Coating colors are very complex colloid systems of which stability and theological behaviors are of importance in the coating process and in the mechanical, optical properties of the coated layer. Clay is one of the main ingredients of coating colors in the paper industry. There can be very complicated colloid interactions that control the stability and theological properties of the coating colors. The main purpose of this work is to get a better understanding about the role of the colloid interactions in the theological behavior of suspensions which are composed of materials having significant meanings in coating color formulations (kaolin, sodium carboxymethyl cellulose, and sodium chloride). For practical applications in many cases, suspensions with a high solid content are required which show low viscosity, significant elasticity, and thixotropy as well. The aim of this investigation is to find such a composition of above components which show the above mentioned theological properties. The colloid interactions were studied by the theological and sedimentation volumes investigations. The results showed that lv (low viscosity) NaCMC was a better stabilizing and thinning agent than my (medium viscosity) NaCMC; NaCl increased the viscosity of CMC added suspensions. 0.01% my NaCMC increased the viscosity of 0.5% lv NaCMC added kaolin suspension supposedly due to bridging flocculation. This is in a good agreement with the results of sedimentation volume investigations. 0.1% lv NaCMC, 0.002% mv NaCMC and 0.5% NaCl together caused the most significant thixotropy, without of NaCl the suspension shows anti-thixotropy. Real-elasticity was only found in the presence of my NaCMC. The samples, prepared from the mixture of low and medium viscosity NaCMCs, were found to be the best composition for getting low viscosity, significant thixotropy and elasticity.


Modern software deployment process produces software that is uniform, and hence vulnerable to large-scale code-reuse attacks, such as Jump-Oriented Programming (JOP) attacks. Compiler-based diversification improves the resilience and security of software systems by automatically generating different assembly code versions of a given program. Existing techniques are efficient but do not have a precise control over the quality, such as the code size or speed, of the generated code variants.
This paper introduces Diversity by Construction (DivCon), a constraint-based compiler approach to software diversification. Unlike previous approaches, DivCon allows users to control and adjust the conflicting goals of diversity and code quality. A key enabler is the use of Large Neighborhood Search (LNS) to generate highly diverse assembly code efficiently. For larger problems, we propose a combination of LNS with a structural decomposition  of the problem. To further improve the diversification efficiency of DivCon against JOP attacks, we propose an application-specific distance measure tailored to the characteristics of JOP attacks.
We evaluate DivCon with 20 functions from a popular benchmark suite for embedded systems. These experiments show that DivCon's combination of LNS and our application-specific distance measure generates binary programs that are highly resilient against JOP  attacks (they share between 0.15% to 8% of JOP gadgets) with an optimality gap of 10%. Our results confirm that there is a trade-off between the quality of each assembly code version and the diversity of the entire pool of versions. In particular, the experiments  show that DivCon is able to generate binary programs that share a very small number of  gadgets, while delivering near-optimal code.
For constraint programming researchers and practitioners, this paper demonstrates that LNS is a valuable technique for finding diverse solutions. For security researchers and software  engineers, DivCon extends the scope of compiler-based diversification to performance-critical and resource-constrained applications.


This research aims to find the psychological mechanism of students' political participation. The research was designed with predictive correlational design and the data analysis technique was path analysis. The dependent variable was political participation intention. The predictor variables were creativity and students' attitude toward economics. The mediator variables were the necessary political experience and political efficacy. One hundred and four students of Department of Psychology, FPPsi, Malang State University, participated ( M age = 19.50 years old; SD age = 2.397 years). The research found that creativity and attitude toward economics are significant predictors for students' political participation intention and this prediction is mediated by political efficacy and the necessary political experience ( Chi-Square = 8.24, df = 5, P-value = 0.14349, GFI = 0.97, RMSEA = 0.08).


Very-Large-Scale-Integration Circuit Techniques in Internet-of-Things Applications Jiangyi Li Heading towards the era of Internet-of-things (IoT) means both opportunity and challenge for the circuit-design community. In a system where billions of devices are equipped with the ability to sense, compute, communicate with each other and perform tasks in a coordinated manner, security and power management are among the most critical challenges. Physically unclonable function (PUF) emerges as an important security primitive in hardware-security applications; it provides an object-specific physical identifier hidden within the intrinsic device variations, which is hard to expose and reproduce by adversaries. Yet, designing a compact PUF robust to noise, temperature and voltage remains a challenge. This thesis presents a novel PUF design approach based on a pair of ultra-compact analog circuits whose output is proportional to absolute temperature. The proposed approach is demonstrated through two works: (1) an ultra-compact and robust PUF based on voltage-compensated proportional-to-absolute-temperature voltage generators that occupies 8.3× less area than the previous work with the similar robustness and twice the robustness of the previously most compact PUF design and (2) a technique to transform a 6T-SRAM array into a robust analog PUF with minimal overhead. In this work, similar circuit topology is used to transform a preexisting on-chip SRAM into a PUF, which further reduces the area in (1) with no robustness penalty. In this thesis, we also explore techniques for power management circuit design. Energy harvesting is an essential functionality in an IoT sensor node, where battery replacement is cost-prohibitive or impractical. Yet, existing energy-harvesting power management units (EH PMU) suffer from efficiency loss in the two-step voltage conversion: harvester-to-battery and battery-to-load. We propose an EH PMU architecture with hybrid energy storage, where a capacitor is introduced in addition to the battery to serve as an intermediate energy buffer to minimize the battery involvement in the system energy flow. Test-case measurements show as much as a 2.2× improvement in the end-toend energy efficiency. In contrast, with the drastically reduced power consumption of IoT nodes that operates in the sub-threshold regime, adaptive dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) for supply-voltage margin removal, fully on-chip integration and high power conversion efficiency (PCE) are required in PMU designs. We present a PMU–load co-design based on a fully integrated switched-capacitor DC-DC converter (SC-DC) and hybrid error/replica-based regulation for a fully digital PMU control. The PMU is integrated with a neural spike processor (NSP) that achieves a record-low power consumption of 0.61 μW for 96 channels. A tunable replica circuit is added to assist the error regulation and prevent loss of regulation. With automatic energy-robustness co-optimization, the PMU can set the SC-DC's optimal conversion ratio and switching frequency. The PMU achieves a PCE of 77.7% (72.2%) at VIN = 0.6 V (1 V) and at the NSP's margin-free operating point.


Tanjero Formation is one of the best studied stratigraphic units and recently shown to be deposited in foreland basin in different shallow and deep environments. Conversely, Khabour Formation is not studied in detail in term of environment, tectonic and sequence stratigraphy. Therefore, the lower part of the former formation assigned as a norm or model for comparison for the latter one. The comparison is achieved concerning the stratification characteristics; types of trace fossils, type of system tracts, type of environments, source area tectonics and their relation with red beds. The result of this comparison revealed that Khabour Formation, in many aspects, is analogous to lower part of Tanjero Formation. The result of the comparison is showed that Khabour Formation is deposited in different environments include fluvial, deltaic, shelf, slope and deep marine. Among these, now, only the sediments of shelf and slope are cropped out. The thick succession of sandstone with interbeds of shale of this formation is deposited in lowstand system tract forming lowstand wedge. The paleocurrent was possibly toward southwest and the basin may be bordered by active fault during Ordovician. The source area was dioritic or gneissoid body which was possibly weathered in wet climate. ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ ةسارد ةيليلحت ةنراقم نيب نيوكت و روباخلا ي وريجنات يف ش لام قارعلا


Each year, Eastern Mennonite University (EMU) chooses a book to read as a whole campus, called The Common Read. In 2014-2015 the book chosen was "The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains" by Nicholas Carr. Three professors wrote a response that was then read aloud and discussed at a lunch presentation on campus. The questions the responders were asked included: How do we use the internet and related technology well? How do we opt out of cultural changes that aren't life giving? How do we retain the ability to read and engage the 'long-form' book? What does academic excellence mean in an age of The Shallows?


We evaluate Austrian labor market policy focusing on its possible effects upon recurrent unemployment. Without properly considering the selection processes for public training programs, perverse results emerge. Taking the participation decision into account in a bivariate probit setting, Austrian manpower training programs turn out to be a sort of 'catching up1 strategy: (i) disadvantaged and less motivated job-seekers are given priority in enrollment into training programs and (ii) participation in such courses improves employment stability significantly.


The need to contend with greater diversity in cities raises the question of the level and timbre of group interactions. This study examines how diversity at a small scale operates and the conditions under which it may lead to true engagement, parallel lives, detachment, or hostility. The site is the multicultural Parisian neighborhood of Belleville, with a focus on the behaviors and attitudes of merchants who work there. Data gathering comprised observation and examination of neighborhood dynamics, the distribution of various businesses, and the nature of customer and everyday traffic as well as 34 structured interviews. Our findings show the significant Chinese population and businesses separated from the rest of the district and the other businesses. This separation is reinforced with a large degree of mutual distrust. However, relations between Arabs and Jews, tense at larger scales, are harmonious though increasingly tinged by outside worries. Multicultural relations observed on the ground differ from those apparent at larger scales, reaffirming the importance of place and local circumstances.


The chemical profile, cytotoxic and apoptotic effect, and antioxidant activity were determined of ethanolic extracts of Vitex agnus-castus L. (chaste tree). Ripened fruits and fruitless aerial parts were extracted with ethanol, and the chemical characterization of the extracts was determined by LC/ESI-MS-MS. Twelve compounds were tentatively identified in the extracts. The dose-dependent cytotoxic effects of the extracts were tested on C6, A549 and MCF-7 cells by using MTT assay; inhibition of DNA synthesis, and apoptotic and caspase-3 activation effects of the extracts were determined. The potential antioxidant activities of the extracts were evaluated by in vitro methods such as DPPH and ABTS scavenging activity, reducing power and β-carotene bleaching assays. The fruit extract showed noticeable cytotoxic activity against MCF-7 cells with an IC50 value of 88 μg/mL. Both extracts showed similar DPPH scavenging activity comparably with that of the standard.


