Deep learning algorithms have become the golden standard for segmentation of medical imaging data. In most works, the variability and heterogeneity of real clinical data is acknowledged to still be a problem. One way to automatically overcome this is to capture and exploit this variation explicitly. Here, we propose an approach that improves on our previous work in this area and explain how it potentially can improve clinical acceptance of (semi-)automatic segmentation methods. In contrast to a standard neural network that produces one segmentation, we propose to use a multi-path Unet network that produces multiple segmentation variants, presumably corresponding to the variations that reside in the dataset. Different paths of the network are trained on disjoint data subsets. Because a priori it may be unclear what variations exist in the data, the subsets should be automatically determined. This is achieved by searching for the best data partitioning with an evolutionary optimization algorithm. Because each network path can become more specialized when trained on a more homogeneous data subset, better segmentation quality can be achieved. In practical usage, various automatically produced segmentations can be presented to a medical expert, from which the preferred segmentation can be selected. In experiments with a real clinical dataset of CT scans with prostate segmentations, our approach provides an improvement of several percentage points in terms of Dice and surface Dice coefficients compared to when all network paths are trained on all training data. Noticeably, the largest improvement occurs in the upper part of the prostate that is known to be most prone to inter-observer segmentation variation.


Conventionally-grown and organically-grown tomato seeds sourced from both fresh tomatoes and store-bought packages were germinated for seven days to evaluate the effect of seed source on germination rates. Seeds from fresh Roma tomatoes were prepared by allowing them to ferment in their own pulp for 24 hours, while commercially packaged dry seeds did not require any preparation. Once prepared, the seeds were spaced evenly on wet paper towels and stored in resealable plastic bags in groups of 10 for a total sample size of 100 seeds in each of four treatments. The number of germinated seeds and the length of their roots were measured daily for seven days. 82.5% of the seeds from fresh tomatoes germinated—91% of the conventional and 74% of the organic—while only 49% of the commercially dried seeds germinated—35% of the conventional and 63% of the organic. Conventionally-grown seeds germinated on average one day faster than organically-grown seeds. In addition, the seeds from fresh tomatoes experienced significantly faster germination rates by 0.78 days and longer average growth. Our data indicate potentially higher germination success for seeds sourced from fresh tomatoes, but only when conventionallygrown.


As machine learning models are being extensively deployed across many applications, concerns are rising with regard to their trustability. Explainable models have become an important topic of interest for high-stakes decision making, but their evaluation in the legal domain still remains seriously understudied; existing work does not have thorough feedback from subject matter experts to inform their evaluation. Our work here aims to quantify the faithfulness and plausibility of explainable AI methods over several legal tasks, using computational evaluation and user studies directly involving lawyers. The computational evaluation is for measuring faithfulness , how close the explanation is to the model's true reasoning, while the user studies are measuring plausibility , how reasonable is the explanation to a subject matter expert. The general goal of this evaluation is to find a more accurate indication of whether or not machine learning methods are able to adequately satisfy legal requirements.


Background A key component for many medical simulations is assessing communication, or 'non-technical' skills. The ability to see a candidate deploy their medical knowledge, for a specific task in a spoken scenario, is one of the great advantages of simulation as an integrated assessment. But the way these skills are assessed can be controversial, particularly when uneven pass rates occur for overseas candidates. This paper will look at some assessed simulations, in which interpersonal skills form a central part of the marking criteria, and investigate the ways relationships with the role-played patient are performed through talk, by candidates from different backgrounds. Methodology Videos are transcribed from a purposive sample of 50 candidates sitting a simulated exam, encompassing a range of performances from UK graduates and international medical graduates. Discourse analysis, as a means of analysing 'real-world' linguistic data in its social context, is a useful means of approaching the data. In this paper, we initially perform a quantitative, 'corpus linguistic' survey, to establish the patterns of talk in the exam. Micro-interactional analysis, which allows the researcher to look closely at how the interaction progresses, turn-by-turn, is then used to investigate how a relationship is established with the role-played patient, successfully or not, through talk. Results/outcomes The quantitative overview of the transcribed consultations finds that certain, recipe-like 'stock phrases' are used by all candidates in the exam. However, a closer look through micro-interactional analysis reveals that some are more successful at performing these phrases than others. Areas of relative difficulty for candidates, particularly in terms of performing patient-centredness, are discussed further in the paper. Potential impact The way that 'stock phrases' are used in simulated consultations raises questions for the design and function of medical simulations in assessing communication, as well as the training candidates receive for such exams.


Abstract The management of older patients with chronic primary immune thrombocytopenia (ITP) is still very challenging because of the fragility of older patients who frequently have severe comorbidities and/or disabilities. Corticosteroid-based first-line therapies fail in most of the cases and patients require a second-line treatment, choosing between rituximab, thrombopoietin-receptor agonists and splenectomy. The choice of the best treatment in elderly patients is a compromise between effectiveness and safety and laparoscopic splenectomy may be a good option with a complete remission rate of 67% at 60 months. But relapse and complication rates remain higher than in younger splenectomized ITP patients because elderly patients undergo splenectomy with unfavorable conditions (age >60 year-old, presence of comorbidities, or multiple previous treatments) which negatively influence the outcome, regardless the hematological response. For these reasons, a good management of concomitant diseases and the option to not use the splenectomy as the last possible treatment could improve the outcome of old splenectomized patients.


Abstract : In 1974 Loran-C was selected to be the government-provided radio navigation system for the U.S. Coastal Confluence Zone and the Great Lakes. Title 14, USC 81 states that the U.S. Coast Guard may establish and maintain electronic aids to operate marine navigation required to serve the needs of the military and commerce of the United States. Loran-C is a highly accurate positioning system. It operates at an assigned frequency of 100 kHz, and provides phase-coded pulses to develop hyperbolic time-difference lines-of-position (LOP's). In addition to providing for radio navigation, Loran-C also provides precise time and time interval to within +/- 5 microseconds of UTC. The paper discusses the steps taken to plan, install, operate and maintain the Loran-C system up to the year 2000. The following topics are included in the discussion: theory of operation, timing, chain planning, group repetition interval, coding delay versus emission delay, chain calibration, chart verification, system accuracy, signal reliability, and future developments. The opinions or assertions contained herein are the private ones of the writer and are not to be construed as official or reflecting the views of the Commandant or the Coast Guard at large.


Following political devolution in 1999, Scotland's already distinctive education system has diverged further from the rest of the United Kingdom. A major trend has been a weakening of input regulation of the school curriculum. Scotland's recently developed Curriculum for Excellence (CfE) has been predicated upon notions of curricular flexibility, local autonomy and school-based curriculum development. Ostensibly Scotland has entered a new era of curricular autonomy for schools and teachers. However, while Scotland has escaped some of the worst excesses of England's marketised approaches to regulating outputs, the new curriculum has been accompanied by high levels of output regulation – most notably the recourse to external inspections and the use of attainment data to judge of the effectiveness of schools – which reduce school autonomy. Although there have been recent attempts to soften this approach in line with the spirit of CfE, it is evident that such methods for accountability exert an effect on schools, contributing to cultures of performativity, creating perverse incentives and potentially distorting educational decision making in schools. In this paper, I examine the balance between input and output regulation, considering how the current balance in Scotland impacts upon teacher agency, and especially the capacity of teachers to undertake school-based curriculum development.


This article presents the key findings from a collaborative study about the experiences and support needs of carers whose relatives are admitted into a nursing or residential care home. Drawing upon data from carers' qualitative accounts, it considers carers' post‐admission roles, responsibilities and profiles, and the contribution carers make to the continued care of their relative. Carers' post‐admission caring experiences are described in detail and differences between spouse carers and carers involved in looking after a parent are identified. A temporal model depicting the complex and dynamic nature of carers' postadmission experiences is presented. The implications for policy and practice are discussed.


We present a case of a 36-year-old female patient who presented with subacute liver disease with a history of alcohol abuse. On basic liver function tests (LFT), she had aspartate transaminase / alanine transaminase > 2.2 and alkaline phosphatase / total bilirubin < 4. This pattern in acute liver failure patients signifies Wilson's disease. Its presence in our patient with subacute liver disease also prompted us to suspect Wilson's disease and we extended the liver disease screen to include slit lamp eye examination for Kayser-Fleischer rings, serum ceruloplasmin and 24-hour urinary copper level, which led to the diagnosis. She improved clinically and biochemically with zinc acetate therapy. As screening for rare diseases is not always possible in low-income countries, this case demonstrates the usefulness of the basic LFT as a guide for suspecting Wilson's disease in patients with liver disease.


In this paper, a multiobjective genetic algorithm is proposed to automatically learn persistent fuzzy linguistic queries for text retrieval applications. These queries are able to represent user's long-term standing information needs in a more interpretable way than the classical "bag of words" user profile structure. Thanks to its multiobjective nature, the introduced genetic fuzzy system is able to build different queries for the same information need in a single run, with a different trade-off between precision and recall. The experiments performed on the classical CACM collection show that although the different queries obtained from our genetic fuzzy system are less accurate in the retrieval task than those derived by one state-of-the-art bag of words method, they compose more flexible, comprehensible and expressive user profiles


We introduce a novel deep learning framework for data-driven motion retargeting between skeletons, which may have different structure, yet corresponding to homeomorphic graphs. Importantly, our approach learns how to retarget without requiring any explicit pairing between the motions in the training set. We leverage the fact that different homeomorphic skeletons may be reduced to a common primal skeleton by a sequence of edge merging operations, which we refer to as skeletal pooling. Thus, our main technical contribution is the introduction of novel differentiable convolution, pooling, and unpooling operators. These operators are skeleton-aware, meaning that they explicitly account for the skeleton's hierarchical structure and joint adjacency, and together they serve to transform the original motion into a collection of deep temporal features associated with the joints of the primal skeleton. In other words, our operators form the building blocks of a new deep motion processing framework that embeds the motion into a common latent space, shared by a collection of homeomorphic skeletons. Thus, retargeting can be achieved simply by encoding to, and decoding from this latent space. Our experiments show the effectiveness of our framework for motion retargeting, as well as motion processing in general, compared to existing approaches. Our approach is also quantitatively evaluated on a synthetic dataset that contains pairs of motions applied to different skeletons. To the best of our knowledge, our method is the first to perform retargeting between skeletons with differently sampled kinematic chains, without any paired examples.


