With the extensive industrial applications of laccase in mind, this study was performed to investigate the decolorization applicability of sol-gel matrix-immobilized laccase. Indigenous G. leucidum laccase (592±6 U/mL) was purified 6.5-fold with a specific activity of 875 U/mg. The purified laccase had a molecular weight of 66 kDa, as evidenced by a single band on SDS-PAGE. Active laccase fractions were immobilized by entrapping in Sol-Gel matrix of trimethoxysilane (TMOS) and propyltetramethoxysilane (PTMS). A maximum of 90.7% immobilization efficiency was achieved with a purified fraction containing 2 mg/mL laccase. An activity profile revealed that immobilized laccase retained 78 to 80% of its original activity at a pH of 4 and a temperature of 80 °C, compared to free laccase. The tolerance capacity of laccase against inactivating agents (cystein, EDTA, and Ag+) was also enhanced by up to 80% by sol-gel immobilization. To explore the decolorization applicability, the immobilized laccase was tested against four different textile industry effluents. After the stipulated reaction time (24 h), varying decolorization percentages of wastewater effluents (with a maximum of 97.3% decolorization) were achieved.


ABSTRACT In recent years, home-sharing platform Airbnb has developed into a major player in the tourism sector. It allows tourists to have authentic, off-the-beaten-track experiences in neighbourhoods previously unvisited. Although neighbourhoods can profit from increased attention and income, Airbnb and other short-term rentals (STRs) can also be disruptive to the traditional lodging industry and trigger gentrification processes; housing affordability and availability are jeopardized when housing units are turned into vacation rentals. Local governments worldwide are struggling to regulate STRs and their negative externalities. This paper focuses on key challenges cities face when dealing with STR platforms and the rationale behind different regulatory approaches. It first compares policies of 11 European and American cities and then zooms in on Denver to see how it regulates the impact of Airbnb. Most cities are relatively lenient towards STRs, with little to no (complete) prohibition. Instead, they limit the number of guests, nights and times a property can be rented, demand certain safety precautions and information provision, or require primary residency. Regulations are mostly directed to mitigate neighbourhood impacts, rather than creating a level playing field for the traditional lodging industry. Enforcement remains difficult due to the STR market's dynamic nature and online practice.


Importance of accuracy and conciseness of type and content of information being disseminated to the populace in respect of a development intervention to avoid misleading the populace cannot be overemphasised. Given the strategic importance of Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) in policy drive of Nigerian government and useful lesson it has for repositioning Nigerian Agriculture in a bid to salvage Nigeria's economy dependence on oil, this study content analysed 193 ATA news in selected newspapers in Nigeria. Variables measured included news frames, frequency, space allotted and placement of ATA news. Data were analysed using both descriptive (frequency, percentage) and inferential (correlation and analysis of variance) statistics at α0.05. ATA news in Nigerian newspapers included press outcome, muster, courtesy call, commencement programmes, reports, analysis and gathering. There was a high coverage of ATA news in the first year (2012), with the Guardian allotting highest space (13203.5cm2) and the least by Nigerian Tribune (7987cm2).  Majority of Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) news (98.5%) were placed in other pages of the newspapers. There was no significant difference between spaces allotted to ATA in the selected newspapers (F = 0.660). Time is apt for development advocates to promote placement of news on development issues in strategic positions in national dailies.

 Key words: Agricultural transformation agenda, content analysis, coverage, development communication, Nigerian newspapers.


Chemokines play necessary and important roles in regulating the trafficking of lymphocytes to intra- or interlymphoid tissues as well as to sites of inflammation. The complex migratory patterns of lymphoid lineage cells is governed by subset-specific expression of chemokine receptors and their access to specific ligands. Several chemokine receptors and chemokine receptor-like orphan receptors also serve, in conjunction with CD4, as coreceptors for infection by human and simian immunodeficiency viruses (HIV and SIV). Here we show that the expression pattern of Bonzo/STRL33, an orphan SIV/HIV coreceptor, is highly restricted to the memory subset of T cells and is up-regulated upon stimulation of these cells with IL-2 or IL-15. Both the pattern and the regulation of Bonzo expression closely paralleled that of CC family chemokine receptors CCR5 or CCR6 and inversely correlated with CXCR4 expression. However, in striking contrast to CCR5, Bonzo expression was not down-modulated by PMA or mitogen stimulation of T cells. Targeted replacement of the Bonzo gene with a gene encoding green fluorescent protein in mice revealed that the expression and cytokine regulation of mouse Bonzo are comparable to those of its human counterpart. The similar expression and regulation patterns of Bonzo and the HIV coreceptor CCR5 may have implications for understanding the role of HIV/SIV receptors in viral evolution and pathogenesis.


Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an inflammatory demyelinating disorder of the CNS. Bile acids are cholesterol metabolites that can signal through receptors on cells throughout the body, including the CNS and immune system. Whether bile acid metabolism is abnormal in MS is unknown. Using global and targeted metabolomic profiling, we identified lower levels of circulating bile acid metabolites in multiple cohorts of adult and pediatric MS patients compared to controls. In white matter lesions from MS brain tissue, we noted the presence of bile acid receptors on immune and glial cells. To mechanistically examine the implications of lower levels of bile acids in MS, we studied the in vitro effects of an endogenous bile acid – tauroursodeoxycholic acid (TUDCA) on astrocyte and microglial polarization. TUDCA prevented neurotoxic (A1) polarization of astrocytes and pro-inflammatory polarization of microglia in a dose-dependent manner. TUDCA supplementation in experimental autoimmune encephalomyelitis reduced severity of disease, based on behavioral and pathological measures. We demonstrate that bile acid metabolism is altered in MS; bile acid supplementation prevents polarization of astrocytes and microglia to neurotoxic phenotypes and ameliorates neuropathology in an animal model of MS. These findings identify dysregulated bile acid metabolism as a potential therapeutic target in MS.


Background: The treatment of cancer-related symptoms continues to represent a major challenge for health care providers. Traditional approaches often require pharmacologic interventions which have potential side effects. A wide variety of approaches using complementary and alternative medicine (including music therapy) have demonstrated some early benefit. The role of a visual art intervention on pain, anxiety and mood has not been studied to date. Patients and Methods: Our patient population consisted of 21 Hematology inpatients at the Mayo Clinic (19 women, 2 men with a median age of 53.4 years, [range19 to 73]), with the following hematological disorders: Acute Leukemia (n = 6); Lymphoma (n = 5); Multiple Myeloma (n = 5); and a variety of other malignant conditions (n =5). Patients and their families were invited to participate actively or passively (i.e. observe) in a 1 to1 visual art intervention, conducted by a trained artist educator using different forms of art media. Baseline assessments of pain, anxiety and mood were conducted just prior to the intervention using Visual Analog scales (VAS), the Spielberger State Trait Anxiety Inventory and the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) respectively. The same scales were administered immediately following completion of the art intervention. Results: Twenty of 21 patients completed the intervention, and all 20 patients actively participated. A significant improvement in positive mood scores (4.6 [95%CI: (1.7, 7.5)] or 14.6% change, p=0.003), decrease in negative mood scores (−3.4 [95%CI: (−0.7, −6.1)] or 18% change, p=0.016) and in anxiety scores (−9.2 [95%CI: (−14.2, −4.1)] or 21.6% change, p=0.001) were observed. Among the 14 patients who reported some pain (VAS>0) prior to the intervention, the mean VAS pain score improved significantly (−1.4 [95%CI: (−2.4, −0.3)] or 35.1% change, p=0.017). Universally all patients commented that they would participate in art-based interventions in the future Conclusions Bedside visual art interventions can decrease pain and anxiety, and improve mood in hospitalized hematological patients with cancer diagnoses. These intriguing findings warrant future placebo-controlled studies, and suggest that these alternative measures should be considered as an adjunct to conventional therapies in patients with cancer-related pain, and symptoms of anxiety and decreased mood.


We here propose a neural network model to explore how neural oscillations might regulate the replay of memory traces. We simulate the encoding and retrieval of a series of events, where temporal sequences are uniquely identifiable by analysing population activity, as several recent EEG/MEG studies have shown. Our model comprises three parts, each considering distinct hypotheses. A cortical region actively represents sequences through the disruption of an intrinsically generated alpha rhythm, where a desynchronisation marks information-rich operations as the literature predicts. A binding region converts each event into a discrete index, enabling repetitions through a sparse encoding of events. We also instantiate a temporal region, where an oscillatory "ticking-clock" made up of hierarchical synfire chains discretely indexes a moment in time. By encoding the absolute timing between events, we show how one can use cortical desynchronisations to dynamically detect unique temporal signatures as they are replayed in the brain.


In today's competitive workplace, it is vital that graduates are equipped with the professional skills to succeed in industry. Yet, it is commonly acknowledged that undergraduate learners often lack the competencies necessary to make a smooth transition into industry. Indeed, the Lambert Review exposed the difficult interface between academia and industry, with this being particularly relevant to Yorkshire & Humberside (Y&H), where only six per cent of employers have any contact with higher education. In response, this project aims to address these issues by designing, developing and piloting a professional learner/employer engagement approach and impact evaluation model, which includes industrial mentor training. The model was constructed upon a capability maturity foundation and built from employer engagement and learner Information, Advice and Guidance (IAG) research. From analysis of this research, a focused range of sustainable, short courses were developed and embedded into existing curriculum to enhance learner's industrial readiness and employability. In parallel, an integrated partnership of academic institutions, specialist training providers and professional bodies, supported the increased provision of student placements and initiated the development of an accredited, industrial mentors course to further improve collaboration depth. This paper initially examines research findings from the work, prior to the presentation and evaluation of results attained from the pilot implementation of the model.


