The See Color interface transforms a small portion of a colored video image into sound sources represented by spatialized musical instruments. Basically, the conversion of colors into sounds is achieved by quantization of the HSL color system. Our purpose is to provide visually impaired individuals with a capability of perception of the environment in real time. In this work the novelty is the simultaneous sonification of color and depth, depth being coded by sound rhythm. Our sonification model is illustrated by several experiments, such as: (1) detecting an open door in order to go out from the office; (2) walking in a hallway and looking for a blue cabinet; (3) walking in a hallway and looking for a red tee shirt; (4) moving outside and avoiding a parked car. Videos with sounds of experiments are available on http://www.youtube.com/guidobologna.


We present results from a study of TESS observations of the eclipsing dwarf nova system Z Cha, covering both an outburst and a superoutburst. We discover that Z Cha undergoes hysteretic loops in eclipse depth – out-of-eclipse flux space in both the outburst and the superoutburst. The direction that these loops are executed in indicates that the disc size increases during an outburst before the mass transfer rate through the disc increases, placing constraints on the physics behind the triggering of outbursts and superoutbursts. By fitting the signature of the superhump period in a flux-phase diagram, we find the rate at which this period decreases in this system during a superoutburst for the first time. We find that the superhumps in this source skip evolutionary stage 'A' seen during most dwarf nova superoutbursts, even though this evolutionary stage has been seen during previous superoutbursts of the same object. Finally, O–C values of eclipses in our sample are used to calculate new ephemerides for the system, strengthening the case for a third body in Z Cha and placing new constraints on its orbit.


The World Health Organization has labeled the omnipresence of misinformation about COVID-19 an "infodemic" that threatens efforts to battle the public health emergency. However, we know surprisingly little about the level of public uptake of medical misinformation and whether and how it affects public preferences and assessments. We conduct a pair of studies that examine the pervasiveness and persuasiveness of misinformation about the novel coronavirus' origins, effective treatments, and the efficacy of government response. Across categories, we find relatively low levels of true recall of even the prominent fake claims. However, many Americans struggle to distinguish fact from fiction, with many believing false claims and even more failing to believe factual information. An experiment offers some evidence that corrections may succeed in reducing misperceptions, at least in some contexts. Finally, we find little evidence that exposure to misinformation significantly affected a range of policy beliefs and political judgments.


Location-based games are an emerging paradigm for training, simulation, entertainment, health and many other domains. In this paper, we consider the role of location-based games as a platform for data collection and analysis of human behavior. We also examine how human teams perform in a disaster scenario when such a scenario is mapped to a game environment conducted as a location-based augmented reality game. We use a pilot experiment to study human behavior between simulated disaster rescue teams and an integrated commander for the purpose of future research into improving exploitation of local tasks versus exploration of assigned objectives by disaster response teams. We show the results of our pilot experiment, analyze the effectiveness of this game as a data collection platform and then investigate how additional experiments may be conducted to formalize this problem further.


In the Netherlands, primary schools have a rolling admissions policy. In particular, children can individually start school right after their fourth birthday instead of starting with a cohort on a fixed date. Children with birthdays during school holidays start together at the beginning of the next term. Leuven et al. (2010) indicated that these two features of the Dutch schooling system create adequate exogenous variation in children's enrolment opportunities to identify the effects of additional early formal education on later test scores. This study replicates Leuven et al. and finds some differences.


Whole neonate rabbit corneas and adult corneas containing 2-week-old scars were incubated in the presence of [14C] glycine. Radiolabeled collagen extracted from the corneas and scar tissue were analyzed by sodium dodecylsulfate/polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis and fluorography to determine the types and relative quantity of collagen polypeptides present and synthesized by these tissues. In addition to other collagen types, type III was found in both neonate cornea and scar tissue from adult cornea, albeit in relatively small quantities. Type III collagen in normal cornea was associated with the residue after pepsin digestion and formic acid extraction of the tissue, and the same type of collagen was extracted from scar tissue after similar treatment. Type III collagen-specific monoclonal antibody bound to developing normal corneas and healing adult tissue sections, as determined by immunofluorescence. Antibody binding was localized to the endothelium and growing Descemet's membrane in fetal and neonate corneas, and restricted to the most posterior region of the corneal scar tissue. Although monoclonal antibody to keratan sulfate, used as a marker for stromal fibroblasts, bound to most of the scar tissue, the antibody failed to bind to the posterior scar tissue positive for type III collagen. We conclude that endothelial cells from fetal and neonate rabbit cornea and endothelium-derived fibroblasts from healing wounds of adult cornea synthesize and deposit type III collagen. Moreover, this collagen appears to be incorporated into the growing Descemet's membrane of normal corneas and narrow posterior portion of the scar tissue.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)


Background One-in-three women has experienced domestic violence, which is a serious public health problem and a human right violation. Domestic violence is a common life experience among women in Ethiopia. The tool used to assess violence against women (VAW) has not been validated to assess its consistency. Cronbach's alpha (α, or coefficient alpha) is a measure of internal consistency, or reliability, that is, how closely a set of items are related as a group. Reliability is how well a test measures what it should. Therefore, the aim of this study was to estimate the inter-item correlation (reliability) of the tool adapted from literature. Methods A community-based study was conducted in Northwestern Ethiopia between November 15, 2017 and December 31, 2017. A total of 1,269 women at their permanent place of residence (specifically at their households) were recruited using the multistage stratified systematic sampling method. A structured questionnaire was adapted from literature. Also, 12 trained female data collectors collected the data using the face-to-face interview method. Data were entered into EpiData 3.1.0 and exported to SPSS 23.0 for analysis. Descriptive statistical analysis was carried out to estimate the reliability of the response(s). Results Overall, Cronbach's alpha was higher than the minimum recommended value of 0.70. Cronbach's alpha for specific sections were 0.764 for women's decision-making autonomy (13 items); women's accepting attitude toward justified wife-beating (five items, 0.894); physical violence (seven items, 0.876); psychological violence (15 items, 0.925); sexual violence (five items, 0.812); and inequitable gender-norms (seven items, 0.867). Conclusion The tool used to assess domestic VAW in Northwestern Ethiopia had a high reliability. Therefore, researchers can adapt the tool and further assess its reliability in other settings to have a common and validated tool to study VAW in a low-income countries.


Sewage treatment plants in Japan are subjected to advanced treatment to remove nutrients and hence control eutrophication problems in lakes and bays. This paper discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the separate digestion treatment mode for sludge generated from advanced wastewater treatment. In the separate digestion only primary sludge is digested and the excess activated sludge is directly dewatered. Separate digestion can reduce the return load of nutrients to approximately one third, and has major potential for the beneficial use of sludge.


The prolactin concentration in blood of 58 patients was measured during vestibular crisis and compensation of vestibular disorders. The results were compared with the clinical development of the disease and localization of vestibular problems. Patients with acute vestibular lesions at the central level of vestibular disorders showed a significant increase of prolactin concentrations that was higher than the concentrations in patients with the peripheral vestibular syndrome at the decompensation stage. Hyperprolactinemia during central vestibular dysfunction is viewed as a manifestation of dopamine deficiency of the tuberoinfundibular area. It is suggested that inadequacy of dopaminergic structures is one of the factors reducing adaptive and compensatory capabilities of the vestibular apparatus when its central compartments are injured.


This study was part of the WAFOW project "Can waste emission from fish farms change the structure of marine food webs?" whose objective was to perform mesocosms experiment to simulate the ammonium enriched environment, caused by salmon aquaculture. In order to assess how changes in the stoichiometry of major elements (nitrogen) in the sea affect the distribution of bioactive trace metals, and its effects on the base of the pelagic food web, the distribution and variation in time of the trace metal iron in the water and within the plankton community was studied along a 22 day experiment. It involved 2 types of water (surface and marine systems) each one, with 1 control and 4 NH4+ concentrations. Additional samples collected in a river transect and in depth provided the general Fe distribution in the environment. The iron concentration in the water was determine for three fractions as: Chelex labile (Total: TFeCh and dissolved: DFeCH), DGT labile (FeDGT) and direct (Total: TFe and dissolved: DFe), whereas the particulate concentration iron in the plankton community was determined both per fraction (PFeSF) and total content (PFe>0.2). Total average per treatments showed higher concentrations for both TfeCh and DFeCh in the marine systems compare to the surface. TFeCh showed general increasing trend in time and with increase NH4+ concentration, with a sharp decrease towards the end of the experiment in both systems. DFeCh pattern was inverse to TFeCh, with general decrease over time but lower in magnitude. FeDGT showed an average lower concentration compare to DFeCh with no define trend over time. Final FeDGT concentrations were significantly lower in treatments with artificial NH4+ addition. PFe>0.2 showed an increasing trend in time and with increased NH4+ in both systems. However when normalized to Chlorophyll-a (Chl-a) or particulate organic carbon (POC) the trend inverted, showing that at higher NH4+ influx the iron per Chl-a or POC decreases. PFeSF major changes occurred in the marine system where a estimation of the ratio between the 20-140 µm and the 2-20 µm fractions, indicative of the dominant phytoplankton size class, was significantly higher in 2 of the 3 treatments with artificial NH4+ addition. This point that the microphytoplankton increased significantly with higher NH4+. The variation over time of the concentration of Fe in the water as in the plankton community, indicate that the concentration of NH4+ can have positive or negative relation depending on the iron form. Whether via increasing the PFeCh, or by reducing the uptake by phytoplankton, a modified C:N:P can affect the cycling of iron, which in turn can have negative or positive feedbacks over the major biogeochemical cycles.