Hypoxia is a generic micro-environmental factor of solid tumours. High levels of hypoxia lead to resistance to radiotherapy, which can be targeted by adding hypoxia-modifying therapy to improve clinical outcomes. Not all patients benefit from hypoxia-modifying therapy, and there is a need for biomarkers to enable progression to biologically personalised radiotherapy. Gene expression signatures are a relatively new category of biomarkers that can reflect tumour hypoxia. This article reviews the published hypoxia gene signatures, summarising their development and validation. The challenges of gene signature derivation and development, and advantages and disadvantages in comparison with other hypoxia biomarkers are also discussed. Current evidence supports investment in gene signatures as a promising hypoxia biomarker approach for clinical utility.


Solanum nigrum L., Cleome gynandra L. and Amaranthus spp. are some of the indigenous leafy vegetables (ILVs) that contribute to food diet, income generation, good nutrition and health to resource-poor farmers in Kisii and Trans-Mara counties. The production of ILVs is constrained by inadequate land, diseases and pests of which, root-knot nematodes (RKN) are the most damaging pests to vegetable crops causing about 30 % yield losses globally. However, there is no information about the incidence, prevalence and management of RKN on ILVs in Kenya or worldwide. A survey was conducted in Kisii and Trans-Mara to determine the incidence and prevalence of RKN in ILVs and the available germplasms were screened for response to Meloidogyne spp. in greenhouse. Five organic amendments (OAs) commonly used in the areas of study for ILVs cultivation were also evaluated for their effects on RKN on C. gynandra, S. nigrum, S. villosum and Amaranthus spp. in greehouse and field tests. The amendments included: tea (Camellia sinensis (L.) Kuntze) residues (Tres) and rejects (Trej), decomposed cattle manure (CM), goat manure (GM) and Tithonia diversifolia manure (Td). The amendments were incorporated into the sterilized soil in micro-pots and the field at recommended rates. Unamended soils served as controls. After ninety (90) days, the disease and plant growth parameters were assessed. The study revealed that, 62.8 % of the farms surveyed were infected with RKN. The disease incidence was generally higher in the black nightshades from Kisii compared to those from Trans-Mara, while disease incidence in spider plants and amaranths was generally higher in Trans-Mara compared to Kisii Counties. Black nightshades were susceptible to RKN with green berried recording higher reproduction and galling index compared to susceptible check, while amaranths and spider plants had lower scores (<15.0 %) in the screening experiment. All OAs significantly (P<0.05) reduced final populations, rate of galling and reproduction of RKN relative to unamended soil. The reduction in such parameters greatly varied with the type of the OA and the host plant. Generally, Tres and Trej were most effective (P<0.05) against RKN galling followed by Td, while CM and GM were the least. However, corresponding decrease in ILV growth was observed in Tres and Trej amendment while, the other OAs showed significant growth increase under greenhouse conditions. As for managing RKN on ILVs, Tres and Trej were the most effective inhibitor to its build-up followed by Td manures. Percentage increase in black nightshades and amaranth shoot height and biomass was obtained in soils amended with Td, CM and GM compared to Trej and Tres in pots yet in the field Tres increased plant growth significantly. Further studies are imperative to correctly identify all the prevailing races of Meloidogyne spp. across various soil types in the study areas in addition to determination of the mechanisms of control by the OAs for proper nematode management.


You have a question, or want to find out current perceptions about a subject, and a comprehensive literature search does not give the answer. A questionnaire or survey, if appropriately designed and administered, can be an easy and efficient way to collect data. However, a well-designed tool is essential to provide meaningful answers.

Guidance on good questionnaire design is available.1–4 This can be framed around three simple steps: preparation—evaluation—delivery. Analysis and interpretation are the final stages of completing the research.

Is a survey method the most appropriate research tool to answer the question? Questionnaires are useful to investigate opinions or attitudes of a population. If a questionnaire is chosen as the research tool, the next step is to identify whether a validated instrument already exists. If a tool needs to be designed, what format would be of greatest value in answering the enquiry; a structured interview or a self-completed written form? The latter can gather a large amount of rich data, while the former provides a deeper understanding through semistructured questioning.3

Self-completed questionnaires require careful construction with clear articulation of purpose. Their success depends strongly on format as well as the wording; use an attractive, easy to navigate presentation and ensure the length is kept as short as possible. Consider whether to include open or closed questions, or a combination of both. Questions should only include a single point, written unambiguously and contained within short sentences. Wording should be appropriate for your survey population and avoid jargon to reduce potential confusion. Closed questions can provide large amounts of easily handled (often numerical) data. Open questions, as in free …


In patients with periodontal disease a distinct increase in secretion of salivary acidic and alkaline RNAases was found. The RNAases activity in mixed saliva correlated with the intensity of degradation of periodontal tissues during loss of alveolar layer in aged Wistar rats and the spontaneous periodontal disease in cats. In experiments with golden hamsters salivary RNAase was found to penetrate through mucosa in active form. The purified salivary RNAase inhibited the protein biosynthesis in rabbit gingiva. Intensive atrophic alterations were produced in periodontal tissues of Wistar rats by means of purified salivary RNAase.


Magnetic polariton (MP) that couples electromagnetic waves with magnetic excitation can be predicted by equivalent inductor–capacitor (LC) circuit model. However, when the resonance frequencies of MP and surface phonon polariton (SPhP) is close, the absorption and transmission peaks predicted by LC circuit model are far different from solving electromagnetic field calculation results. In this work, absorption and transmission enhancements with a SiC slit array are theoretically demonstrated within the SiC phonon absorption band with finite difference time-domain (FDTD) method. The interactions between SPhP and MP are confirmed by electromagnetic field distributions. Mutual inductor–inductor–capacitor (MLC) circuit model is used to predict the multiorder MP resonance conditions, and the coupling between MP and SPhP is treated as a mutual inductor in MLC model. The geometric effects of SiC slit arrays are investigated and MLC circuit model works well. This study may contribute to the design and prediction of thermal radiative properties and micro-/nanostructure metamaterials thermal radiative properties database building.


Energy derived from leaf litter decomposition fuels food webs in forested streams. However, the natural spatial variability of the decomposition rate of leaf litter and the relative contributions of its drivers are poorly known at the local scale. This study aims to determine the natural in-stream variability of leaf litter decomposition rates in successive riffles and to quantify the factors involved in this key ecosystem process at the local scale. Experiments were conducted on six successive riffles in nine streams in north-western France to monitor the decomposition rate in fine (microbial decomposition, kf) and coarse (total decomposition, kc) mesh bags. We recorded 30 ± 2% (mean ± S.E.) variation in kc among riffles and 43 ± 4% among streams. kf variability was 15 ± 1% among riffles and 20 ± 3% among streams. However, in-stream variability was higher than between-stream variability in four of the nine streams. Streambed roughness was negatively related to decomposition and was the most important factor for both total and microbial decomposition. Our study shows that the natural variability of the decomposition rate resulting from the local morphological conditions of habitats could be very important and should be taken into consideration in studies using leaf litter assays as a bio-indicator of anthropogenic impacts in streams.


This paper investigates the role of urbanization in the relation between population change and new business formation. The hypothesis of research is that population change significantly influences new business formation only in regions at lower urbanization. This hypothesis is based on the idea that local demand and growing population are significant determinants of new business formation only for rural regions. Using Italian data, we find evidence in support of this hypothesis. Moreover, we find that evidence of spatial dependence in the relation between population change, new business formation and urbanization.


By the employment of the colorimetric method statistically significant objective data on postmortem changes in the colour of different parts of the skin have first been obtained. Histological and spectrophotometric studies were carried out in order to elucidate the causes of these changes. The colour of the cadavar skin as well as the colour of the human skin in life depends on primary pigments: hemoglobin, melanin, carotene and melanoid. A certain role is likely to be played by the main structural proteins of the derma and epidermis: collagen and keratin. The cadavar skin colour differs in variations of the dominant wave length and reflectance which are associated with postmortem redistribution of the blood under the effect of the gravity and qualitative transformation of oxyhaemoglobin into reduced haemoglobin. The distribution of melanin, carotene, and melanoid does not differ from that in life. The most specific index of the amount of melanin is the purity of colour and not reflectance.


Many pesticides are used increasingly in combinations during crop protection and their stability ensures the presence of such combinations in foodstuffs. The effects of three fungicides, pyrimethanil, cyprodinil and fludioxonil, were investigated together and separately on U251 and SH-SY5Y cells, which can be representative of human CNS glial and neuronal cells respectively. Over 48h, all three agents showed significant reductions in cellular ATP, at concentrations that were more than tenfold lower than those which significantly impaired cellular viability. The effects on energy metabolism were reflected in their marked toxic effects on mitochondrial membrane potential. In addition, evidence of oxidative stress was seen in terms of a fall in cellular thiols coupled with increases in the expression of enzymes associated with reactive species formation, such as GSH peroxidase and superoxide dismutase. The glial cell line showed significant responsiveness to the toxin challenge in terms of changes in antioxidant gene expression, although the neuronal SH-SY5Y line exhibited greater vulnerability to toxicity, which was reflected in significant increases in caspase-3 expression, which is indicative of the initiation of apoptosis. Cyprodinil was the most toxic agent individually, although oxidative stress-related enzyme gene expression increases appeared to demonstrate some degree of synergy in the presence of the combination of agents. This report suggests that the impact of some pesticides, both individually and in combinations, merits further study in terms of their impact on human cellular health.


