Japanese women are frequently perceived by foreigners as stereotypes. Pictured as compliant, long-suffering, and charming in a childlike way, they are said to be child-centered and restricted in their interests and actions to the domestic realm. The appear as victim, pawn, or tragic heroine: Madame Chrysanthemum, Madame Butterfly, and even the impossible Mariko of "Shogun." "The Women of Suye Mura" provides a rich body of information by means of which such stereotypes may be reevaluated and challenged. Based on Ella Wiswell's extensive field notes from the mid-1930s-when she and her late husband John Embree undertook a joint research project in rural Japan-this volume forms a companion to Embree's now-standard "Suye Mura: A Japanese Village." Its focus on the women of the village affords a unique look at their daily lives and a detailed portrait of their world-views and social understandings at a time when the orthodoxies of the contemporary state were not yet completely accepted. Through Ella Wiswell's journal, sensitively edited by Robert Smith, we may understand some of their hopes and fears, see what amuses and angers them, and hear their comments on everything from adultery and illness to religion, magic and the origins of the imperial house. The body of data, secured by direct observation, is unparalleled in the literature. No other account of the lives of Japanese rural women of this era remains, and in no contemporary community can their like be found. "The Women of Suye Mura" will thus serve as an important resource for anyone interested in the past-and present-of the Japanese woman.


Visual tracking is the task of repeatedly inferring the state (position, motion, etc.) of the desired target in an image sequence. It is an important scientific problem as humans can visually track targets in a broad range of settings. However, visual tracking algorithms struggle to robustly follow a target in unconstrained scenarios. Among the many challenges faced by visual trackers, two important ones are occlusions and abrupt motion variations. Occlusions take place when (an)other object(s) obscures the camera's view of the tracked target. A target may exhibit abrupt variations in apparent motion due to its own unexpected movement, camera movement, and low frame rate image acquisition. Each of these issues can cause a tracker to lose its target.
This thesis introduces the idea of learning and propagation of tracking information over multiple temporal scales to overcome occlusions and abrupt motion variations. A temporal scale is a specific sequence of moments in time Models (describing appearance and/or motion of the target) can be learned from the target tracking history over multiple temporal scales and applied over multiple temporal scales in the future. With the rise of multiple motion model tracking frameworks, there is a need for a broad range of search methods and ways of selecting between the available motion models.
The potential benefits of learning over multiple temporal scales are first assessed by studying both motion and appearance variations in the ground-truth data associated with several image sequences. A visual tracker operating over multiple temporal scales is then proposed that is capable of handling occlusions and abrupt motion variations.
Experiments are performed to compare the performance of the tracker with competing methods, and to analyze the impact on performance of various elements of the proposed approach. Results reveal a simple, yet general framework for dealing with occlusions and abrupt motion variations. In refining the proposed framework, a search method is generalized for multiple competing hypotheses in visual tracking, and a new motion model selection criterion is proposed.


Type 2 diabetes is one of the most prevalent endocrine disorders worldwide. Traditionally, herbal plants and their derivatives are used to lessen complications of type 2 diabetes. The hypoglycemic and hypolipidemic properties have been reported for vinegar, but some cases of discrepant effects were also observed. In the current study, the impact of apple vinegar on some hematological and blood biochemical factors in type 2 diabetic patients was investigated. In this trial study, sixty patients with type 2 diabetes were divided into two groups. The first group took 15 ml of vinegar with their middle meal for one month. The second group received water as placebo. At the beginning and end of the study, blood samples were collected and biochemical factors including fasting blood sugar (FBS), glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), triglycerides (TG), total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (LDL-C), high-density lipoprotein-cholesterol (HDL-C), urea, creatinine (Cr), uric acid, aspartate transaminase (AST), alanine transaminase (ALT), alkaline phosphatase (ALP) and complete blood count (CBC) were evaluated. Findings showed that FBS (P=0.006), HbA1c (P=0.002), MCV (P=0.0001) and mean cell hemoglobin (MCH; P=0.002) decreased where platelets (PLT) (P=0.005) increased significantly in first group. There was no significant difference in the studied parameters in placebo group. Based on the results of this study, it can be concluded that vinegar is a hypoglycemic agent that can be applied for treatment of type 2 diabetes.


Robert Barnes is a name well known to historians of the English Reformation. He receives brief mention in most historical surveys, being variously discussed as Coverdale's prior, Luther's friend, Cromwell's protégé, or Henry VIII's martyr. Among scholars whose interests lie primarily with the theology of the Reformation, Barnes has at times received further, more focused attention, his written works being examined in some detail and he himself being painted as a rare English Lutheran. Those interested in the politics of the Henrician Reformation have also found reason to assign Barnes a place of some importance, giving particular attention to his later role as royal ambassador to the princes and theologians of the German Protestant League of Schmalkalden. In contrast to these portraits of Barnes as a theologian and diplomat, and in spite of the fact that Barnes regularly mounted the pulpit while in England, there has been no comparable emphasis on Robert Barnes the preacher. The reason for this lacuna is quite simply that, despite the amount of contemporary commentary on his preaching, none of Barnes's actual sermons has been preserved. This is a fact all the more lamentable since, as those friends and foes who did comment upon his preaching make clear, he was known by contemporaries to be an extraordinarily zealous and effective preacher.


Chirality is an interesting geometric property and it is meaningful to explore the interactions between chiral small molecules and stereoselective biomacromolecules, with pre-clinical and clinical significance. Since the first observation of enantioselective binding to human-derived P-glycoprotein (P-gp) by mefloquine enantiomers [1], sparse stereoselectivity studies with P-gp modulators emerged. Recently, we have shown that newly synthesized (thio)xanthonic derivatives protect against toxic P-gp substrates acting as potent inducers/activators of this transporter [2-3]. Now we aim to discover new P-gp modulators and enlightening the stereoselectivity of this ABC transporter face to this class of modulators.
Herein, we report the synthesis and characterization of a library of new chiral aminated thioxanthones in their enantiomeric pure form (Figure 1) and in silico and in vitro preliminary results concerning their P-gp modulation behavior.
In silico docking studies in P-gp rat model anticipated enantioselectivity for these new derivatives. Thioxanthones cytotoxicity was evaluated by the Neutral Red uptake assay, in order to select a non-cytotoxic working concentration. The compounds were assessed for their influence in P-gp ATPase assay. The investigation of P-gp expression and activity allowed to discover new P-gp modulators. Nevertheless, no significant differences between enantiomeric pairs of thioxanthones were observed.
[1] L. Lu, F. Leonessa, M.T. Baynham, R. Clarke, F. Gimenez, Y.T. Pham, F. Roux, I.W. Wainer, Pharmaceutical research, 18 (2001) 1327-1330.
 [2] R. Silva, A. Palmeira, H. Carmo, D.J. Barbosa, M. Gameiro, A. Gomes, A.M. Paiva, E. Sousa, M. Pinto, L. Bastos Mde, F. Remiao, Archives of toxicology, 89 (2015) 1783-1800.
[3] R. Silva, E. Sousa, H. Carmo, A. Palmeira, D.J. Barbosa, M. Gameiro, M. Pinto, L. Bastos Mde, F. Remiao, Archives of toxicology, 88 (2014) 937-951.

This work was partially supported through national funds provided by: FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology and European Regional, Development Fund (ERDF) and COMPETE under the projects PEst-C/MAR/LA0015/2013, PTDC/MAR-BIO/4694/2014, and INNOVMAR - Innovation and Sustainability in the Management and Exploitation of Marine Resources, reference NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000035, Research Line NOVELMAR.


Radio Frequency Identification is increasingly popular technology with many applications. The majority of applications of RFID are in the field of supply chain management. In this paper, we proposed the development of wireless RFID Glove for various applications in real life. Proposed wireless RFID glove is composed of RFID reader of 13.56 MHz, RF wireless module, and power supply battery. Proposed Gloves were applied to two applications. The first application is the interactive leaning and the second application is meal aid system for blind people. The experimental results confirmed good performances.


Using the random matrix theory, we investigate the ensemble statistics of edge transport of a quantum spin Hall insulator with multiple edge states in the presence of quenched disorder. Dorokhov-Mello-Pereyra-Kumar equation applicable for such a system is established. It is found that a two-dimensional quantum spin Hall insulator is effectively a new type of one-dimensional (1D) quantum conductor with the different ensemble statistics from that of the ordinary 1D quantum conductor or the insulator with an even number of Kramers edge pairs. The ensemble statistics provides a physical manifestation of the Z(2) classification for the time-reversal invariant insulators.


The importance of agricultural infrastructure to the development of organic farming in Libya is receiving considerable attention from policy makers in view of its potential in contributing to economic development. There is a vital role for agricultural infrastructure in promoting organic farming development in Libya. This would increase employment, enhance general economic development and stimulate growth in other sectors. Agricultural infrastructure already contributes to the general development of Libyan agriculture, and it may be vital to improving sustainability.Despite growing research interest in agriculture in Libya, there is still work to be done to bring the relationship of infrastructure and organic farming development into focus. In order to understand better the role that infrastructure plays in the development of agriculture and transformation to organic farming. This research draws on agricultural development theory to enhance understanding on the relationship between agricultural infrastructure and transformation to organic farming in Libya. Particular attention is paid to the historical development of agriculture in Libya and the role politics played in shaping agricultural development and resultant policy initiatives. The empirical focus of the research is on three main agricultural regions in Libya. This study argues that despite the fact that organic farming is in its embryonic stages in Libya, there is the potential to transform agricultural practices to facilitate organic farming if the constraints of availability and accessibility associated with current agricultural infrastructure especially at the regional and farm levels are given adequate attention with the involvement of all stakeholders including farmers. Interviews with ten agricultural experts provide a range of insights into the issues associated with infrastructure and agricultural development. A variety of issues and constraints which serve as barriers to agricultural development in Libya were identified from data collected from 277 farmers through questionnaires. The research highlights the importance of availability and accessibility of agricultural infrastructure to the transformation to organic farming in Libya. There is inadequate and inappropriate infrastructure especially at the farm level to promote the development of organicfarming practices. A variety of suggestions is presented on ways to improve the development of agriculture in Libya. This includes a suggestion for closer collaboration among all stakeholders in the agricultural sector so that the provision of agricultural infrastructure will be at the preferred areas to maximize their utilisation. This will require improved communication among all stakeholders in the planning and implementation of agricultural policies. The research highlights the importance of availability and accessibility of financial assistance to farmers as well as the provision of food processing plant. The research shows that there is potential to enhance organic farming development in Libya and has demonstrated the importance of agricultural infrastructure to this process.