Encouraging more walking or cycling amongst commuters in the United Kingdom could help reduce physical inactivity and contribute various health, environmental and other economic benefits. Existing empirical studies of the determinants and impact of active commuting are
limited however, since they typically use cross-sectional, observational study designs or focus on small scale behavioural interventions. This thesis explored how the impact of larger scale population-level changes in the design of urban built environments and other transport policies
could be assessed using theories and techniques often employed in health economics. There are three main sections. First, a literature review which found few studies of the health impact of changes to the built environment that had used randomisation or advanced econometric
techniques (e.g. instrumental variables). This included an assessment of whether the chosen methodological approach critically affected the results obtained and the development of a guide to aid policy makers in distinguishing between, and assessing the quality of, observational
studies that used different analytical techniques. Second, an empirical analysis of twenty-one waves of the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS) which included an exploration of the determinants of active commuting including life events (e.g. moving home and changing job)
and studies of the impact on body mass index and subjective wellbeing of switching commute mode from car travel to walking, cycling or public transport. Third, an exploration of the potential impact of financial incentives to promote active travel. This included an empirical review of intervention studies as well as a theoretical element, including development of a simple analytical framework and review of behavioural economic concepts. Whilst the identified health improvements could support the case for investment in policies that promote active commuting, the thesis recommended that more robust evaluation of population-level policies is required so that scarce resources can be targeted more effectively.


In last decades a special attention has been paid to intercultural communication and its development in societies all around the world. A number of cultural anthropologists describe it as an informal face-to-face verbal/oral interaction between individuals representing different cultures (Asante-Gudykunst, 1989:14; Prosser, 1978:102). In addition, in a number of scientific papers one can read that this subtype of human communication can have its key success only if it is based on the premise of the equal use of different languages and of their respect. Article 2:3 of the Lisbon Treaty itself states that the European Union "shall respect its rich cultural and linguistic diversity, and shall ensure that Europe's cultural heritage is safeguarded and enhanced" (OJEU, 2007:11). The truth is that intercultural communication, as one part of communication in general, is a necessity for successfully bridging the gap between different cultures and languages. In the European Union intercultural exchange and communication among the European nations are the imperative for a united international (economical, political, social etc.) cooperation in which foreign language learning has a special social and political priority. However, inside the borders of the European Union there is a large group of official languages which are lesser used and, consequently, not widely learnt (e.g. Polish, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Catalonian, Welsh etc.). In the Balkans all official national languages together with other spoken minority ones belong to this group according to Ferguson`s sociolinguistic classification. Viewing intercultural communication as a profound social phenomenon, Singer (1998:41) undoubtedly pointed out that when different groups encounter one another, a common problem is that people think differently. According to the theories of cognitive anthropology, this always occurs because of the existence of either slightly or completely different cultural models in societies. To be achieved a deeper and comprehensive intercultural communication and its effectiveness, which both involve reduction in a large measure of uncertainty and anxiety related to otherness and building a new perceptive scheme about others, learning lesser used languages, such as Greek in Serbia and Serbian in Greece, is considered a categorical request for any further constructive development of relations and cooperation between different nations within and outside the European Union.


We focus on the confounding bias between language and location in the visual grounding pipeline, where we find that the bias is the major visual reasoning bottleneck. For example, the grounding process is usually a trivial languagelocation association without visual reasoning, e.g., grounding any language query containing sheep to the nearly central regions, due to that most queries about sheep have ground-truth locations at the image center. First, we frame the visual grounding pipeline into a causal graph, which shows the causalities among image, query, target location and underlying confounder. Through the causal graph, we know how to break the grounding bottleneck: deconfounded visual grounding. Second, to tackle the challenge that the confounder is unobserved in general, we propose a confounder-agnostic approach called: Referring Expression Deconfounder (RED), to remove the confounding bias. Third, we implement RED as a simple language attention, which can be applied in any grounding method. On popular benchmarks, RED improves various state-of-the-art grounding methods by a significant margin. Code is available at: https://github.com/JianqiangH/Deconfounded_VG.


In this study, we utilized unsupervised machine learning techniques to examine the relationship between different symptoms in cases who died of COVID-19 and cases who recovered from it. First, our data was cleared of redundancies, and the ten most important variables were selected using a filter-based technique (extra-tree classifier). Next, we calculated the Silhouette, Davis Boldin (DB), and the mean intra-cluster distance measures to select the optimal number of clusters, then clustered the data using both the K-means and hierarchical clustering based on Self Organizing Map (SOM) neural network. Our results revealed that patients who died of COVID-19 had high mean values in different symptoms, but not all patients with this characteristic necessarily died. Be- sides, our result indicated that the patient ' s age is directly related to the hospital duration, and elderly patients are more likely to be assigned to the intensive care unit (ICU). However, the patient ' s sex has the same distri- bution in different groups and does not correlate with other symptoms. In conclusion, our results confirmed past studies. Also, this research helps physicians improve medical services by considering other important factors for treating different groups of COVID-19 patients.


Unfavourable effects of trans monounsaturated fatty acid (trans-C18:1) isomers on health variables have been reported. Reports on their actual intake, however, are scarce, because of the absence in many nutrient databases of values for trans-C18:1, and the wide variation in the level of trans fatty acids between different brands of the same product. We therefore examined whether the intake of trans-C18:1 is reflected by trans-C18:1 concentrations in serum triacylglycerols or platelet phospholipids. Thirtyeight men received two diets in random order. During the first experimental period twenty men consumed a Western-type control diet for six weeks, and eighteen men consumed a modified diet in which 70% of the fat was replaced by palm oil. After a wash-out period of 3 weeks, regimens were crossed over (second experimental period). The proportion of total fatty acids from trans-C18:1 in the diet decreased from 4·7 (SEM 0·27) during the control to 2·1 (SEM 0·16) on the modified diet (P < 0·001). Trans-C18:1 in serum triacylglycerols decreased from 3·5 (SEM 0·13) to 2·8 (SEM 0·11)% (P < 0·001), and in platelet phospholipids from 1·0 (SEM 0·06) to 0·7 (SEM 0·4)% (P < 0·001). After the first experimental period trans-C18:1 in the diet correlated with trans-C18:1 in serum triacylglycerols (r 0·41; P = 0·014), and platelet phospholipids (r 0·52; P = 0·001). Also, differences in the intake between the two periods correlated with changes in the proportion of trans-C18:1 in serum triacylglycerols (r 0·56; P= 0·001) and platelet phospholipids (r 0·58; P < 0·001). These results suggest that analyses of blood lipid fractions can be used to estimate the intake, and to monitor changes in the intake, of trans-C18:1.


The rhizosphere supports greater bacterial densities than root-free soil. Rhizosphere bacteria (RB) can affect plant health and nutrition however, attempts to manipulate introduced and/or indigenous communities to benefit plants are unreliable. Current evidence indicates that habitat factors strongly influence bacterial communities. In the rhizosphere many processes give rise to a high degree of habitat heterogeneity therefore, to understand how RB interact with their environment their ecology should be studied at the micro-spatial-scale. The objectives of this research were to develop a method for sampling RB at the microhabitat-scale, and to investigate techniques that can link these samples with key factors, such as substrate availability and pH. A novel method enabling non-destructive, micro-scale sampling of bacteria was developed. Its efficiency for removing bacteria from the root surface was similar to that of existing methods but offered greater accuracy in estimating RB densities. The novel method revealed that RB density was inversely proportional to distance from the apex of Brassica napus roots and that the composition of RB communities was highly variable at the micro-scale. Imaging of 14C-labelled root exudates revealed that RB density was not reflective of exudate availability but attempts to link RB with available C were unsuccessful. A key outcome of this work was the development of a strategy to combine micro sampling with microelectrode measurements. Microelectrodes revealed that pH at the root surface was highly variable at the micro-scale which, combined with similar observations for RB density/diversity, highlights the appropriateness of this scale for linking RB communities with their environment. This thesis considers the link between RB community structure, habitat and function and provides a detailed description of micro-sample analyses as well as a set of methods that will enable for the first time, the interactions between any surface-associated bacteria and their environment to be investigated at a microhabitat-scale.


Solid wastes are always collected as mixtures of different materials. They gets crushed, classified and sorted in solid waste treatment plants. Among these processes the sorting is the determining step for recycling and reuse. Traditional sorting technologies like magnetic sorting and eddy current sorting are only able to process some special kinds of ingredients of waste mixture roughly, such as the separation of ferrous and non-ferrous metals. Since there exist corresponding force fields between waste particles and separators. Some other properties of the solid particles such as the colours, shapes and texture features could also be considered as sorting criterions but there is no sufficient force field between these properties and separators. In this paper, an indirect sorting process by using optical sensor and mechanical separating system was developed and introduced. By using this system the particle sizes and positions, colours and shapes of each waste particle are able to be determined and used as sorting criterion. The mechanical sorting device consists of a compressed air nozzle which is controlled by computer, the target particles which were recognized by sensor were blown out of the main waste stream. Feature recognition by using optical sensor yield good results. This research provides a new approach for multi-feature recognition of sensor based sorting technology.


