Abstract Using data from the representative IAB Establishment Panel, this paper charts changes in the two main pillars of the German IR model over the last 20 years. It shows that collective bargaining coverage and worker representation via works councils have substantially fallen outside the public sector. Less formalized and weaker institutions such as voluntary orientation of uncovered firms towards sectoral agreements and alternative forms of employee representation at the work-place have partly attenuated the overall erosion in coverage. Multivariate analyses indicate that the traditional German IR model (with both collective agreements and works councils) is more likely found in larger and older plants, and it is less likely in plants managed by the owner, in single and foreign-owned plants, in individually-owned firms or partnerships, and in exporting plants. In contrast, more than 60 % of German plants did not exhibit bargaining coverage or orientation or any kind of worker representation in 2015. Such an absence of the main institutional features of the German IR model is mainly found in small and medium-sized plants, in particular in the service sector and in eastern Germany, and its extent is increasing dramatically.


This paper has the character of a survey. In it we consider questions in the theory of Fredholm (Noether) and semi-Fredholm operators on a Banach space that depend on a many-dimensional parameter. The paper divides naturally into two parts: the theory of operators depending continuously on a parameter (§§ 1-2), and the theory of operators depending holomorphically on a parameter (§§ 3-5). The theory of Banach bundles provides a natural apparatus for the study of these questions. In this connection we give a detailed account of a number of parts of this theory. In addition, we quote, with proofs, some fundamental facts in functional analysis that have been obtained in the past ten or twenty years and are not well represented in the monographs and text-books.


This study aimed to explore clinical supervisors' perspectives on the components of the relationship competency. The constituents of relational competence have been articulated by expert committees, and the present study sought to add to this literature through understanding these competencies from Australian field supervisors' perspectives. In the present study, supervisors were asked to provide relational competence definitions and specific behavioral markers they use in assessing supervisee competence within their supervision practice. They were then asked to describe the developmental trajectory of relational competence among their supervisees, ranging from novice to intermediate and expert stages. Similarities and notable differences between previous expert panels and the current sample were observed in comparing data on the development of relational competence. A unique aspect of this study is that compared with previous expert panels, the current sample greatly emphasized the ability to understand relational data in the moment and to speak directly about the therapeutic relationship with the client. The results of this study offer useful, in-depth descriptions of supervisee progress in the development of relational competence. Consideration of competence markers within a sequential trajectory offers a useful map for the ongoing development and evaluation of these abilities.


Synthesis of chemical derivatives from finite fossil fuels requires considerable energy inputs and leaves an undesirable environmental footprint. The emerging biorefinery approach leads to sustainable processing of biomass into a wide spectrum of bio-based products, catering to food, feed, chemicals, materials, and bioenergy industries. Cyanophycin (multi-L-arginyl-poly-L-aspartic acid, CGP) is a non-ribosomally synthesized reserve polypeptide, which consists of equimolar amounts of arginine and aspartic acid arranged as a polyaspartate backbone and arginine as the side chain. Cyanophycin is a source of the constituent N-functionalized platform chemical, which can be further processed into many other chemicals of importance. It can be hydrolyzed in mild condition to its constituent amino acids aspartic acid and arginine. These amino acids may be utilized directly in food and pharmaceutical applications. Based on the chemical structure of these amino acids and the presence of functionalized nitrogen-containing groups, it is conceivable that a number of industrial chemicals can be synthesized, for example: 1, 4-butanediamine, a co-monomer in the production of nylon-4, 6. Other chemicals which could be obtained from cyanophcyin, that are currently prepared from fossil resources, include 1,4-butanediol and urea. Cyanophycin can also be hydrolyzed to a derivative with reduced arginine content or even to poly-aspartic acid, and used as a biodegradable substitute for synthetic polyacrylate in various technical process, such as water treatment (water softeners) and plastics. Cyanophycin is produced by most cyanobacteria in nature; however, these microbes are not suitable for large-scale production due to slow growth and low polymer content. Biosynthesis of cyanophycin is catalyzed by a single enzyme cyanophycin synthetase (CphA), which is encoded by cyanophycin synthetase structure gene (cphA). The cphA gene can be expressed in several bacteria and plants. E.coli is one of the most commonly used bacterial hosts for the production of recombinant proteins. The recombinant culture has the ability to produce considerably large quantities of cyanophycin in a shorter period of time compared to cyanobacteria. Genome of Anabaena variabilis ATCC 29413 has been sequenced, and it contains the structural gene (cphA) for cyanophycin synthetase. The native enzyme-cyanophycin synthetase from this cyanbacterium culture had been purified and it consists of identical subunits of 98kDa. Polymerization of the amino acids to cyanophycin in vitro is dependent on the presence of ATP, K, Mg, a (cyanophycin) primer and a thiol reagent such as β-mercaptoethanol in the reaction mixture. Our research is the first time that cphA gene from A. variabilis ATCC 29413 was cloned into E.coli. The 2.7 kb cphA gene was amplified by PCR, ligated to the vector pET45b+ and cloned into BL21 (DE3) pLysS and BL21 (DE3). Characterization of cyanophycin was performed by SDS-PAGE, HPLC, mass spectrometry and amino acid analysis. Results showed that protein with molecular weight of 21.5 to 31 kDa did not match any E.coli proteins when compared with E.coli protein data base, thereby showing expression of a protein foreign to host strain. Amino acids analyses showed that the cyanophycin produced by recombinant E.coli contained aspartic acid and arginine, and small amount of lysine, in the ratio: 1.05: 1: 0.2 (mass basis), thereby confirming cyanophycin biosynthesis. Experiments for high cyanophycin synthesis was performed at shake flask and 2-L fermentor level using recombinant BL21 (DE3) pLysS, LB broth as carbon and nutrient source, and casamino acids as primer. The maximum yield of cyanophycin obtained in flask level was 7.6% of cell dry mass, and the yield increased to 12.6% of cell dry mass at 2-L fermentor level. Cyanophycin is also referred to as "structural granules" because of substructures visible in electron micrographs. Phase contrast photomicrograph was able to depict cyanophycin inclusions in the cytoplasm, and transmission electron microscopy depicted finer details inside cell after IPTG induction.


In a previous paper* it has been pointed out that the Tertiary volcanic rocks of the Western Isles of Scotland offer beautiful examples of materials of every variety of composition, from the most acid to the most basic, and of every type of structure, from the holocrystalline to the vitreous. The detailed description of these varieties of volcanic rocks was reserved for a future occasion ; and in the present paper we propose to give the first of such a series of descriptions. As the more acid vitreous rocks have during recent years been discussed in considerable detail in numerous papers read before this Society, it may not be inappropriate to direct attention to the rare but equally interesting glasses of basic composition, which have, up to the present time, received far less notice in this place. The studies on which this paper is based have been carried on in the Geological Laboratory of the Normal School of Science and Royal School of Mines. 1. History of Previous Opinion on the Subject. By the older writers on petrography rocks of the kind of which we now treat appear to have been classed as "pitchstones." Jameson and the other followers of Werner, who endeavoured to introduce the precision of nomenclature and the exact methods of their master into the study of British rocks—though they recognized these materials, not as minerals but as rocks—do not seem to have discerned the difference between the acid and basic


Effective personalization of web experiences constitutes matching the intent and interest of a user (or a group of users) to content they consume, while optimizing a set of target engagement metrics. With improved content consumption tracking via web analytics, such personalization is not only feasible but also valuable for a content publisher/owner with large volumes of content to choose from. However the multitude of media (desktop, mobile, etc.) and the diversity of users' interests necessitates automation in this process of constructing personalized content experiences. In this paper, we propose a genetic algorithm based framework that chooses a subset of content items (from a large collection) that are relevant to a given user and determines their respective sizes and relative positions to construct a layout that is optimized for a chosen engagement metric. Comparisons against existing frameworks based on crowd-sourced annotations indicate improved prominence of key content (based on historic engagement metrics) by the proposed approach, while improving the information diversity of the content presented in the layout.


Human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) can infect various types of cell populations such as CD4+ T cells and macrophages. The heterogeneity of these target cells implies different birth, death, infection rates, and so on. To investigate the within‐host dynamics of HIV which can infect n different types of target cells, a theoretical model with infection‐age structure for each type of target cells and a general nonlinear incidence rate is proposed in this manuscript. The model, in the form of a hyperbolic system of partial differential equations (PDE) for infected target cells coupled with several ordinary differential equations, is shown to be biologically reasonable with the establishment of existence, positivity, and boundedness of solutions. Although the PDE form poses novel challenges to theoretical investigation, rigorous analysis is performed to show the uniform persistence of the virus when the basic reproduction number is greater than one. Furthermore, by constructing suitable Lyapunov functionals, we show that the infection‐free steady state is globally asymptotically stable when the basic reproduction number is less than unity, while the positive steady state is globally asymptotically stable when the basic reproduction number is greater than one.


The interaction between business models is used in consumer centric manner instead of using a producer centric approach for customizing the business process in cloud environment. The knowledge based human semantic web is used for customizing the business process It introduces the Human Semantic Web as a conceptual interface, providing human-understandable semantics on top of the ordinary Semantic Web, which provides machine-readable semantics based on RDF in this mismatching is a major problem. To overcome this following technique automatic customization detection is an automated process of detecting possible elements or variables of a business process that need to be especially treated in order to suit the requirement of the other process. To the business process to be customized as the primary business process and those that it collaborates with as secondary business process or SBP. Automatic customization enactment is an automated process of taking actions to perform the customization on the PBP according to the detected customization spots and the automatic reasoning on the customization conceptualization knowledge framework. The process of customizing business processes by composite the web pages by using web service.


