train an image-based model that directly learns to plan in the Bird's Eye View (BEV) space. Next, we use unla-beled data to augment the decision-making knowledge and robustness of an initially trained model via self-training. In particular, we propose a pseudo-labeling step which enables making full use of highly diverse demonstration data through "hypothetical" planning-based data augmentation. We employ a large dataset of publicly available YouTube videos to train SelfD and comprehensively analyze its generalization benefits across challenging navigation scenarios. Without requiring any additional data collection or annotation efforts, SelfD demonstrates consistent improvements (by up to 24%) in driving performance evaluation on nuScenes, Argoverse, Waymo, and CARLA.


The growth of mobile applications on smartphones and tablets ("apps") ranks as one of the most astonishing technological developments of the recent past. The marketplaces for these mobile apps (i.e., the Apple iOS App Store and Google Play) are a significant disruptive change in the way content is created and consumed. In this paper, taking a data-driven approach, we study the impact visibility in these marketplaces has on demand that apps obtain. The market platforms feature "top-ranked" charts that list apps by number of downloads. A shift to a high position in these charts is typically followed by a remarkable boost in demand. We call the effect of top-rank position on future sales an *indirect effect.* Our main contribution is to estimate the magnitude of this indirect effect. We develop a novel econometric methodology that allows us to deal with the significant endogeneity in the problem: ranks are determined by downloads, but also affect downloads. Our results show that the indirect effect is statistically significant and substantial; for example, we find that moving from position 20 to position 1 can nearly double the demand for an app.


e14535 Background: Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields), a non-invasive, loco-regional, anti-mitotic treatment comprises low-intensity alternating electric fields. In the phase III EF-14 study in newly diagnosed glioblastoma (ndGBM), TTFields in combination with temozolomide (TMZ) significantly improved survival compared to TMZ alone. In preclinical studies TTFields had a radiosensitizing effect and increased the efficacy of radiation therapy (RT). This pilot study [NCT03780569] evaluated the feasibility and safety of TTFields administered concurrently with RT and TMZ in ndGBM patients. Methods: Patients with histologically confirmed ndGBM were treated with TTFields/RT/TMZ followed by adjuvant TMZ/TTFields. TTFields (200 kHz) were delivered for ≥18 hours/day with transducer arrays removed during RT delivery. RT was administered to the tumor bed in 30 fractions (total dose 60 Gy) in combination with daily TMZ (75 mg/m2). In the adjuvant phase, patients received monthly TMZ (150–200 mg/m2 for 5 days) plus TTFields. The primary outcome was safety of the combined therapies; secondary outcomes included progression-free survival (PFS) and overall survival (OS). Adverse events (AEs) were graded per CTCAE v4.0. Results: Ten patients were enrolled at a single center between April and December 2017. Median age was 60.2 years, median Karnofsky Performance Score was 90.0, and eight (80%) patients were male. Five (50%) patients had undergone tumor resection while the remainder had biopsy only. Eight patients experienced ≥1 RT treatment delay; delays were unrelated to TTFields treatment. All patients experienced ≥1 AE. Three patients suffered from serious AEs (urinary tract infection, confusional state, and decubitus ulcer) that were considered unrelated to TTFields. The most common AE was skin toxicity, reported in eight (80%) patients; all were of low severity (CTCAE grade 1–2) and were reported as related to TTFields treatment. Median PFS from enrollment was 8.9 months; median OS was not reached at the time of study closure. Conclusions: Eighty percent of patients experienced grade 1–2 TTFields-related skin toxicity. No other TTFields-related toxicities were observed and there was no increase in RT- or TMZ-related toxicities as a result of combining TTFields with these therapies. Based on the safety and preliminary efficacy results of this pilot study, a phase 2 randomized trial (N = 60; NCT03869242) and the Phase 3 TRIDENT trial have been initiated to further investigate the efficacy of concomitant RT/TMZ/TTFields in ndGBM. Clinical trial information: NCT03780569.


Background: Proper nutrition during infancy has a significant effect on a child's future health, immunity and success. Weaning is a transition time for the child during which the consistency and source of its diet shifts. Objective: This study was carried out to formulate foxtail millet-based composite mixes and to assess the feeding practices among the infants under the age group of 0–12 months. Materials and Methods: Foxtail millet and other major ingredients such as Bengal gram dhal, green gram dhal, groundnut, and amaranthus, as well as spinach, were procured from local market in Salem, Tamil Nadu. Fruits such as banana and papaya were also procured from the local market in Salem, Tamil Nadu. Four kinds of complementary feeding mixes were formulated at different combinations. The formulated four composite mixes have undergone an assessment of nutritive value, microbial examination, sensory analysis, and shelf-life studies. Results: The findings showed that the formulated composite mixes compared to Prescribed Dietary Allowances (Recommended Dietary Allowances) were expected to show a significant difference in nutrients such as energy, protein, thiamine, and riboflavin at 0.05% level. Regarding sensory analysis, there was a significant difference between standard and overall acceptability of the formulated mixes at 0.05% level. The shelf-life at the end of 30 days showed no noticeable difference in appearance, consistency, odor, taste and overall acceptability. Conclusion: From this study, it was concluded that minor millet and multi-nutrient grains, green leafy vegetables, and basic low-cost fruits were good sources of energy, protein, iron, and micronutrients to the targeted infants as a supplementing weaning food. It can be recommended based on the infant's length and weight with the supervision. To improve the infant and young child feeding, access to adequate complementary food is necessary. complementary food is necessary.