We recently found that nucleosomes directly block access of CRISPR/Cas9 to DNA (Horlbeck et al., 2016). Here, we build on this observation with a comprehensive algorithm that incorporates chromatin, position, and sequence features to accurately predict highly effective single guide RNAs (sgRNAs) for targeting nuclease-dead Cas9-mediated transcriptional repression (CRISPRi) and activation (CRISPRa). We use this algorithm to design next-generation genome-scale CRISPRi and CRISPRa libraries targeting human and mouse genomes. A CRISPRi screen for essential genes in K562 cells demonstrates that the large majority of sgRNAs are highly active. We also find CRISPRi does not exhibit any detectable non-specific toxicity recently observed with CRISPR nuclease approaches. Precision-recall analysis shows that we detect over 90% of essential genes with minimal false positives using a compact 5 sgRNA/gene library. Our results establish CRISPRi and CRISPRa as premier tools for loss- or gain-of-function studies and provide a general strategy for identifying Cas9 target sites. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.19760.001


Excavations were carried out over a number of seasons and included the recovery of a dug-out canoe which was serving as an underlying support of a portion of the woodwork in one of the pits. The crannog was a hunting seat of the Earls of Ross during the medieval period. When in 1476 ,the Earldom" of Ross was irrevocably annexed to the Crown, the " management of its rent" was entrusted by the King to the Earl of Sutherland, who transferred the trust to Alexander Mackenzie of Kintail, sixth chief of the Mackenzies. By the nineteenth century it was being used as a kitchen garden. It does not appear to have been a matter of common knowledge that the island was artificial. Structurally the island appears to consist of three main series of layers:, the upper structure of earth, clay, and boulders, with local seams\r\nof peat, charcoal, and burnt clay, the strata represented in the west half of the island by the platforms of timber with the intervening occupation debris, and in\r\nthe east half by the stratified layers of brushwood, clay, peat, and habitation refuse, the mass of organic material at the base of the island. Little direct evidence of the age of the crannog was obtained in course of the investigation. That wood-chips, cut with a sharp iron instrument, exist at the base of the island, is helpful only in a general way. The bones included portions of the skull of a shorthorn ox, which may be the Celtic shorthorn, Bos longifrons.


Possible interaction of volatilized As and S with CaO and Fe2O3 (creating solid product) could efficiently improve coal combustion flue gas cleaning. For this reason, S-CaO, As-CaO, S- Fe2O3 and As- Fe2O3 relationships were evaluated in bottom ash and fly ash fractions from fluidised-bed co-combustion of coal and wastes (and limestone as desulphurization additive) through calculation of correlation coefficients and composition of magnetic concentrates. It was concluded that S exhibited a dominant association with CaO while As exhibited affinity to both CaO and Fe2O3 - the significance differed a little in bottom ash and fly ash. In the bottom ash, the affinity of As to CaO was more significant, while in the fly ash the association to Fe2O3 slightly prevailed.


An option's market price reflects the risk-neutral probability that it will end up in the money. Research has been increasing in recent years that shows how, given a set of market prices for options covering a range of strikes, an estimate of the entire risk-neutral probability distribution can be obtained. The technique is based on the fact that the second partial derivative of the option pricing function with respect to the strike price is the risk-neutral density (discounted from option expiration). This idea is generally attributed to Breeden and Litzenberger's 1978 paper. In this article, Zimmermann shows that the connection between the second partial derivative of the option price with respect to the exercise price and risk-neutral probabilities has a much longer history, including a little-known 1974 note by Fischer Black, and going all the way back to Bachelier in 1900.


Detection and recognition of object movements in a video is one of the research topics that are popular today. For the purposes of the analysis of the object movements in the video, the direction of movement is the important feature. In this study, we proposed a new method for determining the direction of movement using Histogram of Oriented Optical Flow (HOOF). We extract it locally at every N-by-N grid, not the entire frame. Direction movement is determined based on the value of HOOF on every grid. We classify the direction of movement in each grid into 12 directions. We use a video from UMN datasets for testing the proposed method. The experiment results show the value of False Positive Per Grid (FPPG) is 28.32%, and False Negative Per Grid (FNPG) is 4.08%. It proved that the use of Grid-based HOOF for analyzing movements on video data is good enough and can be improved in the future studies.


AIM
Evidence arising from experimental studies indicates an association between increased levels of the growth hormone/insulin-like growth factor 1 and oxidative stress. The association of the Ser326Cys polymorphism in the 8-oxoguanine glycosylase (OGG1) gene with a colon carcinoma and diabetes mellitus has been examined. The aim of the study was to compare the genotypic distribution of OGG1 Ser326Cys between acromegaly patients and nonacromegalic subjects and to explore whether this polymorphism is associated with a colon polyp risk and abnormal glucose tolerance.

METHODS
We examined 98 acromegaly patients, and 99 healthy subjects who can be compared in terms of age and gender. All participants were evaluated by anthropometric and biochemical measurements. Also, a 75-g oral glucose test and colonoscopy was applied to the patients. Genomic DNA was isolated from peripheral blood leucocytes and the genotype was assessed by melting temperature analyses after using a real-time polymerase chain reaction protocol.

RESULTS
Colon polyps were detected in 13 (30.2%) of 43 patients who underwent the colonoscopy. Except for diastolic blood pressure, clinical and biochemical characteristics were similar between the patients diagnosed with and without a colon polyp. A higher proportion of acromegaly patients had the Ser326Ser genotype when compared to the control group (p=0.007). Genotypes were similar between the patients with a normal glucose tolerance and an abnormal glucose tolerance (p=0.774). The frequency of the Cys allele was significantly higher in patients with polyps than those without a polyp (38.5% vs. 18.3%) (p=0.029).

CONCLUSION
Our results suggest that the Cys allele may influence the colon polyp risk in acromegaly patients. Large-scale studies with acromegaly patients are required to show whether being a carrier of the Cys allele is associated with the risk of a colorectal polyp.


In this paper, we focus on a monitoring environment with wireless sensor network in which multiple mobile sink nodes traverse a given sensing field in different spatial-temporal patterns and collect various types of environmental data with different deadline constraints. For such an environment, we propose an energy-efficient data collection method that reduces intermediate transmission in multi-hop communication while meeting predetermined deadlines. The basic approach of the proposed method is to temporarily gather (or buffer) the observed data into several sensor nodes around the moving path of the mobile sink that would meet their deadlines at the next visit. Then, the buffered data is transferred to the mobile sink node when it visits the buffering nodes. We also propose a mobile sink-initiated proactive routing protocol with low cost (MIPR-LC) that efficiently constructs routes to the buffering nodes on each sensor node. Moreover, we simulate the proposed collection method and routing protocol to show their effectiveness. Our results confirm that the proposed method can gather almost all of the observed data within the deadline, while reducing the intermediate transmissions by 30%, as compared with an existing method. In addition, the MIPR-LC method can reduce the transmissions for the route construction by up to 12% when compared with a simple routing protocol.


Aging effects are common in lead free solder joints within electronic assemblies that are exposed to isothermal environments for extended periods. Such exposures lead to evolution of the solder microstructure, which results in changes in the mechanical properties and creep behavior of the solder joints. In our recent investigations, we have been utilizing Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) to better understand aging induced degradations. The microstructural evolutions were observed in SAC305 and SAC_Q (SAC+Bi) alloys exposed to isothermal conditions at T = 125 °C for several different regions from several different joints. The microstructures in several fixed regions of interest were recorded after predetermined time intervals of aging, which were 1 hour (up to 24 hours) and 10 hours (up to 150 hours) for the short term aging samples; and 250 hours (up to 2500 hours) for the long term aging samples. Using the recorded images and imaging processing software, the area and diameter of each IMC particle was tracked during the aging process.
 As expected, the quantitative analysis of the evolving SAC_Q microstructure showed that the particles coalesced during aging leading to a decrease in the number of particles. This caused an increase in the average diameter of the particles of slightly more than 100% for long term aging of 2500 hours. For SAC305, the average particle diameter was found to increase at three times the rate (increase of 200% after 2500 hours of aging). Thus, coarsening of IMC particles was greatly mitigated in the SAC_Q alloy relative to that observed in SAC305. Immediately after reflow solidification, Bismuth rich phases were present in the SAC_Q joints. During aging at T = 125 °C, the bismuth was observed to quickly go into solution both within the beta-Sn dendrites and in the intermetallic rich regions between dendrites. This resulted in solid solution strengthening of the lead free solder. It was also found that the aging-induced presence of bismuth in solution within the beta-Sn matrix provided an increased resistance to the Ostwald ripening diffusion process that coarsens the Ag3Sn IMC particles. The combination of these two effects in the SAC+Bi alloy lead to greatly improved resistance to aging induced effects relative to the SAC305 solder alloy. Finally, we have compared the time dependent evolution of microstructure with the degradation in strength during aging for of the two solder alloys, and good correlations were observed.


: The effects of Bitter Melon ( Momordica charantia ) on the normal and onset of alloxan-induced diabetes in male and female Swiss albino mice were examined. It was observed that the mice given orally juice extract of Bitter melon (10 ml /kg BW for 12 weeks) showed a significant decrease in the blood glucose level and glycosylated hemoglobin A1c of diabetic mice induced by intra-peritoneal injection of alloxan (50 mg/ kg, BW i.p .) and significantly improved the glucose tolerance test. Histological examinations were also done on pancreas. Oral administration of juice extract of Bitter melon (10 ml/ kg BW) three times weekly for 12 weeks showed dramatic regeneration in the pancreatic islets of alloxan diabetic mice. The present results suggest that orally given of fruit juice, M. charantia may have a role in the renewal of β cells in alloxan-diabetic mice or alternately may permit the recovery of partially destroyed β cells. Momordica charantia may effectively normalize blood AST, ALT, creatinine and cholestrol in alloxan induced-diabetic group. These findings revealed that juice extract of bitter melon may have a potential benefit in the treatment of diabetes, play a role in its management and reduces the risk of diabetic complications.


