Earth System models (ESMs) are global climate models with the added capability to explicitly represent biogeochemical processes that interact with the physical climate and so alter its response to forcing such as that associated with human‐caused emissions of greenhouse gases. Representing the global carbon cycle allows for feedbacks between the physical climate and the biological and chemical processes in the ocean and on land that take up some of the emitted carbon dioxide and so act to reduce warming. The sulfur cycle is also important in that both natural and human emissions of sulfur contribute to the production of sulfate aerosols which reflect incoming solar radiation (a direct cooling effect) and alter cloud properties (an indirect cooling effect). Other components such as ozone are also being incorporated into some ESMs. Evaluating the physical component of an ESM is becoming increasingly comprehensive and sophisticated, but the evaluation of the biogeochemical components suffer somewhat from a lack of comprehensive global‐scale observational data. Nevertheless, such models provide valuable insight into climate variability and change, and the role of human activities and possible mitigation actions on future climate change. Internationally coordinated experiments are increasingly important in providing a multimodel ensemble of climate simulations, thereby taking advantage of some 'cancellation of errors' and allowing better quantification of uncertainty. WIREs Clim Change 2011, 2:783–800. doi: 10.1002/wcc.148


BackgroundThe effect of interleukin-2 (IL-2) in combination with antiretroviral therapy on HIV-1 replication and reservoirs was investigated. MethodsIn a prospective, open-label trial, 56 asymptomatic HIV-1-infected subjects (CD4 T cell count > 350 × 106 cells/l) were randomized to highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART: stavudine, lamivudine, nelfinavir, saquinavir) with or without IL-2 (9 megaunits daily for 5 days in 6-weekly intervals for a total of eight cycles). Productive and latent infection were analysed in peripheral blood, and residual virus replication in the lymphoid tissue and in the cerebrospinal fluid. The influence of IL-2 on viral rebound after treatment discontinuation was studied. ResultsVirus replication was detected in 21 of 31 on-treatment lymph nodes despite undetectable plasma viraemia. Viral RNA was found in resting as well as in proliferating cells. RNA-negative patients tended towards more rapid proviral DNA elimination. Supplementary IL-2 led to a greater increase in CD4 T cell counts than HAART alone (P < 0.001), resulting in normalization in ~90% of IL-2-treated patients compared with ~50% HAART-only subjects. IL-2 had no beneficial effect on virus replication and on proviral DNA in peripheral blood. ConclusionsViral persistence during HAART is partly a result of continued low-level replication, calling for more active regimens. IL-2 accelerates the normalization of CD4 T cell counts but does not impact on virus production or latency.


We introduce a meshless method for solving both continuous and discrete variational formulations of a volume constrained, nonlocal diffusion problem. We use the discrete solution to approximate the continuous solution. Our method is nonconforming and uses a localized Lagrange basis that is constructed out of radial basis functions. By verifying that certain inf-sup conditions hold, we demonstrate that both the continuous and discrete problems are well-posed, and also present numerical and theoretical results for the convergence behavior of the method. The stiffness matrix is assembled by a special quadrature routine unique to the localized basis. Combining the quadrature method with the localized basis produces a well-conditioned, symmetric matrix. This then is used to find the discretized solution.


Supra-regional deposition of nutrients in
tropical rainforests represents an important source of nutrients
for these ecosystems. Increasing loads of anthropogenic emitted
material into the sensitive nutrient cycles of tropical rainforests
lead to a shift in the nutrient balance connected with a loss of
richness off species. Measuring of nutrient deposition in tropical
areas is mostly difficult because of a lack of infrastructure in
remote areas, and in mesoscalic areas it is even impossible. Both
the transport of samples to the laboratory and the determination of
low-concentrated nutrients in rainwater samples are difficult.
Based on ion exchange resin, a passive Ion Exchange Resin-collector
(IER-collector) has been developed. The sampler allows collecting
bulk deposition samples integrated over a period of approximately
one month at field sites. Laboratory tests showed that the
IER-collectors are able to absorb 80-99% of solute ion loads,
depending on element specific properties and different
concentrations. Correction factors for the calculation of the
all-in-all nutrient deposit load were necessary because in the
extraction only 49 100% of the loaded mass were found depending on
element specific characteristics. The comparison different sampler
types revealed a correlation between percolation speed and fixation
rate on the IER surface. Tests with simulated hard-rain-events of
more than 300 mm h-1 and the detection of extremely low nutrient
concentrations showed that IER-collectors are suitable for use in
field sites. Nearly identical deposited loads between the two
sampling systems (conventional bulk water collectors
(BWS-collector) versus IER-collectors) were found for the elements
calcium (Ca), iron (Fe), magnesium (Mg), manganese (Mn), sodium
(Na) and phosphorus (P). Results of the two measuring systems
differed between 80% 132%, depending on the element. For aluminium
(Al) and nitrate (NO3-N) higher results with more than 400% were
found in the IER-collectors. This could be explained with low
concentrations in rainwater samples. The deposition of potassium
(K) was underestimated in IER-collectors (65%). Generally higher
deposition loads were found in IER-collectors compared to
BWS-collectors. IER-collectors deliver more precise result because
a higher concentration of elements in extraction solutions were
better detectable at analyse instruments. In the framework of the
Sonderforschungsbereich (SFB) 552, at 13 sites of the 2310 km


The present paper deals with the transcapillary fluid balance in hypoproteinemia and increased venous pressure. Interstitial fluid hydrostatic pressure (Pi) was measured by a wick method, and interstitial fluid colloid osmotic pressure (COP i ) was measured in tissue fluid samples obtained from implanted wicks. In rat subcutaneous tissue and skeletal muscle the COP i was 10 mm Hg and Pi was -1 mm Hg. In hypoproteinemia a marked fall in COP i was observed in both subcutaneous tissue and skeletal muscle. A fall in plasma COP of 5-6 mm Hg was associated with almost identical fall in COPi . Similar fall in subcutaneous COP was observed by increasing local venous pressure by 10 mm Hg. Raising the venous pressure on the hind limb did, however, not lead to a fall in skeletal muscle COP i in intact, freely moving rats. However, when the hind limb was denervated and immobilized an increase of venous pressure caused a fall in skeletal muscle COP i , similar to that observed in subcutaneous tissue. In both hypoproteinemia and increased venous pressure no rise in Pi could be measured before visible edema was detected. The results indicate that the fall in COP i will prevent or limit edema formation in hypoproteinemia and when the venous pressure is increased. In addition, in skeletal muscle the muscle pump will protect against increased capillary fluid filtration when the venous pressure is increased, probably by keeping a low capillary pressure during muscle contractions.


The importance of the services' business sector increased dramatically as a main driving force of GDP particularly in developed countries which highlights the potential impact of an effectively managed service supply chain (SSC). There is a significant lack of understanding of the concept of SSC and the implementation of its practices; in addition to the lack of studies that focused on how to model, manage and assess the performance of SSC. This paper aims at developing an adequate framework to manage and asses the performance of SSC. A critical review was conducted to define and map the key supply chain processes in the service sector, then a corresponding set of appropriate performance measures was identified and quantified to analyse and assess SSC performance. To demonstrate the applicability of the developed framework, sampling of multiple cases from logistics industry in Egypt was conducted. It has been found -unlike the manufacturing sectorservices cannot be standardized as they vary and lack common features. In addition, the review indicated that the analysis of services quality is unlikely to be quantifiable which makes the assessment of SSC performance rather difficult. The implementation of the developed framework can be a quantifiable practical tool for managing SSC performance. The proposed framework would help service-based companies in managing the effectiveness and the efficiency of SSC and to trace areas that need improvement through evaluating, monitoring and controlling SSC processes' performance.


Norway has strictly regulated the introduction and marketing of drugs for more than 50 years. The system is a state owned whole-sale monopoly with nationwide distribution. Marketing approvals must satisfy a medical "need" clause and are granted and reviewed every 5 years by the " Specialties ' Committee." Although clinical trials are not mandatory for drug approval, relative efficacy and benefit/risk considerations make them desirable. Assessment of clinical data is based on reviews by outside consultants. Because of such strict regulation, the total number of drug products available is smaller than other Western European countries, however, only a few therapeutic classes are not represented. The impact of regulation on the drug market and the therapeutic armamentarium available for health care in Norway are discussed.


The main purpose of this descriptive research study is to investigate the conceptual and psychometric properties of a self-efficacy perception scale developed for determining selfefficacy perception of 3rd and 4th grade Turkish pre-service teachers, who took Turkish as a Foreign Language (TFL) course theoretically in undergraduate level, towards teaching TFL. As a result of analysis of the related literature and written responses of participants, researchers initially formed an item-pool by considering that they best suit to TFL context. Then, they adapted the items into 5-point Likert scale. The current instrument was administered to 176 pre-service Turkish teachers with a random sampling design. The repetitive statistics showed that the instrument has three factors with 25 items that measure the self-efficacy of participants. The factors which have been identified in the instrument possess the construct validity and psychometric properties of internal consistency. The reliability and validity of the scale were analyzed with SPPS 17.0. According to exploratory factor analysis results for maintaining construct validity of the scale, factor values of the scale changed between 0.57 and 0.82, and total variant of the scale was found to be 70.379 %. As for the Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin (KMO) measuring of sampling adequacy and Bartlett"s test of sphericity, KMO is found to be 0.95 being greater than 0.60 and Bartlett"s test is large with Chi-square value (χ2(300)= 4143.5; p< ,0001) and significant at 0.000. As for reliability, the results showed that the items of scale in terms of item-total correlation changed between 0.45 and 0.84, and the total internal reliability coefficient of the scale (Cronbach"s Alpha) was calculated as 0.972. Additionally, the two scholars gave their positive opinions in favor of the scale for face validity.The results indicates that the scale has the validity and reliability. Furthermore, the findings of the study confirmed that this scale had validity and reliability that could be used in TFL context for exploring pre-service teachers" self-efficacy perception towards teaching TFL


Some marginal notes in the Syro-Hexapla of Ecclesiastes,as represented by the Codex Ambrosianus, indicate that Aquila, Symmachus, and Theodotion are identical to the text of the Seventy in Origen's Fifth Column. Careful scrutiny reveals that these notes derive from a different manuscript than the one from which the lemma text of the Syro-Hexapla was translated. The evidence also suggests that the term oμoiως is used when identity with the lemma but not the o′ text is in view, and oμoiως τoις o′ when identity not only with the lemma but also the o′ text obtains. This results in a proposed text for α′ σ′ ϑ′ which differs from that given in Field's Origenis Hexaplorum quae supersunt.


