Book synopsis: This volume presents in-depth and contextualized analyses of a wealth of visual materials. These documents provide viewers with a mesmerizing and informative glimpse into how the early modern world was interpreted by image-makers and presented to viewers during a period that spans from manuscript culture to the age of caricature. The premise of this collection responds to a fundamental question: how are early modern texts, objects, and systems of knowledge imaged and consumed through bimodal, hybrid, or intermedial products that rely on both words and pictures to convey meaning? The twelve contributors to this collection go beyond traditional lines of inquiry into word-and-image interaction to deconstruct visual dynamics and politics—to show how images were shaped, manipulated, displayed, and distributed to represent the material world, to propagate official and commercial messages, to support religious practice and ideology, or to embody relations of power. These chapters are anchored in various theoretical and disciplinary points of departure, such as the history of collections and collecting, literary theory and criticism, the histories of science, art history and visual culture, word-and-image studies, as well as print culture and book illustration. Authors draw upon a wide range of visual material hitherto insufficiently explored and placed in context, in some cases hidden in museums and archives, or previously assessed only from a disciplinary standpoint that favored either the image or the text but not both in relation to each other. They include manuscript illuminations representing compilers and collections, frontispieces and other accompanying plates published in catalogues and museographies, astronomical diagrams, mixed pictographic-alphabetic accounting documents, Spanish baroque paintings, illustrative frontispieces or series inspired by or designed for single novels or anthologies, anatomical drawings featured in encyclopedic publications, visual patterns of volcanic formations, engravings representing the New World that accompany non-fictional travelogues, commonplace books that interlace text and images, and graphic satire. Geographically, the collection covers imperial centers (Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Spain), as well as their colonial periphery (New France; Mexico; Central America; South America, in particular Brazil; parts of Africa; and the island of Ceylon). Emblematic and thought-provoking, these images are only fragments of the multifaceted and comprehensive visual mosaic created during the early modern period, but their consideration has far reaching implications.


Hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) reside in a bone marrow niche in a nondividing state from which they occasionally are aroused to undergo cell division. Yet, the mechanism underlying this unique feature remains largely unknown. We have recently shown that freshly isolated CD34-KSL hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in a hibernation state exhibit inhibited lipid raft clustering. Lipid raft clustering induced by cytokines is essential for HSCs to augment cytokine signals to the level enough to re-enter the cell cycle. Here we screened candidate niche signals that inhibit lipid raft clustering, and identified that transforming growth factor-p (TGF-p) efficiently inhibits cytokine-mediated lipid raft clustering and induces HSC hibernation ex vivo. Smad2 and Smad3, the signaling molecules directly downstream from and activated by TGF-p receptors were specifically activated in CD34-KSL HSCs in a hibernation state, but not in cycling CD34+KSL progenitors. These data uncover a critical role for TGF-p as a candidate niche signal in the control of HSC hibernation and provide TGF-p as a novel tool for ex vivo modeling of the HSC niche.


Results of current and previous studies by M. C. Hastings et al. [J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 79, S80 (1986); J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 80, S75 (1986); and J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 81, S7 (1987)] and P. S. Enger [Hearing and Sound Communication in Fishes (Springer‐Verlag, New York, 1981), pp. 243–255] to determine the effect of intense tone stimulation on the anatomy of the peripheral auditory system in bony fishes are summarized. In these studies different species of fish were exposed to pure tones at frequencies between 200 and 1000 Hz at different sound pressure levels for 1 to 4 h. The sensory epithelia in the saccule and legena were then examined using scanning electron microscopy to assess damage to hair cells. These experimental evaluations indicated (1) the possibility of a gross place‐type mechanism for frequency discrimination and (2) a possible breakdown of the Weberian apparatus in goldfish (Carassius auratus) at extremely high sound pressure levels because the primary site of hair cell damage switched from the saccule to lagena. A mathematical model for the dynamic motion of the swimbladder and Weberian ossicles has been developed based on the work of R. McN. Alexander [J. Exp. Biol. 38, 747–757 (1961)], which includes viscoelastic properties of the tissue. The model supports previous experimental observations and indicates that motion is no longer transmitted to the saccule when the system is excited by sufficiently high sound pressure levels. [Work supported in part by ONR and NIH.]


In macaques, the route of immunization has a profound effect on the immune response. Augmenting rectal or vaginal immunization with oral or nasal immunization enhanced the secretory IgA, serum IgG, and T cell responses. However, targeted iliac lymph node (TILN) immunization with recombinant simian immunodeficiency virus (SIV) gp120 and p27 elicited the most consistent mucosal antibody responses in the rectum, vagina, urine, seminal fluid, and blood. Both mucosal and TILN immunization induced specific CD4+ T cell proliferative responses in the iliac lymph nodes, which drain these mucosal surfaces, and in the splenic and circulating T cells. Rectal mucosal challenge with cell-free SIV induced total protection in 4 of 7 macaques that were immunized by the TILN route, and, compared with unimmunized macaques or those immunized by the mucosal route (P<.001), it induced a >90% decrease in virus load in 3 of them. Protection from mucosal rectal infection with SIV was significantly associated with an increase in the CD8 suppressor factor (which was generated by the iliac lymph node), RANTES, and MIP-1beta (P<.01).


Ca(2+)-mobilizing hormones induce oscillations in the cytoplasmic concentration of free Ca2+ ('free Ca') (spikes) in many cells. In hepatocytes the frequency of spiking depends on agonist dose, but the time course of an individual spike does not change with agonist concentration. Interestingly, the time course of individual spikes does depend on the hormone species, but the cellular mechanisms underlying this agonist-specificity are not understood. Here we show that ryanodine, which blocks the muscle Ca2+ channel responsible for Ca(2+)-induced Ca2+ release ('CICR') in the open conformation, has almost no effect on phenylephrine-induced spikes, but does, in contrast, inhibit vasopressin- or angiotensin II-induced spikes. We also show that ryanodine has no effect either on the increase in frequency or on the elevated peak free Ca induced by increased cyclic AMP on phenylephrine spikes. In contrast, ryanodine truncates the prolonged falling phases of spikes induced by vasopressin or angiotensin II in the presence of elevated cyclic AMP. A working hypothesis is proposed in which vasopressin- or angiotensin II-induced spikes consist of an Ins(1,4,5)P3-mediated symmetrical spike, identical in time course and mechanism with those induced by phenylephrine, followed by a 'tail' that represents CICR. The data hint at the existence of a novel signalling pathway.