Abstract:In recent decades, the working class as it was once conceived has lost its paradigmatic place in labor history along with the nineteenth-century struggles from which it emerged. This essay surveys what the Working Class in American History book series has taught us about class in the age of cotton, coal, and steel, reviews the major criticisms of the concept of the working class on which it was founded, and reconsiders what its nineteenth-century subjects still have to say. The essay concludes with a call to reclaim a more capacious conception of class as a political formation based on property relations, describing at once a prospect, a project, and a perspective with labor at its core.


Reconstruction of objects from a scene may be viewed as a data fitting problem using energy minimizing splines as the basic shape. The process of obtaining the minimum to construct the "best" shape can sometimes be important. Some of the potential problems in the Euler-Lagrangian variational solution proposed by Kass et al. (1988), were brought to light by Amini et al. (1990), and a dynamic programming (DP) method was also suggested. In this paper we further develop the DP solution. We show that in certain cases, the discrete form of the solution presented by Amini et al., and adopted subsequently by others may also produce local minima, and develop a strategy to avoid this. We provide a stronger form of the conditions necessary to derive a solution when the energy depends on the second derivative, as in the case of "active contours".


A method for assaying antibodies to insulin that is based on the protection of insulin-I-131 from degradation by a liver extract is described. Moderately potent antibodies to insulin were obtained in rabbits by the injection of crystalline beef insulin, and a high degree of insulin resistance was demonstrable in some of the animals. The immunized animals did not become diabetic. The biological activity of various insulin preparations was detected by their ability to lower the blood sugar of rabbits or through the stimulation of glucose uptake by the rat hemidiaphragm. Crystalline beef insulin and crude extracts of beef pancreas were effectively neutralized under the conditions of the tests whereas corresponding pork insulin preparations were incompletely neutralized in the rat hemidiaphragm assay. The insulin activity of sera from beef, pork, sheep and human sources was neutralized by the rabbit antisera. The insulin activity of rabbit pancreas extracts and rabbit sera exhibited significant individual differences in the extent of neutralization. These observations on rabbit insulin preparations support the concept of Moloney and Coval that insulin of a given animal species can exist either in a "native" form that is not readily neutralized by antiserum produced in the same species, or an "altered" form that can be neutralized.


A large rockslide was released from the inner Askja caldera into Lake Askja, Iceland, on 21 July 2014. Upon entering the lake, it caused a large tsunami that traveled about ∼3 km across the lake and inundated the shore with vertical runup measuring up to 60–80 m. Following the event, comprehensive field data were collected, including GPS measurements of the inundation and multibeam echo soundings of the lake bathymetry. Using this exhaustive data set, numerical modeling of the tsunami has been conducted using both a nonlinear shallow water model and a Boussinesq-type model that includes frequency dispersion. To constrain unknown landslide parameters, a global optimization algorithm, Differential Evolution, was employed, resulting in a parameter set that minimized the deviation from measured inundation. The tsunami model of Lake Askja is the first example where we have been able to utilize field data to show that frequency dispersion is needed to explain the tsunami wave radiation pattern and that shallow water theory falls short. We were able to fit the trend in tsunami runup observations around the entire lake using the Boussinesq model. In contrast, the shallow water model gave a different runup pattern and produced pronounced offsets in certain areas. The well-documented Lake Askja tsunami thus provided a unique opportunity to explore and capture the essential physics of landslide tsunami generation and propagation through numerical modeling. Moreover, the study of the event is important because this dispersive nature is likely to occur for other subaerial impact tsunamis.


The German National Specialist Libraries cooperate closely in the field of digital preservation. One of the partners hosts the preservation system, while each library creates its own workflows and is free to ingest its digital material into this system. This paper delineates the factors for success of this collaboration. It describes the different aspects of collaboration in digital preservation and describes the benefits and costs of cooperation in this field as a case study.
Digital preservation is resource intensive and the required technology is complex. Therefore the libraries benefit from synergy effects: Reduced cost by sharing the preservation system, usage of similar workflows and formats of digital objects, work sharing in networking activities and staff training. The paper also stresses the advantages and difficulties while applying for certificates in a consortium. Their collaboration extends to intensive national and international networking activities, which yield more contacts than a single library could maintain if it acted on its own. The libraries' staffs are active in working groups of nestor – the German network for digital preservation – and in working groups of the Open Preservation Foundation.


Background The carrier status of lavender foal syndrome (LFS), cerebellar abiotrophy (CA), severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), and occipitoatlantoaxial malformation (OAAM1) in foals with juvenile idiopathic epilepsy (JIE) is unknown. Hypothesis/Objectives To determine the carrier status of LFS, CA, SCID, and OAAM1 in foals with JIE. Animals Ten foals with JIE. Materials and Methods Archived DNA samples were tested for known genetic mutations causing LFS, CA, SCID, and OAAM1. The inclusion criteria consisted of having been diagnosed with JIE by ruling out other causes of seizures in foals and supported by electroencephalographic examination. Results Ten Egyptian Arabian horses (5 females and 5 males) were phenotyped as foals with JIE by electroencephalography (EEG). All foals were negative for the genetic mutations that cause LFS, CA, SCID, and OAAM1 except for 1 foal that was a carrier of CA. Conclusions and Clinical Importance Juvenile idiopathic epilepsy of Egyptian Arabian foals and LFS appear to be phenotypically and genetically distinct disorders. There was no apparent association between JIE and LFS, CA, SCID, and OAAM1.


A robust and straightforward synthesis of waterborne polymer nanospheres bearing the supramolecular association unit dialkoxynapthalene at their surface is presented using polymerization-induced self-assembly (PISA). A RAFT agent bearing this unit is first employed to produce poly(acrylic acid) chains, which are then chain-extended with styrene (S) to spontaneously form the nano-objects via RAFT aqueous emulsion polymerization. The particular challenge posed by the dialkoxynapthalene hydrophobicity can be overcome by the use of PISA and the deprotonation of the poly(acrylic acid). At pH = 7, very homogeneous latexes are obtained. The particle diameters can be tuned from 36 to 105 nm (with a narrow particle size distribution) by varying the molar mass of the PS block. The surface accessibility of the dialkoxynapthalene moieties is demonstrated by complexation with the complementary host cyclobis(paraquat-p-phenylene) (CBPQT4+ · Cl- ), highlighting the potential of the nanospheres to act as building blocks for responsive supramolecular structures.


The origins of the commonly observed green emission (GE) from ZnO nanostructures remain highly controversial despite extensive studies over the past few decades. Herein, through a comprehensive ultrafast optical spectroscopy study, new insights into its origin and the charge trapping dynamics at the GE centers in ZnO nanowires prepared by the vapor transport method are gained. Transient absorption spectroscopy (TAS) revealed a sub-band-gap absorption bleaching band arising from the state filling of the electrons in the conduction band and holes trapped in the GE centers. The GE originates from the recombination between the electrons in the conduction band and/or shallow donor levels and the holes trapped at the GE centers (which are located at \ensuremath{\sim}0.88 eV above the valence band). Importantly, an ultrafast excitonic Auger-type hole trapping process to the GE centers occurring in a subpicosecond time scale was also uncovered by TAS\char22{}shedding new light on the mechanism behind the fast and efficient charge trapping of photoexcited carriers. The knowledge gained is crucial for the development of ZnO-based optoelectronic devices.


INTRODUCTION: The brain works with electrochemical shots, generating the brain waves that represent the activity of the cortex. The basic frequencies of brain functioning: gamma (30-70 Hz), beta (13-30 Hz), alpha (8-13 Hz), theta (4-8 Hz) and delta (1-4 Hz). With reference to the mental characteristics associated with each brain wave pattern, it is possible to improve the "quality" of these waves so that it is possible to condition cortical activity by inducing a specific wave pattern. One way to do this is through the binaural sounds that can be used to harmonize or synchronize both hemispheres of the brain in a single synergistic pattern of waves. METHODOLOGY: Integrative review, made from the reading of articles found in the databases with the descriptors: binaural beats, cerebral wave, and brain synchronization. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION: Binaural pulses are apparent sounds whose perception arises in the brain independently of the physical stimulus. They are sounds with different frequencies that arrive separately and simultaneously through each ear, creating variations in the brain, since it receives a stimulus and the predominant frequency will be changed until the frequency of the stimulus. By choosing specific patterns of binaural rhythm one can modify experiences and feelings and reproduce the natural cycles of the brain. The technique can be applied to induce favorable mental states to extend treatments of various disorders that affect humans safely and non-invasively, and can be used to combat depression and anxiety. CONCLUSION: This technique allows its use in learning and rehabilitation in people with cognitive impairment.


During the year of 2000, in a Junior High School of Porto Alegre, a health listener service was introduced aiming to ease the path of the school community to information and to answer their health needs. The activities were based on three axes: Developing Adults Capabilities, Assistance and Education. Those activities focused on health and tried to approach different subjects according to the school community needs. Through this work, we support the importance of developing workshops and nursing consultations as efficient ways to bring education and health to the community.


NAD(P)H:quinone oxidoreductase (NQO1) has been proposed to play a protective role against the toxic effects of benzo[a]pyrene quinones. The C609T base change in the NQO1 gene, resulting in a Pro187Ser amino acid change in the protein, has been associated with deficient enzyme activity. We examined whether this polymorphism modified the risks of smoking-related cancers in a case-control study involving patients with lung cancer (n = 150), laryngeal cancer (n = 129), oral/pharyngeal cancer (n = 121) and control individuals (n = 172), all Caucasian smokers. No statistically significant associations were observed between the NQO1 genotypes and smoking-related cancers, although the Ser/Ser genotype was associated with a tendency towards increased risk for lung cancer (odds ratio [OR] = 2.2, 95% confidence interval [CI] 0.7-6.7) and for oral/pharyngeal cancer (OR = 2.3, 95% CI 0.6-8.2). No significant interaction between the NQO1 genotype and either smoking exposure or GSTM1 genotype was found. Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that lack of NQO1 activity may be involved in some smoking-related cancers. However, they were based on small numbers of individuals with the putative atrisk genotype, and the associations did not reach statistical significance. Moreover, these results contrast with those observed in some other ethnic populations, where a protective effect of the NQO1 Ser allele was found. Further studies are therefore clearly needed for a better understanding of the potential role of NQO1 activity in tobacco-related cancers.