Background A few recent studies have suggested that other sexually transmitted infections may increase the likelihood of a human papillomavirus (HPV) infection progressing to high-grade cervical neoplasia and cancer. Goal The goal was to assess whether exposures to Chlamydia trachomatis, human T-cell lymphotrophic virus type 1 (HTLV-I), and/or human simplex virus type 2 (HSV-2) are greater in colposcopy patients with cervical intraepithelial neoplasia grade 3 or cancer (CIN3+) than in patients with low-grade cervical neoplasia (CIN1). Study Design Sequential patients (n = 447) attending a colposcopy clinic in Kingston, Jamaica, a country with high cervical cancer rates and high HTLV-I prevalence, were tested for (1) HPV DNA by L1 consensus primer (MY09/11) polymerase chain reaction assays, (2) C trachomatis DNA by ligase chain reaction, (3) C trachomatis antibodies by both microimmunofluorescence and a peptide (VS4) enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA), (4) HTLV-I antibodies by ELISA confirmed by western blotting, and (5) HSV-2 antibodies by a recombinant HSV-2-specific ELISA. Odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals were estimated with use of multinomial logistic regression models. Results HPV DNA detection was associated with grade of cervical neoplasia but other evaluated sexually transmitted infections were not. Conclusions HTLV-I, C trachomatis, and/or HSV-2 were not associated with severity of cervical neoplasia in Jamaican women.


Software engineering project management (SEPM) has been the focus of much recent attention because of the enormous penalties incurred during software development and maintenance resulting from poor management. To date there has been no comprehensive study performed to determine the most significant problems of SEPM, their relative importance, or the research directions necessary to solve them. We conducted a major survey of individuals from all areas of the computer field to determine the general consensus on SEPM problems. Twenty hypothesized problems were submitted to several hundred individuals for their opinions. The 294 respondents validated most of these propositions. None of the propositions was rejected by the respondents as unimportant. A number of research directions were indicated by the respondents which, if followed, the respondents believed would lead to solutions for these problems.


Abstract:This article focuses on the management of the taxi industry in the eThekwini Municipality. It examines how the financing of the taxi industry influences the provision of transport for people with disabilities highlighting the experiences of a variety of stakeholders of the Integrated Rapid Public Transport Network (IRPTN) and other interim measures to improve public transport provision. The research derives from a larger study on the factors that influence public transport service provision for people with disabilities in the eThekwini Municipality using data which was produced through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with a range of stakeholders. Whilst government and policy makers are desperately seeking to improve the transportation landscape, there seems to be little cognisance of the subversive power of the taxi industry as long as its interests are not acknowledged. Furthermore, the state's constitutional mandate to provide access for people with disabilities appears to be subverted by the taxi industry, which does not seem to regard people with disabilities as economically valuable, resulting in their marginalisation, potentially compromising the successful implementation of the IRPTN. The authors also highlight concerns relating to the lack of effective interim measures and contradictory suggestions by the participants, signalling that any solution needs to acknowledge the complexity and multi-faceted nature of the problem, and that no 'perfect' and simplistic solution is on the horizon. The authors contend that unless sufficient consensus is reached among all stakeholders, the future of public transport service provision for people with disabilities in the eThekwini Municipality remains uncertain.


Driver fatigue problem is one of the important factors of traffic accidents. Recent years, many research had investigated that using EEG signals can effectively detect driver's drowsiness level. However, real-time monitoring system is required to apply these fatigue level detection techniques in the practical application, especially in the real-road driving. Therefore, it required less channels, portable and wireless, real-time monitoring and processing techniques for developing the real-time monitoring system. In this study, we develop a single channel wireless EEG device which can real-time detect driver's fatigue level on the mobile device such as smart phone or tablet. The developed device is investigated to obtain a better and precise understanding of brain activities of mental fatigue under driving, which is of great benefit for devolvement of detection of driving fatigue system. This system consists of a Bluetooth-enabled one channel EEG, a regression model, and smartphone, which was a platform recording and transforming the raw EEG data to useful driving status. In the experiment, this was a sustained-attention driving task to implement in a virtual-reality (VR) driving simulator. To training model and develop the system, we were performed for 15 subjects to study Electroencephalography (EEG) brain dynamics by using a mobile and wireless EEG device. Based on the outstanding training results, the leave-one-subject-out cross validation test obtained 90% fatigue detection accuracy. These results indicate that the combination of a smartphone and wireless EEG device constitutes an effective and easy wearable solution for detecting and preventing driver fatigue in real driving environments.


The determination of substrate turnover rate with stable isotope-labeled compounds has advantages of being safe and applicable in the study of children and pregnant women. Currently, a majority of these studies has been performed with primed constant-rate infusion technique. The isotope enrichment of the substrate in the plasma is measured by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GCMS). The turnover rate is then calculated from steady-state kinetics. A number of different equations have been used by various investigators for this purpose. Based on theoretical consideration and experimental data, it is concluded that the equation P = [(1/E) - 1] I or P = (y/x) I should be used for a correct turnover rate calculation, where P is turnover rate in mumol X kg-1, E the isotope enrichment, I the infusion rate in mumol X kg-1 X min-1, and y/x the mole ratio of tracee to tracers. A GCMS standard curve constructed from isotope enrichment versus isotope peak abundance should be used for the former equation, whereas a standard curve constructed from mole ratio (x/y) versus isotope ratio should be used for the latter equation. Interchange of standard curves or use of other equations will produce erroneous turnover rate. This is especially significant when a low enriched isotope-labeled compound is used as a tracer.


The Last clock displays a space's history and rhythm. Trails behind its hands paint the clock face with a video feed, creating a mandala of archived time. The Last clock began as an investigation into representations of time. The goal was to use the mutable properties of digital technology, hoping to create something aesthetically pleasing, interesting, and ever changing without having to succumb to randomness. The clock reveals the rhythm of events and spaces. It provides a record of and a means of reflection for what is happening and what has happened. With the Internet-connected streaming version, the clock can connect two or more remote spaces so that people feel a sense of each other's presence. The clock does not show precisely the activity in the space, just a filtered version of it. Beyond being an aesthetic object, Last serves a real purpose as a display that shows an overview of a given space's dynamics and history. By borrowing the form of a traditional analog clock, Last becomes an easy-to-read visualization of complex information, which includes the type of activity captured, the pace and volume of motion, and the point in time that this activity happened. it shows all this information in a continuously updated, live, single image. This article is available with a short video documentary on CD-ROM.


