Pb(Zr, Ti)O3 thin films were successfully prepared on (111)Pt/IrO2/SiO2/(100)Si substrates using SrTiO3 seeds at 290 oC by RF inductive heating type and 350 oC by resistive heating type metalorganic chemical vapor deposition method (MOCVD), respectively. The SrTiO3 was chosen as seed layers and prepared by pulsed laser deposition method. The crystal structures and orientations of SrTiO3 seeds were changed by deposition temperature. In the case of preparation with RF inductive heating MOCVD, the remanent polarization (2Pr) and coercive field (2Ec) were 42 μC/cm2 and 256 kV/cm, respectively.


The global collaborations and partnerships in research and science are evidently growing as an inevitable reality to tackle the mounting common global challenges. To overcome all of these challenges and create a balance between countries, institutions, stakeholders, and fields and to strengthen the research and science fair collaborations and boost institutional research capacities and potential, the Council on Health Research for Development (COHRED), developed an evidence-based tool, the Research Fairness Initiative (RFI). This paper investigates the RFI experience and application among the Middle East partners to propose better ways for better research and science collaborations. The COHRED team used two scientific methods to understand the region's stakeholders on research collaboration. 7 telecom. meetings were carried out with 7 academic institutions in the region and a literature review was implemented. Partners in the region were largely interested when the RFI was introduced to 7 academic institutions from five countries: Palestine, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia. 3 have launched the work of the RFI and they will be potential RFI reporting institutions by submitting RFI report. Efforts seeking to build and strengthen research and scientific collaborations receive real attention and also evidently proves the lack of collaboration and partnership platforms and frameworks is a reality. The RFI was seen as a useful institutional instrument to develop the institution's capacity. The major reason behind this is that the institutions are lacking structural, technical, logistical, ethical, resource capacities to establish and develop regional and international research and scientific collaborations. Research collaboration is a global, regional, and national priority and RFI is evidently recognized as a realistic and forward-thinking tool in building collaborations based on fairness, integrity, impact, and transparency.

 RFI is one of the best institutional reporting tools that ensure equitable and fair research collaborations. Research collaboration is a global, regional, and national priority for the slow-developing countries (Middle East region).


Stable forested environments can be converted to savanna in response to changes in environmental disturbances. New Caledonia is a biodiversity hotspot; significant ecological and economic resources would be lost if forests were turned into savanna by anthropogenic environmental changes. On the landscape scale, systems that have undergone shifts of this kind are characterized by sharp forest–savanna boundaries and mosaic-like distributions of savanna and forest. Understanding the locations and the dynamics of such boundaries is a challenge for ecologists and is critical for landscape management and biodiversity conservation. Using a time series of aerial photographs (1955–2000) and a forest habitat suitability map, we tested the hypothesis that topography and spatial processes, especially those relating to fire spread and seed dispersal, are the main determinants of the spatial distribution of rainforest and savanna in a New Caledonian landscape covering 24 km2. Within the studied landscape, the overall forest coverage decreased by 24% between 1976 and 2000. This was primarily due to the contraction of forests on west-facing slopes, which accounted for about 90% of the total loss. Conversely, the east-facing forests seemed to have contracted extensively prior to the studied period, and were confined to refuges. A habitat suitability index calculated from the landscape's topographical features using generalized additive models accurately predicted both the presence of forests and the probability of forest expansion/contraction. We also provide evidence that spatial processes such as fire spread and seed dispersal limit the expansion and contraction of forests. Our results suggest that rainforests on west-facing slopes in New Caledonia will be progressively destroyed by fire until they are restricted to refuges along thalwegs and creeks, as appears to have already happened for their east-facing counterparts.


: Enalapril maleate (MK-421), an ethyl ester, is an angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor from a novel series of substituted N-carboxymethyldipeptides. The parent diacid (MK-422) N-[(S)-1-carboxy-3-phenylpropyl]-L-Ala-L-Pro of MK-421 inhibited hog plasma ACE with an I50 of 1.2 nM. Because deesterification occurs slowly or not at all in vitro, the in vitro I50 for enalapril was 1200 nM. However, both enalapril and MK-422 were potent inhibitors of ACE by the i.v. and oral routes in rats and dogs. In rats with experimental hypertension, enalapril was most potent in those models in which the renin-angiotensin system plays a dominant role (salt restriction, two-kidney Grollman) and in models rendered renin dependent by diuretics, although blood pressure reduction did occur in low or normal renin models such as spontaneously hypertensive rats, in which inhibition of ACE as measured by the blockade of angiotensin I pressor responses bore little temporal relationship to the later fall in blood pressure after enalapril.


The Wellington after the Quake conference, organised by the Earthquake Commission in Wellington in March 1995, sought to answer some of the questions faced by all concerned with the recovery and restoration phases of a major earthquake in a nationally significant city. The papers, which were by a range of international authorities, and the discussions were published later that year, and some copies of the volume are still available from the Earthquake Commission.
Then, in November 1996, the Earthquake Commission and the Insurance Council of New Zealand jointly sponsored a seminar on Natural Hazards: Finding, managing and sharing people and information, and a summary booklet was prepared as a record for those who attended and to inform those who were unable to attend.
This seminar, Counting the Cost: The economic effects of a major earthquake, was again sponsored jointly by the Earthquake Commission and the Insurance Council of New Zealand, with the intention of looking more closely at the economic effects of a major earthquake. It attracted about 200 participants, most coming from the insurance and banking industries, fund and risk managers, and economists in a range of organisations, although there were also representatives from emergency management and civil defence organisations, local and regional councils, and earthquake engineers.
This report on the information presented in the papers and discussions has been prepared to highlight the main conclusions and themes raised, for both the attendees and a wider audience who were unable to be present.


Background:
 A relevant number of stroke patients have swallowing disabilities; assessment of swallowing ability is an important procedure on a stroke unit to reduce complications. There is still doubt whether or not a trained nurse has a similar efficacy in the assessment of swallowing difficulties as does a specialized speech therapist (ST).

 Methods:
 Our ST has trained any stroke unit nurse (SN) in assessment of swallowing function. A test using first thickened flavored water (custard consistency) and 5 ml water is done.

 For a pilot study, during 6 weeks all stroke unit patients with cerebral ischemia were included. Patients with TIA, non-stroke diagnoses or altered consciousness (score 2-3 for item 1a of the NIHSS) were excluded. Swallowing function was evaluated independently by the patient's SN and latest on the next working day by the ST. A 5 step scale was used, measuring from no food, to 2 different texture-modified diets, to normal food.
 Cohen's kappa statistic was calculated to evaluate congruence of the assessments. Univariate statistics were done to analyze difference between cohorts with equivalent and different grading.

 Results:
 Overall 90 patients were included (53% male, 93% ischemic stroke, mean age 71 years). In 72 (80%) of the SN and ST scored identical (10% no food allowed, 11% special food preparation, 79% no problem). In 11 (12%) SN were more careful than the ST, and in 7 (8%) the SN assessed less swallowing-problems than the ST. Cohens's kappa was 0.6067. In four of those patients the ST found relevant swallowing problems, which could have led to feeding abstention (2 patients) or special food preparation (2 patients). Comparing those 18 patients with differences in the assessments and those 72 without, presence of dysarthria was the only different parameter and was more present in the patients with varying rating (Mann Whitney U, p=0.0019)

 Conclusion:

 In this unselected cohort of ischemic stroke patients, swallowing problems were detected in 32%, when using the ST's assessment as gold standard. Inter-rater agreement with a trained SN was good. In a small percentage (8%) nurses had overseen swallowing problems and in 4% this was relevant. Presence of dysarthria was the only factor, which was different between equal and unequal graded patients.


Abstract. Variations in ground thermal conditions in Svalbard were studied based on measurements and modelling. Ground temperature data from boreholes were used to calibrate a transient heat flow model describing depth and time variations in temperatures. The model was subsequently forced with historical surface air temperature records and possible future temperatures downscaled from multiple global climate models. We discuss ground temperature development since the early 20th century, and the thermal responses in relation to ground characteristics and snow cover. The modelled ground temperatures show a gradual increase between 1912 and 2010, by about 1.5 °C to 2 °C at 20 m depth. The active layer thickness (ALT) is modelled to have increased slightly, with the rate of increase depending on water content of the near-surface layers. The used scenario runs predict a significant increase in ground temperatures and an increase of ALT depending on soil characteristics.


The rice root-knot nematode (Meloidogyne graminicola) is an important pathogen of rice in Nepal. Surveys were conducted in 65 rice fields in the Rupandehi, Chitwan and Parsa districts of Nepal by collecting rice soil and root samples from 25, 20 and 20 grower fields, respectively, in 1999-2001. Soil bioassays using these field soils were done in 1999 and 2000 to understand the factors affecting variability in population densities of the rice root-knot nematode, severity of symptoms and crop yields. Rice fields with light soils and low yields had larger nematode population densities. Similarly, larger nematode population densities were recovered from symptomatic fields/symptomatic plants (chlorotic plants in patches with reduced growth and reduced tiller numbers) as compared to asymptomatic plants/fields. Higher nematode populations were observed with severe symptomatic plants. In the surveys and the screen-house tests, all rice cultivars tested were susceptible to the nematode but acted differentially. Soil physical and chemical properties from these fields were analyzed and correlated with nematode population densities using different models. A positive relationship with sand and phosphorus, a negative relationship with nitrogen, no relationship with silt and pH and a variable relationship with clay (negative to positive relationship) to nematode population densities were observed in the absence of other predictors and interaction terms in the models. However, when these predictor variables were considered in the presence of other predictor variables, with or without interactions, the relationships were different. In addition, volunteer rice and seedling rice were also sampled from different parts in 1999 to understand their role in nematode survival and dispersal, respectively. Volunteer plants and rice seedlings supported nematode survival, growth, and multiplication in the absence of a rice crop in the field, so helping to increase the severity of the nematode problem. The effect of the rice root-knot nematode populations on rice yield reduction was studied under the influence of nitrogen plus phosphorus and compost in micro-plots. The results indicated that nematode-induced rice yield reduction was low when plots were supplied with nitrogen and phosphorus as compared to control plots (no fertilizer or compost).