The thesis opens with a consideration and critical analysis of the theoretical bases influencing my early teaching, i.e. Piaget, Skinner and Rogers, which is, in a real sense, my personal and intellectual starting point. This leads to a review of pertinent literature which identifies some key concepts of teaching, learning and study approaches, i.e. Biggs's Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ)(1987), Honey and Mumford's Learning Styles Questionnaire (LSQ)(1986), and Buzan's ideas on such study techniques as mind-mapping. The Q-sort, an approach devised by Stephenson (1953) and used by Rogers to assess growth and change in a client's self-esteem, is then adapted and used as a basis for the empirical investigation in this thesis. This technique is used to elicit information from further education students about their individual, and unique, ideas on their approaches to learning. Inferences about the data collected from the first cohorts (the 1996-8 'A' level and 1997-9 GCSE students) result in further refinements to the Q-sort for its administration with the second cohorts (the 1997-9 'A' level and 1997-8 GCSE students). Students' Q-sorts, combined with lecturer predictions of examination outcome, will be concurrently validated by comparing them with SPQ and LSQ scores to establish concurrent validity. Q-sort scores and lecturer predictions will also be compared with examination grades actually achieved, to establish predictive validity. The thesis closes by drawing defensible inferences from the data and presenting suggestions for further research and educational practice.


Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved impressive performance in a variety of online settings in which an agent's ability to query the environment for transitions and rewards is effectively unlimited. However, in many practical applications, the situation is reversed: an agent may have access to large amounts of undirected offline experience data, while access to the online environment is severely limited. In this work, we focus on this offline setting. Our main insight is that, when presented with offline data composed of a variety of behaviors, an effective way to leverage this data is to extract a continuous space of recurring and temporally extended primitive behaviors before using these primitives for downstream task learning. Primitives extracted in this way serve two purposes: they delineate the behaviors that are supported by the data from those that are not, making them useful for avoiding distributional shift in offline RL; and they provide a degree of temporal abstraction, which reduces the effective horizon yielding better learning in theory, and improved offline RL in practice. In addition to benefiting offline policy optimization, we show that performing offline primitive learning in this way can also be leveraged for improving few-shot imitation learning as well as exploration and transfer in online RL on a variety of benchmark domains. Visualizations are available at this https URL


Recognizing that many of the modern categories with which we think about people and their activities were put in place through the use of numbers, we ask how numbering practices compose contemporary sociality. Focusing on particular forms of algorithmic personalization, we describe a pathway of a-typical individuation in which repeated and recursive tracking is used to create partial orders in which individuals are always more and less than one. Algorithmic personalization describes a mode of numbering that involves forms of de- and re- aggregating, in which a variety of contexts are continually included and excluded. This pathway of a-typical individuation is important, we suggest, to a variety of domains and, more broadly, to an understanding of contemporary economies of sharing where the politics of collectivities, ownership and use are being reconfigured as a default social.


Autopsies on over 3000 rabbits collected between October 1980 and January 1983 provided information on the reproduction of rabbits in Central Otago. In contrast to year-round breeding elsewhere in New Zealand, reproduction was restricted to the period September-February. Distinct seasonal cycles occurred in both male and female fertility. Both sexes reached peak fertility when 12-17 months old. Female fertility is also related to carcass weight and condition. Most females (80%) experienced some pre-natal mortality, which accounted for about 30% of ovulations. Pre-natal mortality varied seasonally and was greatest in young « 6 months) and older (>18 months) females. Despite a larger mean litter size (6.04), the annual productivity of 23.1 young per female is about half that of other areas in New Zealand, an effect of the restricted breeding season. Comparisons for most reproductive parameters highlight the effects of seasonally severe but predictable environmental conditions in Central Otago. Poisoning success will be greatest between March and August, when there are fewer territorial and social constraints on a rabbit's ability to encounter baits.


STRENGTHEN SOFTWARE SECURITY BY HELPING DEVELOPERS AND SECURITY EXPERTS WORK TOGETHER Traditional approaches to securing software are inadequate. The solution: Bring software engineering and network security teams together in a new, holistic approach to protecting the entire enterprise. Now, four highly respected security experts explain why this confluence is so crucial, and show how to implement it in your organization. Writing for all software and security practitioners and leaders, they show how software can play a vital, active role in protecting your organization. Youll learn how to construct software that actively safeguards sensitive data and business processes and contributes to intrusion detection/response in sophisticated new ways. The authors cover the entire development lifecycle, including project inception, design, implementation, testing, deployment, operation, and maintenance. They also provide a full chapter of advice specifically for Chief Information Security Officers and other enterprise security executives. Whatever your software security responsibilities, Enterprise Software Security delivers indispensable big-picture guidanceand specific, high-value recommendations you can apply right now. COVERAGE INCLUDES: Overcoming common obstacles to collaboration between developers and IT security professionals Helping programmers design, write, deploy, and operate more secure software Helping network security engineers use application output more effectively Organizing a software security team before youve even created requirements Avoiding the unmanageable complexity and inherent flaws of layered security Implementing positive software design practices and identifying security defects in existing designs Teaming to improve code reviews, clarify attack scenarios associated with vulnerable code, and validate positive compliance Moving beyond pentesting toward more comprehensive security testing Integrating your new application with your existing security infrastructure Ruggedizing DevOps by adding infosec to the relationship between development and operations Protecting application security during maintenance


Pathological cardiac remodeling occurs following myocardial injury and results in impaired cardiac function. Cellular therapy involving stem cell transplantation has been shown to attenuate the effects of cardiac remodeling and improve cardiac function. Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are known to alleviate arrhythmias and improve conduction when transplanted into cardiac tissue; however, the mechanism was not yet determined. Therefore, the first objective of the study was aimed to determine the mechanism by which MSCs modulate the excitability and conduction in cardiac tissue after transplantation by testing the hypothesis that MSCs modulate conduction i. by intercellular coupling with cardiomyocytes or ii. by paracrine signaling. Multi-electrode arrays (MEAs) were used to monitor beating frequency and conduction velocity (θ) in HL-1 cardiomyocyte monolayers in vitro. Co-culture of MSCs with HL-1 cells significantly attenuated the beating frequency over time with no significant change in θ. However, treatment of HL-1 cells with MSC-conditioned media/tyrode (ConM/ConT) significantly enhanced θ over time with no change in excitability. Further results demonstrated that connexin 43 (Cx43) expression was upregulated after treatment with ConM/ConT. This upregulation was dependent on the activation of Wnt signaling pathway in part through MSC-dependent Wnt secretion. Overall the results indicate that MSCs decrease cardiomyocyte excitability via hetero-cellular coupling and increase cardiac conduction by upregulation of Cx43 via paracrine signaling.
The second objective of the thesis involved studying transverse-tubule
(T-tubule) remodeling during pathological cardiac remodeling.
T-tubules are cellular structures that enable synchronous calcium release and uniform contraction across the entire myocyte. Although it is known that t-tubules undergo remodeling under pathological conditions such as hypertrophy and heart failure (HF), the mechanisms underlying this are not clearly understood. Therefore, we aimed to determine the mechanism by which t-tubule remodeling occurs. T-tubule integrity was assessed using confocal microscopy. The initial experimental results indicate that inhibition of NADPH oxidase, a reactive oxygen species (ROS) producer, attenuates t-tubular remodeling. Therefore, this initial study demonstrates ROS as a potential target to attenuate
t-tubular remodeling during pathological conditions.


Twenty nuclear accidents at the official International Nuclear Event Scale of 4 to 7 have occurred between 1952 and 2011 (Lelieveld et al. 2012). The risk of another major accident during the next 50 years is high and it has been estimated that some 30 million people could be directly affected by such an accident (Lelieveld et al. 2012). The highest risks occur around major metropolises such as New York, Washington, Atlanta, Toronto, Western Europe, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Tokyo and Osaka. The lessons that have emerged from Chernobyl and Fukushima reveal a range of serious questions that must be answered appropriately, above all for the sake of citizens, but also for the credibility of the nuclear industry, and for framing the ongoing debate over energy alternatives. Because recent models suggest that more than half of released radioactive material from a nuclear disaster would be transported more than 1000 km from the site of release (Lelieveld et al. 2012), these questions are important even for citizens in distant countries. It is in this spirit that we have produced a list of unpleasant questions that have been a cause of concern since we first started conducting research at Chernobyl in 1992, and have grown in urgency since conducting research at Fukushima beginning in 2011.


A music learning experiment was performed, illustrating the possibility of isolating certain components of performance (labeled Skill and Motivation) by using separate measurement situations for each. Straightforward application of Hullian theory—which considers that component factors of performance interact prior to overt behavior and are not thus separable in measurement situations—to the experiment's data led to a self-contradiction. It was shown, further, that Hull's theory could be considered consistent with the present data only when certain assumptions of dubious plausibility were made.


Some stability properties of a recently reported minimal-capacitor low-sensitivity RC active realisation of voltage transfer functions are investigated. It is shown that the realisation can attain a low-frequency unstable mode of operation. Five new circuits are derived from the original, using the theory of singular elements. Only two of these circuits are shown to be free from low-frequency unstable modes. The two new stable structures retain all the attractive features of the original realisation.