We studied the feasibility of using single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNTs) as antigen carriers to improve immune responses to peptides that are weak immunogens, a characteristic typical of human tumor antigens. Binding and presentation of peptide antigens by the MHC molecules of antigen presenting cells (APCs) is essential to mounting an effective immune response. The Wilm's tumor protein (WT1) is upregulated in many human leukemias and cancers and several vaccines directed at this protein are in human clinical trials. WT1 peptide 427 induces human CD4 T cell responses in the context of multiple human HLA-DR.B1 molecules, but the peptide has a poor binding affinity to BALB/c mouse MHC class II molecules. We used novel, spectrally quantifiable chemical approaches to covalently append large numbers of peptide ligands (0.4 mmol/g) onto solubilized SWNT scaffolds. Peptide-SWNT constructs were rapidly internalized into professional APCs (dendritic cells and macrophages) within minutes in vitro, in a dose dependent manner. Immunization of BALB/c mice with the SWNT–peptide constructs mixed with immunological adjuvant induced specific IgG responses against the peptide, while the peptide alone or peptide mixed with the adjuvant did not induce such a response. The conjugation of the peptide to SWNT did not enhance the peptide-specific CD4 T cell response in human and mouse cells, in vitro. The solubilized SWNTs alone were nontoxic in vitro, and we did not detect antibody responses to SWNT in vivo. These results demonstrated that SWNTs are able to serve as antigen carriers for delivery into APCs to induce humoral immune responses against weak tumor antigens.


Low bit-width model quantization is highly desirable when deploying a deep neural network on mobile and edge devices. Quantization is an effective way to reduce the model size with low bit-width weight representation. However, the unacceptable accuracy drop hinders the development of this approach. One possible reason for this is that the weights in quantization intervals are directly assigned to the center. At the same time, some quantization applications are limited by the various of different network models. Accordingly, in this paper, we propose Multiple Phase Adaptations (MPA), a framework designed to address these two problems. Firstly, weights in the target interval are assigned to center by gradually spreading the quantization range. During the MPA process, the accuracy drop can be compensated for the unquantized parts. Moreover, as MPA does not introduce hyperparameters that depend on different models or bit-width, the framework can be conveniently applied to various models. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MPA achieves higher accuracy than most existing methods on classification tasks for AlexNet, VGG-16 and ResNet.


HASKELL B. CURRY. Foundations of mathematical logic. McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc., New York, San Francisco, Toronto, and London, 1963, xii + 408 pp. This book consists largely of revisions of parts of XXXII267, XIX 146, and, mainly, XVI 56. About two-thirds form a useful and often elegant treatise discussing many alternative ways of formalizing intuitionistic and classical propositional and first-order logic. Chapter 4 gives a lattice-theoretic treatment of propositional logic. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 are concerned with z>, A, and v, with negation, and with quantification, respectively, and emphasize Gentzen-type methods. In addition, there is a very brief chapter on modality, and there are three initial chapters, roughly comprising one-third of the book, in which Curry sets forth his views concerning formal systems in general. A major purpose of the book is to provide an interpretation for systems of intuitionistic logic. According to 2B4 (Chapter 2, Section B, Subsection 4), and also 2C5, an interpretation of a given system is an effective mapping assigning to each of certain elementary statements (2B1) of the system a statement, in general not belonging to the system, whose truth-value can be ascertained on grounds not dependent on provability in the system. The interpretation is full if each elementary statement has an image, valid if each image of a theorem is true, and adequate if each pre-image of a true statement is a theorem. Curry apparently claims, e.g. on page 185, that he gives an interpretation of intuitionistic systems 3 in which the interpretants are statements concerning derivability in a formal system 0 that is subject only to very broad restrictions. The reviewer believes that this claim is misleading and that a full, adequate, and valid interpretation requires 6 to satisfy conditions very similar to those required of 3The interpretation therefore seems to be of little value. For example, if 3 satisfies the rule % A IH B -»9£ IIA a B of page 187, then a full, adequate, and valid interpretation of 3 seems to require that ifB,AltA2,A3 are formal objects of 3, and if the elementary statement of © which corresponds to B is a theorem of 6 , then the statement of 0 which corresponds to Ax D (A2 => (A3 s B)) is also a theorem of €>. It should be added that the reviewer had great difficulty in following the discussion of this point. Contributing factors were the use of two notions of interpretation in 5 A2 and 5A3 which, while related to that of 2B4 and 2C5, differ from it, an intentional but ill-advised blurring of the distinction between formal objects and their interpretants, and failure, e.g. in 5A3, to specify the mapping which is to serve as interpretation. The book is intended for graduate students. It is therefore regrettable that the terminology used differs extensively from that in the logical literature. Many of the differences arise from Curry's preference of ob systems (2C3) over the more commonly used syntactical systems (2C2). Now the obs (objects) of an ob system may be regarded as the elements of an absolutely free algebra. Thus the study of ob systems has certain advantages over that of syntactical systems, which Curry was one of the first to emphasize and exploit. Nowadays, these seem to be most easily utilized by employing standard terminology from universal algebra. Each chapter has a supplementary section. These contain much interesting material from recent history of logic which would be difficult to find elsewhere. WILLIAM CRAIG


Blunt traumatic injury to the urogenital region in the prepubescent girl is commonly evaluated in pediatric emergency departments (ED). The purpose of this study is: 1) to establish recommendations for an accurate, painless (both physically and psychologically), and timely diagnosis, and 2) to determine whether the ED examination can accurately determine the extent of the injury. Over a 24-month period (January 1991 through December 1992), 22 girls with blunt trauma to the urogenital region (mean age 5.7 years, range 2-9 years) were retrospectively evaluated. Initial ED evaluations were by both an emergency physician and a pediatric surgeon. All 22 patients underwent an examination under anesthesia (EUA) in the operating room to evaluate the extent of the injury and to repair the injury as needed. Follow-up was obtained in all patients and averaged 18 months. The findings at EUA demonstrated a significant disagreement with the preoperative ED evaluation. In only five patients was there agreement between the preoperative ED assessment and the findings during the EUA (24% concurrence). Thus, 16 patients (76%) had injuries of greater extent than was appreciated during the preoperative examination in the ED. Partial or complete disruption of the perianal sphincters occurred in six patients (27%) and was unrecognized preoperatively in each. Twenty-one of the 22 patients required suture repair of lacerations, the remaining patient did not require surgical therapy. Three patients had contusions or lacerations to the urethral area requiring repair and/or prolonged bladder catheter drainage for two to 14 days (average seven days). The average hospital stay was 19.3 hours. There were three minor wound complications following surgery: two required repeat EUA with suturing or cauterization, and one required no further therapy. This study clearly demonstrates that the ED examination, by both emergency physicians and pediatric surgeons, of young girls who have suffered blunt urogenital trauma grossly underestimates the severity of injuries when compared to the EUA in the operating room. EUA is safe and allows early discharge with minimal psychologic sequelae. Recommendations for mandatory EUA are made.


This paper proposes a ranking methodology of cooking recipe by using fitness value between a recipe and onomatopoeia. This system is implemented as a function of a cooking recipe search site" Onomatoperori". By using onomatopoeia, users can find what they want to cook from their ambiguous idea. We defined formulas for calculating fitness value between recipe and onomatopoeia by using mutual information between onomatopoeia and a word in title or description of recipes. In addition, we defined the similarity measure between onomatopeia words by mapping their words by using 15 sentimental dimensions for expressing the tastes and textures of the dishes. And we improve the ranking methodology by using the similarity among onomatopoeia words. By using these ranking methodologies we can search the cooking recipes which are related to the onomatopoeia although they do not include the onomatopeia word in the recipes.


Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) builds upon the intuitive notion of service already known and used in our society for a long time. SOC-related approaches are based on computer-executable functional units that often represent automation of services that exist at the social level, i.e., services at the level of human or organizational interactions. With the increasing adoption of SOC, more complex scenarios mixing computational and social services are emerging, raising the need to better understand the relationship between social and computational services and to specify and model them accordingly. In this paper we present our ontology-based approach to dynamic service provisioning. Our approach aims at improving the current state of the art by allowing an explicit distinction between social and computation services and dynamic service provisioning support for these two types of services. We illustrate the applicability of our approach with a use case scenario in the health care domain.


PURPOSE
Emphasis on consumer-centered care for frail and institutionalized older adults has increased the development and adaptation of surveys for this population. Conventional methods used to pretest survey items fail to investigate underlying sources of measurement error. However, the use of the cognitive interview (CI), a method for studying how respondents answer survey items, is not well established or documented in this population. This study demonstrates how CIs can be used to improve questionnaires intended for nursing home residents.

DESIGN AND METHODS
CIs were conducted with 29 nursing home residents in order to identify potential problems with prospective survey items. We used scripted probes to standardize the interviews and adapted the Question Appraisal System to enumerate and classify the problems discovered.

RESULTS
We fielded between one and five versions of each item in an iterative process that identified 61 item-specific problems. Additionally, residents' cognitive responses suggested that some screened their answers on the basis of perceived physical and environmental limitations, and some had difficulty answering items about preferences that fluctuate day to day. These findings led us to modify the items and response set to simplify the respondents' cognitive task.

IMPLICATIONS
This study illustrates how CI techniques can be used to understand residents' comprehension of and response to survey items.