It has been conjectured that every configurationC of convex objects in 3-space with disjoint interiors can be taken apart by translation with two hands: that is, some proper subset ofC can be translated to infinity without disturbing its complement. We show that the conjecture holds for five or fewer objects and give a counterexample with six objects. We extend the counterexample to a configuration that cannot be taken apart with two hands using arbitrary isometries (rigid motions).


From fansubbing, fan-generated translation, to user-generated translation, from amateur translation to social translation, non-professional subtitling has come a long way since its humble beginning in the 1980s. The prevailing technological affordance enables and mobilises the digital generation to turn subtitling into a method of self-expression and mediation, and their activities have made translation a more social and visible activity than ever before. This volume provides a comprehensive review of the current state of play of this user-generated subtitling phenomenon. It includes projects and research focusing on various aspects of non-professional subtitling, including the communities at work, the agents at play, the production conditions and the products. The perspectives in the book explore the role played by the agents involved in the emerging subtitling networks worldwide, and their impact on the communities is also discussed, based on empirical data generated from observations on active fansubbing communities. The collection demonstrates, from various viewpoints, the ways in which non-professional subtitling connects languages, cultures and communities in a global setting.


Focusing is widely used to increase the resolution in medical ultrasound imaging systems. Focusing increases signal levels returning from the mainlobe direction and decreases those from sidelobe directions. The sidelobes, when not completely cancelled, deteriorate the resulting image resolution. This paper proposes a method of improving the resolution by scaling the received signal according to the ratio between the mainlobe and the sidelobe levels computed in the frequency domain by the use of Fourier transform. The proposed method is verified by computer simulation and experiment and is shown to be highly effective in narrowing the mainlobe width and decreasing the sidelobe levels at the same time.


This paper proposes a novel approach to specific object detection in complex scenes using color-based entropy features and a fuzzy classifier (FC). Appearances of the detected objects are assumed to contain multiple colors in non-homogeneous distributions that make it difficult to detect these objects using shape features. The proposed detection approach consists of two filtering phases with two different novel color-based entropy features. The first phase filters a test pattern with the entropy of color component (ECC). A self-splitting clustering (SSC) algorithm is proposed to automatically generate clusters in the hue and saturation (HS) color space according to the composing pixels of an object. The ECC value is computed from histograms of pixels in the found clusters and is used to generate object candidates. The second filtering phase uses the entropies of geometric color distributions (EGCD) to filter the object candidates obtained from the first phase. An EGCD is computed for each of the clustered composing colors of a candidate object. The EGCD values are fed to an FC to enable advanced filtering. A new FC using the SSC algorithm and support vector machine (FC-SSCSVM) for antecedent and consequent parameter learning, respectively, is proposed to improve detection performance. Experimental results on the detection of different objects and comparisons with various detection approaches and classifiers verify the advantage of the proposed detection approach using the FC-SSCSVM.


Widely open economies along with highly integrated markets with unstable nature, have made all corporations and business units vulnerable to macroeconomic fluctuations. The flow of Macro-changes in performance falsifies the outcome of a firm's action with misleading signals, which does not reflect sustainable competitiveness of the firm. This means that raw performance measurements are inappropriate for benchmarking purposes as well as industry averages. I argue that macroeconomic variables are not only firm-specific, but also divisionspecific. I have employed MUST-analysis approach to recognize the macroeconomic variables specific to each division and to eliminate their effects, in order to obtain "intrinsic" measure of divisions' performance. Empirical results are presented from a case study of four divisions within Jotun Group, and showed that each unit is exposed to different sets of macroeconomic variables in addition to existence of deviations between traditional performance measurements and adjusted ones. Thus, leads to conclude that performance measurement purification is a necessary-supplementary condition in any benchmarking and strategic decision-making process.


INTRODUCTION
Vitamin D has been determined to have some effects on b cell function and insulin sensitivity, and it is known that type 2 diabetes mellitus and hyperparathyroidism can cause obesity. The aim of our study was to investigate if vitamin D deficiency without diabetes mellitus and metabolic syndrome is associated with obesity and abdominal obesity.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
The study included 276 healthy premenopausal women. To exclude other causes of obesity, postmenopausal women and subjects with diabetes mellitus and metabolic syndrome were excluded. Women were divided into two groups depending on their 25-hydroxyvitaminD(3) [25(OH)D(3)] levels: subjects with vitamin D deficiency (Group 1) and subjects without vitamin D deficiency (Group 2). Body mass index (BMI), waist circumference (WC), and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) were compared between the two groups.

RESULTS
BMI, WC, WHR, rates of obesity, and abdominal obesity according to WC and WHR of Group 2 were lower than those of Group 1 (p = 0.0005, p = 0.0001, p = 0.0045, p = 0.032, p = 0.002, p = 0.011, respectively). 25(OH)D(3) levels negatively correlated with BMIs (r = -0.480, p < 0.0001), WCs (r = -0.480, p < 0.0001) and WHRs (r = -0.312, p < 0.05). There were no differences between serum parathormone, calcium and phosphorus levels of Group 1 and 2 (p = 0.239, p = 0.354, p = 0.95, respectively).

CONCLUSION
Vitamin D deficiency without diabetes mellitus and hyperparathyroidism may be associated with obesity and abdominal obesity.


Sepsis is an important disease in both humans and animals. In animals, it is usually caused by septicaemia after infection and has not been well-studied. This article describes a retrospective analysis of sepsis cases in small and large ruminants submitted to the Post-Mortem Laboratory, Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, Universiti Putra Malaysia between the years 2007 and 2017. The incidence of sepsis was found to be at 40.5% in small ruminants and 38.6% in large ruminants. In both small and large ruminants, sepsis was mainly caused by bacterial infection, which was significantly (p<0.05) higher compared to parasitic and viral infections. Most cases of sepsis occur due to infections originating from the gastrointestinal tract and this is followed by the respiratory tract. Escherichia coli has been found to be the most common bacterial pathogen of sepsis in ruminants; significantly (p<0.05) higher compared to other bacterial pathogens like Klebsiella pneumoniae, Pasteurella sp., and Staphylococcus aureus. Sepsis involving E. coli has often resulted in pure isolation of the pathogen, thus being suggestive of a single infection. Underlying or concurrent infection is the most important risk factor leading to sepsis in ruminants, with significant difference (p<0.05) compared to other risk factors such as stress or malnutrition. Associations between the gastrointestinal system as the point of entry and sepsis caused by either E. coli or K. pneumoniae have been noted. This study provides an insight into a basic understanding of sepsis in ruminants.


In this magisterial work the history of the peoples of Palestine from the earliest times to Alexander's conquest is thoroughly sifted and interpreted. All available source material-textural, epigraphic, and archeological-is considered, and the approach taken aims at a dispassionate reconstruction of the major epochs and events by the analysis of social, political, military, and economic phenomena. The book, chronologically structured, is indispensable for the study of the Hebrew Bible and of the ancient Near East.


We introduce a simple, yet powerful approach towards force-induced healing polymers. While most synthetic polymers fail in response to stress and have no recovery mechanism, we demonstrate that polymers containing a thiocarbonylthio group exhibit amplified mechanochemical activity. In the presence of a crosslinker, the radicals generated from homolytic cleavage are exploited to trigger a 'healing' response within minutes.


The Adobe Flash platform has become the de facto standard for developing and deploying media rich web applications and games. The relative ease-of-development and cross-platform architecture of Flash enables designers to rapidly prototype graphically rich interactive applications, but comprehensive support for audio and signal processing has been lacking. ActionScript, the primary development language used for Flash, is poorly suited for DSP algorithms. To address the inherent challenges in the integration of interactive audio processing into Flash-based applications, we have developed the DSP Audio Toolkit for Flash, which offers significant performance improvements over algorithms implemented in Java or ActionScript. By developing this toolkit, we hope to open up new possibilities for Flash applications and games, enabling them to utilize real-time audio processing as a means to drive gameplay and improve the experience of the end user.


This thesis examines the relationships between risk assessment and parole decisions. Chapter 1 introduces the problem. Chapter 2 systematically reviews 29 papers involving 20,568 participants, concluding that practices vary widely, but subjective rather than evidence-based risk assessment predominates. Chapter 3 reports a study of how parole decisions related to three widely-used risk assessment instruments (the PCL-R, the HCR-20, and the SVR-20), and recommendations of professionals (psychologists and probation officers) on 100 life sentence prisoners in England and Wales, 84 of whom were eligible for parole. The study found that parole decisions were related to the recommendations of professionals, especially that of the offender manager (external probation officer). Professional recommendations themselves were related to the more subjective subscales of the risk assessment instruments. Chapter 4 considers an instrument used in the research, the PCL-R psychopathy assessment, concluding that the PCL-R, although it may have been successful in academic research, lacks reliability when used as a risk assessment instrument "in the field". Chapter 5 discusses the findings, concluding that the present system of risk assessment for parole in England and Wales is not evidence-based and that as a result many low-risk prisoners are likely to undergo prolonged detention unnecessarily.