On 16 March 2020, as a result of the unprecedented global health crisis linked to the emergence of a new form of coronavirus (COVID-19), the 74 universities of France closed their doors, forcing nearly 1.6 million students, as well as their teachers, to find solutions and initiatives that could ensure continuity in teaching. In the reliance on videoconferencing tools, chat, the sharing of documents/tutorials/videos/podcasts, and the use of social networks, many ideas have emerged, but no consensus has developed nor has a common way of doing things been adopted by a majority of teachers. Some software tools, such as Zoom, have also been questioned over data security issues or excessive intrusion into the student learning process. Nevertheless, in these uncertain times, much had to be done so that students can acquire the requisite knowledge, develop skills, and build on what they have learned. How can we ensure that the learning process is as smooth as possible for everyone involved? How can we evaluate knowledge and skills learned at a distance, and their relevance? Four groups of electronic and electrical engineering students in France were monitored during the containment period in order to provide answers to these questions. Lectures, tutorials, practical work, and projects were carried out using the Microsoft Teams and Zoom video conferencing and chat tools to complement activities made available through the digital work environment. In order to ensure equity among all students, especially in view of the digital divide, open access tools/software/applications have been promoted. In the various surveys completed, the engineering students asserted their complete satisfaction with the learning process, the use of distance tools, and the level of mastery of these tools by their teachers. The results of the various knowledge tests show that, for the same course, distance learning does not reduce the performance of the engineering students. Indeed, they obtained local grades similar to those expected in face-to-face teaching. The results presented in this article are not intended to highlight the virtues of distance education, but rather to open up a debate and reflect more widely on the sustainability of this transformation of education in universities.


Rabbits injected with purified acetylcholine (ACh) receptor protein produce antibodies against the receptor and develop generalized muscle weakness. The compound muscle action potentials show a decremental fall in amplitude with repetitive nerve stimulation. Both the weakness and the decrement is counteracted by reversible cholinesterase inhibitors. Intracellular recordings from muscle endplates show that the amplitude of the miniature end-plate potentials is considerably reduced. A reduced binding of neurotoxin to muscles from immunized rabbits was observed. Nerve impulses release a normal number of ACh packages (quanta) from the motor nerve terminals. The muscle weakness in immunized rabbits thus has the same features as the muscle weakness in myasthenia gravis and may be a good animal model of myasthenia gravis.


Gesture spotting is the task of detecting and recognizing gestures defined in a vocabulary. The difficulty of gesture spotting stems from the fact that valid gestures appear sporadically in a continuous gesture stream, interspersed with invalid gestures (movements that do not correspond to any gesture contained in the vocabulary). In this paper, a novel method for designing threshold models from valid gesture models learnt through Adaptive Boosting is proposed. This threshold model is adaptive in nature and discriminates between valid and invalid gestures. Furthermore, a gesture spotting network consisting of the individual gesture models and the threshold model is proposed to perform the task of spotting and recognition simultaneously. This technique is evaluated in the context of spotting and recognizing activity gestures (hand gestures) from continuous accelerometer data streams. The proposed technique results in a precision of 0.78 and a recall of 0.93 out performing the HMM based threshold model which resulted in 0.4 and 0.81 precision and recall values.


We study three corporate non-market strategies designed to influence the lobbying behavior of other special interest groups: 1) "astroturf," in which the firm covertly subsidizes a group with similar views to lobby when it normally would not, 2) the "bear hug," in which the firm overtly pays a group to alter its lobbying activities, and 3) self-regulation, in which the firm voluntarily limits the potential social harm from its activities. All three strategies reduce the informativeness of lobbying, and all reduce the payoff of the public decision maker. We show that the decision maker would benefit by requiring the public disclosure of funds spent on astroturf lobbying, but the availability of alternative influence strategies limits the impact of such a policy.


OBJECTIVE
The tibial tubercle (TT)-trochlear groove (TG) distance is an important metric in the assessment of patellofemoral dysfunction and is routinely measured on axial MRI and CT. This study examines error in measurements of the TT-TG distance related to variance in axial MRI scan orientation.

SUBJECTS AND METHODS
Isotropic 3D turbo spin-echo MRI of the extended knee was performed in 12 healthy subjects. The z-axis of the scanner defines the perpendicular to a routine axial plane, and the anatomic axial plane is parallel to the knee joint. Isotropic MRI was reformatted into routine and anatomic axial planes and in axial planes simulating 5° of femoral adduction and abduction relative to the anatomic plane. A method for correcting the TT-TG distance to account for variable axial scan orientation is presented.

RESULTS
Five degrees of simulated femoral abduction is associated with a mean increase in the TT-TG distance of 38% (SD = 17%), whereas 5° of simulated femoral adduction is associated with a mean decrease in the TT-TG distance of 51% (SD = 39%). The average deviation of the routine axial plane from the anatomic axial plane was 5.0° abduction (SD = 2.3°). The simplest correction method reduced the mean discrepancy in the observed TT-TG distance by 68% and 72% in simulated femoral abduction and adduction, respectively.

CONCLUSION
The TT-TG distance is sensitive to small changes in femoral alignment and should be interpreted with caution if axial image acquisition is not standardized. Knowing the vertical separation of the TT from the TG facilitates a simplified correction of the TT-TG distance, which is as effective as more complex corrections.


Abstract:From 2015, China began to promote eco-sustainability in the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) through not only vision statements but also specific guidelines and governance initiatives. What has driven these policy changes? Bringing together theories of norm localization, norm subsidiarity, and policy deliberation, we argue that China's move toward green BRI began as a norm localization process where environmental norms emerged in the open policy space created by China's top leaders carrying the ambition to make the BRI a new global governance model. After adopting a broad norm on environmental stewardship, state bureaucracies found opportunities to create procedural and operational rules. A novel procedural rule-making methodology emphasizing inclusive dialogue with host countries has emerged, driven by top leaders' pursuit of international leadership and preexisting local norms guiding South–South cooperation. With operational rules, different actors follow their preferences to localize existing international standards or develop new ones.


Two basic factors-paddy production and rice consumption-determining marketed surplus of paddy were analysed in terms of their causal variables using data collected from three categories of farmers randomly selected from different parts of Bangladesh. The causal variables considered were paddy area and yield as determinants of paddy production; farm size and intensity of paddy cultivation as determinants of paddy area; resource endowment, tenurial status and HYV technology as determinants of paddy yield; family size measured in adult male equivalent unit as determinant of rice consumption. Land being limited in the country, yield expansion measures are particularly suggested for increasing production and marketed surplus of paddy. Family planning measures are also expected to contribute to the increase in marketed surplus.


The B0.2 V magnetic star tau Sco stands out from the larger population of massive magnetic OB stars due to its high X-ray activity and remarkable wind, apparently related to its peculiar magnetic field - a field which is far more complex than the mostly-dipolar fields usually observed in magnetic OB stars. tau Sco is therefore a puzzling outlier in the larger picture of stellar magnetism - a star that still defies interpretation in terms of a physically coherent model. Recently, two early B-type stars were discovered as tau Sco analogues, identified by the striking similarity of their UV spectra to that of tau Sco, which was - until now - unique among OB stars. We present the recent detection of their magnetic fields by the MiMeS collaboration, reinforcing the connection between the presence of a magnetic field and wind anomalies (Petit et al. 2010). We will also present ongoing observational efforts undertaken to establish the precise magnetic topology, in order to provide additional constrains for existing models attempting to reproduce the unique wind structure of tau Sco-like stars.


The sedimentary succession of the Permian to Middle Triassic of the Albanian Alps is described, as part of the eastern Adria passive margin towards the Tethys. A carbonate ramp deepening towards NE in present day coordinates developed during the Middle Permian and was affected by block faulting with the deposition of carbonate breccia. The Early Triassic was characterized by intense terrigenous deposition with several cobble conglomerate units up to 80 m-thick, and by oolitic carbonate shoals. The fine clastic deposition ended gradually during the earliest Anisian and a wide calcarenitic ramp occupied the area, with small local carbonate mounds. Basinward, the red nodular limestone of the Han Bulog Formation was interbedded with calcarenitic material exported from the ramp. Drowning to more open conditions occurred towards the end of the Pelsonian. Subsequently, cherty limestone and tuffitic layers spread over the entire area. Towards the end of the Ladinian, with the end of the volcanic activity, red pelagic limestone was deposited locally for a short period. By the latest Ladinian most of the area returned to shallow-water conditions, with a peritidal carbonate platform. In the Theth area, in contrast, a basin with black organic-rich dolostone and limestone developed which seems to be unique in that part of the Adria passive margin. The occurrence of cobble conglomerate units in the Lower Triassic testifies to very active block faulting and high accommodation, not yet described for the area.


Introduction: Behçet's disease (BD) is a rare chronic disorder. The predominant histopathological lesion is vasculitis. Pulse wave velocity (PWV) is a marker of aortic stiffness and inversely related to arterial distensibility, elasticity, or relative arterial compliance. The aim of the present study was to investigate the arterial elasticity using PWV in patients with BD. Patients and Methods: A total of 25 patients with BD (21 male) and 21 healthy subjects (10 male) without known traditional cardiovascular risk factors, such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus, and hyperlipidemia, were studied. The mean time of disease duration was 3.6 ± 2.5 (1-10) years. Arterial elasticity was assessed by automatic carotid-femoral (aortic) PWV measurement by the Complior Colson (France) device. PWV is calculated by the following formula: Pulse wave velocity (m/s) = distance (m)/transit time (s). Results: The carotid-femoral (aortic) PWV (10.66 ± 1.74 vs. 8.16 ± 0.84 m/s) and diastolic blood pressure (79.00 ± 10.10 vs. 73.33 ± 8.11 mmHg) were higher in patients with BD than in the control groups (p< 0.001 and p= 0.03, respectively). A significant correlation was found between PWV and age, diastolic blood pressure, and mean blood pressure in the studied group (p< 0.001, r= 0.56; p= 0.02, r= 0.32; and p= 0.03, r= 0.31, respectively). Conclusion: Arterial elasticity assessed by carotid-femoral (aortic) PWV, an indicator of arterial stiffness and atherosclerosis, is lower in patients with BD than in healthy controls.