E-campaigning refers to the utilisation of information and communication technologies (ICTs), predominantly the Internet, and related applications for election campaigning. At present, scholarly research in this social phenomenon chiefly focuses on how e-campaigning is utilised by political parties or candidates. Also, there is growing research interest in factors that influence e-campaigning utilisation. However, political parties' or candidates' e-campaigning utilisation is largely unexplored and unexplained. This is attributable to several factors, notably, restricted access to the phenomenon, the narrow and geographical concentration of existing e-campaigning research, the accessibility of political parties' or candidates' campaign teams as research participants, and a dearth of multidisciplinary research. To that end, this study empirically explores and explains e-campaigning utilisation with a multidisciplinary, multiple-case research approach. Further, this study is situated in the 2008 New Zealand general election, involving six of eight parliamentary parties. Based on existing e-campaigning research, this study proposes a new theoretical framework to understand, describe, and compare e-campaigning utilisation. This e-campaigning framework has been empirically applied. Notably, the findings suggest that political parties' e-campaigning utilisation varied markedly beyond information dissemination; although social media was introduced in most parties' e-campaigning, its interactive nature was barely exploited; and innovative e-campaigning appeared to be the exception rather than the norm. From political science and information systems literature, this study identifies ten factors, encompassing both external and internal aspects as well as various perspectives, to explain e-campaigning utilisation. The findings suggest that those factors in general are empirically relevant, accurate, and adequate. This study concludes that e-campaigning is a complex, contextual, diverse, and dynamic phenomenon. As such, it is difficult, if not impossible, to generalise or predict e-campaigning utilisation; also, a multidisciplinary approach is pivotal to investigating the phenomenon.


Attention-based Encoder-Decoder has the effective architecture for neural machine translation (NMT), which typically relies on recurrent neural networks (RNN) to build the blocks that will be lately called by attentive reader during the decoding process. This design of encoder yields relatively uniform composition on source sentence, despite the gating mechanism employed in encoding RNN. On the other hand, we often hope the decoder to take pieces of source sentence at varying levels suiting its own linguistic structure: for example, we may want to take the entity name in its raw form while taking an idiom as a perfectly composed unit. Motivated by this demand, we propose Multi-channel Encoder (MCE), which enhances encoding components with different levels of composition. More specifically, in addition to the hidden state of encoding RNN, MCE takes 1) the original word embedding for raw encoding with no composition, and 2) a particular design of external memory in Neural Turing Machine NTM) for more complex composition, while all three encoding strategies are properly blended during decoding. Empirical study on Chinese-English translation shows that our model can improve by 6.52 BLEU points upon a strong open source NMT system: DL4MT1. On the WMT14 English-French task, our single shallow system achieves BLEU=38.8, comparable with the state-of-the-art deep models.


This is the first complete survey and thematic profile of one of the most prolific and accomplished Italian architects of the century. From the Richard-Ginori chinaware and the founding of "Domus "magazine in the 1920s and '3Os, to the Pirelli tower erected in Milan in the 1950s to the "facade" architecture of the '70s, Gio Ponti has been a major force in the shaping of twentieth-century Italian design. "The Complete Work "presents a fully illustrated decade-by-decade account of Ponti's vast output in interior and industrial design, decorative arts, and architecture. It describes his powerful influence on generations of Italian designers, his contributions to Italy's urban culture, and his role as a propagandist and editor.Gio Ponti was not only an architect but a poet, painter, polemicist, and designer of exhibitions, theater costumes, Venini glassware, Arthur Krupp tableware, Cassina furniture, lighting fixtures, and ocean liner interiors. He is perhaps best known as the architect of Milan's Pirelli tower, at one time the tallest building in Europe, and for his "Super-leggera" chair which was first manufactured in the '50s and has become classic because of its almost universal use in Italian restaurants. Above all, Ponti was responsible for the renewal of Italian architecture and decorative arts. Drawing upon the legacy of the Viennese Secession and the Wiener Werkstatte, he transformed "classical" language into a rationalist vocabulary.The entire photographic archive of Ponti's studio, together with his unpublished writings, were made available for the first time for the preparation of this book. There are many new photographs of his work and a broad selection of his letters, diaries and essays. A biographical profile, bibliography, and chronologies of works, exhibitions, and sales round out this stunning bookLisa Licitra Ponti is curator of the Ponti Archives, She is also a well-known art and architecture critic. She collaborated with her father from 1940 until his death in 1979.


The hot compression deformation behavior of AZ81 magnesium alloy was studied with Gleeble-1500 thermal simulation machine at the strain rate of 0.003 ~ 3.0s-1 and temperature of 340 ~ 430 °C. The results show that, the flow stress decreases when the deformation temperature increases and strain rate decreases; the peak stress increases with decrease of the temperature and the increase of the strain rate; the critical strain that comes into stable phase increases obviously. It is that the high temperature flow stress model of AZ81 magnesium alloy is constructed by introduceing Zener-Hollomon parameters, its average deformation activation energy is 169.48 kJ / mol. Processing maps of AZ81 magnesium alloy is also calculated and analyzed by the dynamic model of the material. Useing hot deformation processing maps, the flow instability zone is determined and the best process parameters access to the test parameters during hot deformation are as follow: thermal processing temperature range of 380 °C ~ 420 °C, strain rate range of 0.01 ~ 0.03 S-1.


Abstract Our objective was to investigate, and establish neuroanatomical correlates of, semantic deficits in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis-frontotemporal dementia (ALS-FTD), compared to semantic dementia (SD) and controls. Semantic deficits were evaluated using a naming and semantic knowledge composite score, comprising verbal and non-verbal neuropsychological measures of single-word processing (confrontational naming, comprehension, and semantic association) from the Sydney Language Battery (SYDBAT) and Addenbrooke's Cognitive Examination – Revised (ACE-R). Voxel based morphometry (VBM) analysis was conducted using the region of interest approach. In total, 84 participants were recruited from a multidisciplinary research clinic in Sydney. Participants included 17 patients with ALS, 19 with ALS-FTD, 22 with SD and 26 age- and education-matched healthy controls. Significant semantic deficits were observed in ALS and ALS-FTD compared to controls. The severity of semantic deficits varied across the clinical phenotypes: ALS patients were less impaired than ALS-FTD patients, who in turn were not as impaired as SD patients. Anterior temporal lobe atrophy significantly correlated with semantic deficits. In conclusion, semantic impairment is a feature of ALS and ALS-FTD, and reflects the severity of temporal lobe pathology.


Purpose: Despite the growth of food-away-from-home expenditures, food-at-home (FAH) expenditures still constitute the majority of American families' food dollars. The FAH expenditures may have important impacts on children's diets and, consequently, their weight statuses. This study examined the association between the composition of FAH expenditures and childhood overweight or obesity. Design: We compiled a longitudinal data set from the 2010 to 2012 IRI Consumer Panel and its associated MedProfiler surveys. Setting: This study took place in the United States. Participants: One thousand seven hundred thirty-one households across the United States, with 2645 children aged 2 to 17, were surveyed over 3 years (2010-2012). Measures: The binary outcome variable indicated whether a child was overweight or obese. The key predictor variable—composition of FAH expenditures—was an index reflecting households' adherence to expenditure shares for 24 food categories recommended by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Thrifty Food Plans. The key control variables were FAH expenditure shares from different food stores. Analysis: Data were analyzed by multilevel logistic regressions that controlled for a number of individual-level and household-level characteristics. Results: Higher compliance with the USDA Thrifty Food Plans was associated with lower risk of childhood overweight or obesity. Channel expenditure shares were not significantly associated with the weight outcomes. Conclusion: To prevent childhood obesity, the USDA Thrifty Food Plans can provide potential guidelines for households to decide the composition of their FAH expenditures.


Given that the costs and benefits of tourism are not uniformly distributed across space, knowledge of how residents perceive tourism both within their own community and from a broader regional perspective is needed to inform tourism-based economic development plans. This study explores the role of physical distance from tourism on resident attitudes, where support for the development of tourism within a person's town of residence is compared to support for tourism development at the county level. Differences were found across these "community scales" with residents indicating less support for tourism at the, more intimate, town level. To explore this variation, ordered logit regression models identified factors in-fluencing attitudes at the town and county levels.


This article has been accepted for publication in Geophysical Journal Internationa ©: 2016 Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Royal Astronomical Society. All rights reserved.


In 1991, approximately 40% of total blood requirement in Delhi was collected from commercial blood donors. The rest was supplied by voluntary and replacement donations in hospital-based blood banks and by voluntary blood recruiting agency (Indian Red Cross Society). This study analyses the standards of working and quality assurance in 26 blood transfusion centers in Delhi. The majority of these centers are ill-equipped and lack trained manpower. Most of these do not have adequate testing facilities and any standardized procedure for blood collection. Quality assurance scheme is not being followed and documentation and record maintenance is grossly inadequate. This reports also gives the recommendations for improvements of blood transfusion services in Delhi.


The Neighborhood Voice is a vehicle customized for conducting health research in community settings. It brings research studies into neighborhoods affected most by health disparities and reaches groups often underrepresented in research samples. This paper reports on the experience and satisfaction of 599 African American women who participated in research on board the Neighborhood Voice. Using bivariate, psychometric, and logistic regression analyses, we examined responses to a brief post-research survey. Most women (71%) reported that they had never previously participated in research, and two-thirds (68%) rated their Neighborhood Voice experience as excellent. Satisfaction scores were highest among first-time research participants (p < .05). Women's ratings of the Neighborhood Voice on Comfort (OR = 4.9; 95% CI = 3.0, 7.9) and Convenience (OR = 1.8; 95% CI = 1.2, 2.9) significantly predicted having an excellent experience. Mobile research facilities may increase participation among disadvantaged and minority populations. Our brief survey instrument is a model for evaluating such outreach.