In this paper, we detail two techniques for standing wave evanescent field optical trapping utilizing total internal reflection at a prism-water interface. Firstly, we describe an actively-locked cavity enhancement technique that generates circulating powers in excess of 10 W over an area of 150 μm x 75 μm on the prism surface using a 400 mW source, as well as providing control over the shape of the underlying transverse cavity mode. Secondly, we have combined an inverted optical tweezers with a counter-propagating evanescent wave trapping experiment, providing a useful platform for exploring light scattering interactions between small ensembles of particles. The resulting structures are compared to our theoretical model based upon Generalised Lorentz-Mie Theory.


*Corresponding author We present new zircon fission-track (ZFT) data from Variscan granitoid bodies in the Veporic (footwall unit) and Gemeric (hangingwall unit) thick-skinned nappe sheets of the Central Western Carpathians. All samples show Late Cretaceous to earliest Paleogene cooling ZFT ages, which contribute to constraining the low-temperature exhumation history of the Vepor–Gemer Belt. Four granite samples from the western part of the Gemericum near the contact with the underlying Veporicum provided central ZFT ages between 70.4 ± 5.4 and 74.7 ± 5.6 Ma. One sample from this area shows an older age of 87.7 ± 5.9 Ma, possibly owing to its higher structural position. One remoter sample from the SE part of the Gemeric Unit has 61.7 ± 3.4 Ma central ZFT age, which probably reflects exhumation associated with a younger compressional tectonic event in that area. One sample from the centre of the Veporic metamorphic core complex yielded a cooling age 64.9 ± 4.8 Ma. However, most of these samples exhibit an internal age scatter pointing to complex cooling and exhumation history influenced by a slow passage through the zircon partial annealing zone and/or reheating brought about by the Cretaceous Rochovce granite intrusion. In spite of this, the acquired ages generally match the exhumation trend of the Veporic metamorphic core complex.


Protein hydrophobic interaction has been considered the most important factor dominating protein folding, aggregation, gelling, self-assembly, adhesion, and cohesion properties. In this paper, morphology and phase separation of hydrophobic clusters, networks, and aggregates of soy globular protein polymers, induced by using a reducing agent (NaHSO3), are studied using microscopic instruments. The morphology and phase separation of these hydrophobic clusters are sensitive to protein structure and composition, pH, and ionic-strength (I(m)). Most of the clusters are in spherical-shape architecture and mainly consist of hydrophobic polypeptides. Rod-shape clusters were also observed at higher ionic strength, and mainly consist of hydrophilic polypeptides. The ratio of hydrophobic/hydrophilic (HB/HL) polypeptides is important to facilitate the formation of clusters in an environment with a certain pH value and ionic strength. At HB/HL 0.8, uniform spherical clusters were observed and diameters ranged from 30 to 70 nm. At HB/HL <0.8, large spherical clusters were formed with diameters ranging from 100 to 1,000 nm, and at HB/HL >or=1.8, large hydrophobic aggregates formed, and size of aggregates can be up to 2 500 nm. When solid content increased from 3% to 38%, at I(m) <or= 0.058 mol x L(-1), pH = 4.8, HB/HL ratio <0.8, the networks turned into a continuous substance that has strong adhesion to various surfaces; at I(m) >or= 0.115 mol x L(-1), HB/HL ratio >or=1.8, the large aggregates became very cohesive and viscoelastic. Clear phase separation was observed during curing between hydrophobic and hydrophilic protein polymers. Phase-separation degree increased as HB/HL ratio increased.


We present an energy harvesting technique that leverages readily available time-varying ambient electric field (EF) as source, and explore the utilization of surrounding everyday objects that are constructed from conductive materials. In this abstract, we describe the general concept and the circuit model of our approach. We showed that by incorporating energy store and release circuitry, we were able to deliver power to a usable level. To thoroughly test the technique, we developed Wireless Logger hardware module and conduct extensive one week-long power harvesting experiment. We show our ambient electric field profiler tool that checks the electrical properties of an environment. This tool is useful to obtain parameters to know whether our technique is feasible for a given environment. We highlight limitations that encourage us to refine our design, explore other grounding strategies, and implement techniques to extract the maximum harvestable energy in the future iterations of this strategy. We believe that the perpetual issue in Internet-of-Things is electrical power, and this research contributes as a simple, lightweight, thus usability-wise, a powerful solution for this issue.


The cell is the fundamental building block of life. With the advent of single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq), we can for the first time assess the transcriptome of many individual cells. This has profound implications for biological and medical questions and is especially important to characterize heterogeneous cell populations and rare cells. However, the technology is technically and computationally challenging as complementary DNA (cDNA) needs to be generated and amplified from minute amounts of mRNA and sequenceable libraries need to be efficiently generated from many cells. This requires to establish different protocols, identify important caveats, benchmark various methods and improve them if possible. To this end, we analysed amplification bias and its effect on detecting differentially expressed genes in several bulk and a single-cell RNA sequencing methods. We found that correcting for amplification bias is not possible computationally but improves the power of scRNA-seq considerably, though neglectable for bulk-RNA-seq. In the second study we compared six prominent scRNA-seq protocols as more and more single-cell RNA-sequencing are becoming available, but an independent benchmark of methods is lacking. By using the same mouse embryonic stem cells (mESCs) and exogenous mRNA spike-ins as common reference, we compared six important scRNA-seq protocols in their sensitivity, accuracy and precision to quantify mRNA levels. In agreement with our previous study, we find that the precision, i.e. the technical variance, of scRNA-seq methods is driven by amplification bias and drastically reduced when using unique molecular identifiers to remove amplification duplicates. To assess the combined effects of sensitivity and precision and to compare the cost-efficiency of methods we compared the power to detect differentially expressed genes among the tested scRNA-seq protocols using a novel simulation framework. We find that some methods are prohibitively inefficient and others show trade-offs depending on the number of cells per sample that need to be analysed. Our study also provides a framework for benchmarking further improvements of scRNA-seq protocol and we published an improved version of our simulation framework powsimR. It uniquely recapitulates the specific characteristics of scRNA-seq data to enable streamlined simulations for benchmarking both wet lab protocols and analysis algorithms. Furthermore, we compile our experience in processing different types of scRNA-seq data, in particular with barcoded libraries and UMIs, and developed zUMIs, a fast and flexible scRNA-seq data processing software overcoming shortcomings of existing pipelines.
In addition, we used the in-depth characterization of scRNA-seq technology to optimize an already powerful scRNA-seq protocol even further. According to data generated from exogenous mRNA spike-ins, this new mcSCRB-seq protocol is currently the most sensitive scRNA-seq protocol available.
Single-cell resolution makes scRNA-seq uniquely suited for the understanding of complex diseases, such as leukemia. In acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), rare chemotherapy-resistant cells persist as minimal residual disease (MRD) and may cause relapse. However, biological mechanisms of these relapse-inducing cells remain largely unclear because characterisation of this rare population was lacking so far. In order to contribute to the understanding of MRD, we leveraged scRNA-seq to study minimal residual disease cells from ALL. We obtained and characterised rare, chemotherapy-resistant cell populations from primary patients and patient cells grown in xenograft mouse models. We found that MRD cells are dormant and feature high expression of adhesion molecules in order to persist in the hematopoietic niche. Furthermore, we could show that there is plasticity between resting, resistant MRD cells and cycling, therapy-sensitive cells, indicating that patients could benefit from strategies that release MRD cells from the niche. Importantly, we show that our data derived from xenograft models closely resemble rare primary patient samples. In conclusion, my work of the last years contributes towards the development of experimental and computational single-cell RNA sequencing methods enabling their widespread application to biomedical problems such as leukemia.


Abstract The ability to flexibly categorize object concepts is essential to semantic cognition because the features that make two objects similar in one context may be irrelevant and even constitute interference in another. Thus, adaptive behavior in complex and dynamic environments requires the resolution of feature-based interference. In the current case study, we placed visual and functional semantic features in opposition across object concepts in two categorization tasks. Successful performance required the resolution of functional interference in a visual categorization task and the resolution of visual interference in a functional categorization task. In Experiment 1, we found that patient D. A., an individual with bilateral temporal lobe lesions, was unable to categorize object concepts in a context-dependent manner. His impairment was characterized by an increased tendency to incorrectly group objects that were similar on the task-irrelevant dimension, revealing an inability to resolve cross-modal semantic interference. In Experiment 2, D. A.'s categorization accuracy was comparable to controls when lures were removed, indicating that his impairment is unique to contexts that involve cross-modal interference. In Experiment 3, he again performed as well as controls when categorizing simple concepts, suggesting that his impairment is specific to categorization of complex object concepts. These results advance our understanding of the anterior temporal lobe as a system that represents object concepts in a manner that enables flexible semantic cognition. Specifically, they reveal a dissociation between semantic representations that contribute to the resolution of cross-modal interference and those that contribute to the resolution of interference within a given modality.


Most national and international development policies have now made ample room for the application of ICT and transition toward the information society. Within each country as well as among them, inequalities in access and use (usually referred to as "digital divide") are seen as a major threat. In addition to securing "universal access," information literacy is a major component of these efforts. A number of examples mostly drawn from Latin America illustrate the patterns in addressing information literacy issues. The emphasis upon use of computers and more generally the quite narrow perspective of these programs makes them look far more an exercise for "retooling" the workforce than empowering citizens. It is advocated that the potential of the Information Age cannot be realised without expanding the scope of information and computer literacy far beyond their usual, functional aspects. What is at stake is the formation of an information culture, which itself involves the adaptation of preexisting cultures. In other words a cultural revolution assumed by the actors rather than a cultural involution pushed by the global media. In conclusion a few requirements for such a new course are outlined.