Background and objectives: Acute otitis externa is one the commonest otological disease. In this study we aimed to evaluate its types and the possible predisposing factors as well as comparing the effectiveness between local wick and local drops in treating acute otitis externa. Methods: A prospective analysis of 100 patients complained of acute otitis externa was performed in the department of Otolaryngology at Rizgary Teaching Hospital in Hawler between August 2005 to January 2006. Male patients were 45%, and the rest 55% were females. Patients were classified into two groups; 50 patients received topical application of cream using aural wick, and the second group of 50 patients treated by topical ear drops. Results: The commonest predisposing factors were water entrance to the affected ear during bathing and swimming (51%). On culturing, bacteria were found in 64% of patients and fungi in 11%. Topical application using aural wick showed 100% response, whereas only 60% of those received topical ear drops had an immediate response. Conclusion: Acute diffuse otitis externa is the most frequent type. Pseudomonas aeruginosa is the commonest bacterial growth. Aspergillous species is the commonest caused of fungal growth. Response to aural wick treatment is much better than aural drops.


The mechanisms of community assembly underpinning plant invasion are contested; limiting similarity predicts divergence in the traits of native and alien species whilst habitat filtering predicts trait convergence. Using site‐based floristic data collected three decades apart, we ask whether the competitor–stress tolerator–ruderal (CSR) strategies of herbaceous alien and native plant species in Australian woodlands show evidence of divergence (indicating limiting similarity) or convergence (indicating habitat filtering). We also ask whether increasing dereliction between the two sampling periods, as a result of declining fire frequency, has influenced habitat filtering processes. Null models were used to assess the similarity in CSR strategies of native and alien species in order to identify the community assembly processes driving woodland invasions. The observed frequencies of CSR types were also compared to randomly assembled communities from null models for species experiencing increases, decreases or static abundance changes between the two surveys to assess the impacts of dereliction on habitat filters. The spectrum of CSR strategies of the most common aliens (n = 25) was highly convergent with the strategies of the most common natives (n = 51). Competitive–ruderal species dominated the flora (> 30% of all species), and strict competitors were absent. No aliens exhibited a stress‐tolerant strategy, and ruderals were more common in the alien flora (i.e. 36% vs. 18% of native species). Null models revealed differences in the CSR strategies of increaser and decreaser species at three of the ten sites examined, although none of these trends were consistent across the sites, indicating that increasing dereliction has not dramatically altered the habitat filters determining species admission. Synthesis. The similarity of CSR types between alien and native species indicates that habitat filtering is the principal community assembly process operating in the study region. We discuss our findings with respect to suggestions that limiting similarity and environmental filtering may be occurring simultaneously to structure plant communities. Species abundance changes due to dereliction were not evident as a coordinated shift in the functional composition of woodland dominants suggesting that time lags between altered management regimes (dereliction) and the functional response of species to habitat filters may still be playing out.


82 Figure 3 Tumor-infiltrating immune cells in both tumors Tumor samples were stained with antibodies and analyzed by multicolor flow cytometry. Dead cells were excluded from analysis. Results show mean ± SEM (n = 3–5 per group) as a percentage of total or markergated (CD4 or CD8) cells obtained from the tumor sample. Statistical significance was assessed using a corrected t test. Conclusions SQ3370 is a proof of concept example for a novel modular approach that addresses limitations of current immunoand cytotoxic therapies for patients with solid tumors. Local release of Dox with SQ3370 expands the therapeutic window of Dox, minimizes toxicities and leads to a robust anti-tumor response that potentially also causes immune activation against the tumors. Acknowledgements The authors would like to thank the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation (NSF), and Y Combinator. Ethics Approval This study, project number: SQI-FFS-ON20181119_04_v4, was approved by the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) of the vendor, following the guidance of Association for Assessment and Accreditation of Laboratory Animal Care (AAALAC), accreditation number 001516. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jitc-2020-SITC2020.0082 83 THE PROGNOSTIC SIGNIFICANCE OF PERIPHERAL BLOOD BIOMARKERS IN PATIENTS WITH ADVANCED NON-SMALL CELL LUNG CANCER TREATED WITH PEMBROLIZUMAB: A CLINICAL STUDY Kira MacDougall*, Muhammad Niazi, Jeff Hosry, Sylvester Homsy, Alexander Bershadskiy. Staten Island University Hospital, Staten Island, NY, USA Background Pembrolizumab is an anti-programmed cell death protein 1 (PD-1) antibody used for the treatment of advanced non-small cell lung carcinoma (NSCLC). Systemic inflammation has long been associated with poor outcomes in many types of solid tumors. Peripheral blood biomarkers such as absolute lymphocyte count (ALC) and absolute neutrophil count to absolute lymphocyte count ratio (ANC/ALC) serve as surrogate markers of inflammation. The aim of this study is to investigate ALC and ANC/ALC in patients with advanced NSCLC receiving pembrolizumab and determine if there is a correlation between these biomarkers and overall survival (OS). Methods A total of 240 patients with advanced NSCLC treated with pembrolizumab at Northwell Health hospital centers were included. The ALC and ANC/ALC were examined at initiation of pembrolizumab and after 6 weeks on treatment. The prognostic role of these peripheral blood biomarkers on OS were examined with Kaplan-Meier curves and a multivariable cox regression analysis. Results Of the 240 patients, the majority were male (52%), with a median age of 67 years (interquartile range [IQR] 59– 73 years), had a diagnosis of adenocarcinoma (76%), with stage IV disease (82%). PDL-1 expression was >50% in 44% of the patients. The median time on treatment with pembrolizumab was 5.7 months [IQR: 2.7–12.5]. The median ALC and ANC/ALC were significantly lower at 6 weeks of pembrolizumab compared to the start date of treatment (1.38 vs. 1.4, p<0.001) and (3.6 vs. 4.6, p<0.001) respectively. An ALC greater than 1.4 was associated with an increased OS (figure 1), at 6 weeks after initiation of pembrolizumab (p=0.046), but not at the start of treatment (p=0.095). An ANC/ALC less than 5 was associated with improved OS (figure 2), both at initiation of pembrolizumab (p=0.003) and at 6 weeks after initiation of treatment (p = 0.028). Likewise, after adjusting for potential cofounders with a multivariate analysis (table 1), a baseline ANC/ALC of 5 or higher had a significantly increased risk of death (hazards ratio (HR)=1.84; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.21–2.79; p=0.004), compared with patients with a lower ratio. Conclusions High ALC at time of diagnosis as well as low ANC/ALC at baseline and at 6 weeks on treatment correlated with an increased OS in patients with advanced NSCLC treated with pembrolizumab. These findings represent a readily available predictive biomarker for oncologists and may help with risk stratification and strategizing treatment plans. Abstract 83 Figure 1 Kaplan-Meier survival estimates between groups with different ALC at the start date of pembrolizumab and at 6 weeks after initiation of pembrolizumab. There is a statistically significant difference in OS between patients with ALC < 1.4 and patients with ALC 1.4 at 6 weeks after initiation of pembrolizumab (p = 0.046), but not at the start of treatment (p = 0.095).83 Figure 1 Kaplan-Meier survival estimates between groups with different ALC at the start date of pembrolizumab and at 6 weeks after initiation of pembrolizumab. There is a statistically significant difference in OS between patients with ALC < 1.4 and patients with ALC 1.4 at 6 weeks after initiation of pembrolizumab (p = 0.046), but not at the start of treatment (p = 0.095). Abstract 83 Figure 2 Kaplan-Meier survival estimates between groups with different ANC/ALC ratio at the start date of pembrolizumab and at 6 weeks after initiation of pembrolizumab. There is a statistically significant difference in OS between patients with ANC/ALC < 5 and patients with ALC 5, both at the start date of pembrolizumab (p = 0.003) and at 6 weeks after initiation of pembrolizumab (p = 0.028). Abstracts83 Figure 2 Kaplan-Meier survival estimates between groups with different ANC/ALC ratio at the start date of pembrolizumab and at 6 weeks after initiation of pembrolizumab. There is a statistically significant difference in OS between patients with ANC/ALC < 5 and patients with ALC 5, both at the start date of pembrolizumab (p = 0.003) and at 6 weeks after initiation of pembrolizumab (p = 0.028). Abstracts A52 J Immunother Cancer 2020;8(Suppl 3):A1–A559 on M arch 1, 2022 by gest. P rocted by coright. http/jitc.bm jcom / J Im m unther C acer: frst pulished as 10.11jitc-2020-S IT C 20.0083 on 9 N ovem er 220. D ow nladed fom Ethics Approval The study was approved by Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell at Staten Island University Hospital's IRB #: 19–0922 REFERENCE 1. Mantovani A, Allavena P, Sica A, Balkwill F. Cancer-related inflammation. Nature. 2008;454(7203):436–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/jitc-2020-SITC2020.0083 84 QUANTIFYING PHARMACODYNAMIC BIOMARKER CHANGES IN IMMUNO-ONCOLOGY BY MASS SPECTROMETRY Joseph Eckenrode*, Omar Laterza, Michael Lassman. Merck and Co., Inc., Kenilworth, NJ,


Back during my time at the Universidad Tecnológica de La Habana "Jose Antonio Echeverŕıa", CUJAE I assist with a workshop on the Problem Base Learning (PBL) approach to teaching. Little did I know about the serious science behind the development of innovative Learning and Teaching approaches. Even less on how far in our history, it is possible to track our "modern" problems and solutions! In the present contribution I share with the readers some of these findings. I will particularly focus on those corresponding to the Hellenistic times of the classical Greco-Roman philosophy, and hopefully, just hopefully, I will be able to transmit how modern these "ancient thoughts" look like.