Abstract Pinus subsection Cembroides comprises approximately 15 taxa distributed from the southwestern United States to south central Mexico. Despite previous phylogenetic studies based on morphology, nuclear ribosomal DNA, and plastid DNA, we still lack a robust phylogenetic hypothesis and clear delimitation for the closely-related species within the group. We studied the evolutionary relationships within subsection Cembroides and explored incomplete lineage sorting and reticulation using low-copy number nuclear genes. Concatenation and multispecies coalescent phylogenies were inferred from samples representing all taxa from subsection Cembroides and outgroups corresponding to the closely-related subsections Balfourianae, Nelsoniae, Gerardianae, and Krempfianae. The concatenation and coalescence-based trees mainly agreed with one another in recovering Pinus subsection Cembroides as monophyletic and in recovering similar relationships among species as in previous plastid DNA-based studies. Phylogenetic position and admixture analysis suggest that P. californiarum should be treated as a separate species from P. monophylla. Furthermore, our results support recognizing P. fallax as a species rather than as an infraspecific taxon of P. monophylla or P. edulis. The ASTRAL-III tree was consistent with the presence of very high levels of ILS in the group of pinyon pines with small cones. Analyses that account for both incomplete lineage sorting and reticulation identify some unexpected hybridization scenarios that were not reported in the literature.


If the best universities in the world – who have the widest choice of candidates – systematically appoint top researchers as their vice chancellors and presidents, is this one form of evidence that, on average, better researchers make better leaders? This paper addresses the first part of the question: are they currently appointing distinguished researchers? The study documents a positive correlation between the lifetime citations of a university's president and the position of that university in a world ranking. The lifetime citations are counted by hand of the leaders of the top 100 universities identified by the Institute of Higher Education at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in their 'Academic Ranking of World Universities' (2004). These numbers are then normalised by adjusting for the different citation conventions across academic disciplines. The results are not driven by outliers. This paper posits the theory that there are two central components involved in leading research universities: managerial expertise and inherent knowledge. It is suggested here that active and successful researchers may have greater inherent knowledge about the academy that in turn informs their role as leader.


From the Publisher:
This title shows developers how to build Internet-based, distributed applications using Microsoft .NET Remoting, which enables powerful remote interaction among objects. A fundamental understanding of .NET Remoting is crucial as developers shift to developing distributed, Internet-based applications. Until recently, DCOM was the preferred method for developing distributed applications on Microsoft platforms. But as this book demonstrates, the .NET Remoting architecture is much easier to use and extend than DCOM. The book covers all aspects of .NET Remoting, including in-depth coverage of the .NET Remoting architecture plus concrete examples, best practices, and performance tips to show how to extend and customize the framework.


Purpose
DNA methylation is a key epigenetic modification involved in various biological processes and diseases. Corneal epithelial wound healing (CEWH) is essential for restoring corneal integrity and transparency after injury. However, the role of DNA methylation in CEWH remains elusive. Here, we investigate the function and underlying mechanism of DNA methylation in regulating CEWH.

Methods
Dot blots and global methylation assays determined DNA methylation levels during CEWH. Quantitative RT-PCR and Western blot analysis examined the expression of DNA methyltransferases (DNMTs), cyclin-dependent kinase inhibitor 2B (CDKN2B), and miR-200a during CEWH, respectively. MTS assays and flow cytometry were used to analyze human corneal epithelial cell (HCEC) proliferation and cell cycle, respectively. The in vitro scratch wound assay assessed HCEC migration and an in vivo murine corneal epithelial debridement model evaluated wound healing. Using bisulfite sequencing PCR, we determined the DNA methylation status of the candidate genes. Transfection of miR-200a mimic or inhibitor assessed the function of miR-200a in HCECs. Rescue experiments were performed to clarify the correlation between DNMT1 and miR-200a/CDKN2B during CEWH.

Results
DNMT1 and DNMT3B expression was significantly upregulated during CEWH, resulting in a significant global DNA hypermethylation. DNMT1 downregulation dramatically delayed CEWH in vivo, and suppressed HCEC proliferation and migration. MiR-200a inhibited HCEC migration. Furthermore, miR-200a and CDKN2B were identified as molecular targets of DNA methylation and as having a causal connection with DNMT1.

Conclusions
DNMT1-mediated DNA hypermethylation can enhance the process of CEWH by directly targeting miR-200a and CDKN2B. This insight pinpoints novel potential drug targets for promoting CEWH.


The recent phase-out of the soil fumigant methyl bromide (MB) due to its impact on stratospheric ozone pre-sents a huge challenge to strawberry nursery producers. We evaluated the effectiveness of alternative fumigants on soil pests and plant productivity, as well as production costs in California strawberry nurseries. Our trials followed nursery stock through low- and high-elevation phases of runner-plant propagation and a complete cycle of fruit production in coastal fields. Plant yields from the nurseries and fruit yields from Oxnard and Watsonville indicated that nursery plots treated with iodomethane plus chloropicrin, with 1,3-dichloropropene followed by dazomet, and with chloropicrin followed by dazomet produced runner-plant yields that were similar to methyl bromide plus chloropicrin. However, our economic analysis suggests that nursery profitability may nonetheless suffer from the loss of methyl bromide.


This study aimed to evaluate the desire to live among patients with advanced hepatobiliary-pancreatic cancer who were excluded from radical treatment and to examine the ideal nursing support for them. We recruited 18 patients in a department specializing in the treatment of hepatobiliary-pancreatic cancer at a university hospital in the metropolitan area of Japan. We included those with advanced hepatobiliary-pancreatic cancer who received a treatment other than definitive treatment. We conducted semi-structured interviews, and the responses were analyzed qualitatively and descriptively. Events experienced by patients with advanced hepatobiliary-pancreatic cancer and out of indication for radical treatment were divided into five major phases, while desire to live was divided into 11 categories. Two of these categories were represented by the word "death". The desire to live was present in all phases, and the expressions of these desires were diverse. Patients suppressed expressing their desire to live because they understood that their situation was challenging. In addition, there was a tendency to avoid expressing their desire to live to medical staff and their families. We found that nurses need to establish a medical relationship in which patients can express their desire to live and become connected to nursing support.


Chronic fatigue sindrome is a relatively unknown and underdiagnosed entity in Italy where its epidemiology remains uncertain, as well as its etiology, although it causes important disability in those affected. Classification criteria by Fukuda are available to diagnose the syndrome. Its epidemiology indicates that it is probably more frequent in Northern countries and it is described in Gulf War veterans. Etiological hypotheses include infectious diseases, immunology and neurology. Among these hypotheses sickness behavior mimes certain aspects of this syndrome and is characterized by a cytokine imbalance in the central nervous system and in the periphery. There are no valid therapies available at the moment. In the laboratory of Immunogenetics, we are constituting a biological bank of the syndrome to study the immunogenetic aspects of the disease in the hope of delucidating some of the obscure areas of its etiopathogenesis.


: Esthesioneuroblastoma is an uncommon tumor originating in the upper nasal cavity and constitutes 3% of all intranasal neoplasms. Few references exist about the expression of somatostatin receptors in these tumors. Our case demonstrates a good correlation between the somatostatin receptor scintigraphy and magnetic resonance imaging.


Cloud-native mobile networks pave the road for Network Slicing as a Service (NSaaS), where slice overbooking is a promising management strategy to maximize the revenues from admitted slices by exploiting the fact they are unlikely to fully utilize their reserved resources concurrently. While seminal works have shown the potential of overbooking for NSaaS in simplistic cases, its realization is challenging in practical scenarios with realistic slice demands, where its actual performance remains to be tested. In this paper, we propose kaNSaaS, a complete solution for NSaaS management with slice overbooking that combines deep learning and classical optimization to jointly solve the key tasks of admission control and resource allocation. Experiments with large-scale measurement data of actual tenant demands show that kaNSaaS increases the network operator profits by 300% with respect to NSaaS management strategies that do not employ overbooking, while outperforming by more than 20% state-of-the-art overbooking-based approaches.


Background: Magnetic resonance guided high intensity focused ultrasound (MRgHIFU) therapy is a promising new technology to ablate tissues non-invasively. Exact knowledge of the location of the target organ as well as the risk structures on the beam path is crucial to a successful therapy. One particularly important structure is the ribcage due to its vicinity to the liver, and bones' absorption and reflection of ultrasound energy causing harm to themselves and the surrounding tissues. Therefore, it is necessary to detect ribs in MR images.


For most if not all European herpetofauna, range-wide mtDNA phylogeographies have been published. This facilitates establishing the provenance of introduced populations. However, precision is contingent on the spatial genetic structure across the range of the taxon under study and, in particular, from where within that range the introduction was sourced. In the Netherlands, the common midwife toad, Alytes obstetricans, only naturally occurs in the extreme southeast and is on the decline there. Yet, introduced populations thrive elsewhere in the country. We use mtDNA analysis to try to determine the origin of two introduced populations along the Dutch coast, in the city of The Hague and the dune area Meijendel. We compiled a database of hundreds of individuals from throughout the distribution range and added over 130 individuals from both native and introduced populations from the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. The mtDNA haplotypes found in the introduced populations are associated with postglacial expansion. The main haplotype predominates in the natural range in the Netherlands, but also occurs much more widely across western Europe, north of the Pyrenees. A closely related haplotype, newly identified from The Hague, was not found in the native Netherlands range, suggesting an origin from abroad. The combination of low phylogeographic resolution and low sampling density in the postglacially colonized part of the range hampers our ability to determine the provenance of the introduced A. obstetricans populations.