Background. Osteoarthritis (OA) is a chronic and degenerative pathology that affects joints in particular hands, knees, hip and lower back. The prevalence and incidence is in continuous increase for the advanced ageing of the population and the increasing presence of risk factors such as obesity. OA burden of disease implies high care costs and has an important social impact because it limits people's every day activities causing pain and mobility reduction. Objectives. The aim of this work is to carry out an economic evaluation of the intra-articular (i.a.) use of the Platelet-Rich Plasma (PRP) therapy in the treatment for knee osteoarthritis. Recently the scientific literature has shown the effectiveness of this treatment. The comparator adopted is the Hyaluronic acid (HA) which represents the standard i.a. therapy. Both therapies can reduce pain, improving patient quality of life, and can help the patient to delay the joint surgery, that represents a high cost for the National Health System. Methods. A cost-effectiveness analysis (CEA) were performed using a decision tree model. The effectiveness outcomes are reported in terms of Quality Adjusted Life Year (QALY). The costs are reported in Euro (€) currency evaluated in 2016. The adopted perspective is the Healthcare System and only direct cost have been included in the analyses. Deterministic and probabilistic sensibility analyses are reported in order to evaluate the robustness of the results and account for the different sources of uncertainty.The analyses have been carried out for three European country: Germany, Italy and France Results. The PRP therapy results more costly but also more effective than HA. Using a Willingness to pay thresholds of € 10,000/QALY, the PRP result the cost-effective therapy with respect to HA, for patient with moderate to severe knee OA.


Objectives This study aimed to explore carers' experiences of supporting a family member or friend with dementia through COVID-19 and experiences of hope and resilience during this time. Methods Qualitative longitudinal research was undertaken in the UK, with 13 unpaid carers of people living with dementia who took part in two semi-structured interviews 8 weeks apart between June and October 2020. All transcripts were analysed using reflexive thematic analysis. Findings Four themes were developed and included: COVID-19 impacted negatively upon everyday living; carer resilience: adapting to COVID-19; analysis of risk: safeguarding the person living with dementia; and thinking about the future with COVID-19. Conclusions The results illustrated how the sudden changes which occurred during the pandemic negatively impacted on carers and people living with dementia in several ways, including additional responsibilities and taking away hope. The importance of continued formal and informal support for carers and people living with dementia during COVID-19 were highlighted. Formal services, care homes, and organisations need to be supported to implement procedures to ensure a safe environment during future lockdowns or periods of social restrictions. This will enable carers to remain visiting their family members and increase their confidence in accessing services and allowing paid carers to support their family member with dementia. These results have also illustrated the resilience of carers, who adapted to sudden changes which impacted negatively on their wellbeing and the wellbeing of the person living with dementia.


The paper presents a feasible method to complement ground-based middle atmospheric Rayleigh lidar temperature observations with numerical simulations in the lower stratosphere and troposphere to study gravity waves. Validated mesoscale numerical simulations are utilized to complement the temperature below 30-km altitude. For this purpose, high-temporal-resolution output of the numerical results was interpolated on the position of the lidar in the lee of the Scandinavian mountain range. Two wintertime cases of orographically induced gravity waves are analyzed. Wave parameters are derived using a wavelet analysis of the combined dataset throughout the entire altitude range from the troposphere to the mesosphere. Although similar in the tropospheric forcings, both cases differ in vertical propagation. The combined dataset reveals stratospheric wave breaking for one case, whereas the mountain waves in the other case could propagate up to about 40-km altitude. The lidar observations reveal an interaction of the vertically propagating gravity waves with the stratopause, leading to a stratopause descent in both cases.


With the rapid growth of medical and biomedical image data, energy-efficient solutions for analyzing such image data that can be processed fast and accurately on platforms with low power budget are highly desirable. This paper uses segmenting glial cells in brain microscopy images as a case study to demonstrate how to achieve biomedical image segmentation with significant energy saving and minimal comprise in accuracy. Specifically, we design, train, implement, and evaluate Fully Convolutional Networks (FCNs) for biomedical image segmentation on IBM's neurosynaptic DNN processor — TrueNorth (TN). Comparisons in terms of accuracy and energy dissipation of TN with that of a low power NVIDIA TX2 mobile GPU platform have been conducted. Experimental results show that TN can offer at least two orders of magnitude improvement in energy efficiency when compared to TX2 GPU for the same workload.


Using human induced pluripotent stem cell (hiPSC) technology we are developing methods to examine host-bacterial interactions. Due to the fact that undifferentiated human induced pluripotent stem cells are amenable to genetic engineering, can be cultured indefinitely and can further be differentiated into multiple cell types, we are exploiting both organoid and macrophage systems to investigate the interactions between host cells and diarrhoeal pathogens, including enterotoxigenic Escherichia coli and Vibrio cholerae. Utilising both wild type and relevant knockout hiPSC lines we are probing both initial interactions and subsequent utilisation of pathways for the effects of toxins. The further analysis of genetically engineered bacteria extend the usefulness of this model system, and complement the availability of mutant host cells, towards the simultaneous genetic analysis of both pathogen and host.


I couldn't bear to look at her - or to look away. I watched her, wondering how long she could suffer like this and still evade death. My 69-year-old mother was dying from breast cancer that had spread to her bones and major organs. Watching her on her deathbed, struggling for breath, I realized (and am still coming to understand) that her suffering had meaning.


Abstract Objective: To design and characterize aerosol microparticles (MP) to provide sustained release of the water-soluble compound sulforhodamine B (SRB) and achieve effective aerosol dispersion. Significance: Modulating the release of water-soluble compounds remains a challenge in pulmonary drug delivery. Methods: SRB and water made up an aqueous solution, while acetalated dextran (Ac-Dex) and isopropyl alcohol made up an organic solution. The two solutions were mixed together, and the solution was spray dried to produce MP. MP were characterized for morphology, size, release kinetics, aerosol dispersion, and cellular interactions. Results: Ac-Dex MP exhibited corrugated morphology and aerodynamic diameters from 2.06 to 2.86 μm. MP deposited in all stages of a Next Generation Impactor, with >90% fine particle fraction. MP exhibited encapsulation efficiencies >129% with SRB loading values up to 16.7 μg SRB/mg MP. MP exhibited sustained release of SRB at pH 7 and fast release at pH 5. In vitro experiments showed minimal cytotoxicity, successful uptake of MP in epithelial cells, and no disruption to the integrity of epithelial monolayers. Conclusions: Ac-Dex MP systems demonstrated the ability to provide sustained the release of a water-soluble therapeutic in addition to effective aerosol dispersion for pulmonary applications. Graphical Abstract


Geocoding is commonly employed to determine the location of addresses for use in spatial analysis, including the establishment of residency restriction zones for sex offenders. Street geocoding has known limitations in terms of positional accuracy, which may adversely affect spatial analytic methods. A case study on sex offenders in Orange County, Florida, is used to characterize the positional accuracy of street geocoding and its impact on spatial analysis. Positional accuracy of street geocoded locations of sex offenders' residences, schools, and day care facilities was determined using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) by measuring the distance to the correct property boundaries. Results show that positional errors in street geocoding are substantial and may bias conclusions drawn from proximity analysis. Findings strongly suggest that street geocoding is not appropriate for assessing residency restriction violations for sex offenders. These findings have important implications for criminal justice policies related to residency restrictions for sex offenders.


The strip isolation of AC-coupled n-on-p silicon strip sensors is compromised by positive charges located in the oxide above the silicon bulk. These positive oxide charges form an inversion layer electrically interconnecting the n+-implanted strips. To achieve a proper strip isolation though, a p+-implantation, the p-stop, is usually inserted in between the strips. The properties of this implantation like the concentration or implantation depth influence the final strip isolation. To investigate the isolation capability of the p-stop, field effect transistor (FET) test structures have been designed, measured and simulated using Synopsys TCAD. The main goal of these studies is to relate the threshold voltage of such transistors to the inter-strip resistance of actual sensors. Therewith, extensive measurements of usually large resistances could be transferred to comparable simple ones.


The enrichment model is a model that aims to be used in the education of gifted children and is based on the development of some additional programs for children. Enrichment educational programs (EEP) consist of high-level content products and processes which are designed to develop problem solving skills, to support creativity and independent learning and which are based on the individualized programs and teaching. The aim of this study is to determine the views of the classroom teachers about the EEPs designed for gifted students who continue their education through inclusion in primary schools. Therefore, the case study model, one of the qualitative research methods, was used in the research. The participants of the study are ten primary school teachers who taught gifted students. The data were collected using the "Semi-structured interview form" which was developed by the authors. The findings of the research show that the teachers do not have knowledge about the EEP practices in general. Therefore, there is a need for the support of the field experts in the planning and implementation of the EEPs.