In order to further elucidate the potentiating effect of ethanol on the glucose-mediated insulin response, triply catheterized anesthetized pigs were submitted to an intravenous glucose infusion test after a four-hour preinfusion with ethanol (11 pigs) or saline (six pigs, control experiment). During the tests portal, hepatic, and peripheral venous blood was drawn simultaneously. Two series of ethanol-preinfusion experiments were carried out: in one series the serum ethanol concentration was maintained at ∼ 10 mM and in the other at 19 mM. Compared with saline, 10 mM of serum ethanol induced a more than threefold increment in the insulin secretory response to glucose as estimated in the portal blood (p < 0.01). Likewise, hepatic and peripheral venous blood insulin levels were enhanced (p < 0.01). In contrast, 19 mM of serum ethanol did not elevate serum insulin levels above those found in the control experiments. When individual incremental portal insulin areas were plotted against the corresponding average value of serum ethanol in the preinfusion period, a significant inverse relationship was found (p < 0.02), indicating a decrease in the potentiating effect of ethanol on the glucose-mediated insulin response with increasing levels of serum ethanol. Comparison of portal and hepatic incremental insulin areas revealed that ethanol did not, in the concentration range investigated, influence the hepatic insulin degradation rate. In conclusion, ethanol seems to potentiate, in an inverse concentration-dependent manner, the glucose-mediated insulin response through an action directly on the pancreas.


The median volume diameter (MVD) and the droplet size distribution (DSD) in an aerosol cloud under icing conditions are investigated. The procedure involves experimental observation of aerosol size distributions in an icing wind tunnel, computing the MVD by applying an empirical formula, and matching a distribution function to experimental data so as to estimate the DSD. Some of the nozzle dynamic parameters (NDPs), i.e., nozzle water and air pressure, are varied throughout the experiments, and droplet diameter is measured near the nozzle outlet. A new empirical formula is proposed that expresses the relationship between the MVD and the NDPs and, compared to previous studies, provides wind tunnel operators with a more convenient technique to estimate the MVD in the operational range of the selected nozzles. Moreover, the least squares fitting technique is used to find the best-fitting distribution function among published empirical relationships intended to model the DSD for nozzle-generated aerosol. The MVD and DSD obtained by this procedure, together with the NDPs and the thermodynamic parameters, may be used to model and control two-phase flows in icing wind tunnels.


Mixed mountain forests of European beech (Fagus sylvatica L.), Norway spruce (Picea abies (L.) Karst), and silver fir (Abies alba Mill.) cover a total area of more than 10 million hectares in Europe. Due to altitudinal zoning, these forests are particularly vulnerable to climate change. However, as little is known about the long-term development of the productivity and the adaptation and mitigation potential of these forest systems in Europe, reliable information on productivity is required for sustainable forest management. Using generalized additive mixed models this study investigated 60 long-term experimental plots and provides information about the productivity of mixed mountain forests across a variety of European mountain areas in a standardized way for the first time. The average periodic annual volume increment (PAI) of these forests amounts to 9.3 m3ha−1y−1. Despite a significant increase in annual mean temperature the PAI has not changed significantly over the last 30 years. However, at the species level, we found significant changes in the growth dynamics. While beech had a PAI of 8.2 m3ha−1y−1 over the entire period (1980–2010), the PAI of spruce dropped significantly from 14.2 to 10.8 m3ha−1y−1, and the PAI of fir rose significantly from 7.2 to 11.3 m3ha−1y−1. Consequently, we observed stable stand volume increments in relation to climate change.


Aims The stability of cementless acetabular components is an important factor for surgical planning in the treatment of patients with pelvic osteolysis after total hip arthroplasty (THA). However, the methods for determining the stability of the acetabular component from pre‐operative radiographs remain controversial. Our aim was to develop a scoring system to help in the assessment of the stability of the acetabular component under these circumstances. Patients and Methods The new scoring system is based on the mechanism of failure of these components and the location of the osteolytic lesion, according to the DeLee and Charnley classification. Each zone is evaluated and scored separately. The sum of the individual scores from the three zones is reported as a total score with a maximum of 10 points. The study involved 96 revision procedures which were undertaken for wear or osteolysis in 91 patients between July 2002 and December 2012. Pre‐operative anteroposterior pelvic radiographs and Judet views were reviewed. The stability of the acetabular component was confirmed intra‐operatively. Results Intra‐operatively, it was found that 64 components were well‐fixed and 32 were loose. Mean total scores in the well‐fixed and loose components were 2.9 (0 to 7) and 7.2 (1 to 10), respectively (p < 0.001). In hips with a low score (0 to 2), the component was only loose in one of 33 hips (3%). The incidence of loosening increased with increasing scores: in those with scores of 3 and 4, two of 19 components (10.5%) were loose; in hips with scores of 5 and 6, eight of 19 components (44.5%) were loose; in hips with scores of 7 or 8, 13 of 17 components (70.6%) were loose; and for hips with scores of 9 and 10, nine of nine components (100%) were loose. Receiver‐operating‐characteristic curve analysis demonstrated very good accuracy (area under the curve = 0.90, p < 0.001). The optimal cutoff point was a score of ≥ 5 with a sensitivity of 0.79, and a specificity of 0.87. Conclusion There was a strong correlation between the scoring system and the probability of loosening of a cementless acetabular component. This scoring system provides a clinically useful tool for pre‐operative planning, and the evaluation of the outcome of revision surgery for patients with loosening of a cementless acetabular component in the presence of osteolysis.


It is in the hermeneutics of theories that the relevant foundations of socio-political and even legal progress may be established. Theories themselves are either directly postulated by their originators, or are espoused from the thoughts of great thinkers as in the present case where we try to read the 'person-optimism' theory into Archbishop Valerian Okeke's thoughts and attitude to the dignities of man. In the life style, speeches, writings and administrative actions of Archbishop Okeke, one is recurrently confronted by a prodigious predilection for the sanctity, capacity, dynamism and dignity of the human person. This rare optimism characterizes the Archbishop's personal approach to the all too commonly disvalued human person, much as it underpins his theoretical conception of the otherwise depraved human nature. In this work, we merely try to outline the profound ethical considerations which inspire Archbishop Okeke's irrevocable optimism in the dignity of man, including the corresponding features of jurisprudence derivable from his general thoughts on the subject. Interestingly, from the rich thought pattern of the Archbishop, one derives a veritable theoretical foundation for positive evaluation of all legal positions and/or defenses arising from the dignity attached thereof to human nature. Accordingly, we read into and designate his ethic of human nature as 'person-optimism' approach to reality and so build it up to a theoretical status through an aggregate of postulates. This work there upon argues that arising from the 'person-optimism' theory of Archbishop Valerian Okeke, existing legal framework for the protection of human dignity and rights could be more positively adjusted. The substance of this work therefore is to make a case for the adoption of the 'person-optimism' theory as a jurisprudential ground for further reviews and postulations of legal defense and/or protection of human dignity and rights especially in the Nigerian Jurisdiction. The Archbishop's 2007 Lenten Pastoral provides the fundamental anchor for this work.

 Key words: Archbishop Okeke, optimism, 'person-optimism' theory, human dignity.


Abstract Two and a half years of data from an expanded, telemetered seismic network on the Olympic Peninsula reinforce the conclusion that the Juan de Fuca plate is subducting beneath Washington. However, the rate of seismicity is presently much lower than typical rates at other convergent margins. The located earthquakes can be divided into two groups on the basis of depth. At the coast, a shallow zone extends to a depth of approximately 20 km while a deep zone begins at 25 km. On the eastern edge of the Peninsula, the shallow zone has thickened to 30 km and the depth to the top of the deep zone has increased to 45 km. The rate of crustal seismicity is much lower on the Peninsula than in the adjacent Puget Sound region. The deep zone is 5 to 10 km thick and dips to the east at an angle of about 11°. The deep events appear to be occurring in the upper part of the subducting oceanic lithosphere. Focal mechanisms were constructed for 16 events in the suite of deep events with magnitudes ranging from 1.6 to 4.3. The solutions show primarily normal faulting with the P axes normal to the slab and the T axes displaying a range of angles within the slab with the average T axis in the downdip direction. Small events with down-dip tension in the downgoing slab are consistent with the slab sinking under its own weight. Several strike-slip events may be caused by a shearing within the slab. These features are consistent with ongoing subduction of the Juan de Fuca plate beneath North America.


AIM
The aim of the work was to estimate the strength of influence of the first (131)I activity on the outcome of the first course of radioiodine treatment as compared with other variables such as remnants volume, size and number of metastases in lymph nodes.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
68 adult patients with differentiated thyroid cancer have been treated with radioiodine after thyroidectomy. All patients had metastatic lesions in lymph nodes accumulating (131)I. Activities administered amounted from 1000 to 6000 MBq. From 1 to 4 courses of radioiodine therapy were necessary for total ablation of metastases and remnants. Logistic function has been used to describe the probability of the total ablation of metastases and thyroid remnants after the first course.