Introduction
Congenital heart disease (CHD) is defined as 'a gross structural abnormality of the heart or intrathoracic great vessels that is actually or potentially of functional significance? and it is the most common congenital anomaly with a worldwide prevalence of 9 per 1,000 live births. Considering the improving of the diagnosis, the surgical and the overall medical approaches, the literature shows that up to 90% of CHD surgically treated infants survive with the possibility to grow until the adulthood. For this reason, the grown-up congenital heart disease (GUCH) patients (i.e. patients aged ≥ 18 years) are increasing worldwide, being a relatively new population with important peculiarities, such as the need of a specific care planning and a life-time clinical follow-up.
The majority of research focuses on the CHD childhood clinical management or on the CHD adulthood challenges (i.e. GUCH challenges). The literature has paid attention to explore the peculiarities of the transition period from childhood to adulthood in patients with CHD, barely in the last few years. Some recent studies present different transition care models, including generic and disease-based models, but there is a shortage of literature aimed to present implementation experiences and perspectives related to those models.
Background
The transition care models have to orient and encourage a sound health-behavior, considering how these patients could be exposed to many psychological issues related to their development of self-identity, self-esteem and self-image. The main psychological issues among adolescents with CHD are given by: (a) modification of their body image (e.g. scars); (b) social functioning (e.g. family or peers relationships); (c) increased risk of anxiety, diminished selfesteem and depression, often associated with their personal problems internalizing; and (d) problems concerning smoking, alcohol or illicit drugs consumption, and sexual behaviors. Some authors show how smoking and alcohol or illicit drugs consumption among adolescents with CHD are comparable with consumption among adolescents without CHD.
The behavior of adolescents with CHD is more likely influenced by their peer relationships rather than their clinical condition. Indeed, the adolescents with CHD seem to pay less attention than their peer to some health-promoting behaviors, such as physical exercise or dental hygiene. Moreover, the relationships between parents and adolescents with CHD seem to have some peculiarities, which are recently highlighted in the findings of a literature meta-synthesis of qualitative studies where some contradictions emerged, such as the parents' hyper-responsibility and overprotection versus the adolescents' independence desire.
The American Academy of Pediatrics defines the main goal of the transition process as to optimize lifelong function through high-quality and uninterrupted services. According to that important milestone, the recent literature presents some transition care models, which can be generic or CHD specific. The CHD specific models consider: (a) timing of transition (i.e. the process starting individualization, according to each patient's medical and developmental conditions); (b) assessing the disease pattern, where both the un-operated CHD patients (i.e. unrecognized or undiagnosed during childhood) and the CHD patients undergo corrective or palliative surgery during childhood should be assessed; and (c) care planning, involving local hospitals closely linked to the specialist centers with a transition clinic.
In recent years, the literature shows an increasing number of papers aimed to propose CHD transition care models. However, there is little empirical data showing the effectiveness of these models. Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, there are no papers aimed to share their perspective and experience on the implementation of these models. Therefore, the aim of this work is to describe the experience of Policlinico San Donato (PSD) clinicians regarding to the empirical implementation of CHD adolescents' transition care model, highlighting the most significant author's perspectives. PSD is an Italian teaching hospital and a specialist center for CHD patients.
The CHD transition care model implementation at PSD: experience and perspective
There is lively debate regarding the organization of the distribution of healthcare centers involved in CHD care, especially regarding which organizational characteristics and competencies are needed to be a CHD specialist center, because the whole care process for these patients is very challenging. Approximately 500 patients with CHD are surgically treated every year in PSD; 368 of them are under 18 years old and 41 patients are 11–18 years old (i.e. adolescent patients). In the last 10 years of care activities, beyond the traditional attention that PSD clinicians have paid to CHD paediatric patients or GUCH, they are also paying more attention towards the adolescents, since they cannot be considered neither 'big kids' nor 'adults'. PSD clinicians' attention to adolescents with CHD is the interim result of a paradigm shift, which is still driving their overall implementation of the CHD transition care model. This approach is in accordance to the CHD disease-specific theoretical descriptions available in the literature. Moreover, the patients' needs represent the PSD care delivery core of the CHD transition care model, while the multidisciplinary and the multi-professional approaches represent the paradigm of care.
The project implementation officially began with Ethical Committee approval (36/INT/2015) of a research project in April 2015. The problem underpinning the whole research project, and thus the overall implementation of the CHD transition care model at PSD, is given by the significant gap in knowledge regarding the worldwide lack of data showing the effectiveness of these models and their impact on patient health outcomes (e.g. follow-up adherence; medical outcomes; psychosocial outcomes; nursing outcomes). For this reason, PSD clinicians have chosen to closely link the transition care model implementation to a research project aimed to: (a) describe the adolescents needs with CHD, highlighting their main social and health issues; and (b) to assess the model effectiveness regarding some selected outcomes (e.g. adherence, quality of life, overall health outcomes, satisfaction).
Besides the production of new knowledge, this implementation strategy (i.e. the close link between clinical practice and research) could lead to some cultural benefits because the research protocol concerns all healthcare professionals involved in the care of adolescents with CHD, facilitating the cultural shift needed to implement a transition model. The authors may also speculate that this research project will also drive the development of patients' paths, based on the mapping of the main patients' health issues related to their clinical condition and their CHD. These paths are clinical (e.g. outpatient disease-specific clinical pathways) and educational (e.g. clinical bundles), and they are also aimed to standardize the practice. The standardization of these paths could also help the clinicians to deliver tailored care, since the standardization allows the dedication of more staff members and organizational resources to help identify the patient's peculiarities, beyond some critical common issues related to their clinical condition. More specifically, the standardization of these paths concerns: (a) the patients' categorization; (b) the healthcare professionals' competence in mapping and improving; (c) the patients' self-management improving; and (d) the development of a functional clinical data collection system.


The ENSO Diagnostics Discussion (EDD) is issued by NOAA Climate Prediction Center each month on the Thursday between the 5th and 11th with few exceptions (major holiday). The discussion provides information on the current and future status of ENSO, describes the current oceanic and atmospheric conditions in the Pacific, and gives information on related climate impacts over the United States and other regions. More specifically, the discussion includes analyses of surface and subsurface ocean temperatures, rainfall, outgoing longwave radiation, and low-level and upper-level winds over the equatorial Pacific Ocean. Along with current observations, predictions from statistical and dynamical models are also provided. The EDD is provided in HTML, PDF, and Microsoft Word document formats, and a Spanish version is provided along with an English version. The EDD is designed for use by scientists, decision makers, and for members of the general public.


Background: We aimed to estimate prevalence of severe or critical illness and case fatality of COVID-19 in a systematic review and meta-analysis and to examine clinical, biochemical and radiological risk factors in a meta-regression.
Methods: PRISMA guidelines were followed. PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science were searched using pre-specified keywords.  Peer-reviewed empirical studies examining rates of severe illness, critical illness and case fatality among COVID-19 patients were examined. Random-effects meta-analyses were performed and adjusted for publication bias. Meta-regression analyses examined the moderator effects of risk factors.
Results: The meta-analysis included 29 studies representing 2,090 individuals. Pooled prevalence rates of severe illness, critical illness and case fatality among COVID-19 patients were 15%, 5% and 0.8% respectively. There were significant heterogeneity and publication bias related with the studies. Meta-regression analyses revealed that increasing age and elevated LDH consistently predicted severe / critical disease and case fatality. Moreover, hypertension; fever and dyspnea at presentation; and elevated CRP predicted increased severity.
Conclusions: Emerged predictors of severity and case fatality should inform clinicians to define at-risk endophenotypes. Differences in un-adjusted vs. adjusted pooled estimates indicates limited utility of small-scale studies and underscores the importance of multi-national studies to establish the morbidity and mortality rates in pandemics.


The first cases of Hantavirus infection in Turkey were reported in early 2009 in the Zonguldak and Bartin provinces. The aim of this study was to investigate the presence of Hantavirus antibodies in patients who had clinical and laboratory findings that were potentially associated with Hantavirus infection prior to the epidemic in Bartin in 2009. After screening 314,577 medical records from between 2007 and 2009, the clinical and laboratory data for 442 patients meeting the criteria of coexistent thrombocytopenia, and elevated urea and creatinine levels were transferred to a statistical program. Home visits were made to 170 patients, 84 of whom consented to participate in the study. The participants completed a questionnaire and provided a blood sample. Commercial anti-Hantavirus IgG and IgM ELISA and immunoblotting assays were used, with seropositive samples being confirmed by focus reduction neutralization tests (FRNT). ELISA and/or immunoblotting assays detected 10 positive samples; however, only 7 of these were recorded as positive by FRNT. FRNT positivity was significantly associated with female sex, the presence of a barn near to the house, and working in a forest (P < 0.05). In a Hantavirus endemic region, physicians must keep in mind that thrombocytopenia, and elevated urea and creatinine levels may indicate Hantavirus infection.


This is a guide to the political party platforms, news stories, etc. for the Canadian federal election that took place on October 19, 2105


Dynamic program monitoring is an effective technique for detecting bugs and security attacks in running applications. Because of the industry-wide shift to multicore chips, program monitoring tools must be extended to monitor parallel programs. Parallel programs introduce a new challenge for monitoring tools: inter-thread dependences. Existing tools assume sequential consistency and often slow down the monitored program by orders of magnitude. In this paper, we present a novel approach that avoids these pitfalls by not relying on detailed inter-thread dependences. Instead, we assume only that events in the distant past on other threads have become visible; we make no assumptions on the relative ordering of more recent events on other threads. To overcome the potential state explosion of considering all the possible orderings among recent events, we adapt two techniques from static dataflow analysis, reaching definitions and reaching expressions, to this new domain of dynamic parallel monitoring. Significant modifications to these techniques are proposed to ensure the correctness and efficiency of our approach. We prove that our approach is accurate, and sacrifices precision only due to the lack of a a relative ordering among recent events. Finally, we show how our adapted analysis can be used in two popular memory and security tools.


Economic growth is the increase in the inflation-adjusted market value of the goods and services produced by an economy over time. The total output is the quantity of goods or servicesproduced in a given time period within a country. Sweden was affected by two crises during the period 2000-2010: a dot-com bubble and a financial crisis. How did these two crises affect the economic growth? The changes of domestic output can be separated into four parts: changes in intermediate demand, final domestic demand, export demand and import substitution. The main purpose of this article is to analyze the economic growth during the period 2000-2010, with focus on the dot-com bubble in the beginning of the period 2000-2005, and the financial crisis at the end of the period 2005-2010. The methodology to be used is the structural decomposition method. This investigation shows that the main contributions to the Swedish total domestic output increase in both the period 2000-2005 and the period 2005-2010 were the effect of domestic demand. In the period 2005-2010, financial crisis weakened the effect of export. The output of the primary sector went from a negative change into a positive, explained mainly by strong export expansion. In the secondary sector, export had most effect in the period 2000-2005. Nevertheless, domestic demand and import ratio had more effect during the financial crisis period. Lastly, in the tertiary sector, domestic demand can mainly explain the output growth in the whole period 2000-2010.