To address the question on how to enhance the design of user-artefact interaction at the initial stages of the design process, this study focuses on exploring the differences between designers and users in regard to their concepts of an artefact usage. It also considers that human experience determines people's knowledge and concepts of the artefacts they interact with, and broadens or limits their concept of context of use. In this exploratory study visual representation of concepts is used to elicit information from designers and users, and to explore how these concepts are influenced by their individual experience. Observation, concurrent verbal and retrospective protocols and thematic interviews are employed to access more in depth information about users' and designers' concepts.

The experiment was conducted with designers and users who were asked about their concepts of an everyday product. Three types of data were produced in each session: sketches, transcriptions from retrospectives verbal reports and observations. Through an iterative process, references about context, use and experience were identified in the data collected; this led to the definition of a coding system of categories that was applied for the interpretation of visuals and texts. The methodology was tested through preliminary studies. Their initial outcomes indicate that the main differences between designers' and users' concepts come from their knowledge domain, while main similarities are related to human experience as source that drives concept formulation. Cultural background has been found to influence concepts about product usability and its context of use. The use of visual representation of concepts with retrospective reports and interviews allowed access to insightful information on how human experience influence people's knowledge about product usability and its context of use. It is expected that this knowledge contributes to the enhancement of the design of product usability.


Using our K2 Campaign 5 fully automated planet-detection data set (43 planets), which has corresponding measures of completeness and reliability, we infer an underlying planet population model for the FGK dwarf sample (9257 stars). Implementing a broken power law for both the period and radius distributions, we find an overall planet occurrence of planets per star within a period range of 0.5–38 days. Making similar cuts and running a comparable analysis on the Kepler sample (2318 planets; 94,222 stars), we find an overall occurrence of 1.10 ± 0.05 planets per star. Since the Campaign 5 field is nearly 120 angular degrees away from the Kepler field, this occurrence similarity offers evidence that the Kepler sample may provide a good baseline for Galactic inferences. Furthermore, the Kepler stellar sample is metal-rich compared to the K2 Campaign 5 sample, so a finding of occurrence parity may reduce the role of metallicity in planet formation. However, a weak (1.5σ) difference, in agreement with metal-driven formation, is found when assuming the Kepler model power laws for the K2 Campaign 5 sample and optimizing only the planet occurrence factor. This weak trend indicates that further investigation of metallicity-dependent occurrence is warranted once a larger sample of uniformly vetted K2 planet candidates is made available.


In today's world implementation of any expert system with maximum data and networking security becomes a real necessity in academic organizations as well as in industrial communities. In this paper, an expert security system is developed using speech recognition technology. The proposed system is a chamber, which is closed by a sliding door. A smart microphone is situated in front of the door, will receive the voice samples and allows the hardware sensor to open/close the door of the system. To develop this security system, Spartan 6 FPGA is used as a hardware sensor, which is further connected with a server PC, placed inside the system for on/off control of motor. Xilinx is used to port the VHDL program in Spartan 6 FPGA. The speech recognition is performed using MAT Lab SIMULINK in server PC. This further sense the correct voice sample and sends feedback to the Spartan. Finally Spartan controls the motor of the sliding door to open/close. This VLSI designed FPGA based proposed system using Xilinx will ensure fast service compared to earlier micro-processor based VSS bio-metric switched door control. Such Spartan based system ensures the security of the system at a highest level and will also protect the system from any external undesirable threats suitably.


Automated trust negotiation (ATN) is a successful approach to establishing mutual trust between strangers wishing to share resources or conduct business by gradually requesting and disclosing digitally signed credentials. An ATN strategy need to be adopted to determine a successful negotiation sequence based on the access control policies. Traditional ATN strategies provide the maximum degree of protection to the involved resources. However, there can be cases where efficiency is the most crucial need especially in light of widespread use of mobile device. It is preferable to adopt highly efficient ATN strategies, even if they do not maximize the protection of involved resources. Thus in this paper, we propose an approach to improve efficiency of traditional negotiation strategies by integrating sequence prediction, making a trade-off between negotiation efficiency and sensitive information protection. We validate the effectiveness of our approach by performing experiments on a mobile platform, taking the representative traditional negotiation strategy PRUENS as an example. Our experimental results show that our approach dramatically enhances efficiency of PRUNES.


In previous studies, we have used antisera raised to envelope (env)-gene-encoded synthetic peptides to identify a region of (HIV) glycoprotein (gp) 120 env protein designated SP10 that contains a type-specific neutralizing determinant. To develop a polyvalent, synthetic peptide inoculum that can evoke both neutralizing antibodies and T cell proliferative responses to more than one HIV isolate, synthetic peptides containing type-specific neutralizing determinants of gp120 from HIV isolates HTLV-IIIB (IIIB), HTLV-IIIMN (MN) and HTLV-IIIRF (RF) were coupled to a 16 amino acid T cell epitope (T1) of HIV-IIIB gp120 and used to immunize goats. Goat antisera to each T1-SP10 peptide derived from the SP10 region of gp120 of IIIB, MN, and RF neutralized HIV isolates IIIB, MN and RF in a type-specific manner. Moreover, peripheral blood T cells from immunized goats also proliferated in a type-specific manner to peptides derived from gp120 of IIIB, MN, and RF. When combined in a trivalent inoculum, T1-SP10 peptides from HIV-1 isolates IIIB, MN, and RF evoked a high titered neutralizing antibody response to isolates IIIB, MN, and RF in goats and as well induced immune T cells to undergo blast transformation in the presence of peptides derived from gp120 of all three HIV isolates. The T1 portion of the T1-SP10 construct was shown to induce a B cell antibody response against determinants within the T1 peptide in addition to inducing T cell proliferative responses in immune goat T cells. Moreover, the SP10 portion of the T1-SP10 constructs not only induced B cell antibody production but also induced type-specific T cell proliferative responses localized to the C-terminal variable sequences of the SP10 peptides. Finally, the T1-SP10 peptide construct induced memory T cell proliferative responses to native gp120 env protein. Thus, combinations of homologous SP10 region synthetic peptides containing type-specific neutralizing determinants and T cell epitopes of HIV gp120 may be useful in man to elicit high titered neutralizing B cell responses and, as well, T cell responses to more than one HIV isolate.


The DSM-III-R subclassifies panic disorder (PD) under the anxiety disorders (or anxiety and phobic neuroses) along with phobic, obsessive compulsive (OCD), generalized anxiety and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Although allowances are made for the specification of the current degree of impairment as severe, e.g., at least eight panic attacks monthly, avoidance behavior resulting in being completely house-bound or compulsions being the major life activity, the anxiety disorder category does not provide for the simultaneous occurrence of associated psychotic features as part of the disorder. In fact, depending on the circumstances, diagnostic hierarchial principles, in the DSM-III-R, require dual diagnoses or a diagnosis of the more pervasive disorder only, if elements of both anxiety and psychosis are present. In contradistinction to the anxiety disorder category, the DSM-III-R recognizes a myriad of psychotic features, including delusions, hallucinations, thought insertion and broadcasting, as extreme manifestations of the affective syndromes. The following case report of a patient with panic disorder, culminating in a florid psychosis, puts into question current official nosology. Conflicting outcome data from the schizophreniform disorders may be due, in part, to the mislabelling of patients with psychoses secondary to severe anxiety disorders as schizophreniform.


Unstructured enterprise data such as reports, manuals and guidelines often contain tables. The traditional way of integrating data from these tables is through a two-step process of table detection/extraction and mapping the table layouts to an appropriate schema. This can be an expensive process. In this paper we show that by using semantic technologies (RDF/SPARQL and database dependencies) paired with a simple but powerful way to transform tables with non-relational layouts, it is possible to offer query answering services over these tables with minimal manual work or domain-specific mappings. Our method enables users to exploit data in tables embedded in documents with little effort, not only for simple retrieval queries, but also for structured queries that require joining multiple interrelated tables.


This paper presents a model of economic behavior that explicates the phenomenon known as "orderly marketing," which was a main objective of the Marketing Orders agricultural program introduced early in the New Deal. Recent analyses of marketing orders start with an implicit assumption that there is no market failure—thus, that price regulation can cause only deviations from the first-best market solution. However, historical evidence suggests that disorderly marketing might refer to a kind of market imperfection. In the model presented here, a monopsonist processor sets a price to be paid, and an aggregate quantity to be purchased. In some states of the world, some farmers are excluded from the market. In other words, nonprice rationing can occur, and changes in consumer expenditure for the final product are absorbed by the processor rather than passed along to the farmer. The classified price and pooling provisions of federal orders can lead to a Pareto improvement in welfare.


Palm kernel cake (PKC) is the solid residue following oil extraction of palm kernels and useful to fatten animals either as a single feed with only minerals and vitamins supplementation, or mixed with other feedstuffs such as corn kernels or soy beans. The occurrence of mycotoxins (aflatoxins, ochratoxins, zearalenone, and fumonisins) in feed samples affects the animal's health and also serves as a secondary contamination to humans via consumption of eggs, milk and meats. Of these, aflatoxin B1 (AFB1) is the most toxically potent and a confirmed carcinogen to both humans and animals. Methods such as High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) and Liquid Chromatography–Mass Spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) are common in the determination of mycotoxins. However, these methods usually require sample pre-treatment, extensive cleanup and skilled operator. Therefore, in the present work, a rapid method of electrochemical immunosensor for the detection of AFB1 was developed based on an indirect competitive enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) and chitosan (CS) were used as the electrode modifier for signal enhancement. N-ethyl-N′-(3-dimethylaminopropyl)-carbodiimide (EDC) and N-hydroxysuccinimide (NHS) activated the carboxyl groups at the surface of nanocomposite for the attachment of AFB1-BSA antigen by covalent bonding. An indirect competitive reaction occurred between AFB1-BSA and free AFB1 for the binding site of a fixed amount of anti-AFB1 antibody. A catalytic signal based on horseradish peroxidase (HRP) in the presence of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and 3,3′,5,5′-tetramethylbenzidine (TMB) mediator was observed as a result of attachment of the secondary antibody to the immunoassay system. As a result, the reduction peak of TMB(Ox) was measured by using differential pulse voltammetry (DPV) analysis. Based on the results, the electrochemical surface area was increased from 0.396 cm2 to 1.298 cm2 due to the electrode modification with MWCNT/CS. At the optimal conditions, the working range of the electrochemical immunosensor was from 0.0001 to 10 ng/mL with limit of detection of 0.1 pg/mL. Good recoveries were obtained for the detection of spiked feed samples (PKC, corn kernels, soy beans). The developed method could be used for the screening of AFB1 in real samples.