RESULTS
It was shown that the value of the first activity has the decisive influence on the treatment outcome. In patients included into analysis the outcome of the first course actually does not depend on level of radioiodine accumulation in pathological lymph nodes and effective half-time of (131)I excretion in remnants.

CONCLUSION
As a result, in the case of metastatic lesions in lymph nodes accumulating radioiodine the first activity should not be less then 5000 MBq with the aim of minimizing the number of courses. Outcome of the treatment only slightly depends on such factors as histology, the number and the size of metastases in lymph nodes.


In this paper, we propose Text2Scene, a model that generates various forms of compositional scene representations from natural language descriptions. Unlike recent works, our method does NOT use Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs). Text2Scene instead learns to sequentially generate objects and their attributes (location, size, appearance, etc) at every time step by attending to different parts of the input text and the current status of the generated scene. We show that under minor modifications, the proposed framework can handle the generation of different forms of scene representations, including cartoon-like scenes, object layouts corresponding to real images, and synthetic images. Our method is not only competitive when compared with state-of-the-art GAN-based methods using automatic metrics and superior based on human judgments but also has the advantage of producing interpretable results.


Innovative work behavior is important to produce effectiveness in organizations and to survive in a challenging environment. Transformational leadership and transactional leadership are leadership styles that are considered effective in fostering and increasing employees' innovative work behavior. This is also supported by employee psychological empowerment in influencing innovative work behavior. The purpose of this study is to determine the moderating role of psychological empowerment in the transformational and transactional leadership relationship to innovative work behavior. This research was conducted on 53 permanent employees in the news, production and programming department of JTV Surabaya. The results of this study were analyzed using Partial Least Squares (PLS) to determine the relationship between variables.


Multiple instance data are sets or multi-sets of unordered elements. Using metrics or distances for sets, we propose an approach to several multiple instance learning tasks, such as clustering (unsupervised learning), classification (supervised learning), and novelty detection (semi-supervised learning). In particular, we introduce the Optimal Sub-Pattern Assignment metric to multiple instance learning so as to provide versatile design choices. Numerical experiments on both simulated and real data are presented to illustrate the versatility of the proposed solution.


High faculty morale and job satisfaction are vital for optimum performance and important to the quality and vitality of the academic enterprise. However, research on faculty morale and job satisfaction has historically been limited to faculty at traditional comprehensive institutions and specific professional programs. Faculty who conduct biomedical research at academic health centers experience substantial differences in employment expectations and how they are funded than other faculty. The purpose of this study was to explore how personal and professional factors contribute toward positive morale and job satisfaction for faculty in biomedical research programs at one academic health center. This qualitative study used individual semi-structured interviews to explore work-life aspects associated with self-reported levels of morale and job satisfaction. Results from this study indicated that biomedical research faculty enjoy their work and highly value collaborating with their colleagues. The persistent need to fund at least half of their salaries through soft money, the loss of valued colleagues due to turnover, and a lack of identity with their institution decreases job satisfaction. It was also found that job satisfaction is expressed differently by gender and length of employment at one's current institution. Female faculty expressed feelings of limited support for those raising families while faculty employed longer expressed lower satisfaction than those recently hired. Better understanding of what influences job satisfaction and morale for this population will help academic health centers further support their research faculty as well as increase positive faculty identification with the institution. FACULTY MORALE IN BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH ii


This study examined the development of interaction between the hemispheres as a function of computational complexity (Banich & Belger, 1990; Belger & Banich, 1992) in 24 children aged 6.5 to 14 years. Participants performed 2 tasks: a less complex physical-identity task and a more complex name-identity task. Children, like adults, exhibit an across-hemisphere advantage on the computationally more complex name-identity task, and neither a within- nor an across-hemisphere advantage for the computationally less complex physical-identity task. Correlations indicated that the younger the child, (a) the greater the size of the within-hemisphere advantage on the less complex task, (b) the greater the size of the across-hemisphere advantage on the more complex task, and (c) the poorer the ability to ignore attentionally distracting information in a selective attention paradigm. These results suggest that interhemispheric interaction in children, like that in adults, serves to deal with the heightened processing demands imposed by increased computational complexity.


Gluten and its protein fractions were isolated from wheat flour. Stress relaxation in hydrated gluten, its protein fractions and varying percentage mixtures of the components were investigated by means of rheometry and confocal laser scanning microscopy. Stress relaxation was carried out over a period of 30 min at 20 °C for all samples under investigation. Samples exhibited relaxation modulus G(t) ranging from 1 to about 1000 Pa with the gliadin fraction showing almost full decay. MATLAB with the combination of regularization algorithms were used to generate L-curves and calculate the relaxation spectra of the samples. Stress relaxation spectra identified five dominant relaxation modes with baseline resolution. Stress relaxation is somewhat independent of compositional differences, although, confocal microscopy showed the influence of protein composition on the morphology of the networks. Therefore, morphology and relaxation dynamics seem to be controlled by independent mechanisms for gluten networks. These findings provide a fundamental understanding of gluten dynamics and may allow controlling the industrial performance of flours and engineering novel dough formulations.


This article on public leadership contributes to the literature by (1) focusing on the 'public' aspect of leadership and (2) developing quantitative scales for measuring four public leadership roles. These roles all refer to the extent to which public leaders actively support their employees in dealing with public sector issues: (1) accountability leadership, (2) rule-following leadership, (3) political loyalty leadership, and (4) network governance leadership. We tested the factor structure using exploratory and confirmatory analyses, with satisfactory results. Also, as expected, the scales for public leadership relate to transformational leadership and leadership effectiveness. The scales also correlate with organizational commitment, work engagement and turnover intention. These results indicate that our four scales of public leadership work adequately. We conclude with a future research agenda on how the scales can be used in survey and experimental research.


This thesis addresses the issues associated with conventional genetic algorithms (GA) when applied to hard optimisation problems. In particular it examines the problem of selecting and implementing appropriate genetic operators in order to meet the validity constraints for constrained optimisation problems. The problem selected is the travelling salesman problem (TSP), a well known NP-hard problem.
Following a review of conventional genetic algorithms, this thesis advocates the use of a repair technique for genetic algorithms: GeneRepair. We evaluate the effectiveness of this operator against a wide range of benchmark problems and compare these results with conventional genetic algorithm approaches. A comparison between GeneRepair and the conventional GA approaches is made in two forms: firstly a handcrafted approach compares GAs without repair against those using GeneRepair. A second automated approach is then presented. This meta-genetic algorithm examines different configurations of operators and parameters. Through the use of a cost/benefit (Quality-Time Tradeoff) function, the user can balance the computational effort against the quality of the solution and thus allow the user to specify exactly what the cost benefit point should be for the search.
Results have identified the optimal configuration settings for solving selected TSP problems. These results show that GeneRepair when used consistently generates very good TSP solutions for 50, 70 and 100 city problems. GeneRepair assists in finding TSP solutions in an extremely efficient manner, in both time and number of evaluations required.


The purpose of this study was to establish whether or not the English language teacher education curriculum at the University of Zambia had the relevant knowledge and skills for teaching English language in Zambian secondary schools and can produce a quality teacher of English language despite curriculum designers not conducting a job analysis as the starting point of the curriculum designing process.
Ten lecturers who taught subject content courses from the School Humanities and Social Sciences and methodology courses from the School of Education were interviewed so as to find out how the lecturers in the two schools viewed the aim of the programme, the kind of students they intended to produce and the criteria that they used to select content for their courses. The interviews also included the two Deans of the respective schools where subject content and methods courses were taught. 106 student teachers who were just about to graduate and 82 former students who by then were already teaching in schools but had graduated from the same programme responded in writing to a questionnaire. The questions required them to rate themselves on their confidence to teach at the time of graduation, their coverage and understanding of knowledge and skills that were related to the teaching of English language in secondary schools in Zambia in the subject content and methodology courses that they did when they studied English language at the University of Zambia. Two cohorts consisting of 160 student teachers also wrote two tests based on the knowledge and skills that were taught in secondary school. The secondary school English language syllabus and courses for the English language teacher education curriculum provided materials for document analysis.
Qualitative data was analyzed using the Constant Comparative Method to identify emerging themes and categories while quantitative data was analysed by conducting independent samples t-tests and One Way ANOVA.
The results showed that the two schools which taught subject content and methodology courses had different aims about the same curriculum. While the School of Education aimed at producing a teacher of English language, the School of Humanities and Social Sciences intended to produce a graduate who would use the knowledge and skills learnt to venture in any field related to what would have been studied since they thought producing a teacher was not their mandate. As such what the school of humanities included in the subject content courses that they taught did not reflect the skills and knowledge to prepare one to teach English language in secondary school. To a large extent, this led to the poor coverage and understanding of skills and knowledge in methodology courses. Consequently, as the results indicated, students who followed this curriculum did not cover and understand knowledge and skills which were relevant for teaching in secondary schools. The poor results in the tests further confirmed that the graduates of the English language teacher education curriculum did not acquire the relevant knowledge and skills for teaching the subject in secondary school. In view of these findings, it was evident that student teachers and graduate teachers did not have sound understanding of the subject matter they were to teach and pedagogical knowledge and skills to effectively teach English language in secondary schools at the time of their graduation because the curriculum that they followed did not have the relevant knowledge and skills since job analysis was not done at the beginning of the teacher education curriculum designing process. These findings have critical implications on English language teacher education and teaching and learning of the same subject in secondary schools. The researcher made four clear recommendations which were based on the findings of the study.