Objectives To develop and validate a new algorithm to identify patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and estimate disease prevalence using administrative health databases (AHDs) of the Italian Lombardy region. Design Case–control and cohort diagnostic accuracy study. Methods In a randomly selected sample of 827 patients drawn from a tertiary rheumatology centre (training set), clinically validated diagnoses were linked to administrative data including diagnostic codes and drug prescriptions. An algorithm in steps of decreasing specificity was developed and its accuracy assessed calculating sensitivity/specificity, positive predictive value (PPV)/negative predictive value, with corresponding CIs. The algorithm was applied to two validating sets: 106 patients from a secondary rheumatology centre and 6087 participants from the primary care. Alternative algorithms were developed to increase PPV at population level. Crude and adjusted prevalence estimates taking into account algorithm misclassification rates were obtained for the Lombardy region. Results The algorithms included: RA certification by a rheumatologist, certification for other autoimmune diseases by specialists, RA code in the hospital discharge form, prescription of disease-modifying antirheumatic drugs and oral glucocorticoids. In the training set, a four-step algorithm identified clinically diagnosed RA cases with a sensitivity of 96.3 (95% CI 93.6 to 98.2) and a specificity of 90.3 (87.4 to 92.7). Both external validations showed highly consistent results. More specific algorithms achieved >80% PPV at the population level. The crude RA prevalence in Lombardy was 0.52%, and estimates adjusted for misclassification ranged from 0.31% (95% CI 0.14% to 0.42%) to 0.37% (0.25% to 0.47%). Conclusions AHDs are valuable tools for the identification of RA cases at the population level, and allow estimation of disease prevalence and to select retrospective cohorts.


We have studied the effects of two endotoxins, S enteritidis and E coli on liver, pancreas, intestine, lung and kidney of 10 day old Sprague Dawley rat at light and electron microscope levels. One group of experimental animals (N = 31) received a single intraperitoneal injection of 0.1 mg/kg of S enteritidis endotoxin. The second experimental group (N = 34) received multiple intraperitoneal injections of 5 to 10 mg/kg of E coli endotoxin at 15 minute intervals over a period of 75 minutes. Within four hours of injections, histopathologic evaluation of all the tissues revealed interstitial edema, widening of blood capillary lumina, accumulation of polymorphonuclear leukocytes and platelets in capillary lumina and marked swelling, vacuolization and focal desquamation of endothelial cells in microvasculature. Hepatocytes showed loss of glycogen, vacuolization and degeneration in the centro-portal region. Islet cells of pancreas also revealed swelling and vacuolization. In the small intestine, hemorrhagic pools of blood were frequently seen in lamina propria and the apical portion of villi showed degeneration and breakdown. Lungs showed focal hemorrhage, collapse of alveolar architecture and swelling of endothelium in larger artereoles. Based on these studies, we suggest that endothelial cells of microvasculature in various tissues of 10 day old rat are extremely sensitive to endotoxins, irrespective of source, and cells derived from reticuloendothelial system may play an important role in the endotoxicosis.


A number of rural household-based productive activities, such as kitchen gardens, livestock rearing and micro enterprises, are dependent on adequate supplies of domestic water to operate. This paper examines whether improved access to piped water can facilitate these types of activities, particularly for poor households. Using data from rural Vietnam, we find that most household enterprises use non-metered water and have very small profit margins. Thus, the evidence suggests that these enterprises may be better supported by a household-level water supply infrastructure, such as well pumps and rainwater catchment tanks, rather than by piped systems in rural areas. We also found an unanticipated link between operating small-scale food production businesses and raising livestock: for many households, waste products from food-based micro enterprises were used for rearing pigs, and this enabled business owners to expand their pork production, a significant source of income and prosperity in rural Vietnam.


This study was conducted to examine the effect of corporal punishment on antisocial behavior of children using stronger statistical controls than earlier literature in this area; to examine whether the effect of corporal punishment on antisocial behavior is nonlinear; and to investigate whether the effects of corporal punishment on antisocial behavior differ across racial and ethnic groups. The author used a nonexperimental design and data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The analysis was conducted using fixed-effects methods to control for observed independent variables and unobserved time-invariant variables. Corporal punishment had a nontrivial effect on children's antisocial behavior in later years despite the strong controls introduced by the fixed-effects models. The analysis provides no evidence for differences in the effect of corporal punishment across racial and ethnic groups. Key words: antisocial behavior; corporal punishment; fixed-effects model ********** Researchers studying parenting and family life have long been interested in studying the ways in which parents discipline their children. A particular focus of empirical research has been parental use of corporal punishment. Although many U.S. parents believe in spanking their children when their children misbehave (Gershoff, 2002; Straus & Donnelly, 2001; Straus, Sugarman, & Giles-Sims, 1997), some research suggests that the use of corporal punishment may increase behavior problems among children (Eamon, 2001; Gershoff; Straus & Donnelly; Straus et al.). In a seminal article, Straus and colleagues (1997) examined the effect of corporal punishment on a cohort of six- to nine-year-olds drawn from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY). Despite introducing several control variables into their model, these authors found that the use of corporal punishment predicted an increase in later antisocial behavior among children. In response to this contention that the use of corporal punishment is harmful, other authors have suggested that corporal punishment is either not always harmful (Gunnoe & Mariner, 1997) or is only harmful when it is excessive (Larzelere, 2000). In this study recent data from the NLSY were used to re-examine the effect of corporal punishment on antisocial behavior. Analytic methods, with more rigorous statistical controls than those that have been used in earlier research in this area, were used. Fixed-effects regression methods were used with appropriate independent variables to develop a model with strong statistical controls for factors whose effects could be confounded with the effects of corporal punishment. BACKGROUND AND SIGNIFICANCE Theoretically, research on the relationship of corporal punishment and children's antisocial behavior may be seen as part of a broad agenda of developmental research that focuses on the relationship between children and their parents (Gershoff, 2002). Davies (1999) observed that the use of physical punishment has an effect on children's working model of their relationship with their parents, and that "when the child is exposed to harsh and inconsistent discipline in infancy and toddlerhood, she is likely to model her behavior after the parent's" (p. 57). A similar perspective was expressed by Vuchinich and colleagues (1992) who suggested that parents who use harsh discipline may "unintentionally promote antisocial behavior in their children through inept discipline practices and erratic expressions of anger toward the child" (p. 511). Strassberg and colleagues (1994) echoed these concerns. A number of researchers have examined the relationship between corporal punishment and later antisocial behavior among children. Straus and Donnelly (2001) suggested that parents may use corporal punishment in an attempt to enforce compliance with desired behaviors among their children. However, the empirical work of Straus and his colleagues (Straus et al. …


Influenced by the call for 'non-media-centric media studies', and based on interviews with transnational professionals and forced migrants, this article scrutinises transnational identifications under mediatised conditions. With the point of departure in space/mobility and everyday life practices – the common denominators in the perspectives of transnationalism and mediatisation – the analysis shows that mediated deterritorialisation is conditional due to migrants' sociocultural resources and earlier life experiences. Hence, experiences of war and conflict may reduce the potential of mediated mobilities. The article demonstrates how media are an integrated part of migrants' multiple identifications with the city they reside in and their country of origin. Besides establishing multiple identifications, the article shows how these identities are linked to particular contexts, practices and socialities in the migrants' everyday lives. The conclusion is that mediatisation and transnationalism are complex matters yet a transdisciplinary, contextual and 'non-media-centric' approach seems to be a promising way to grasp these complexities.


Electronic states bound to impurities located in the quantum well barriers are calculated when the bulk binding energy is comparable to the quantum well depth. We show the existence of a complex level pattern due to the interaction between barrierlike states and states which are essentially confined in the well. The effects of an electric field are also discussed.


The use of cultural events continues to grow as a destination marketing and promotion strategy with destinations eager to broaden attraction attributes. One such cultural event is the Dragon Boat Festival, transforming from what was a traditional private Taoist ceremony surrounded in ritual and social identity within local Chinese fishing villages, to an international racing phenomenon, hosted annually in several major cities and locations. With this use of cultural events is the paradox that their increasing popularity can also take away from the authentic experience, becoming more 'staged' as performances for visitors. This research explores the level of participants' motives and perceptions towards the events at the International Dragon Boat Festivals in Macao, China, the event's cultural origin, and Melbourne a location where dragon boating has been successfully staged, revealing that the participants' opinions can differ depending on their culture of origins. This will have implications on the cultural sustainability of the event as a destination tourism attraction, given the importance of the historical and ritual legacy of dragon boating as its unique promotional attribute.


Though information technology IT transformation programs are gaining in importance, we know little about the nature of the challenges involved in such programs and how to manage them. Using grounded theory methodology, we conducted a multiyear case study of a large IT transformation program in a major commercial bank, during which we encountered the interrelated themes of paradoxes and ambidexterity. Grounded in our case, we construct a substantive theory of ambidexterity in IT transformation programs that identifies and explains the paradoxes that managers need to resolve in IT transformation programs. The ambidexterity areas we identified are 1 IT portfolio decisions i.e., IT efficiency versus IT innovation, 2 IT platform design i.e., IT standardization versus IT differentiation, 3 IT architecture change i.e., IT integration versus IT replacement, 4 IT program planning i.e., IT program agility versus IT project stability, 5 IT program governance i.e., IT program control versus IT project autonomy, and 6 IT program delivery i.e., IT program coordination versus IT project isolation. What weaves these six areas together is the combined need for IT managers to employ ambidextrous resolution strategies to ensure short-term IT contributions and continuous progress of IT projects while simultaneously working toward IT transformation program success as a foundation for IT-enabled business transformation. However, in addition to this commonality, we find that the nature of paradoxical tensions differs across the six areas and requires slightly different management strategies for paradox resolution. Ambidexterity areas 1, 2, and 3 are associated with IT transformation strategizing and, in addition to balancing short-and long-term goals, require the mutual accommodation and blending of business and IT interests in the spirit of IT-business partnering to achieve IT-enabled business change and IT-based competitiveness. Ambidexterity areas 4, 5, and 6 are associated with IT program and project execution and, in addition to balancing short-and long-term requirements, require a recurrent and dynamic act of balancing "local" needs at the IT project level and "global" needs at the IT program level.