Abstract Background and aim: Vitamin D deficiency is common in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The aims of the present study were to determine the prevalence of vitamin D deficiency and to identify clinical and epidemiological variables associated with vitamin D deficiency in an outpatient population with IBD. Methods: Participants were recruited from nine hospitals in the southeastern and western regions of Norway as part of an observational, multicentre study from March 2013 to April 2014. Clinical and epidemiological data were collected by interview and from medical records. All analyses of serum 25-hydroxyvitamin D (25-OH-D) were performed in the same laboratory. Results: In total, 49% (200/408) of the patients had a 25-OH-D concentration <50 nmol/L, including 53% (122/230) of the Crohn's disease (CD) patients and 44% (78/178) of the ulcerative colitis (UC) patients. In CD patients, disease activity, measured as the HBI, was inversely associated with vitamin D deficiency. No such association was observed with the Simple Clinical Colitis Activity Index (SCCAI) scores in UC, but in UC patients, vitamin D deficiency was associated with elevated faecal calprotectin >100 mg/kg. In patients with CD, there were significantly more relapses during the previous year in patients with vitamin D deficiency. Conclusions: Vitamin D deficiency was common, especially in CD, and was associated with increased disease activity, a relapsing disease course and higher inflammatory activity.


A simple methodology is presented for the estimation and compensation of mutual coupling in antenna systems of arbitrary geometries, including antenna arrays in the vicinity of scatterers. The methodology includes both theoretical and experimental schemes, while also, does not resort to assumptions often encountered in previous mutual coupling estimation approaches. In particular, our methodology uses a matrix representation for the antenna system and is based on a new concept, the antenna current Green's function which uses the recently proven inverse reciprocity theorem, or more intuitively, a relation of the transfer function for the transmitting mode of the antenna system to the corresponding transfer function for the receiving mode. Validation is performed by comparing calculated predictions to measurements and simulations of a practical antenna system as well as a two- and four-element array. An algorithm using matrix interpolation, that aims at exploiting the antenna transfer function, is also developed and experimentally demonstrated for practical array calibrations and coupling compensation techniques in array signal processing. The developed procedures are non-specific and can also be applied to a diversity of antenna systems and other complex scattering problems.


For understanding the physical condition of earthquake generation, we estimated the deviatoric stress fields and fault planes of the large earthquakes in the hypocentral area of the 2016 Kumamoto earthquake sequence, central Kyushu, Japan. We analyzed precise hypocenters and their focal mechanism tensors from 1993 to 2017 and found the complex fault planes of the largest foreshock and the mainshock during the sequence. The faults of large earthquakes could not be detected from the preceding high seismic activity in the area to the mainshock. The analyses of the deviatoric stress tensors obtained from pre‐ and post‐sequence seismic moment tensor data revealed the temporal change in the deviatoric stress field at the vicinity of the hypocenters of the largest foreshock and the mainshock. Because of this temporal change, we found that the stress level of the deviatoric stress field in this region is the same level as the co‐seismic stress change caused by the two large earthquakes. We attempted to estimate the differential stress at the region using a new method, which can be applied to the heterogeneous stress fields. The average value of the estimated differential stresses in the region was 15.4 ± 10 MPa. The rotation of the principal stress axes and the low differential stress are important information to understand the physical processes of the earthquake generation and the state of the crustal stress.


Flood resilience (resilient flood risk management), which has been repeatedly demanded, can be achieved through the phases of the risk management cycle. There is a vast body of literature on adaptation, disaster risk reduction measures, and effectiveness of prevention, seen through the lens of postdisaster recovery, but oftentimes the existing literature seems to underestimate the impact of financial flood recovery schemes on resilient recovery of individual households in particular. This contribution focuses on how financial schemes for flood damage compensations—their sources, design, and timing—shape the resilience of recovery of individual households. It discusses the dilemma of recovery of whether recovery schemes should be used strategically to increase resilience, or rather serve early restoration needs, equality access issues, and so on. This contribution seeks to unify the current fragmented academic debate on household resilient recovery by focusing on the ambiguous role of financial recovery schemes.


This issue of Textile Progress reviews the way that fashion retailing has developed as a result of the application of the World Wide Web and information and communications technology (ICT) by fashion-retail companies. The review therefore first considers how fashion retailing has evolved, analysing retail formats, global strategies, emerging and developing economies, and the factors that are threatening and driving growth in the fashion-retail market. The second part of the review considers the emergence of omni-channel retailing, analysing how retail has progressed and developed since the adoption of the Internet and how ICT initiatives such as mobile commerce (m-commerce), digital visualisation online, and in-store and self-service technologies have been proven to support the progression and expansion of fashion retailing. The paper concludes with recommendations on future research opportunities for gaining a better understanding of the impacts of ICT and omni-channel retailing, through which it may be possible to increase and develop knowledge and understanding of the way the sector is developing and provide fresh impetus to an already-innovative and competitive industry.


In advanced multimedia communication based systems, performance improvement is one of the most important issues. Data cache consumes a major portion of the whole processor power for communication applications as they are mainly data intensive. The cache architecture cannot be taken care of specifically for an application in case of an integrated communication system. As a result, a big amount of cache memory is not used. In this paper, the software-controlled cache architecture has been proposed, that improves the energy efficiency of the shared cache in an integrated communication based system. For different cache regions, data types are allocated for an application. Only the allocated cache regions are activated. The effectiveness of software-controlled cache after integration is tested in a communication based system on chip. The results show the performance improvement of the system on chip up-to a huge level on ARMlike cache architecture.


Recent efforts at gene therapy for haemophilia A and B using AAV-derived vectors show durable expression of coagulation factors at significant levels, resulting in almost complete correction of the phenotype. This is the first success of gene therapy for a major hereditary disorder, and shows how continuous improvement of many components of the system has finally succeeded. Although these results must be confirmed with more patients and longer durations, they constitute a significant accomplishment for this approach after decades of frustration.


Discrete Event System (DES) are systems whose behavior is governed by discrete events occurring asynchronously over time and solely responsible for generating state transitions. DESs are particularly used in the field of the manufactured systems, handling systems and transportation systems: even if such system are being studying for long time, because of their complexity, they still present many issues that attract research interest. In particular this dissertation focuses about handling system modeling and DES identification. Obtaining a good model of a system (both time-driven and event-driven) allows to more easily execute operations as performance analysis, control, monitoring of system evolution. However, in some cases modeling of a system is not simple because of several complications due to the behavior of the system or of the context it belongs to. As example, sometimes, especially in the context of material handling and transportation, systems present both an event-driven and a timedriven behavior. In all that cases a very high accuracy is not requested it is usual neglect the latter and "looking" at the system as a DES (as example modeling a handling system it is possible to be interested in knowing if a vehicle is or not in a zone of the path while it is not important to know its exactly position). When the time-driven behavior plays a fundamental role in the obtaining the overall system performance, such dynamics cannot be neglected and they have to be explicitly modeled. This is the case, as example, of the automated warehouse systems, where the handling subsystem, as will be shown in the rest of this dissertation, presents time-driven dynamics that greatly influence the warehouse's performance. Consequently a new way to model the system behavior has to be used. However, there are situation in which the difficult issue is not choosing the right formalism to model the system but it is the modeling itself. This is typical in many practical contexts, where it can occur that one has to work with unknown ready-made systems and no documentation about their behavior is available, or the model of a very complex system is needed. In these and other cases modeling becomes hard and another way to obtain the model of the system is needed: automated identification can be the solution. In the modeling environment, contribution of this thesis consists in presenting a new methodology to obtain a model oriented to the control and performance analysis of complex material handling systems that is highly modular, compact and made of parameterized modules. First a discrete event model is presented and then a new formalism that merges the concepts of Hybrid Petri Nets and Colored Petri Nets is introduced: the Colored Modified Hybrid Petri Nets (CMHPNs). Hence a new CMHPN model is proposed: it allows to model both the event nature and the continuous nature of the system. As more, to allow the monitoring of system evolutions, a freeware simulation tool for the CMHPNs is presented. Finally it is shown how the CMHPN model can be used to execute analysis and performance evaluation. Liveness analysis is performed by means of a hybrid automaton obtained from the net model. A deadlock prevention policy is synthesized working on an aggregated model. To prove the effectiveness of this new formalism an existing large automated warehouse system is presented as case study: its CMHPNs model is used to simulate the system behavior and to analyze the warehouse's performance. In the identification environments, the guidelines of a new "active" approach to identify the model of a preexisting system is described. The proposed preliminary algorithm identifies a free labeled PN model on the basis of the observed output sequences and of the modifiable input consisting of the enabled controllable transitions set. The main idea is to use the knowledge of the set of enabled controllable transitions together with additional information on the conflicting transitions to accelerate the net identification with respect to the passive identification approaches. In particular, the system assumes that the maximum time that must elapse from the enabling of a transition until it fires is known and that it is possible to detect if the system is entered in a cyclic behavior. Using this additional information, it is possible to determine set of constraints to represent sequences that are not accepted by the system. Such constraints can be used to improve the net identification.