Effects of different tillage systems on organic carbon and carbon management index (CMI) in paddy soil of long-term experiment site (since 1990) were studied. The experiment included three tillage treatments: conventional tillage with rotation of rice and winter fallow (CT-r) system, no-tillage and ridge culture with rotation of rice and rape (RT-rr) system, and conventional tillage with rotation of rice and rape (CT-rr) system. Soil labile organic carbon measured by oxidation of KMnO4 respond rapidly to carbon supply changes, and it is considered as an important indicator of soil quality. Compared with CT-r system, long-term RT-rr system significantly increased total organic carbon and labile organic carbon in surface soil (0-10 cm and10-20 cm). The proportion of labile organic carbon to total organic carbon under RT-rr system was higher than other tillage systems. The carbon management index (CMI) is derived from the total soil organic carbon pool and carbon lability and is useful to evaluate the capacity of management systems to promote soil quality. The CMI increased in each layer under RT-rr system, while it decreased under CT-rr system. This indicated that conservation tillage improved the capacity of the management system into promoting soil quality in Sichuan Basin of China.


This project began with a desire to define and articulate what I have termed cinematic performance, which itself emerged from an examination of how liveness, as a privileged performance studies concept, functions in the 21st century. Given the relative youth of the discipline, performance studies has remained steadfast in delimiting its objects as those that are live--shared air performance--and not bound by textuality; only recently has the discipline considered the mediated, but still solely within the circumscription of shared air performance. The cinema, as cultural object, permeates our lives--it is pervasive and ubiquitous--it sets the bar for quality acting, and shapes our expectations and ideologies. The cinema, and the cinematic text, is a complex performance whose individual components combine to produce a sum greater than the total of its parts. The cinema itself is a performance--not just the acting--participating in a cultural dialogue, continually reshaping and challenging notions of liveness, made more urgent with the ever-increasing use of digital technologies that seem to further segregate what is generally considered real performance from the final, constructed cinematic text.Liveness and presence have remained defining forces within the field. In her now-canonical Unmarked (1993), Peggy Phelan assertively concludes, Performance's only life is in the present. Performance cannot be saved, recorded, documented, or otherwise participate in the circulation of representations of representations: once it does so, it becomes something other than performance (146). At the end of the same decade, however, Philip Auslander begins to play devil's advocate in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (1999) by troubling what he sees as a reductive binary opposition of the live and the mediatized (3). Through a genealogical consideration of live and mediated forms of performance, Auslander concludes that the live cannot be considered outside of or as separate from the mediated (7).With the rise of digital products, and the ever-increasing incorporation of the digital into our daily lives, Auslander's initial troubling of the traditional concept of liveness expands and becomes more complex. The cinema, as an art and as an analytical object, continually foregrounds its absent presence, its present absence. By the turn of the 21st century, cinema studies had firmly established claims of indexicality in the relationship of the cinematic text to reality: the celluloid captures the light, is imprinted by the profilmic event. Yet, the rise of new media and digital technologies at the end of the 21st century have allowed for the creation of photorealistic scenes created wholly outside the images captured with the camera, requiring no relationship to the profilmic event.At the same time that cinema seemed to be losing its indexical relationship to reality, and as digital technologies increasingly permeated the fabric of daily existence, zombie cinematic production witnessed a renaissance in popularity and surge in quantity. It is no small coincidence that zombie cinema also rose in popularity during film's transition to sound (1930s-1940s), again during the proliferation of televisions into every American home (1960s), and then again most recently with the explosion of digital technologies. In each of these moments zombie cinema thematizes presence, absence, and liveness. Combining performance theory, film theory, new media studies, and zombie popular culture, this project seeks to account for the most recent surge in zombie cinema and zombie culture, arguing that 21st century zombie cinema performs new media. The introduction provides a theoretical background, outlining the beginnings of this project and providing some initial grounding in the theoretical terminology that structures the project. In Chapter One, I provide the historical and genealogical grounding, surveying the history of zombie cinema. Chapter Two, Inaugurating the 21st Century Zombie: Embodying Biomedia and Liminality in Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002), begins my analysis of new media--in this case, Eugene Thacker's concept of biomedia--and how it emerges within and is represented by zombie cinema, leading to an assertion of zombie liminality. I continue to expand upon new media and zombie cinema in Liveness and Living Dead: Remediation and Intermediality in George A. Romero's Diary of the Dead (2007), introducing the concept of remediation and demonstrating some of the potentialities of liminality. Chapter Four, Networked Dispersal: Performance Process, Multiplicity, and Connectivity in 21st Century Zombie Cinema, expands from the single film examination to a larger consideration of 21st century zombie cinema and how it performs network connections. In the last chapter, Visceral Viewing: Zombies In Real Life (IRL), I step away from screened representations of zombies to a consideration of zombies embodied in real life: zombie walks, zombie theater, and community formations. I conclude by returning to the beginning: cinematic performance. And here I offer a continuation of the project, a new branch, taking-up another aspect of cinematic performance and considering how digital post production creates performance and is its own performance.


This study presents an intelligent solution for load-frequency control in a restructured power system using a modified traditional frequency response model, suitable for a bilateral-based deregulation policy. The new approach is based on an extended classifier system with continuous-valued inputs (XCSR) which is the most successful learning classifier systems. The proposed intelligent solution does not require an accurate model of the system and is more flexible in specifying the control objectives. Also it is an automated learning-based approach. It means there is not any need to training data and expert knowledge of the system to determine the states and actions, which is a very time-consuming and difficult stage of designing reinforcement learning-based solutions. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, its performance on a three-area restructured power system with possible contract scenarios, large load demands and area disturbances has been compared with multi-agent reinforcement learning-based controller. The results show that the proposed intelligent solution achieves good robust performance for a wide range of load changes in the presence of system nonlinearities and has good ability to track the contracted and non-contracted demands.


In this study, we examined the links between Internet addiction, engagement in online erotica (including pornography usage and usage of sex-based Internet chat sites), and engagement in risky online sexual behaviors, in this case, sending sexually-explicit pictures to those known only online (i.e., sexting) and expecting to engage in offline sex with those known only online. In our sample of 276 U.S. adults, men engaged in most of these online sexual activities significantly more than women, but women were just as likely as men to send sexually-explicit pictures to online chat partners, and they were also just as likely as men to demonstrate signs of internet addiction. More importantly, using pornography and sex site usage were sequential mediators in the relationship between Internet addiction and engagement in risky online sexual activities. Moreover, whereas pornography viewing alone was not a predictor of risky online sexual activities, when the behavior escalated to engaging in Internet sex chat sites it did predict engagement in sexting or expectations of offline sex with those known only online. Based on these findings, we suggest that although these behaviors might be considered under one umbrella of online sexual activity, it might be useful from an intervention and treatment standpoint to target specific online sexual activities (e.g., sex site usage).


The enzymatic membrane bioreactor (EMB), which is a combination of a membrane separation process and an enzymatic reaction, is increasingly applied in food and agriculture fields. This article reviews the previous literatures of this topic, and particularly focuses on mathemaitc models which simulate the EMB system behavior and factors restricting EMB performances. The article consists of three parts. The first sector discusses mathematic models of EMB which are mostly derived from Michaelis-Menten equation, Fick's diffusion law, chemical equilibrium and material balance, and affecting factors whose interactions are revealed by response surface methodology, in order to optimize the parameters of EMB. The second section summarizes the reaction characters of EMB. Finally, the future research areas of EMB are proposed.


Professor Jan Strzalko – Polish physical anthropologist, longtime Editor-in-Chief of Anthropological Review, scholar and academic of Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan, author of numerous articles and textbooks, authority on human biology and ecology, died August 15, 2016 in Poznan. He was born January 31, 1943 in Kleck, Nowogrodek Voivodeship (now part of Belarus). His family repatriated to Poland in 1945 from Strzalkowo and settled in Poznan. He studied biology and anthropology at the Faculty of Biology and Earth Sciences, Adam Mickiewicz University during years 1960-1965. He completed his master's degree in 1965 (and joined the faculty), a PhD in 1968, and a post-doctoral degree in 1974. The title of Professor was conferred on him in 1989 (after 7 years' delay, due to unfavorable opinion of the communist authorities of the time). Professor Strzalko was the first Dean of the newly established Department of Biology, Adam Mickiewicz University (1984-1985) – his term of office, as well as those of the Rector and Deans of other faculties, was interrupted by the then Minister of Science and Higher Education. Between years 1984-1987 he was head of the Department of Anthropology at the Faculty of Biology, founder and head of the Department of Human Population Ecology at the Institute of Anthropology (1987-2012), and from 1990-1996 Vice-rector for Research at Adam Mickiewicz University. Since 1962 he was a member of the Polish Anthropological Society. After several years working on the editorial body of the Society's journal – Przegląd Antropologiczny (Anthropological Review), he was appointed member of the Editorial Committee in 1973. In 1978 he became Deputy Editor, and in 1986 Editor-in-Chief of the journal – a position he held for 25 years. Professor Strzalko's first research interests were mainly the morphology and morphogenesis of the human skeleton, including the factors affecting the variability of the skeleton. He then went on to investigate the research methodology of prehistoric populations – studying bone material obtained from excavations. The third sphere to which he devoted attention was human population ecology and the relationships between biological and cultural evolution. A fourth interest was physical attractiveness – the research being as much anthropological as psychoevolutionary – then a new field. Last, but not least, was the problem of so-called human races, racial stereotypes and xenophobia. He was editor and co-author of several books, including university textbooks "Antropologia fizyczna" (Physical anthropology) and "Antropologia" (Anthropology), for which he received the awards of the Minister of Higher Education and Technology (1981) and Minister of National Education (1990). He was also Chief Editor of the first Polish translation of the American textbook "BIOLOGY: Campbell, Reece" (2012). For his outstanding achievements in the fields of education and science, and in recognition of the importance of his work, he was awarded the Medal of Commission of National Education (1981) and Knight's Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (1990). Jan Strzalko was not only an eminent and creative researcher, but also a gifted academic teacher. He was a guest lecturer in Poland, and abroad – as Visiting Professor at the University of South Africa (UNISA) in Pretoria, in 1993. He supervised over 150 masters students and mentored 9 PhD students. Professor Strzalko had broad interests (from biology and statistics to literature and classical music) and enormous knowledge. He was extremely well-read and one could engage him about almost anything. He popularized the science of evolution, gave comments to the press, radio and TV, shaped and directed the scientific development of young researchers, and was a keen debater and reviewer. At the same time, he was an extremely warm and cultured man – a true gentleman of great intellect. At the end of 2011 he took ill, and yet, his death was sudden and unexpected. He passed away, leaving his wife, daughter, son and grandson. Jan, you are sorely missed.