A subspace-based method for multiple-target localization by multi-input multi-output (MIMO) array is presented in this paper. Because the covariance matrix of reflected signals from targets at different locations is always nonsingular as a result of mutual orthogonality among the signals transmitted by MIMO array, estimation of signal parameters via rotational invariance technique (ESPRIT) algorithm can be directly applied to the direction of arrival (DOA) estimation problem of the MIMO array without spatial smoothing (SS) techniques beforehand. Simulation results verify the effectiveness of the proposed method.


Actinides are radioactive heavy elements with atomic numbers between 89 and 103. Based on their occurrence, they can be separated into two groups: naturally occurring and synthetic elements. However, the line between them is not a sharp one. This is due to human activities in using and testing nuclear power and nuclear weapons as well as to a smaller degree due to natural nuclear reactors in the Proterozoic era. Thorium, protactinium, uranium and, in much smaller amounts, plutonium are the naturally occurring elements. Neptunium and all elements with atomic numbers (AN) larger than 94 are synthetic elements. The isotopes of elements beginning with einsteinium (AN=99) have relatively short lifetimes of radioactive decay (<472 d for 252Es) and their availability is very limited. Therefore, no information about their behaviour in biological systems has been published until recently. Especially uranium, neptunium, plutonium and to some extent americium can exist in different oxidation states. Therefore, for these elements redox reactions in biological systems are of great significance. Actinides can accumulate in the human body. However, the target accumulating organs differ. While protactinium mainly accumulates in the kidneys and bone, plutonium is incorporated in lung, liver and bone. All actinides have long residence times in the human body. Therefore, it is sometimes not straightforward to distinguish between chemical toxicity and radio-toxicity. Most of the scientific literature deals with monitoring of radioactivity and calculation of doses in living systems; however, this aspect will not be the focus of this chapter. Several bodies of data are available, dealing with questions of decontamination of actinides inhaled or ingested into the human body. Lanthanides (elements of the 4f series) show similar chemical behaviour to actinides in the same oxidation state. The behaviour of actinides in biosystems that are of common interest includes pathways of uptake and excretion, plus strategies of protection and defence employed by organisms. The long-living elements thorium and uranium mainly show heavy metal effects; this behaviour changes within the actinide series, starting with neptunium where radiological effects also have to be taken into account.


Seasonal modifications in the structure of cellular membranes occur as an adaptive measure to withstand exposure to prolonged environmental change. Little is known about whether such changes may occur independently of external cues, such as photoperiod or temperature, or how they may impact the central nervous system (CNS). We compared membrane properties of central neurons isolated from the retina of goldfish (Carassius auratus), an organism well-adapted to extreme environmental change, during the summer and winter months. Goldfish were maintained in a facility under constant environmental conditions throughout the year. Analysis of whole-retina phospholipid composition using mass spectrometry-based lipidomics revealed a two-fold increase in phosphatidylethanolamine species during the winter, suggesting an increase in cell membrane fluidity. Atomic force microscopy was used to produce localized, nanoscale-force deformation of neuronal membranes. Measurement of Young's modulus indicated increased membrane stiffness (or decreased elasticity) in neurons isolated during the winter. Voltage-clamp electrophysiology was used to assess physiological changes in neurons between seasons. Winter neurons displayed a hyperpolarized reversal potential (Vrev) and a significantly lower input resistance (Rin) compared to summer neurons. This was indicative of a decrease in membrane excitability during the winter. Subsequent measurement of intracellular Ca2+ activity using Fura-2 microspectrofluorometry confirmed a reduction in action potential activity, including duration and action potential profile, in neurons isolated during the winter. These studies demonstrate chemical and biophysical changes that occur in central neurons of goldfish throughout the year without exposure to seasonal cues, and suggest a novel mechanism of seasonal regulation of CNS activity. SUMMARY STATEMENT Central neurons isolated from the retina of goldfish held under constant environmental conditions undergo seasonal changes in membrane structure and excitability.


The objective of this retrospective study was to investigate what percentage of the dental students in the University of Malaya has a tooth size discrepancy. The sample comprised 40 good quality pre-treatment study models with fully erupted and complete permanent dentitions from first molar to first molar, which were selected from the dental students of the University of Malaya. The mesiodistal diameter tooth sizes were randomly measured manually from first molar to first molar using digital calliper (Mitutoyu) accurate to 0.01 mm, and the Bolton analyses for anterior and overall ratios were calculated by scientific calculator. Reproducibility analysis for intra- and interexaminer calibrations was assessed by measuring 10 study models twice, a week apart. A paired sample t-test and the correlation coefficient were used to evaluate the systematic and random errors of the measurements using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 12.0. The reproducibility of the intra and inter-examiners for the sum of upper and lower mesiodistal tooth size were high (average mean difference = 0.62, r = 0.82). This study found 47.5% of the samples had anterior, and about 10% had overall· tooth width ratios greater than 2 standard deviations from Bolton's mean. Large percentage of the dental students of the University of Malaya has tooth size discrepancies outside of Bolton 2 standard deviations. It would seem prudent to routinely perform the tooth size analysis and include the findings into orthodontic treatment planning.


3604 Recently a novel defensin, Brevinin-2R, a 25-amino acid polypeptide was isolated from the skin of the frog Rana ridibunda. The novel molecule kills semi-selectively cancer cells, but does not exhibit the typical hemolytic activity for the majority of the Brevinin-family defensins. The anti-cancer activity was demonstrated on various malignant cells such as Jurkat (T-cell leukemia), BJAB (B-cell lymphoma), SW742 (colon carcinoma), and MCF-7 (breast adenocarcinoma). Also data have shown that L929 and MCF-7 cells stably transfected with a dominant-negative mutant of the pro-apoptotic Bcl-2-family member BNIP3 (DTM-BNIP3) were significantly more resistant towards Brevinin-2R triggered cell death. Furthermore, we observed decrease in mitochondrial membrane potential (ΔΨm) and that induction of cell death is independent of caspase activation. Over-expressing of Bcl-2 in cancer cell lines significantly counteracted ΔΨm triggered by Brevinin-2R. Malignant hematopoietic cell lines were more sensitive towards Brevinin-2R than primary peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC). Our results demonstrate that the polypeptide leads to activation of the mitochondrial death pathway, but does not induce cell death in cancer cells by classical apoptosis. The semi-selective anti-cancer effect of Brevinin-2R makes it a promising lead molecule for the development of anti-cancer drugs.


This paper presents a non-disruptive handoff protocol with dynamic channel reservation for wireless ATM networks. A mobile host (MH) in a wireless network is highly probable to travel from one radio cell to another radio cell. It is therefore very important to design an efficient handoff protocol for wireless ATM networks to re-establish a ATM virtual circuit as soon as a handoff request is initiated. In our protocol design, an MH sends a handoff request to its original base station (BS), which in turn forwards this request to its control function. One of the innovative designs of this protocol is to perform non-disruptive handoff with dynamic channel reservation over an ATM virtual circuit, regardless of which radio cell the MH is moving to. For the purpose of evaluation, a simulator is built to demonstrate that a nondisruptive handoff with dynamic channel reservation does significantly reduce the average waiting time during handoff.


Radar observations made at Jicamarca show that the equatorial electrojet current and the E and F region electric fields can reverse from their normal direction during the day or night and during magnetically quiet or disturbed conditions. The nighttime reversals can only be detected by such radar measurements. The observations support most of the current hypotheses concerning the electrojet plasma instabilities. The rapid reversals sometimes seen during disturbed conditions indicate that high-latitude currents and electric fields associated with substorm activity strongly perturb the dynamo current system at all latitudes.


Internal waves have been proven to transport invertebrate larvae onshore, but there has been little indication on whether internal waves transport fish eggs. Fish eggs are typically buoyant and are often found in neustonic samples, and internal waves often cause fronts that transport oils and other light particles. This research aims to determine whether there are patterns to the distribution of fish eggs. One possibility is that offshore fish eggs can be transported onshore, to nearshore nursery habitats. Before 2003, when genetic barcoding was proposed as an identification mechanism, fish eggs could only be identified visually, using color, size, and shape. However, this method can be unreliable, so this research utilizes the COI barcoding gene to identify fish eggs to a species in samples taken in the South La Jolla State Marine Preserve, an area known to experience internal waves. Samples were taken within internal wave events and also at times without internal waves for control samples. Overall, 14 species of fish were found throughout the samples via DNA barcoding, 13 in event samples, and 7 in control samples. One sample was unable to be identified to a species, due to a higher level of species divergence from the most closely related sequenced specimen. No statistically significant differences were seen in abundance or distribution, although weak trends were seen that more fish eggs were found during event samples than in controls, and that more species were found in event samples. After calculation of diversity indices, only Simpson's evenness showed significant differences, with event samples being more evenly distributed than control samples. Overall, fish eggs were found during internal wave fronts, indicating that they can be transported. However, insights as to how or why these eggs are transported are unclear, including whether or not the eggs are simply carried along in the fronts by accident.


Ocean lifeguards have several responsibilities that require precise training. California State Parks is one of the largest providers of open water lifeguard services in the United States, and trains approximately 200 new lifeguards per year. As part of our lifeguard training section's quality improvement efforts, we conducted a training needs assessment to help determine how well our introductory ocean lifeguard training curriculum prepared lifeguards to perform job related tasks upon successful completion of the training program. We surveyed both first year and seasoned lead lifeguards on operational needs, training gaps, and specific subject areas. We identified several areas where our training program required improvement. This assessment provided us with evidence from which to update our curriculum, helped identify gaps in the field, and provided a feedback mechanism from field staff not previously involved in prioritizing training needs.