This paper analyses how the Bollinger Band method is used to represent defective objects and repeated patterns in fabric images. Regularity is one of the main features for many Patterned texture material inspection. This study shows the new approach called Bollinger Band (BB) method which is used to outline the shape of the defective region. In the proposed method the Bollinger Band is calculated based on standard deviation and moving average. The Bollinger Band method is shift invariant approach and hence immune of the alignment. In this paper the upper Bollinger band and lower Bollinger bands are developed to indicate defective areas in patterned fabric. Abnormal changes in the pattern lead to large variation in the standard deviation. Its mathematical definition was simple. For defect detection on patterned texture application of Bollinger Band is divided into training stage and testing stage.


This thesis is dedicated to the release and immobilization of As5+ and Sb5+ in contaminated geomaterials. Although the physical properties and chemical composition of the contaminated materials vary widely, the mechanisms, which control the fate of the contaminants are supposedly similar. In order to understand these mechanisms, I carried out a mineralogical and geochemical investigation of a soil, which was mixed with contaminated As-rich ash waste. With techniques including powder-PXRD, ICP-MS, sequential extractions, EMPA and synchrotron based µ-XRD and XANES, the carriers of As5+ in the fresh ash waste and soil-ash mixtures were identified and characterized. Glass particles and unburned coal particles with veinlets of As-rich calcite are the main carriers of As5+. In the soil-ash mixtures, the soluble As5+ containing phases of the ash-waste almost completely disappeared and As5+ migrated into the soil components, presumably consisting of iron oxides. In the following study, the immobilization of As5+ by iron oxides in the context of As5+ incorporation in hematite was investigated. As5+-ferrihydrite was transformed to hematite and examined by ICP-MS, powder-XRD, SEM, TEM, and EXAFS spectroscopy. The results show that As5+ can be incorporated into hematite with concentrations of 1.9 wt%. This novel immobilization mechanism encouraged me to investigate the possibility of Sb5+ incorporation into iron oxides in a subsequent study. Ferrihydrite was doped with different concentrations of Sb5+, As5+, and P5+ and transformed to more-well crystalline products. The transformation products were analyzed and characterized by ICP-MS, PXRD, SEM and TEM. The results show that Sb5+ directly controls the outcome of the ferrihydrite transformation and therefore the transformation products. These transformation products contain Sb5+ with up to 14 wt.%, exceeding an exclusive adsorption mechanism by far, suggesting structural incorporation of Sb5+ into the iron oxides.


Traffic congestion created by urban highway construction and rehabilitation activity imposes substantial cost burdens on highway users. In their attempts to quantify and predict such costs, transportation planners have customarily relied on computer models that focus principally on vehicle operating cost and time delay increases. Increasingly, however, planners are recognizing that highway users themselves can inflate system costs--particularly those costs associated with increases in tailpipe emissions. Thus, the challenge to highway planners is to model these effects so that a full range of cost effects can be used at the planning stages of a traffic engineering project. The preliminary results of a study undertaken to modify an existing work zone model--QUEWZ--to report net increases in energy and tailpipe pollution associated with various traffic-handling scenarios within construction zones are given.


Ecosystem-based fisheries management, which considers the interactions between fisheries, target species, and the physical and biological components of ecosystems, is necessary to ensure that directed fisheries avoid adverse impacts to ecosystems over the long term. The successful implementation of ecosystem-based fisheries management requires an understanding of predator− prey relationships and ways to operationalize such relationships to inform fisheries management. Here, we investigated if the diet of a generalist predator, Atlantic puffin Fratercula arctica, can be used as an indicator of the abundance of 2 commercially exploited prey species (haddock Melanogrammus aeglefinus and Acadian redfish Sebastes fasciatus) in the Gulf of Maine. Because haddock and redfish eaten by puffins are juveniles (age 0), there is potential to use their proportions and lengths in puffin diet to better understand the processes influencing haddock and redfish recruitment. By using principal component analysis to develop measures of diet across multiple puffin colonies, we show both spatial variation and large-scale patterns in the proportions and lengths of haddock and redfish in puffin diet. Spawning stock biomass was a strong predictor of haddock proportion in puffin diet and a moderate predictor of redfish proportion; however, proportions in puffin diet did not predict age-1 recruitment, suggesting that variation in recruitment is caused by processes that occur after the puffin breeding season and which affect the survival of older juveniles. Haddock length on one colony was a moderate predictor of age-1 recruitment. We conclude that puffin diet can be used as an indicator of haddock and redfish abundance.


he aim of this work is to make a theoretical critique to the introduction of contractual relations between the State and the senior managers of the Executive branch which is one component of the New Public Management (NPM) paradigm. I assert that the contractual relationships in the speciic form proposed by the NPM in its ideal-type model is functional with the ideal neoliberal State-type, because it weakens the power of the representative government, and thus the power of democracy and the State center over the administrative apparatus. As a consequence, this weakens the State's autonomy with respect to the market and weakens its rooting with people. Inversely, they strengthen the power of a technocracy, they strengthen its rooting with the market and the private sector, and they strengthen their autonomy with respect to the representative government, the democratic process and the citizens.


It has been proposed that the active centre of cyclic AMP-dependent protein kinase contains an arginine-recognition site, which is considered to be essential for the function of the catalytic subunit of the kinase [Matsuo, Huang & Huang (1978) Biochem. J.173, 441-447]. The catalytic subunit can be inactivated by 3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)-1-ethylcarbodi-imide and glycine ethyl ester at pH6.5. The enzyme can be protected from inactivation by preincubation with histone, a protein substrate of the enzyme. On the other hand, ATP, which also serves as a protein kinase substrate, does not afford protection. Polyarginine, a competitive inhibitor of protein kinase, which is known from kinetic studies to interact specifically with the arginine-recognition site, partially protects the catalytic subunit from inactivation by 3-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)-1-ethylcarbodi-imide. These results lead to the conclusion that the site of modification by carbodi-imide/glycine ethyl ester is most likely located at the arginine-recognition site of the active centre. A value of 1.7+/-0.2 (mean+/-s.d.) mol of carboxy groups per mol of catalytic subunit has been obtained for the number of essential carboxy groups for the function of protein kinase; a complete chemical modification of these essential carboxy groups results in total loss of catalytic activity. Finally, we have identified the essential carboxy group in the catalytic subunit of cyclic AMP-dependent protein kinase as being derived from glutamate residues. This is achieved by a three-step procedure involving an extensive proteolytic digestion of the [1-(14)C]glycine ethyl ester-modified enzyme and two successive high-voltage electrophoreses of the hydrolysate. It is concluded that 1.7mol of glutamyl carboxy groups per mol of catalytic subunit may be considered a component of the arginine-recognition site in the active centre of cyclic AMP-dependent protein kinase.


This paper provides a theoretical, methodological, and practical contribution to the debate about strategies for the divulgation of the Italian technical literature of the eighteenth century in English-speaking countries with attention to the Italian universities and cultural institutions of the time. The paper contains a survey of the historical bibliography of contemporary translations of non-technical treatises of architecture in the English language and it proceeds to draw up a set of guidelines (decalogue) of different recently proposed methodologies and strategies. It describes the selection of the treatise to translate, relevant to the context and authoritative knowledge in the European scientific background of the eighteenth century; it continues by proposing a synopsis of the original text in the Italian modern language, a strategy used in order to make historical technical treatises accessible to the contemporary scientific Italian language. Approaches and strategies are experimented with in the case study of Historic Memories about the Great Dome of the Vatican Church (Le Memorie Istoriche della Gran Cupola Vaticana) by Giovanni Poleni, one of the most authoritative scholars of eighteenth-century Europe.


BACKGROUND
Juvenile osteochondritis dissecans (JOCD) lesions are rarely located in the trochlea and few studies have focused on the causes and outcomes of JOCD lesions in this part of the knee. The purpose of this study is to (1) evaluate the clinical characteristics and outcomes of patients who undergo surgery for JOCD in this unusual location as well as (2) assess the association between trochlear JOCD and participation in sporting activities that load the patellofemoral joint.

METHODS
We conducted a retrospective cohort study of 34 trochlear JOCD lesions in 30 patients. Cases that involved traumatic cartilage shear or patella instability were excluded. Preoperative and postoperative magnetic resonance images and x-rays were evaluated and demographic data, sports played, comorbidities, surgical procedures, and clinical data were extracted from medical records. A case-control cohort of 102 femoral condyle lesions was used to assess the correlation between sports played and lesion location.

RESULTS
The cohort comprised 34 consecutive trochlear JOCD lesions in 30 patients (26 males, 4 females). Average age at surgery was 13.8 years (9.3 to 18.0 y). In total, 27 (90%) patients were active, and of these active patients, soccer and basketball were the most common sports played. In the case-control comparison, the correlation between playing either basketball or soccer and the presence of a trochlear JOCD lesion was statistically significant (P=0.017). In total, 21 knees (62%) received operative treatment. Sixteen of the surgical patients underwent repair and fixation with bioabsorbable nails. The average length of clinical and radiographic follow-up was 21.1 months. All patients who underwent fixation showed radiographic and/or clinical indications of healing at most recent follow-up. Thirteen of the patients who underwent fixation were active, and all of these patients reported successful return to sports. Thirteen knees underwent nonoperative treatment, and the majority of these patients had limited follow-up.

CONCLUSIONS
We report a significant association between pediatric athletes who play basketball and soccer and the development of trochlear JOCD, suggesting that repetitive loading of the patellofemoral joint may play a role in the development of JOCD lesions. Patients with trochlear JOCD lesions were likely to undergo surgery, and repair and fixation of the lesions produced good outcomes at short-term follow-up.

LEVEL OF EVIDENCE
Level III-case-control study.