High intensity skeletal loading during growth may be an effective strategy to maximise bone accrual and reduce fracture risk in old age. Preventing Osteoporosis With Exercise Routines in Physical Education (POWER PE) was an 8-month randomised controlled school-based exercise intervention designed to apply known principles of effective bone loading to practical opportunities to improve life long musculoskeletal outcomes. We replaced regular warm up activities with jumping in the twice-weekly PE classes of early high school students to observe the effect on bone accrual in adolescent boys and girls. A total of 99 adolescents (46M:53F, 13.8 ? 0.4 years) volunteered to participate in the yearlong study. Most were classified as Tanner IV (53%). Intervention group subjects performed ten minutes of supervised jumping activity in place of regular PE warm up activities. Control subjects performed regular PE warm-up activities directed by their teacher. Anthropometrics, Tanner staging, peak height velocity, muscle strength and power, flexibility, and bone mass (DXA and QUS) were measured at baseline and follow-up. Geometric properties (such as FN cross-sectional moment of inertia and LS index of bone strength) were estimated from DXA measures. Physical activity and dietary calcium were determined by questionnaire. There were no differences in any measured variable between control and intervention groups at baseline. No group differences were detected for 8-month change in anthropometric, maturity, strength, or flexibility variables for boys or girls. At eight months, boys in the intervention group had experienced significant improvements in calcaneal BUA (+5.0%, p = 0.012), and fat mass (-10.5%, p = 0.023), while controls did not (+1.4% and -0.8% respectively). Girls in the intervention group, however, experienced significant improvements in FN BMC (+13.9%, p = 0.05) and LS BMAD (+5.2%, p = 0.04), which were not observed in controls (+4.9% and +1.5% respectively). Other bone strength parameters improved significantly for both groups, such that between group comparisons of percent change revealed significant intervention effects only for WB BMC (+10.6% vs +6.3%, p = 0.029) for boys. Short duration, regular jumping activity during adolescence appears to improve bone accrual in a sex-specific manner. Boys improved whole body bone mass and BUA, and reduced fat mass, while girls improved bone mass at the hip and spine.


Contributions without benefits provide a huge subsidy. Since illegally crossing the Mexican border into the United States six years ago, Angel Martinez has done backbreaking work, harvesting asparagus, pruning grapevines, and picking the ripe fruit. More recently, he has also washed trucks, often working as much as seventy hours a week, earning $8.50 to $12.75 an hour. Not surprisingly, Mr. Martinez, 28, has not given much thought to Social security's long-term financial problems. But Mr. Martinez-who comes from the state of Oaxaca in southern Mexico and hiked for two days through the desert to enter the United States near Tecate, some 20 miles east of Tijuana-contributes more than most Americans to the solvency of the nation's public retirement system. Last year, Mr. Martihez paid about $2,000 toward Social security and $450 for Medicare through payroll taxes withheld from his wages. Yet unlike most Americans, who will receive some form of a public pension in retirement and will be eligible for Medicare as soon as they turn 65, Mr. Martinez is not entitled to benefits. He belongs to a big club. As the debate over Social security heats up, the estimated seven million or so illegal immigrant workers in the United States are now providing the system with a subsidy of as much as $7 billion a year. While it has been evident for years that illegal immigrants pay a variety of taxes, the extent of their contributions to Social security is striking: the money added up to about 10 percent of last year's surplus-the difference between what the system currently receives in payroll taxes and what it doles out in pension benefits. Moreover, the money paid by illegal workers and their employers is factored into all the Social security Administration's projections. Illegal immigration, Marcelo Suarez-Orozco, co-director of immigration studies at New York University, noted sardonically, could provide "the fastest way to shore up the long-term finances of Social security." It is impossible to know exactly how many illegal immigrant workers pay taxes. But according to specialists, most of them do. Since 1986, when the Immigration Reform and Control Act set penalties for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants, most such workers have been forced to buy fake IDs to get a job. Currently available for about $150 on street corners in just about any immigrant neighborhood in California, a typical fake ID package includes a green card and a Social security card. It provides cover for employers, who, if asked, can plausibly assert that they believe all their workers are legal. It also means that workers must be paid by the book-with payroll tax deductions. IRCA, as the immigration act is known, did little to deter employers from hiring illegal immigrants or to discourage them from working. But for Social security's finances, it was a great piece of legislation. Starting in the late 19805, the Social security Administration received a flood of w-2 earnings reports with incorrect-sometimes simply fictitious-Social security numbers. It stashed them in what it calls the "earnings suspense file" in the hope that someday it would figure out whom they belonged to. The file has been mushrooming ever since: $189 billion worth of wages ended up recorded in the suspense file over the 1990s, two and a half times the amount of the 19805. In the current decade, the file is growing, on average, by more than $50 billion a year, generating $6 billion to $7 billion in Social security tax revenue and about $1.5 billion in Medicare taxes. In 2002 alone, the last year with figures released by the Social security Administration, nine million w-2s with incorrect Social security numbers landed in the suspense file, accounting for $56 billion in earnings, or about 1.5 percent of total reported wages. Social security officials do not know what fraction of the suspense file corresponds to the earnings of illegal immigrants. …


— This study will use the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework; which has been broadly used to clarify how to adopt technological innovation from the standpoint of a business (Tornatzky and Fleischer, 1990; Wu and Chen, 2014) and integrating it with the TAM Model which is modified to incorporate two factors such as perceived usefulness and perceived of ease to TOE framework which recognizes three factors that influence an organization's implementation of technological innovations directly, and they are technological dimension, organizational dimension, and environmental dimension. The link between these technological, organizational and environmental factors and technology adoption such as web services and 3D printers is a conception worth to examine and explore. Although, previous studies have acknowledged significant factors through TOE frame work that can encourage the adoption of 3D printer (CC Yeh, YF Chen, 2018), but as the study recommends that future researchers can add more factors or methods to investigate 3D printer adoption, therefore it's more effective to include the three factors with the TAM factors. The research will help to locate the effect of the three criteria's using TOE framework and TAM Model. In addition, Cost is a major player or a major mediator to these elements that will affect the 3D printer adoption decision, which will measure the readiness and acceptance to adopt and use this technology.


Context: Postoperative acute kidney injury (AKI) is associated with increased morbidity and mortality in patients undergoing cardiac surgery. Aim: The aim of the present study is to compare preoperative and postoperative serum albumin levels, urine albumin–creatinine ratio (UACR), and estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) in patients undergoing cardiac surgery as a predictor of AKI. Settings and Design: The prospective study was conducted at cardiothoracic unit in the individuals of age 40–70 years admitted for coronary artery bypass grafting. Materials and Methods: The study participants admitted for cardiac surgery with normal serum creatinine value of 0.3–1.3 mg/dl were included. Preoperative and postoperatively (days 1 and 3 after cardiac surgery) parameters such as serum albumin, creatinine, and UACR were analyzed. Baseline serum creatinine >1.6 mg/dl was excluded. eGFR was calculated with Cockcroft's formula and categorized as Group A with eGFR <60 ml/min and Group B with eGFR ≥60 ml/min. Results: Mean UACR compared to baseline was found to be increased progressively on day 1 and day 3 postoperative period after cardiac surgery. Compared with baseline data, albumin levels were found to be decreased during postoperative phase. eGFR reflected the risk of kidney damage as it gets decreased by 15% on day 1 after cardiac surgery. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis of albumin and UACR revealed sensitivity and specificity that predicts lowered eGFR. Conclusion: Decreased serum albumin and increased UACR after cardiac surgery reflected with lowered eGFR indicate the renal injury after cardiac surgery. Serum hypoalbuminemia and UACR are predictors of AKI in the postoperative phase.


Closed-form solutions are presented for the frequency-dependent characteristic impedance of microstrip as defined by the ratio of the electromagnetic power to the square of the electric current. The analysis uses the rigorous spectral-domain approach based on the charge-current formulation. Analytical expressions for the impedance solutions show that the frequency dispersion occurring in microstrip is characterized in terms of three different impedances. The characteristic impedance of a TEM line given in the limit as the frequency decreases is derived from one of these impedances, and the other two are involved in expressing the nature of dispersion to vanish in the limit. Conversely, as the frequency increases, these dispersive parts grow rapidly. Some comments are given in conjunction with previous works.


Over the past decade, deep neural networks (DNNs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in a variety of applications. As we try to solve more advanced problems, increasing demands for computing and power resources has become inevitable. Spiking neural networks (SNNs) have attracted widespread interest as the third-generation of neural networks due to their event-driven and low-powered nature. SNNs, however, are difficult to train, mainly owing to their complex dynamics of neurons and non-differentiable spike operations. Furthermore, their applications have been limited to relatively simple tasks such as image classification. In this study, we investigate the performance degradation of SNNs in a more challenging regression problem (i.e., object detection). Through our in-depth analysis, we introduce two novel methods: channel-wise normalization and signed neuron with imbalanced threshold, both of which provide fast and accurate information transmission for deep SNNs. Consequently, we present a first spiked-based object detection model, called Spiking-YOLO. Our experiments show that Spiking-YOLO achieves remarkable results that are comparable (up to 98%) to those of Tiny YOLO on non-trivial datasets, PASCAL VOC and MS COCO. Furthermore, Spiking-YOLO on a neuromorphic chip consumes approximately 280 times less energy than Tiny YOLO and converges 2.3 to 4 times faster than previous SNN conversion methods.