In mammals, the adhesion and fusion of the palatal shelves are essential mechanisms in the development of the secondary palate. Failure of any of these processes leads to the formation of cleft palate. The mechanisms underlying palatal shelf adhesion are poorly understood, although the presence of filopodia on the apical surfaces of the superficial medial edge epithelial (MEE) cells seems to play an important role in the adhesion of the opposing MEE. We demonstrate here the appearance of chondroitin sulphate proteoglycan (CSPG) on the apical surface of MEE cells only immediately prior to contact between the palatal shelves. This apical CSPG has a functional role in palatal shelf adhesion, as either the alteration of CSPG synthesis by -D-Xyloside or its specific digestion by chondroitinase AC strikingly alters the in vitro adhesion of palatal shelves. We also demonstrate the absence of this apical CSPG in the clefted palates of transforming growth factor beta 3 (TGF3) null mutant mice, and its induction, together with palatal shelf adhesion, when TGF3 is added to TGF3 null mutant palatal shelves in culture. When chick palatal shelves (that do not adhere in vivo nor express TGF3, nor CSPG in the MEE) are cultured in vitro, they do not express CSPG and partially adhere, but when TGF3 is added to the media, they express CSPG and their adhesion increases strikingly. We therefore conclude that the expression of CSPG on the apical surface of MEE cells is a key factor in palatal shelf adhesion and that this expression is regulated by TGF3. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)


The aetiology based classification of pericardial disease comprises: infectious pericarditis; pericarditis in systemic autoimmune diseases; type 2 (auto)immune pericarditis; metabolic disorders; trauma; tumours; pericardial cysts; and congenital defects.1 This classification has major therapeutic consequences that will be elaborated upon in this article, with the focus on practical management of pericardial syndromes and specific underlying diseases.

### Pericardial syndromes

The diagnosis of acute pericarditis relies on clinical findings, ECG changes, and echocardiography (table 1).2,3 Chronic pericardial inflammation includes effusive, adhesive, and constrictive forms, lasting three months or more. Recurrent pericarditis may be intermittent (symptom-free interval without treatment) or incessant (discontinuation of anti-inflammatory treatment always ensures a relapse).

View this table:

 Table 1
Diagnostic pathway and sequence of performance in acute pericarditis.2,3

Pericardial effusion occurs as transudate (hydropericardium), exudate, pyopericardium or haemopericardium, or a mixture of these. Large effusions generally indicate more serious disease and are common with neoplasia, tuberculosis, hypercholesterolaemia, uraemic pericarditis, myxoedema, and parasitoses.2,4 Patients can be asymptomatic if effusion develops slowly. Many pregnant women develop a minimal to moderate clinically silent hydropericardium by the third trimester. Fetal pericardial fluid can be detected by echocardiography after 20 weeks' gestation and is normally 2 mm or less in depth. More fluid should raise questions of hydrops fetalis, Rh disease, hypoalbuminaemia, and immunopathy or maternally transmitted mycoplasmal or other infections, and neoplasia.3

Echocardiography reveals the size of effusions: (1) small (echo-free space in diastole < 10 mm); (2) moderate (at least ⩾ 10 mm posteriorly); (3) large (⩾ 20 mm); or (4) very large (⩾ 20 mm with compression of the heart).2 Presence of fibrin, clot, tumour, air, and calcium can also be detected. Pericardial effusion must be differentiated from pleural fluid, ascites, atelectasis, or epicardial fat. Transoesophageal echocardiography is useful in loculated pericardial effusions, intrapericardial clots, metastases, and pericardial thickening. …


The present study was undertaken to assess the knowledge, attitude and practice regarding play needs among mother of under five children. The study was conducted in pediatric ward and pediatric OPD at PIMS Puducherry. Totally 100 samples were selected for this study. Data was collected by B.Sc Nursing students. Parents must know the play needs of their children to take care of sound mental and physical health. Under five children need a safe, healthy, environment and warm, responsive adults to stimulate their growth and development. It's nature and nurture working together that enhances physical, social, emotional, cognitive, cultural and artistic growth in children This study was done to assess the level of knowledge, attitude and practice of mothers of under five children and to improve awareness regarding importance of play, it revealed that 26 (26%) had inadequate knowledge, 51 (51%) had moderately adequate knowledge and 23 (23%) had adequate knowledge regarding importance of play needs of under five children.


A case of primary visceral virchowian hanseniasis is presented. The onset and symptoms of the disease made one think that it was a lymphoma because of the severe enlargement of the liver, spleen, and lymph nodes. Biopsies of the liver, lymph nodes, and bone marrow revealed virchowian infiltration with acid-fast bacilli and globi. The skin was free of lesions and negative to bacilli, and there were no neural symptoms.


The Kandra river basin occupies an area of about 148 sq. km. in Kolhapur District of Maharashtra. The area lies between Long. 740 0′ 9″ E to 740 05′ 12″ E and Lat. 160 45′ 10″ N to 160 50′ 10″ N in Survey of India Toposheet no. 47L/1. The study area is mainly underlain by Deccan basaltic flows. Quaternary and recent formations are confined mainly to the river valleys. Samples were collected after 10 min of pumping and stored in 1 litre plastic bottles, which were pre-cleaned (acid washed) and thoroughly rinsed with distilled water. Each of the collected groundwater sample was analyzed for the physico-chemical parameters such as; pH, electrical conductivity (EC), bi-carbonate, chloride, sulfate, calcium, magnesium, sodium and potassium using the standard procedures as per APHA (1989). Cite this Article Khanapurkar JV, Suryawanshi RA, Kurane MA et al. Analysis of groundwater quality parameters of kandra river basin of panhala tehsil, Kolhapur district, Maharashtra. Journal of Remote Sensing & GIS. 2015; 6(3): 65–69p.


This article investigates the link between passive (descriptive) and active (substantive) representation in public bureaucracies. Previous studies on this topic mostly focused on the US context, where race and gender are the most salient aspects of bureaucratic representation. In Switzerland, representation of the various cultural communities in the federal bureaucracy is the most salient issue. Active representation is operationalized as administrators' preferences for minority origin, as well as for skills in minority languages when selecting candidates in personnel recruitment processes. We use a structural equation model to analyze individual-level data from a survey of administrators in the Swiss federal civil service. Findings are that passive representation fosters active representation not only at the level of individual bureaucrats, but also at the level of the agencies as the main bureaucratic work environment. Moreover, we find that effects of passive on active representation are not direct but mediated by administrators' sensitivity to issues related to minority representation. Sensitivity to minority conditions therefore appears as the main microfoundation for active representation of minority interest, and as a core explanatory factor for active representation outside of demographic congruence.


After 2008, the US personal saving rate had its strongest postwar jump, from 2% to 5%, and the investment ratio its sharpest fall from its postwar average of 16% to its lowest level of 12%. The coordination of saving and investment is analyzed here in a theoretical model of general equilibrium with rational expectations and no forward market. Shocks affect preferences for future consumption. A paradox of thrift is proven that formalizes an argument in the General Theory of Keynes but the equilibrium is a constrained Pareto optimum. Textbook fiscal policies are neutral at best, or inefficient.


Many different technical areas are involved in the design process of large gearless drives for the mining industry, aiming at correctly describing the electrical-mechanical-thermal behavior of the drive. So far, these various technical areas are being treated more or less separately, and no descriptions or references are found concerning the modeling of these large drives using coupled multi-physics models, which allow an overall optimization of this kind of machinery. In this framework, the goal of this thesis is to create reliable and coherent interdisciplinary mathematical models based on a multi-physics approach. The originality of the thesis is to be found in the full interlinked model of a gearless drive. The use of "Evolution Strategies" in the optimization is also an original contribution to the field of gearless drive design. The proposed mathematical multi-physics model incorporates the key technical areas of a gearless drive. These technical areas are electromagnetism, structural dynamics, heat and mass transfer. Such technical areas are closely linked to each other, with results from one area affecting the others and vice-versa. The multi-physics model of the drive is connected to a meta-heuristic optimization procedure based on "Evolution Strategies". The electromagnetic, thermal and structural behaviors have been modeled using the Finite Element Method in 2D and 3D. The mass transport has been described by means of a discrete model and solved using the Newton-Raphson method. One of the major challenges has been to simplify the different sub-models to minimize calculation time without losing accuracy of the final results. This has allowed the models to be utilized in an iterative optimization process. It is shown that the proposed multi-physics model leads to different results than the decoupled models previously used, as the decoupled models use constant values from the several technical areas even though these values are interdependent. The multi-physics model therefore leads to a more precise determination of the design parameters. The thesis gives a clear overview of the necessity of the coupled models and highlights the vital design parameters. As already mentioned, the main contribution to the modeling of gearless mill drives is to be found in the full integration of the various technical areas, enabling a more accurate determination of the different physical parameters that characterize mill drive behavior. This enables an overall optimization that would not have been possible by other means. In this work, the optimization is based on the minimization of the mass of the drive components and losses in the drive, leading to a minimization of purchase and operating costs. The optimization resulted in a mass reduction of 4.0% and a decrease of losses of 9.9% compared to the original drive design. The thesis also opens new research fronts and highlights three new necessary research aspects for further development of the design processes of large gearless drives based on a multi-physics approach: a) experimental tests on the physical mill drives for verification and adjustment of the presented models are crucial, since the multi-physics models have only been compared with other mathematical models; b) 3D


Abstract The aim of this paper is to review the concept of benchmarking with emphasis on its strengths and weaknesses and the methods by which it can be applied to tourist facilities and destinations. To achieve its aim, the paper presents several approaches to the benchmarking and benchmarking development. In doing this, it examines the perceived benefits and costs of benchmarking and the implementation process. It then examines the different benchmarking methods using qualitative and quantitative research to identify performance gaps. From this, weaknesses of past benchmarking research are addressed. Finally, it analyses the development of benchmarking within the tourism industry together with some examples and its limitations.