We use inexact Newton iterates to approximate a solution of a nonlinear equation in a Banach space. Solving a nonlinear equation using Newton iterates at each stage is very expensive in general. That is why we consider inexact Newton methods, where the Newton equations are solved only approximately, and in some unspecified manner. In earlier works [2], [3], natural assumptions under which the forcing sequences are uniformly less than one were given based on the second Fréchet derivative of the operator involved. This approach showed that the upper error bounds on the distances involved are smaller compared with the corresponding ones using hypotheses on the first Fréchet derivative. However, the conditions on the forcing sequences were not given in affine invariant form. The advantages of using conditions given in affine invariant form were explained in [3], [10]. Here we reproduce all the results obtained in [3] but using affine invariant conditions.


The reception of the Picaresque in the French, English, and German Traditions is a metacritical study of the picaresque as it has been perceived in three major Western critical traditions. The study opens with a critical analysis of the origins of the picaresque novel as a genre in the Siglo de Oro in Spain. Three following sections detail the historical development of Gattungskonzepte of the picaresque in three major European traditions. Literary critics, trained in different traditions, will gain an appreciation for works from neighboring cultures.


Robots are entering our daily lives from self-driving cars to health-care robots. Historically, pre-programmed robots were vulnerable to changing conditions in daily life, primarily because of a lack of ability to generate novel, non-preset flexible solutions. Thus there is a need for robotics to incorporate adaptation, which is a trait of higher order natural species. This adaptation allows higher-order natural species to change their behaviours and internal mechanisms based on experience with often dynamic environment. The ability to adapt emerged through evolutionary processes. Evolutionary Robotics is an approach to create autonomous robots that are capable of automatically generating artificial behaviors and morphologies to achieve adaptation. Evolutionary robotics has the potential to automatically synthesize controllers for real autonomous robots and generate solutions to complete tasks in the uncertain real-world. Compared to the inflexibility of pre-programmed robots, evolutionary robots are able to learn flexible solutions to given tasks through evolutionary methods.  Cognitive robotics, a branch of artificial cognitive systems research, is such an attempt to create autonomous robots by applying bio-inspired methods. As the robot interacts with environment, an underlying cognitive system can learn its own solutions toward task completion. This learning-solution-from-interaction approach, also termed as a Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach, is widely applied in cognitive robotics to learn the solutions automatically. Ideally, the solutions can emerge in the cognitive system through the trial-and-error process of the RL approach without introducing human bias.  This thesis aims to develop an evolutionary cognitive architecture (system) for a robot that can learn adaptive solutions to complete tasks. Inspired by emotion theories, this work proposes Affective Computing Multilayer Cognitive Architecture (ACMCA), a universal cognitive architecture, which is able to learn diverse solutions. Extending from previous work, ACMCA has a five-layer structure, where each layer aims to achieve different components of the solutions. The position of this thesis is that introducing a novel emotion inspired multilayer architecture that produces task solutions through subsumption operations and underlying appropriate machine learning algorithms will allow a robot to complete admissible tasks.  ACMCA's five layers are: primary reinforcer layer, secondary reinforcer layer, core affect state layer, strategy layer, and behaviour layer. This five-layer decomposition also meets the traditional decomposition of a mobile control system into functional modules (e.g. perception, modelling, planning, task execution, and motor control). Each layer contains computing nodes as functional modules that process various Stimuli, Actions, and their consequential Outcomes of the cognitive system. In this work, 17 computing nodes and their connections in ACMCA represent the solutions that a mobile robot has learned to complete navigation tasks in complex scenarios.  Inspired by the Constructive Theory 1 and the robotic subsumption system, this work proposes a contingency-based subsumption approach to construct ACMCA. This contingency is termed Stimuli-Action-Outcome Contingency (SAOC), which is extended from the Action-Outcome (AO) contingency of Construction Theory. SAOCs are represented by "if-then" rules, termed SAOC rules, which encapsulate Stimuli, Actions, and their consequential Outcomes, providing clear symbolic interpretations. That is, the symbolic meaning of a SAOC rule can be interpreted as: if the input stimulus is perceived, the output action will be advocated as a cognitive response, expecting the outcome of the action with an estimation of relevance. As low-level computing nodes encapsulate Stimulus, Actions, and Outcomes, high-level computing nodes can subsume these low-level ones through the form of SAOC rules. Therefore, the proposed ACMCA can be constructed by subsumption layers of Stimuli-Action-Outcome Contingency (SAOC) rules.  This work applies machine learning techniques to facilitate ACMCA's real-world robotic implementation. This work selects Accuracy-based Learning Classifier Systems (XCS) algorithms as the underlying machine learning techniques that are deployed at computing nodes for the contingency-based subsumption operations. The mitosis approach of XCS and the XCS with a Combined Reward method (XCSCR) are two novel variants of XCS algorithm. They are proposed to amend two challenges that occur when the standard XCS approaches are applied for robotic applications. The mitosis approach introduces an accuracy pressure into the algorithm's evolutionary process, improving the algorithms' performance in robotic applications where noisy interferences exist. The XCSCR enables the policy to emerge earlier and more frequently than the existing benchmark approaches in multistep problems. Therefore, a robot with the XCSCR can handle a multistep scenario more effectively than those with the benchmarked algorithms.  This work conducts five experiments to test the capability of ACMCA and its underlying algorithms in learning solutions for robotic navigation tasks. The five experiments are conducted as follows: reflex-learning, IR-tuning, deliberation-establishing, emotion model, and combined reward assignment. As the results of the experiments, three different affective patterns have emerged in the first three experiments, an emotion model has emerged in the fourth experiments, and the fifth experiment explores ACMCA's potential implementation in the life-long learning scenario.  These results demonstrate that ACMCA, a novel emotion inspired multilayer architecture, can produce task solutions through contingency-based subsumption operations and underlying appropriate machine learning algorithms, allowing a robot to complete admissible tasks through evolutionary processes. The contingency-based subsumption operations can establish three contingencies and one emotion model between the subsumed components by multiple RL agents which deploy the proposed mitosis approach of XCS algorithms. These three emotion patterns and emotion model can consistently improve the robot's navigation performance with interpretable explanations. These two variants of XCS algorithms can amend shortfalls of the standard XCS approach in real-world robotic implementations. It has been demonstrated that the diverse solutions learned by ACMCA improve the navigation performance of the robot in terms of higher flexibility, reduction in continuous collisions and shorter navigation time consumption.


Tricyclic antidepressants, such as amitriptyline (Elavil), and the nontricyclic agent, fluoxetine (Prozac), bind to growth-regulatory intracellular histamine receptors, associated with anti-estrogen binding sites in microsomes and nuclei. The prototype anti-estrogen binding site/intracellular histamine receptor ligand, jV,/V-diethyl-2-|4-(phenylmethyl)phenoxy|ethanamine HC1, inhibits normal cell proliferation in vitro but stimulates tumor growth in vivo. Because of their structural similarity to /V,/V-diethyl-2-|4-(phenylmethyl)phenoxy|ethanamine HC1, we carried out studies to determine whether amitriptyline and fluoxetine stimulate tumor growth and/or development in rodents at concentrations relevant to the treatment of human depression (equivalent human dose range, ~ 100-150 mg/day for amitriptyline and ~20-80 mg/day for fluox etine). All experiments were performed blinded. In studies of growth stimulation of transplantable syngeneic tumors, groups of mice were inoculated s.c. with C-3 fibrosarcoma cells or given i.v. or s.c. injections of BloflO melanoma cells, followed 24 h later by daily ¡.p. injections of saline, amitriptyline, or fluoxetine. Tumor latency (fibrosarcoma), aggre gate tumor weight (s.c. injected melanoma), or time to death from pulmonary metastasis (i.v. injected melanoma) was determined; druginduced stimulation of DNA synthesis in C-3 fibrosarcoma cells in vitro was correlated with tumor growth acceleration in vìvo. In a mammary carcinogenesis model, the effects of chronic saline, amitriptyline, or fluoxetine administration on the rate and frequency of development of mammary tumors in rats fed dimethylbenzanthracene (DMBA) were compared. Eight of 20 amitriptylineor fluoxetine-treated mice developed fibrosarcoma tumors by day 5, as compared to none of 20 saline controls (P < 0.002). Similarly, 20 of 21 DMBA-treated rats receiving the antidepressant drugs developed 33 mammary tumors by week 15 as compared to 5 tumors in 4 of 7 DMBA-treated rats receiving saline (/' < 0.001). For both models, tumor latency decreased 30-40% and, in the DMBA model, tumor frequency increased >2-fold in the antidepressanttreated rats as compared to controls. Stimulation of fibrosarcoma growth in vivo correlated with a corresponding bell-shaped drug-induced increase in DNA synthesis in vitro. While the median time to death from pulmo nary métastasesdid not differ among groups given i.v. injections of melanoma cells, a significant (/' < 0.01) stimulation of growth of s.c. injected melanoma was observed in mice receiving the antidepressants. On the basis of these findings, we suggest that: (a) properly designed epidemiolÃ3gica!studies be carried out to determine whether antidepres sant drugs adversely affect the development or course of cancer in humans; and (h) preclinical drug screening procedures should include studies of tumor promotion, in addition to carcinogenesis.


OBJECTIVE
To determine which nuclear morphologic and background features are most associated with normal and abnormal chromosome patterns in urine cells evaluated by fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) with Vysis UroVysion (Downers Grove, Illinois, USA).