Author(s): Bao, Wenzhong | Advisor(s): Lau, Chun Ning (Jeanie) | Abstract: Graphene is an exciting new atomically-thin two-dimensional (2D) system of carbon atoms organized in a hexagonal lattice structure. This "wonder material" has been extensively studied in the last few years since it's first isolation in 2004. Its rapid rise to popularity in scientific and technological communities can be attributed to a number of its exceptional propertiess. In this thesis I will present several topics including fabrication of graphene devices, electrical and mechanical properties of graphene.I will start with a brief introduction of electronic transport in nanosclae system including quantum Hall effect, followed by a discussion of fundamental electrical and mechanical properties of graphene. Next I will describe how graphene devices are produced: from the famous "mechnical exfoliation" to our innovative "scratching exfoliation" method, together with the traditional lithography fabrication for graphene devices. We also developed a lithography-free technique for making electrical contacts to suspended graphene devices. Most of the suspended devices presented in this thesis are fabricated by this technique. Graphene has remarkable electrical properties thanks to its crystal and band structures. In Chapter 3, I will first focus on proximity-induced superconductivity in graphene Josephson transistors. In this section we investigate electronic transport in single layer graphene coupled to superconducting electrodes. We observe significant suppression in the critical current Ic and large variation in the product IcRn in comparison to theoretic prediction; both phenomena can be satisfactorily accounted for by premature switching in underdamped Josephson junctions. Another focus of our studies is quantum Hall effect and many body physics in graphene in suspended bilayer and trilayer graphene. We demenstrate that symmetry breaking of the first 3 Landau levels and fractional quantum Hall states are observed in both bilayer and trilayer suspended graphene devices. A surprising finding in these systems is the observation of insulating states in both suspended bilayer and trilayer graphene devices, which arises from electronic interactions. In bilayer graphene, we observe a phase transition between the single-particle metallic state and the interaction-induced insulating state in ultra-clean BLG, which can be tuned by temperature, disorder, charge density n and perpendicular electric field E. In trilayer graphene we demonstrate dramatically different transport properties arising from the different stacking orders, and an unexpected spontaneous gap opening in charge neutral ABC-stacked trilayer graphene. One of graphene's unique properties is that it is nature's thinnest elastic membrane with exceptional mechanical properties. In chapter 7 I will describe the first direct observation and controlled creation of one- and two-dimensional periodic ripples in suspended graphene sheets, using both spontaneously and thermally generated strains. We are able to control ripple orientation, wavelength and amplitude by controlling boundary conditions and exploiting graphene's negative thermal expansion coefficient, which we measure to be much larger than that of graphite. In addition, we also study the morphological change of suspended graphene sheets by apply gate voltages, which is a simple and direct method to strain and buckle graphene.Our experimental results contribute to the fundamental understanding of electrical and mechanical properties of graphene, and may have important implications for future graphene based applications.


Water is the most frequently used substance for extinguishing of wildfires. Ones of the most commonly used additives enhancing the extinguishing efficiency are foaming agents. This article deals with the influence of foaming agents on germination of coniferous species. Foaming agents Moussol-APS F-15 and Sthamex F-15, foaming solutions of various concentrations were used for the tests. Germination of seeds of Norway spruce (Picea abies) and Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) was observed. The percentage of germinating seeds was recorded every 7 days. The results were evaluated in the form of graphs.
When the concentration levels of foaming solutions ranged from 0.1 vol% to 0.25 vol%, their influence on germination of both coniferous species seeds varied from negligible to slightly positive. Subsequently, the negative effect increased considerably and with concentrations exceeding 1 vol% - 1.5 vol% the germination of samples reached zero values. While foaming solutions of Sthamex F-15 showed less significant influence on germination of the Scots pine seeds, seeds of the Norway spruce were less influenced by foaming agent Moussol-APS F-15.  Based on obtained results it is possible to recommend minimisation of foaming agents amounts, eventually application of substances with less negative effect on plants germination for extinguishing of wildland fires, in order to gain restoration of affected area as fast as possible.  Key words: foaming agent, germination, wildfire (wildland fire), foaming solution


Background: Gastric cancer is one of the deadliest malignant diseases, and the non-invasive screening and diagnostics options for it are limited. In this article, we present a multi-modular device for breath analysis coupled with a machine learning approach for the detection of cancer-specific breath from the shapes of sensor response curves (taxonomies of clusters). Methods: We analyzed the breaths of 54 gastric cancer patients and 85 control group participants. The analysis was carried out using a breath analyzer with gold nanoparticle and metal oxide sensors. The response of the sensors was analyzed on the basis of the curve shapes and other features commonly used for comparison. These features were then used to train machine learning models using Naïve Bayes classifiers, Support Vector Machines and Random Forests. Results: The accuracy of the trained models reached 77.8% (sensitivity: up to 66.54%; specificity: up to 92.39%). The use of the proposed shape-based features improved the accuracy in most cases, especially the overall accuracy and sensitivity. Conclusions: The results show that this point-of-care breath analyzer and data analysis approach constitute a promising combination for the detection of gastric cancer-specific breath. The cluster taxonomy-based sensor reaction curve representation improved the results, and could be used in other similar applications.


The impact of anthropogenic activity on ecosystems has highlighted the need to move beyond the biogeographical delineation of species richness patterns to understanding the vulnerability of species assemblages, including the functional components that are linked to the processes they support. We developed a decision theory framework to quantitatively assess the global taxonomic and functional vulnerability of fish assemblages on tropical reefs using a combination of sensitivity to species loss, exposure to threats and extent of protection. Fish assemblages with high taxonomic and functional sensitivity are often exposed to threats but are largely missed by the global network of marine protected areas. We found that areas of high species richness spatially mismatch areas of high taxonomic and functional vulnerability. Nevertheless, there is strong spatial match between taxonomic and functional vulnerabilities suggesting a potential win-win conservation-ecosystem service strategy if more protection is set in these locations.


The article deals with the current situation in the study by forensic experts of holographic protective elements (hereinafter – HPE). Over the past 30 years, HPE have been actively developing and widespread, they are used both as design elements and to protect various types of documents. In its manufacture, application software and equipment are used, which provides high-resolution images and allow encoding large amounts of information. Although there are several scientific works included in the Register of methodologies for conducting forensic examinations of the Ministry of Justice of Ukraine, but it was written more than 20 years ago. Therefore, to conduct an expert study of HPE, it is necessary to update the methodological base, revise the approaches to its research and issues to be solved.
The article briefly outlines the design features, techniques and methods of protecting HPE that are used by its manufacturers. It is emphasized that latent images are introduced into the structure of holograms to control its authenticity, which are checked by various detectors. There are described examples of latent image decoding. It is also described an example of detecting a fake film with holographic elements that are very similar to the original. At the same time, when examining the fake film, it was found that there are no microtext and the hidden abbreviation "MBС" (in Ukrainian).
As a result of the research carried out, the author proposes to accept the results of verification of the elements of control of the authenticity of the HPE, in order to substantiate the probable conclusion about the conformity or inconsistency of the hologram. In addition, the presence of significant differences in the common features of the studied HPE and the sample, in the author's opinion, is a sufficient basis for the conclusion about the discrepancy between the holographic images and the sample. Therefore, experts of the questioned document examination can carry out such studies, with certain restrictions.


Collagen mimetic peptides (CMPs) self-assemble into a triple helix reproducing the most fundamental aspect of the collagen structural hierarchy. They are therefore important for both further understanding this complex family of proteins and use in a wide range of biomaterials and biomedical applications. CMP self-assembly is complicated by a number of factors which limit the use of CMPs including their slow rate of folding, relatively poor monomer-trimer equilibrium, and the large number of competing species possible in heterotrimeric helices. All of these problems can be solved through the formation of isopeptide bonds between lysine and either aspartate or glutamate. These amino acids serve two purposes: they first direct self-assemble, allowing for composition and register control within the triple helix, and subsequently can be covalently linked, fixing the composition and register of the assembled structure without perturbing the triple helical conformation. This self-assembly and covalent capture are demonstrated here with four different triple helices. The formation of an isopeptide bond between lysine and glutamate (K-E) is shown to be a faster and higher yielding reaction than lysine with aspartate (K-D). Additionally, K-E amide bonds increase the thermal stability, improve the refolding capabilities, and enhance the triple helical structure as compared to K-E supramolecular interactions, observed by circular dichroism. In contrast, covalent capture of triple helices with K-D amide bonds occurs slower, and the captured triple helices do not have enhanced helical structure. The crystal structure of a triple helix captured through the formation of three K-E isopeptide bonds unequivocally demonstrates the connectivity of the amide bonds formed while also confirming the preservation of the canonical triple helix. The rate of reaction and yield for covalently captured K-E triple helices along with the excellent preservation of triple helical structure demonstrate that this approach can be used to effectively capture and stabilize this important biological motif for biological and biomedical applications.