Many physicians and trainers are not aware of the entity of avulsion of the profundus tendon insertion. This is unfortunate, since early diagnosis and prompt surgical treatment generally produce the best result. Late, untreated patients who are asymptomatic are best left alone. For late instability of the DIP joint, fusion should be considered. A one- to two-stage flexor tendon graft can be performed in carefully selected, untreated patients, but the potential risks may outweigh the possible advantages in some individuals.


Both meteorological methods and remote sensing methods contain some deficiencies in monitoring agricultural
drought. To improve the accuracy of the agricultural drought monitoring, the comprehensive monitoring model
was established based on the relationship between the standardization vegetation, supply water index (VSWIs),
the comprehensive precipitation index (CPI) and the synchronous soil moisture data measured in the study area.
The VSWIs was effective in monitoring drought at high density vegetation areas and the CPI was suitable to the
tropical area. The root mean square error (RMSE) and the relative root mean square error (RMSEr) of the
model were 4.65% and 19.28% respectively. The model was then used to evaluate the change of the agricultural
drought in Hainan Island from October 2004 to January 2005. The results indicated that the drought in the
study area had significant spatial and temporal differences. The droughts in the west and the north were more
serious than those in the east and the south of the island respectively, and the drought in the plain was more
serious than that in the mountain area. Temporally the drought intensified from early October 2004. Until late
January 2005, the drought was still very serious. The drought approached its peak in early December 2004. The
heavy drought area of paddy fields, dry land and other woodland accounted for about 59%, 61% and 20%
respectively. Crop growth was constrained obviously by this drought. Compared with last year, the cumulative
value of normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) was reduced by 6.34%, and yield of the natural rubber
was reduced about 1.16×104t from October to December in 2004.


We investigated the protective effects exerted by oridonin, the main active constituent of the Chinese medicinal herb Rabdosiarubescens, against lipopolysaccharide (LPS)/D-galactosamine (D-Gal)-induced acute liver injury (ALI). An ALI model was induced in mice using LPS (40 μg/0.5 ml) and D-Gal (5 mg/0.5 ml). The mice were randomly divided into the following five groups of six mice each: one control group (a), one ALI group (b), two oridonin treatment groups (c and d), and one oridonin control group (e). Oridonin (0.2 mg/0.5 ml) was administered once 1 h prior to the LPS/D-Gal challenge in group c and a total of three times over a period of four days, with the last dose given at 1 h before the LPS/D-Gal challenge, in group d. Pretreatment with oridonin improved the survival rate, alleviated histopathological abnormalities, and suppressed plasma aminotransferases in the LPS/D-Gal-challenged mice. Importantly, oridonin attenuated LPS/D-Gal-induced apoptosis in hepatocytes by reducing pro-apoptotic signals (P<0.05), such as tumor necrosis factor-α (TNF-α) and c-Jun N-terminal kinases (JNK). Furthermore, JNK-associated mitochondrial pro-apoptotic proteins were also suppressed by pretreatment with oridonin. Taken together, these data show that oridonin exerts protective effects against LPS/D-Gal-induced ALI in mice via a mechanism that may involve the suppression of the pro-apoptotic cytokine TNF-α and JNK-associated pro-apoptotic signaling.


Idiopathic scoliosis is a deformity of the spine that affects 2–3% of adolescents. The treatment of scoliosis often requires the use of a rigid brace to align the spine and prevent progression of the deformation. The most common brace, referred to as the Boston brace, has a high success rate in preventing progression of the scoliotic curve. The common root failure is lack of patient compliance in wearing the brace for the prescribed time. This lack in compliance is due to patient discomfort, both physically and emotional, and the patients' limited ability to perform activities of daily living (ADL) when wearing the brace. The likelihood of needing surgery increases dramatically when bracing is unsuccessful.We seek to improve patients' comfort by designing a brace that improves range of motion, while remaining stiff in the corrective direction. Primary ranges of motion were acquired using a motion capture system. A kinematic analysis was performed using homogeneous transformations and screw theory to determine primary screw axes of the motions. The required lateral stiffness for the brace was found in literature.Compliant mechanisms are used because they can apply the corrective force, but also allow the patients some range of motion. The mechanism implementation was characterized using finite element analysis and compared to a physical model test.Initial findings confirm that compliant mechanisms are suitable for the application of a scoliosis brace. We have found that the proposed brace can apply the necessary forces at reasonable displacements. The proposed brace will not allow the patient a full range of motion, but we believe that it will achieve an improved range of motion that will increase a patient's ability to perform activities of daily living.Copyright © 2016 by ASME


PURPOSE
To assess the bactericidal action of ozone pneumoperitonium, and to compare the results with CO2.

METHODS
It was used 36 Wistar rats. The animals, under anesthesia, were inoculated with 2ml of E. coli ATCC at a concentration of 10(10)UFC, and 1ml of BaSO4, into the peritoneal cavity. They were divided into three groups: Group 1, CO2 pneumoperitoneum was performed for 15 minutes; Group 2, ozone pneumoperitoneum was performed for 5 minutes at a concentration of 42microg/ml, and Group 3, ozone pneumoperitoneum was performed for 5 minutes at a concentration of 62microg/ml. Six animals from each group were sacrificed after the experiment, and the remaining 6 observed for 24 hours. Material was collected from the cavity of all animals for microbiological study.

RESULTS
Ozone presented a greater bactericidal effect than CO2 in those animals sacrificed immediately after pneumoperitoneum. In the animals studied 24 hours after pneumoperitoneum evidenced no difference in bactericidal effect between the two gases. Moreover, no difference in mortality was observed.

CONCLUSION
Ozone has a more potent bactericidal effect than carbon dioxide gas, although this did not influence survival of the animals.


This study examines our current perioperative fluid regimen in relation to body fluid compartments, intravascular volumes, and early kidney function in 17 kidney transplant recipients and their living related donors. Donors were given 0.5 g/kg of 10% dextran-40 during surgery and electrolyte solutions averaging 3032 ml/24 h. Recipients were randomized to receive albumin or dextran-40 infusions and given 0.5 g/kg during surgery. Electrolyte and 5% glucose infusions averaged 5580 ml/ 24 h, to match the urinary output. Total intravascular albumin (TIA) and total intravascular dextran (TID) were calculated from the plasma concentrations and plasma volume (PV).Mean preoperative PV in the donors was 44.5 ml/kg. The TIA loss of 0.37 g/kg was balanced by a TID of 0.27 g/kg, and PV increased to 46 and 49 ml/kg at 3 and 34 h after surgery, respectively. In recipients, the preoperative volume of extracellular water correlated linearly to the total body water and PV, as well as to the urine flow the first 24 h after transplantation. No difference was found in urine volume, serum creatinine, or PV expansion between recipient patients receiving albumin or dextran-40. Twelve patients with immediate urinary onset had blood volume (BV) and PV of more than 70 and 45 ml/kg, respectively, in sharp contrast to five patients with delayed urinary onset, who had lower BV and PV values. A fall in TIA of 0.9 g/kg at 3 h corresponded to a PV loss of 18 ml/kg and was only partially replaced by the 0.5 g/kg of intraoperative colloids.We conclude that BV and PV of more than 70 and 45 ml/kg, respectively, are associated with immediate kidney function in living related transplant recipients. Immediate kidney function may be induced by colloid infusions in a dose of about 1 g/kg, in addition to electrolyte solutions and blood transfusions.


Founded in 1870 at Indiana Asbury (now DePauw University) in Greencastle, Ind., Kappa Alpha Theta is the first Greek-letter sorority known among women. In 1917-18, the Tau Epsilon Tau sorority became a chapter of the national Kappa Alpha Theta Greek society at the Colorado Agricultural College.