This study provides a test of the price change-volume relationship. The relationship between price changes and volume in markets has been a topic of dispute among researchers in finance and economics for a number of years. The study investigates the empirical relationship between the stock exchange indices and turnover volume. Data gathered in time series form and variables have been determined from monthly reports of the Tehran stock exchange for the period from 2003 to 2009. The findings prove that there is positive relationship between exchange turnover value and stock exchange indices. An important but difficult part for further work in this area is to develop a theoretical understanding of markets that incorporates a lot of diverse agents, each of whom maximizes a multi period objective function subject to a stochastic environment. The joint distribution of price and volume could emerge in such a model.


The numbers of vehicle competitors in Indonesia make consumers have many alternatives to fulfill their needs. Brand image is a set of beliefs of consumers from a certain brands, while product quality is the entire features and characteristics of a product that are able to satisfy the stated or implied needs of the product. Brand image and product quality plays an important role in influencing purchase decision. This purpose of this study was to determine the effect of variable brand image and product quality on purchase decision Honda Brio on Honda Semarang Center. Type of research is explanatory research with 91 respondents drawn by using accidental sampling technique. The data collection techniques used questionnaires and interviews. The data analyses techniques used regression analysis with SPSS (Statistical Product and Service Solutions) version 20.0. The results of research showed that the brand image has an effect on purchasing decisions with a correlation coefficient of determination coefficient of 0.597 and 35.6%, product quality has an effect on purchasing decisions with a correlation coefficient of 0.646 and a coefficient of determination of 74.1%. Brand image and product quality together have an effect on purchasing decisions by the equation Y = 3,702 + 0,360 X1 + 0,367 X2. This means that the effect of brand image and product quality will improve purchasing decisions. Conclusion of the study is brand image and product quality influence on purchase decisions. Advices for that company based on this research are to strengthen the brand image of product and to evaluate its product quality


We propose an efficient multipath routing algorithm for a given quality of service (QoS) in carrying delay-sensitive traffic. The proposed algorithm takes advantage of available alternate routes that can be used in the network without violating end-to-end delay and bandwidth constraint. The objective of our routing scheme is to minimize the maximum of link utilization. For an arriving connection request, a set of feasible paths is found without re-routing the existing traffic flows and the corresponding ratio in allocation of traffic for each path is determined. The algorithm is very efficient and can be used for the arrival connection request on-the-fly. Extensive simulation results show that 13-27% gains of additional connections can be achieved when compared to the shortest path routing.


In the last thirty years, the widespread use of endoscopic retrograde cholangiopancreatography (ERCP) has radically changed the management of patients with diseases of the extrahepatic biliary tract and pancreas. Pneumothorax is a rare complication of ERCP. We report two cases of pneumothorax following elective ERCP for ductal stone clearance. The first patient was a 45-year-old female, who developed respiratory distress, abdominal pain, and profoundly abdominal distention immediately after the procedure. Imaging studies revealed the presence of a right-side pneumothorax, pneumomediastinum, pneumoperitoneum, and pneumoretroperitoneum. The second patient was a 94-year-old female, who developed tension pneumothorax with clinical signs of shock during the procedure. Imaging studies revealed the presence of a right-side pneumothorax without free air in the mediastinum and retroperitoneal space. The imaging findings suggest that the occurrence of this rare complication in our patients was caused by entirely different pathophysiological mechanisms. Both patients were successfully treated with chest tube insertion, and no further intervention was required. Clinicians should be aware of this serious complication because delayed diagnosis may involve significant morbidity and mortality risks.


Economists, lawyers, environmentalists and other policy makers and scholars have written extensively about the use and benefits of economic instruments, such as taxes, to affect behavior that harms the environment. Tax incentives and subsidies have long played a key role in the development of fossil fuels, and lately, the development of alternative energy technologies. Many scholars have also observed the social and cultural transformation that the United States (and the world) has experienced as a result of the technologies that energy has afforded us. This paper draws on economic and social research to advocate for the development of tax policies that encourage change - change that addresses the destructive environmental realities of continued and increasing fossil fuel usage. New policies, however, can not ignore who Americans are, and how we like to live and travel. Thus, in developing environmentally friendly tax policies, we must take into account, not only the economic impact but the social impact of such tax policies and other laws and policies that influence behavior. The analysis begins with a comparative analysis of the United States' investment in non-renewable energy technologies (specifically fossil fuels) versus renewable energy technologies. Through an historical analysis of federal tax incentives and subsidies to the energy industry, the paper illustrates the need to provide significant investment in renewable energy technology if we are ever to achieve a sustainable mobile society. This historical analysis is not only about tax laws, but also about the corresponding social changes of the time. Combining legal, economic and social history of our romance with fossil fuels provides a richer understanding of the problems associated with our dependence on fossil fuels and deeper insight into how we might successfully move toward change.


ABSTRACT In this study, ternary Al-12Si-0.6Mg material was manufactured by gravity die casting method in induction melting furnace. Microstructure images of alloy were taken on optical microscope after T6 heat treatment. Hardness, yield and tensile strength and breaking elongation of as-cast and heat-treated materials were measured by universal methods. CNC lathe was used for cutting tests and dynamometer was used to measure cutting force. Cutting tests were performed by using different cutting speeds-CS (450-500-550 m/min), feed rates-FR (0.05–0.15-0.25 mm/rev) and constant depth of cut-DOC (1.5 mm). Uncoated (A), CVD-TiCN + TiN (B) and PVD-TiAlN+TiN (C) coated carbide inserts were selected as a cutting tool. In the microstructural observations, it was determined that the structure of the material made up of aluminum rich α, primary and eutectic silicon, δ (Al4FeSi2) and π (Al8Mg3FeSi6) phases. The heat treatment refined the phases in the structure of the alloy. In addition, it has been determined that it improves mechanical properties (hardness, yield and tensile strength) by spheroidizing silicon particles. As a result of the cutting tests, it was detected that the cutting force (CF) reduced with T6 heat treatment at all CS and FR values. The CF, BUE (Built up edge) and BUL (Built up layer) heightened with increasing FR, while it reduced with increasing CS on all cutting tools. CF, BUE and BUL were formed at least in tools A, B and C, respectively. While continuous chip formation was detected in the as-cast part, brittle chip formation was observed in the heat-treated part due to the reduction in breaking elongation of the material.


In this paper, we propose the design of on-chip and off-chip interfaces adapted to a globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) network-on-chip (NoC) architecture. The proposed on-chip interface not only handles the resynchronization between the synchronous and asynchronous NoC domains, but also implements NoC communication priorities. This design is based on existing multi-clock synchronization fifos based on Gray code, and is adapted to standard implementation tools. Concerning Off-chip communications, a new concept of mixed synchronous/asynchronous dual mode NoC port is proposed as an efficient off-chip NoC interface for NoC-based open-platform prototyping. These interfaces have been successfully implemented in a 0.13mum CMOS technology


To investigate the interactions among mineral N, C availability, microbial biomass, and respiration in arctic soils, we sampled soils five times during a growing season from a toposequence on a slope in northern Alaska. The toposequence consisted of six vegetative types from the ridge top to the stream bank: lichen heath, dry cassiope, moist carex (Carex spp.), water track, tussock tundra (intertussock), and riparian. The spatial distribution and temporal variation of soil mineral N, microbial biomass, soil C availability, and C turnover were soil type dependent. During the growing season, the concentration of soil NH 4+-N decreased in tussock tundra soils but increased in lichen heath soils. Soil C availability at all locations was the highest at the beginning of the growing season and declined thereafter. The C availability index (CAI) and the potential C turnover rate increased as soils became wetter. Tussock-forming tundra soil was generally colder than other sites and had high C/N ratios, low amounts of mineral N, and a low potential C turnover index, and therefore, was the least biologically active type. In contrast, water track was the most biologically active site in the sequence and had the highest C and N availability, the highest potential C turnover index, and the highest microbial biomass C and N. The mosaic of diverse plant communities and soil types that comprise arctic landscapes necessitates that accurate estimates of large-scale C or N budget can only be made by integration of all types of plant communities and soils.


Accurate localization Systems, based on the measurement of the time of flight of a signal between radio devices, also known as Real Time Location Systems (RTLS) are becoming increasingly important especially in indoor applications. Due to severe multi path conditions, the largest problem for those RTLS systems is to detect the time of arrival of signals traveling over the direct line of sight path. We present issues of an new High Resolution Direct Path Tracker (HRDPT) architecture, that allows an efficient hardware implementation of a high resolution method for multi path mitigation, and demonstrate first results.


We present BoTNet, a conceptually simple yet powerful backbone architecture that incorporates self-attention for multiple computer vision tasks including image classification, object detection and instance segmentation. By just replacing the spatial convolutions with global self-attention in the final three bottleneck blocks of a ResNet and no other changes, our approach improves upon the baselines significantly on instance segmentation and object detection while also reducing the parameters, with minimal overhead in latency. Through the design of BoTNet, we also point out how ResNet bottleneck blocks with self-attention can be viewed as Transformer blocks. Without any bells and whistles, BoTNet achieves 44.4% Mask AP and 49.7% Box AP on the COCO Instance Segmentation benchmark using the Mask R-CNN framework; surpassing the previous best published single model and single scale results of ResNeSt [67] evaluated on the COCO validation set. Finally, we present a simple adaptation of the BoTNet design for image classification, resulting in models that achieve a strong performance of 84.7% top-1 accuracy on the ImageNet benchmark while being up to 1.64x faster in "compute"1 time than the popular EfficientNet models on TPU-v3 hardware. We hope our simple and effective approach will serve as a strong baseline for future research in self-attention models for vision.2


A randomized double-blind trial was carried out in 80 patients with post-operative pain after discectomy to relieve chronic radicular syndrome, to compare the analgesic effectiveness and tolerance of tiaprofenic acid and indomethacin. Patients received either 600 mg tiaprofenic acid or 75 mg indomethacin per day, in 3 divided doses, on the day of the operation and for the next 4 days. The results of patient assessment of pain severity showed a statistically significant greater relief on the day of operation in the tiaprofenic acid group and lower pain scores were recorded on each of the 4 following days than in patients receiving indomethacin, although the difference did not reach statistical significance on any of these days. Fewer patients reported side-effects after tiaprofenic acid treatment but once again the difference between the two groups was not significant.