Avian influenza viruses (AIVs) are a group of pathogens responsible for many respiratory illnesses, infected human and animals worldwide. Although early detection of influenza diseases relied on conventional techniques, monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) have been reported to be useful in rapid detection, identification and treatment of influenza infections. In this study, monoclonal antibodies against neuraminidase (NA) protein of avian influenza virus A/Chicken/Iran/16/2000/H9N2 were produced to contribute to the enhancement of detection, diagnosis and control of avian influenza virus infections. Avian influenza virus (AIV) subtype H9N2 was propagated in embryonated chicken eggs. Propagated virus was purified and used as immunizing agent for Balb/c mice. Hybridoma clones were produced by fusing spleen cells from AIV-immunized mouse with SP2/O (myeloma cells) using polyethylene glycol (PEG) as fusing agent. Supernatant of constructed hybridomas was screened by ELISA for the detection of the antibodies. The highly positive clones were subjected to a series of limiting dilutions in order to ensure their monoclonality. Subclasses of the selected mAbs were determined; as well immunoblotting was performed to identify the specificity of produced mAbs. Clones which exhibited specificity towards NA protein were selected and characterized by neuraminidase inhibition test, elution inhibition test, and virus yield reduction in embryonated chicken eggs allantoic fluids. Characterization was extended by assessing the effect of anti-neuraminidase mAbs in neutralizing the virus in MDCK cells. Most importantly, cross reactivity was done to determine whether the produced mAbs exhibit cross-reaction to H5N1, H1N1, H3N2 and H3N8 influenza strains. The in vivo protection efficacy of anti-neuraminidase mAbs was evaluated in Balb/c mice, which were challenged with lethal dose of H9N2 viruses 24h before or after treatment with the antibodies. In order to study the large productivity of hybridoma culture, cells were grown in fed batch culture mode using cost effective spinner flask system. Seven hybrid cell lines that produced mAbs against H9N2 were developed and designated as 2H5, 4H2, 2A5, 2A12, 3C7, 5F3, and 3D7. Isotyping showed that 2H5 was IgG1; 3C7 was IgG2b; 4H2, 2A5, 2A12 and 5F3 were IgM and 3D7 was IgA. Kappa (κ) light chains were found in all mAbs. Immunoblot analysis of the clones revealed on only five clones' that recognized H9N2 proteins. Among the five clones, mAbs 2H5 and 4H2 recognized NA protein, mAb 2A12 recognized HA protein and both 2A5 and 3C7 recognized M protein, whereas mAbs 5F3 and 3D7 did not match any epitope. The clones that produced mAbs against neuraminidase (NA) protein showed inhibitory effect on NA enzyme activity, strongly inhibited elution of the virus from RBCs, and reduced the virus yield in the infected allantoic fluids of embryonated chicken eggs. Furthermore, mAbs against NA inhibited virus replication in MDCK cells which led to viability percentages of 78.8 % and 75.2 % at 1000 μg/mL mAbs concentration for 2H5 and 4H2 clones, respectively. The reactivity of each mAb with several subtypes of influenza virus revealed that clones 2H5 and 4H2 react strongly with H5N1, H1N1 and H3N2 strains. All clones showed moderate to weak reactivity towards H3N8. It was observed that pre treatment with anti-neuraminidase mAbs protect mice totally (100 %) from the virus induced mortality, with remarkable reduction in severity of the clinical symptoms and reduction of lung virus shedding to 22.8 and 23 HAUs at dose 10 mg/kg of body weight for 2H5 and 4H2, respectively. Whereas, protection values of the mAbs administered 24 h post infection, did not show complete protection even when they were administrated at high doses (62.5% protection). In fed batch culture with the continuous addition of nutrients, antibodies reached concentrations of 550 mg/L and maximum cell density and viability of about 6.8 × 106 cells/mL and 96.9%, respectively. Compared with the results obtained from the conventional batch culture, the antibodies concentration was about 320 mg/L, and cell density and viability were lasted at around 1.2 x106 cells/mL and 51.3%, respectively. The addition of nutrient medium in fed batch process, maintained the continuous supply of nutrients specially glucose and glutamine and kept their by-products lactate and ammonia at low levels, which led to the enhancement of productivity in terms of antibodies concentration, cell density and cell viabilities. In conclusion, this study had constructed and characterized monoclonal antibodies against NA protein of H9N2 virus which act effectively in inhibiting neuraminidase enzyme in vitro and in vivo. These monoclonal antibodies may have the potential to be used for detection, diagnosis and therapy of avian influenza virus infections.


A Mobile Adhoc Network (MANET) is a class of wireless mobile nodes that dynamically organize themselves in arbitrary network topologies. Due to mobility of nodes, routing plays an important role in communication and routing protocols are divided into two basic classes: proactive and reactive. AODV is an on demand routing network protocol which is specially design for ad hoc networks. This protocol starts to, only when a certain node claims to send data and is an establish the route efficient adhoc network routing protocol for data transfer. AODV suffers from the limitation of low bandwidth. In the AODV routing protocol, wherever a link breaks an error message is sent to the source indicating the link failure and further communication is stopped temporarily. This paper proposes an improved AODV routing protocol by including route repair scheme to overcome the link failure problems of its predecessor. In the proposed scheme the data packet is sent through alternate routes instead of dropping it. It is shown through simulation results that the proposed scheme improves data delivery rate. Keywords - MANET; Ad-hoc wireless networks; Routing Algorithm; AODV; pause time.


Morphology tuning is one of the innovative technique to overcome challenges of a pristine graphitic carbon nitride (g-C 3 N 4 ) as a photocatalyst. In this study, a facile, environmentally friendly and scalable approach was employed to fabricate a novel Pipe-like C 3 N 4 by treating Dicyandiamide (DCDA) with ethylene glycol and nitric acid. The unique structural morphology of the sample fabricated possess critical advantages for enhanced visible light harvesting, efficient charge separation and large surface area with more reactive sites. These properties enhanced the Pipe-like C 3 N 4 to exhibit a superior complete photocatalytic degradation of Methylene Blue (MB) within 30 min under visible light (λ > 420 nm) compared to the bulk C3N4. In addition, the Pipe-like C 3 N 4 possess a good photostability and efficiency (96%) and has a potential application in other fields such as photoelectrochemistry, electrocatalysis and optoelectronic devices.


The long-term stability and brittle nature of ceramic bone replacements in physiological conditions makes them prone to mechanical failure. These problems have led to the development of bioresorbable bone replacement materials. Bioresorbable biomaterials are expected to degrade at a rate which is proportional to the rate of formation of new bone tissue. In the majority of cases, however, resorption is driven by simple dissolution and so it is difficult to ensure an appropriate degradation rate for all patients. This thesis seeks to develop a material that can degrade in response to the bone formation process, thus linking implant resorption to tissue formation. We have shown that this can be achieved by linking implant resorption to a biological stimulus, such as the enzyme alkaline phosphatase (ALP), which is found on the surface of bone forming cells (osteoblasts). ALP causes bone mineralisation by removing the pyrophosphate (P\(_2\)O\(_7\)\(^4\)\(^-\)) ion, a known inhibitor to calcium phosphate formation. By removing the P\(_2\)O\(_7\)\(^4\)\(^-\) P2O74- ions from solution the dissolution of calcium pyrophosphate ((Ca\(_2\)P\(_2\)O\(_7\)\(^4\)\(^-\)) crystals were accelerated in accordance with Le Chetalier's principle. We demonstrated that for this accelerated dissolution to occur, the ALP did not require access to the crystal surface. This is contrary to previous work which suggested that CPPD dissolution occurred as a result of ALP cleaving the crystal surface. Bulk (Ca\(_2\)P\(_2\)O\(_7\)\ ceramics were successfully produced by sintering brushite cement at temperatures ≥ 400°C, the dissolution of which could accelerated in the presence of ALP but was heavily dependent on material specific surface area. The process of sintering limits the possibility of producing biomaterials of complex morphology; therefore the final part of this thesis involved the fabrication of ((Ca\(_2\)P\(_2\)O\(_7\) ceramic using stereolithography.