Purpose Integration, that is, the coordination and alignment of tasks, is widely promoted as a means to improve hospital performance. A previous study examined integration and differentiation, that is, the extent to which tasks are segmented into subsystems, in a hospital's social network. The current study carries this research further, aiming to explain integration and differentiation by studying the rules and coordination mechanisms that agents in a hospital network use. Design/methodology/approach The current case study deepens the analysis of the social network in a hospital. All planning tasks and tasks for surgery performance were studied, using a naturalistic inquiry approach and a mixed method. Findings Of the 314 rules found, 85% predominantly exist in people's minds, 31% are in documents and 7% are in the information system. In the early planning stages for a surgery procedure, mutual adjustment based on hospital-wide rules is dominant. Closer to the day of surgery, local rules are used and open loops are closed through mutual adjustment, thus achieving integration. On the day of surgery, there is mainly standardization of work and output, based on hospital-wide rules. The authors propose topics for future research, focusing on increasing the hospital's robustness and stability. Originality/value This exploratory case study provides an overview of the rules and coordination mechanisms that are used for organizing hospital-wide logistics for surgery patients. The findings are important for future research on how integration and differentiation are effectively achieved in hospitals.


PilB is the assembly ATPase for the bacterial type IV pilus (T4P), and as a consequence, it is essential for T4P-mediated bacterial motility. In some cases, PilB has been demonstrated to regulate the production of exopolysaccharide (EPS) during bacterial biofilm development independently of or in addition to its function in pilus assembly. While the ATPase activity of PilB resides at its C-terminal region, the N terminus of a subset of PilBs forms a novel cyclic-di-GMP (cdG)-binding domain. This multi-domain structure suggests that PilB binds cdG and adenine nucleotides through separate domains which may influence the functionality of PilB in both motility and biofilm development. Here, Chloracidobacterium thermophilum PilB is used to investigate ligand binding by its separate domains and by the full-length protein. Our results confirm the specificity of these individual domains for their respective ligands and demonstrate communications between these domains in the full-length protein. It is clear that when the N- and the C-terminal domains of PilB bind to cdG and ADP, respectively, they mutually influence each other in conformation and in their binding to ligands. We propose that the interactions between these domains in response to their ligands play critical roles in modulating or controlling the functions of PilB as a regulator of EPS production and as the T4P assembly ATPase.


The popularity of cloud computing has made cloud services gradually become the leading computing model nowadays. The trustworthiness of cloud services depends mainly on construction processes. The trustworthiness measurement of cloud service construction processes (CSCPs) is crucial for cloud service developers. It can help to find out the causes of failures and to improve the development process, thereby ensuring the quality of cloud service. Herein, firstly, a trustworthiness hierarchy model of CSCP was proposed, and the influential factors of the processes were identified following the international standard ISO/IEC 12207 of the software development process.Further, a method was developed combined with the theory of information entropy and the concept of trustworthiness. It aimed to calculate the risk uncertainty and risk loss expectation affecting trustworthiness. Also, the trustworthiness of cloud service and its main construction processes were calculated. Finally, the feasibility of the measurement method were verified through a case study, and through comparing with AHP and CMM/CMMI methods, the advantages of this method were embodied.


The investigation of geological disaster in our article locates in southern Australia, which is characterized by wide range, high relief, inaccessibility and other unfavorable factors. Multi-spectral ETM+ and SPOT 5 pan images were selected as the remote sensing data source, and Brovey transform (BT), intensity-hue-saturation (IHS), principal component analysis (PCA), high-pass filtering (HPF) and modified Gram-Schmidt (MGS) methods were used for image fusion. A comparison has been conducted between the resultant fusion images to assess the image quality both in subjective and objective evaluation. The results show that, the MGS method is the optimal image fusion method for geological disaster interpretation, and can provide abundant textural and spectral information in interpreting such geological disasters as landslide, rock fall and debris flow.


The goal of the study was to explore the most fundamental aspects of a magnetoencephalography (MEG)-based dipole source analysis. For that purpose, a MEG measurement with an ideal magnetometer system (providing the radial component of the magnetic field as a continuous function) is considered. The analytical formulas derived for the variances and covariances of the parameter estimation errors, validated by means of Monte Carlo simulations, allow quantitative predictions in terms of dipole depth, radius and span of the magnetometer system, signal-to-noise (SNR) ratio, and other parameters. A negative correlation exists between radial coordinate and longitudinal component of the moment (perpendicular to radial direction, same plane as actual dipole moment and center of sphere), whereas the other parameters are independent. The standard deviations of the five dipole parameters show fundamental differences with respect to their asymptotic behavior for deep dipoles: If the root mean square (rms) value of the magnetic field is kept constant (moment with depth-dependent amplitude), the error for the transverse coordinate (perpendicular to radial and longitudinal coordinate) is proportional to the distance R between dipole and center of sphere, the errors for the other dipole coordinates, and the relative error for the transverse component of the dipole moment are constant, and the relative error for the longitudinal component of the dipole moment follows a 1/R law.


Multicamera networks are becoming complex involving larger sensing areas in order to capture activities and behavior that evolve over long spatial and temporal windows. This necessitates novel methods to process the information sensed by the network and visualize it for an end user. In this paper, we describe a system for modeling and on-demand visualization of activities of groups of humans. Using the prior knowledge of the 3D structure of the scene as well as camera calibration, the system localizes humans as they navigate the scene. Activities of interest are detected by matching models of these activities learnt a priori against the multiview observations. The trajectories and the activity index for each individual summarize the dynamic content of the scene. These are used to render the scene with virtual 3D human models that mimic the observed activities of real humans. In particular, the rendering framework is designed to handle large displays with a cluster of GPUs as well as reduce the cognitive dissonance by rendering realistic weather effects and illumination. We envision use of this system for immersive visualization as well as summarization of videos that capture group behavior.