Existing ad hoc network localisation solutions rely either on external location references or network-wide exchange of information and centralised processing and computation of location estimates. Without these, nodes are not able to estimate the relative locations of other nodes within their communication range. This thesis defines a new distributed localisation algorithm for ad hoc networks of moving nodes. The Relative Neighbour Localisation (RNL) algorithm works without any external localisation signal or systems and does not assume centralised information processing. The idea behind the location estimates produced by the RNL algorithm is the relationship between the relative locations of two nodes, their mobility parameters and the signal strengths measured between them. The proposed algorithm makes use of the data available to each node to produce a location estimate. The signal strength each node is capable of measuring is used as one algorithm input. The other input is the velocity vector of the neighbouring node, composed of its speed and direction of movement, which each node is assumed to periodically broadcast. The relationship between the signal strength and the mobility parameters on one, and the relative location on the other side can be analytically formulated in an ideal case. The limitations of a realistic scenario complicate this relationship, making it very difficult to formulate analytically. An empirical approach is thus used. The angle and the distance estimates are individually computed, together forming a two-dimensional location estimate. The performance of the algorithm was analysed in detail using simulation, showing a median estimate error of under 10m, and its application was tested through design and evaluation of a distributed sensing coverage algorithm, showing RNL location estimates can provide 90% of the coverage achievable with true locations being known.


Activities of Daily Living (ADL) and Instrumental Activities of Daily Living (IADL) enable people to continue to live independently, as far as possible. Slowing down a person's decline or utilising equipment to maintain independence is a growing area of research. However, how we carry out daily tasks within the home can accelerate this decline. To date, little or no consideration has been given to quantifying load and the risk level associated with the performance of daily tasks within the home environment. This study evaluates and quantifies load and the risk level associated with the performance of domestic tasks which could be responsible for a person's change in behaviour in the later stages of life. In order to understand the IADL tasks, an initial survey was used to gather different people's perceptions about these tasks, and then to discover the hardest sub-task within the selected tasks. An observational study used existing ergonomic assessment methods to evaluate the postural load, and revealed that existing ergonomic tools are not enough on their own as they did not identify other risks which are associated with the performance of daily tasks.
Finally, a task assessment tool for ease and risk (AER) was developed to evaluate and quantify the risk associated with the performance of daily tasks. AER is useful in the detection of early warnings (pre-event) for healthy individuals as well as for those undergoing rehabilitation, as it can easily identify the tasks that are hardest to perform. The tool is based on three risk parameters: (1) psychological perception of the tasks, (2) adopted postures and (3) manual handling. It is capable of assessing the risk level associated with individual tasks while simultaneously assessing the domestic load over a period of time. The novelty of this work is to propose a self-assessment tool which provides the knowledge about a person's own risk associated with the performance of domestic tasks. The initial development of AER consisted of two phases: (1) development of AER and (2) evaluation of user trials, based on (a) ease of use of AER record sheet and (b) validity study. The AER trials overall used 20 healthy able-bodied participants and both trials were performed in the home environment. AER consists of a booklet and record sheets and specifically covers instrumental activities of daily living (IADL)[1] tasks but can also be extended to cover all tasks performed in the home environment. In the ease of use trial, the feedback questionnaire confirmed that AER is easy to use, free from ambiguity, applicable to almost all the tasks performed in the home environment and almost all participants agreed that AER does not require training for assessment. In the validity trials, the AER predicted risk level is measured in relation to perceived discomfort and it was found that AER has high sensitivity (78%), specificity (74%) and predictive (73% positive and 80% negative) values which revealed that AER is a sensitive and useful tool for identifying risk and perceived discomfort in performing daily tasks. It also concluded that the participants' self-assessed (IADL) exposure scores were reasonably similar as compared to the researcher's assessment and revealed that regular use of AER will help to obtain more accurate and reliable results. AER is able to assess the risk level associated with a single task and can also assess the general behaviour or domestic load over a period of time. AER is also helpful for identifying those tasks which required more caution when performed and which are responsible for someone's change in behaviour in later life. Moreover, it is believed that AER may play a vital role in the development of comprehensive and proactive strategies for the detection of problems related to the home environment and for managing them effectively before it can affect a person's quality of life.


Abstract Turkey's candidacy for accession to the European Union (EU) dates back to many years and is still a current and highly disputed issue. This study was conducted to determine the opinions of students at Turkish and German universities on Turkey in relation to the European Union. Two hundred twenty six German students participated in the study from the departments of Turkish Translation and Interpretation and Asian Languages at the University of Bonn, Germany, and 270 Turkish students participated in the study from Ataturk Faculty of Education in Marmara University, Istanbul-Turkey. The research data were collected through a questionnaire created by Dartan, Nas, Akman, and Savran (2004). The questionnaire was prepared in both Turkish and German languages and consisted of 27 items. Five items of the questionnaire aimed at the collection of personal data and 17 items are responded with "yes, no, uncertain, no idea." These items were categorized under four dimensions consisting of "Turkey's general structure, Turkey's economic and political situation, Turkey's foreign policy, and general opinions on Turkey's accession to the EU." The other 5 items consisted of multiple or one choice questions, which investigated students' approach to the EU from different perspectives. According to the findings, responses given by two groups of students have been interpreted comparatively. According to the results of the study, Turkish students specified health issues, economic and political instabilities, and debates over secularism as the fundamental problems in accession of Turkey to the EU. Turkish students believe that Turkey's accession to the EU is a very long process and perhaps a process that would never end. German students had a more positive approach to Turkey's accession to the EU. However, students in Germany highlighted religion, population, and economic factors as the most important obstacles to the accession of Turkey to the EU. Furthermore, contrary to Turkish students, students in Germany believe that Turkey is ready to join the EU. Both groups confirm that Turkey is a secular and democratic country and that it provides a model for the other Islamic countries. Key Words European Union, Education, Democracy, Political Situation. Globalization, creation of market-based international competition, as well as inter-sector/inter-region exchange and communication have become symbols of this century. With its member states, the European Union (EU) is a heterogeneous community in which different cultures, languages, and religions come together. The EU aims to create a European identity by creating common policies for controlling the security of Europe, coordination of economic development, promotion of democratic values, encouragement of social integration, struggling with problems such as narcotics, crime and terrorism, use of a single currency, and provision of right of free movement between the member states. To this end, the EU member states put forth efforts to develop collaboration among educational and training institutions through cultural integration programs and develop joint projects aimed at teaching and spreading languages of member states (Lange, 1992; Wallace, 1997; Field, 1998; Mitchell and McAleavey, 1999; Beukel, 2001; Sezgin, 2001; Calis; 2002 & De Neve, 2007). Turkey's westernization movement that began in the Ottoman period gained importance with the establishment of the Republic and became an important goal of Turkey (Sener and Akdemir, 2006 &Kaya, Kilic and Yildirim, 2008). The present EU was established in Strasbourg in 1949 as a result of search for economic recovery and welfare among the Western European countries. Turkey's negotiations with the thennamed European Economic Community started in 1959 and resulted with the Ankara (or Association) Agreement, which came into effect in December 1964. Turkey's full membership application was materialized on April 14, 1987. …


Background: There is considerable evidence of problems with the quality of cancer care. Wide variation in rates of interventions suggests that cancer care decisions may not reflect the preferences of informed patients.Purpose: To present a framework for systems support for improving the quality of decisions in cancer.Methods: We outlined the types of decisions faced by cancer patients and categorized them based on the level of evidence available about effectiveness of choices and the amount of variation in patients' preferences for the key outcomes. Then we describe appropriate strategies to systematically improve the quality of decision making for each category.Results: The types of decisions faced by cancer patients and providers are varied. The appropriate strategy to drive improvements differs for different decisions. For complex, preference-sensitive decisions, improvements in decision quality require increasing patients' knowledge and the match between patients' preferences and treatments.Conclusions: Decision making in cancer care is complex. Neither patients nor providers can make treatment decisions alone. System support is needed to improve the quality of decisions.


Late time accelerated expansion of the universe is usually considered to be the result of dark energy, and the standard model of cosmology implements the cosmological constant as the drive of the acceleration of the universe. A possible alternative to the cosmological constant is modified gravity, and screening mechanisms are a possible way to work around the local gravity constraints on modified gravity. This work implements screening mechanisms to gravitational collapse in order to investigate a wide parameter space of two screening mechanisms, the chameleon and symmetron, by numerically solving the second Friedmann equation for spherically symmetric perturbations. In particular, the effects of the chameleon and symmetron mechanisms on the density of virialized objects have been considered. It has been confirmed that heavily screened objects have a density at virialization similar to the results from a cosmological constant. Further, it has been confirmed that with these screening mechanisms virialized and unscreened objects in general have a much lower density than with a cosmological constant. However, two exceptions from this general trend was found for very late symmetry breaking in the symmetron model. These exceptions was explained as a delay in virialization due to late, full unscreening of the objects. Additionally, both the chameleon and symmetron screening mechanisms was found to have sets of the parameters which lead to a smaller density of the virialized objects than the surrounding parameters did. In particular, these sets of the parameters lead to partial, but close to maximal, unscreening of objects. Since these parameter sets are characterized by the transition from total unscreening to partial unscreening they have been dubbed the transition regimes of the models. The existence of these regimes can provide constraints on the model parameters when compared to observations of virialized halos. All code used to produce the results and figures in this thesis can be found in the git repository https://github.com/mrnafstad/SphericalCollapseScreening.