The use of remotely piloted aircraft systems allows for practicality in the collection and monitoring of study areas or in the development of rehabilitation projects for degraded areas. As such, this technology is gaining space as an alternative for applications in studies and surveys of several areas. This work is justified by the demand for projects and the search for practical alternatives that will enable the framing of rural properties according to the new Brazilian Forestry Code (Codigo Florestal Brasileiro) and its environmental recovery plans (Plano de Recuperacao Ambiental). The objective of this study is therefore to evaluate the use of a Remotely Piloted Aircraft System in the monitoring of a rural property, seeking to include it in the framework of the Brazilian Forestry Code. To accomplish this work, information samples were taken in an area of 30.19 ha of a rural property with the use of a Remotely Piloted Aircraft System - RPAS. After the data collection, the images were treated using the QGis software and through the generation of an ortho-mosaic, which enabled the data to be analyzed and interpreted. With the interpretation of land use and occupation data and with the generation of maps of land use and occupation, a diagnosis of the current situation of the area can be obtained. In a second phase, maps were created to include the property in the current legislative framework, seeking its regularization. After the completion of this work, the conclusion can be drawn that the use of a Remotely Piloted Aircraft System - RPAS is viable and enables the monitoring of rural areas with efficiency and speed.


2021 (received for review January 29, 2021) The COVID-19 pandemic triggered an unparalleled pursuit of vaccines to induce specific adaptive immunity, based on virus-neutralizing antibodies and T cell responses. Although several vaccines have been developed just a year after SARS-CoV-2 emerged in late 2019, global deployment will take months or even years. Meanwhile, the virus continues to take a severe toll on human life and exact substantial economic costs. Innate immunity is fundamental to mammalian host defense capacity to combat infections. Innate immune responses, triggered by a family of pattern recognition receptors, induce interferons and other cytokines and activate both myeloid and lymphoid immune cells to provide protection against a wide range of pathogens. Epidemiological and biological evidence suggests that the live-attenuated vaccines (LAV) targeting tuberculosis, measles, and polio induce protective innate immunity by a newly described form of immunological memory termed " trained immunity. " An LAV designed to induce adaptive immunity targeting a particular pathogen may also induce innate immunity that mitigates other infectious diseases, including COVID-19, as well as future pandemic threats. Deployment of existing LAVs early in pandemics could complement the development of specific vaccines, bridging the protection gap until specific vaccines arrive. The broad protection induced by LAVs would not be compromised by potential antigenic drift (immune escape) that can render viruses resistant to specific vaccines. LAVs might offer an essential tool to " bend the pandemic curve, " averting the exhaustion of public health resources and preventing needless deaths and may also have therapeutic benefits toprovide (partial) protection and limitthe spread of the pandemics until the development of specific vaccines.


Tick borne diseases are major constraints to livestock productivity and food security in many developing countries. They cause high morbidity and mortality in cattle, and prevent the introduction of highly productive but disease-susceptible breeds of cattle. They are also expensive to control and place a huge economic burden on poor small holder farmers. East Coast Fever (ECF, Theileria parva, Theiler 1904) is one of the most serious of the theileria species. ECF is transmitted primarily by the brown ear tick Rhipicephalus appendiculatus. In Africa, it is estimated that 1.1 million cattle suffer from ECF resulting to losses at US dollars 168 million. In Kenya, about 50-80% of the national cattle population of about 10 million animals is exposed to tick infestations and out of this 1% die of ECF each year. Use of semiochemicals represents a strategy for the control management of the vector which is eco-friendly. On host behavior studies of adult R. appendiculatus shows preference to feed mainly inside and around the ear of their host. Combination of a repellent blend from the anal region and an attractive blend at the ear has been shown to play natural "push" and "pull" roles, respectively, to guide these ticks to the cattle ears. In a preliminary study, application of a crude repellent blend collected from the anal region at the ears has been shown to confuse the ticks, most of which drop off the cattle. Preliminary work showed the presence of forty three compounds in the GC-MS of the anal odour. These compounds include ketones, phenols, amines and alcohols. The major constituents comprised of 4-methylguaiacol, 4-hydroxy-4-methl-2-pentanone, and 3-methyl-2-pentanone among others. Bioassays of blends of these and individual constituents showed varying levels of repellence, with 4-methylguaiacol showing the most repellent effect. A number of analogues of this constituent was tested and 2,4-dimethylphenol was found to be most repellent . The present research will build on these results, undertake further structure-activity studies and evaluate potent compounds individually and in blends in laboratory assays and on cattle. This will be followed by development of a controlled-release formulation of a selected repellent or blend, which can then be evaluated in a push tactic on the host animals. All data will be analyzed using Analysis of Variance (AN OVA) while the mean will be compared by Student -Newrnan-Keuls test at P 20.05.


This article performs a novel comparison of the life-cycle costs of the series and parallel architectures for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles. Economic viability is defined as having a payback period less than 2 years and number of battery replacements less than or equal to three over a vehicle life of 12 years along-with drivability and gradability constraints. Economic viability is compared for two plug-in hybrid electric vehicle applications (Medium-duty Truck and Transit Bus) using series and parallel architectures over multiple drivecycles, for three economic scenarios (viz. 2020, 2025 and 2030 where the fuel price, battery price and motor price are varied such that latter scenarios are more favorable for hybridization). One battery overnight recharge is assumed. The results demonstrate that by 2020 the plug-in hybrid electric vehicle transit buses are viable for the duty cycles Manhattan, Orange County, and China (Normal and Aggressive). By 2025, plug-in hybrid electric vehicle Class 6 trucks are viable for all duty cycles considered (Pick-up and delivery, Refuse and New York Composite). The parallel architectures generally require less than 50% of the initial cost of the series architecture, due to smaller motor sizes, driving earlier viability for parallel architectures. The transit bus scenarios generally achieve payback sooner than the medium-duty truck due to higher fuel cost savings, driving earlier viability for transit bus applications.


of Thesis Excitotoxicity can lead to increases in intracellular Na and Ca concentrations via the glutamatergic NMDA receptors, which can lead to cell death. Detailing the timedependent degradation of neuronal components in response to excitotoxic challenge may help elucidate the sequence in which these signaling pathways are initiated and further, associate these pathways with topographic cellular demise. Using organotypic hippocampal slice culture technique, tissue from neonatal rat pups was exposed to NMDA, APV, or co-exposed for 24, 72 or 120 hours. Fluorescent microscopy of propidium iodide (PI) was used to evaluate neuronal membrane damage, changes in the density of mature soma (NeuN) and NMDA NR2B subunits were measured using immunohistochemical procedures. After 24 hours of exposure, the CA1 showed an increased PI signal and a decrease in NeuN marker, indicating somatic injury occurs shortly after excitotoxic challenge; these effects were blocked by co-administration of APV. Also in the CA1, loss of NR2B subunits, heavily expressed in dendritic processes, declined following 72 hours of exposure. Because somatic injury precedes loss of distal NR2B subunits, it is possible that these events involve different mechanisms, findings that may be relevant in the development of therapies to target neurodegeneration resulting from excitotoxicity.


Investigators have tried to increase the precision of similarity searches of images by using distance functions that reflect the similarity of features. When the quadratic-form distance is used, however, dissimilar images can be judged to be similar. We therefore propose that the similarity of images be evaluated using a measure of distance in a multi-vector feature space based on pseudo-Euclidean space and an oblique basis (MVPO). In this space an image is represented by a set of vectors each of which represents each feature. And we propose a distance (called D-distance) between two sets of vectors. Roughly speaking, it is the distance between solids.Another representative distance used in similarity searches is the Earth Mover's Distance (EMD). It can be formalized using MVPO, and that explains well why EMD outperforms quad-ratic-form distance. The main difference between EMD and D-distance is that EMD is based on partial matching and D-distance is based on total matching.We also discuss performance issues of MPVO and D-distance to address practical use of them.


The paper describes quantitative and qualitative dimensions of nanomedicine research studies in India. The study is based on research publications data in nanomedicine research (1491 publications) as covered in Scopus data basefor the period 2002-20. The study finds that nanomedicine research in India registered a high 73.7% growth with an average of 22.93 citations per paper. The nano-oncology subfield accounted for the highest share (48.49% share) in the national output, followed by seven other nanomedicine subfields. Jamia Hamdard University, Delhi, Panjab University, Chandigarh and Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi lead as the most productive organizations in the country. The paper also lists the most productive authors in nanomedicine research. The most productive research journals that reported nanomedicine research in India include Nanomedicine, International Journal of Nanomedicine and Current Pharmaceutical Design. In addition, International Journal of Pharmaceutics, International Journal of Nanomedicine and Drug Delivery Today topped in the list of most cited research journals.


ABSTRACT The fossil record of nonbiomineralized chordates is surprisingly extensive. As with most exceptionally preserved fossils, key anatomical features in non-biomineralized chordate fossils are often preserved in less than pristine condition, and potentially only a subset of those originally present. How taphonomic processes impacted on the anatomy of fossils can be constrained by experimental decay of extant analogues. We experimentally decayed tadpoles of Xenopus laevis to document the rate at which various nonbiomineralized tissues degrade and identify changes over time in their ultrastructure. Tissues decayed under identical conditions and sampled at the same time often differed in the level of ultrastructural detail. This is termed an inconsistent pattern of decay and introduces unpredictable taphonomic noise to any dataset. We integrated these results with data from anuran tadpole fossils from the Miocene of Spain and confirm that the nerve cord is less decay resistant than the notochord. Only the notochord is likely to be preserved organically. The nerve cord is only likely to be preserved if replicated in authigenic minerals (calcium phosphate). This is more likely than for other extremely decay-prone tissues, a result of the nerve cord's chemistry in vivo. Two tissues of similar recalcitrance do not, therefore, have equal fossilization potential. On the basis of the experimental and fossil data, structures preserved in amphibians from the Permian Saar-Nahe Basin of Germany are interpreted as fossilized nerve cords, not notochords.