Recently, communities of Israeli immigrants have been formed in Australia. Although Israeli immigrants in Australia now number over 10,000, their Israeli communities have been little studied. The diasporic identity of Israeli emigrants in Australia, termed 'Ausraelis' in this thesis, is the focus of this study. It explores questions about the national, religious and host-society affiliation components of that identity. The thesis is based on three data sources. The first are quantitative: the Australian-Jewish community survey (Gen08) which included 356 Israel-born respondents (out of almost 6,000 participants); the 2006 Australian Census; and data from 77 Israel-born participants amongst 602 Jewish immigrants, in a 2005 survey by Rutland and Gariano. The second are qualitative sources, collected in fieldwork: participant observation on the Tapuz online social forum for Israelis in Australia; 18 interviews; and the responses of participants in a focus group conducted for the Gen08 survey. The third are text-based sources and include: a review of Eton, the Israeli newspaper in Australia; literary sources in the form of fictional novels and memoirs. The methodological strategy chosen for analysis combines quantitative methods, mainly descriptive statistical analysis, subject-based categorisation and participant observation Examining the experiences of Israeli emigrants in Australia, the study points to a shift in the push-and-pull factors for immigration from familial to economic and security-laden motives. Also revealed is a sub-group of Ausraelis, the 'desperate', who challenge past paradigms and perceptions about emigration from Israel. Analysing the interaction of Ausraelis with the Jewish community, the study found that most Ausraelis can be categorised as peripherals, with relatively low levels of involvement in community activities. The social cohesiveness of the Israeli community in Australia was found to be relatively strong, despite its lack of an institutional basis. With regard to religious affiliation, the study identified most Ausraelis as seculars, who employ Israeli civil religion as the primary means for transmission of Israeli national identity to their children. The policy implications of the study point to the need for a new basis of interaction between the State of Israel and the established Jewish community on one hand, and between the established Jewish community and Israelis immigrants on the other


The surging demand for multilingual dialogue systems often requires a costly labeling process for each language addition. For low resource languages, human annotators are continuously tasked with the adaptation of resource-rich language utterances for each new domain. However, this prohibitive and impractical process can often be a bottleneck for low resource languages that are still without proper translation systems nor parallel corpus. In particular, it is difficult to obtain task-specific low resource language annotations for the English-derived creoles (e.g. Nigerian and Cameroonian Pidgin). To address this issue, we utilize the pretrained language models i.e. BART which has shown great potential in language generation/understanding – we propose to finetune the BART model to generate utterances in Pidgin by leveraging the proximity of the source and target languages, and utilizing positive and negative examples in constrastive training objectives. We collected and released the first parallel Pidgin-English conversation corpus in two dialogue domains and showed that this simple and effective technique is suffice to yield impressive results for English-to-Pidgin generation, which are two closely-related languages.


Despite their practical success, a theoretical understanding of the loss landscape of neural networks has proven challenging due to the high-dimensional, non-convex, and highly nonlinear structure of such models. In this paper, we characterize the training landscape of the mean squared error loss for neural networks with quadratic activation functions. We prove existence of spurious local minima and saddle points which can be escaped easily with probability one when the number of neurons is greater than or equal to the input dimension and the norm of the training samples is used as a regressor. We prove that deep overparameterized neural networks with quadratic activations benefit from similar nice landscape properties. Our theoretical results are independent of data distribution and fill the existing gap in theory for two-layer quadratic neural networks. Finally, we empirically demonstrate convergence to a global minimum for these problems.


Twisted cubes are variants of hypercubes. In this paper, we study the optimal embeddings of paths of all possible lengths between two arbitrary distinct nodes in twisted cubes. We use TQn to denote the n-dimensional twisted cube and use dist(TQn, u, v) to denote the distance between two nodes u and v in TQn, where n ges l is an odd integer. The original contributions of this paper are as follows: 1) We prove that a path of length l can be embedded between u and v with dilation 1 for any two distinct nodes u and v and any integer l with dist(TQn, u, v) + 2 les l les 2n - 1 (n ges 3) and 2) we find that there exist two nodes u and v such that no path of length dist(TQn, u, v) + l can be embedded between u and v with dilation 1 (n ges 3). The special cases for the nonexistence and existence of embeddings of paths between nodes u and v and with length dist(TQn, u, v) + 1 are also discussed. The embeddings discussed in this paper are optimal in the sense that they have dilation 1


King cobra (Ophiophagus hannah) venom L-amino acid oxidase (OH-LAAO), a heat stable enzyme, has been shown to exhibit bactericidal activity against several strains of clinical isolates Gram-positive and Gram-negative bacteria. Its potency was compared with some common antibiotics such as cefotaxime, kanamycin, tetracycline, vancomycin and penicillin. King cobra venom LAAO was effective in inhibiting Gram-positive bacteria tested, with minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) of 0.78 μg/mL (0.006 μM) and 1.56 μg/mL (0.012 μM) against S. aureus and S. epidermidis, respectively. The MICs are comparable to the MICs of the antibiotics tested. However, the OH-LAAO was moderately effective against the Gram-negative bacteria tested (P. aeruginosa, K. pneumonia, and E. coli), with MIC ranges from 25 to 50 μg/mL (0.2 - 0.4 μM). Catalase (1 mg/mL) significantly abolished the bactericidal activity of OH-LAAO, indicating that the antibacterial effect of the enzyme involves generation of hydrogen peroxide. Binding studies indicated that OH-LAAO binds strongly to the Gram-positive S. aureus and S. epidermidis, but less strongly to the Gram-negative E. coli and P. aeruginosa, suggesting that specific binding to the bacteria is important for its potent antibacterial activity.
The enzyme was also shown to exhibit very potent anti-proliferative activity against human tumourigenic breast (MCF-7), lung (A549), promyelocytic leukaemia (HL-60) and prostate (PC-3) cells, with IC50 of 0.04 - 0.07 μg/mL after 72 h incubation. In comparison, its cytotoxicity was about 3 to 4 times lower when tested against the non-tumourigenic breast (184B5) and lung (NL 20) cells, suggesting selective anti-tumour activity. Furthermore, its potency in human tumourigenic cells was greater than the effects of doxorubicin, which has an IC50 of 0.1 - 0.63 μg/mL. The selective cytotoxic action of the OH-LAAO was confirmed by PE-annexin V/7-AAD apoptotic assay. The ability of OH-LAAO in inducing apoptosis in tumour cells was further demonstrated using caspase-3/7 and DNA fragmentation assays. Apoptosis induction activity of the enzyme is via both intrinsic and extrinsic pathways as indicated by increase in caspase-9 and -8 activities as well as increased cytochrome c levels in both cytosolic and mitochondria fractions in the LAAO-treated cells. The generation of H2O2 plays a significant role in the cytotoxic action of the enzyme, as its cytotoxicity was significantly reduced in the presence of catalase (a H2O2 scavenger). It was postulated that the alterations of gene and protein expression in cells treated with OH-LAAO, as observed in microarray and proteomics studies, were largely caused by non-specific oxidative modifications of signalling molecules that eventually lead to apoptosis and cell death.
Administration of 1 μg/g (i.p.) of OH-LAAO to PC-3 tumour-bearing NU/NU mice markedly inhibited the tumour growth. TUNEL staining analysis on the tumour sections showed a significantly increase of apoptotic cells in the LAAO-treated animals. The enzyme also did not cause any significant pathology changes on the vital organs as well as the body weight of the treated mice. In view of its heat stability, its selective and potent cytotoxic action on cancer cells, OH-LAAO can be potentially developed for treating solid tumours.


In this article the issue of a motivational structure of an opioid addicted personality is addressed. The essence of the developed and implemented stages of psychological rehabilitation is revealed. The importance of applying transtheoretical pattern of behavior change is stressed. To assess the motivational changes, we used a modified questionnaire called "Diagnostics of Motivational Structure of Personality", by V. E. Milman, aimed at diagnosing the motivational structure of personality. Using this technique, we examined the basic life aspirations of opioid addicts, identified the types of emotional profiles. According to V. E. Milman, the structure of personality contains two types of motivation: the productive and the consumptive one. Consumptive motivation is aimed at supporting an individual's life and is determined by his needs. There are a number of versions of this technique. The content of scales may vary as well. At the same time, since the idea of the technique appears attractive enough, we applied the technique of diagnostics of motivational structure of personality. This technique enables us to trace the types of emotional profiles included in the study. Inclusion of emotional profiles into general motivational component is substantiated scientifically by indissolubility of motivation and emotionality. In pilot study, this combination provides us significant diagnostic information. The results of empirical study of opioid addicts as to their motivational structure are presented. Keywords: motivational structure, psychological rehabilitation, an opioid addict, description of the problem. transtheoretical model of behavior change. Accepted : 03.07.2017 Reviewed :03. 17.2017 Published :03.24.2017 * * * * * Download/read PDF


Introduction Postoperative outcomes of total hip replacement (THR) and total knee replacement (TKR) have been improved by Enhanced Recovery after Surgery (ERAS) guidelines. The elderly population is increasing and successful fast-track rehabilitation can be achieved amongst this cohort. However, the cohorts studied in previous literature are generally younger, healthy patients, who would be expected to recover well from a multidisciplinary pathway. Literature to assess the role of enhanced recovery in the very elderly is limited. The aim of this study is to assess the current outcomes for elderly patients post THR and TKR and explore the opportunity for further application of ERAS pathways. Methods This retrospective study was completed by collecting UK acute NHS hospital data through Hospital Episode Statistics (HES), accessed via the Dr. Foster Healthcare Intelligence Portal. Length of stay, readmission rates, complication of care and mortality were recorded for all THR and TKR cases. Results Length of stay, readmission and complication of care rates increased linearly with age for both THR and TKR patients. For over 85s, average length of stay was 5.0 and 4.5 days (THR and TKR respectively), 30 day re-admission was 9.4% and 9.9%, complication of care was 13.3% and 11.9% and mortality rate was 0.5% and 0.4%. Conclusions The very elderly have the most to gain from an ERAS programme but still have the longest stay in hospital and the greatest post-operative complications. Further work is required to determine how to reduce the risk of complications and increase functional recovery in elderly patients.