Health is a Fundamental Right granted by the Constitution of India. The Government of India passed the "Drugs Act" in 1940 to regulate the import, manufacture, distribution and sale of drugs. The Drugs Control Administration aims at assuring the availability of drugs & Cosmetics of proven quality, efficacy and safety at prices as announced. Pharmacy is the health profession that links the health science with chemical science and it is charged with ensuring the safe and effective use of pharmaceutical drugs. In this study to identify the areas of variation in Interpretation of Drugs and Cosmetics Act, 1940 and Rules thereunder among southern states of India. These findings suggested that lot of banned fixed dose combinations are approved by the different states and difficult to track and trace the substandard drugs and different states adopting different procedure in issuing license for manufacture of drugs among states of India, and even there is a variation in Administrative Actions and implementation of the said Act also. It affects the public health. Hence it requires the harmonization of implementation of Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940 and Rules 1945 among the States of India.


Chronic pancreatitis (CP) is a progressive inflammatory disease that eventually results in the impairment of exocrine and endocrine functions of the pancreas. Recent studies have shown an association between mutations in the serine protease inhibitor Kazal type 1 (SPINK1) gene and CP. SPINK1 provides the first line of defense against prematurely activated trypsinogen by physically blocking the active site of trypsin. The IVS3+2T>C (c.194+2T>C) mutation is a loss-of-function splicing mutation; it affects the consensus splicing donor site in intron 3 and may cause the skipping of the entire exon 3, where the trypsin-binding site is located. We report here three CP patients carrying this mutation in a homozygous form, with no noticeable family history of pancreatitis. The first patient is a 25-year-old male with juvenile-onset idiopathic CP. He suffered from repeated attacks of pancreatitis since 5 years old and underwent pancreatico-jejunostomy. He complained of epigastralgia, and was diagnosed as obstructive pancreatitis in the area of the accessory pancreatic duct. The second patient is a 75-year-old male with alcoholic CP. He did not have apparent attacks of pancreatitis, but had numerous calcifications throughout the pancreas and confirmed exocrine failure and diabetes mellitus. The last patient is a 44-year-old female with late-onset idiopathic CP. She suffered from repeated attacks of pancreatitis since 32 years old. She had numerous stones in the main pancreatic duct in the pancreas head and confirmed exocrine failure. The clinical courses of these patients are apparently different, indicating the phenotypic variability of the SPINK1 IVS3+2T>C mutation-associated CP.


A series of isostructural lanthanide sulfates LnSO4-NTU1 (Ln = Eu (1), Tb (2), Sm (3), Dy (4), and Er (5)) containing extra-large 36-membered ring (36-MR) channels were prepared by employing "scale chemistry" theory with cluster building units. The 2-fold interpenetrated dia network was assembled with tetrahedral {Ln10(SO4)16} clusters. A single dia framework contains 36-MR channels with the pore size (22.0 × 16.8 A) reaching the mesoscale. The discovery of LnSO4-NTU1 sets a new record, pushing the existing maximum channel size of metal sulfates from 24-MR forward up to 36-MR. Notably, mix-Eu/TbSO4-NTU1 exhibits color-tunable luminescence from red to green through adjusting the molar ratio of Eu : Tb in the frameworks.


CD4+ T cells of 57 patients with B cell chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) were analysed for expression of CD45RA and CD29. The majority of CLL patients (33 cases) showed a novel coexpression of these markers on a significant proportion of CD4+ T cells; however, analysis of a single blood sample revealed no apparent prognostic value associated with the markers. Expression of CD45RA and CD29 correlated with parameters of immune function consistent with the known attributes of these markers.


This study explores the question of whether California's freight system is staying competitive with other US regions. A novel analytical framework compares supply chain performance metrics across multiple US states and regions for seaports, airports, highways, freight rail service, and distribution centers by combining the Performance Evaluation Matrix (PEM), Competitive Position Matrix (CPM), and Business Process Management (BPM) approaches. Analysis of industry data and responses from structured interviews with 30 freight industry experts across 5 transportation sectors suggests that California's freight system is competitive for seaports, airports, and freight rail; however, highways and distribution centers have room for improvement with respect to travel time reliability and operation costs, and California should prioritize infrastructure investments here. To stay competitive with the Texas and North East regions, state investments could also expand seaport container terminals and air cargo handling facilities, improve intermodal port connections and management of flows of chassis, container trucks, empty containers to ameliorate cargo backlogs and congestion on highways, at the ports, and at warehouses. The state could also invest in inland ports, transporting goods by rail directly from seaports to the Inland Empire or Central Valley.


The histological and cytological features of follicular thyroid neoplasms with oxyphilic change (Hurthle cell tumors) may lead to the differential diagnosis of metastatic malignant melanoma. S-100 and HMB-45 staining was studied in 18 Hurthle cell tumors, 6 Hurthle cell carcinomas, and 5 cases of Hashimoto's thyroiditis using a rabbit polyclonal antibody to S-100 protein, a mouse monoclonal antibody to HMB-45 protein, and the avidin alkaline phosphatase method. All 6 carcinomas and 17 of 18 Hurthle cell tumors exhibited strong cytoplasmic and nuclear staining for S-100. One Hurthle cell carcinoma also contained a spindle cell anaplastic area that was negative for S-100. All cases of Hashimoto's thyroiditis displayed intense staining in Hurthle cells for S-100, with weak to negative staining in nonoxyphilic follicular epithelium. In the three studied lesions, all cases were negative for HMB-45 protein. Three nonthyroid oncocytic tumors (renal oncocytoma, oncocytic carcinoma of the parotid, and parathyroid oxyphilic adenoma) were found to be negative for both S-100 and HMB-45 staining. Hurthle cell lesions should be included in the differential diagnosis of S-100-positive tumors. HMB-45 remains a marker more restricted to melanocytic lesions.


Tinnitus remains a scientific and clinical problem whereby, in spite of increasing knowledge on effective treatment and management for tinnitus, very little impact on clinical practice has been observed. There is evidence that prolonged, obscure and indirect referral trajectories persist in usual tinnitus care. Objective It is widely acknowledged that efforts to change professional practice are more successful if barriers are identified and implementation activities are systematically tailored to the specific determinants of practice. The aim of this study was to administer a health service evaluation survey to scope current practice and knowledge of standards in tinnitus care across Europe. The purpose of this survey was to specifically inform the development process of a European clinical guideline that would be implementable in all European countries. Design A health service evaluation survey was carried out. Setting The survey was carried out online across Europe. Participants Clinical experts, researchers and policy-makers involved in national tinnitus healthcare and decision-making. Outcome measures A survey was developed by the study steering group, piloted on clinicians from the TINNET network and underwent two iterations before being finalised. The survey was then administered to clinicians and policy-makers from 24 European countries. Results Data collected from 625 respondents revealed significant differences in national healthcare structures, use of tinnitus definitions, opinions on characteristics of patients with tinnitus, assessment procedures and particularly in available treatment options. Differences between northern and eastern European countries were most notable. Conclusions Most European countries do not have national clinical guidelines for the management of tinnitus. Reflective of this, clinical practices in tinnitus healthcare vary dramatically across countries. This equates to inequities of care for people with tinnitus across Europe and an opportunity to introduce standards in the form of a European clinical guideline. This survey has highlighted important barriers and facilitators to the implementation of such a guideline.


Animals should adapt their escape behaviour to both physical and social surroundings in order to maximize their probability of survival. Cover can be both obstructive, reducing the visibility of the surroundings and hindering escape, and protective, providing refuge. We investigated how the provision of cover (long grass) affected (1) the escape behaviour and (2) the alarm call behaviour of Common Starlings Sturnus vulgaris responding to a model hawk during a simulated attack. Starlings always retreated away from the predator and sometimes alarm-called. Their escape trajectory was close to the ground when escaping in long grass, which could be explained by either tall swards hindering take-off or such swards being used as protective cover. On short grass their escape trajectory was much steeper (> 45 ° ). We also investigated the use of alarm calls in Starlings according to predictions arising from the costs and benefits to callers and receivers. Callers could benefit from using alarm calls through dilution or confusion if their use initiates flock departures, thus reducing their probability of being targeted. If there is no cost to the producer of alarm calls we predicted that detectors should call at all times to gain these benefits (i.e. irrespective of grass length), but if their use is costly we predicted that they would be used only when the benefits outstrip the costs. In this case we would predict that alarm calls would be given when other (visual) signals were impaired on long grass but not when they were effective on short grass. Starlings used alarm calls on long grass when visibility was reduced more frequently than on short grass, suggesting that calling has a cost to the producer. The contrasting escape strategies of Starlings in relation to a relatively small (10 cm) change in grass height demonstrates the potential importance of habitat structure in determining predation risk.


The initial efforts of transformation to market economies in transaction economy countries are to increase tighter links to modern eastern countries and one of the topics is the stock market. Empirical evidence suggests that the stock market can affect the economic growth. On the other hand, economic growth can affect the investments on the stock market by increasing the expectations of future economic growth. In this paper, I explore the possibility of the reverse causality between the stock market and economic growth in fourteen Central Eastern European (CEE) countries during 1998 to 2009. Mixed evidences indicate that the stock market is exogenous and has a positive effect on the economic growth. However, the results are ambiguous because they depend on the measurement of the stock market and the country settings.


Coaxial helicity injection (CHI) on the National Spherical Torus Experiment (NSTX) has produced 240 kA of toroidal current without the use of the central solenoid. Values of the current multiplication ratio (CHI produced toroidal current/injector current) up to 10 were obtained, in agreement with predictions. The discharges, which lasted for up to 200 ms, limited only by the programmed waveform, are more than an order of magnitude longer in duration than any CHI discharges previously produced in a spheromak or a spherical torus.