STUDY DESIGN
One hundred specimens were analyzed and the nuclear morphologic and background features compared between FISH-negative (disomic) and -positive (polysomic) cases.

RESULTS
Our data show that polysomic urothelial cells have significantly (p < 0.001) weaker DAPI nuclear counterstaining, nuclear enlargement, more irregular nuclear shape and more chromatin clumping when compared to disomic cells.

CONCLUSION
These findings indicate that there are specific staining and nuclear cytologic features that can help identify cells that have a high probability of being polysomic by FISH. This information may help cytologists decrease the time required to evaluate urine specimens by FISH and may aid in the development of instruments that automate FISH analysis.


Capacity-building projects in forest-based communities are implemented by governments, cooperatives, and non-government organisations to encourage sustainable management of community forests. While such projects are regularly evaluated on a case-by-case basis, they are rarely subjected to a landscape-level examination to explore conservation implications. To understand how environmental capacity-building projects address regional conservation goals, an interdisciplinary framework was developed to highlight the thematic focus, the geographic distribution, and the degree of community participation in environmental capacity-building projects. We demonstrate how the framework can be used by characterising projects in campesino communities in the Amazonian department of Pando, Bolivia, that were active during 2006-2008. While projects were too recent to affect forest cover, we describe how the framework elucidates three project themes (timber, Brazil nut, and agroforestry management); that project distribution was largely related to land tenure security, proximity to town, historical relationships, and motorised access; and that capacity-building strategies varied in participation, depending on thematic content and federal requirements for specific resources. We then discuss how the framework can be used to analyse forest cover implications over many years. Understanding the combination of thematic focus, geographic distribution, and degree of participation in project strategies offers a foundation for understanding how capacity-building initiatives can influence forest landscapes.


The semi-solid compression behaviors and the microstructure of Al-Fe alloy prepared by electromagnetic stirred were investigated in the strain rate range of 5×10-3 s-1 to 5×10-1 s-1 and the temperature range of 610 to 640°C on INSTRON-5500R materials testing machine. The experimental results showed that, during the semi-solid deformation of Al-Fe alloy,the peak value of true stress decreased with elevating deformation temperature. As the deformation increased, the stress peak value of the high solid fraction alloy was tending upwards, and that of the low solid fraction was tending downwards. The peak increased with increasing the strain rate. Al-Fe alloy was sensitive to strain rate during semi-solid compression. The strain softening phenomenon would happen. The smaller strain rate, the longer softening process, the stress falling was more slowly. The strain softening was a reason that the semi-solid alloy structure was instability during deformation. The semi-solid deformational behaviors of Al-Fe alloy was bound up with deformation temperature, strain rate, and deforming extent.


The seasonal haul-out pattern of itinerant male Antarctic fur seals (Arctocephalus gazella) was determined by regular counts at Mossman Peninsula, Laurie Island, South Orkney Islands, from 1996 to 2005. Small numbers of animals began to arrive at the beach in late December / early January (mean date 28 December ± 15 days, n = 10). Peak numbers of animals ashore changed considerably between seasons. In 1996, 1998 and 2001, peak numbers were registered in March (6/3, 18/3 and 6/3, respectively). Numbers peaked in 1997, 1999 and 2005 at the end of January / beginning of February (26/1, 2/2 and 28/1, respectively). In 2000, 2002, 2003 and 2004 peaks were registered in the third week of February (15/2, 22/2, 14/2 and 20/2, respectively). Peaks in numbers of seals ashore also varied between years, being minimum during 2001 (2531 individuals) and maximum during 2006 (16 610 individuals). In March 1998 the coasts of Laurie Island were surveyed by navigating inflatable boats near the shoreline; 18 haul-out places were identified. The big differences in peak numbers, as well as in the dates of peak events among years, suggest that local conditions could have an effect on the numbers of animals hauled out in a given year. It may therefore be difficult to predict trends from summer censuses in non-breeding places.


Pye's Surgical Handicraft: A Manual of Surgical Principles, Minor Surgery, and other matters connected with the work of Surgical Dressers, House Surgeons, and Practitioners. Edited by Hamilton Bailey, F.R.C.S., F.A.C.S., F.R.S.Ed. Seventeenth edition. (Pp. 800+xvi; illustrated. 52s.) Bristol: John Wright and Sons Ltd. 1956. Pye's Surgical Handicraft was first published in 1884. Mr. Hamilton Bailey has edited every edition since 1938, and in this, the seventeenth edition, he has enlisted the help of more than 50 distinguished contributors. The result is an authoritative and reliable account of all the methods, techniques, and tests which pertain to the duties of the housesurgeon or surgical registrar. Many of the chapters are masterpieces of judicieus compression, notably the ten pages on burns by Mr. A. B. Wallace, a short section on rectal operations by Mr. Gabriel, the 20 pages on eye conditions by Mr. Williamson-Noble, and the 70 pages in which Sir Reginald Watson-Jones gives a volume of information on fractures and dislocations. Mr. Bailey himself has written many articles full of practical wisdom, and we would particularly call attention to his suggestion that the practitioner should pass a gastric aspiration tube as a first-aid method of treatment in cases of perforated peptic ulcer. There is an interesting introductory tribute to Mr. Pye with an accompanying photograph. This is a book which the housesurgeon should buy. Anyone who says he cannot afford it must have a distorted sense of values. ZACHARY COPE.


Predators can provide a valuable ecosystem service by suppressing crop pests. However, intraguild predation, where predators compete for the same prey resource whilst consuming each other, may destabilize population dynamics and increase the risk of pest outbreaks. Very little is known about intraguild predation in open fields or the strengths of trophic links between predators which may negatively affect pest control.
We tested the null hypothesis that predation by the epigeal predator Pterostichus melanarius (Coleoptera: Carabidae) on different spiders is species-independent (proportional to density). A combination of population monitoring in winter wheat, molecular identification of juvenile spiders, molecular analysis of predator gut contents and a Monte Carlo simulation model were used to analyse prey choice.
Pterostichus melanarius were pitfall-trapped over three months, and 622 individuals were screened for the remains of four spider species. Predation rates on spiders were 43·6% in June and 33·3% in August and showed clear evidence of prey choice.
Predation on the web-dependent Tenuiphantes tenuis (Linyphiidae) was significantly greater than predicted from a random choice model, while predation on Bathyphantes gracilis (Linyphiidae) was significantly lower. The beetles may be selecting the most abundant species disproportionately (switching) or responding in some cases to spatial niche separation (T. tenuis locate their webs marginally lower than B. gracilis). However, two itinerant hunters, Erigone spp. (Linyphiidae) and Pachygnatha degeeri (Tetragnathidae), were consumed in proportion to their density.
Synthesis and applications. High levels of intraguild predation were revealed using molecular diagnostics. The gut analysis approach provided invaluable data that will inform the future design of appropriate pest management and integrated farming strategies that encourage these predators. The data showed strong evidence of prey choice. Managers can, however, probably encourage high densities of all these known aphid predators (spiders and carabids) because disproportionately high rates of predation on the most common spiders at our field sites (T. tenuis) were not sufficient to prevent strong growth in the density of this species between June and August (adults increased × 1·6 and juveniles × 8·6). Such work is essential if we are to reveal the processes behind functional biodiversity in crops.


The purpose of this study is to explore and understand the social and structural dynamics of an organization working with questions regarding development. The organization in question is Vi-agroforestry, a Swedish based NGO that works around the lake Victoria basin and the focus will be on their office in Rwanda. I have used a qualitative approach and conducted participatory observation as well as semi-structured interviews to gather data.

I have emanated from the individuals in the organization by using a theory of microsociological organisationperspecive to understand how the employees create and is created by the existing social structures. (Blomberg, 2003)
Even though the office in Rwanda only is a relatively small part of Vi-agroforestry's operations it is still highly individual and independent from the rest of the organization. It has an own set of unwritten rules and a locally adapted way of acting. As of now a lot of changes are taking place in the structure and conditions for how the organization can operate, allowing an observer to notice details in how the different levels interact and what the conditions for mutual understanding can be. The office stands in front of big changes that can either divide or unify the staff.


Hybridization experiments were carried out between sub-periodic Brugia malayi and B. pahangi recovered from cats originating from the same area in South Kalimantan (Borneo), Indonesia. Five to six week-old immature males and females of both species from Mongolian gerbil (Meriones unguiculatus) intraperitoneal infections were inoculated into the peritoneal cavity of other gerbils. Mating occurred between the species and microfilariae developed into infective third-stage larvae in mosquitoes. Larvae from the mosquitoes developed into adults in the peritoneal cavity of gerbils but microfilariae were not produced since the males were sterile. Back-crossing between hybrids and males and females of the parental species were also done and female hybrids produced microfilariae when crossed with parental males but females from the parental species did not produce microfilariae when mated with the hybrid males. This confirmed that the males were sterile but the females were not. If these species are hybridized in nature and humans are exposed to hybrid third-stage larvae, could this lead to occult filarial infection? These results confirmed previous hybridization experiments of these species orginating from other geographic areas.


This study was conducted against a back-drop of International Business Management. International Business is a term used to collectively describe all commercial transactions that take place between two or more nations. The objective of the study was to find out the strategies being employed by global firms to become leaders in Kenya's domestic market. This research used a cross-sectional survey design in collecting data from the respondents. In the study, the total population for the study was all the global firms operating in Kenya; however close scrutiny is on those which have successfully managed to become market leaders locally. In this study, emphasis was given to primary data. Content analysis was greatly used to analyse the qualitative data that was gathered for the study. According to the findings, factors that have been repeatedly observed as facilitating the ease or difficulty o f entry and operation in Kenya include lack o f tax holidays on entry; favourable profit repatriation policies also facilitate entry of global companies. The free enterprise market in Kenya makes doing business much easier. Kenya also has a very highly skilled job market. Also, with Kenya being a growing economy, it has been relatively easy for global companies to gain momentum in the market due to the growth path. These and other factors have influenced the migration or otherwise of global companies to Kenya. The main modes of entry that the global companies that we surveyed used to enter the market included partnerships, direct entry, mergers, franchising and exporting. These strategies succeeded and were directly attributed by the respondent companies to their success. Strategies employed to achieve market leadership included localization and standardization, mergers, partnerships, market penetration and premium pricing in some remote cases. These strategies worked well to enhance the leadership of global firms in Kenya. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Declaration.................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgement..................................................................................................................... iii Dedication.................................................................................................................................... iv Abstract......................................................................................................................................... v CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION.................................................................... 1 1.1 Background of the Study...................................................................................... 1 1.1.1 Global Business Operations................................................................. 2 1.1.2 The Kenya Business Environment...................................................... 3 1.1.3 Global Firms Operating in Kenya........................................................ 8 1.2 Research Problem................................................................................................. 9 1.3 Research Objective............................................................................................... 12 1.4 Value o f the Study................................................................................................ 12 CHAPTER TWO: LITERATURE REVIEW.................................................... 14 2.