#1 Amazon Best Seller in Philosophy Criticism The world is increasingly unthinkable, a world of planetary disasters, emerging pandemics, and the looming threat of extinction. In this book Eugene Thacker suggests that we look to the genre of horror as offering a way of thinking about the unthinkable world. To confront this idea is to confront the limit of our ability to understand the world in which we live - a central motif of the horror genre. In the Dust of This Planet explores these relationships between philosophy and horror. In Thacker's hands, philosophy is not academic logic-chopping; instead, it is the thought of the limit of all thought, especially as it dovetails into occultism, demonology, and mysticism. Likewise, Thacker takes horror to mean something beyond the focus on gore and scare tactics, but as the under-appreciated genre of supernatural horror in fiction, film, comics, and music. This relationship between philosophy and horror does not mean the philosophy of horror, if anything, it means the reverse, the horror of philosophy: those moments when philosophical thinking enigmatically confronts the horizon of its own existence. For Thacker, the genre of supernatural horror is the key site in which this paradoxical thought of the unthinkable takes place. The cover of In the Dust of this Planet can be seen in a New York gallery, on a banner at the 2014 Climate Change march in New York and on Jay-Z's back promoting Run. The book influenced the writers of the US TV series True Detective and has been lambasted by ex-Fox News broadcaster, Glenn Beck in this podcast https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IW8OK4_1gQ Other writing by Eugene Thacker Two more in the series Horror of Philosophy will be published in 2015: [ Zero Books ] Starry Speculative Corpse Horror of Philosophy vol. 2 Eugene Thacker Philosophy meets horror against the backdrop of an indifferent, unhuman cosmos. Paperback: TBC 978-1-78279-891-0 eBook: 978-1-78279-890-3 [ Zero Books ] Tentacles Longer Than Night Horror of Philosophy vol. 3 Eugene Thacker Philosophy meets more horror against the backdrop of an indifferent, unhuman cosmos. Paperback: TBC 978-1-78279-889-7 eBook: 978-1-78279-888-0 Thacker has also contributed an essay The Sound of the Abyss on nihilism & Schopenhauer in the Zero Books title by Scott Wilson published in September 2014 Melancology: Black Metal Theory and Ecology.


Using an infinite sample, the contrast function and the FastICA algorithm are deterministic. In the practical case, we have only a finite sample. Then the contrast function and the FastICA algorithm become estimators of the deterministic case. This paper provides a unified study of the deflation FastICA algorithm assuming a finite or an infinite sample. We consider four random probability distributions based on the finite sample, and construct four FastICA estimators. We show that under mild conditions, each of these estimators are equal to a local minimizer of the contrast function with respect to the underlying random probability distribution. Making use of the existing results of M-estimators, we give a rigorous analysis of the asymptotic errors of FastICA estimators. We derive five criteria for the optimal choice of the nonlinearity function.


The effect of elemental sulfur concentration on bioleaching of Cu, Zn and Pb and loss of fertilizer value from sewage sludge was investigated in flasks by batch experiments. The results showed that the ultimate pH of sludges with 3-5 g/L of sulfur added was about 1.3 and the production of SO4(2-) had good correlation with the elemental sulfur concentration. The sensitivity of removal efficiency of metals to sulfur concentration was: Pb > Cu > Zn. The sulfur concentration except for 3-5 g/L had significant effect on the solubilization of Cu, Pb and Zn. The highest solubilization efficiency for sludge with 3 g/L of sulfur was 87.86% for Cu, 32.72% for Pb and 92.14% for Zn, which could make the treated sludge easily meet the metal limitations for land application. The sulfur concentration of 3 g/L was enough for the solubilization of all three heavy metals. The influence of sulfur concentration on solubilization of total nitrogen and potassium from sludge was negligible, but that on solublization of total phosphorus was of great importance. The loss of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium of sludge with 3 g/L of sulfur by bioleaching was 38.2%, 52.1% and 42.8% respectively, and the sludge still remained satisfactory fertilizer value after bioleaching.


This paper presents a probabilistic model for sense disambiguation which chooses the best sense based on the conditional probability of sense paraphrases given a context. We use a topic model to decompose this conditional probability into two conditional probabilities with latent variables. We propose three different instantiations of the model for solving sense disambiguation problems with different degrees of resource availability. The proposed models are tested on three different tasks: coarse-grained word sense disambiguation, fine-grained word sense disambiguation, and detection of literal vs. non-literal usages of potentially idiomatic expressions. In all three cases, we outperform state-of-the-art systems either quantitatively or statistically significantly.


Background Endoscopic pituitary surgery (EPS) is increasingly being used for the treatment of pituitary lesions. Obesity is a growing epidemic in our nation associated with numerous comorbidities known to impact surgical outcomes. We present a multi-institutional database study evaluating the association between body mass index (BMI) and postsurgical outcomes of EPS. Methods Patients who underwent EPS from 2005 to 2013 were identified from the American College of Surgeons National Surgical Quality Improvement Program database. Preoperative variables, comorbidities, and postoperative outcomes, such as 30-day complications, morbidity, and mortality, were analyzed. Results A total of 789 patients were analyzed, of which 382 were obese (BMI ≥ 30) (48.4%). No difference in reoperation rate (P = .928) or unplanned readmission rates (P = .837) was found between the obese versus nonobese group. A higher overall complication rate was observed in the obese group compared to the nonobese counterparts (P = .005). However, when separated into surgical complications (3.7% vs 1.5%, P = .068) and medical complications (7.6% vs 3.9%, P = .027), only medical complications, specifically pneumonia, remained significantly different. EPS on obese patients was also associated with prolonged operating time (154.8 min vs 141.0 min, P = .011). Conclusions EPS may be a safe treatment option for pituitary lesions in the obese population. Although obese patients undergoing EPS are at increased risk of medical complications and prolonged operating times, this did not influence mortality, reoperation, or readmission rate.


The International Development Research Centre (IDRC) has recently launched the OAI-PMH compliant IDRC Digital Library (IDL), a DSpace institutional repository. The digital library has been developed to enhance the dissemination of research outputs created as a result of Centre-funded research. The repository has a number of unique qualities. It is the public bibliographic database of a Canadian research funding organization, its subject focus is international development and the content is retrospective, dating back to the early 1970s. Intellectual property issues have been a major factor in the development of the repository. Copyright ownership of a majority of IDL content is held by developing world institutions and researchers. The digitization of content and its placement in the open access IDL has involved obtaining permissions from hundreds of copyright holders located in Africa, Asia and Latin America. IDRC has determined that obtaining permissions and populating the repository with developing world researchers' outputs will help to improve scholarly communication mechanisms for Southern researchers. The expectation is that the IDL will make a contribution to bridging the South to South and South to North knowledge gap. The IDRC Digital Library will serve as a dissemination channel that will improve the visibility, accessibility and research impact of southern research.


Core–shell structured M@Pd/SnO2–graphene (Gr), [M = Co, Ni or Cu] electrocatalysts were synthesized using ethylene glycol as a reducing agent with the aid of microwave irradiation in a two-step process. XRD, TEM and EDX analysis techniques were employed to physically characterize the prepared electrocatalysts. They revealed the formation of SnO2–Gr as a support, surrounded by M as a core that was coated with Pd as a shell. The M@Pd/SnO2–Gr electrocatalysts showed a gradual negative shift of their Pd(111) and Pd(200) diffraction peaks when compared to those in the XRD pattern of Pd/Gr. Cyclic voltammetry, chronoamperometry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy were employed to investigate the electrocatalytic activity of the prepared electrocatalysts for ethanol oxidation in NaOH solution. Increased ECSA values were recorded at the M@Pd/SnO2–Gr electrocatalysts, especially Cu@Pd/SnO2–Gr [467.49 m2 g−1] in relation to that at Pd/Gr. The presence of cobalt, nickel or copper in the M@Pd/SnO2–Gr electrocatalyst improved the ethanol oxidation mass activity of Pd/Gr by 4.42, 4.78 or 5.84, respectively. A chronoamperometry test demonstrated enhanced electrochemical durability for the fabricated core–shell structured electrocatalysts. Lowered charge transfer resistance values were also measured at these electrocatalysts during the ethanol oxidation reaction. Based on the results in previous reports, core–shell structured Cu@Pd/SnO2–Gr is a potentially valuable electrocatalyst for fuel cell applications.


In June 2004, the High Court of Israel (HCI) ruled on the ""Beit Sourik"" case in which Palestinian villagers challenged the legality of Israel's separation wall, which had been routed through their villages causing great hardship. This article examines the HCI decision\---|which upheld the legality of the wall under international law but mandated changes in its route\---|and the argumentation used. In the process, the article shows how the HCI, despite some disagreements with the state on narrow issues of administrative application, broadly supports the government's policies of occupation, and it explains how the court interprets international law in order to do so. The article also contrasts the HCI's ruling with the nearly simultaneous ruling of the International Court of Justice, highlighting the two courts' very different approaches to international law.