This document is the product of a cooperative venture
involving several public agencies. It started when Anne
Kohler, Director of the Texas Governor's Committee on
Aging Research Utilization Program (now a part of the
Texas Department of Public Welfare) made a request of
NASA: could the space agency help to improve nutritional
services for the elderly, particularly those in areas not
reached by meals-on-wheels programs? As it turned out,
NASA's experience in developing a shelf-stable, nutritious,
easily transportable meals system for its manned space programs
provided the foundation for design and development
of a meals system intended to meet the special needs of the
elderly. A joint project was launched to develop the system,
conduct technical and user taste tests, develop new delivery
systems, conduct field tests, undertake medical assessments,
and evaluate the results of these various activities.


This study aims to contribute to sustainable tourism destination competitiveness research by proposing a systemic model for identifying the factors that impact Brazilian municipalities' ability to create and integrate value‑added tourism products to meet the needs of local communities and visitors and maintain the tourism competitiveness. It proposes that the available destination competitiveness models can be divided into three groups: i) aggregate indices; ii) conceptual and descriptive; and iii) explanatory and predictive. Six sustainable tourism competitiveness determinant factors were formulated: Tourism Infrastructure, Information and Communication Technology Infrastructure, Education, Heritage and Culture, Socioeconomic Development and Environmental Preservation. Four dependent factors related to tourism activity success were also postulated: Tourism Flow, Jobs, Wages and Revenue. All constructs were based on secondary indicators for Brazil's 5,565 municipalities. The theoretical model was tested using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM).


Forty-eight Holstein cows were alternately assigned to one of the two following treatments: (T1) A stocking rate of 2.5 cows/ha on grass pastures fertilized with 2,270 kg (15-5-10)/ha/yr, plus 1 kg of concentrate/2.15 kg of milk above 10 kg/d; (T2) A stocking rate of 3.125 cows/ha on pastures fertilized with 1,700 kg/yr, plus 1 kg of concentrate/2 kg of milk. Through 180 days post-partum, cows in T1 produced more milk (17.1 vs. 14.3 kg/d; P < 0.01) and more 4% fat-corrected-milk (FCM; 14.8 vs. 12.9 kg/d; P < 0.02) than in T2, in spite of consuming only about half (3.8 vs. 7.4 kg/d) as much concentrate. Body weight losses were extensive, more so for cows in T2 at both 30 (4.9 vs. 6.8%; P < 0.03) and 90 days post-partum (6.4 vs. 9.6% of calving weight; P < 0.05). Feed and land costs per unit of milk produced were greater for T2 than for T1 (22.7 vs. 18.7 cents/kg). However, milk yield and income over feed and land costs per hectare grazed were greater for T2; therefore, system T2 represents a better alternative for intensive utilization of limited pasture resources.


Research has shown that deep networks tend to be overly optimistic about their predictions, leading to an underestimation of prediction errors. Due to the limited nature of data, existing studies have proposed various methods based on model prediction probabilities to bin the data and evaluate calibration error. We propose a more generalized definition of calibration error called Partitioned Calibration Error (PCE), revealing that the key difference among these calibration error metrics lies in how the data space is partitioned. We put forth an intuitive proposition that an accurate model should be calibrated across any partition, suggesting that the input space partitioning can extend beyond just the partitioning of prediction probabilities, and include partitions directly related to the input. Through semantic-related partitioning functions, we demonstrate that the relationship between model accuracy and calibration lies in the granularity of the partitioning function. This highlights the importance of partitioning criteria for training a calibrated and accurate model. To validate the aforementioned analysis, we propose a method that involves jointly learning a semantic aware grouping function based on deep model features and logits to partition the data space into subsets. Subsequently, a separate calibration function is learned for each subset. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves significant performance improvements across multiple datasets and network architectures, thus highlighting the importance of the partitioning function for calibration.


The present research investigated how host and foreign cultures impacted on multiply enculturated individuals, specifically on how they integrate values from foreign cultures. We argued that whether foreign values are integrated into an individual's host cultural meaning system depends on the compatibility of the values with implicit beliefs in the host culture. Hence some parts of a foreign culture are more likely to be embraced than others. Specifically with regard to Western achievement versus moral values, we contend that because Western achievement values are relatively more compatible with implicit beliefs in Hong Kong society, they are more cognitively accessible than Western moral values. We investigated the cognitive accessibility of cultural values to contemporary Hong Kong students by measuring the associations triggered by role models. Study 1 found that Chinese moral values were relatively more accessible than other values when Chinese role models were presented whereas competence values were more accessible than other values when Western role models were presented. In studies 2 to 5, participants generated examples of role models; the Chinese role models generated tended to exemplify Chinese moral values best whereas Western role model generated tended to exemplify Western competence values better than Western moral values. This implied that impact of Chinese culture on contemporary Hong Kong students occurs mainly in moral domain, whereas that of Western culture was mainly in competence domain. Implication for the dynamic use of values from different cultures by bicultural individuals is discussed.


In the tracking system, a better prediction model can significantly reduce power consumption in a wireless sensor network because fewer redundant sensors will be activated to keep monitoring the object. The Gauss-Markov mobility model is one of the best mobility models to describe object trajectory because it can capture the correlation of object velocity in time. Traditionally, the Gauss-Markov parameters are estimated using an autocorrelation technique or a recursive least-squares estimation technique; either of these techniques, however, requires a large amount of historical movement information of the mobile object, which is not suitable for tracking objects in a wireless sensor network because they demand a considerable amount of message communication overhead between wireless sensors which are usually battery powered. In this paper, we develop a Gauss-Markov parameter estimator for wireless sensor networks (GMPE_MLH) using a maximum likelihood technique. The GMPE_MLH model estimates the Gauss-Markov parameters with few requirements in terms of message communication overhead. Simulations demonstrate that the GMPE_MLH model generates negligible differences between the actual and estimated values of the Gauss-Markov parameters and provides comparable prediction of the mobile object's location to the Gauss-Markov parameter estimators using an autocorrelation technique or a recursive least-squares estimation.