A 0.45% C steel was deformed in torsion over the temperature range 762-872°C in a 5%H2-Argas atmosphere. Strains of 0.25-3.0 were applied at a strain rate of ε. = 4 s-1. The experimental parameters were varied in order to study the effects of strain and temperature on the formation of ferrite by dynamic transformation (DT) at temperatures above the Ae3. The critical strain for ferrite formation by DT was about 0.2 and its volume fraction increased with strain. The average ferrite grain sizes were about 1 to 2 µm and were fairly independent of temperature. It was observed that the deformation-induced ferrite remained fairly stable during 800 s of isothermal holding. In general, the experiments showed that DT takes place at temperatures above the Ae3 and that the reverse static transformation is much slower than the forward dynamic transformation.


Using feedback control schemes in multiprocessor systems is proposed. In a multiprocessor, individual processors do not have complete control over, nor information about, the overall state of the system. The potential exists, then, for the processors to unknowingly interact in such a way as to degrade the performance of the system. An example of this is the problem of tree saturation caused by hot-spot accesses in multiprocessors using multistage interconnection networks. Tree saturation degrades the performance of all processors in the system, including those not participating in the hot spot activity. Feedback schemes can be used to control tree saturation, reducing degradation to memory request that are not to the hot spot, thereby increasing overall system performance. As a companion to feedback schemes, damping schemes are also considered. Simulation studies show that feedback schemes can improve overall system performance significantly and with relatively little hardware cost in many cases. Damping schemes in conjunction with feedback are shown to further improve. >


This study investigates the sources of information people (n = 334) use when deciding to embark on a wine tourism excursion by visiting a USA wine region environment. The study's overall aim was to establish whether there are differences between first-time and repeat and between in-state- and out-of-state-based visitors in terms of sources of information they use to plan their visit to a wine region and how situational and sociodemographic variables relate to these. Specific differences exist in the information sources used by first-time and repeat wine tourists. Repeat visitors use informal sources such as exposure to a regional winery's label, attending a tasting elsewhere and previous visits to the region significantly more than first-time visitors, who are more inclined to use formal sources such as brochures/pamphlets and the visitor information bureau. Word of mouth is used more than any other source by both in-state- and out-of-state-based visitors. Across the board, wine tourists did not differ much in their use of these sources by gender or age generation, with the exception of female millennials, in which case word of mouth and brochures/pamphlets were used significantly more.


The Coastal National Elevation Database (CoNED) Applications Project develops enhanced topographic (land elevation) and bathymetric (water depth) datasets that serve as valuable resources for coastal hazards research (Danielson and others, 2016; Thatcher and others, 2016). These datasets are used widely for mapping inundation zones from riverine flood events, hurricanes, and sea-level rise and for other Earth science applications, such as sediment transport, erosion, and storm impact models. CoNED is a U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) Coastal-Marine Hazards and Resources Program (formerly Coastal and Marine Geology Program) activity centered at the USGS Earth Resources Observation and Science Center and distributed at other USGS Science Centers. As part of the vision for a 3D Nation, the CoNED Project is working collaboratively with the USGS National Geospatial Program, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers through the Interagency Working Group on Ocean and Coastal Mapping to build integrated elevation models in the coastal zone by assimilating the land surface topography with littoral zone and continental shelf bathymetry. Several nongovernmental organizations and Federal agencies, including the Department of the Interior Pacific Islands Climate Adaptation Science Center, the National Park Service, the Nature Conservancy, the Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority, and numerous academic institutions, partner to make CoNED a success.


In three-dimensional computation for linear elastic fracture mechanics, how to simulate the stress singularity near the crack tip has been a difficult and important point. The so-called quarter-point element is often used to model the stress and displacement field near the crack tip. However, ANSYS only provides automatic meshing capability for two-dimensional problems. It cannot directly generate crack elements for three-dimensional models. At the crack tip region we generate the quarter-point element manually to model the correct singularity of the stresses near the crack tip, thus making the computation for three-dimensional crack problem possible. Manual generation of elements may be tedious for a large and complex model. In this paper, two methods are presented to compute three-dimensional Stress Intensity Factors (SIFs). Firstly, submodel and partial crack submodel methods are adopted to compute the SIFs. Manual generation is only needed for submodel region, which is of much reduced size, thus manual generation is feasible. Secondly, mesh200 element can be used to mesh the area with two dimensional singular elements, and then sweep this area through certain coordinate system to establish three-dimensional crack elements. Finally, three static and dynamic crack examples are given to prove the correctness and ability of these methods. The accuracy of these methods is guaranteed compared with other literature. These two methods are easy to handle and extend the ability of ANSYS in computing three-dimensional SIF.


Wild rice Oryza meridionalis Ng (formerly Oryza rufiopogon Griff.) is a widespread and abundant annual floodplain grass,endemic to northern Australia. Its seeds provide an important annual food resource for floodplain fauna, particularly the Dusky Plains Rat Rattus colletti and the Magpie Goose Anseranas semipalmata. Floodplains of the monsoonal wet-dry tropics are a hydrologically dynamic habitat. During the annual wet season, the underlying clay soils are flooded by 10 to 200 cm of water, while  during the dry season they are dry and deeply cracked. The annual wetting and drying cycle is a reliable occurrence, but the timing of wet season onset, and the extent and duration of inundation are not. This study investigated the significance of inundation regime to growth and fecundity of O. meridionalis in a tank experiment, growing potted plants in four inundation treatments. The growth habit, vegetative productivity, fecundity and mortality of O. meridionalis plants were  significantly affected by inundation regime, with plants grown in the two intermediate inundation regimes (with maximum depths of 15 and 74 cm) being the most vegetatively productive. The two intermediate inundation treatments also resulted in the greatest number of spikelets per plant (a mean range of 1,900 and 2,300 spikelets per plant). Both the exposed and deepest treatments (0 cm and 120 cm respectively) resulted in significantly fewer spikelets per plant. Although inundation regime had a significant effect on growth and fecundity, reproductive output was still > 700 spikelets per plant in all treatments, illustrating the plasticity of growth of O. meridionalis in response to inundation. The 700 spikelets per plant in this study equates with 30,100 spikelets m-2 in the field. The preference of O. meridionalis in the field for areas of intermediate depth is unlikely to be explained only by inundation alone. Although spikelet production for O. meridionalis, was significantly decreased by the driest and wettest inundation treatments, it was still high (>700) under a 120 cm range of inundation regimes. In the field inter-specific competition and density-dependent effects, may also interact with these edaphic factors to limit spikelet production and O. meridionalis population size. Ability to tolerate abiotic "stress" is frequently inversely related to competitive ability, and this high reproductive effort under a range of inundation regimes may at the expense of the competitive ability of O. meridionalis. However if habitat variability, such as inundation regime, limits the growth and reproduction of perennial species, then O. meridionalis would be well placed to occupy any vacated space. In the field, significant differences in growth and fecundity were also detected between years of different inundation period. For example, the 1992 wet season commenced 6 weeks later than it did in 1994. This additional time for vegetative accumulation prior to the initiation of inflorescences also may have contributed to higher spikelet production in the field populations.


.. Background: Gallstones and biliary sludge accounted for 30–55% of acute pancreatitis in the West whereas in other countries the incidence of all cases of pancreatitis amounts up to 68.5%. The risk of subsequent attacks for patients recovering from the first attack of acute biliary pancreatitis is 30-fold higher than general population. Further attacks can be prevented by cholecystectomy. Both immediate and delayed cholecystectomies are used with different degree of success and complication rates. Objectives: To compare the frequencies of complications in early and late cholecystectomy in cases of mild acute biliary pancreatitis. Material & Methods:... Study Design: Randomized control trial. Setting: Surgical unit I Nishtar Medical College/ Hospital Multan. Duration of Study: 2 years from 1-1-2015 to 31-12-3016. Sample Size: Total 172 patients, 86 in each group. Sampling Technique: Nonprobability, consecutive sampling. Results: In this study there were total 172 cases out of which 89 (51.74%) were males and 83 (48.26%) females. The mean age was 42.02± 6.36 years and mean duration of symptoms was 4.08± 2.54 days. Mean duration of surgery was 53.30± 6.30 minutes. There were 47 males in the group undergoing early cholecystectomy and 39 in delayed with p= 0.44. Both groups had maximum cases in age group of 40-50 year with p= 0.39. There was no significant difference in terms of duration of symptoms (p=0.26) in both groups. There was significant difference in terms of prolonged duration of surgery where it was seen in 8 (9.30%) out of 86 cases with early as compared to 2 (2.33%) out of 86 cases with delayed cholecystectomy with p value of 0.05. Prolonged duration of hospital stay was also more seen in early cholecystectomy as compared to delayed one, seen in 10 (11.63) cases in early and 4 (4.65%) cases with delayed surgery in their respective groups with p= 0.09. There was significant difference (p= 0.008) in terms of per operative complication with early surgery where it affected the 18 (20.93%) cases as compared to delayed one with 6 (6.95%) cases. There was again significant difference shown in terms of recurrence of pancreatitis which was seen in 7 (8.14%) of cases with early as compared to 1 (1.16%) with delayed surgery with p= 0.03. Conclusion: Early and late cholecystectomies both are performed in tertiary care hospitals. The late cholecystectomy has shown significantly lower per operative complications, duration of surgery and chances of the recurrent pancreatitis.


Single-cell studies are extremely important in several fields of research in both molecular and cell biology. Current nanocharacterization techniques based on atomic force microscopy allow researchers to study cells and molecules in unprecedented detail. An important limitation of conventional equipment results from the use of a single probe to measure different parameters of the same sample. To avoid this, here we present a multitool platform based on coordinated self-sensing probes. A first tool, based on quartz tuning fork resonators, is used to image the surface. A second tool, based on a piezoresistive cantilever, is used to measure the nanomechanical properties of the sample. Specific instrumentation circuitry was developed to optimize imaging and force measurement with these probes. Different coordination strategies were studied and a solution was selected that coordinates the nanotools in the microworld and in the nanoworld. Finally, an experiment with biological samples was conducted: the tuning-fork-based tool measured the topography of Escherichia Coli bacterial membranes and the piezoresistive-cantilever-based tool measured their elastic properties.