Tobacco hornworm larvae reared on diet or jimsonweed and with one or both pairs of maxillary sensillae styloconica removed were given feeding tests with four non-host plants (collard, dandelion, cowpea and mullein). Increased feeding was observed for all larvae lacking medial, lateral, or both pairs of sensillae; these increases were greater for larvae that had been reared on jimsonweed. For larvae with both pairs of sensillae removed, all test plants were highly acceptable. For larvae with only the lateral sensillae removed, the test plants were only slightly more acceptable. Diet-reared larvae with the median sensillae removed found test plants slightly more acceptable than did control larvae. Jimsonweed larvae lacking only the median sensillae found dandelion, normally a rejected plant, almost completely acceptable. Possible physiological reasons for these behavior changes are discussed.


Spitzer observations of SN 1987A have now spanned more than a decade. Since day ∼4000, mid-infrared (mid-IR) emission has been dominated by that from shock-heated dust in the equatorial ring (ER). From 6000 to 8000 days after the explosion, Spitzer observations included broadband photometry at 3.6–24 μm, and low and moderate resolution spectroscopy at 5–35 μm. Here we present later Spitzer observations, through day 10,377, which include only the broadband measurements at 3.6 and 4.5 μm. These data show that the 3.6 and 4.5 μm brightness has clearly begun to fade after day ∼8500, and no longer tracks the X-ray emission as well as it did at earlier epochs. This can be explained by the destruction of the dust in the ER on timescales shorter than the cooling time for the shocked gas. We find that the evolution of the late time IR emission is also similar to the now fading optical emission. We provide the complete record of the IR emission lines, as seen by Spitzer prior to day 8000. The past evolution of the gas as seen by the IR emission lines seems largely consistent with the optical emission, although the IR [Fe ii] and [Si ii] lines show different, peculiar velocity structures.


Linear scan voltammograms of various concentrations of AA and UA was used to test the effect of screen-printed carbon electrode (SPCE) and oxygen plasma-treated SPCErsquos (OP-SPCE) ability to distinguish the oxidative peak potentials (Epa) of UA from AA. The oxygen plasma-treated SPCE (OP-SPCE) could make the oxidative peaks of ascorbic acid (AA) and uric acid (UA) on the linear scan voltammograms became more defined with the Epa to 150 mV (RSD =6.9%,n=7) and 350 mV (RSD =0.6%, n=7), respectively. While measuring a composite solution containing of AA and UA, the AArsquos current signals, generated at the shoulder of the AA peak curve on the linear scan voltammogram caused interference behavior thereby background currents presented to the uric acidrsquos oxidative peak. The degree of background was found proportional to the concentration of AA in the composite solution with a linear regression equation of y = 0.0226x + 2.421 (R2=0.9962). A sequential measurement of ascorbic acid and uric acid concentration in a composition solution by linear scan voltammograms on the plasma treated screen-printed carbon paste electrode has developed: (1) determined the AA concentration (2) determined the degree of interference caused by AA at the uric acidrsquos oxidative peak (3) the estimated interference-free UA peak current is determined by subtracting the level of AA interference. By using the fitting procedure, The UA concentration can be quantitatively and accurately analyzed. Excellent recovery rates (97.9 to 106%) and RSD of 1.4% were obtained for the measurement of UA, even in the presence of high concentrations of AA.


Research on social change suggests that cultural values and behaviour have become increasingly individualistic over the past century. Prior researchers theorized that shifts in sociodemographic variables—e.g., changes in urbanization and socioeconomic status, are largely responsible for this cultural change. The research presented in this paper draws from social psychological research to introduce the idea that greater ethnic diversity is related to an increased endorsement of individualistic values and behaviour, and may contribute to the increasing rates of individualism. Across six studies, I investigate the association between the levels of ethnic diversity and individualism across multiple levels of analyses. In Study 1, I demonstrate that historical levels of ethnic diversity across the United States over the last century predict societal indicators of individualism. Study 2 presents evidence that increasing ethnic diversity predicts increasing individualism at the level of U.S. states over the span of 16 years, an effect that exists for both majority and minority group members. In Study 3, I offer evidence that people who perceive greater ethnic diversity in their communities report increased interactions with ethnically different others, and that increased interethnic interactions contribute to a greater endorsement of individualistic values. In Study 4, I present evidence that undergraduate student's perceptions of greater ethnic diversity in a classroom at the start of an academic term predicted a greater endorsement of individualism at the end of that academic term. In Study 5, I show that people who report greater ease of recalling ethnically diverse others in their interpersonal network endorse greater levels of individualism. In Study 6, I present experimental evidence that imagining interacting with ethnically different (vs. same) others increases one's endorsement of individualism. I conclude by discussing the implication of these findings for research on cultural change and intergroup relations.


Silicon carbide fiber-reinforced silicon carbide matrix composites (SiCf/SiC composites) are attractive materials for use in the blankets and divertors of fusion reactors due to their excellent thermo-mechanical properties and inherently low induced radioactivation. However, the brittle characteristics of SiC such as low fracture toughness and low strain-to fracture impose a severe limitation on the practical applications of SiC materials. SiCf/SiC composites can be considered as a promising candidate in various structural materials, because of their good fracture toughness. In this composite system, the direction of SiC fiber will give an effect to the mechanical properties such as fracture toughness and tensile strength. Therefore, it is important to control a proper direction of SiC fiber for the fabrication of high performance SiCf/SiC composites. .


This paper presents a novel holographic image representation which has a better reconstruction quality after cropping the hologram than any known representation today. Reconstructed images are very close to ideally low-pass filtered versions of the original image, almost without aliasing. We use the same test images which were used by Bruckstein et al. (see ibid., vol.,7, p.1583-97, 1998) and show empirically that our method has smaller reconstruction errors, on all of them, than the errors produced by subsampling and Fourier transform methods presented by Bruckstein et al.


Natural gas hydrates are ice-like materials which exist in permafrost regions and in the continental margins of oceans. They constitute a huge unconventional reservoir of natural gas around the globe including offshore Nigeria. The paper is a review of this important global resource with particular focus on the Nigerian deposits. The reasons for the interest on hydrates are discussed including the potential for the recovery of large quantities of methane, the climate change and ocean floor instability that may result from their dissociation. They may also be exploited for large-scale CO2 sequestration. The geographical distribution of hydrates deposits on earth, the thermodynamics of why they occur in those particular places and source of the methane gas that is eventually enchlathrated into hydrates are discussed. The natural gas in the Nigerian hydrate is essentially biogenic in origin and is almost pure methane (more than 99% methane). The hydrates exist in finely disseminated or massive aggregate forms within clay-rich sediment.


The isotopic compositions of natural materials are determined by their parent reservoirs, on the one hand, and by fractionation mechanisms, on the other hand. Under the right conditions, fractionation represents isotope partitioning at thermodynamic equilibrium. In this case, the isotopic equilibrium constant depends on temperature, and reflects the slight change of free energy between two phases when they contain different isotopes of the same chemical element. The practical foundation of the theory of mass-dependent stable isotope fractionation dates back to the mid-twentieth century, when Bigeleisen and Mayer (1947) and Urey (1947) proposed a formalism that takes advantage of the Teller–Redlich product rule (Redlich 1935) to simplify the estimation of equilibrium isotope fractionations. In this chapter, we first give a brief introduction to this isotope fractionation theory. We see in particular how the various expressions of the fractionation factors are derived from the thermodynamic properties of harmonically vibrating molecules, a surprisingly effective mathematical approximation to real molecular behavior. The central input data of these expressions are vibrational frequencies, but an approximate formula that requires only force constants acting on the element of interest can be applied to many non-traditional isotopic systems, especially at elevated temperatures. This force-constant based approach can be particularly convenient to use in concert with first-principles electronic structure models of vibrating crystal structures and aqueous solutions. Collectively, these expressions allow us to discuss the crystal chemical parameters governing the equilibrium stable isotope fractionation.

Since the previous volume of Reviews in Mineralogy and Geochemistry dedicated to non-traditional stable isotopes, the number of first-principles molecular modeling studies applied to geosciences in general and to isotopic fractionation in particular, has significantly increased. After a concise introduction to computational methods based on quantum mechanics, we will focus on the modeling of isotopic properties in liquids, which represents a bigger methodological challenge than …


Significant ecosystem services derive from the coastal wetlands of the Laurentian Great Lakes even though two-thirds of the original coastal wetlands have been lost since European settlement, and the remaining 126,000 ha of U.S. coastal wetlands and ≥70,000 ha of Canadian wetlands are affected by anthropogenic stressors. Published information indicates that wildlife habitat, fisheries support, and water quality improvement are significant ecosystem services provided by Great Lakes coastal wetlands that should be strongly considered during management decision making. 30 species of waterfowl, 155 breeding bird species, and 55 species of reptiles and amphibians are supported by coastal wetland habitats across the Basin. Nearly all sport and commercial Great Lakes fish species use coastal wetlands for life-cycle functions, and Great Lakes food webs are supported by wetland export of young sport and forage fish. Biological responses indicate declines in the wildlife and fishery services with increasing levels of anthropogenic disturbance. Extrapolation from a single well-studied system suggests that, Basin-wide, coastal wetlands may retain nearly 4000 tonnes P and 53,000 tonnes N per year, but additional studies are needed to support these estimates and determine stressor effects. Coastal wetlands appear to retain sediments over long time scales, but may either retain or release sediments during storm events. Extrapolation of carbon sequestration from other wetland types suggests that less than 90 g C yr−1 might be retained across the Basin. Wild rice production provides a culturally important ecosystem service, and coastal protection may be locally significant where fringing wetland remain. To support management decisions, quantitative relationships between specific stressors or land use practices and the delivery of ecosystem services are needed, as are ecosystem service indicators to measure those responses.