The Internet of Things (IoT) enables the interconnection of new cyber-physical devices which generate significant traffic of distributed, heterogeneous and dynamic data at the network edge. Since several IoT applications demand for short response times (e.g., industrial applications, emergency management, real-time systems) and, at the same time, rely on resource-constrained devices, the adoption of traditional Data Mining techniques is neither effective nor efficient. Therefore, conventional Data Mining techniques need to be adjusted for optimizing response times, energy consumption and data traffic while still providing adequate accuracy as required by the IoT application. In this paper, new Data Mining approaches particularly tailored for the IoT scenario have been investigated, in particular with respect to the promising, emerging novel distributed computing paradigm of Edge Computing. In detail, two approximated versions of K-Means clustering algorithm, centralized and distributed, have been implemented in the EdgeCloudSim simulation framework and validated on a real system. As highlighted by the algorithm performance analysis, choosing an approximated and distributed clustering solution can provide benefits in terms of computation, communication and energy consumption, while maintaining high levels of accuracy. The management of such trade-off, obviously, has to be done in the light of the specific IoT application requirements.


A field of sediment undulations has been mapped by means of high resolution multibeam bathymetry and seismic reflection profiles in the Llobregat River prodelta, off the city of Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain. Similar features had previously been recognized in other prodelta environments and interpreted either as downslope sediment deformation or sedimentary structures induced by bottom currents or hyperpycnal flows. Since the study area is undergoing significant offshore development, proper interpretation of such sediment undulations is needed for a correct risk assessment. The occurrence of the sedi- ment undulations is restricted to the prodelta front on slope gradients between 3 and 0.2o. The undulations have developed at the edge and atop an area of gas bearing sediments within the Late-Holocene high-stand mud wedge. An evaluation is made of the character- istics of the sediment undulations in order to determine the most likely process for the origin of these structures. Amongst these characteristics are the continuity of the reflec- tions and lack of diffractions in between different undulations, their size distribution (large to small) both from shallow to deep and with depth in section, the asymmetry (de- creasing from proximal to distal), the crest to trough vertical distance on the landward side of the undulations (up to 0.5 m), and the lack of features that could indicate a pro- gressive movement such as growth structures and drag folds. These characteristics indi- cate that the sediment undulations on the Llobregat River prodelta do not result from sediment deformation, but rather from the interaction of bottom currents generated by hyperpycnal flows from the Llobregat River with regional sea water circulation. Their identification as sediment waves implies that such features do not pose a major hazard for further offshore development.


In this paper, a direct torque control (DTC) technique for brushless dc (BLDC) motors with non-sinusoidal back-EMF operating in the constant torque region is presented. This approach introduces a two-phase conduction mode as opposed to the conventional three-phase DTC drives. In this control scheme, only two phases conduct at any instant of time. Unlike conventional six-step PWM current control, by properly selecting the inverter voltage space vectors of the two-phase conduction mode from a simple look-up table at a predefined sampling time, the desired quasi-square wave current is obtained. Therefore, a much faster torque response is achieved compared to conventional PWM current control. In this paper, it is also shown that in the constant torque region under the two-phase conduction DTC scheme, the amplitude of the stator flux linkage cannot easily be controlled due to the sharp changes and the curved shape of the flux vector between two consecutive commutation points in the stator flux linkage locus. Furthermore, to eliminate the low- frequency torque oscillations caused by the non-ideal trapezoidal shape of the actual back-EMF waveform of the BLDC motor, a pre-stored back-EMF versus position look-up table is designed. As a result, it is possible to achieve DTC of a BLDC motor drive with faster torque response due to the fact that the voltage space vectors are directly controlled while the stator flux linkage amplitude is deliberately kept almost constant by ignoring the flux control in the constant torque region. Since the flux control along with PWM generation is removed, fewer algorithms are required for the proposed control scheme. A theoretical concept is developed and the validity and effectiveness of the proposed DTC scheme are verified through the simulations and experimental results.


In this work we continue the syntactic study of completeness that began with
the works of Immerman and Medina. In particular, we take a conjecture raised by
Medina in his dissertation that says if a conjunction of a second-order and a
first-order sentences defines an NP-complete problems via fops, then it must be
the case that the second-order conjoint alone also defines a NP-complete
problem. Although this claim looks very plausible and intuitive, currently we
cannot provide a definite answer for it. However, we can solve in the
affirmative a weaker claim that says that all ``consistent'' universal
first-order sentences can be safely eliminated without the fear of losing
completeness. Our methods are quite general and can be applied to complexity
classes other than NP (in this paper: to NLSPACE, PTIME, and coNP), provided
the class has a complete problem satisfying a certain combinatorial property.


Ferroelectric hafnium and zirconium oxides have undergone rapid scientific development over the last decade, pushing them to the forefront of ultralow-power electronic systems. Maximizing the potential application in memory devices or supercapacitors of these materials requires a combined effort by the scientific community to address technical limitations, which still hinder their application. Besides their favorable intrinsic material properties, HfO2–ZrO2 materials face challenges regarding their endurance, retention, wake-up effect, and high switching voltages. In this Roadmap, we intend to combine the expertise of chemistry, physics, material, and device engineers from leading experts in the ferroelectrics research community to set the direction of travel for these binary ferroelectric oxides. Here, we present a comprehensive overview of the current state of the art and offer readers an informed perspective of where this field is heading, what challenges need to be addressed, and possible applications and prospects for further development.


To detect biological substances such as bacteria speedily and accurately, a dielectrophoresis-assisted surface plasmon resonance (SPR) fluorescence biosensor is being developed. Using Escherichia coli as a target organism, an appropriate voltage frequency to collect E. coli cells on indium tin oxide quadrupole electrodes by dielectrophoresis is analyzed. Then, E. coli is stained with 4′,6-diamidino-2-phenylindole (DAPI). To clearly detect fluorescence signals from DAPI-stained E. coli cells, the sensor is optimized so that we can excite SPR on Al electrodes by illuminating 405 nm photons. As a result, the number of fluorescence signals is increased on the electrodes by the application of a low-frequency voltage. This indicates that E. coli cells with a lower permittivity than the surrounding water are collected by negative dielectrophoresis onto the electrodes where the electric field strength is lowest.


The efforts of a Government to provide ICTs in a developing country are mostly well intended but not always successful. To establish why this happens can be a complex process. Influencing government initiatives are a variety of inhibitors, enablers and influences ranging from the diversity of stakeholders and their cultures and history, to skill levels, existing infrastructure, economic conditions, access, prejudice and politics, and language. All these factors need to be understood and managed before current or future initiatives can hope to be successful. To this end, the purpose of this paper was to develop a Capability Maturity Model for use as a conceptual framework to advance the understanding of researchers and practitioners of Governmental ICT4D policy, and the implementation of that policy. This paper sets up a theoretical model with four levels of maturity, each level consisting of five dimensions. Each of the five dimensions are then discussed and, finally, the use and contribution of the model is outlined.


This paper challenges the prevalent 'green building' design approach that treats nature as a resource rather than a living eco-system(s), and aims only to minimise the net negative impacts on the environment. It argues that buildings and cities could increase the ecological base as well as improve the economic and social health of surrounding regions. Genuine Sustainability would require the eco-retrofitting of existing development to provide the infrastructure and space to improve ecosystem health and increase natural capital. The good news is that this can be done without sacrificing space for human functions, amenity and life quality. However, it would require a very different kind of environmental management, planning and design.


The study supports Government efforts to introduce reforms to the insurance industry and its negotiations for accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). It provides a consolidated perspective about insurance services in Laos, with particular reference to the impact of possible Government commitments to liberalizing the insurance industry as part of its WTO accession process. The study builds on a survey of the industry and its regulatory environment to determine the areas that could benefit from liberalization and restructuring. It uses these findings along with the experiences of other Asian countries and best practice recommendations to suggest possible reforms and commitments under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) of the WTO. The implications of liberalization for the insurance industry are then considered and reforms supporting the Government's overall economic plan are propose.


In recent issues of this journal, J. Hagan, A. R. Gillis, and J. Simpson elaborate a power- control theory of common deliquency. They propose a positive relationship between neo-Marxist conceptions of class and common forms of delinquency, patterns of variation in gender differences by class, and intervening variables to explain these variations. An examination of class, gender, and delinquency in three U.S. data sets did not reveal the same patterns. A neo- Marxist categorization of the labor force was generally unrelated to common delinquency, and there was no evidence of paterned class-gender variations of the sort reported in their 1985 analysis. Gender differences by race were consistent with their theory, while racial differences were not. Moreover, an attempted reconstruction of data for the full set of household categories reported in the 1987 analysis raises important questions about the nature of class variations and the role of patriarchal imbalance in generating gender differences.