Ability of managers and other nonproduction professionals is key for the productivity of firms. Hence, the assignment of heterogeneous nonproduction workers across firms determines the distribution of productivity. In turn, the transmission of productivity differences into profit differences -- resulting from product market competition -- determines firms' willingness to pay for higher managerial skills. This paper explores the equilibrium assignment of nonproduction workers across ex ante identical firms which results from this interaction between product market and the market for nonproduction skills. The analysis suggests that, typically, large and productive firms coexist with small, low-productivity firms. Consistent with empirical evidence, a skewed distribution of firm size tends to arise. Moreover, the model predicts a positive relationship of firm size to productivity, manager quality, and manager remuneration. Finally, according to comparative-static analysis, higher intensity of product market competition can account for increases in the compensation at the top of the wage distribution.


Interest is renewed in herbal medicine since it is believed it has less side effects and is safer. In addition, there has been continued demand to obtain more drugs from plant sources to alleviate various ailments of mankind. This study is aimed at investigating the antimalarial activity in an herbal cocktail and individual plant extracts contained on Plasmodium berghei in infected Wistar rats. Thirty five Wistar rats randomly assigned into seven groups of five were used. The cocktail and individual aqueous extracts of Azadirachta indica, Mangifera indica, Carica papaya, and Citrus limon were orally administered to the infected Wistar rats weighing an average of 200 g at standard doses of 100 mg/kg/day for seven days, with the exception of aqueous leaf extract of A. indica which was administered at a dose of 10 mg/kg/day. The therapeutic effects of the cocktail and the individual extracts against P. berghei were investigated and the effects on the liver were histologically assessed. Biochemical assays for liver markers aspartate aminotransferase (AST), alanine aminotransferase (ALT), total protein (TP) and albumin (ALB) were also assessed. The results showed that the cocktail and individual extracts possess antimalarial activity, by reducing the degree of parasitaemia, inducing recovery of hepatic cells and reduction of malaria associated liver pathology. Administration of the extracts did not significantly alter the level of albumin and total protein, no increase was observed in AST activity (P > 0.05). Significant increase was observed in the ALT activities among the rats administered with the cocktail or that which contained extract (P < 0.0001). In conclusion, the cocktail and the individual extracts possess antimalarial activity, thus justifying their usage in traditional medical practice. Extensive studies for validation of various medicinal plants used in treating malaria should be further conducted

 Key words: Plasmodium berghei, cocktail, aspartate aminotransferase, alanine aminotransferase, total protein, albumin.


The purpose of this paper is to explore the adequacy of business excellence models (BEMs) to address corporate sustainability, which is conceptualised in terms of economic, social, and environmental bottom lines. How organisations may manage corporate sustainability in the absence of a comprehensive sustainability management system standard is also explored. A survey of literature has been carried out. The European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) excellence model and the Baldrige Criteria for Performance Excellence (BCPE) are analysed with regard to their considerations of sustainability. The findings reveal that while triple bottom-line considerations are addressed to some extent in the studied BEMs, the models per se do not comprehensively address sustainability issues and economic prosperity remains a dominant consideration. Suggestions for the improvement of the EFQM excellence model and BCPE are discussed. To provide a comprehensive approach for addressing corporate sustainability, an integrated quality-sustainability framework is proposed. The essence of the framework is that sustainability indicators, such as those provided in the Global Reporting Initiative framework, could be integrated with core business processes using the structures and infrastructure provided by BEMs. The proposed improvements should be considered in future revisions of the EFQM excellence model and BCPE.


The European Space Agency's Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) satellite is designed to accurately detect the energy of the electromagnetic radiation naturally emitted from Earth, from which the level of soil moisture and ocean salinity content can be derived. Studies of these two geophysical parameters will increase the knowledge of the Earth's water cycle and improve the understanding of the climate. The single payload of the SMOS satellite is the Microwave Imaging Radiometer by Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS). Researchers at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in Barcelona have developed the MIRAS Testing Software which basically translates SMOS raw data into useful data. The data is continuously analyzed and it has been discovered that some parameters of the MIRAS instrument are drifting more than expected.The objective of this Master's thesis project was to create a long-term stability analyzing tool with which the long-term trends of the MIRAS parameters antenna temperature and brightness temperature can be investigated. The long-term stability analyzing tool has been coded in Matlab and the analysis is based on flight data from January to November 2010. The data has been processed in the MIRAS Testing Software with different inversion and calibration options before it has been used as input to the long-term stability analyzing tool. The main goal of this project was to find out which of the options gave the least drifting and most accurate results.The calibration options that have been studied are the 1-point and 4-point calibration, referring to the number of reference points used in each calibration respectively. The long-term stability analysis of the antenna temperature shows that the 1-point calibration gave more stable results than the 4-point calibration. This was expected since the 4-point calibration makes use of the so called NIR (Noise Injection Radiometer) antennas so a drift in the calibration of the NIRs is added to the uncertainty of the 4-point calibration.The inversion options refer to different approaches of inverting the measured visibility to brightness temperature. The two approaches that have been studied differ from each other by a correction term of the visibility that is included in Approach 3 and not in Approach 5. The long-term stability analysis of the brightness temperature shows that the inversion Approach 5 gave more stable results than the inversion Approach 3, which means the correction term causes instability in the results. If the correction was modified though, Approach 3 could possibly give more stable results which might imply a change of this conclusion.This long-term stability analysis aimed to contribute to the assessment of the stability of the MIRAS instrument, and so it has. This Master's thesis project's main contribution to the SMOS project is the demonstration of a new kind of systematic long-term stability analysis, which uses the same set of data when comparing things, in this case different inversion and calibration options. As a consequence of this Master's thesis project, the SMOS calibration community is now discussing the options for finding metrics that can help to establish the SMOS long-term stability.


Tumour necrosis factor (TNF)-α inhibitors, despite being an effective treatment for granulomatous diseases such as sarcoidosis and Crohn's, are recognised to trigger a paradoxical granulomatous response.1 ,2 Reported cases have predominantly described lymph node, pulmonary and skin manifestations. We present a case of a granulomatous thoracic spine lesion, leading to atraumatic fracture, arising as a consequence of etanarcept treatment of connective tissue disease with associated interstitial lung disease (ILD).

Dr C Sharp (StR)

A 50-year-old woman, a retired hairdresser, with rheumatoid arthritis/Jo-1 overlap syndrome, diagnosed 14 years earlier, and with associated but hitherto stable ILD, was referred to the ILD service with progressive dyspnoea and deteriorating lung function. Other relevant medical history included febrile neutrophilic dermatosis. The patient reported smoking 10–20 cigarettes per day, but had had no occupational or animal exposures and no past exposure to tuberculosis. At presentation, there was marked joint destruction though no active synovitis, and systemic symptoms were well controlled with the anti-TNFα monoclonal antibody etanercept which had been commenced in 2006. Prior to commencement of the etanercept, a Heaf test had been negative. There was no history of significant corticosteroid usage. Respiratory examination was remarkable only for fine bi-basal inspiratory crackles.

Pulmonary function tests in January 2006 demonstrated a forced expiratory volume in 1 s (FEV1) of 2.62 L (95% predicted), forced vital capacity (FVC) 3.27 L (105% predicted), with diffusion coefficient for carbon monoxide (DLCO) 5.08 mL CO/Min/mm Hg (60% predicted). At presentation to the ILD service in May 2010, the values had fallen to FEV1 2.02 L (78%), FVC 2.53 L (86%) and DLco 3.73 (44%).

Autoimmune profile demonstrated a positive rheumatoid factor (99 IU/mL), a positive antinuclear antibody and the presence of anti-Ro, anti-La and anti-Jo-1 antibodies. A high-resolution (HR) CT scan of the thorax and an echocardiogram were arranged.

Dr A Spiers (Consultant Thoracic …


This paper investigates the potential of providing intra-hour load balancing services using aggregated heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) loads. A directload control algorithm is presented. A temperature-priority-list method is used to dispatch the HVAC loads optimally to maintain customer-desired indoor temperatures and load diversity. Realistic intra-hour load balancing signals are used to evaluate the operational characteristics of the HVAC load under different outdoor temperature profiles and different indoor temperature settings. The number of HVAC units needed is also investigated. Modeling results suggest that the number of HVAC units needed to provide a ±1-MW load balancing service 24 hours a day varies significantly with baseline settings, high and low temperature settings, and outdoor temperatures. The results demonstrate that the intra-hour load balancing service provided by HVAC loads meets the performance requirements and can become a major source of revenue for load-serving entities where the two-way communication smart grid infrastructure enables direct load control over the HVAC loads.