Bibliography: p. 544-566.%%%%Introduction to a linguistic exploration  – General overview of the grammar of Japanese  – Processes of saying  – Processes of sensing  – Processes of being  – Processes of doing  – Conclusion.%%%%This is a theory-based and corpus-based description of the grammar of modern Japanese. The thesis explores the world of meaning that is constituted by means of the grammar, and provides an account for the grammar of Japanese in general, and the transitivity system of Japanese in particular. That is, the thesis explores specifically how our experiences of the world of around us and inside us are construed by the grammar. The exploration is firmly based on systemic functional theory - a theory that offers a multidimensional interpretation of language as resource. Here language is seen as meaning potential, and is interpreted along the dimensions set by the theory - stratification, metafunction, axis, rank, delicacy and instantiation - which capture the mul-tidimensionality of language, and provide trinocular views of language, allowing us to see it 'from above', 'from around' and 'from below'.  – Such views obtained through the exploration will be presented very explicitly by means of the system network. It represents paradigmatic and syntag-matic relations of the recurrent grammatical patterns in the form of non-cyclical graph. The thesis explores in detail the domains of process type - processes of 'saying', 'sensing', 'being' and 'doing' - in terms of the theory of nuclear transitivity and, where appropriate, the theory of circumstantial transitivity. Each process type will be explored in the space of a chapter, and the characteristics of each of these process types will be modelled by means of the system network.  – The system network will provide us with a view of the global typological organization of the transitivity system as a resource for construing experience; the system network presents interrelated options as discrete grammatical categories. To adjust this typological view of the grammar, the thesis adopts a complementary perspective, i.e. a topological perspective. This perspective allows us to gain further insight into the organization of meaning, and it brings out indeterminate cases that in turn point to the overlapping semantic regions spreading across the domains of different process types. In other words, the thesis will explore the experiential domains of meaning and characterize them as a multidimensional elastic meaning space that construes our experience of the world around us and inside us.%%%%%%%%xxvi, 566 p. ill


The anodic electrochemistry and etching of the group IV compound semiconductor SiC was studied in both KOH and acidic fluoride solutions. The results for p-type and n-type electrodes are compared with those obtained for the group IV elemental semiconductor Si. We point out a number of interesting applications of this work for SiC device technology.


While a variety of lossy compression schemes have been developed for certain forms of digital data (e.g., images, audio, video), the area of lossy compression techniques for arbitrary data tables has been left relatively unexplored. Nevertheless, such techniques are clearly motivated by the ever-increasing data collection rates of modern enterprises and the need for effective, guaranteed-quality approximate answers to queries over massive relational data sets.In this paper, we propose SPARTAN, a system that takes advantage of attribute semantics and data-mining models to perform lossy compression of massive data tables. SPARTAN is based on the novel idea of exploiting predictive data correlations and prescribed error-tolerance constraints for individual attributes to construct concise and accurate Classification and Regression Tree (CaRT) models for entire columns of a table. More precisely, SPARTAN selects a certain subset of attributes (referred to as predicted attributes) for which no values are explicitly stored in the compressed table; instead, concise error-constrained CaRTs that predict these values (within the prescribed error tolerances) are maintained. To restrict the huge search space of possible CaRT predictors, SPARTAN uses a Bayesian network structure to guide the selection of CaRT models that minimize the overall storage requirement, based on the prediction and materialization costs for each attribute. SPARTAN's CaRT-building algorithms employ novel integrated pruning strategies that take advantage of the given error constraints on individual attributes to minimize the computational effort involved. Our experimentation with several real-life data sets offers convincing evidence of the effectiveness of SPARTAN's model-based approach --- SPARTAN is able to consistently yield substantially better compression ratios than existing semantic or syntactic compression tools (e.g., gzip) while utilizing only small samples of the data for model inference.


Our general objective is to explain how norms can emerge in complex, ambiguous situations: settings with large and complex spaces of normative options over which populations may try to agree using only limited, indirect knowledge of each others' currently preferred options, possibly gained through limited interaction samples. We study this process using the concrete example of agents developing and using common languages. Language can be viewed as an inherently distributed information and representation system. Because of this, it serves as a model problem for studying central issues in many kinds of distributed information systems, and norms are one such issue. Language is inherently normative. First, communicative language requires agreement—conventions—on many language aspects (such as ontological units, grammar, lexicon, morphology, etc.). Second, accurate communication is valuable. The value of successful communication translates to value for the conventionalization of language; this value in turn creates the decentralized normative force that drives agents to obey linguistic conventions. In this way, linguistic conventions become normative constraints on possible communication options, since obeying them increases communicability and its resulting communication payoffs. None of this means that convergence to linguistic norms is easy; in fact it presents novel issues not yet well understood. We show how ambiguity arises in language convergence, and describe a variety of techniques to resolve that ambiguity. We focus on one particular technique, text based learning. We show that it significantly reduces the amount of effort required for linguistic norms to emerge, and we show how it is an instance of a general norm-convergence technique.


In keeping with developments in children's rights, research is increasingly including the views of children. Accessing a hard to reach population of children can, however, raise significant ethical and methodological challenges for researchers. Negotiating access through gatekeepers, securing parental consent and limits on confidentiality are central issues in the recruitment process of children. This paper is based on a qualitative study of young carers in the Irish population. It outlines the methodological approaches employed to access a representative sample of young carers and the measures taken to fulfil ethical obligations. In the recruitment phase of the study, researchers attempted to strike a balance between two sometimes competing requirements, the need to protect children from harm and to respect children's competence. This paper reflects on the success and limitations of the approaches adopted towards achieving this balance, exploring the use of gatekeepers as a method to identify and recruit a hidden population, and revisiting the measures taken to comply with the ethical requirements of parental consent and limits on confidentiality.


In August 2019, a 4-km thick wildfire smoke layer was observed in the lower stratosphere over Leipzig, Germany, with a ground-based multiwavelength Raman lidar. The smoke was identified by the smoke-specific spectral dependence of the extinction-to-backscatter ratio (lidar ratio) measured with the Raman lidar. The spaceborne CALIPSO (Cloud-Aerosol Lidar and Infrared Pathfinder Satellite Observation) lidar CALIOP (Cloud–Aerosol Lidar with Orthogonal Polarization) detected the smoke and classified it as sulfate aerosol layer (originating from the Raikoke volcanic eruption). In this article, we discuss the reason for this misclassification. Two major sources for stratospheric air pollution were active in the summer of 2019 and complicated the CALIPSO aerosol typing effort. Besides intense forest fires at mid and high northern latitudes, the Raikoke volcano erupted in the Kuril Islands. We present two cases observed at Leipzig, one from July 2019 and one from August 2019. In July, pure volcanic sulfate aerosol layers were found in the lower stratosphere, while in August, wildfire smoke dominated in the height range up to 4–5 km above the local tropopause. In both cases, the CALIPSO aerosol typing scheme classified the layers as sulfate aerosol layers. The aerosol identification algorithm assumes non-spherical smoke particles in the stratosphere as consequence of fast lifting by pyrocumulonimbus convection. However, we hypothesize (based on presented simulations) that the smoke ascended as a results of self-lifting and reached the tropopause within 2–7 days after emission and finally entered the lower stratosphere as aged spherical smoke particles. These sphercial particles were then classified as liquid sulfate particles by the CALIPSO data analysis scheme. We also present a successful case of smoke identification by the CALIPSO retrieval method.


Local search procedures for solving satisfiability problems have attracted considerable attention since the development of GSAT in 1992. However, recentwork indicates that for many real-world problems, complete search methods have the advantage, because modern heuristics are able to effectively exploit problem structure. Indeed, to develop a local search technique that can effectively deal with variable dependencies has been an open challenge since 1997.

In this paper we show that local search techniques can effectively exploit information about problem structure producing significant improvements in performance on structured problem instances. Building on the earlier work of Ostrowski et al. we describe how information about variable dependencies can be built into a local search, so that only independent variables are considered for flipping. The cost effect of a flip is then dynamically calculated using a dependency lattice that models dependent variables using gates (specifically and, or and equivalence gates). The experimental study on hard structured benchmark problems demonstrates that our new approach significantly outperforms the previously reported best local search techniques.


Finite-difference time-domain is a numerical method used for modelling of computational electrodynamics. The method is resource intensive, especially regarding memory usage. Multiple memory accesses are required per single computation so memory bandwidth acts as a bottleneck limiting the overall performance. Existing solutions use either fixed-point or floating-point arithmetic, depending on the complexity of the target platform, to model the data. Floating-point requires less memory access but the computation is more intensive due to the normalisation. Fixed-point is the opposite – simple computation but with more memory access for the same precision. The novelty of this paper is in the block floating-point realization which is the middle ground between the two. The approach is less compute intensive than the floating-point solutions while using less memory than the fixed-point realization. This makes the solution an alternative for bit-exact platforms, such as field-programmable gate arrays. The results are compared to both floating-point and fixed-point implementations and the memory bandwidth and other resources needed for targeted platform are calculated. DOI:  http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.eie.24.4.21475


How do political conditions influence whether public support develops for a new policy? Specifically, does the presence of partisan polarization and a viable threat to a policy's continuation prevent the emergence of such support? We propose a theoretical framework that considers how policy feedback may be affected by the presence or absence of both policy threat and polarization. We argue that a threat is likely to increase policy salience and trigger loss aversion, expanding policy feedback even amid strong partisanship. We examine the threat to the Affordable Care Act after Republicans won control of Congress and the White House and stood poised to act on their long promise to repeal the law. Five waves of panel data permit analysis of how individuals' responses to the law changed over time, affecting their support for it as well as their voting calculations. The results suggest that policy threat heightens the effect of policy feedback for some populations while depressing it for others, in some cases mitigating partisan polarization, and overall boosting program support.


Considerable controversy surrounds the impact of schools and teachers on the achievement of students. This paper disentangles the separate factors influencing achievement with special attention given to the role of teacher differences and other aspects of schools. Unique matched panel data from the Harvard/UTD Texas Schools Project permit distinguishing between total effects and the impact of specific, measured components of teachers and schools. While schools are seen to have powerful effects on achievement differences, these effects appear to derive most importantly from variations in teacher quality. A lower bound suggests that variations in teacher quality account for at least 7« percent of the total variation in student achievement, and there are reasons to believe that the true percentage is considerably larger. The subsequent analysis estimates educational production functions based on models of achievement growth with individual fixed effects. It identifies a few systematic factors a negative impact of initial years of teaching and a positive effect of smaller class sizes for low income children in earlier grades but these effects are very small relative to the effects of overall teacher quality differences.