The condition of the fallopian tubes was assessed in 100 fertile women on whom a caesarean section had been performed and in 100 infertile women who had undergone a diagnostic laparascopy. The 100 infertile women revealed both peritubal adhesions (20% vs 2%) and fimbrial agglutinations (4% vs 0%) in a significantly higher number of cases. When the diagnostic procedure was extended to include the salpingoscopy of 20 women with periampullary and peritubal adhesions, 10% of them were found to be suffering from damage of the endosalphinx. In patients with fimbrial agglutination, the same diagnostic procedure revealed mucosal damage in 40% of the cases. The rate of damage to the endosalpinx may help to explain the relatively high rate of ectopic pregnancies (15%) following microsurgical fimbrioplasty. Thus, in cases where the patient is suffering from peritubal adhesions and fimbrial agglutinations, salpinogoscopy can be of use in deciding whether microsurgery is indicated. In those cases, where there is evidence of damage to the endosalpinx, in-vitro fertilization with intrauterine embryo transfer must be considered as the preferential method.


In dynamic systems, state constraints are formulas that hold in every reachable state. It has been shown that state constraints can be used to greatly reduce the planning search space. They are also useful in program verification. In this paper, we propose a sound but incomplete method for automatic verification and discovery of ∀*∃* state constraints for a class of action theories that include many planning benchmarks. Our method is formulated in the situation calculus, theoretically based on Skolemization and Herbrand Theorem, and implemented with SAT solvers. Basically, we verify a state constraint by strengthening it in a novel and smart way so that it becomes a state invariant. We experimented with the blocks world, logistics and satellite domains, and the results showed that, almost all known state constraints can be verified in a reasonable amount of time, and meanwhile succinct and intuitive related state constraints are discovered.


Birmingham, U.K.—Drawing on three spacecraft—U.S., Japanese, and Russian—that are now flying through Earth's magnetosphere, scientists are planning a 3- to 5-month campaign of coordinated observations. By making simultaneous measurements at different points in this vast region of trapped particles, they hope to unravel how it captures energy from the solar wind and funnels it toward Earth. The campaign is scheduled for this winter, when the orbits of all three satellites will place them in favorable positions.


Background Dispensing medication is a chain of multiple stages, and any error during the dispensing process may cause high potential risk for the patient. Few research studies have investigated the nature and the contributory factors that are associated with dispensing errors in hospital pharmacies. Purpose To determine the nature and severity of unprevented dispensing errors reported in the hospital pharmacy at Luton and Dunstable Hospital in the UK; and to explore the pharmacy staff's perceptions of contributory factors to dispensing errors and strategies to reduce these errors. Material and methods A mixed method approach was used and encompassed two phases. Phase I: a retrospective review of dispensing error reports for an 18 month period from 1 January 2012 to 30 June 2013 was conducted. An assessment of the potential clinical significance of the dispensing errors was undertaken. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics. Phase II: self-administered qualitative questionnaires were distributed to the dispensary team at the hospital. Content analysis using NVivo software was undertaken. Results 766 medication error reports were documented and 49 (6.4%) reports were related to dispensary incidents. The most frequently reported dispensing errors were: dispensing the wrong medicine (n = 9, 18.4%), labelling the wrong strength (n = 8, 16.3%) and dispensing the wrong strength (n = 7, 14.3%). The majority of the dispensing errors had minor or moderate potential to harm patients. Look-alike/sound-alike medicines, high workload, lack of staff experience, fatigue and loss of concentration during work, hurrying through tasks and distraction in the dispensary were the most common contributory factors. Furthermore, ambiguity of the prescriptions was also reported as a contributory factor in the hospital. Conclusion Decreasing distractions in the pharmacy are needed to enhance patient safety. Furthermore, monitoring and reporting errors, and educating the dispensary team about these errors are also needed. An e-prescribing system may help to improve dispensing efficiency and safety. The findings of this study re-emphasise the fact that dispensing errors are widespread in hospital pharmacy. Therefore, efficient interventions need to be implemented to mitigate these errors. References and/or Acknowledgements Many thanks to the Saudi Ministry of Health for the scholarship and funding my study No conflict of interest.


For big breasts I no longer use classic Strõmbeck, McKissock or Dufourmentel techniques, because we can be faced with problems of the areolar complex. On the other hand to achieve a good, long lasting result we need to realize a very important reduction. The drawing is done high at 17 +/- 1 cm with the long Wise pattern and the McKissock lazy-S. Only the upper part of the dermis flap is prepared for bed of the areolar complex and for reinforcement of the vertical part of the T scar. This technique of modeling mammectomy is perhaps one of the quickest and safest method of breast reduction. We present our experience after 50 bilateral reductions.


Introduction Hungary has a single payer health insurance system offering free healthcare for acute cerebrovascular disorders. Within the capital, Budapest, however there are considerable microregional socioeconomic differences. We hypothesized that socioeconomic deprivation reflects in less favorable stroke characteristics despite universal access to care. Methods From the database of the National Health Insurance Fund, we identified 4779 patients hospitalized between 2002 and 2007 for acute cerebrovascular disease (hereafter ACV, i.e. ischemic stroke, intracerebral hemorrhage, or transient ischemia), among residents of the poorest (District 8, n = 2618) and the wealthiest (District 12, n = 2161) neighborhoods of Budapest. Follow-up was until March 2013. Results Mean age at onset of ACV was 70±12 and 74±12 years for District 8 and 12 (p<0.01). Age-standardized incidence was higher in District 8 than in District 12 (680/100,000/year versus 518/100,000/year for ACV and 486/100,000/year versus 259/100,000/year for ischemic stroke). Age-standardized mortality of ACV overall and of ischemic stroke specifically was 157/100,000/year versus 100/100,000/year and 122/100,000/year versus 75/100,000/year for District 8 and 12. Long-term case fatality (at 1,5, and 10 years) for ACV and for ischemic stroke was higher in younger District 8 residents (41–70 years of age at the index event) compared to D12 residents of the same age. This gap between the districts increased with the length of follow-up. Of the risk diseases the prevalence of hypertension and diabetes was higher in District 8 than in District 12 (75% versus 66%, p<0.001; and 26% versus 16%, p<0.001). Discussion Despite universal healthcare coverage, the disadvantaged district has higher ACV incidence and mortality than the wealthier neighborhood. This difference affects primarily the younger age groups. Long-term follow-up data suggest that inequity in institutional rehabilitation and home-care should be investigated and improved in disadvantaged neighborhoods.


The invention discloses a novel urban intelligent bus station management system. The novel urban intelligent bus station management system comprises a plurality of terminals and a data processing center, and is characterized in that each terminal comprises an advertising module, a public service module, a touch screen and a wireless communication module, wherein the data processing center comprises a data receiving module, a data storage module, a data calling module and a log record module. The novel urban intelligent bus station management system is provided with the public service module; through the arranged functional modules, the novel urban intelligent bus station management system can be used for propagating external images of a city, and introducing tourist attractions, cultural landscape, and places of interest of the local city; meanwhile, an arranged public security module has a very important effect on maintaining the stability of social security; the urban traffic transportation convenience is improved by a taxi convenient module, so that good convenience is brought to tourists and passengers; meanwhile, instant information (including earthquake, flood, mudslide and other urban public information) can cover and be distributed in a large area in the first time by an instant information distribution function of the system, so that the city is managed effectively, and the interaction of urban population and foreign tourists can be promoted.


The fusion of color and lidar data plays a critical role in object detection for autonomous vehicles, which base their decision making on these inputs. While existing methods exploit redundant and complimentary information under good imaging conditions, they fail to do this in adverse weather and imaging conditions where the sensory streams can be asymmetrically distorted. These rare "edge-case" scenarios are not represented in available data sets, and existing fusion architectures are not designed to handle severe asymmetric distortions. We present a deep fusion architecture that allows for robust fusion in fog and snow without having large labeled training data available for these scenarios. Departing from proposal-level fusion, we propose a real-time single-shot model that adaptively fuses features driven by temporal coherence of the distortions. We validate the proposed method, trained on clean data, in simulation and on unseen conditions of in-the-wild driving scenarios.