The shelf life of processed food is greatly reduced by spoilage microorganisms, which has resulted in great losses to food processors, wholesalers, retailers and even consumers. This study was aimed at controlling food spoilage microorganisms using leaf extracts from mango and guava. Fried meat (beef, chicken, grass-cutter, and goat meat), fried fish and fresh bread were purchased from Benin City, and left to spoil, after which spoilage organisms were isolated, identified and characterized using standard microbiological techniques. Mango and guava leaf extracts (ethanolic and aqueous), with Potassium sorbate and sodium nitrite was used. Significant highest (<0.05) (15.67±0.88 mg/ml) antibacterial activity of Mango leaf extract was recorded against Escherichia coli , and significant highest (<0.05) antifungal activity (19.67±0.33) was recorded against Penicillium oxalicum . Ethanolic leaf extracts of mango had better MICs (6.25 mg/ml) against E. coli tested than guava (25 mg/ml). In addition, ethanolic leaf extracts from Mango did not have any effect on Bacillus polymyxa . This study suggests that extracts from Mango and Guava leaves can be explored for controlling spoilage organisms; however, ethanolic extracts are more potent than aqueous


BACKGROUND: The problem of persistently low rates of employment and earnings for people with autism is well established. In the U.S., the 2014 Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) updated the legal framework for the federal Vocational Rehabilitation (VR) program which assists people with disabilities to find and maintain employment. OBJECTIVE: This study examined whether and how the needs of transition-age youth and adults with autism are addressed in state WIOA plans. METHODS: We analyzed WIOA documents for all states plus the District of Columbia using content analysis. RESULTS: Of the 51 state plans, 44 contained references to autism, and 19 explicitly identified autism as a disability group that is underserved by the state VR agency. Even among states that clearly defined autism as underserved, only 10 provided comprehensive plans which defined goals and strategies to address the vocational needs of this group. We discuss major themes related to VR service delivery for people with autism identified within the state plans. CONCLUSIONS: This study identifies state policy aimed at facilitating employment for people with autism and contributes to efforts to discover why individuals with autism in some states have better employment outcomes than in others.


In order to improve patient diagnosis various image processing software are developed to extract useful information from medical images. An essential part of the diagnosis and treatment of leukemia is the visual examination of the patient's peripheral blood smear under the microscope. Morphological changes in the white blood cells are commonly used to determine the nature of the malignant cells, namely blasts. Morphological analysis of blood slides are influenced by factors such as hematologists experience and tiredness, resulting in non standardized reports. So there is always a need for a cost effective and robust automated system for leukemia screening which can greatly improve the output without being influenced by operator fatigue. This paper presents an application of image segmentation, feature extraction, selection and cell classification to the recognition and differentiation of normal cell from the blast cell. The system is applied for 108 images available in public image dataset for the study of leukemia. The methodology demonstrates that the application of pattern recognition is a powerful tool for the differentiation of normal cell and blast cell leading to the improvement in the early effective treatment for leukemia.[1]


To the Editor.— In their letter, Maier and Buller report that significant reductions in levels of anxiety occur among patients with panic disorder one year after entering treatment. Based on these data, they conclude that the course of panic disorder is less severe than reported in our study 1 and by other investigators. 2-4 Several points warrant further discussion. First, we reported that although our patient group had nonremitting, chronic courses before admission to our clinic, most patients subsequently made an excellent recovery from their panic and agoraphobic symptoms after combined behavioral therapy and imipramine hydrochloride or alprazolam treatment. 1 Moreover, in a recent prospective 2.5-year outcome study of patients from our study, Nagy et al 5 reported that the significant reductions in anxiety symptoms derived from our treatment program persisted throughout the follow-up period. These data indicate that agoraphobia, with panic attacks, is very responsive to appropriate treatment. However, when panic disorder is


Biologists study on the biological behavior of various marine creatures in situ using underwater observation systems. However, darkness in an underwater environment is always one of the most difficult problems to overcome in order to clearly monitor the life of underwater creatures. In this research, a light-following scheme is proposed with the lighting device installed on a separate Pan/Tilt platform as a slave while the main Pan/Tilt camera platform works as a master. A dynamic model of Pan/Tilt platform was developed using the Lagrange's equation. In order to achieve high speed manipulation of the Pan/Tilt platforms in underwater environment, hydrodynamic forces have to be considered. Scientists had done a great deal of researches on the hydrodynamic forces of underwater motion bodies. Most of the researches employed the semi-empirical equation based on the experimental study. The coefficients (Cd Cm ) of drag and added-mass which were solved by experimental study were the research point of hydrodynamic modeling in previous researches. However, these modeling methods can be employed for the underwater bodies with the simple geometry dimension. Two hydrodynamic torque models which represent the degree of freedoms (DOFs) of panning and tilting respectively had been developed employing CFD software. The selection of turbulence models, i.e., K-E, K-W, SST, RSM and LES, was firstly accomplished using the case of turbulence flow over flat plane. The hydrodynamic torque models are obtained with the simulations results for a certain range of position and velocity values for each of DOFs. The maximum velocity for simulation was set at 60 rpm for each axis. The geometry model which represents the space relationship between the master (camera) and slave (light) and the control algorithms would be elaborated in a separate paper.Copyright © 2009 by ASME


ABSTRACT Nuclear factor κB (NF-κB) serves to coordinate the transcription of genes in response to diverse environmental stresses. In this report we show that phosphorylation of the α subunit of eukaryotic initiation factor 2 (eIF2) is fundamental to the process by which many stress signals activate NF-κB. Phosphorylation of this translation factor is carried out by a family of protein kinases that each respond to distinct stress conditions. During impaired protein folding and assembly in the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), phosphorylation of eIF2α by PEK (Perk or EIF2AK3) is essential for induction of NF-κB transcriptional activity. The mechanism by which NF-κB is activated during ER stress entails the release, but not the degradation, of the inhibitory protein IκB. During amino acid deprivation, phosphorylation of eIF2α by GCN2 (EIF2AK4) signals the activation of NF-κB. Furthermore, inhibition of general translation or transcription by cycloheximide and actinomycin D, respectively, elicits the eIF2α phosphorylation required for induction of NF-κB. Together, these studies suggest that eIF2α kinases monitor and are activated by a range of stress conditions that affect transcription and protein synthesis and assembly, and the resulting eIFα phosphorylation is central to activation of the NF-κB. The absence of NF-κB-mediated transcription and its antiapoptotic function provides an explanation for why eIF2α kinase deficiency in diseases such as Wolcott-Rallison syndrome leads to cellular apoptosis and disease.


Functional gastrointestinal disorders (FGIDs) are defined by symptom complexes that occur in the absence of organic, systemic, or metabolic diseases that are likely to explain the symptoms. The criteria were first standardized by a group of experts in 1995 forming the Rome I criteria. There have been 3 subsequent iterations with Rome IV being released in 2016. Pain-associated FGIDS are common, with one of the two most prevalent being functional dyspepsia (FD).


The incidence of non-contact knee injury was reported higher in female than male. In female, the occurrence of this injury was related to different phases of the menstrual cycle. In view of this, we investigated the followings: (i) changes in knee laxity in rodent model under different sex-steroid influence; (ii) mechanisms underlying changes in knee laxity, which involves differential expression of relaxin receptors and (iii) correlation between knee laxity and serum levels of sex-steroids and relaxin at different phases of the menstrual cycle. In first part of the study, ovariectomized WKY rats were divided into different treatment groups (n=6 per group): different doses of 17 β-oestradiol, progesterone and testosterone were administered. The hormones were injected subcutaneously for 3 consecutive days. In parallel, steroid hormone receptor blockers and enzyme inhibitor (ICI 182780, PHTPP, MPP, Mifepristone, Flutamide, and Finasteride) were also injected with the respective agonist. In parallel, intact rats were grouped based on their oestrous cycle stages: proestrus, estrus, metestrus and diestrus. In ovariectomized steroid treated and intact rats, knee range of motion (ROM) was measured by using a digital miniature goniometer. The rats were sacrificed and expression of relaxin receptor isoforms, RXFP1 and RXFP2 mRNAs and proteins in knee ligaments and tendons were determined. Meanwhile, in humans, changes in knee laxity were observed at different phases of the menstrual cycle in the female athletes. The knee varus and valgus angles were determined at different phases of the menstrual cycle by using an orthopedic goniometer ruler. Blood was withdrawn and serum levels of oestrogen, progesterone and relaxin were determined in human at different phases of their menstrual cycle. Our findings showed a significant increase in knee ROM in rats following oestrogen and progesterone treatment however was decreased following testosterone treatment. Changes in knee ROM was antagonized by the concomitant administration of oestrogen, progesterone and androgen receptor antagonists. Knee ROM was high at proestrus and diestrus stages of the oestrous cycle. Progesterone and oestrogen up-regulated while testosterone down-regulated RXFP1 and RXFP2 mRNA and protein expressions which were antagonized by the respective steroid hormone antagonist. Meanwhile, relaxin administration increases knee ROM in oestrogen and progesterone treated but not testosterone treated groups indicating relaxin receptor up-regulation. In humans, significant difference in knee varus and valgus angles were observed in female athletes and non-athletes at different phases of the menstrual cycle which was the highest in the ovulatory and menstrual phases. Non-athletes have higher medial and lateral knee laxity as compared to athletes. This study has provided an insight into the mechanism underlying sex-steroid control of knee ROM via modulating the expression of RXFP1 and RXFP2 receptors. In rodents, increased RXFP1 and RXFP2 expressions could contribute to increase in knee laxity. In humans, the increase in laxity at ovulatory and mid-luteal phases of the cycle was consistent with high level of oestrogen and progesterone. In both intact rats and humans, strong correlations was noted between knee laxity and serum relaxin levels. Our study has provided the basis underlying female susceptibility towards non-traumatic knee injury at different phases of their reproductive cycle.