Purpose Pseudoexfoliation syndrome (PEX) is an eye disease that develops under the influence of regional population differences, genetic factors, age, and environmental factors and is characterized by visualization of a gray-white fibrogranular substance in the lens anterior capsule and/or pupil margin during anterior segment examination. The underlying biochemical mechanisms of the disease have not yet been fully elucidated. Therefore, this study was designed to show the changes in aqueous humor and blood serum levels of matrix metalloproteinases (decorin and tenascin C), total antioxidants (TAS), and total oxidants (TOS) in both cataract patients who have unilateral PEX material and cataract patients who do not have unilateral PEX material. Methods Biological samples were simultaneously collected from 22 cataract patients who had unilateral pseudoexfoliation (PEX patients) and 22 cataract patients who did not have unilateral pseudoexfoliation (control patients). From the collected biological samples, decorin (DEC) and tenascin C (TN-C) were measured with the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) method, and TAS and TOS were measured with an autoanalyzer. Results When decorin, tenascin C, and TOS values of PEX patients were compared with those of control patients, there was a statistically significant increase in all three parameters. Conversely, TAS values showed a statistically significant decrease in PEX patients compared to controls. DEC, TN-C, TAS values, and TOS values were significantly higher in aqueous fluid than in blood in both the PEX patient and control groups. Conclusions We suggest that parameters such as DEC, TN-C, TAS, and TOS play a role in the etiopathology of pseudoexfoliation syndrome. Thus, bringing these increased levels of extracellular proteins and TOS and decreased levels of TAS back to within physiological limits can mediate the reorganization of the blood-aqueous fluid barrier and slow the progression of pseudoexfoliation syndrome.


A new, rapid, environmentally friendly prototyping method is presented. This method is based on the use of a negative, water-developable dry-film photoresist as the structural material. In this method, the photomask is prepared by printing microchannel patterns to either a sheet of Vellum paper or a transparency by an office laser printer. It follows by transferring the patterns to the dry-film photoresist by low-dose UV exposure. The patterned photoresist is developed by spraying with pressurized warm water, which makes this method unique and environmentally friendly. The developed SR-3000 with engraved open patterns can be sealed, after plasma-oxidation, to poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) with a good strength of bonding as high as the 340–410 KPa (50–60 psi) range, strong enough to hold pressure for typical microfluidic applications. The turn-around can be accomplished in 3 h with no cleanroom facility. Microchannel designs were prototyped to demonstrate three typical applications in microfluidics.


Mangrove forests are ecologically and economically important and frequently dominating protected coastal areas in the tropics and subtropics at suitable intertidal zones and are often subjected to disturbances that disrupt the structure of an ecosystem, that change resource availability and that create patterns in vegetation by producing a mosaic of seral stages that ecologists have long recognised as important to landscape-level patch mosaics. Several good reasons justify the need for pursuing a predictive understanding of the ecology of mangrove species competition including the role of disturbance events and the aftermath. A predictive understanding can challenge our assumptions concerning the factors that control plant distribution and abundance and provide techniques for predicting rates of species change ranges in response to disturbances. The aim of this study was to evaluate and predict the impact of canopy disturbances on Gazi Bay mangrove forests and the subsequent vegetation patterns both spatially and temporally. The use of a simple 1D cellular automaton provided a detailed and nearly comprehensive parameterisation of the model by forest structure parameters belonging to the standard measurements of mangrove fi eld surveys. In the study presented, the fi eld data were obtained for disturbance impacts at various spatial scales considering not only the spatial extent of the disturbance but also its particular location. For this, multiple sampling transects were selected a priori, based on the vegetation patterns observed on Quickbird satellite image (2002) of Gazi, to refl ect major ecological zones and vegetation transitions in space. Earlier fi eld studies already revealed different population trajectories in some cases for the same pairwise species interactions, which are consistent with the hypothesis that different scales of disturbances may affect succession trends. Simulation experiments supported these fi ndings by demonstrating that varying disturbance impacts determine coexistence or mutual exclusion of the interacting species and occasionally leading to equilibrium shifts to alternative states. We suggest the consideration of simulation experiments as a good proxy for predicting mangrove species dynamics not neglecting the need of further evaluation based on the transient ecodynamics.


The stiffness and frequency properties of tensegrity structures are functions of the pre-stress, topology, configuration, and axial stiffness of the elements. The tensegrity structures considered are tensegrity booms, tensegrity grids, and tensegrity power lines.A study has been carried out on the pre-stress design. It includes (i) finding the most flexible directions for different pre-stress levels, (ii) finding the pre-stress pattern which maximizes the first natural frequency.To find the optimum cross-section areas of the elements for triangular prism and Snelson tensegrity booms, an optimization approach is utilized. A constant mass criterion is considered and the genetic algorithm (GA) is used as the optimization method.The stiffness of the triangular prism and Snelson tensegrity booms are modified by introducing actuators. An optimization approach by means of a GA is employed to find the placement of the actuators and their minimum length variations. The results show that the bending stiffness improves significantly, but still an active tensegrity boom is less stiff than a passive truss boom. The GA shows high accuracy in searching the non-structural space.The tensegrity concept is employed to design a novel transmission power line .A tensegrity prism module is selected as the building block. A complete parametric study is performed to investigate the influence of several parameters such as number of modules and their dimensions on the stiffness and frequency of the structure. A general approach is suggested to design the structure considering wind and ice loads. The designed structure has more than 50 times reduction of the electromagnetic field and acceptable deflections under several loading combinations.A study on the first natural frequencies of Snelson, prisms, Micheletti, Marcus and X-frame based tensegrity booms has been carried out. The result shows that the differences in the first natural frequencies of the truss and tensegrity booms are significant and not due to the number of mechanisms or pre-stress levels. The tensegritybooms of the type Snelson with 2 bars and prism with 3 bars have higher frequencies among tensegrity booms.


3 clippings from various newspapers about Dr. May Owen's election as president of Texas Medical Association and her appearance at the Texas Association of Future Nurses convention. One of the clippings has a photographic portrait of Dr. Owen, one has a sketch portrait of Dr. Owen, and the third has a photo of two students registering as future nurses. On the back of the newspaper clippings are articles on hair styling, an Easter Sunday meal advertisement, and part of a photograph of a firefighter.


Numerical simulation of heat transfer in a high aspect ratio rectangular microchannel with heat sinks has been conducted, similar to an experimental study. Three channel heights measuring 0.3 mm, 0.6mmand 1mmare considered and the Reynolds number varies from 300 to 2360, based on the hydraulic diameter. Simulation starts with the validation study on the Nusselt number and the Poiseuille number variations along the channel streamwise direction. It is found that the predicted Nusselt number has shown very good agreement with the theoretical estimation, but some discrepancies are noted in the Poiseuille number comparison. This observation however is in consistent with conclusions made by other researchers for the same flow problem. Simulation continues on the evaluation of heat transfer characteristics, namely the friction factor and the thermal resistance. It is found that noticeable scaling effect happens at small channel height of 0.3 mm and the predicted friction factor agrees fairly well with an experimental based correlation. Present simulation further reveals that the thermal resistance is low at small channel height, indicating that the heat transfer performance can be enhanced with the decrease of the channel height.


The British government's announcement of its intention to withdraw 'East of Suez' by the end of 1971 was the catalyst for renewed efforts to resolve many disputes in the Gulf region. Accordingly, the threat posed by the growing
Marxist inspired rebellion in Dhofar to Britain's remaining interests in the area could not be left unchallenged. But the means by which this challenge was to be met (including the extent of both overt and covert support for the Sultan) in the post-Suez era, posed a number of challenges for decision-makers in Whitehall.

It soon became apparent that with aid flowing to the rebels from South Arabia, the situation was rapidly deteriorating. The failure of the counter-insurgency campaign thus far was increasingly seen to be the fault of Sultan Sa'id bin
Taimur whose stubborn refusal to engage in anything but repression in Dhofar and whose denial of modernity to his people in spite of increasing oil revenues meant that Sa'id came to be seen as part of the problem and not the solution.
This thesis examines how officials in London defined British interests in Oman and the debates in Whitehall, under successive governments, about how best to tackle the growing insurgency. This complex balancing act between
protecting British interests and influence, creating an effective indigenous administration and security bodies while maintaining the image of strategic retreat and the sovereign independence of Oman forms the focus of this
thesis.

Through an exploration of British government decision making regarding Oman this thesis provides a systematic re-examination of the Anglo-Omani relationship during the critical years of transformation from isolated,
undeveloped state into a modern outward looking nation. Since there have been no impartial, in-depth studies of this period which have had access to a wide range of primary source documents, the thesis is able to fill a gap in the literature by demonstrating how British interests were decided upon, how foreign policy was made and how it was implemented. Through the examination of this process this thesis aims to develop a better understanding
of how and why Britain decided to commit herself to the protection of the Omani regime, while, at the same time, withdrawing from the Gulf and seeking membership of the European Economic Community.

Using historical methodology and drawing extensively upon newly released archival records and interviews with former officials and high ranking officers, the thesis challenges established narratives regarding Britain's role in Oman.
By examining the three key pillars of British support for the Sultanate of Oman - the political, military and diplomatic - this thesis argues that the evolution of a
careful, considered and sometimes parsimonious policy marked British policy towards Oman, a policy far removed from the deterministic, callous and rapacious account presented by writers such as Halliday, Newsinger and
Owtram.


In this study, it is aimed to determine the relationship between employees'' perception of ethical leadership and organizational identification and person-organization fit. The survey data were collected from the blue-collar employees in Istanbul by using a questionnaire form in 2018. The collected data were interpreted using SPSS and SEM statistical programs. According to the results, a significant relationship was found between ethical leadership perception and organizational organization, as well as ethical leadership and organizational identification. In addition, the main motivation of the research is the mediation effect, and it has been determined that the harmony of the person organization fit a partial mediation effect between the ethical leadership perception and organizational identification.