This thesis explores the punk phenomenon in China. In order to examine punk members and practices, an ethnographic research was conducted in large-scale cities, such as Beijing and Shanghai, and small-scale cities, such as Wuhan and Huaihua in China, as well as on the Internet. In particular, the thesis focuses on two prominent themes subculture and resistance as the main directions of analysis. Through discussing findings from the three dimensions of the individual, collective and online, it is argued that the Chinese punk phenomenon exists as a subculture and punk subcultural practices can be regarded as manifesting forms of resistance in China.

First, this study presents a detailed individual biography of one punk musician and then further examines those of other participants. It is discovered that subcultural resistance can have a different impact at different stages of a person s life. Second, this study demonstrates forms of collective practices and how they are manifested, and reveals how Chinese punk subculture members collectively produce different forms of subcultural resistance. Finally, this study examines Chinese punk online. It focuses on how online group members produce meanings of their activities and deploy specific techniques to resist online norms and censorship.

Overall this thesis contributes to the ongoing discussions in current field of subcultural studies. By providing a study on punk subculture in China, the research engages empirically in the question of power relations in a society from both individual and collective levels, which has rarely been undertaken before.


A case of adult rhabdomyoma, a rare muscle-derived tumor, is described in a 40-year-old man. The tumor was located in close proximity to the thyroid gland and was initially misinterpreted as an adenoma of the gland. The most important differential diagnoses are discussed including methods available for differentiating those from rhabdomyoma.


Abstract Optimization of equine sperm cryopreservation protocols requires an understanding of the water permeability characteristics and volumetric shrinkage response during freezing. A cell-shape-independent differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) technique was used to measure the volumetric shrinkage during freezing of equine sperm suspensions at cooling rates of 5°C/min and 20°C/min in the presence and absence of cryoprotective agents (CPAs), i.e., in the Kenney extender and in the lactose-EDTA extender, respectively. The equine sperm was modeled as a cylinder of length 36.5 μm and a radius of 0.66 μm with an osmotically inactive cell volume (Vb) of 0.6Vo, where Vo is the isotonic cell volume. Sperm samples were collected using water-insoluble Vaseline in the artificial vagina and slow cooled at ≤0.3°C/min in an Equitainer-I from 37°C to 4°C. By fitting a model of water transport to the experimentally obtained DSC volumetric shrinkage data, the best-fit membrane permeability parameters (Lpg and ELp) were determined. The combined best-fit parameters of water transport (at both 5°C/min and 20°C/min) in Kenney extender (absence of CPAs) are Lpg = 0.02 μm min−1 atm−1 and ELp = 32.7 kcal/mol with a goodness-of-fit parameter R2 = 0.96, and the best-fit parameters in the lactose-EDTA extender (the CPA medium) are Lpg[cpa] = 0.008 μm min−1 atm−1 and ELp[cpa] = 12.1 kcal/mol with R2 = 0.97. These parameters suggest that the optimal cooling rate for equine sperm is ∼29°C/min and is ∼60°C/min in the Kenney extender and in the lactose-EDTA extender. These rates are predicted assuming no intracellular ice formation occurs and that the ∼5% of initial osmotically active water volume trapped inside the cells at −30°C will form innocuous ice on further cooling. Numerical simulations also showed that in the lactose-EDTA extender, equine sperm trap ∼3.4% and ∼7.1% of the intracellular water when cooled at 20°C/min and 100°C/min, respectively. As an independent test of this prediction, the percentage of viable equine sperm was obtained after freezing at 6 different cooling rates (2°C/min, 20°C/min, 50°C/min, 70°C/min, 130°C/min, and 200°C/min) to −80°C in the CPA medium. Sperm viability was essentially constant between 20°C/min and 130°C/min.


With a few narrow exceptions, U.S. patent law concerns itself with activity that either occurs within this country's borders or crosses its borders. The result is that patent owners have only been able to recover money damages for activity that takes place in this country. In the typical case, that means that a patentee can recover lost profits or reasonable royalties for the domestic sales of infringing products. However, patentees have begun to advance a new and creative "worldwide causation�? theory that would allow them to calculate damage based on sales everywhere. So long as some domestic infringement can be said to cause sales overseas, these patentees argue that there should be no territorial limitation on their recovery. This Essay argues that the courts should reject this new theory on both doctrinal and policy grounds. As a doctrinal matter, permitting patentees to recover damages for sales that take place overseas would circumvent the explicit territorial limitations that are well established in U.S. patent law. This argument is reinforced by the presumption against the extraterritorial application of any U.S. law. The worldwide causation theory of damages also makes bad international and domestic policy. Under the current international regime, each nation has its own patent system. This means that inventors must satisfy a country's specific patent laws to obtain a patent, and navigate through its courts to obtain any remedy that the country sees fit to grant. The proposed worldwide causation theory would subvert this regime and allow United States patent law to trump laws in other countries. Of course other countries could also follow suit and exercise their own forms of "patent imperialism�? thereby wreaking havoc with notions of territorial sovereignty in patent law. In addition to causing problems abroad, the worldwide causation theory provides troubling disincentives for U.S companies. Companies that locate key activities in the U.S. will be worse off than companies that offshore those activities. In sum, there are ample reasons to reject patent imperialism.


OBJECTIVE AND IMPORTANCE
Massive congenital intracranial teratomas with extracranial extension are rare. The prognosis in these cases has been poor, with stillbirth or immediate postpartum death as the usual outcome. With recent advances in fetal monitoring, neonatal care, and surgical techniques used for the management of complex tumors of the cranial base, some of these lesions may now be amenable to radical surgical resection and then immediate craniofacial reconstruction.

CLINICAL PRESENTATION
A neonate with a large congenital immature teratoma involving the entire left side of the cranium and face was evaluated at our institution 1 day after birth.