Background: Long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFA) are nutritionally important constituents of breast milk to support normal growth, immune function and central nervous system development of newborn infants. Both linoleic acid (18:2 n-6; LA) and alpha-linolenic acid (18:3 n-3; ALA), the essential fatty acids, precursors of n-6 and n-3 LC-PUFA, are also present in breast milk. Although the total amount of fat in human milk is fairly constant, the fatty acid composition can vary substantially depending on the diet of the mother. Large variations in the LA, ALA and DHA (22:6 n-3) contents are observed among countries. As reported by previous studies, the ALA consumption of the French population was 2-3 times lower than the recommended value. Since this period, the food industry offers more food products enriched in n-3 fatty acids. Objective: The present study aimed to investigate whether nutritional recommendations and the improvement of the n-3 PUFA content of foodstuffs have contributed to an improvement of the PUFA composition of human milk. For this purpose, the PUFA content of a large number of human milk samples collected in 2007 in different French regions were compared with previous data obtained in studies conducted in the nineties years (1993-1998).Study design and methods: Mature (postpartum day ≥ 30) human milk samples (n = 145) were provided in 2007 by eight French regional human milk banks (Bordeaux: n = 20; Dijon: n = 21; Ile-de-France: n = 18; Lyon: n = 20 ; Montpellier: n = 18 ; Nantes: n = 21 ; St Etienne: n = 6 ; Tours: n = 21), from healthy women volunteers with no particular health history. The fatty acid composition of breast milk was analyzed by high-resolution gas-liquid chromatography. Statistical analysis was performed with Kruskall Wallis and Mann and Whitney U tests (p  Fatty acid composition of human milk samples did not differ significantly among the eight French regions. The proportions of saturated fatty acids were similar (means ranging from 44.9% to 48.7% of total fatty acids). Monounsaturated fatty acids also varied little, from 36.9% to 39.7%. Total n-6 and n-3 PUFA accounted for 12.5%-15.2%, with the n-6/n-3 PUFA ratio value close to 10, similar among the collect centers. Considering the overall results, LA ranged from 10.4% to 12.7%, and ALA from 0.72% to 0.95%. Comparison of previous data (1993-1998) to the present results showed opposite changes in both LA and ALA contents. Between the two periods, the LA level decreased by 17%, whereas the ALA level increased by 45%, and consequently the LA/ALA ratio value favorably decreased from 24 to 15. The LC-PUFA content remained unchanged.Conclusion: Basing on the PUFA composition of human milk, this large French study has showed favourable changes in consumption of both omega-6 and omega-3 fatty acid precursors.


Climate change is expected to have economic impacts on semi-arid lands of Kenya, particularly on rural farming households whose livelihoods depend on rain-fed agriculture. Fanya juu terraces have been promoted for soil and water conservation and as an adaptation strategy to climate change in semi-arid lands of South Eastern Kenya. However, the impact of adoption of terraces as an adaptation strategy has not been explored. Propensity Score Matching approach was used to evaluate impact of adopting fanya juu terraces in maize and pigeon pea production on farmers' per capita income and poverty. Survey data was gathered from Machakos, Makindu and Mutomo Subcounties. Results showed that adopters would have increased cost of production; significant increase in per capita income and reduction of poverty compared to non adopters. The study recommends government involvement in facilitation of establishment of terraces on the farms by providing technical knowhow of rainwater harnessing and harvesting; improve farmers access to seeds and other farm inputs to enhance their adaptation to climate change; improvement of market environment as an incentive to adopt the adaptation strategies to enable yields have easy access to functioning markets.


We report on an experimental study of the large-scale flow (LSF) and Reynolds numbers in turbulent convection in a cylindrical sample with height equal to its diameter and heated locally around the center of its bottom plate (locally heated convection). The sample size and shape are the same as those of Narezo Guzman et al. [D. Narezo Guzman, J. Fluid Mech. 787, 331 (2015)JFLSA70022-112010.1017/jfm.2015.701; D. Narezo Guzman, J. Fluid Mech. 795, 60 (2016)JFLSA70022-112010.1017/jfm.2016.178]. Measurements are made at a nearly constant Rayleigh number as a function of the mean temperature, both in the presence of controlled boiling (two-phase flow) and for the superheated fluid (one-phase flow). Superheat values Tb-Ton up to about 11 K (Tb is the bottom-plate temperature and Ton is the lowest Tb at which boiling is observed) are used. The LSF is less organized than it is in (uniformly heated) Rayleigh-Benard convection (RBC), where it takes the form of a single convection roll. Large-scale-flow-induced sinusoidal azimuthal temperature variations (like those found for RBC) could be detected only in the lower portion of the sample, indicating a less organized flow in the upper portions. Reynolds numbers are determined using the elliptic model (EM) of He and Zhang [G.-W. He and J.-B. Zhang, Phys. Rev. E 73, 055303(R) (2006)PLEEE81539-375510.1103/PhysRevE.73.055303]. We found that for our system the EM is applicable over a wide range of space and time displacements, as long as these displacements are within the inertial range of the temporal and spatial spectrum. At three locations in the sample the results show that the vertical mean-flow velocity component is reduced while the fluctuation velocity is enhanced by the bubbles of the two-phase flow. Enhancements of velocity fluctuations up to about 60% are found at the largest superheat values. Local temperature measurements within the sample reveal temperature oscillations that also used to determine a Reynolds number. These results are generally consistent with the mean-flow EM results and show a two-phase-flow enhancement of up to about 30%.


In this paper a simple structure of Ultra Wideband (UWB) antenna is proposed by placing unsymmetrical feedline to the patch. The antenna offers excellent performance for UWB system, ranging from 3.6 GHz to 14.5 GHz. The antenna exhibits a 10 dB return loss bandwidth over the entire frequency band. The antenna is designed on FR4 substrate and fed with 50 ohms microstrip line. It is found that the frequency band depends on the width of the partial ground width, the width and position of the feedline of UWB antenna.


Objective To assess the outcome of cochlear implantation in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Study Design Retrospective case review and survey. Setting Tertiary referral center. Patients Children who meet criteria for cochlear implantation and diagnosis of ASD. Main Outcome Measures Receptive and expressive language scores and parental survey data. Results Fifteen patients with history of ASD and cochlear implantation were analyzed and compared with 15 patients who received cochlear implant and have no other disability. Postoperatively, more than 67% of children with ASD significantly improved their speech perception skills, and 60% significantly improved their speech expression skills, whereas all patients in the control group showed significant improvement in both aspects. The top 3 reported improvements after cochlear implantation were name recognition, response to verbal requests, and enjoyment of music. Of all behavioral aspects, the use of eye contact was the least improved. Survey results in regard to improvements in patient interaction were more subtle when compared with those related to sound and speech perception. The most improved aspects in the ASD patients' lives after cochlear implantation seemed to be attending to other people's requests and conforming to family routines. Of note, awareness of the child's environment is the most highly ranked improvement attributed to the cochlear implant. Conclusion Cochlear implants are effective and beneficial for hearing impaired members of the ASD population, although development of language may lag behind that of implanted children with no additional disabilities. Significant speech perception and overall behavior improvement are noted.


The article presents the results of the analysis of the noise structure of micromechanical transducers of motion parameters – micromechanical gyroscopes (MMG) and micromechanical accelerometers (MMA) of an experimental measuring unit of strapdown inertial position navigation systems. The unit is manufactured and developed at JSC «GYROOPTICS» (St. Petersburg). It consists of a LL–MMG triad with measuring ranges of ±400°/s and an axial-type MMA triad with measuring ranges of ± 50 g. Micromechanical gyroscopes and accelerometers manufactured using modern microelectronics technologies are among the most promising microsystem technology devices that are widely used as sensors of the primary information of strapdown inertial orientation and navigation systems. The accuracy of the functioning of the inertial orientation and navigation inertial systems is significantly affected by the noise structure of the output signals of the inertial motion parameters sensors. For this reason, the urgent task of identifying the noise of micromechanical gyroscopes and accelerometers. The noise structure of the angular rate and linear acceleration transducers of the tested SINS block was identified by the Allan variance method. The output signals of the transducers were recorded in normal climatic conditions, the sampling interval was 1.0 ms, and the recording duration was 90 minutes. The processing of the output signals of the transducers was carried out on the basis of special software using the AlaVar 5.2 program. It has been established that the predominant noise components of the transducers are the random walk of the output signal – white noise and the instability of the zero signal – flicker noise. No quantization noise was detected in the output signals of the transducers. The values of the noise characteristics in Allan variance of the output signals of the angular rate transducers and the linear acceleration of the test block are compared with the noise characteristics of the most advanced modules produced by foreign companies.


This article presents an original work aimed at rationally designing molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) toward a high specific adsorbent. Assembling with cobalt as the pivot, the MIP was prepared by coordinating polymerizable monomers around an inducible template. The use of pivot obviously plays a positive role on increasing the specificity of MIP, so as to adsorb more for the template and less for its analogue. Related studies indicate that these may be a result of increasing specific interaction, which makes the MIP capable of recognizing the imprint species. Further information from thermodynamic analysis reveals that the increasing specific interaction, in logic, can be due to a higher fidelity of imprint, which specifically allures the template to bind.