Supercontinent assembly and breakup has been an important topic since Wagener's discovery of Pangaea in the early twentieth century and has been recognized as an important process of the Wilson Cycle since the late 1960s. The separate proposals of a Mesoproterozoic Rodinia supercontinent by Dalziel (1991) and Hofmann (1991) concentrated the attention of many geoscientists on this topic. The UNESCO-IUGS-IGCP-288 project 'Assembly of Gondwanaland' (1990–1996) focused on the subject of Rodinia to Gondwanaland, and was followed by IGCP-368 'Proterozoic Events in East Gondwana' (1995–2001) and by IGCP-440 'Rodinia Assembly and Breakup' (1999–2003). At the 31st IGC in Rio de Janeiro in October 2000, IGCP-368 organized a general session entitled 'Proterozoic Events in East Gondwana' to which many contributions came from both IGCP-368 and IGCP-440. This session provided the impetus in collating the present volume. East Gondwana was traditionally thought to have formed as a major part of Rodinia during the Mesoproterozoic Grenvillian-Circum-East Antarctic Orogeny (Yoshida 1995; Unrug 1997) and survived until the Middle-Late Mesozoic when Pangaea broke up. An ice-covered Antarctica is the key component of this long-lived subsupercontinent. West Gondwana, on the other hand, assembled during the Neoproterozoic and collided with pre-existing East Gondwana at this time. However, the accumulation of Pan-African zircon ages, mostly from Antarctica since the early 1990s, coupled with an increase in the number of reliable palaeomagnetic data from various parts of the globe, has resulted in a re-evaluation of the above classical model, creating a radical new model. According to this new model, East


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Background and Aim: The health care industry is very critical base on its relation to human life. The amount of research and changes in the diagnostic techniques and procedures, therapeutic techniques, drugs and equipment are very vast and fast. In order to prevent the waste of resources, it is required to understand the needs and wants of the market. Therefore, it is very crucial to understand the patient's opinion.
Methods: By reviewing the literature of consumer behavior theories, a number of factors are classified into seven categories. Based on this classification a questionnaire was developed. The main respondents were parents of a child who is suffering from renal failure. Then, two statistical tests were held using t-test in order to identify the importance and prioritizing of each factor also correlation coefficient to understand the availability and strength of relationship among factors.
Results: The results base on the statical tests indicates that the three groups of factors do not affect consumer behavior. The rest of the factors have an influence on consumer behavior regarding a new product.
Base on the result hospitals and clinics that have hemodialysis sections with the specialty of delivering service to children should recognize the product accuracy, the lowest possible price, with vast of informative activity to parents and the children and doctors.
Conclusion: These approaches will smooth the way for hospitals and clinics to launch new services to renal failure patients.


Cued Speech (CS) is a visual communication system for the deaf or hearing impaired people. It combines lip movements with hand cues to obtain a complete phonetic repertoire. Current deep learning based methods on automatic CS recognition suffer from a common problem, which is the data scarcity. Until now, there are only two public single speaker datasets for French (238 sentences) and British English (97 sentences). In this work, we propose a cross-modal knowledge distillation method with teacher-student structure, which transfers audio speech information to CS to overcome the limited data problem. Firstly, we pretrain a teacher model for CS recognition with a large amount of open source audio speech data, and simultaneously pretrain the feature extractors for lips and hands using CS data. Then, we distill the knowledge from teacher model to the student model with frame-level and sequence-level distillation strategies. Importantly, for frame-level, we exploit multi-task learning to weigh losses automatically, to obtain the balance coefficient. Besides, we establish a five-speaker British English CS dataset for the first time. The proposed method is evaluated on French and British English CS datasets, showing superior CS recognition performance to the state-of-the-art (SOTA) by a large margin.


Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies are vulnerable to unauthorized replication attacks, where an adversary exploits imitation learning to reproduce target policies from observed behavior. In this paper, we propose Constrained Randomization of Policy (CRoP) as a mitigation technique against such attacks. CRoP induces the execution of sub-optimal actions at random under performance loss constraints. We present a parametric analysis of CRoP, address the optimality of CRoP, and establish theoretical bounds on the adversarial budget and the expectation of loss. Furthermore, we report the experimental evaluation of CRoP in Atari environments under adversarial imitation, which demonstrate the efficacy and feasibility of our proposed method against policy replication attacks.


The complex microbial population residing in the human gastrointestinal tract consists of commensal, potential pathogenic and beneficial species, which are probably perceived differently by the host and consequently could be expected to trigger specific transcriptional responses. Here, we provide a comparative analysis of the global in vitro transcriptional response of human intestinal epithelial cells to Lactobacillus acidophilus NCFM™, Lactobacillus salivarius Ls-33, Bifidobacterium animalis subsp. lactis 420, and enterohaemorrhagic Escherichia coli O157:H7 (EHEC). Interestingly, L. salivarius Ls-33 DCE-induced changes were overall more similar to those of B. lactis 420 than to L. acidophilus NCFM™, which is consistent with previously observed in vivo immunomodulation properties. In the gene ontology and pathway analyses both specific and unspecific changes were observed. Common to all was the regulation of apoptosis and adipogenesis, and lipid-metabolism related regulation by the probiotics. Specific changes such as regulation of cell-cell adhesion by B. lactis 420, superoxide metabolism by L. salivarius Ls-33, and regulation of MAPK pathway by L. acidophilus NCFM™ were noted. Furthermore, fundamental differences were observed between the pathogenic and probiotic treatments in the Toll-like receptor pathway, especially for adapter molecules with a lowered level of transcriptional activation of MyD88, TRIF, IRAK1 and TRAF6 by probiotics compared to EHEC. The results in this study provide insights into the relationship between probiotics and human intestinal epithelial cells, notably with regard to strain-specific responses, and highlight the differences between transcriptional responses to pathogenic and probiotic bacteria.


Expression of IL-33 is elevated in patients with pulmonary diseases, and full-length (not proteolytically processed) IL-33 is the predominant form in the lungs in health and disease. To determine whether activation of IL-33 is needed for functional effects, activities of full-length mouse and mature mouse (mm) forms of IL-33 were compared in vivo. Replication-deficient adenoviral constructs were used for gene delivery. Both isoforms caused pulmonary infiltration of lymphocytes and neutrophils, whereas mmIL-33 also caused pulmonary eosinophilia and goblet cell hyperplasia and increased expression of IL-4, IL-5, IL-13, IL-17, MCP-1, and KC. The different effects were not associated with differential release from IL-33–producing cells or by differences in subcellular distributions of IL-33 isoforms. Germline deficiency of the cell surface receptor chain ST2 abrogated the mmIL-33– induced Th2-associated effects (pulmonary eosinophilia, goblet cell hyperplasia, and increased IL-4 and IL-5), yet the lymphocytic infiltration induced by full-length mouse IL-33 or mmIL-33 was not fully abrogated by the absence of ST2. The similar effects of IL-33 isoforms were associated with comparable regulation of gene expression, notably matrix metalloproteinases 3, 10, and 13. Thus, full-length IL-33 is functionally active in vivo in an ST2-independent fashion, and its effects are partially different from those of mature IL-33. The different effects of these isoforms, particularly the pro-Th2 effects of mature IL-33, are due to differential utilization of the IL-33R


On 19 June 1956, eight Japanese prisoners entered a brightly lit military courtroom in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang (沈阳). Having emerged from their prison in neighboring Fushun (抚顺) and borne the shame of public confessions of crimes ranging from the massacre of Chinese civilians to the promotion of Japanese "cultural imperialism (文化帝国主义 wenhua diguozhuyi)" in Manchukuo, the repentant war criminals now stood to receive their verdicts. With the judicial announcement that death sentences had been rejected, and that most of the war criminals would soon be released back to Japan, cries escaped the lips of the convicts and their tears welled up. Throughout, flashbulbs exploded and Xinhua film reels whirred, recording the spectacle of justice for its ultimate conveyance to audiences on the Chinese mainland and in Japan.1 Watching carefully from Beijing was Zhou Enlai (周恩來 1898-1976), the man whose orders had initiated the trials and whose foreign ministry was using every power at its disposal to promote the trials and render the subsequent release of the war criminals as a propaganda success. In the mid-1950s, Zhou was in the midst of orchestrating a major turn in Chinese policy toward Japan; and, indeed, mass amnesty and repatriation of Japanese war criminals played an important component in the foreign minister's drive toward rapprochement. The policy of magnanimity adopted by the Chinese Communist Party (共产党 [CCP]) toward the war criminals was, further, a significant component in Zhou Enlai's "people's diplomacy (民間外交 minjian waijiao)" offensive toward Japan. Beginning in the early summer of 1956 more than fifty Japanese stood trial in Shenyang and Taiyuan. The trials marked the high point in PRC prosecutions of Japanese for war crimes, coinciding precisely with China's unmistakable push for diplomatic normalization with Japan. Because the trials intersect with so many important narratives of twentieth-century Chinese history, it is surprising that so little has been written about the proceedings. The burgeoning literature on Chinese Communist domestic and foreign policy in the 1950s rarely engages the trials as an object of inquiry.2 Mainland historians tend to take the trials more seriously as a component of the Sino-Japanese relationship, but mostly follow the CCP's predetermined narrative that emphasizes the humanity displayed by the CCP toward the war criminals, implicitly modeling the "correct" form of penitence for guilty Japanese.3 Similar trials were taking place all across the Communist bloc in the 1950s, but the Shenyang proceedings have eluded comparison with other trials in that period.4 The Soviet trial and repatriation of German prisoners of war after 1954 has been well studied, for instance, and its remarkable similarities to the procedure and intent of the Shenyang trials could be profitably juxtaposed.5 Scholars of prisoner of war (POW) culture in East Asia in the 1950s might also find the trials noteworthy.6 Beyond such comparisons, the Shenyang proceedings as documented in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives (中国外交部档案馆 Zhongguo waijiaobu dang'anguan) could fuel further discussion of Sino-Soviet relations, war and memory, "thought reform (思想改革 sixiang gaige)" among prisoners, and, of course, the wide range of political campaigns occurring in China in that unique year of 1956.