OBJECTIVE
Repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) has been shown to have clinically beneficial effects in altering the perception of auditory hallucinations (AH) in patients with schizophrenia. However, the mode of action is not clear. Recent neuroimaging findings indicate that rTMS has the potential to induce not only local effects but also changes in remote, functionally connected brain regions. Frontotemporal dysconnectivity has been proposed as a mechanism leading to psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia. The current study examines functional connectivity between temporal and frontal brain regions after rTMS and the implications for AH in schizophrenia.

METHOD
A connectivity analysis was conducted on the fMRI data of 11 healthy controls receiving rTMS, compared with 11 matched subjects receiving sham TMS, to the temporoparietal junction, before engaging in a task associated with robust frontotemporal activation.

RESULTS
Compared to the control group, the rTMS group showed an altered frontotemporal connectivity with stronger connectivity between the right temporoparietal cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the angular gyrus.

CONCLUSION
This finding provides preliminary evidence for the hypothesis that normalizing the functional connectivity between the temporoparietal and frontal brain regions may underlie the therapeutic effect of rTMS on AH in schizophrenia.


A three-phase theoretical model is proposed that is suitable for describing the effective permittivity of polymer-matrix composites containing spherical nanoparticles. The model accounts for the presence of an interphase region, which surrounds each nanosphere, whose permittivity is allowed to be different from that of the matrix polymer. The nanoparticles themselves are approximated as hard (non-overlapping) spheres, whereas the interphase regions of neighboring nanoparticles are permitted to overlap. The volume fraction of the interphase region is computed by assuming that the nanoparticles are arranged on the nodes of a simple-cubic lattice. The effective permittivity of the composite is subsequently computed via three-phase Wiener bounds. As an example application of the model, permittivity data measured on a silicon/bisphenol E cyanate ester nanodielectric and a low-density polyethylene/alumina nanodielectric are shown to lie outside the range of the two-phase Wiener bounds yet lie within the range of the three-phase Wiener bounds with appropriate choice of interphase permittivity and thickness.


In this paper, we propose a Modelica-based parallel computing framework for adaptive special protections schemes in power systems. The use of Modelica allows for an easy implementation of both component and special protection systems and the parallel computing allows for testing and evaluating settings concurrently fast enough for real-time operation. Our framework is flexible and new component and protection models can easily be added.The framework is demonstrated using a four-area test network, inspired by the Nordic power system. We show how the framework can be used for ranking different system protection settings, based on the amount of load shedding.


We present faceton, a geometric modeling primitive designed for building architectural models, using a six degrees of freedom (DoF) input device in a virtual environment (VE). A faceton is given as an oriented point floating in the air and defines a plane of infinite extent passing through the point. The polygonal mesh model is constructed by taking the intersection of the planes associated with the facetons. With the simple drag-and-drop and group interaction of faceton, users can easily create 3D architecture models in the VE. The faceton primitive and its interaction reduce the overhead associated with standard polygonal mesh modeling in VE, where users have to manually specify vertexes and edges which could be far away. The faceton representation is inspired by the research on boundary representations (B-rep) and constructive solid geometry (CSG), but it is driven by a novel adaptive bounding algorithm and is specifically designed for the 3D modeling activities in an immersive virtual environment.


Summary Scalable group rekeying schemes proposed in the literature can be classified into two categories: stateful schemes, e.g., logical key hierarchy (LKH) based approaches, and stateless schemes, e.g., subset difference based member revocation (SDR) mechanism. They differ mainly on the interdependency of rekey messages and messaging overhead in rekeying. SDR messaging overhead in rekeying is dependent on the membership during an entire multicast session whereas LKH messaging overhead is dependent on membership of the group during a rekeying instance. In this paper, we study the advantages and applicability of stateful and stateless rekeying algorithms to different groups and multicast security applications. We analytically compare the storage cost and the rekeying cost (number of encrypted keys) of LKH and SDR in immediate and batch rekeying scenarios. Our simulation studies show that LKH performs better in immediate rekeying and small batch rekeying, whereas stateless rekeying performs better as we process membership changes in larger batches. In some cases, stateless rekeying is observed to be as inefficient as encrypting the group key separately for each member of the group. We also report on the effect of member adjacency on SDR rekeying cost that it seems to have more impact on rekeying cost than the number of membership changes. We further show that the analysis of SDR rekeying cost in [12] is incomplete and present a better result.


The purpose of this study was to investigate the role of malocclusion in temporomandibular disorders (TMD) in an orthodontic patient population prior to treatment. The subjects were 508 Chinese patients (214 males, 294 females), 6 to 56 years of age. The type of malocclusion was diagnosed using dental casts, and TMD signs were recorded by clinical examination. The overall prevalence of TMD signs in the whole group was 26.6%. The frequencies of TMD signs were 44.0% for edge-to-edge bite, 31.2% for posterior crossbite, 27.6% for deep bite, 26.5% for excessive overjet, 26.5% for crowding, 23.7% for anterior crossbite and 23.6% for open bite. Although patients with edge-to-edge bite or posterior crossbite had TMD signs more often than the others in the whole group, the differences did not reach statistical significance. We did not find a significant relationship between morphologic malocclusion and TMD.


To solve the problem of deformation measurement for spatial complex tubular joints, a non-contact three-dimension optical method is proposed. Firstly, some artificial targets are pasted on the deformation area before loading. Then the three-dimension coordinates of those targets are calculated by three-dimension reconstruction technique including collinear equation, image orientation based on the coplanar equation, direct linear transform, epipolar geometric constraint and bundle adjustment. Finally, each single deformation stage is aligned to the basic stage, by tracking and comparing the three-dimension coordinates of the homonymous artificial targets, the deformation vectors are obtained. The precision evaluation experiments prove that the proposed measurement system could achieve accuracy of 0.1mm/m. Real scale model experiment shows that the proposed method could fulfill the efficiency and accuracy requirement in three-dimension deformation measurement of the spatial complex tubular joints. In addition, this method has the advantage of non-contact.


In this paper we present a new patch antenna as a hexagonal patch operating in the Industrial Scientific Medical (ISM) frequency band at 2.45 GHz, the proposed antenna is verifying using to different numerical techniques which are Finite Element Method FEM and Method of Moment MoM, the compression results give us good agreement. When human body is presented near the antenna the antenna performance such as S11 and bandwidth are affected, the result demonstrates that the new antenna has negligible effect compared with that of the rectangular patch antenna.


To investigate the involvement of apoptosis in the pathogenesis of T3-induced pulmonary hypertension in broiler chickens, caspase-1, -2, and -3 gene expressions were evaluated by semiquantitative RT-PCR in the lungs and left and right heart ventricles. One-day-old fast-growing chickens were randomly divided into 2 equal groups with 3 replicates per group. Chicks were reared for 7 weeks under standard conditions. T3 as a thyroid hormone was added to the ration after week 1 of rearing. Pulmonary hypertension was induced at 49 days based on RV/TV ratio index. The caspase genes were constitutively expressed in the lung and right and left ventricles of intact and pulmonary hypertensive broiler chickens. The relative amount of caspase-1, -2, and -3 mRNA in the lung and right and left ventricles of the heart was higher in pulmonary hypertensive broilers than in control broilers (P < 0.05). It is speculated that increased mRNA levels of caspase in the lungs and hearts of pulmonary hypertensive broilers could be evidence of upregulated apoptosis, which is involved in the pathophysiology of broiler chickens with pulmonary hypertension.


Staphylococcus aureus is an opportunistic pathogen often carried asymptomatically on the human body. Methicillin-resistant S. aureus (MRSA) strains have acquired a gene that makes them resistant to nearly all beta-lactam antibiotics. Resistance to other antibiotics is also common, especially in hospital-associated MRSA. These organisms are serious nosocomial pathogens, and finding an effective treatment can be challenging. Community-associated MRSA strains, which originated outside hospitals, are also prevalent in some areas. While these organisms have generally been easier to treat, some have moved into hospitals and have become increasingly resistant to drugs other than beta-lactams. Animals sometimes become infected with MRSA from humans, and may either carry these organisms asymptomatically or develop opportunistic infections. Most of the MRSA found in dogs and cats seem to be lineages associated with people. Colonization of dogs and cats is often transient and tends to occur at low levels; however, these organisms can be transmitted back to people, and pets might contribute to maintaining MRSA within a household or facility. MRSA can also be an issue in settings such as veterinary hospitals, where carriage rates can be higher, especially during outbreaks in pets, horses and other animals. Animal-adapted MRSA strains also exist. The livestock-associated lineage MRSA CC398, which apparently emerged in European pigs between 2003 and 2005, has spread widely and infected many species of animals, especially pigs and veal calves, in parts of Europe. CC398 has also been found on other continents, although the reported prevalence varies widely. People who work with colonized livestock or poultry can carry CC398, and these organisms can cause opportunistic infections. Other livestock associated MRSA have also been identified in various locations. CC9 is an especially prominent lineage in Asia. MecC-bearing MRSA is a new type of MRSA first recognized in 2011. Many of these organisms have been recovered from animals, especially dairy cattle, but they can also infect and colonize humans. Recognizing mecC MRSA is currently problematic, as most of the diagnostic tests used routinely to identify MRSA do not detect these organisms.