Received: 01-May-2020. Revised: 06-Jun-2020. Accepted: 08-Jul-2020. Published: 19-Sep-2020. This is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution‐NonCommercial‐ShareAlike 4.0 License, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non‐commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.


Moving mesh methods provide an efficient way of solving partial differential equations for which large, localised variations in the solution necessitate locally dense spatial meshes. In one-dimension, meshes are typically specified using the arclength mesh density function. This choice is well-justified for piecewise polynomial interpolants, but it is only justified for spectral methods when model solutions include localised steep gradients. In this paper, one-dimensional mesh density functions are presented which are based on a spatially localised measure of the bandwidth of the approximated model solution. In considering bandwidth, these mesh density functions are well-justified for spectral methods, but are not strictly tied to the error properties of any particular spatial interpolant, and are hence widely applicable. The bandwidth mesh density functions are illustrated in two ways. First, by applying them to Chebyshev polynomial approximation of two test functions, and second, through use in periodic spectral and finite-difference moving mesh methods applied to a number of model problems in acoustics. These problems include a heterogeneous advection equation, the viscous Burgers' equation, and the Korteweg-de Vries equation. Simulation results demonstrate solution convergence rates that are up to an order of magnitude faster using the bandwidth mesh density functions than uniform meshes, and around three times faster than those using the arclength mesh density function.


Abstract : The use of information technology in the voting process expected to help solving problems them. The use of computer technology in the implementation of voting is known as electronic voting. The purpose of this study was to help Badan Eksekutif Mahasiswa (BEM) STMIK Pontianak in implementing the Chief Electoral BEM with a computerized system. The research method used is descriptive method. Software design method used is RAD. Programming language used Visual Basic 6. The results of this study tested the Network Local Area Network (LAN), where several computers as a client computer and a computer unit as a data bank or as a server with a database that has been in sharingkan. With the BEM application program in STMIK Pontiaanak Based Desktop allows the user (users) the easier it is to perform the E-Voting election. Keyword : E-Voting, BEM STMIK Pontianak, RAD, Visual Basic 6


The paper presents the results of a 6-year investigation of hemopoiesis of dogs which were exposed to double irradiations (with a 1.5-month interval) with protons at a dose of 350 rad when different parts of the body (head, chest, abdomen, pelvis) were shielded. Throughout the entire period the dogs showed moderate leucopenia and by the end of the investigation insignificant anemia. The dogs irradiated with shielded abdomen displayed disturbances in bone marrow hemopoiesis, whereas other dogs exhibited relative, although transient, normalization. All the dogs showed a significant decrease of erythropoiesis and a relative stability of leucopoiesis as well as a significant elevation of the number of reticulocytes, monocytes and plasmocytes 5.5 year after irradiation.


Wireless communications and navigation have different constraints to cope with. On the one hand, communication systems traditionally aim at high spectral efficiency with specific requirements such as low latency and low power consumption. On the other hand, navigation is usually based on the transmission of known data signals at low data rates with fine synchronization capabilities for efficient signal acquisition and tracking. The ICT project WHERE (Wireless Hybrid Enhanced Mobile Radio Estimators) will focus on exploiting the positioning information to enhance communications -and vice versawithin heterogeneous and/or cooperative wireless systems. The paper gives an overview and outlines the upcoming goals of the FP7-ICT project WHERE. The WHERE project is an ICT STREP project involving 14 partners. It started in January 2008, for a duration of 30 months.


The pH values of most natural, river, and lake waters are in the range of 6–9. There are natural and anthropogenic sources that may influence the acidification of surface inland waters. The former depend on geological, geochemical, biological, and climatic factors. Since the 1960s, the problem of lake and river acidification has mostly been related to anthropogenic emissions of chemical compounds that have contributed to acidification either through acid deposition (SO2, NOx) or via terrestrial chemical transformations leading to H production (NH3/NH4 ). This entry presents a brief history of the problem of river and lake acidification. Moreover, it also focuses on the sources of this phenomenon with examples of natural and human-induced changes in freshwater pH. The environmental impact of acidification on surface inland waters is also described with a brief discussion on possible solutions to this issue.


The H-theorem, originally derived at the level of the Boltzmann nonlinear kinetic equation for a dilute gas undergoing elastic collisions, strongly constrains the velocity distribution of the gas to evolve irreversibly towards equilibrium. As such, the theorem could not be generalized to account for dissipative systems: the conservative nature of collisions is an essential ingredient in the standard derivation. For a dissipative gas of grains, we construct here a simple functional H related to the original H, that can be qualified as a Lyapunov functional. It is positive, and results backed by three independent simulation approaches (a deterministic spectral method, the stochastic direct simulation Monte Carlo technique, and molecular dynamics) indicate that it is also nonincreasing. Both driven and unforced cases are investigated.


This research develops a framework that disaggregates investments in IT in the healthcare industry into four distinct categories: investments in patient management IT (PMIT), transactional support IT (TSIT), communications IT (CIT), and administrative IT (AIT). In a longitudinal study, financial and operational data from several hospitals spanning 26 years are analyzed to examine the lag as well as duration of the effect of these IT investments on hospital costs and labor productivity. The results reveal that TSIT capital has an immediate effect on medical labor and administrative labor productivities, and a lagged but durable effect on operating costs. CIT capital has an immediate but short-term effect on medical labor and administrative labor productivities. AIT capital has an immediate but short-term effect on medical labor productivity. PMIT capital, on the other hand, increases operating costs, an effect that is immediate but short-term. Finally, post hoc marginal analysis reveals that among the four types of IT investments, CIT has the maximum economic value effect on hospital productivity, followed by TSIT, and then AIT; with PMIT having a minimal economic value effect.


Establishing Formal Specialties Within the Accounting Profession In its 1985-86 Annual Report, the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants (AICPA) [1, p. 213] stated, "recognizing the existence of de factor specialization among members and the desire of some to have a particular expertise recognized, Council authorized a program to accredit specialties. The Special Committee on Specialization ... will study areas of practice in which members, by meeting experience, examination, and educational requirements, can seek accreditation." This formal creation of a special AICPA committee to pursue the accreditation of specialties is significant because this action recognizes the reality that specialization is very prevalent in the accounting profession. The special committee's report will not be available for some time; however, the primary question for resolution should be "How will the formal accreditation (certification) system for specialization of practitioners operate?" Specialization is a logical reaction to the reality within the accounting profession as changes occur in the environment. This paper summarizes the specialization issues, describes certain conditions that now especially favor recognition of specialists, presents certain advantages and disadvantages associated with accrediting specialties, and offers recommendations for implementing a specialization framework. The accounting profession's traditional position has been that all CPAs are qualified and competent to provide comprehensive services commonly offered by public accounting firms. Consequently, it has not been considered necessary to formally create specialization classifications with supporting practice standards. However, during the 1970s, the AICPA did attempt several times to resolve the issue of formal recognition of specialization within the accounting profession. These unsuccessful efforts were undertaken by separate special committees established in 1970, 1973 and 1975. The rationale for creating these committees, together with their activities, recommendations, and reasons for their ultimate demise, has been described by Olson [3]. Two of these committees apparently had their efforts concerning specialization somewhat influenced and also diluted by the concurrent issue of whether associate memberships for non-CPAs should be allowed by the AICPA. The rationale for this issue was whether individuals working within CPA firms and having specialized knowledge should be permitted to gain membership in the AICPA even though they were not CPAs. Moreover, during the 1970s, the AICPA's bylaws were being examined for a number of important issues regarding the scope of services provided, such as management advisory engagements and the legal implications of other provisions of the Code of Ethics. These special committees also functioned at a time when ethics interpretation 502.4 (Self Designation as Expert or Specialist) was in effect. This interpretation [2] stated, "Claiming to be an expert or specialist is prohibited because an AICPA program with methods for recognizing competence in specialized fields has not been developed and self designations would be likely to cause misunderstanding or deception. A member or a member's firm may indicate the services offered but may not state that the practice is limited to one or more types of service." Traditionally, the AICPA Code of Ethics prohibited CPAs from promoting themselves as specialists, but the Code could not prohibit the actual trend toward emerging specialization. Ethics interpretation 502.4 was initially established to prevent self designation of a specialized proficiency since no certification structure was available to recognize specialists. The professional ethics committee in 1981 withdrew its restriction against members claiming specialist or expert status. This revocation of interpretation 502.4 represented a logical extension of the reversal in 1978 of the ethics prohibition against advertising. …


Fundaments: non-compliance is a frecuent cause of medical actions 'failure, being the absence to periodical controls a very important form of the same. Objective: to know the non-compliance degree to arrange appointments of patients with arterial hypertension and the factors involve in it. Design: observational, analitical. Materials and methods: it was included all patients with controlled arterial hypertension in arrange appointments and were followed during one year. It was considered as a non-compliant those patients who did not attend to more than 20% of the arrange appointments. In case of not attendance, we called the patient by telephone to make a new appointment. Results: it was included 129 patients (the mean was 7.3 controls in a year). There were 11.2% non-compliance to the clinics and 24.8% were non-compliant, although 51.2% did not attend to any appointments. Men were more non-compliant than women (36.2 vs 18.3%) and people below 50 years old (66. 7% non-compliant). It was not observe differences in relation with cultural level, civil state or work situation, but there were differences related with cohabitation (45. 5% lived alone vs 20.2% and 22.2% if they lived in family or with another people). Previous non-compliant patients were also more non-compliant (34.5 vs 16.9%) It was not found any differences in compliance depending on clinic, the appointment's time, interval between the appointments or distance since the latest on-demand clinic. Conclusions: it does not exist a clear type of non-compliant hypertensive patient to regular controls, but it would probably have to be alert and take anticipatory actions in young men and patients with previous non compliance appointments.


Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) are a promising approach to language generation. The latest works introducing novel GAN models for language generation use n-gram based metrics for evaluation and only report single scores of the best run. In this paper, we argue that this often misrepresents the true picture and does not tell the full story, as GAN models can be extremely sensitive to the random initialization and small deviations from the best hyperparameter choice. In particular, we demonstrate that the previously used BLEU score is not sensitive to semantic deterioration of generated texts and propose alternative metrics that better capture the quality and diversity of the generated samples. We also conduct a set of experiments comparing a number of GAN models for text with a conventional Language Model (LM) and find that neither of the considered models performs convincingly better than the LM.


Purpose
This study aims to investigate built heritage revitalisation projects in Hong Kong through a case study.

Design/methodology/approach
For this study, a representative built heritage revitalisation project in Hong Kong is selected study revitalisation in practice in Hong Kong. The case study adopts content analysis as the main method of analysis. It involves counting keywords, comparing content, categorising content patterns and interpreting the content of documents.

Findings
The findings reveal that in the revitalisation process, there is significant fragmentation in collaboration among government sectors and in conservation documentation and that an effective knowledge sharing mechanism and valid public engagement is needed. A conceptual framework of social network-enabled building information modelling (BIM) platform is proposed to enhance knowledge sharing and cross-sector collaboration.

Practical implications
The conceptual framework developed based on the case study is expected to bring practical implications to urban regeneration policies in Hong Kong.

Originality/value
This study views built heritage revitalisation practice as different individual projects and provides a social and technical perspective to investigate built heritage revitalisation.


In the present study, the influencing factors such as the intensity and the direction of gradient magnetic fields, the magnetic susceptibilities of non-magnetic metals on the structures are studied theoretically and experimentally. In the theoretical analyses, the influences of high gradient magnetic fields on nucleation and structures are investigated. In the experimental research, high gradient magnetic fields are imposed on paramagnetic material Al and diamagnetic one Sn during their solidification processes. Then the macro- and microstructures of these samples are examined and the influences of magnetic susceptibilities of metals, the intensity and the direction of high magnetic fields are analyzed in details. It is found that solidified structures could be refined when the magnetization force and gravity were in the same directions, while the solidified structures could be coarsened and the coarse dendrites grew along the direction of the imposed magnetic fields when the directions of these two forces were opposite. Those phenomena could be explained from the views of reduced gravity and elevated gravity effects caused by magnetization force and the convection suppression effect caused by high magnetic fields. The results indicate that high magnetic fields can be applied to control the solidified structures of metals and then improve the quality and the properties of materials for different purposes.


Author(s): Keen, Eric | Advisor(s): Barlow, Jay P; Dayton, Paul K | Abstract: The energy needs of rorqual whales (f. Balaenopteridae) govern their relationship to marine habitats during the foraging season. However, their cryptic foraging strategies and extreme feeding behaviors complicate our effort to identify and protect habitats "critical" for rorquals. What is the relationship between rorquals and their habitat, and how must that shape conservation strategies? I addressed this question in the case of sympatric humpback (Megaptera novaeangliae) and fin whales (Balaenoptera physalus) in the marine territory of the Gitga'at First Nation in the Kitimat Fjord System of British Columbia. For three summers (2013-2015) I studied whales, their prey, and their environment aboard the RV Bangarang using oceanographic station sampling, systematic transect surveys, and opportunistic focal follows of whales (Chapter 1). Ocean sampling demonstrated the strong coupling of water features with offshore patterns in storm forcing and regional meteorology (Chapter 2). By combining these surveys with a long-term Gitga'at dataset, area humpback whales were found to practice a structured and persistent pattern in seasonal habitat use, which demonstrates how complex and habitat-specific a rorqual's habitat use can be (Chapter 3). Both humpback and fin whales were found to respond to changes in krill supply in aggregative and behavioral thresholds that are set by a combination of intrinsic energetic needs and the context of local prey supply (Chapter 4). Associations with non-prey habitat features were markedly different in the two species (Chapter 5). Humpback distribution was more closely coupled to that of their prey and other habitat features, while fin whale distribution was driven broadly by site fidelity. Novel spatial analytics were used to identify the most probable environmental cues used by foraging whales (Chapter 6). Both species were found to be particularly sensitive to the depth of prey layers, which is governed largely by oceanographic features (Chapter 7). This coupling of habitat features and feeding performance influences the competitive dynamics of rorqual whales. The findings in this case study advance general theories on marine predator ecology and conservation, and have direct implications for the management of Gitga'at territory and the identification of fin whale critical habitat in Pacific Canada.


The harmful interference caused by rogue radios poses a serious threat to spectrum sharing ecosystems. One approach for mitigating this problem is to adopt an enforcement scheme that can be used by an enforcement entity (e.g., Federal Communications Commission's Enforcement Bureau) to uniquely identify transmitters by authenticating their waveforms. In this approach, the enforcement entity that is authenticating the waveform is not the intended receiver, and hence it has to decode the authentication signal "blindly" with little or no knowledge of the transmission parameters. In real-world scenarios, an enforcement entity may need to cope with additional challenges, including poor signal strength of the received signals and simultaneous co-channel transmissions from multiple transmitters. In this paper, we propose a novel concept that effectively addresses some of these challenges, which we refer to as crowd-sourced blind authentication of co-channel transmitters (CBAT). We also present a concrete instantiation of this concept called frequency offset embedding for CBAT (FREE). Our results show that FREE enables the enforcement entity to blindly authenticate multiple co-channel transmitters with good accuracy by harnessing the power of crowd-sourcing.


The Early Silurian graptolites Spirograptus turriculatus and Sp. guerichi are typically preserved in condensed graptolite shale lithologies as entirely flattened outlines; all whorls are visible and little or no sediment infills the originally cone-shaped rhabdosomes, as though the graptolites had been sealed in clingfilm, or plastic wrap, prior to burial and compaction. By contrast, the rhabdosomes of graptolites transported in turbidity currents typically are filled with sediment. The most likely reason for the clingfilm mode of preservation is encasement or covering of the graptolite rhabdosomes by marine snow and/or microbial mats prior to burial by clastic sediment and compaction on an anoxic seafloor. Experimental evidence reported herein supports this suggestion. The organic material that mediated the preservation of such graptolites was likely akin to, but probably physically stronger than, the delicate benthic flocculation layer of the current Black Sea floor. Like the latter, it probably formed significant microtopography at and just below the sediment- water interface and mediated geologic processes such as early diagenesis in graptolite shale lithologies.