Sentiment analysis is the computational study of opinionated text and is becoming increasing important to online commercial applications. However, the majority of current approaches determine sentiment by attempting to detect the overall polarity of a sentence, paragraph, or text window, but without any knowledge about the entities mentioned (e.g. restaurant) and their aspects (e.g. price). Aspect-level sentiment analysis of customer feedback data when done accurately can be leveraged to understand strong and weak performance points of businesses and services, and can also support the formulation of critical action steps to improve performance. In this paper we focus on aspect-level sentiment classification, studying the role of opinion context extraction for a given aspect and the extent to which traditional and neural sentiment classifiers benefit when trained using the opinion context text. We propose four methods to aspect context extraction using lexical, syntactic and sentiment co-occurrence knowledge. Further, we evaluate the usefulness of the opinion contexts for aspect-sentiment analysis. Our experiments on benchmark data sets from SemEval and a real-world dataset from the insurance domain suggests that extracting the right opinion context is effective in improving classification performance.Specifically combining syntactical features with sentiment co-occurrence knowledge leads to the best aspect-sentiment classification performance.


When planning problems have many kinds of resources or high concurrency, each optimal state has exponentially many minor variants, some of which are "better" than others. Standard methods like \Astar cannot effectively exploit these minor relative differences, and therefore must explore many redundant, clearly suboptimal plans. We describe a new optimal search algorithm for planning that leverages a partial order relation between states. Under suitable conditions, states that are dominated by other states with respect to this order can be pruned while provably maintaining optimality. We also describe a simple method for automatically discovering compatible partial orders in both serial and concurrent domains. In our experiments we find that more than 98% of search states can be pruned in some domains.


Asthma exacerbations can be triggered by viral infections or allergens. The Th2 cytokines IL-13 and IL-4 are produced during allergic responses and cause increases in airway epithelial cell mucus and electrolyte and water secretion into the airway surface liquid (ASL). Since ASL dehydration can cause airway inflammation and obstruction, ion transporters could play a role in pathogenesis of asthma exacerbations. We previously reported that expression of the epithelial cell anion transporter pendrin is markedly increased in response to IL-13. Herein we show that pendrin plays a role in allergic airway disease and in regulation of ASL thickness. Pendrin-deficient mice had less allergen-induced airway hyperreactivity and inflammation than did control mice, although other aspects of the Th2 response were preserved. In cultures of IL-13-stimulated mouse tracheal epithelial cells, pendrin deficiency caused an increase in ASL thickness, suggesting that reductions in allergen-induced hyperreactivity and inflammation in pendrin-deficient mice result from improved ASL hydration. To determine whether pendrin might also play a role in virus-induced exacerbations of asthma, we measured pendrin mRNA expression in human subjects with naturally occurring common colds caused by rhinovirus and found a 4.9-fold increase in mean expression during colds. Studies of cultured human bronchial epithelial cells indicated that this increase could be explained by the combined effects of rhinovirus and IFN-γ, a Th1 cytokine induced during virus infection. We conclude that pendrin regulates ASL thickness and may be an important contributor to asthma exacerbations induced by viral infections or allergens.


The circulating renin-angiotensin system (RAS) is an important determinant in maintaining adequate systemic blood pressure, and it also may modify organ-specific blood flow. All recognized RAS components have been identified in the eye. In this study, angiotensinogen (ANG) was localized using an affinity-purified antibody and paraffin sections of seven human eyes. An antibody for human serum albumin was used for comparison. The ANG was present selectively in the cytoplasm of the nonpigmented ciliary epithelium (NPCE), more prominently in the pars plana than in the pars plicata. Both ANG and albumin were present in the blood vessel lumina of the uvea and retina. Both antibodies also stained perivascular tissue in the uvea, but not in the retina, reflecting the relative tightness of blood-tissue barriers. The detection of ANG in the NPCE may be significant in view of previous descriptions localizing prorenin and angiotensin-converting enzyme in the same cell layer.


The Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917 and the consequent collapse of the Tsarist empire led to a reorganization of the sociopolitical structure, determining a dualism between what belonged to a long–standing tradition and the future vision of a renewed society. The social transformations triggered by the young Soviet intelligencija gave rise to innovative experimentations both in the ideological and artistic fields, starting from the rethinking of collective life. Traditional methods and means of artistic expression were questioned. Figurative art and architecture began to follow a common orientation by accepting a series of aesthetic–formal issues that led to exploration of a visual language structured on the laws of psychophysical perception of the mechanical, volumetric and chromatic elements, implementing a psychoanalytic method of analysis of the form. In this context, numerous Marxist–inspired movements, such as the LEF (Left Front of the Arts) and the AKhRR (Revolutionary Russia Artists Association), professed their faith in science and technology, aspiring to the fusion between left–wing figurative art and the society of revolution. The propaganda image became the result of a "dictatorship of taste" that, through the interaction between cinema, typography and photography, divulged "the abolition of artistic fiction in favor of direct news and the use of raw life" (Elia 2008, p. 102). The essay deals with an iconographic recognition of some of the most significant propaganda images of the avant–garde Soviet production, with an emphasis on the graphic strategies and on the symbolic values adopted by the iconic Russian revolution.


Beta-conglycinin, one of the dominant storage proteins of soybean, has a trimeric structure, being composed of three subunits alpha, alpha', and beta. The alpha and alpha' subunits contain the extension regions in addition to the core regions common to all subunits, which are N-glycosylated. Physicochemical functions of recombinant nonglycosylated individual subunits and deletion mutants (alpha(c) and alpha'(c)) lacking the extension regions of the alpha and alpha' subunits were examined at pH 7.6 and 3.7 at low (mu = 0.08) and high (mu = 0.5) ionic strengths. Although individual recombinant subunits exhibited different properties at all conditions, there were some consistencies. Surface hydrophobicities and thermal stabilities of the individual subunits were likely to be conferred by their core regions, and the carbohydrate moieties did not contribute to these properties at any conditions examined here. Solubility at mu = 0.08, heat-induced association, and emulsifying ability remarkably depended on the extension regions and the carbohydrate moieties in addition to the structural features of the core regions. These findings indicate that various end products could be produced by the selection of soybean varieties containing beta-conglycinin with different subunit compositions and suggest a direction for a principle of soybean breeding.


We, herein, presented a rare case of bilateral brachial artery infiltration by tumoral calcinosis located on both elbows. A 58-year-old man presented with a history of painless, palpable solid mass restricting the range of motion of both elbows. These masses were located on the anterior aspect of the elbows and gradually enlarged. After clinical, laboratory and radiological examinations, tumoral calcinosis was suspected, and excisional biopsy was planned for a definite diagnosis. Surgery was first performed on the left elbow. The median nerve was found to be compressed but not infiltrated by the mass. Interestingly, the brachial artery was totally infiltrated throughout the entire mass. Occlusion was observed in the brachial artery located within the mass. The tumor on the left elbow, 8.5 × 5.5 × 2.5 cm in size, was totally excised with approximately 12-cm brachial artery segment. The artery was resected until the healthy tissue was reached. The defect was reconstructed with saphenous vein graft obtained from the ipsilateral lower extremity. The same surgical procedure was performed on the right elbow after 3 months. The tumor size on the right elbow was 7 × 3.5 × 1.7 cm. Approximately 15-cm brachial artery segment was excised, and the defect was reconstructed with saphenous vein graft. Tumoral calcinosis is a rare benign condition that can be located in close relationship with neurovascular structures. In such cases, detailed neurologic and vascular examination, including imaging modalities, for arterial flow is essential to establish a more accurate surgical plan and avoid any unexpected situation during surgery.


The nanoplasma formations of Na and Kr clusters, which contained 2 (cid:1) 10 7 atoms per cluster, irradiated by intense femtosecond laser field have been predicted in detail within the framework of the modified nanoplasma model. Based on this modified model, ionization process, heating, expansion, and explosion of the cluster have been studied. When laser intensity is above a critical value, it blows off all of electrons from the cluster and forms a non-neutral ion cloud. The analytic calculation provides time evolution of radius of the cluster, internal and external fields, coulomb and hydrodynamic pressures, electron density, and ion and electron energy. During the coulomb explosion of the resulting highly ionized, high-temperature nanoplasma, ions acquire their energy. It is shown that ultrafast ions are produced in this comparative study (4.4 keV for Kr cluster and 2.2 keV for Na cluster), which can be the source of energetic ions. We have found that the coulomb pressure is little than the hydrodynamic pressure for both clusters.


The onset of action of three sympathomimetic drugs (rimiterol 0.2 mg, terbutaline 0.25 mg and isoprenaline 0.08 mg) administered by metered dose inhaler was compared in 12 asthmatics. In order to evaluate side effects of the drugs, a second dose of the aerosols, 8-10 times higher than the first one, was given after 30 min. The effects were measured in terms of VC, FEV1.0, PEF and heart rate. All the substances caused a significant increase in spirometric values within 1.5 min, the results with isoprenaline being slightly better than those with terbutaline. An increased heart rate was observed after the first dose of isoprenaline whereas no further increase was found after the higher dose. Two patients complained of palpitations, one after isoprenaline and one after rimiterol. No other side effects were recorded. It is concluded that there is a small, clinically insignificant, difference in the onset of action of isoprenaline compared with that of the selective beta2-stimulating aerosol, terbutaline.