Abstract While dry and rain deposition of nitrate (NO3−) and ammonium (NH4+) are regularly assessed, fog deposition is often overlooked. This work assesses summer fog events contribution to nitrogen deposition and availability for forest ecosystems. Rain and fog samples were collected at Mt Åreskutan, Sweden, during CAEsAR (Cloud and Aerosol Characterization Experiment), in 2014. NH4+ + NO3− represent (31 ± 25) % of total rain ion amount, and (31 ± 42) % in fog. Based on ion concentrations and the nitrate stable isotope signatures δ(15N) and δ(18O), it was possible to detect the plume generated by the Västmanland forest fire; NOx emissions from oil rigs and Kola Peninsula; and the plume of Bardarbunga volcano, Iceland. Scavenging of ions by fog was more efficient than by rain. Rain NH4+ and NO3− deposition was (26 ± 36) μmol m−2 d−1 and (23 ± 27) μmol m−2 d−1, respectively. Fog NH4+ and NO3− contributed (77 ± 80) % to total wet deposition of these species. Upscaling rain deposition fluxes to 1 year gave an inorganic nitrogen deposition of (18 ± 16) mmol m−2 a−1 ((252 ± 224) mg m−2 a−1 N equivalents), whereas fog deposition was estimated as (59 ± 47) mmol m−2 a−1 ((826 ± 658) mg m−2 a−1 N equivalents). Annual fog deposition was four times higher than previously reported for the area which only considered rain deposition. However, great uncertainty on the calculation of fog deposition need to be bear in mind. These findings suggest that fog should be considered in deposition estimates of inorganic nitrogen and major ions. If fog deposition is not accounted for, ion wet deposition may be greatly underestimated. Further sampling of wet and dry deposition is important for understanding the influence of nitrogen deposition on forest and vegetation development, as well as soil major ion loads.


AIM: To investigate the effect of adeno-associated virusmediated gene transfer of human endostatin on the growth of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC).METHODS: HCC cell line Hep3B was infected with recombinantadeno-associated virus containing human endostatin gene (rAAV2-hEndo). The results of transfection were detected by RT-PCR and SDS-PAGE assay. MTT assay was used to observe the effects of supernatant of transfected cells on ECV304 cell proliferation. An animal model of HCC was established by injecting Hep3B cells subcutaneously into the back of nude mice. Intratumoral injection of rAAV2hEndo, empty virus and phosphate-buffered saline were given sequentially. Serum endostatin was determined byELISA, the inhibitory effect of endostatin on the growth of xenograft was assessed in 3 wk.RESULTS: The results of RT-PCR and SDS-PAGE assay confirmed that rAAV2-hEndo successfully transfected Hep3B cells, and endostatin was secreted from Hep3B cells to medium. The supernatant of transfected cells markedly inhibited the proliferation of ECV304 cells (P<0.01). Intratumoral injection of rAAV2-hEndo (2×1010v.g.) led to a sustained serum endostatin level ofapproximately (86.71±5.19) ng/mL. The tumor volumeand microvessel density were less in rAAV2-hEndo group than in control groups (P<0.01).CONCLUSION: Human endostatin can be stably expressed by adeno-associated virus-mediated gene transfer and effectively inhibit the growth of HCC.


The dialogue between literature and the visual arts in Brazil in the 1920s has as its key moment the Week of Modern Art, or Week of '22, and as its main names Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral--through the interrelation between their works as well as joint productions. The approach of several artists of the time to blackness, prostitution, and the portrayal of Mangue in poetry and painting also seems to me very significant and emblematic in presenting the Horatian theme UT PICTURA POESIS (poetry is like painting). These are the axes around which revolves the text I will present.


The purification of staphylococcal β-hemolysin was accomplished by the successive use of three protein fractionation methods. The first method employed was a double precipitation with the use of ammonium sulfate at 65% saturation. The second phase of purification used Sephadex G-100 column fractionation. The third phase utilized either carboxymethyl cellulose or diethylaminoethyl cellulose fractionation. The last two fractionation methods both resulted in the separation of a relatively high concentration of cationic hot-cold lysin and a low concentration of anionic hot-cold lysin. Because of the low concentration of the anionic component, its purity could not be assessed. However, the purity of the cationic component was demonstrated by immunodiffusion, microimmunoelectrophoresis, and by disc polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis. In addition, antisera against purified cationic β-hemolysin yielded one line of precipitate when tested against the original crude β-hemolysin. The purified cationic β-hemolysin was stable in the lyophilized state. Crude β-hemolysin was dermonecrotic, whereas purified cationic β-hemolysin was not dermonecrotic even after Mg++ activation.


A well-known limitation of the recursive digital filter, when compared to the nonrecursive filter, is its incapability of having a strictly linear phase characteristic; thus it may only approximate a constant group delay. For the analog filters the choice of the maximally flat criterion leads to the use of the Bessel polynomials. Yet digital approximations of these continuous filter functions are inadequate to yield the true maximally flat delay approximation of the recursive filters. Our purpose is to provide for the problem at hand a solution obtained by a direct approximation procedure in the z plane. The denominator of the transfer function turns out to be a Gaussian hypergeometric function, more particularly connected with the Legendre functions. The stability of the filters is discussed and some numerical results in regard to the amplitude and phase responses as well as the pole loci are given.


Abstract Microsite, patch, and landscape conditions may interact to influence nest predation. In northern Minnesota, silvicultural and agricultural practices may be involved in recent increases in nest predators and regional declines in several ground-nesting songbirds. To examine this problem, we evaluated 17 hierarchical models of predation on Ovenbird (Seiurus aurocapilla) nests that included microsite variables, distances to edges, and amount of core forest within a 2-km radius surrounding six study plots. During 2000 and 2001, 157 Ovenbird nests were monitored to estimate nest predation rates. A model that included the main effects of litter depth and core forest area and an interaction term between the two best described variation in predation on Ovenbird nests (AICc weight = 0.83). The nest predation rate from this model was 0.51 ± 0.01 (mean ± SE), assuming mean values of litter depth and amount of core forest. Shallow litter was associated with higher nest predation in three plots surrounded by less core habitat (40–60 ha), whereas there was no relationship in three plots surrounded by more core area (100–150 ha). Management that promotes deep leaf litter and the maintenance of large, intact forest tracts will likely benefit Ovenbirds and other forest songbirds. Factores que Influencian la Depredación de Nidos de Seiurus aurocapilla en los Bosques del Norte: Interacciones a través de las Escalas Espaciales


The mammalian brain and skull develop concurrently in a coordinated manner, consistently producing a brain and skull that fit tightly together. It is common that abnormalities in one are associated with related abnormalities in the other. However, this is not always the case. A complete characterization of the relationship between brain and skull phenotypes is necessary to understand the mechanisms that cause them to be coordinated or divergent and to provide perspective on the potential diagnostic or prognostic significance of brain and skull phenotypes. We demonstrate the combined use of magnetic resonance imaging and microcomputed tomography for analysis of brain and skull phenotypes in the mouse. Co-registration of brain and skull images allows comparison of the relationship between phenotypes in the brain and those in the skull. We observe a close fit between the brain and skull of two genetic mouse models that both show abnormal brain and skull phenotypes. Application of these three-dimensional image analyses in a broader range of mouse mutants will provide a map of the relationships between brain and skull phenotypes generally and allow characterization of patterns of similarities and differences.


Anisotropic diffusion is known to be a powerful tool in image processing. It enables the smoothing of initially noisy images while still retaining, respectively sharpening edges and enhancing features. Here recent results in the context of vector field visualization are expanded to non Euclidean domains. The aim is to graphically represent vector field data on two dimensional surfaces in an intuitively understandable way. Furthermore the multiscale properties of the approach support a scale of resolutions, ranging from detailed flow representation to a coarse overview of field data. Here an initial noisy image intensity is smoothed along integral lines, whereas the image is mainly sharpened in the orthogonal direction. The method is based on a continuous model and requires the solution of a parabolic PDE problem on manifolds. It is discretized by finite elements on surface triangulations only in the final implementational step. Applications are shown for principal directions of curvature on general surfaces.


This research guide will lead scholars to a wide range of print and online resources dealing with 21st century terrorists and terrorism


In this article, we present a novel Bayesian approach for estimating spectral and range profiles from single-photon Lidar waveforms associated with single surfaces in the photon-limited regime. In contrast to classical multispectral Lidar signals, we consider a single Lidar waveform per pixel, whereby a single detector is used to acquire information simultaneously at multiple wavelengths. A new observation model based on a mixture of distributions is developed. It relates the unknown parameters of interest to the observed waveforms containing information from multiple wavelengths. Adopting a Bayesian approach, several prior models are investigated and a stochastic Expectation-Maximization algorithm is proposed to estimate the spectral and depth profiles. The reconstruction performance and computational complexity of our approach are assessed, for different prior models, through a series of experiments using synthetic and real data under different observation scenarios. The results obtained demonstrate a significant speed-up (up to 100 times faster for four bands) without significant degradation of the reconstruction performance when compared to existing methods in the photon-starved regime.


Membrane-bound endosomal vesicles play an integral role in multiple cellular events, including protein processing and turnover, and often critically regulate the cell-surface availability of receptors and other plasma membrane proteins in many different cell types. Neurons are no exception, being dependent on endosomal function for housekeeping and synaptic events. Growing evidence suggests a link between neuronal endosomal function and Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathophysiology. Endosomal abnormalities invariably occur within neurons in AD brains, and endocytic compartments are one likely site for the production of the pathogenic beta-amyloid peptide (Abeta), which accumulates within the brain during the disease and is generated by proteolytic processing of the amyloid precursor protein (APP). The enzymes and events involved in APP processing are appealing targets for therapeutic agents aimed at slowing or reversing the pathogenesis of AD. The neuronal endosome may well prove to be the intracellular site of action for inhibitors of beta-amyloidogenic APP processing. We present here the view that knowledge of the endosomal system in the disease can guide drug discovery of AD therapeutic agents.