Background NICE guidelines recommend CT calcium scoring as first line investigation for low risk chest pain followed by CT coronary angiography if the score is 1–400. The AHA and ESC guidelines however do not recommend the routine use of calcium scoring in chest pain evaluation. In our institution, most patients referred for CT investigation of chest pain or asymptomatic risk stratification have a CT calcium score (CAC) followed by a CT coronary angiogram (CTCA). The CONFIRM trial indicated a prevalence of 4.9% of coronary stenoses >50% in low risk symptomatic patients with a CAC score of zero. Aims The aims of this study were: (1) to assess the diagnostic performance of CAC and (2) evaluate if there is any incremental benefit to routinely performing both CAC and CTCA, considering clinical yield and radiation exposure. Methods The study period was 01/01/2012 to 31/12/2015. Inclusion criteria: (1) patients referred for evaluation of low to intermediate risk stable chest pain or (2) asymptomatic patients requiring cardiovascular risk stratification. Exclusion criteria: (1) CT scans performed to evaluate for anomalous coronaries, coronary bypass grafts or pulmonary venous anatomy pre ablation or (2) isolated CAC scoring performed without CTCA. The effective radiation dose was calculated for all scans in 2015. Results 234 patients underwent a CAC score followed by a prospective ECG gated CTCA. Eighteen of these angiograms were significantly limited by motion or reconstruction artefact, rendering them nondiagnostic, and were excluded leaving 216 diagnostic scans in this study. The mean age was 49.5 years (range: 27–73 years). Forty seven percent (n = 101) were female. The mean CAC = 1 (range 0–1161). Seventy percent (n = 152) of patients had a CAC score = 0. Of the 152 patients with a CAC of 0, 18% (n = 28) were found to have mild atheroma on their CTCA. None had more significant disease. The diagnostic performance of CAC scoring over the four year period was calculated using CTCA as the standard. The negative predictive value of a CAC = 0 was 100%, while the positive predictive value of a CAC > 1 for greater than mild atheroma, was 70%. The sensitivity of CAC in our patient population was 100%, specificity 89%. There were no false negative results with a CAC = 0. The average total effective radiation dose of a combined CAC and CTCA was 3.3 mSv (range 1.6–6.5 mSv). The average effective radiation dose for a CAC score was 0.86 mSv (0.3–1.3 mSv) while the average for a CTCA was 2.2 mSv (0.8–4.8 mSv). On average, a CAC test accounts for 26% of the effective radiation exposure from the total investigation. There was a non linear relationship between CAC score and stenosis severity (Figure 1). Conclusions CAC scoring demonstrated excellent negative predictive value for significant coronary artery disease in low to intermediate risk patients. A negative calcium score did not exclude mild atheroma, but also did not produce any false negatives for significant stenoses. CAC scoring requires considerable radiation exposure.


Cellular DNA was measured by high-speed flow microfluorometry in mammalian diploid and heteroploid cell populations stained by the fluorescent Feulgen procedure. Heteroploid cells with elevated modal chromosome number showed the expected increase in modal DNA content. However, the variability of DNA content was the same in diploid and heteroploid cell populations despite the large variability of chromosome number in the latter populations. This suggests that heteroploidy may include defects in the chromosomal condensation and kinetochore development systems.


Harp seals (Pagophilus groenlandicus) that breed in February and March in the White Sea migrate to open water around Svalbard and Franz Josef Land in the Barents Sea, feeding pelagically while following the receding ice edge northward to the edge of the polar pack. Although harp seals are present throughout the area during the summer, they are primarily pelagic and do not appear to be extensively preyed upon by polar bears (Ursus maritimus). However, occasionally, large numbers of harp seals may haul out and rest on the pack ice or feed in the water below the ice and surface to breathe between the floes. When approached by a polar bear while on the ice, harp seals do not exhibit the instant flight response characteristic of the polar bear's primary prey species, ringed (Pusa hispida) and bearded seals (Erignathus barbatus). In this situation, polar bears may make multiple kills without either consuming their own prey or scavenging seals killed by other bears. This behavior appears not to frighten other nearby harp seals, whether hauled out on the ice or in the water below the floes. These unusual concentrations of harp seals hauled out on sea ice may be related to the distribution and abundance of fish or other epontic prey. Their lack of an escape response to predators on the surface of the sea ice is probably a result of briefly hauling out in large numbers in spring while whelping on the sea ice in areas where the consequences of potential polar bear predation are insignificant. The rare events of harp seal mortality from bears killing them on the surface of pack ice during the summer do not appear to have a significant impact at the population level of either species.


This study is part of an evaluation of a Chess in Schools Initiative (CIS) which was a program implemented in 2017-2018 by a State Department of Education in the southeastern United States. The aim of the program was to introduce chess instruction in the classroom in order to impact the areas of curriculum standards, critical thinking, and 21st Century Skills. Teachers were trained in the use of chess in education, how to both play chess, and to use the game during lesson time in different subject areas. This presentation focuses on students' perceptions of the benefits of chess in several areas; cognitive, academic, and social. The data were obtained from a cross-sectional survey administered at the end of the academic year after a year-long exposure to chess. The findings showed that the majority of the 1,286 students who were surveyed across all grade levels felt they had experienced a variety of positive outcomes as a result of their exposure to chess-based instruction. Large percentages (Grades 1-4: 65.8%; Grades 5-12: 43.6%) of students had an increased enjoyment of math and felt an overall increase in their ability to work harder on their school assignments (Grades 1-4: 82.7%; Grades 5-12: 65.7%) after participating in chess-based instruction. Also, students (Grades 1-4: 80.6%; Grades 5-12: 65.7%) felt better able to work on difficult assignments. These perceived increases could prove beneficial in understanding chess-based learning as they provide insight beyond only measuring students on metrics such as test scores.


A prominent feature of international trading relations since 1970 has been the spread of quantitative restrictions on imports. This paper describes initial work to quantify and assess the economic effects of such nontariff barriers (NTBs), taking as a case study the United Kingdom footwear industry. By way of example it considers the demand side effects of the voluntary export restraint on UK leather footwear imports from Comecon countries. Previous studies of NTBs have assumed that prices rise so as to clear the market following the imposition of quantitative restrictions. This paper departs from this practice by allowing for nonprice rationing in response to NTBs. We apply the Rotterdam model to describe the geographical allocation of imports since it provides a theoretically consistent but general system of demand equations and admits the simultaneous estimation of regimes in which quantity is determined endogenously and in which it is constrained.


Light absorption by the live intact HeLa cells during light microscopy was studied. The light absorption may be considered as a parameter analogous to optical density used in spectrophotometry. This parameter can be used as a quantitative characteristic of life cell as well as intracellular structures. It is shown that cells from one population but belonging to two different clones were differed by their optical density. Optical density correlation between the shadow peripheral regions of the cells and a actin localization in these regions was established.


Age measurements on glauconite by the K-Ar and Rb-Sr methods show a consistent variation with geological age with moderately small scatter. The results appear to fall 10-20 per cent short of ages measured on micas associated with dated igneous rocks. K-Ar and Rb-Sr age values are closely concordant in the majority of samples. In no samples measured by the writers have glauconites yielded ages that are definitely higher than expected limits in the time scale. Glauconites have interlayered structures. The interlayering involves mainly non-expandable 10 A layers and expandable (montmorillonitic) layers. The potassium content of glauconites is inversely proportional to the per cent expandable layers. Furthermore, the percentage of expandable layers is greater in younger glauconites than in older. This suggests that the glauconite pellets continue to develop into purer mineral grains over long periods of time, with a decrease from 30 per cent or more of expandable layers in young glauconite to about 10 per cent in glauconite of early Paleozoic age. Almost without exception Lower Paleozoic glauconite was found to contain more than 5 per cent potassium. Common strontium is adsorbed on basal plane surfaces of the expandable layers and is easily removed by exchange. It is commonly roughly proportional to the abundance of these layers. It does not affect the Rb-Sr age measurements, except in an increase of precision error in analysis. The only K-bearing mineral phase of importance that would be expected to be interlayered would be 1Md muscovite. A study of the K-Ar ages in illitic shales suggests that the effect of minor amounts of interlayered authigenic muscovite phases in glauconite would not be significant because the age values shown by these phases are very similar to those given by glauconite. Detrital 2M1 muscovite occluded in the grains would presumably increase the observed age. It is expectable that some potassium will be contained in the expandable layers, and that argon generated in these may be lost. If the glauconite undergoes a slow purification with time, in which the expandable layers gradually become well ordered glauconite, up to about 20 per cent of the mineral in Lower Paleozoic samples may not be truly authigenic. It is believed that this is the cause of the apparently lower ages in the Paleozoic. Superimposed on this effect is an expectable diffusion loss of the argon in materials that have been deeply buried, giving rise to some unusually low values. However, in the normal sample of glauconite from thin sedimentary sections of the typical platform facies, the estimated diffusion loss of argon is too small to account for the observed decrease in age. The agreement of the Rb-Sr ages also bears out this conclusion. The writers conclude that glauconite may have a limited use in the dating of unknown sediments because of the consistency indicated in world-wide comparisons, on an empirical glauconite age-scale.


Room-temperature CW (continuous-wave) operation of distributed feedback (DFB) double channel planar buried heterostructure (DCPBH) InGaAsP, InP lasers emitting in the 1550-nm wavelength region has been achieved. Lasing characteristics and wave propagation in a five-layer DFB waveguide were analyzed to design low threshold current and stable single longitudinal/transversal mode operation. DFB-DCPBH structures with second-order corrugation were prepared by a two-step liquid-phase epitaxial growth process. A threshold current of 50 mA at 25 degrees C and stable single longitudinal mode operation over a wide range of driving current and temperature have been obtained. Linewidth was measured both in DC conditions and in modulated conditions up to 500 MHz.<<ETX>>