Plankton and water chemistry were sampled in four glacial prairie lakes on six dates in 1995 and 1996. Phytoplankton and zooplankton were identified and enumerated. Chemical parameters included nitrate, total kjeldahl nitrogen, total phosphorus, silica, iron, manganese, sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, chloride, sulfate, bicarbonate, carbonate and chlorophyll a. Station depth, secchi depth, turbidity, and conductivity were also measured. Two of the lakes were located in moraines and two were located in outwash. One lake was less than 13,000 years old as determined by position, and three were older. Two of the lakes were hypertrophic and two were eutrophic. Two of the lakes were slightly saline in 1995-1996, and two were fresh. Values obtained were compared with previous data bases maintained by the junior author and state agencies from in the 1970's and 1989-1994. Roy Lake (Marshall County) is located in Mankato moraine (less than 13,000 years old). It was slightly saline with the following mean values measured in 1995-6: 1170 uS conductivity, 376 ppm sulfate, 251 ppm bicarbonate, 122 ppm calcium, and 91 ppm magnesium. Roy Lake was eutrophic (7.8 ppb chlorophyll a, 0.03 ppm total phosphorus, 1.31 ppm total nitrogen, 2.32 m secchi depth, and 4.2 ntu turbidity). Mean values for other phytoplankton nutrients were: 0.07 ppm iron, 0.07 ppm manganese, and 8.5 ppm silica. Pickerel Lake (Day County) is older and located in outwash. It was fresh with the following mean values measured in 1995-6: 580 uS Conductivity, 73 ppm sulfate, 189 ppm bicarbonate, 36 ppm calcium, and 34 ppm magnesium. Pickerel Lake was eutrophic (17.7 ppb chlorophyll a, 0.03 ppm total phosphorus, 0.75 ppm total nitrogen, 1.25 m secchi depth, and 7.4 ntu turbidity). Mean values for other phytoplankton nutrients were: 0.17 ppm iron, 0.07 ppm manganese, and 4.5 ppm silica. Bitter Lake (Day County) is older than Pickerel and located in outwash, downstream from Pickerel Lake. Bitter is a saline lake in most years. However, during 1995-6, its water level rose and it was slightly saline with the following mean values measured in 1995-6: 3758 uS conductivity, 3248 ppm sulfate, 386 ppm bicarbonate, 142 ppm chloride, 509 ppm magnesium, 401 ppm sodium, and 93 ppm potassium. Bitter Lake was hypertrophic (33.7 ppb chlorophyll a, 0.64 ppm total phosphorus, 9.56 ppm total nitrogen, 0.78 m secchi depth, and 38.9 ntu turbidity). Mean values for other phytoplankton nutrients were: 0.20 ppm iron, 0.14 ppm manganese, and 5.0 ppm silica. 268 Proceedings of the South Dakota Academy of Science, Vol. 76 (1997) Oak Lake (Brookings County) is located in 14,000 year old moraine. It was fresh with the following mean values measured in 1995-6: 610 uS conductivity, 123 ppm sulfate, 178 ppm bicarbonate, 36 ppm calcium, and 32 ppm magnesium. Oak Lake was hypertrophic (35.6 ppb chlorophyll a, 0.13 ppm total phosphorus, 1.41 ppm total nitrogen, 0.42 m secchi depth, and 37.3 ntu turbidity). Mean values for other phytoplankton nutrients were: 0.28 ppm iron, 0.12 ppm manganese, and 10.3 ppm silica. Comparisons with previous data bases did not indicate major changes between years for Roy, Pickerel and Oak but indicated drastic change between years for Bitter. Major ion concentrations other than calcium were almost an order of magnitude lower in 1995-6 than sampled by the junior author in 1975. In addition, water depth and clarity were much greater in 1995-6 than in all previous years. In previous years Bitter was dominated by non-nitrogen-fixing coccoid bluegreen algae including Anacystis (Microcystis) incerta and cyanea. Anacystis spp. populations were 2 orders of magnitude lower in 1995, however Bitter experienced a heavy bloom of the nitrogen-fixing Aphanizomenon holsaticum (flos-aquae) in midsummer 1995, a species not previously recorded from Bitter.


The CMAJ editorial on the topic of open access1 is of special relevance for developing countries. I am a South Asian physician pursuing graduate studies in a Canadian institution, and the online availability of the latest medical literature through my university's subscription has opened up a new world for me, helping me to improve the quality of my research and my understanding of the issues. I am already dreading the loss of this privilege when I return home.

Medical schools and research centres in developing countries often cannot pay for the high cost of online journal access, and subscriptions to print versions are limited. In many cases, researchers have access only to abstracts (through PubMed [www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi] and, more recently, Google Scholar [www.scholar.google.com]). It is difficult for residents on limited stipends to buy even single articles, which cost anywhere from US$10 upward. Furthermore, Internet access is limited, and safe online banking and credit card use are not available. As a result, residents and scientists use outdated sources for their research, which is reflected in the final quality and scientific rigour of their work.

The initiatives promoting open access that have been undertaken by CMAJ, BioMed Central (www.biomedcentral.com/), SciDev.Net (www.scidev.net/) and the Public Library of Science journals, among others, are laudable. However, the practice of making authors pay for online publication of their articles, as described in the CMAJ editorial,1 might dissuade researchers in developing countries from sharing their research results in international journals. Special discounts will need to be worked out, and journals will need to continue exploring innovative ways to support progress in open access and offset their costs.

CMAJ's experience has shown the advantages of an open-access policy.1 I hope that the journal continues its leadership in promoting equal opportunities and access in the global medical community.

Anant Bhan Fogarty International Fellow University of Toronto Joint Centre for Bioethics Toronto, Ont.


In this work, the dispersion and radiation properties of bound and leaky modes on one-dimensional printed periodic structures (printed on a grounded dielectric slab) are investigated. It is shown that a new type of Brillouin diagram can be constructed to account for the different types of physical leakage, namely leakage into one or more surface waves or also simultaneously into space. This new Brillouin diagram provides physical insight into the behavior of the modes on one-dimensional periodic structures, and it also allows for a simple and convenient way to determine the paths of integration for the space harmonics, which arise in a spectral-domain moment-method solution of such structures. Numerical results are provided that show the advantage of using the new Brillouin diagram in explaining the leakage and stopband behavior for these kinds of periodic structures.


Abstract This article explores ethical conundrums in linguistic research on online platforms populated by 'pick-up artists' (PUAs), a community that learns and practices speed-seduction for short-term mating. Originally a male heterosexual community, PUAs encourage men to use manipulative strategies to select, pursue, isolate and sexually conquer women (Hall, Jeffrey A. & Melanie Canterberry. 2011. Sexism and assertive courtship strategies. Sex Roles 65(11). 840–853). Using so-called 'field reports' – detailed accounts of interactions with women – from Anglophone PUA forums as our data, we investigate the narrative stance devices that PUAs use to impose the game frame on their activities. Unavoidably, sampling language in an environment where risky topics are under constant discussion presents ethical dilemmas. The article focuses on how conducting research in a hostile community may influence traditional methodological decisions. Through the example of the PUA community, we discuss the vulnerability of subjects and potential harm in linguistic research, and whether anything gives the researcher the freedom to forego informed consent, especially when dealing with publicly available data in an open forum. We also address the myth of the unbiased researcher that is prevalent in contemporary social science, arguing that an analysis should benefit from the fact that the analyst inevitably takes part in the "fight to construct reality" (Latour, Bruno & Steve Woolgar. 1979. Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).


A dedicated single-chip multilevel parallel graphics cache memory for high-speed parallel texture mapping in PC graphics has been fabricated by a 0.16 /spl mu/m DRAM technology. The proposed cache architecture is composed of four components: 1) an 8 MB DRAM L2 cache, 2) eight 16 KB SRAM L1 parallel caches, 3) eight pipelined texture data filters, 4) serial-to-parallel latches. The refill bandwidth of the parallel L1 cache is maximized up to 75 GB/sec by a hidden double data transfer scheme between the L2 and L1 caches. Furthermore, by adaptive sub-wordline activation scheme, the line sizes of the L2 and L1 caches are reconfigurable for achieving optimal cache miss rate and lower power consumption. The SRAM L1 caches and the texture filters by use of parallel pipelined structures result in higher system performance.


In a population of 44 patients receiving continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD) for a total of 591 patient months, there were 104 episodes of peritonitis. The organisms were gram-positive in 65.4%, gram-negative in 23.1%, and cultures of the dialysate were sterile in 11.5%. Pseudomonas aeruginosa was the most frequently encountered gram-negative organism, accounting for 38.5% of the gram-negative infections or 9.6% of all infections. In all cases of P aeruginosa peritonitis, aminoglycoside antibiotic therapy for up to four weeks failed to eradicate the infection, and all patients required removal of the Tenckhoff catheter because of the presence of a sinus tract infection. We conclude that P aeruginosa is the most frequent cause of gram-negative peritonitis in patients receiving CAPD. The presence of a sinus tract infection should be suspected in all patients in whom peritonitis secondary to this organism develops. Removal of the Tenckhoff catheter will be required to cure the peritoneal infection.


We present Stytra, a flexible, open-source software package, written in Python, that we designed to cover all the general requirements involved in larval zebrafish behavioral experiments. It allows timed stimulus presentation, interfacing with external devices and simultaneous real-time tracking of position, tail and eye motion in both freely-swimming and head-restrained preparations. It logs in standardized formats all recorded quantities, metadata, and code version to allow full provenance tracking, from data acquisition through analysis to publication. The package is modular and expandable for different experimental protocols and setups. Current releases can be found at https://github.com/portugueslab/stytra. We also provide complete documentation with examples for extending the package to new stimuli and hardware, as well as a schema and parts list for behavioral setups. We showcase Stytra by reproducing two previously behavioral protocols, one with head-restrained and the other with freely-swimming larvae, as well as an experiment in which the software is used in the context of a calcium imaging experiment, where it can trigger and communicate with other acquisition devices. Our aims are to help laboratories with little or no experience in the field to start implementing behavioral experiments and to provide a platform for sharing stimulus protocols to enable easy reproduction of experiments and straightforward validation. In addition, Stytra can easily serve as a base platform to design behavioral experiments in other model organisms.


The misuse of drugs among our community here in Dublin 15 is of great concern to Blanchardstown Traveller Development Group and it is a concern for Traveller families and for the community as a whole. Traveller's are a marginalised group in Irish society and are one of the most excluded groups socially and culturally in the country and this is no different here in Dublin 15. What is different is the impact that the misuse of drugs is having on our community.

Travellers make up less than one percent of the national population, mostly live in extended families on Traveller sites so when drugs hit our community its more visible and public, so fear of looking for support is harder and this research has identified some of these issues. This research has also identified the type of drug misuse which means we can now start to look at the local responses and supports that are needed to address these serious issues which are having a very negative effect on individuals, parents, families and on the community. The research has identified the local issues and made clear recommendations that need to be acted upon.