Introduction: Over 50% of patients with colorectal cancer (CRC) will progress and/or develop metastases. Biomarkers capable of predicting progression, risk stratification and therapeutic benefit are needed. Cancer stem cells are thought to be responsible for tumor initiation, dissemination and treatment failure. Therefore, we hypothesized that CRC cancer stem cell markers (CRCSC) will identify a group of patients at high risk for progression. Methods: Paraffin-embedded tissue cores of normal (n=8), and histopathologically well-defined primary (n= 30) and metastatic (n=10) CRC were arrayed in duplicate on tissue microarrays (TMAs). Expression profiles of non-CD133 CRCSC (CD29, CD44, ALDH1A1, ALDH1B1, EpCam, and CD166) were detected by immunohistochemistry and the association with clinicopathological data and patient outcomes was determined using standard statistical methodology. An independent pathologist, blinded to the clinical data scored the samples. Scoring included percent positive cells (0 to 4, 0 = <10%, 1 = 10 - 24%, 2 = 25 - 49%, 3 = 50 - 74%, 4 = 75 - 100%), and the intensity of positively stained cells (0 to 4; 0 = no staining, 1 = diminutive intensity, 2 = low intensity, 3 = intermediate intensity, 4 = high intensity). The pathologic score represents the sum of these two values, reported in this paper as a combined IHC staining score (CSS). Results: Of 30 patients 7 were AJCC stage IIA, 10 stage IIIB, 7 stage IIIC and 6 stage IV. Median follow-up was 113 months. DFI was 17 months. Median overall survival (OS) was not reached. Stage-specific OS was: II - not reached; III - not reached; IV - 11 months. In a univariate analysis, poor OS was associated with loss of CD29 expression; median OS, 32 months vs. not reached for CSS 3-7 vs. >7.5, respectively; p=0.052 comparing entire curves, after adjustment. In a Cox model analysis, loss of CD29 exhibited a trend toward association with survival (p=0.098) after adjusting for the effect of stage (p=0.0076). Greater expression of ALDH1A1 was associated with increasing stage (p=0.042 over stages 2, 3b, 3c, and 4) while loss of CD29 expression exhibited a trend toward being associated with stages 3 and 4 (p=0.08). Compared to normal colon tissue, primary tumors were associated with increased expression of ALDH1B1 (p=0.008). ALD1H1B1 expression level differed according to whether the tumor was moderately or poorly differentiated, well differentiated, or mucinous; the highest expression levels were associated with moderately or poorly differentiated tumors (p=0.011). Lymph node metastases were associated with a trend toward decreased expression of EpCAM (p = 0.06) when comparing 0 vs. 1 vs. 2+ positive lymph nodes, as was CD29 (p = 0.08) when comparing 0 vs. any positive lymph nodes. Compared to normal colon tissue metastatic colon cancers from different patients were associated with increased ALDH1B1 expression (p=0.001) whereas CD29 expression was higher in normal colonic tissue (p=0.014). Conclusion: CD29 may be associated with survival as well as clinical stage and number of lymph nodes. ALDH1B1 expression was associated with differentiation as well as type of tissue evaluated. ALDH1A1 was associated with clinical stage, and decreased EpCAM expression was found in patients with advanced lymph node stage. CRCSCs may be useful biomarkers to risk stratify, and estimate outcomes in CRC. Larger prospective studies are required to validate the current findings.


In the present study, a new flame retardancy and non-slip finishing system in one step was developed for cotton/polyester (Co/PET) fabrics. Recipes including P-N synergetic FR agent, PVP (PR)-PDCDA (Fire-off), polysilicic acid and citric acid combinations were developed and applied to cotton and Co/PET fabrics by impregnation method. Flame retardancy (FR) properties and seam slippage resistance of treated fabrics with Fire-off/polysilicic acid systems were investigated. In addition, characterization analysis such as Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), differential scanning calorimeter (DSC) were performed and tensile properties of treated fabrics were tested in order to detect any changes on mechanical properties of fabrics after treatment. Results demonstrated that Fire-off/ polysilicic acid treatment leads good FR properties (LOI ˃27) and seam slippage resistance (warp: 2.2 mm, weft 1.2 mm) with superior ease of application in one-step process. ARTICLE HISTORY Received: 26.07.2018 Accepted: 03.01.2019


Marine Studies Group Meeting 28 January at 2.00 p.m. A discussion on the geology of Rocka11 Plateau J. Francheteau Plate tectonics in the N.E, Atlantic R. A. Scrutton Crustal structure A. S. Laughton Deep boreholes R. J. Bailey Reflection profiles of the continental margin R. A. Eden Hard rock sampling D. G. Roberts Stratigraphy and sediment distribution. Engineering Group Meeting 8 February at 5-15 p.m. Landslide Studies at Charmouth, Dorset B. W. Conway, B. Denness, P. Grainger and D. M. McCann. Joint Meeting of Volcanic Studies Group and The Royal Society 9-10 February 1972 Mount Etna and the 1971 Eruption a discussion meeting organised by J. Sutton, J. E. Guest, R. R. Skelhorn and R. L. Wilson, held in the apartments of the Royal Society. A. Rittman: The structure and evolution of Mount Etna A. Romano: Some considerations on the magma of the 1971 eruption R. Cristofolini: Recent trends in research on Mount Etna A. T. Huntingdon, F. Le Guern: Collection and analysis of gases J. E. Guest: The summit region prior to the 1971 eruption R. L. Wilson: Palaeomagnetic studies M. J. Downes: Experiental studies on quenched rocks R. J. Arculas: Pillow lavas in the Catania area H. Tazieff: Film of the 1971 eruption H. Tazieff: Structural implications of the 1971 eruption G. P. L. Walker, Some recent observations on B.Booth: Mount Etna Ordinary General Meeting 16 February 1972 at 4.30 p.m. The Goastal Batholith of Peru and its tectonic setting W. S. Pitcher & E. J. Cobbing Within


Whole genome sequencing is quickly becoming more affordable and accessible, with the prospect of personal genome sequencing for under $1,000 now widely said to be in sight. The ethical issues raised by the use of this technology in the research context have received some significant attention, but little has been written on its use in the clinical context, and most of this analysis has been futuristic forecasting. This is problematic, given the speed with which whole genome sequencing technology is likely to be incorporated into clinical care. This paper explores one particular subset of these issues: the implications of adopting this technology in the prenatal context without a good understanding of when and how it is useful.

Prenatal whole genome sequencing differs from current prenatal genetic testing practice in a number of ethically relevant ways. Most notably, whole genome sequencing would radically increase the volume and scope of available prenatal genetic data. The wealth of new data could enhance reproductive decision-making, promoting parents' freedom to make well-informed reproductive decisions. We argue, however, that there is potential for prenatal whole genome sequencing to alter clinical practice in undesirable ways, especially in the short term. We are concerned that the technology could (1) change the norms and expectations of pregnancy in ways that complicate parental autonomy and informed decision-making, (2) exacerbate the deleterious role that genetic determinism plays in child rearing, and (3) undermine children's future autonomy by removing the option of not knowing their genetic information without appropriate justification.


The present-day situation requires that a physician should be broad-minded and alert to abdominal tuberculosis. To diagnose abdominal tuberculosis in internal medicine is a challenge, which has been evidenced by studies of the clinical picture of abdominal tuberculosis in 75 patients. The polymorphism and clinical features of abdominal tuberculosis under the present conditions are shown. In 37 (49.3%) patients, abdominal tuberculosis was revealed during surgical interventions. By taking into account the inadequate informative value of indirect studies, the absence of early pathognomic symptoms of the disease and reliable criteria for evaluating the activity of the process, the authors propose to use invasive endoscopic studies of the abdomen, by making biopsy of the involved tissue. The morphological and bacteriological studies of the biopsy specimens obtained permit verification of the diagnosis of abdominal tuberculosis.


For several decades, researchers across many disciplines have developed a large body of research exploring the topic of coming out. This research has provided many insights about what it means for gay, lesbian, and bisexual people to acknowledge their sexualities and to share their sexual identities with others. As helpful as this research has been, little has been done to move scholarship toward a holistic theory of coming out. This chapter provides a step in that direction by oering a constitutive model of coming out. This three-level model proposes that culture informs a person's viewpoints and personal acceptance regarding sexuality; and that both culture and a person's personal viewpoints impact how sexual identities are shared with others. Data from qualitative research studies about coming out help to illustrate the concepts associated with the model. Jimmie Manning Identity, Relationships, and Culture:


An Interactive electronic Atlas (IeA) was developed to assist first‐year nursing students with interpretation of laboratory‐based prosected cadaveric material. It was designed, using pedagogically sound principles, as a student‐centered resource accessible to students from a wide range of learning backgrounds. It consisted of a highly simplified interactive interface limited to essential anatomical structures and was intended for use in a blended learning situation. The IeA's nine modules mirrored the body systems covered in a Nursing Biosciences course, with each module comprising a maximum of 10 pages using the same template: an image displaying a cadaveric specimen and, in most cases, a corresponding anatomical model with navigation panes (menus) on one side. Cursor movement over the image or clicking the menu highlighted the structure with a transparent overlay and revealed a succinct functional description. The atlas was complemented by a multiple‐choice database of nearly 1,000 questions using IeA images. Students' perceptions of usability and utility were measured by survey (n = 115; 57% of the class) revealing mean access of 2.3 times per week during the 12‐week semester and a median time of three hours of use. Ratings for usability and utility were high, with means ranging between 4.24 and 4.54 (five‐point Likert scale; 5 = strongly agree). Written responses told a similar story for both usability and utility. The role of providing basic computer‐assisted learning support for a large first‐year class is discussed in the context of current research into student‐centered resources and blended learning in human anatomy. Anat Sci Educ 8: 126–132. © 2014 American Association of Anatomists.


Angiopoietin-1/Tie2 (ANG1/Tie2) signaling is well documented as regulating angiogenesis and vessel maturation. This pathway is complicated by involvement of the orphan receptor Tie1, which has been implicated as both a positive and negative regulator of ANG1/Tie2 signaling, and ANG2, which can serve as both a Tie2 agonist and antagonist, depending on the context. Two papers in this issue of the JCI provide new insight into this complicated pathway. Korhonen et al. reveal that Tie1 acts to modulate the effects of ANG1 and ANG2 on Tie2 in vitro and in vivo. Kim et al. demonstrate that ANG2 acts as a Tie2 agonist in non-pathological conditions, whereas in the setting of inflammation, ANG2 functions as a Tie2 antagonist and promotes vascular dysfunction. Both studies indicate that inflammation promotes cleavage of the ectodomain of Tie1 and that this cleavage event corresponds with the switch of ANG2 from a Tie2 agonist to an antagonist. The results of these studies lay the groundwork for future strategies to therapeutically exploit this pathway in diseases characterized by adverse vascular remodeling and increased permeability.