The quest towards sustainable development, both nationally and globally, puts the
construction industry in the foreground as the main consumer of natural resources. The
industry has profound economic, social and environmental impacts. Sustainable
construction is one of the most important challenges faced by the construction industry
today. In the UK, sustainability is being driven and enforced by the government through
stringent fiscal policies and regulations, voluntary initiatives combined with naming and
shaming strategies. Stakeholders are becoming more aware of the global challenges and
are using their power to exert pressure on companies. Increasingly, construction clients
are demanding that their business partners submit: their corporate sustainability policies
with tender packages to demonstrate their performance in dealing with opportunities
and risks stemming from economic, environmental and social aspect of sustainability.
However, the lack of understanding of the concept and its practical application has been
a recurrent problem.
The conceptual confusion; its vagueness and ambiguity, the complexity of the myriad of
challenges and fluidity of the sustainability concept, compounded with the myopic
attitude of the industry, lack of clear-cut and practical framework are causing frustration
in the construction industry. Consequently, a number of sustainability management
frameworks have been proposed. There are probably more than one hundred
frameworks for sustainable business strategy. However, the majority of these are either
complicated to implement or lack sound theoretical base, effective change management
and completeness. These, therefore, do not make the situation any easier. Many are still
baffled as to what they should do and how they should go about affecting change. Corporate sustainability in the construction industry is a challenge to many companies.
The industry is still under-performing in each of the key themes of sustainable
construction and this has lead to a 'blame culture' where each sector of the industry
allocates responsibility for its current failings to others (CIRIA C563, 2001). Such a
situation poses a need for a comprehensive, practical and easy to use tool that would aid
the implementation and management of sustainability at the core of business process.
The tool will complement the existing frameworks, which breaks down the strategic and
management issues into manageable components. This will enable companies to focus
on individual areas and identify actions needed to facilitate change. The problem is that
such a tool is virtually non-existent.
The main focal point of this research is the development of a tool to facilitate the
implementation, management and integration of sustainability issues at the strategic
level and promote wider uptake of the concept in the construction industry. This
requires a thorough understanding of the concepts of sustainable development,
sustainable construction and related issues as well as drivers, benefits, barriers and
enablers for achieving corporate sustainability. It also demands an examination of
existing management frameworks and collation of case studies from the early adopters
to establish critical factors for strategic and management issues involved in achieving
corporate sustainability. Through, diverse research epistemologies (quantitative,
qualitative and triangulation methods), the research established four main critical factors
and thirty-six sub-critical factors for achieving corporate sustainability. These factors
underpinned the development of a web-based prototype software (ConPass). This thesis
presents the development and evaluation ConPass Model and the prototype software.


In this work, a stretchable, dual thermo-responsive and strain-responsive ionogel has been synthesized by one-step photopolymerization. The obtained ionogel shows an ultrahigh stretchability (∼3000%), a high ionic conductivity (up to 3.1 mS/cm), and a good temperature tolerance (-40 to 300 °C). Importantly, these ionogels show an upper critical solution temperature-type phase transition with a wide tunable phase-transition temperature (17.5-42.5 °C) and reversible color/transparency switching. In particular, the as-prepared ionogel-based flexible/wearable temperature monitors and smart windows show an excellent designability and programmability, temperature modulation ability, and thermal responsiveness. Moreover, the ionogels-based strain sensors have temperature- and strain-dual responsibility and a broad strain-sensing range (1-700%), which can effectively monitor various motions. This strategy of fabricating dual thermo- and strain-responsive ionogels by using a one-step method and only one polymer holds great promise for the next generation of multifunctional stimuli-responsive materials.


Agent-based simulation is very popular for its ability to approximate real life problems in an efficient way. To assure that the developed model is sufficienlty correct, validation needs to be performed. This contribution proposes a new approach to validate agent-based simulation models. To this end, a novel face validation technique is presented that enables systematic plausibility checks by a human expert immersed in a fine grain virtual reality environment that is the exact representation of the simulated multiagent model. It turns out that Immersive Face Validation, is a technically feasible process which offers great insight into the behaviour context of individual agents.


Supply Chain Management is a critically important approach toward producing and delivering goods and services in a cost-effective, timely manner. However, many SCM systems in practice exhibit the bullwhip effect, a tendency towards increasing variability in demand as this type of information migrates downwards in the producing supply chain. We argue that one can reduce the size of the bullwhip effect through the judicious use of knowledge management technologies. We have advanced our arguments through several propositions, and we have derived a set of testable hypotheses from two of these propositions in order to demonstrate how one would go about verifying these arguments. We have identified two different general research methodologies in order to provide a multiple methodological approach to gaining greater confidence in the propositions. It now remains to carry out this plan of research.


In the present experiment, 25 adult subjects discriminated speech tokens ([ba]/[da]) or made pitch judgments on tone stimuli (rising/falling) under both binaural and dichotic listening conditions. We observed that when listeners performed tasks under the dichotic conditions, during which greater demands are made on auditory selective attention, activation within the posterior (parietal) attention system and at primary processing sites in the superior temporal and inferior frontal regions was increased. The cingulate gyrus within the anterior attention system was not influenced by this manipulation. Hemispheric differences between speech and nonspeech tasks were also observed, both at Broca's Area within the inferior frontal gyrus and in the middle temporal gyrus.


A survey of applications of fuzzy set theory to handwriting recognition is given. Three specific applications are described: 1) the fuzzy k-nearest neighbor algorithm for handwritten word recognition; 2) the fuzzy logic for handwritten street number location; and 3) the fuzzy integral for handwritten character recognition. New research utilizing fuzzy integrals in dynamic programming based handwritten word recognition is also described.<<ETX>>


Constant equivalent noise resistance circles of a series-feedback amplifier are presented. They visualize on the series-feedback element plane, which is the region where a series feedback can be selected in order to decrease the value of . The circles demonstrate that lossy series-feedback impedances can lower the equivalent noise resistance. This is an important point because it demonstrates that the feedback element can make the noise figure less sensitive to changes in the input mismatch; and careful selection of the feedback element may reduce the noise figure of the device, despite the loss in the feedback branch. The use of circles along with circles for a constant magnitude of scattering parameter on the feedback plane is explained.


BACKGROUND Secretory GTPases like Rab27B control vesicle exocytosis and deliver critical proinvasive growth regulators into the tumor microenvironment. The expression and role of Rab27B in breast cancer were unknown. METHODS Expression of green fluorescent protein (GFP) fused with wild-type Rab3D, Rab27A, or Rab27B, or Rab27B point mutants defective in GTP/GDP binding or geranylgeranylation, or transient silencing RNA to the same proteins was used to study Rab27B in estrogen receptor (ER)-positive human breast cancer cell lines (MCF-7, T47D, and ZR75.1). Cell cycle progression was evaluated by flow cytometry, western blotting, and measurement of cell proliferation rates, and invasion was assessed using Matrigel and native type I collagen substrates. Orthotopic tumor growth, local invasion, and metastasis were analyzed in mouse xenograft models. Mass spectrometry identified proinvasive growth regulators that were secreted in the presence of Rab27B. Rab27B protein levels were evaluated by immunohistochemistry in 59 clinical breast cancer specimens, and Rab3D, Rab27A, and Rab27B mRNA levels were analyzed by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction in 20 specimens. Statistical tests were two-sided. RESULTS Increased expression of Rab27B promoted G(1) to S phase cell cycle transition, proliferation and invasiveness of cells in culture, and invasive tumor growth and hemorrhagic ascites production in a xenograft mouse model (n = 10; at 10 weeks, survival of MCF-7 GFP- vs GFP-Rab27B-injected mice was 100% vs 62.5%, hazard ratio = 0.26, 95% confidence interval = 0.08 to 0.88, P = .03). Mass spectrometric analysis of purified Rab27B-secretory vesicles identified heat-shock protein 90alpha as key proinvasive growth regulator. Heat-shock protein 90alpha secretion was Rab27B-dependent and was required for matrix metalloproteinase-2 activation. All Rab27B-mediated functional responses were GTP- and geranylgeranyl-dependent. Presence of endogenous Rab27B mRNA and protein, but not of Rab3D or Rab27A mRNA, was associated with lymph node metastasis (P < .001) and differentiation grade (P = .001) in ER-positive human breast tumors. CONCLUSIONS Rab27B regulates invasive growth and metastasis in ER-positive breast cancer cell lines, and increased expression is associated with poor prognosis in humans.


Magnetism
One of the earliest and most intensively studied problems in quantum optics is the interaction of a two-level system (an atom) with a single photon. This simple system provides a rich platform for exploring exotic light-matter interactions and the emergence of more complex phenomena such as superradiance, which is a cooperative effect that emerges when the density of atoms is increased and coupling between them is enhanced. Going beyond the light-matter system, Li et al. observed analogous cooperative effects for coupled magnetic systems. The results suggest that ideas in quantum optics could be carried over and used to control and predict exotic phases in condensed matter systems.

Science , this issue p. [794][1]

 [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.aat5162


Sperm proteins are known to be associated with normal fertilization as auto- or iso-antibodies to these proteins may cause infertility. Therefore, sperm proteins have been considered to be the potential candidate for the development of antifertility vaccine. Some of the sperm proteins proved to be promising antigens for contraceptive vaccine includes lactate dehydrogenase (LDH-C4), protein hyaluronidase (PH-20), and Eppin. Immunization with LDH-C4 reduced fertility in female baboons but not in female cynomolgus macaques. Active immunization with PH-20 resulted in 100 per cent inhibition of fertility in male guinea pigs but it induced autoimmune orchitis. Immunization with Eppin elicited high antibody titres in 78 per cent of immunized monkeys and induced infertility but the immunopathological effect of immunization was not examined. Human sperm antigen (80kDa HSA) is a sperm specific, highly immunogenic and conserved sperm protein. Active immunization with 80kDa HSA induced immunological infertility in male and female rats. Partial N-terminal amino acid sequence of 80kDa HSA (Peptide NT) and its peptides (Peptides 1, 2, 3 and 4) obtained by enzymatic digestion did not show homology with any of the known proteins in gene bank. Peptides NT, 1, 2 and 4 were found to mimic immunobiological activity of native protein. Passive administration of antibodies to peptides NT, 1, 2 and 4 induced infertility in male and female rats and peptide 1 was found to be most effective in suppressing fertility. Active immunization with keyhole limpet haemocynin (KLH) conjugated synthetic peptide 1 impaired fertility in all the male rabbits and six of the seven male marmosets. The fertility was restored following decline in antibody titre. All these findings on 80kDA HAS suggest that the synthetic Peptide-1 of 80kDa HSA is the promising candidate for development of male contraceptive vaccine.