We propose and demonstrate an in-band optical signal-to-noise ratio (OSNR) monitoring technique using the output power ratio (PR) of the nonlinear optical loop mirror (NOLM) theoretically and experimentally. Operation point (OP) is investigated to be the input average power which corresponds to the first maximum of the power ratio curve. The monitoring performances using PR are proved to be better than those just using one output port of NOLM for on-off keying (OOK) and differential phase-shift-keying (DPSK) signals with different duty cycles: non-return-to-zero (NRZ), carrier-suppressed return-to zero (CSRZ), return-to-zero (RZ) with 50% and 33% duty cycle (RZ 50 and RZ 33) at 40 Gb/s. For 80 Gb/s RZ-differential quadrature phase-shift keying (DQPSK) signal, we obtained 12.16 dB maximum power variation and 13-39.8 dB monitoring range experimentally. The power ratio scheme can improve the contrast ratio by 7.05 dB and the monitoring range by 13.8 dB compared with that just using the transmission port. The tolerance to residual chromatic dispersion of the monitoring performance is investigated to be less than 1.7 ps/nm. The experimental validations are consistent with the theoretical analyses. The proposed scheme can be used in ultra-speed transmission systems.


Melinjo (Gnetum gnemon L.) is the only species of the genus Gnetum that is quickly grown and cultivated in Indonesia. Melinjo is also an economically valuable plant, and the most famous product is emping as a potential small industrial sector commodity and brightly projected in the development of non-oil and gas exports. However, taxonomic studies of pollen morphology of Melinjo are rare, and the pollen fertility needs to study to increase Melinjo production and answer the demand for seeds.   Morphological characterization can be used for taxonomic studies such as The Pollen Dispersal Units (PDUs), polarity, shape, symmetry, apertura, and skulptur (ornamentation) (Hasanuddin, 2018). Melinjo pollen has a level of germination (if it did without treatment pra-germination) only 1 – 2% during six months, and reach 100% during 12 months (World Agroforesty, 2021). Further, if pollen is saved in an organic liquid, it can increase the level of germination during 11 weeks to reach 80,63% (Kairani, 2010). The experiment aimed to study pollen morphology, ultrastructure, and fertility of pollen Melinjo.  Pollen morphology, ultrastructure, and fertility were carried out by removing the blooming strobilus at branch Melinjo trees. Acetylysis method is used to observe the pollen morphology, Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) is used to observe exin ornamentation, and aperture, and tetrazolium staining method is used for fertility test of Melinjo pollen.


This study assessed the productivity and technical efficiency variability among small-holder cotton farmers in Bunda district, Tanzania. The efficiency analysis results have shown that the scores of technical efficiency sample of contract farmers varied from 1.75% to 87.07%, with an average of 46.05%. The implication of this is that there existed considerable technical deficiency in cotton farming. That is to say, usually, small-holder cotton contract farmers in the investigation region incurred loss of about 53.95% in outputs as a result of technical deficiency. The sources of inefficiency for contract farmers were experience of contract farmers, gender of household head and owning Television (TV) On the other hand, non-contract small-holder farmers' technical efficiencies varied from 3.94% to 82.05%, having a mean of 46.79%. Usually, small-holder non-contract farmers in the investigation region incurred loss of about 53.21% in outputs as result of technical deficiency. The implication of this is that output average can be raised by at least 53.21% through the application of resources available as well as the given technology if the deficiency factors are addressed fully. The source of inefficiency for non-contract farmers is owning TV. It is recommended that young farmers need to be encouraged to join contract farming in order to get high productivity, more female headed households should be encouraged to participate in contract farming, both contract and non-contract farmers should watch TV programs which are educative and can assist them gain farm management knowledge for high productivity and lastly, ginners are required to provide more services in exchange of exclusive purchasing rights as agreed when signing contracts.


This paper provides a fuller characterization of the analytical upper bounds for American options than has been available to date. We establish properties required of analytical upper bounds without any direct reliance on the exercise boundary. A class of generalized European claims on the same underlying asset is then proposed as upper bounds. This set contains the existing closed form bounds of Margrabe, (1978) and Chen and Yeh (2002) as special cases and allows randomization of the maturity payoff. Owing to the European nature of the bounds, across-strike arbitrage conditions on option prices seem to carry over to the bounds. Among other things, European option spreads may be viewed as ratio positions on the early exercise option. To tighten the upper bound, we propose a quasi-bound that holds as an upper bound for most situations of interest and seems to offer considerable improvement over the currently available closed form bounds. As an approximation, the discounted value of Chen and Yeh's (2002) bound holds some promise. We also discuss implications for parametric and nonparametric empirical option pricing. Sample option quotes for the European (XEO) and the American (OEX) options on the S&P 100 Index appear well behaved with respect to the upper bound properties but the bid–ask spreads are too wide to permit a synthetic short position in the early exercise option.


The small angle neutron scattering (SANS) instrument is presently being constructed at Chinese Spallation Neutron Source (CSNS) in China, and the biological shielding design is needed to prevent the instrument from causing excessive dose rates in accessible locations. In this paper, the study of shielding design for SANS that relies on Monte Carlo simulation is introduced. Beam line shielding calculations are performed considering both scenarios of closed versus open T0 chopper. The basic design scheme of the beam stop is discussed. The size of the T0 chopper rotor is also estimated.


Background/introduction Laboratory tests for Trichomonas vaginalis using culture and microscopy in current practice have low sensitivity, however new, highly sensitive PCR-based nucleic acid amplification tests (TV NAATs) have been approved e.g. Aptima TV NAAT. It is not known how to optimally deploy these new tests in different settings. Aim(s)/objectives To assess the cost-effectiveness of new TV NAAT tests for the diagnosis of TV infection in women attending genitourinary medicine (GUM) and primary care clinics. To inform national decision-making about who should be offered TV testing. Methods We analysed data from TV tests in residual chlamydia/gonorrhoea samples from nearly 9,000 women. We conducted notes review in GUM clinics to understand current practice. We compared current and proposed pathways for management of TV. We calculated the cost of testing for TV in GUM and primary care. Results Table 1 shows the breakdown of test results by symptomatic/asymptomatic and setting and indicates the current and new cost of testing. (NB. Provisional data, study closed 31/1/2015). Compared with current testing practice, TV NAAT testing detected an additional 41 cases from GUM. In primary care few samples were sent for laboratory testing; only 15 out of 126 NAAT positive cases would have been detected. Discussion/conclusion TV NAAT tests detected many more infections than current testing. Nationally, this translates to an increase in GUM from 6,000 cases to 23,400 cases annually. Overall, the crude cost of adding TV NAAT testing to all chlamydia and gonorrhoea tests is £307 per additional infection diagnosed.


Brems, J.J. Hiatt, J. R. Klein, A. S. Millis, J. M. Colonna, J. O. Quinones-Baldrich, W.J., Ramming, K.P. and Busuttil, R.W. (1989) Effect of a prior portasystemic shunt on subsequent liver transplantation. Annals of Surgery, 209, 51-56 Fifteen patients who had a prior portasystemic shunt underwent orthotopic liver transplantation. Shunt types were portacaval in six patients, II-graft mesocaval in six, distal splenorenal in two, and proximal splenorenal in one. Mean blood loss and hospital stay were highest in the portacaval group. Retransplants (two patients) and deaths (two patients) also were limited to this group. In this report, technical considerations, advantages, and disadvantages of the various shunt types are described. Management of patients with late stages of portal hypertension must include estimation of the effects of a portasystemic shunt on subsequent liver transplantation. It is concluded that portacaval shunts should be avoided in patients who may be considered for transplantation. Distal splenorenai shunts are best performed in younger patients with intractable variceal bleeding who are not expected to require transplantation in the near future. A mesocaval II-graft is the shunt of choice in patients who are current liver transplant candidates.


Abstract:Why does drawing a comparison between Ioannis Metaxas's interwar dictatorship and the military junta of 1967 appear so obvious nowadays? And how does this comparison contribute to the frequent designation of the latter as fascist? In this article, we examine the belief that the two regimes shared a common fascist ideology as a conceptual monument of the antidictatorial struggle with a profound impact on subsequent historical production. We then ask how the junta itself viewed its relation to Metaxas. By examining several statues of the interwar dictator erected during the junta's rule, we identify internal contradictions and continuous power struggles within the regime's leadership that complicate the comparison with Metaxas, as well as contemporary understandings of Greece's dictatorial past.


E-government has increasingly become one of the keys government's interests. This paper discusses egovernment within the context of governmental reforms heavily influenced by the New Public Management (NPM). The general vision of NPM supposes that the use of information and communication technologies (ICT) will enhance efficiency, policy effectiveness and democratic values (OCDE 2003). Based on the concept of 'public value' developed by Moore (1995), we discuss how egovernment policies impact government's political agendas, and not only the process throughout government deliver public services. ICT, we argue, do not only change the platform used to serve public services but also the nature of these public services. Our central argument is presented as follows: if egovernment is strictly following the NPM prescriptions (efficiency and accountability), there is a risk of missing the social and political implications associated with the use of ICT in the public sector. Works addressing such other social and political values are the exception in the literature of e-government. Thus, in this paper we aim to open the way for a deeper discussion of the effects of e-government policies on public values. We draw on an empirical case from Mexico to illustrate our main arguments.