Artifacts deemed to have played a religious or ritual role in past societies belong to a broader analytical category of "symbolic" material culture. This chapter explores a new approach to such material culture, in which each symbolic object is understood as a "once-occurrent" dialogic interaction involving (1) coded cultural content, (2) particular material and contextual attributes, and (3) a situated synthesizing human perspective. Drawing on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin among others, an embodied semiotic approach to symbolic objects is outlined, which identifies the constitution of the object not in its elusive past meaning but in the unique and dynamic relationship of its component parts. This approach positions the human actor not merely as an external evaluator of the object but as a fundamental element of its very definition. Discussion of a group of seal stones from Bronze Age Crete illustrates these ideas.


We present a hierarchical method for human pose estimation from a single still image. In our approach, a dependency graph representing relationships between reference points such as body joints is constructed and the positions of these reference points are sequentially estimated by a successive application of multidimensional output regressions along the dependency paths, starting from the root node. Each regressor takes image features computed from an image patch centered on the current node's position estimated by the previous regressor and is specialized for estimating its child nodes' positions. The use of the dependency graph allows us to decompose a complex pose estimation problem into a set of local pose estimation problems that are less complex. We design a dependency graph for two commonly used human pose estimation datasets, the Buffy Stickmen dataset and the ETHZ PASCAL Stickmen dataset, and demonstrate that our method achieves comparable accuracy to state-of-the-art results on both datasets with significantly lower computation time than existing methods. Furthermore, we propose an importance weighted boosted regression trees method for transductive learning settings and demonstrate the resulting improved performance for pose estimation tasks.


Wetland plants are important components that influence the biogeochemistry of wetland ecosystems. Therefore, remediation performance in wetlands can differ depending on the growth forms of plants. In this study, the effects of Eichhornia crassipes (floating plant) and Ceratophyllum demersum (submerged plant) on the wetland soil and water environments were investigated using a microcosm study with simulated hydrology of retention-type wetlands between rainfall events. The C. demersum microcosm (SP) showed the fastest recovery with a diel fluctuation pattern of dissolved oxygen, pH, and oxidation-reduction potential (ORP) from the impacts of nutrient inflow. Moreover, SP exhibited the lowest decrease in sediment ORP, the highest dehydrogenase activity, and more organic forms of nitrogen and phosphorus. E. crassipes microcosms exhibited the lowest water temperature, and efficiently controlled algae. In the presence of plants, the total nitrogen and phosphorus concentrations in water rapidly decreased, and the composition of organic and inorganic nutrient forms was altered along with a decrease in concentration. The results indicate that wetland plants help retain nutrients in the system, but the effects varied based on the wetland plant growth forms.


Most polygynous male mammals exhibit little or no parental care or involvement raising young. Instead, they invest indirectly in their own morphological and physiological attributes which enhance their chance of reproduction. Such secondary morphological sex traits may contribute to differences in the burrow architecture of fossorial mammals, such as the Cape dune mole-rat, Bathyergus suillus. Indeed, little is known about the seasonal changes in burrow architecture or differences in burrow configuration may differ between the sexes of subterranean African mole-rats (Bathyergidae). We excavated burrow systems of male and female B. suillus during the summer and the winter to investigate whether male burrow architecture reflected putative mate-seeking behaviour. We consider burrow geometry in response to mating strategies. Male burrow systems explored the environment more efficiently than females. This is presumably because of the increase in associated energetic costs of being a large male. Males produce more mounds indicating territorial behaviour even when it is energetically costly to dispose of soil onto the surface when the soil is less friable during the summer. Overall tunnel dimensions did not differ between the sexes. It appears that a change in season does not affect the geometry of the burrow system or tunnel dimensions in a climatically buffered environment.


Agents in contemporary societies are faced continually with choices regarding engagement with technological artifacts. They can choose to engage or decline engagement after considering the costs and benefits in each case. However, certain aspects of the surveillance society may be irresistible in a number of ways, so that refusal to engage with them is not a realistic option. The proliferation of the Internet of Things (IoT), particularly as embedded in "smart city" initiatives, helps to make surveillance technologies potentially irresistible. After laying the conceptual groundwork for discussing irresistible bargains, this essay offers a two-part normative critique, focusing on the asymmetrical power relations engendered by smart cities as well as harms inflicted on the self.


Recent developments in image processing and digital photogrammetry offer to the geomorphologists increasingly accessible and effective tools for the spatio-temporal knowledge of landslides. These techniques were used to reconstitute the historical evolution of a complex flow slide occurring in the "Terres Noires" of the Barcelonnette basin. The lithological and morphological environment of the studied site is characteristic of the whole southern French Prealps where are largely present Jurassic marly formations. Six digital elevation models (D.E.M.) generated from stereoscopic couples of aerial photography, but also various ortho-images and perspective views, allow to follow the morphological evolution of the unstable slope since the years 19509s -- before the releasing of the landslide -- until our days. Besides multitemporal descriptions of the landscape and of the morphological processes occurred on this site, the implemented method appears particularly useful for the quantitative analysis of the instabilities. It appears notably as a powerful tool for the 3-D reconstruction of the landslide geometry and by the same occasion for the calculation of its volume.


Background: Hospital readmissions are common and are viewed as unfavorable. They are commonly used as a measure of quality of care and, in the United States and England, are associated with financial penalties. Readmissions are not the only possible return-to-acute-care metric; patients may also attend emergency departments (EDs). Objective: To assess hospital-level return-to-acute-care metrics using statistical criteria. Research Design: Patient readmissions and/or ED attendances were aggregated to produce risk-standardized hospital rates. Return-to-acute-care rates at 7, 30, 90, and 365 days were assessed using key statistical properties: (i) variability between hospitals; (ii) the relative contribution of patient and nonpatient factors to variation; and (iii) the statistical power to detect performance differences. Subjects: We had pseudonymized administrative data on all inpatient hospital admissions and ED attendances in National Health Service hospitals in England between April 2009 and March 2011. Patients with an inpatient stay for chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder or heart failure were eligible for inclusion. Measures: ED attendances and readmissions for patients discharged from an inpatient stay for chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder or heart failure. Results: Interhospital variation was greatest for ED attendance; in addition, readmission was more strongly determined by patient characteristics than was ED attendance or both combined. Because of smaller numbers, the statistical power to detect differences in rates at 7 days for any indicator was limited. Conclusions: Despite the current emphasis on readmissions, we found that ED attendance within 30 days has more desirable statistical properties and therefore the potential to be a useful metric when comparing hospitals.


This study investigates the relationship between organizational culture and corporate sustainable development (CSD). Organizational culture is measured based on the four types of culture of the competing values framework: i) clan, ii) adhocracy, iii) hierarchy and iv) market type, while CSD was examined as a construct of i) economic, ii) environmental and iii) social dimension. The survey on medium- and large-sized firms in Greece reveals that adhocracy and hierarchy type of organizational culture have a significant effect on CSD. Specifically, adhocracy type is positively related to the environmental dimension of CSD, while hierarchy type is positively related to the economic dimension of CSD.


Many factors have contributed to the reduction of productivity and melon fruit quality, even though it presents an excellent adaptation to the predominant edaphoclimatic conditions in the Brazilian Northeast region. The occurrence of diseases is one of these factors, highlighting the gray stem rot, which is caused by the soil pathogen Macrophomina phaseolina Tassi (Goid.). In this context, a viable alternative to the control of this fungus is the use of resistant cultivars or resistant rootstocks, because it is safe to the environment and be used in a complementary way to other control methods. Thus, the aim of this review is to address the main points that deal with the melon reaction and its breeding for resistance to M. phaseolina.


In this thesis the potential of visual servoing techniques for vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) UAV platforms is explored. An overview of UAV applications and state-of-theart quadrotors is provided, backed up by the necessary theoretical background. Visual servoing based solutions of the important flight tasks (such as vertical take-off and landing, obstacle avoidance and attitude estimation) are presented. A novel vision based autopilot for vertical take-off and landing is developed, experimentally verified and implemented on a medium-size outdoor quadrotor platform provided by Dr. YangQuan Chen from Utah State University, Center for Self-Organizing Intelligent Systems.


How Fatigued Do You Currently Feel? Convergent and Discriminant Validity of a Single‐Item Fatigue Measure: Madelon L.M. van Hooff, et al. Department of Work and Organizational Psychology, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands—The main aim of this study was to establish the convergent and discriminant validity of a single‐item measure of daily fatigue ("How fatigued do you currently feel?") in a daily diary context. Convergent validity of our measure was examined by relating it to a validated multiple‐item measure of fatigue (Profile of Mood States; McNair, Lorr, & Droppelman, 1971) and to other daily (work‐home interference, sleep complaints, work‐related effort) and global (fatigue, health complaints, work‐home interference, job pressure) measures that are conceptually related to fatigue. Discriminant validity was assessed by relating the single‐item fatigue measure to daily (work pleasure) and global (job control, social support, motivation to learn) measures that are conceptually distinct from fatigue. Data were collected among 120 academic staff members, who completed a general questionnaire (tapping the global measures under study) and who took part in a 9‐d daily diary study (3 measurements daily). Correlation patterns and multilevel analyses revealed strong and significant associations between the single‐item fatigue measure and the variables incorporated to assess convergent validity (especially with the POMS: r=0.80), thus supporting the convergent validity of our measure. Relations with variables included to examine discriminant validity were weak or insignificant, supporting the discriminant validity of the single‐item fatigue measure. Despite this study's limitations (i.e., exclusive use of self‐reporting, specific sample) we conclude that this single‐item fatigue measure offers a valid way to assess daily fatigue.