INTERVENTION
Total resection of the mass and then immediate reconstruction of the deformed orbit, maxilla, and mandible were performed at 9 days of age. Additional operations on the midface and mandible to allow for a functional bite were subsequently required as the child developed during the next 2 years. Four years after resection, the patient exhibited a reasonable cosmetic result and only mild developmental delay.

CONCLUSION
We conclude that acceptable functional and cosmetic outcomes can be achieved by early intervention, consisting of radical resection and immediate craniofacial reconstruction, in some neonates with massive congenital craniofacial teratomas.


Levodopa has an established position in the treatment of Parkinson's disease for the last 40 years. It is still called a gold standard therapy. The treatment is relatively easy in the first uncomplicated stage of Parkinson's disease, but the results of many studies performed in recent years showed that the time of treatment initiation and the mode of initial treatment may influence the course of disease in following years. At the late stages the levodopa treatment is a challenge due to the changes in reactivity to single doses as a result of changes in its pharmacokinetics, reactivity of dopamine receptors and progressive loss of dopaminergic neurons. This review paper aims to show the recent views on treatment of Parkinson's disease with levodopa still being a core of this therapy.


Two engine dynamometer test protocols are compared for their ability to discriminate and duplicate the field phenomenon of engine non-start due to combustion chamber deposit (CCD) flaking. The first, a protocol based on a 625 hour deposit accumulation cycle, has been shown in prior work [1, 2] to reflect field experience and discriminate the effects of various fuel additive treatments. The second, a protocol based on a 60 hour deposit accumulation cycle, was developed in an attempt to significantly reduce the time, and thus cost, of testing. Results indicate the shorter protocol is repeatable and has similar discrimination with respect to fuel and fuel additive impact on the no-start phenomenon. There are, however, differences in the results that indicate there may be a severity difference between the tests. The tests both show there are clearly differences in the engine no-start impact of deposits formed by fuel and additives. It is also found that while all CCD's produce flaking, and in all cases significant cylinder pressure loss occurs in one or more cylinders during cold start, neither of these observations correlate with start or no-start results. Clearly, engine no-start due to CCD flaking is a complex phenomenon that cannot be easily accounted for via secondary measurements.


The use of constructed wetlands for tertiary wastewater treatment is emerging as a cost-effective wastewater treatment technology. Constructed wetlands are theoretically designed and operated so that the target constituents have ample time to interact with wetland substrates and microbiota to effect constituent removal necessary to achieve water quality discharge limits. Unfortunately, engineering natural systems is complicated and operational criteria are poorly defined. Long-term research is needed that compares design configurations as well as performance since each constructed wetland system is subjected to a variety of stochastic events (i.e. wind speed and direction, sedimentation due to pulsed rain events, plant dispersal and plant succession). The 650-acre constructed wetland system in Augusta, Georgia was developed in three phases, beginning with a 60-acre pilot study that evaluated use of the technology for ammonia and BOD removal. The pilot study was operated from 1997 - 1999. Design changes resulting from the pilot study were incorporated into Phases 2 and 3, which were completed in 2000 and 2002 respectively. During 2003-2004, an innovative optimization study was conducted to compare performance criteria between wetland cells of different design configurations, age, planting schemes, and operational criteria such as depth and flow. The cells were monitored using multiprobe HydroLab® technology. Water quality analyses included BOD, TSS, nitrate+nitrite, TKN, ammonia, ortho- and total phosphate. Continuous weather data were also collected using a GroWeather® monitoring station. Results of this research indicated that wetland cell performance was similar regardless of design, age, planting scheme, flow rates and various operational manipulations. The study suggested cell orientation to prevailing winds and duckweed cover may have impacted treatment efficiency. Nitrogen removal may also have been compromised by nitrogen import from large colonies of roosting redwing blackbirds as well as blue- green algae blooms. There is also evidence that suggests preferential flow patterns and stagnant zones within the cells may be potentially decreasing efficiency and overall removal performance. A tracer study is planned to evaluate aboveground and belowground processes that may alter the theoretical homogenous flow design of constructed wetland systems.


The Gezi Park protests of 2013 have significantly changed the Turkish agenda and its effects have been felt historically. The protests, which rapidly spread throughout the country, were triggered by the proposal to recreate the Ottoman Army Barracks to function as a shopping mall on Gezi Park located in Istanbul's Taksim neighbourhood despite the oppositions of several NGOs and when trees were cut in the park for this purpose. Once the news that the construction vehicles entered the park on May 27 spread on social media, activists moved into the park to stop the demolition, against whom the police used disproportioned force. With this police intervention and the then prime-minister Tayyip Erdoğan's insistent statements about the construction plans, the protests turned into antigovernment demonstrations, which then spread to the rest of the country, mainly in big cities like Ankara and Izmir. According to the Ministry of Internal Affairs' June 23rd reports, 2.5 million people joined the demonstrations in 79 provinces, that is all of them, except for the provinces of Bayburt and Bingöl, while even more people shared their opinions via social networks. As a result of these events, 8 civilians and 2 security personnel lost their lives, namely police chief Mustafa Sarı, police officer Ahmet Küçükdağ, citizens Mehmet Ayvalıtaş, Abdullah Cömert, Ethem Sarısülük, Ali İsmail Korkmaz, Ahmet Atakan, Berkin Elvan, Burak Can Karamanoğlu, Mehmet İstif, and Elif Çermik, and 8163 more were injured. Besides being a turning point in Turkish history, the Gezi Park protests also had broad repercussions in both in Turkish and in global media, which focused on Turkey throughout the events. Our study conducts content analysis of three Turkish reporting newspapers with varying ideological standpoints, Hürriyet, Cumhuriyet ve Yeni Şafak, in order to reveal their basic approach to news casting in context of the Gezi Park protests. Headlines, news segments, and news content relating to the Gezi protests were treated and analysed for this purpose. The aim of this study is to understand the social effects of the Gezi Park protests through media samples with varying political attitudes towards news casting. Keywords—Gezi Park, media, news casting, tree.