We present radio observations of 18 MIPSGAL bubbles performed at 5 GHz (6 cm) with the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array in configuration B and BnA. The observations were aimed at understanding what kind of information high-resolution and high-sensitivity radio maps can supply on the circumstellar envelopes of different kinds of evolved stars and what their comparison with infrared images with similar resolution can tell us. We found that the 18 bubbles can be grouped into five categories according to their radio morphology. The three bubbles presenting a central point source in the radio images all correspond to luminous blue variable star candidates. Eleven bubbles show an elliptical shape and the total lack of a central object in the radio, and are likely associated with planetary nebulae. Under this assumption we derive their distance, their ionized mass and their distribution on the Galactic plane. We discuss the possibility that the MIPSGAL bubbles catalogue (428 objects) may contain a large fraction of all Galactic planetary nebulae located at a distance between 1.4 kpc and 6.9 kpc and lying in the MIPSGAL field of view. Among the remaining bubbles we identify also a H II region and a proto-planetary nebula candidate.


Drying is essential to prolong storage life of crops. This study is carried out to provide design information for developing a Bambara nut dryer. Bambara nuts samples were condition to 6%, 8%, 10% and 12% db. Pressure drops along depth of 0.2, 0.4, 0.6, 0.8 and 1 m were obtained using a constructed aerodynamic apparatus. Airflow resistances at these depths were calculated for airflow rates of 0.025, 0.035, 0.045, and 0.055 m s. I – Optimal response surface design was used to model and optimize the airflow resistance. Reduces quadratic model was selected among other models to be the best for modeling and optimizing airflow resistance of Bambara nuts. This study showed that airflow rate, bed depth, packing type and moisture content all influenced airflow resistance of Bambara nuts. Optimize airflow resistance values for drying Bambara nuts within and outside the experimental design space were obtained. Cube plots for dryer designers were established for Bambara nuts.


Randomness plays an important role in multiple applications in cryptography. It is required in fundamental tasks such as key generation, masking and hiding values, nonces and initialization vectors generation. Pseudo-random number generators have been studied by numerous authors, either to propose clear security notions and associated constructions or to point out potential vulnerabilities. In this systematization of knowledge paper, we present the three notions of generators that have been successively formalized: standard generators, stateful generators and generators with input. For each notion, we present expected security properties, where adversaries have increasing capabilities (including access to partial information on the internal variables) and we propose secure and efficient constructions, all based on the block cipher AES. In our description of generators with input, we revisit the notions of accumulator and extractor and we point out that security crucially relies on the independence between the randomness source and the seeds of the accumulator and the extractor. To illustrate this requirement, we identify a potential vulnerability of the NIST standard CTR_DRBG.


Today's computer animators have access to many systems and techniques to author high-quality motion. Unfortunately, available techniques typically produce a particular motion for a specific character. In this paper we present a constraint-based approach to adapt previously created motions to new situations and characters. We combine constraint methods that compute changes to motion to meet specified needs with motion signal processing methods that modify signals yet preserve desired properties of the original motion. The combination allows the adaptation of motions to meet new goals while retaining much of the motion's original quality. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Introduction: Developmental Dysplasia of the Hip (DDH) is an important cause of disability.  It affects 1-3% of babies to some degree, with 1-2 in 1,000 babies having a dislocation at birth.  If DDH is detected before three months it can be treated with a harness.  In most cases the outcomes are good. However, if it is picked up after three months, the child may need more complex treatment, including surgery. There has been a programme in place in Ireland for DDH for years. However, there are concerns about high rates of late diagnosed hips. Description of policy context and objective: A national multidisciplinary group representing the services involved was established to develop an evidence-based framework for the Irish DDH programme.  The aim was to improve outcomes for children by maximising the number of babies who were in treatment by 3 months by developing national recommendations and implementing an expanded ultrasound service. Targeted population: This universal service is for all babies born in Ireland.  Identifying and treating DDH involves services in the acute sector (maternity, radiology, physiotherapy, orthopaedics), primary care and general practice. This requires integrated working and information collection to ensure DDH is identified early and to quality assure the screening. Highlights: Detailed recommendations on each stage of the pathway and the responsibilities of professionals were developed.  The programme recommendation was for a physical examination of hips at birth and six weeks with early ultrasound for positive cases and supported by an ultrasound at six weeks for babies with normal examination but with either of two specified risk factors.  The group also did a review of DDH information; developed pathway maps; training curriculum; indicators; changes to IT systems; undertaking an audit; made international links; organised a training programme; and established a radiology network.  Ultrasound is not available in all units. Without it babies have to wait for an X-ray at 4 months.  The Integrated Care Programme for Children secured funding to implement additional ultrasound capacity to ensure all maternity units had access to ultrasound and so the work was integrated with the group work.   This work is ongoing and supported by the development of clear national recommendations for the whole pathway.  Comments on transferability: Multidisciplinary planning needs commitment from many stakeholders and time for them to contribute. It needs project support to drive it in a timely way. National planning needs recognised national stakeholders to work through but a way to get input from grass roots. Conclusions: The recommendations are due for presentation to the HSE's Senior Management Team. The Ultrasound project is progressing through a project manager and integrated project team. It was useful that people agreed that change was needed but it was difficult to get consensus in the detail. Working inside and outside meetings with key champions was useful.


Changes in the chemical and isotopic composition of the solar nebula with time are reflected in the properties of different constituents that are preserved in chondritic meteorites. CR-group carbonaceous chondrites are among the most primitive of all chondrite types and must have preserved solar nebula records largely unchanged. We have analyzed the oxygen and magnesium isotopes in a range of the CR constituents of different formation temperatures and ages, including refractory inclusions and chondrules of various types. The results provide new constraints on the time variation of the oxygen isotopic composition of the inner (<5 AU) solar nebula—the region where refractory inclusions and chondrules most likely formed. A chronology based on the decay of short-lived 26Al (t1/2 ~ 0.73 Myr) indicates that the inner solar nebula gas was 16O-rich when refractory inclusions formed, but less than 0.8 Myr later, gas in the inner solar nebula became 16O-poor, and this state persisted at least until CR chondrules formed ~1-2 Myr later. We suggest that the inner solar nebula became 16O-poor because meter-sized icy bodies, which were enriched in 17O and 18O as a result of isotopic self-shielding during the ultraviolet photodissociation of CO in the protosolar molecular cloud or protoplanetary disk, agglomerated outside the snow line, drifted rapidly toward the Sun, and evaporated at the snow line. This led to significant enrichment in 16O-depleted water, which then spread through the inner solar system. Astronomical studies of the spatial and temporal variations of water abundance in protoplanetary disks may clarify these processes.


Multi-agency crisis management represents one of the most complex real-world situations, requiring rapid negotiation and decision-making under extreme pressure. However, the training provided to Gold Commanders (strategic planners) typically lacks the stress of a real crisis, while research tells us that behavior and decision-making are significantly affected by stress. It is, therefore, vital that training puts trainees under the pressure of a real crisis situation as far as possible. The Pandora+ system, developed from an EU FP7 research project, provides a unique, original, realistic, immersive, and augmented reality training environment in which the stress of each individual trainee can be managed by the trainer, during a training event, with the support of system intelligence. The system uses AI planning techniques to model an unfolding crisis scenario, realized as an event network, which can be dynamically updated by the trainer during a training event. This modeling includes points of decision for trainees managed by automated rules from a knowledge base, behavioral modeling of the trainees, and dynamic management of the environment to provide affective inputs to control and manage trainee stress. In this context, the system controls and reacts to trainee performance in relation to the events and decision points and can dynamically remodel and reconfigure the event network to respond appropriately to trainee decisions. The environment can also represent any missing trainees within the scenario and has the potential to provide training in any domain where a timeline-based scenario of events is required for training. This entire approach is completely novel in crisis training and has been rigorously tested in several trials, the most recent involving close to 150 participants, and has the potential to transform online learning in many domains, not just crisis management.