This article tackles the problem of designing 3D perception systems for robots with high visual requirements, such as versatile legged robots capable of different locomotion styles. In order to guarantee high visual coverage in varied conditions (e.g., biped walking, quadruped walking, ladder climbing), such robots need to be equipped with a large number of sensors, while at the same time managing the computational requirements that arise from such a system. We tackle this problem at both levels: sensor placement (how many sensors to install on the robot and where) and run-time acquisition scheduling under computational constraints (not all sensors can be acquired and processed at the same time). Our first contribution is a methodology for designing perception systems with a large number of depth sensors scattered throughout the links of a robot, using multi-objective optimization for optimal trade-offs between visual coverage and the number of sensors. We estimate the Pareto front of these objectives through evolutionary optimization, and implement a solution on a real legged robot. Our formulation includes constraints on task-specific coverage and design symmetry, which lead to reliable coverage and fast convergence of the optimization problem. Our second contribution is an algorithm for lowering the computational burden of mapping with such a high number of sensors, formulated as an information-maximization problem with several sampling techniques for speed. Our final system uses 20 depth sensors scattered throughout the robot, which can either be acquired simultaneously or optimally scheduled for low CPU usage while maximizing mapping quality. We show that, when compared with state-of-the-art robotic platforms, our system has higher coverage across a higher number of tasks, thus being suitable for challenging environments and versatile robots. We also demonstrate that our scheduling algorithm allows higher mapping performance to be obtained than with naïve and state-of-the-art methods by leveraging on measures of information gain and self-occlusion at low computational costs.


A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE SCHOOL OF POSTGRADUATE STUDIES IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE AWARD OF MASTER DEGREE IN SOCIAL STUDIES EDUCATION, DEPARTMENT OF ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCE EDUCATION, AHMADU BELLO UNIVERSITY, ZARIA-NIGERIA


SUMMARY: Rabbit pox virus grown in tissue culture cells and vaccinia virus grown on rabbit skin have been purified as follows. The virus was sedimented and washed once by centrifugation to provide a tenfold virus concentrate. This semi-purified material was layered on top of a sucrose density gradient and centrifuged to produce a zone of virus separated from zones of urgenty. Sucrose was removed from the purified virus suspension by through washing in the centrifuge. About 40% of the original infectivity was recovered in the purified material which consisted almost entirely of virus particles when examined in the electron microscope. Control experiments indicated a maximum of 5% protein impurity. Almost complete seperation of vaccinia haemagglutinin and virus was obtained.


We consider a class of quasi-variational inequalities (QVIs) for adaptive image restoration, where the adaptivity is described via solution-dependent constraint sets. In previous work we studied both theoretical and numerical issues. While we were able to show the existence of solutions for a relatively broad class of problems, we encountered problems concerning uniqueness of the solution as well as convergence of existing algorithms for solving QVIs. In particular, it seemed that with increasing image size the growing condition number of the involved differential operator poses severe problems. In the present paper we prove uniqueness for a larger class of problems and in particular independent of the image size. Moreover, we provide a numerical algorithm with proved convergence. Experimental results support our theoretical findings.


Objective: We consider challenges in accurate segmentation of heart sound signals recorded under noisy clinical environments for subsequent classification of pathological events. Existing state-of-the-art solutions to heart sound segmentation use probabilistic models such as hidden Markov models (HMMs), which, however, are limited by its observation independence assumption and rely on pre-extraction of noise-robust features. Methods: We propose a Markov-switching autoregressive (MSAR) process to model the raw heart sound signals directly, which allows efficient segmentation of the cyclical heart sound states according to the distinct dependence structure in each state. To enhance robustness, we extend the MSAR model to a switching linear dynamic system (SLDS) that jointly model both the switching AR dynamics of underlying heart sound signals and the noise effects. We introduce a novel algorithm via fusion of switching Kalman filter and the duration-dependent Viterbi algorithm, which incorporates the duration of heart sound states to improve state decoding. Results: Evaluated on Physionet/CinC Challenge 2016 dataset, the proposed MSAR-SLDS approach significantly outperforms the hidden semi-Markov model (HSMM) in heart sound segmentation based on raw signals and comparable to a feature-based HSMM. The segmented labels were then used to train Gaussian-mixture HMM classifier for identification of abnormal beats, achieving high average precision of 86.1% on the same dataset including very noisy recordings. Conclusion: The proposed approach shows noticeable performance in heart sound segmentation and classification on a large noisy dataset. Significance: It is potentially useful in developing automated heart monitoring systems for pre-screening of heart pathologies.


Objective. The mother's ability to attune herself to the child already from life in utero depend on the functioning of the biological hormonal channels that preside over foetal growth and well-being and the loving feelings that represent prenatal attachment. Loving attachment is the deep, specific and permanent bond that allows one to breastfeed, cradle and protect one's baby and not abandon it, and enables the mother to respond effectively to the baby's needs. The aim of this study is to investigate the psycho-emotional dimensions of women in the period of endogestation during the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. Materials and Methods. A cross-sectional study was conducted on a sample of Italian mothers enrolled online via social networks, and the validated Prenatal Attachment Inventory (PAI) questionnaire was used. The statistical analysis we performed by Shapirò-Wilk test, the Wilcoxon test and the Krus-kall-Wallis test. Results. The PAI study showed a high average prenatal attachment of the women in the sample, which increases as the pregnancy progresses and is greater in southern women and primipara. Conclusions. From our study it can be deduced that women, having mostly good social and emotional support, manage to establish a bond with the child despite the stress due to the pandemic.


Theories on the globalization and harmonization of intellectual property law tend to take a state-level approach when discussing the impacts of large-scale harmonization of patent laws on developing countries. This paper uses a case study of the Indian experience of adapting to international treaty mandated changes to domestic patent law and the 2011 announcement of an IP lawsuit over the alleged biopiracy of genetic material from a traditional Indian plant variety, and connects the experience of an individual country to the wider body of research and theory that exists on the relationship between IP and development for non-Western countries. The paper also provides a discourse analysis of the public reaction, as covered by English-language Indian newspapers, to the lawsuit launched against Monsanto, the Maharashtra Hybrid Seed Company, the University of Agricultural Sciences, Dharward, and the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University by the governmental organization the National Biodiversity Authority over the development of the transgenic Bt brinjal crop.


First descriptions of fungal pathogens of onions in Puerto Rico were reported by J. A. B. Nolla, J. Matz, R. A.Toro and C.M.Tucker during the 1920s. At that time onions were grown in the northern region of the island and fungal pathogens such as Alternaria allii, Aspergillus niger, Colletotrichum dematium, C. gloeosporioides, Rhizoctonia sp. and Stemphylium botryosum were reported causing important fungal diseases under field conditions. From 1999 to 2000 a broad survey of fungi associated with onion was conducted in the southern region of the island. Pathogenicity tests were conducted with 25 fungal isolates obtained from soil, mature onion bulbs and foliage from fields at Guanica, Juana Diaz, and Santa Isabel, Puerto Rico. The pathogenicity tests were performed on onion tissues of cultivars Excalibur and Nikita under laboratory and greenhouse conditions. Tests showed that A. niger, Phoma sorghina, Phoma sp., Penicillium purpurogenum and Sclerotium rolfsii were pathogenic to mature bulbs; Alternaria alternata, A. tenuissima, Fusarium acuminatum, F. equiseti, F. oxysporum, Stemphylium sp. and S. herbarum to foliage; Phoma sp. and Phoma sorghina , pathogenic to young roots and bulbs. This is the first report of Phoma sorghina, Penicillium purpurogenum and Sclerotium rolfsii causing diseases in onions in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean.


Neonatal septicemia (NS) is a common cause of death of newborn infants, hence early diagnosis and treatment are of the utmost importance. However, lack of specific clinical symptoms and late detection delay a correct diagnosis. It is therefore of great importance to establish auxiliary indexes for the early diagnosis of NS. To evaluate the value of interleukin (IL-6 and IL-8) in the diagnosis of NS, a prospective study was carried out. Seventy-five newborns who developed septicemia and received treatment in our hospital from January 2013 to December 2014 were selected as research subjects; also, 50 healthy newborns were set as a control group. The levels of serum IL-6 and IL-8 were compared between the two groups. Results demonstrated that levels of C-reactive protein (CRP), IL-6 and IL-8 of the septicemia group were higher than those of the control group on admission, although the difference had no statistical significance (P less than 0.05); the septicemia group had higher sequential organ failure assessment (SOFA) scores but lower pediatric critical illness scores (PCIS) compared to the control group (P less than 0.05); levels of CRP, IL-6 and IL-8 were in positive correlation to the SOFA scores and in negative correlation to PCIS. Analysis of receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curve demonstrated that the sensitivity, specificity and accuracy were 85.7%, 80.2% and 81.8%, respectively, when IL-6 level was set as 32 pg/mL, 78.1%, 64.2% and 66.9%, respectively when IL-8 level was set as 54 pg/mL, and 71.4%, 86.3% and 82.7% respectively, when detection of IL-6 and IL-8 were combined together. Hence it can be concluded that: IL-6 and IL-8 are involved in inflammatory reactions; levels of IL-6 and IL-8 were correlated to the severity of the infection; the value of IL-6 is higher than that of IL-8 in the diagnosis of neonatal septicemia and the combined detection of IL-6 and IL-8 can improve the accuracy of the diagnosis of neonatal septicemia.


An optimality model relating the rate of biosynthesis to body temperature and gene duplication is presented to account for several observed patterns of genome size variation. The model predicts ( 1) that poikilotherms living in a warm climate should have a smaller genome than poikilotherms living in a cold climate, (2) that homeotherms should have a small genome as well as a small variation in genome size relative to their poikilothermic ancestors, (3) that cold geological periods should favor the evolution of poikilotherms with a large genome and that warm geological periods should do the opposite, and (4) that poikilotherms with a small genome should be more sensitive to changes in temperature than poikilotherms with a large genome. The model also offers two explanations for the empirically documented trend that organisms with a large cell volume have larger genomes than those with a small cell volume. Relevant empirical evidence is summarized to support these predictions.