Prolonged benzodiazepine treatment leads to tolerance and increases the risk of dependence. Flurazepam (FZP) withdrawal is associated with increased anxiety correlated with increased alpha‐amino‐3‐hydroxy‐5‐methyl‐4‐isoxazolepropionic acid‐type glutamate receptor (AMPAR)‐mediated synaptic function and AMPAR binding in CA1 pyramidal neurons. Enhanced AMPAR synaptic strength is also associated with a shift toward inward rectification of synaptic currents and increased expression of GluR1, but not GluR2, subunits, suggesting augmented membrane incorporation of GluR1‐containing, GluR2‐lacking AMPARs. To test this hypothesis, the postsynaptic incorporation of GluR1 and GluR2 subunits in CA1 neurons after FZP withdrawal was examined by postembedding immunogold quantitative electron microscopy. The percentage of GluR1 positively labeled stratum radiatum (SR) synapses was significantly increased in FZP‐withdrawn rats (88.2% ± 2.2%) compared with controls (74.4% ± 1.9%). In addition, GluR1 immunogold density was significantly increased by 30% in SR synapses in CA1 neurons from FZP‐withdrawn rats compared with control rats (FZP: 14.1 ± 0.3 gold particles/μm; CON: 10.8 ± 0.4 gold particles/μm). In contrast, GluR2 immunogold density was not significantly different between groups. Taken together with recent functional data from our laboratory, the current study suggests that the enhanced glutamatergic strength at CA1 neuron synapses during benzodiazepine withdrawal is mediated by increased incorporation of GluR1‐containing AMPARs. Mechanisms underlying synaptic plasticity in this model of drug dependence are therefore fundamentally similar to those that operate during activity‐dependent plasticity. J. Comp. Neurol. 511:832–846, 2008. © 2008 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


Background: A hernia repair surgery commonly induces moderate to severe postoperative pain for 48 hours. Aim of the study was to compare 0.5% Ropivacaine with dexamethasone and 0.5% Ropivacaine with clonidine for ultrasonography guided transversus abdominis plane (TAP) block as post-operative analgesia in patients undergoing Inguinal hernia repair surgery. Subjects and Methods: A randomized prospective controlled clinical study was conducted in 64 patients undergoing Inguinal Herneoplasty. Participants were divided into two groups in which group RD (n=32) received 0.5% Ropivavacaine with Dexamethasone 8mg and those in group RC (n=32) received 0.5% Ropivacaine with Clonidine 75mcg as USG guided TAP block at the end of surgery. The postoperative pain was evaluated by visual analog scale (VAS) for pain scoring at every 2 hours for 24 hours postoperatively. Subjective assessment of duration of analgesia was done. Results: Time to first rescue analgesia was significantly less in group RC (424.53±34.13) compared to group RD (616.09±31.36min) (P < 0.001). Total tramadol consumed in 24 h was significantly higher in group RC than group RD (P < 0.001). Visual analog scale scores for both somatic and visceral pain were significantly higher in group RC than group RD at 6h, 8 h and 12 h postoperatively. Conclusion: TAP block is a safe and effective way of relieving postoperative pain in inguinal herneoplasty patients. Addition of dexamethasone to Ropivacaine significantly enhances its effect in terms of block quality and analgesia duration as compared to clonidine addition.


Through a critique of Ball's (1990) policy analysis framework, this dissertation explores the influences that led to the deregulation of international student recruitment ('the policy') and the subsequent development of pathway programs in the Australian higher education sector. In this study Ball's framework is extended to include Marginson and Rhoades' (2002) glonacal heuristic to analyse the global, national and local contexts that contributed to the creation and implementation of 'the policy'. The development of pathway programs is chosen as one aspect of implementation to allow for an exploration that progresses from a macro to a microanalysis of 'the policy' cycle.

The study examines the key 'players' or individuals who contributed to 'the policy's' creation, the ideologies that influenced these individuals and the contexts within which decisions were made. The research found that glonacal influences of neoliberalism, globalisation, internationalisation and commercialisation were paramount in the formation of 'the policy', and in influencing key 'players'. It was also recognized that it was not always possible to definitively describe the role of these 'players' or 'actors' according to a hierarchical structure and separate contexts, confirming Ball's (1990) theory that influence on policy is often ad hoc and trajectory in nature.

Education is an export industry, which contributes an income of $5.6 billion to the Australian economy. In 2004, there were 151,798 international students in the higher education sector, with 10 Australian universities depending on this industry for 15% to 40% of their total income. The development of pathway programs and universities' close association with private providers has contributed significantly to the overall commercial and internationalisation objectives of these universities. The pathway model, delivered through a private provider, examined in this study is quintessentially Australian, and was a local response to the possibilities that 'the policy' created. The model flourished because of Commonwealth and state support, the former providing a national accreditation system in the form of the Australian Qualification Framework ensuring articulation to a university course. From a state perspective, pathway programs and private providers prospered with the support of university partners and successive Western Australian state governments that recognised the commercial gains to be made through co-operative partnerships.

The research concludes that through glonacal influences the recruitment of international students to Australian universities developed into an industry that is uniquely Australian. The development of pathway programs and the involvement of private providers was one of its distinguishing characteristics.


At first glance, it doesn't seem as though socialism and health-care reform have a whole lot to do with each other. After all, the most visible "left" position in the current discussion of health-care reform merely advocates for the government to assume the function of national insurer, leaving the delivery of health care - from its often-questionable content to its hierarchical relationships - firmly in place. As such, a single payer, Medicare-for-All insurance program is a modest, even tepid reform.

Those of us on the left who have been active in the single payer movement have always seen it as a steppingstone toward health-care justice: until the question of access to care is solved, how do we even begin to address not only health care but also health inequities? How, for example, can working-class Americans, Americans of color, and women demand appropriate, respectful, humane, first-rate care when our ability to access any health-care services at all is so tightly constrained?