The most commonly monitored variable for perioperative hemodynamic management is blood pressure. Several indirect noninvasive blood pressure monitoring techniques have been developed over the last century, including intermittent techniques such as auscultation (Riva-Rocci and Korotkoff) and oscillometry (Marey) and continuous techniques. With the introduction of automated noninvasive blood pressure devices in the 1970s, the oscillometric technique quickly became and remains the standard for automated, intermittent blood pressure measurement. It tends to estimate more extreme high and low blood pressures closer to normal than what invasive measurements indicate. The accuracy of the oscillometric maximum amplitude algorithm for estimating mean arterial pressure is affected by multiple factors, including the cuff size and shape, the shape of the arterial compliance curve and arterial pressure pulse, and pulse pressure itself. Additionally, the technique typically assumes a consistent arterial compliance and arterial pressure pulse, thus changes in arterial compliance and arrhythmias that lead to variation in the pressure pulse can affect accuracy. Volume clamping, based on the Penaz principle, and arterial tonometry provide continuous tracking of the arterial pressure pulse. The ubiquitous use of blood pressure monitoring is in contrast with the lack of evidence for optimal perioperative blood pressure targets.


Cyclodextrin glycosyltransferase ( CGTase ) catalyzes an intermolecular transglycosylation reaction to produce functional oligosaccharides or glycosides, which can be used in several industries . In this study, the p19bBC recombinant cells containing CGTase gene from Bacillus circulans A11 were used for synthesizing CGTase . The maximum expression was obtained when the p19bBC cells were cultured at 37 o C for 24 h with 0 . 2 mM IPTG . The recombinant CGTase was purified up to 6 - fold by 5 % ( w / v ) starch adsorption and the specific activity of enzyme was 1 . 08x10 4 units / mg with a 71 % yield . The 72 - kDa relative molecular mass of purified enzyme was determined by 10 % SDS - PAGE . In addition, the acceptor specificity of enzyme was investigated from transglycosylation reaction using β - cyclodextrin as glycosyl donor and various saccharides and flavonoids as acceptors . Among the group of saccharide acceptors, glucose gave the highest activity, followed by maltose and mannose . Within the flavonoid group, hesperidin gave the highest activity with 13 . 5 % as compared to glucose . Due to the broad range of bioactivities of hesperidin flavonoid, and also, the possibility of new glycoside products, this study suggested that using hesperidin as an acceptor is far superior to the saccharides in terms of further applications .


This clinical report describes an 8-year-old Thoroughbred mare that was presented for evaluation of a chronic, unilateral nasal discharge. Findings on physical examination, radiology, and video-endoscopy supported a clinical diagnosis of ethmoidal hematoma. After surgical ablation of the mass a defect was detected in the cribriform plate. At necropsy a 1.5 cm aperture was identified in the left cribriform plate allowing direct communication between the fundus of the nasal cavity and the cranium. Histology of the mass identified tissue consistent with an adenocarcinoma. History of profuse epistaxis warrants further investigation to differentiate malignant lesions from the more common benign lesions. During surgical ablation of large, space-occupying masses of the caudodorsal nasal cavity the cribriform plate should be examined for defects or secondary erosive lesions.


D.H. Lawrence thought Lady Chatterley's Lover was his best and most important novel. Yet he had to pay to have it privately printed. His publishers thought his sexual descriptions and language were obscene under the censorship laws of the UK and the USA, and they were right. From 1928 until 1959 no‐one could legally publish or sell the unexpurgated novel, and copies were subject to confiscation. All this changed in 1959 when Charles Rembar successfully defended Grove Press's right to publish the novel. His defense, which rested on a unique interpretation of Justice Brennan's opinion in Roth v. United States, introduced the redeeming‐social‐value test for obscenity. Within six years it revolutionized American obscenity laws, ensuring that sexual material with even a small measure of social value would enjoy First Amendment protection.


There is an abnormal behavior that seems at this time we escaped the attention of anorexia nervosa. This is very reasonable considering this behavior is deemed not to cause harmful effects when this behavior is closely related between the physical and psychic person. Anorexia nervosa is a mental disorder associated with diets that are often found to occur in women and is a form of self-torture that resulted from excessive fear that the body will be fat if you eat. Authors interested in doing this research with the aim to determine the factors underlying the disorders of anorexia nervosa and psychological condition of patients with anorexia nervosa and efforts that have been taken by people with anorexia nervosa to reduce or stop the disorder. This study used descriptive qualitative research method with the method asessmen through interviews of two subjects with anorexia nervosa. For the validity of data used triangulation
techniques. From the result showed that the factors that cause anorexia nervosa in subjects came from dissatisfaction with body shape that eventually led to insecurity. Coupled with the perception in the subject that looks perfect is if it has a slim body, and a strong desire to have a slim body like the models on television. Psychological symptoms that accompany these two subjects are anxiety, insomnia, loss of appetite, feelings of guilt and difficulty concentrating. Besides that, they became more reclusive. Both subjects are unaware that what they experience today closely linked to the psychic that efforts they are doing to overcome anorexia nervosa had happened to them was limited to cope with physiological disturbances that accompany it so that the disturbances they experience anorexia nervosa can not be cured. Family and friends are the people who always give support to the subject.


The Hestenes-Stiefel (HS) conjugate gradient (CG) method is generally regarded as one of the most efficient methods for large-scale unconstrained optimization problems. In this paper, we extend a modified Hestenes-Stiefel conjugate gradient method based on the projection technique and present a new projection method for solving nonlinear monotone equations with convex constraints. The search direction obtained satisfies the sufficient descent condition. The method can be applied to solve nonsmooth monotone problems for it is derivative free. Under appropriate assumptions, the method is shown to be globally convergent. Preliminary numerical results show that the proposed method works well and is very efficient.


MOTIVATION
The rapid development of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) technologies allows us to explore tissue heterogeneity at the cellular level. The identification of cell types plays an essential role in the analysis of scRNA-seq data, which, in turn, influences the discovery of regulatory genes that induce heterogeneity. As the scale of sequencing data increases, the classical method of combining clustering and differential expression analysis to annotate cells becomes more costly in terms of both labor and resources. Existing scRNA-seq supervised classification method can alleviate this issue through learning a classifier trained on the labeled reference data and then making a prediction based on the unlabeled target data. However, such label transference strategy carries with risks, such as susceptibility to batch effect and further compromise of inherent discrimination of target data.

RESULTS
In this paper, inspired by unsupervised domain adaptation, we propose a flexible single cell semi-supervised clustering and annotation framework, scSemiCluster, which integrates the reference data and target data for training. We utilize structure similarity regularization on the reference domain to restrict the clustering solutions of the target domain. We also incorporates pairwise constraints in the feature learning process such that cells belonging to the same cluster are close to each other, and cells belonging to different clusters are far from each other in the latent space. Notably, without explicit domain alignment and batch effect correction, scSemiCluster outperforms other state-of-the-art, single-cell supervised classification and semi-supervised clustering annotation algorithms in both simulation and real data. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to use both deep discriminative clustering and deep generative clustering techniques in the single-cell field.

AVAILABILITY
An implementation of scSemiCluster is available from https://github.com/xuebaliang/scSemiCluster.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION
Supplementary notes are available at Bioinformatics online.


Sport is a popular pastime in the Netherlands; 10 million people take part
in at least one sport. To do this, they can choose from more than 27,000
non-profit sports clubs, or more than 5,000 commercial providers such as
fitness centres or riding stables. These clubs and commercial providers make
use of almost 8,000 sports facilities throughout the country. Among the most
popular sports are football, swimming, cycling, fitness training and tennis.
The Dutch not only take part in sport, but also help with its
organisation: 11% of the population are active as volunteers in sport.

Internationally, the Netherlands can boast a number of exceptional sporting
performances at the highest level, such as the many swimming medals won by Inge
de Bruijn and Pieter van den Hoogenband or the renowned skills of the Dutch
national football team.

In this publication The Netherlands Institute for Social Research (SCP)
has selected the most notable data on sport in the Netherlands to give the
reader a picture of the Dutch sporting landscape.


Spinning dust grains in front of the bright Galactic synchrotron background can produce a weak absorption signal that could affect measurements of high-redshift 21 cm absorption. At frequencies near 80 MHz where the Experiment to Detect the Global EoR Signature (EDGES) has reported 21 cm absorption at z ≈ 17 , absorption could be produced by interstellar nanoparticles with radii a ≈ 50 Å in the cold interstellar medium (ISM), with rotational temperature T ≈ 50 K. Atmospheric aerosols could contribute additional absorption. The strength of the absorption depends on the abundance of such grains and on their dipole moments, which are uncertain. The breadth of the absorption spectrum of spinning dust limits its possible impact on measurement of a relatively narrow 21 cm absorption feature.


Mean birth weight was 2922 g (SD 316) versus 2474 g (SD 751) (P = 0.025). In MC twins, survival was 80.0% (4/5) in the first group versus 86.9% (20/23) in pregnancies managed conservatively (P = 0.7). Mean gestational age at birth was 35.2 (SD 2.9) weeks in the first group versus 32.7 (SD 3.4) weeks in the second group (P = 0.14). Preterm delivery (< 34 weeks) was reported in 50.0% (2/4) versus 68.2% (15/22) (P = 0.48). Mean birth weight was 2711 grams (SD 596) versus 1667 grams (SD 372) (P = 0.0001). Conclusions: This is the first systematic review on the management of twins discordant for anencephaly. In dichorionic twins, we found a significant increase in mean gestational age and weight at delivery, therefore supporting the use of selective feticide in these pregnancies. In monochorionic twins selective feticide also seems to be preferable but the lack of sufficient data and the complexity of this pathology make it hard to draw clear conclusions in this group.