The effect of ampicillin and kanamycin on the electrophysical properties of Escherichia coli K-12 was studied. Significant changes in the orientation spectra of the cell suspensions incubated with various concentrations of the antibiotics were observed only at the first five frequencies of the orienting electric field (10-1000 kHz). Ampicillin in a concentration of 1.0 mcg/ml and kanamycin in a concentration of 0.5 mcg/ml practically had no effect on the value of the electrooptic (EO) signal of the cells of the strain susceptible to the antibiotics. However, a significant change in the EO signal was recorded, when the cells were incubated in the presence of both ampicillin (1 mcg/ml) and kanamycin (0.5 mcg/ml), that was due to the synergistic effect of the antibiotics. Therefore, possible registration and investigation of antibiotics synergistic effect by electrooptic analysis of cell suspensions was shown, which suggested that electrooptic methods were rather efficient in control of antibiotic action on microorganisms.


This study is focused on the application of Azolla Filiculoides (AF) as adsorbents for the removal of the cephalexin (CFX) antibiotic from aqueous solution. Several adsorption parameters including the adsorbent dosage, the initial CFX concentration, contact time and temperature were studied. The kinetic data revealed that the equilibrium time for CFX adsorption was achieved within 75 min. Several kinetic models, i.e., pseudo-first order, pseudo-second order, Weber Morris intraparticle diffusion, were applied, finding that the pseudo-second order model was the most suitable for the fitting of the experimental kinetic data. Thermodynamic parameters such as Gibb's free energy change (ΔG0), enthalpy change (ΔH0) and entropy change (ΔS0) were calculated. The negative values of ΔH0 and ΔG0 indicates that the CFX adsorption process is endothermic and spontaneous in nature. The study showed that AF can be used as a more efficient adsorbent for the adsorption of CFX From water solution.


Summary

Dehydration and increased risk of respiratory problems are common outcomes of transport, and both appear to be related to journey duration, emotional effects, such as fear, and challenging environmental conditions. Welfare may be improved by familiarising equines with transport vehicles and loading procedures before travel starts, and by providing thermally comfortable and well ventilated conditions during the journey. For long road journeys, rest breaks with drinking water should be given. Both trained and unhandled animals should have sufficient space and freedom to adjust their posture and to lower their heads, but maximum safe space allowances are unknown. Mares and foals should be transported together. Injury during transport is relatively common, particularly in groups of horses travelling to slaughter, and is usually associated with driver error, internal fittings and vehicle type or design, but also with mixing of animals of different sex and weight leading to fighting. There needs to be better training and monitoring to prevent such avoidable risks to horse welfare. There is also a need for more research into appropriate prophylaxis and post transport therapy as knowledge of accumulated stress and depressed immune function following prolonged and repeated transport is poorly understood.


EEG tracings were compared in 44 young adults who received scalp x-radiation treatment for tinea capitis during childhood and 59 non-irradiated control subjects. The irradiated subjects were exposed, over 20 years previously, to a mean dose of 130 rads to the brain. Visual analysis of the EEG revealed an insignificant excess of abnormalities among the irradiated subjects compared to the controls. Power spectral density function analysis showed increased power values among the irradiated subjects, particularly in the beta wave frequencies. This finding provides further evidence for suspecting that x-irradiation during brain maturation may cause long-lasting damage to the brain tissue.


An adaptive treatment strategy (ATS) is defined as a sequence of treatments and intermediate responses. ATS' arise when chronic diseases such as cancer and depression are treated over time with various treatment alternatives depending on intermediate responses to earlier treatments. For example, in two-stage adaptive treatment strategies, patients receive one of the induction treatments followed by a maintenance therapy given that the patients responded to the induction treatment they received. Clinical trials are often designed to compare adaptive treatment strategies based on appropriate designs such as sequential randomization designs. One of the main objectives of these trials is to compare two or more treatment strategies in terms of largest patient benefit, such as prolonged survival.Statistical inference from such trials needs to account for the sequential randomization structure of the design. Recent literature suggests several methods of estimation. A comparative review of currently available inferential procedures for analyzing data from such trials is presented. A sample size formula is introduced for comparing the survival probabilities under two treatment strategies sharing the same initial treatment. The formula is based on the large sample properties of inverse-probability- weighted estimator. Monte Carlo simulation study shows strong evidence that the proposed sample size formula guarantees desired power, regardless of the true distributions of survival times. To test for a difference in the effects of different induction and maintenance treatment combinations, a supremum weighted log-rank test is proposed. The test is applied to a dataset from a two-stage randomized trial and the results are compared to those obtained using a standard weighted log-rank test. A sample-size formula is derived based on the limiting distribution of the supremum weighted log-rank statistic. Simulation studies show that the proposed test provides sample sizes which are close to those obtained by standard weighted log-rank test under a proportional hazard alternative. However, the proposed test is more powerful than the standard weighted log-rank test under non-proportional hazard alternatives.The public health significance of this work is to provide a practical guidance of sample size determination and a test procedure in clinical trials that adopt two stage randomization designs.


Transgenic rabbits expressing pore mutants of KV7.1 display a long QT syndrome 1 (LQT1) phenotype. Recently, NS1643 has been described to increase IKr. We hypothesized that NS1643 would shorten the action potential duration (APD90) in LQT1 rabbits. Transgenic LQT1 rabbits were compared with littermate control (LMC) rabbits. In vivo electrocardiogram studies in sedated animals were performed at baseline and during 45 minutes of intravenous infusion of NS1643 or vehicle in a crossover design. Ex vivo monophasic action potentials were recorded from Langendorff-perfused hearts at baseline and during 45-minute perfusion with NS1643. Left ventricular refractory periods were assessed before and after NS1643 infusion. Genotype differences in APD accommodation were also addressed. In vivo NS1643 shortened the QTc significantly in LQT1 compared with vehicle. In Langendorff experiments, NS1643 significantly shortened the APD90 in LQT1 and LMC [32.0 ± 4.3 milliseconds (ms); 21.0 ± 5.0 ms] and left ventricular refractory periods (23.7 ± 8.3; 22.6 ± 9.9 ms). NS1643 significantly decreased dp/dt (LQT1: 49% ± 3%; LMC: 63% ± 4%) and increased the incidence of arrhythmia. The time course of APD adaptation was impaired in LQT1 rabbits and unaffected by IKr augmentation. In conclusion, KV11.1 channel activation shortens the cardiac APD in a rabbit model of inherited LQT1, but it comes with the risk of excessive shortening of APD.


OBJECTIVE The metabolic effects of low-dose prednisolone and optimal management of glucocorticoid-induced diabetes are poorly characterized. The aims were to investigate the acute effects of low-dose prednisolone on carbohydrate metabolism and whether long-term low-dose prednisolone administration increases visceral adiposity, amplifying metabolic perturbations. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS Subjects with inflammatory rheumatologic disease without diabetes mellitus were recruited. Nine subjects (age, 59 ± 11 years) not using oral glucocorticoids were studied before and after a 7- to 10-day course of oral prednisolone 6 mg daily. Baseline data were compared with 12 subjects (age, 61 ± 8 years) using continuous long-term prednisolone (6.3 ± 2.2 mg/day). Basal endogenous glucose production (EGP) was estimated by 6,6-2H2 glucose infusion, insulin sensitivity was estimated by two-step hyperinsulinemic-euglycemic clamp, insulin secretion was estimated by intravenous glucose tolerance test, and adipose tissue areas were estimated by computed tomography. RESULTS Prednisolone acutely increased basal EGP (2.44 ± 0.46 to 2.65 ± 0.35 mg/min/kg; P = 0.05) and reduced insulin suppression of EGP (79 ± 7 to 67 ± 14%; P = 0.03), peripheral glucose disposal (8.2 ± 2.4 to 7.0 ± 1.6 mg/kg/min; P = 0.01), and first-phase (5.9 ± 2.0 to 3.9 ± 1.6 mU/mmol; P = 0.01) and second-phase (4.6 ± 1.7 to 3.6 ± 1.4 mU/mmol; P = 0.02) insulin secretion. Long-term prednisolone users had attenuated insulin suppression of EGP (66 ± 14 vs. 79 ± 7%; P = 0.03) and nonoxidative glucose disposal (44 ± 24 vs. 62 ± 8%; P = 0.02) compared with nonglucocorticoid users, whereas basal EGP, insulin secretion, and adipose tissue areas were not significantly different. CONCLUSIONS Low-dose prednisolone acutely perturbs all aspects of carbohydrate metabolism. Long-term low-dose prednisolone induces hepatic insulin resistance and reduces peripheral nonoxidative glucose disposal. We conclude that hepatic and peripheral insulin sensitivity should be targeted by glucose-lowering therapy for glucocorticoid-induced diabetes.


This paper presents an adaptive robust fuzzy control architecture for robot manipulators. The control objective is to adaptively compensate for the unknown nonlinearity of robot manipulators which is represented as a fuzzy rule-base consisting of a collection of if-then rules. The algorithm embedded in the proposed architecture can automatically update fuzzy rules and, consequently it is guaranteed to be globally stable and to drive the tracking errors to a neighborhood of zero. Focusing on realization, hardware limitations such as traditional long computation time and excessive memory-space usage are also relaxed by incorporating heuristic concepts, which reveals the flexible feature of this architecture. The present work is applied to the control of a five degree-of-freedom (DOF) articulated robot manipulator. Experiment results show that the proposed control architecture features fast convergence.