Sawahlunto have area of 27 345 hectares or 273.45 km2, which has a distance of 95 km from Padang. Sawahlunto include by hills, ramps and elevation 250-650 m above sea level. Now, Sawahlunto has problems, which has been land sub s idence. Sub s idence happens quite significant and can be fatal if there is construction on it, such as roads, houses and other. Land subsidence become a major issue for society. This research aims to determine the classification of land and calculating subsidence and finding solutions for soil reinforcement in Sawahlunto. This research was carried out by bore hole on a 4 point and laboratory test. At bore hole 1, Land subsidence depth of 5.6 cm, bore hole 2 depth of 14.48 cm, bore hole 3 depth of 27.1 and bore hole 4 depth of 15.6 cm. Soil reinforcement with vertical drainage on research 2. The results will be use for Sawahlunto government.


This study surveyed Arizona high school directors? attitudes toward solo and small ensemble festival and regional large-ensemble auditions which occurred on the same day. The author analyzed 191 responses to demographic and attitude questions. Multivariate analyses of variance using teaching area, school size, education level, and college major as independent variables and three groups of attitude statements (obstacles, scheduling, and values) as the dependent variables resulted in three significant main effects and one significant interaction. However, the researcher observed no practical significance and concluded that Arizona directors showed homogenous attitudes toward the two events. The directors encouraged student participation in solo and small ensemble festival, strongly believed that participating in solo and small ensemble festival contributed to individual performance achievement, and had positive experiences themselves partaking in the event. Despite the directors? positive attitudes toward solo and small ensemble festival they reported their students preferred to focus on regional large-ensemble auditions


Alkali substitute for two-stage anaerobic co-digestion system using kitchen waste, agriculture waste, and horse dung was compared with the standard alkali chemical used for pH control. The substitute used in this experiment is oyster shell waste. The study aims to investigate and evaluate the performance of oyster shells to overcome problems such as pH drops in the hydrolysis stage, greenhouse gas emission from chemical use, and methanogenesis stage performance such as methane gas yield and quality of biogas production. The result shows hydrolysate from control treatment using alkali has the highest volatile solid (VS) (1.18 %) and chemical oxygen demand (COD) (27.7 g/L). Oyster shell treatment has lower VS (1.14 %) and COD (25.01 g/L), but not significantly different from control. One-time oyster shell application can maintain reactor pH throughout the acid phase. Alkali treatment needs multiple doses to maintain the reactor in the intended pH range. At the end of the first stage, liquid hydrolysate pH value from alkali, oyster shell and no pH control treatment are 6.5, 5.29 and 3.8. As a result of comparing greenhouse gases emission in the cases of using NaOH as alkali, and oyster shell by Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method, equivalent weight of CO2 emission from the oyster shell is lower by 0.0504 kg-CO2/kg-waste than that from alkali or only 0.15 times. In methanogenesis stage, alkali treatment produced 31 % higher methane gas yield (429.82 mL CH4/g VS in 1.64 g VS/L/d) compared to oyster shell treatment (321.32 mL CH4/g VS in 2.8 g VS/L/d). Methane gas yields of oyster treatment are stable through the different range of organic loading rate (OLR) while in alkali treatment the gas yield tends to increase in proportion with higher OLR. Highest methane gas percentage in biogas produced from alkali treatment (77.53 %), while in oyster shell treatment highest methane gas percentage is 71.11 %. Alkali treatment performs better in methane gas production using two stage anaerobic digesters, but oyster shells offer advantages in terms of practicality, stability and environmental impact


Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) have the ideal structure to be used as templates for nanomaterials, especially for nanowires, and the tungsten nanowire is an important nanomaterial that is used as a strengthening phase. Therefore, we have proposed to apply mesoporous CNT (mCNT) as a template to prepare tungsten nanowires. However, the tungsten precursor should fill the hollow tube of mCNT firstly, and very few related studies have been reported. In this paper, we have systematically studied the filling process of ammonium metatungstate (AMT) aqueous solution. The results reveal that owing to the mesopores in the mCNT sidewall, the AMT can be encapsulated into the tube at room temperature (RT) and we can fully fill it without destroying the structure. In addition, vibration and solute concentration are also important factors. Besides, the mesoporous sidewall and hollow tubular core structure of mCNT are prerequisites to realize full filling. Furthermore, tungsten nanowires have been obtained after reduction of AMT in mCNTs.


Purpose: The aim of this study is to review the potential application of teaching aid in reading 29 Arabic letters with Fatha vowel using a strategic teaching approach based on mental imagery techniques. Imagery strategies are said to be effective to improve memory and mastery in reading skills.
Design: This study is designed to review a strategic development of a teaching material of the Arabic Vowel Fatha Reading Aid in the teaching of Arabic reading skills for lower-level grades students using ADDIE (Analyze, Design, Develop, Implement and Evaluate) Instructional Model. The methodology of this paper consists four steps: The first step consists analyzing the main cause of students' weaknesses in reading Arabic text. The second step consists designing the characteristics of material to be taken into account in building an effective teaching aid. The third step consists the process in developing the material and the last step consists implementing and evaluating the effectiveness of usage in teaching and learning Arabic. A total of 20 students from Year 1 were exposed to the intervention using the charts that are designed graphically using picture icons which resemble certain Hija'iyyah Alphabets for 7 weeks with a focus on 4-5 letters per week.
Findings: A significant result obtained from pre and post-test using T-test analysis proved that the strategic use of this technique is potentially an alternative method to overcome the problem of reading Arabic Hijaiyyah letter of Fatha lined vowels.
Implication: This innovative teaching aid and teaching technique has a great potential to be used in the Arabic Education subject to enhance students' ability in reading skills. This material hopefully can be useful in helping pupils who are low-achievers in teaching and learning Arabic Language, Tasmik activities (Iqra 'reading guidance) and Quran Literacy Camp (Quranic recovery program) which is being implemented under the j-QAF program.