Matrix rank minimization problem is widely applicable in many fields such as control, signal processing and system identification. However, the problem is in general NP-hard, and it is computationally hard to solve directly in practice. In this paper, we provide a new kind of approximation functions for the rank of matrix, and the corresponding approximation problems can be used to approximate the matrix rank minimization problem within any level of accuracy. Furthermore, the monotonicity and the Fréchet derivative of the approximation functions are discussed. On this basis, we design a new method, which is called as successive projected gradient method, for solving the matrix rank minimization problem by using the projected gradient method to find the stationary point of a series of approximation problems. Finally, the convergence analysis and the preliminary numerical results of the successive projected gradient method for the rank minimization problem are given. Mathematics Subject Classifications: 65K05, 90C30


An isolate of Puccinia coronata f.sp. avenae with virulence against the oat crown rust resistance gene Pc94 was discovered in oat fields in Córdoba, Spain. In order to identify alternative sources of resistance to this virulent isolate, a collection of 159 Avena accessions, including 107 A. sativa and 29 A. byzantina landraces and 23 commercial A. sativa and A. strigosa cultivars, was screened. Eight resistant landraces and four cultivars were selected according to macroscopic assessment to further characterize the operative defence mechanisms. Histological studies showed a range of defence mechanisms, acting alone or in combination, which impeded fungal development at different stages. Some accessions allowed reduced fungal growth before mesophyll penetration. In others, the fungus was arrested at the penetration stage by mesophyll cell wall strengthening and ⁄or papilla deposition. Mesophyll cells of several accessions were penetrated by the fungus, but then the hypersensitive response (HR) leading to cell death hampered fungal development. In some cases cell death was very fast and colonies aborted early, whereas in other cases necrosis was observed later and associated with numerous secondary hyphae, suggesting a slow HR. Characterization of defence mechanisms will be useful for breeding programmes and for further cellular and molecular studies to unravel the bases of resistance. Commonalities with the resistance of the same oat collection to powdery mildew are discussed.


Partnerships are at the core of Oxfam's work to bring about sustainable and transformative change. Oxfam is working in partnership with governments, civil society and the private sector to build the resilience of poor women and men in the Asia-Pacific region. Investment in these partnerships is delivering positive impact, ensuring locally relevant and innovative approaches to resilient development. Partnerships are most effective when they are grounded in a shared understanding of resilience, and future programmes should invest more in strengthening long-term capacity of local partners to advocate for change at national level.


This document specifies the base Peer-to-Peer Streaming Tracker
Protocol (PPSTP) version 1, an application-layer control (signaling)
protocol for the exchange of meta information between trackers and
peers. The specification outlines the architecture of the protocol and
its functionality; it also describes message flows, message processing
instructions, message formats, formal syntax, and semantics. The PPSTP
enables cooperating peers to form content-streaming overlay networks
to support near real-time delivery of structured media content (audio,
video, and associated timed text and metadata), such as adaptive
multi-rate, layered (scalable), and multi-view (3D) videos in live,
time-shifted, and on-demand modes.


This article examines the legal bases of the public's right to access government information, reviews the types of information that have recently been removed from the Internet, and analyzes the rationales given for the removals. The article suggests that the concerted use of the Freedom of Information Act by public interest groups and their constituents is a possible method of returning the information to the Internet.


The need to foster critical thinking has long been one of the key issues in education. It is essentially vital nowadays against the background of an increased volume of cross-cultural communications due to the present-day demand for collaboration to tackle pressing global issues through joint efforts of different nations. While the format of debates has been recognized by researchers as one of the most efficient tools of setting off critical thinking, it is up to the new technologies in education to make it possible to bring this platform to a cross-cultural level. Since a cross-cultural dialogue in most cases supposes the mastery of a foreign language, e-learning in the form of cross-border video-conference debates present an invaluable opportunity for educators to enhance the pedagogy of foreign language acquisition around the globe. The present paper focuses on a case-study of an on-going project of implementing the tool of synchronous crosscultural video-conference debates.


This report explores the plight of Syrian refugees and of the Syrian people more generally. Those coming to Europe are the tip of the iceberg, representing a mere 10 percent of registered refugees. The majority are in neighboring countries of Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq. In addition, among those who remained within the borders of Syria, 7.6 million people are now considered Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). In light of the ever-worsening situation inside the country, with devastating humanitarian consequences, this report argues that the impact of the civil war on the Syrian society will be persistent, and that development institutions can take immediate actions to help preserve development achievements and foster peace. The challenges facing the country need to be addressed now. The report first takes stock of the damage and death through the experiences of refugees in neighboring countries, and then delves into the violence and devastation inside the country. The final section illustrates that a more audacious development agenda can help bring about relief and appeasement in the short-term, and stability in the long-term. While full-scale reconstruction may have to wait for peace before it can start, a credible reconstruction strategy can foster the return to peace. The report calls for the international community to be the guarantor of an inclusive reconstruction strategy that not only makes peace sustainable tomorrow, but makes it happen today: peace and reconstruction are two sides of the same coin.


Alluvial channel geometry has been studied quantitatively for over one hundred years and it is now recognised to be a multi-variable problem. However, as yet there is no widespread agreement on what variables are the most important, nor is there agreement on the relationships between variables or on the form of general model. This study tests the applicability to both stable canals and natural alluvial channels of an experimental flume relationship between channel shape and boundary shear distribution. It establishes a multivariate model of downstream hydraulic geometry, showing clearly that channel geometry is generally controlled by four factors: flow discharge, channel roughness, slope and bank strength. This study makes five important contributions. Firstly, it presents a physical explanation for each of the major factors controlling channel geometry. Secondly, because it has been developed from a wide range of field observations accumulated over many years and studied in combination here, it provides a high level of prediction of channel form. Thirdly, it presents a partially quantitative description of the influence of bank strength on channel form. Vegetated and highly cohesive banks result in narrower and deeper sections while the non-vegetated and noncohesive sandy banks produce wider and shallower sections. Fourthly, it demonstrates the role that sediment transport plays in influencing channel form, finding that velocity and slope are highly dependent on sediment concentration while channel cross-section is slightly dependent. A n increase in bed-material load causes marked increase in width only when the adjustment of channel slope is severely restrained. Finally, this study finds that regime theory, threshold channel condition, channel shape relations and bivariate hydraulic geometry models provide appropriate explanation only for specific conditions and do not provide a general explanation or predictive model for channel geometry.


The problem of institutional fit in social-ecological systems has been empirically documented and conceptually discussed for decades, yet there is a shortage of approaches to systematically and quantitatively examine the level of fit. We address this gap, focusing on spatial fit in an urban and peri-urban regional landscape. Such landscapes typically exhibit significant fragmentation of remnant habitats, which can limit critical species dispersal. This may have detrimental effects on species persistence and ecosystem functioning if land use is planned without consideration of the spatial patterns of fragmentation. Managing habitat fragmentation is particularly challenging when the scale of fragmentation reaches beyond the control of single managers, thereby requiring different actors to coordinate their activities to address the problem at the appropriate scale. We present a research approach that maps patterns of collaborations between actors who manage different parts of a landscape, and then relates these patterns to structures of ecological connectivity. We applied our approach to evaluate the fit between a collaborative wetland management network comprising all 26 municipalities in the Stockholm County in Sweden and an ecologically defined network of dispersed but ecologically interconnected wetlands. Many wetlands in this landscape are either intersected by the boundary between two or more municipalities, or are located close to such boundaries, which implies a degree of ecological interconnectedness and a need for intermunicipal coordination related to wetland management across boundaries. We first estimated the level of ecological connectivity between wetlands in neighboring municipalities, and then used this estimate to elaborate the level of social-ecological fit vis-a-vis intermunicipal collaboration. We found that the level of fit was generally weak. Also, we identified critical misalignments of ecological connectivity and intermunicipal collaboration, respectively, as well as collaborations that represented an adequate alignment. These findings inform on where to most effectively allocate limited resources of collaborative capacity to enhance the level of social-ecological fit. Our approach and results are illustrated using maps, which facilitates the potential application of this method in land use planning practice.


Based on the application of tandem weapon used to destroy concrete target this paper presents the results of simulation and experiment that investigate the penetration performance of shaped charge to runway. Jet formation and penetrating into multi-layer target was calculated by hydro code LS-DYNA3D. Jet tip velocity and jet length, also the penetration performance are studied. The damage performance of shaped charge is validated by experiment. The analysis demonstrates the shaped charge can create a big borehole for subsequent projectile to follow in.


A description is given of UIMS (User Interface Management System), a system using a variety of artificial intelligence techniques to build knowledge-based user interfaces combining functionality and information from a variety of computer systems that maintain, test, and configure customer telephone and data networks. Three artificial intelligence (AI) techniques used in UIMS are discussed, namely, frame representation, object-oriented programming languages, and rule-based systems. The UIMS architecture is presented, and the structure of the UIMS is explained in terms of the AI techniques.<<ETX>>


This letter presents a deep insight on a real implementation of a train-to-wayside radio on subway tunnels that makes use of a 2 × 2 multiple-input-multiple-output orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (MIMO-OFDM) setup. The main purpose of this letter is to study in detail the keyhole phenomenon of an MIMO-OFDM train-to-wayside communication system on a tunnel. MIMO keyholes are studied in different tunnels sections, and capacity results are provided. Moreover, we introduce the first keyhole measurements on a railway tunnel. Finally, we follow a quantitative approach to estimate keyhole probabilities on each tunnel stretch and capacity outage curves.


Long term hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection is a major risk factor in pathogenesis of chronic liver diseases, including hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). The HBV encoded proteins, hepatitis B virus X protein and preS, appear to contribute importantly to the pathogenesis of HCC. Both are associated with oxidative stress, which can damage cellular molecules like lipids, proteins, and DNA during chronic infection. Chronic alcohol use is another important factor that contributes to oxidative stress in the liver. Previous studies reported that treatment with antioxidants, such as curcumin, silymarin, green tea, and vitamins C and E, can protect DNA from damage and regulate liver pathogenesis-related cascades by reducing reactive oxygen species. This review summarizes some of the relationships between oxidative stress and liver pathogenesis, focusing upon HBV and alcohol, and suggests antioxidant therapeutic approaches.