Objective: To explore the pharmacy technician workload analysis and workforce requirements at Ministry of Health Hospitals during mass gathering Hajj nine years (2006-2014) in Al-Medina Region, Saudi Arabia. Methods: It is a retrospective of nine years (2006-2014) of hospital pharmacy technician workload during mass gathering Hajj period. The duration of workload collection was 15-30 days each year. The pharmacists provide pharmaceutical to all patients either Pilgrim or not Pilgrim at Medina region. The workforce requirements calculated based on MOH workforce standards per bed and the workload drives as central pharmacy technician services, patient specific pharmacy technician activities, and general administration specific pharmacy technician activities. Results: The total number of Pilgrims (1,952,817-3,161,573) with average (2,445,208). The total number of prescriptions was (22,278-133,107) with an average of (78,955). It represented (1.07-5.02%) with an average (3.11%) of all pilgrims. The total average number of pharmacy technician needed in Al-Madina was (69.2 FTE) per hospital. It divvied into (3.21FTE) for inpatient services per hospital, (11.48 FTE) for Emergency services per hospital, and (54.51FTE) for Ambulatory care services per hospital. The average number of pharmacy technician calculated per hospital was (38.47 FTE), while the mean number pharmacy technician needed to base on workload for all services was (69.20 FTE) per hospital. Conclusion: The pharmacy technician workforce's analysis showed high demand during mass gathering Hajj over past several years despite clinical pharmacy technician missed. Aiming to increase workforce of pharmacy technician is potential to improve pharmacy services during mass gathering Hajj period in Al-Madina, Saudi Arabia. Key words: Pharmacy Technician, Workload, Workforces, Mass Gathering, Hajj, Al-Medina, Ministry of Health, Saudi Arabia


In treating 40 obese children aged 8--15 years with the I--III degree of constitutional-exogenous adiposity a hypocaloric diet with a reduced content of fats and carbohydrates was applied. The effect of the treatment was evaluated by determining the body mass, the characteristics of the lipids metabolism, e.g. by measuring the total lipids, tryglycerides, cholesterol, the blood plasma lipoproteins, as well as the fatty acids blood plasma composition and of the erythrocytes stroma before and after the treatment. The coefficient of the food fatty acids metabolization effectiveness into polyunsaturated fatty acids (CEM), e.g. the proportion of the arachidonic acid in the sum-total of other polyunsaturated fatty acids with 20 and 22 carbon atoms, was calculated. The CEM magnitude with the applied treatment was found to change variously, i.e. either rising or falling or remaining unchanged. It is presumed that the unequal orientation of the CEM changes in treating obese changes reflects a different degree of the profoundness of changes of the food fatty acids metabolism occurring in them. The value of the CEM application for prognosis of adiposity and evaluating the effect of the treatment in each individual case is stressed.


The widespread use of deep learning techniques for creating realistic synthetic media, commonly known as deepfakes, poses a significant threat to individuals, organizations, and society. As the malicious use of these data could lead to unpleasant situations, it is becoming crucial to distinguish between authentic and fake media. Nonetheless, though deepfake generation systems can create convincing images and audio, they may struggle to maintain consistency across different data modalities, such as producing a realistic video sequence where both visual frames and speech are fake and consistent one with the other. Moreover, these systems may not accurately reproduce semantic and timely accurate aspects. All these elements can be exploited to perform a robust detection of fake content. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for detecting deepfake video sequences by leveraging data multimodality. Our method extracts audio-visual features from the input video over time and analyzes them using time-aware neural networks. We exploit both the video and audio modalities to leverage the inconsistencies between and within them, enhancing the final detection performance. The peculiarity of the proposed method is that we never train on multimodal deepfake data, but on disjoint monomodal datasets which contain visual-only or audio-only deepfakes. This frees us from leveraging multimodal datasets during training, which is desirable given their lack in the literature. Moreover, at test time, it allows to evaluate the robustness of our proposed detector on unseen multimodal deepfakes. We test different fusion techniques between data modalities and investigate which one leads to more robust predictions by the developed detectors. Our results indicate that a multimodal approach is more effective than a monomodal one, even if trained on disjoint monomodal datasets.


This article reviews the current practice in sensors and sensor applications for automotive and traffic-control systems. Sensors to control engine fuelling, ignition and transmission (known as the powertrain) are reviewed and the likely course of future development is discussed in the light of regulatory and market requirements as well as trends in sensor design and manufacture. Sensor needs for suspension, braking and control of traction are also reviewed and the likely introduction of wheel and tyre sensors to enhance driving safety is discussed. The recent trend towards vehicle-mounted devices to sense the vehicle's environment (such as radar, optical, ultrasound, capacitive and image-based systems) and the implications of the introduction of safety-critical automotive systems such as adaptive cruise control are discussed. Sensors for initiating the deployment of safety systems such as airbags, together with transducers for disconnecting fuel pumps and vehicle batteries in the event of a crash, are reviewed. The paper includes a brief discussion of highway-based sensors for measuring vehicle speed and presence and concludes with a discussion of the likely future developments in the field.


The results of investigation of the point defect generation and interaction with impurities in the Si-SiO2 system during the process of its formation by means of electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) and nucleous magnetic resonance (NMR) technique are presented. It has been shown that the diference in point defects interaction with hydrogen at the Si-SO2 interface with n- and p-type conductivity are connected with the sign of hydrogen ions incorporation dependence on the Fermi level position in accordance with the proposed model. The interface properties may be improved by laser irradiation.


Background: Whether the association of chronic kidney disease (CKD) with cardiovascular risk differs based on diabetes mellitus (DM) and hypertension (HTN) status remains unanswered. Methods: We investigated 11,050 participants from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities Study (fourth examination (1996-1998)) with follow-up for cardiovascular outcomes (coronary disease, heart failure and stroke) through 2009. Using the Cox regression models, we quantified cardiovascular risk associated with estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) and urinary albumin-to-creatinine ratio (ACR) in individuals with and without DM and/or HTN and assessed their interactions. Results: Individuals with DM and HTN generally had higher cardiovascular risk relative to those without at all the levels of eGFR and ACR. Cardiovascular risk increased with lower eGFR and higher ACR regardless of DM and HTN status (e.g. adjusted hazards ratio (HR) for eGFR 30-44 vs. 90-104 ml/min/1.73 m2, 2.32 (95% CI, 1.66-3.26) in non-diabetics vs. 1.83 (1.25-2.67) in diabetics and 2.45 (2.20-5.01) in non-hypertensives vs. 1.51 (1.27-1.81) in hypertensives and corresponding adjusted HR for ACR 30-299 vs. <10 mg/g, 1.70 (1.45-2.00) vs. 1.34 (1.10-1.64) and 1.42 (1.10-1.85) vs. 1.57 (1.36-1.81), respectively). Only the ACR-DM interaction reached significance, with a shallower relative risk gradient among diabetics than among non-diabetics (p = 0.02). Analysis of individual cardiovascular outcomes showed similar results. Conclusion: Although individuals with DM and HTN generally had higher cardiovascular risk relative to those without these complications, both low eGFR and high ACR were associated with cardiovascular diseases regardless of the presence or absence of DM and HTN. These findings reinforce the importance of CKD in cardiovascular outcomes.


ABSTRACT Yin, X.; Huang, L.; Lu, Y.; Zou, J., and Wan, L., 2021. Experimental investigation on resistance reduction for multiple service conditions of container ship bulbous bow optimization. Journal of Coastal Research, 37(3), 634–643. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208. In this article, the main objective is to implement an experimental investigation on resistance reduction within a hydrodynamic container ship design procedure for bulbous bow form optimization under multiple service conditions. One container ship was used as a parent ship, and using different bulb characteristic parameters as design variables, a new hull form with an optimized bulbous bow was developed to satisfy the economical requirement of slow steaming for the modern container vessel. Through the conduction of ship-model resistance tests in both design and scantling drafts covering a wide speed range, the experimental results of various resistance component values were monitored and compared between the original and optimized ship. The results show that the hydrodynamic performance of the optimized hull form is improved, especially at lower speeds, and the total resistance reduction per unit displacement in full scale reaches 30%∼40% and then decreases gradually with the increase of Froude number under design draft conditions in contrast to the original hull, suggesting the evolved hull form optimization method is valuable. In addition, the bulbous bow optimization method is proved more practical and effective than the traditional optimization process, which is only based on a contractually specified design condition. On the basis of the comparison and analysis of test results, the influence of the bulbous bow characteristic parameters on the resistance performance is further studied. The presented work is of high reference value for the hydrodynamic optimization design of modern container vessels.


The article proposes to extend the knowledge of the fi gure and work of Victor Legley. It offers some notes about his life, studies and professional activities. It informs about his activities as a musical philosopher, and makes some of his thoughts known about contemporary composition, music's social function, the composer's role, and the relations between composer, interpreter, critic and management, today. The major part of the article is dedicated to his compositions. La Cathedrale d'acier, opus 52, from 1958, has been chosen for an analytical research on his intense thematic work, typical for his production, and also to establish the general characteristics of this composition, representative of much of his work. Finally, we present some conclusions on the importance of his ideas and his production as a composer. 1


The Martian satellites Phobos and Deimos hold many unanswered questions that may provide clues to the origin of Mars. These moons are low Δv stopover sites to Mars. Some human missions to Mars typically identify Phobos and Deimos as staging bases for Mars surface exploration. Astronauts could base initial operations there in lieu of repeated voyages to and from the planet surface, to refuel transiting spacecraft, to teleoperate robotics and other critical machinery, and to develop habitable infrastructure ahead of human landings. Despite their strategic and scientific significance, there has been no successful dedicated mission to either moon. For this reason, we propose Perseus, a geological imaging CubeSat mission to Phobos. Perseus, a 27U, 54kg CubeSat will return thermal and visible images at resolutions better than currently available over most of Phobos' surface. This includes visible images at 5m/pixel and thermal images at 25m/pixel of Phobos' surface. The Perseus mission is nominally intended to be a co-orbital mission, where the spacecraft will encounter Phobos on its Martian orbit. However, a hyperbolic rendezvous mission concept, to image Phobos on a hyperbolic flyby, is also considered to reduce the risks associated with orbit capture and to reduce mission costs. This paper presents the preliminary feasibility, science objectives, and technological development challenges of achieving these science goals. We then formulate two rendezvous concepts as a series of three nonlinear optimization problems that span the design tree of mission concepts. The tree's root node is the heliocentric cruise problem, which identifies the near-optimal launch and arrival windows for the Perseus spacecraft. The leaf nodes of the design tree are the two rendezvous concepts that identify near-optimal co-orbital and hyperbolic trajectories for Phobos' reconnaissance. The design problems are solved using evolutionary algorithms, and the performance of the selected mission concepts is then examined. The results indicate that a co-orbital encounter allows about one encounter per day with about 6 min per encounter. The hyperbolic encounter, on the other hand, allows a single encounter where the spacecraft will spend about 2 min in the imaging region with respect to Phobos. The spacecraft will obtain higher resolution images of Phobos on this feasible region than have ever been seen for most of the surface. These detailed images will help identify candidate landing sites and provide critical data to derisk future surface missions to Phobos.