IN THE SPRING OF 1777 Piazza del Campo at Siena became the site of a collective experiment. One year earlier the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Pietro Leopoldo, ordered that a lightning rod be affixed to the tower of the town hall, the very heart and symbol of the city. His decision prompted the heated reaction of a Siena nobleman, the marquis Alessandro Chigi, who published an attack against the theory that lightning was an electrical phenomenon, claiming that metallic conductors would be ineffective in preventing damages to building and people during thunderstorms.1 Chigi's opposition to lightning rods found quite a few supporters, and when, on April 18, 1777, black clouds darkened the sky above Piazza del Campo, a large crowd gathered in the square to observe the effects of the conductor erected on top of the tower. They saw a bolt of lightning strike the tower and be conducted safely into the ground, channeled by the metallic rod. The professor of physics at the University of Siena, Domenico Bartaloni, examined the tower and the conductor after the storm. Although "the incredulous" expected "a completely different result, almost wishing to see the tower flashing, so as to expose to ridicule the holy laws of physics," Bartaloni declared the complete success of the conductor in protecting the tower. His official report was published in the transactions of the Academy of Siena as well as in the local newspaper. The collective witnessing of the experiment sanctioned the success of lightning rods in the public sphere.2 The Siena episode highlights typical elements that characterized eighteenth century debates on the effectiveness of lightning rods: the involvement of public opinion, the role of local authorities, the experts' engagement in the popularization of their views, and the spectacularly visible setting of the experiments. Towers were main protagonists of the early history of lightning rods. Highly tangible symbols of political, religious, or financial power, towers had always been frequent targets for the fiery meteor of lightning. From the mid-eighteenth century, they became favorite sites for experimenting with lightning conductors. Not only in Siena but also in Florence, Pisa, Milan, Turin, Venice, Genoa, Bologna as well as in smaller towns south of the Alps, natural philosophers affixed metallic conductors on top of the towers of churches, city halls, castles, and palazzi.' In the philosophers' opinion, the pointed conductors would slowly draw the electric fire from tJiunderclouds and channel it into die ground, thereby preventing huge discharges that would damage buildings. Or, they would attract lightning, forcing it to pass through the metal, with the same result. Yet because of their visibility and symbolic significance in the everyday life of Italian cities, towers also became highly debated experimental sites that attracted the inhabitants' attention and made the debate over lightning rods a public concern. This essay shows that before lightning rods became marketable commodities, they were experimental devices used to substantiate or criticize Franklin s theory of electricity, which held that the matter of lightning and that of artificially produced electric sparks were one and the same. The study of the nature of lightning contributed to the reformation of Aristotelian meteorology in terms of die new science of electricity: each flash of lightning that struck a metallic conductor created the experimental setting for electricians to study the behavioT of such a disruptive natural "meteor." The reports of their observations made up a sort of transnational repository of experimental results on which lightning rods advocates relied to support dieir arguments. Because of their unusually visible setting, however, such experiments acquired a public dimension that obliged electrical experimenters to confront public opinion and local authorities. In some cases, this confrontation brought electricians to engage in campaigns of popularization of electrical science, which aimed at highlighting the public benefits deriving from the installation of lightning rods and from the study of electrical meteorology. …


Discusses the current situation in further education, which is being driven by funding pressures associated more traditionally with the cultures of business and industry. Argues that, while human resource development has become a high priority in a sector where the quality of service relies on the quality of staff involved, colleges appear to be heading towards a situation in which the lecturing role is being deskilled. Compares these trends with current approaches to human resource development in the industrial sector and suggests that further education should learn from industrial practice before long‐term quality suffers.


CARBON TRADING and the growing interest in biofuel production from sugarcane necessitate the ability to measure gains and losses of soil organic C which may occur as a result. Modelling and soil sampling suggest that changes in soil C are likely to be 10 years. The paper explores the possibility of calculating soil gains or losses by subtracting the carbon stored in the crop biomass from the carbon gained by the crop through the uptake of carbon dioxide supplied by the atmosphere and processes in the soil. Although uptake and storage very nearly balanced each other in one–year measurements in each of two sugarcane crops for which carbon turnover differed by a factor of 2, it was concluded that errors and uncertainties in the measurements and calculations were presently too large to detect the small differences in the gain or loss of soil C claimed for different management practices or predicted by modelling, at least in the short term.


We report the frequency dependence of polarization mode dispersion (PMD) in a PMD compensator based on six cascaded birefringent crystals separated by Faraday rotators. When all crystal axes are aligned, the device can compensate for the first-order PMD. However, if all crystal axes are coupled with arbitrary angles, it can compensate for high-order PMD. The variations of differential group delay and principal state of polarization with optical frequency are analysed. The PMD vector and Stokes components of the device versus wavelength are measured. The theoretical simulations agree well with the experimental results.


This paper proposes a novel explanation for the decline in unions in the United States since the late 1970s: state-by-state removal of geographical restrictions on branching of banks. Bank branch deregulation reduces union membership in the non-banking sectors by intensifying entry of new firms, especially in sectors with high dependence on external finance. New firm entry, in turn, is associated with a reduction in union wage premium, and subsequently leads to adverse union voting. I provide empirical evidence for these channels using repeated cross-sectional and panel data of U.S. workers and union representation election outcomes.


Musical duets are a type of creative partnership with a long history of artistic practice. What can they tell us about creative partnerships between a human and a computer? To explore this question, we implemented an activity-based model of duet interaction in software designed to support musical metacreation and investigated the experience of performing with it. The activity-based model allowed for the application of reflexive interactive processes, previously used in dialogic interaction, to a synchronous musical performance context. The experience of improvising with the computational agent was evaluated by expert musicians, who reported that interactions were fun, engaging, and challenging, despite some obvious limitations in the musical sophistication of the software. These findings reinforce the idea that even simple metacreative systems can stimulate creative partnerships and, further, that creative human-machine duet partnerships may well produce, like human-human duet partnerships, more than the sum of their parts.


This article examines how state-linked religious actors negotiate religious demands in a secular authoritarian state. There is a prevalent assumption that such religious actors lack the agency to affect state decisions. I do not seek to challenge that proposition, rather to qualify it by identifying the scope and extent of their authority. Taking the state as an autonomous actor, I examine fatwas or official religious edicts in Singapore through the lens of 'policy feedback', which analyses how the bureaucratisation of religious institution created new legal and bureaucratic channels that shape state policies. This paper aims to primarily answer the following question: What role do fatwas play in shaping statist interpretation of religion? I answer this by looking at the historical development of religious bureaucracy in Singapore – which includes the fatwa institution – and analysing the role of fatwas in relation to state policies. I argue that the bureaucratisation of religion not only regulates religious demands, but creates a juncture for religious institutions to inform and contest statist version of Islam though policy feedback, a concept that has thus far been only partially applied to economic issues. Policy feedback explains how religious demands are negotiated at the bureaucratic level and is particularly instructive in clarifying the discourse between the state and the fatwa institutions, which underlines that the policies and programmes of the autonomous state can be influenced by the very demands of religious bureaucrats. This paper also introduces Statist Islam as an original concept with which to conceptualise the amalgamation of statist and religious interests, and considers how the informal authority of fatwas continues to function beyond the legal and bureaucratic restrictions set by the state.


Young children are required to use child safety seats, and the age threshold at which children can legally graduate to seat belts has steadily increased. This paper tests the relative effectiveness of child safety seats, lap-and-shoulder seat belts, and lap belts in preventing injuries among motor vehicle passengers aged 2-6. We analyze three large, representative samples of crashes reported to police, as well as linked hospital data. We find no apparent difference in the two most serious injury categories for children in child safety seats versus lap-and-shoulder belts. Child safety seats provide a statistically significant 25% reduction in the least serious injury category. Lap belts are somewhat less effective than the two other types of restraints, but far superior to riding unrestrained. * We thank Paul Heaton and Jesse Shapiro, the Editor Janet Currie, and two anonymous referees for their comments. Ethan Lieber provided outstanding research assistance. Financial support was provided by the National Science Foundation and the Sherman Shapiro Research Fund. Addresses: Steven Levitt, Department of Economics, University of Chicago, 1126 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, email@example.com; Joseph Doyle, Sloan School, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02142, firstname.lastname@example.com.


A growing body of research is showing how digital inclusion can help communities overcome poverty and injustice. The main challenge lies in how best to achieve this goal. The authors argue that digital inclusion must occur in two distinct stages. The first stage is digital literacy, accomplished with the Symbiotic Computer (SC)-smartphones and tablets. The second stage will be professional capacity-building, accomplished with the more traditional Personal Computer (PC).


This study descripts processing of biphasic calcium-phosphate (BCP) and poly-L-lactide (PLLA) biocomposite implant material. The composite was obtained by mixing completely dissolved PLLA with granules of high crystalline BCP and was compacted by hot pressing using cylindrical dies at 450 K temperature and 98.1 MPa pressure, for 30 and 60 minutes. Wide-angle Xray structural (WAXS) analyses of BCP, PLLA and BCP/PLLA composite blocks were made followed by calorimetric (DSC) tests in the 320-520 K temperature range. Compression tests revealed that Young's modulus and compressive strength of the composite increased with extended hot pressing time and were found to be within the bounds of the cortical bone values.


We propose a cross-layer design for resource-constrained systems that simultaneously decode multiple video streams on multiple parallel processors, cores, or processing elements. Our proposed design explicitly considers the coder specific application characteristics such as the decoding dependencies, decoding deadlines, and distortion impacts of different video packets (e.g., frames, slices, groups of slices etc.). The key to the cross-layer design is the resource management control plane (RMCP) that coordinates the scheduling and processor selection across the active applications. The RMCP deploys a priority-queuing model that can evaluate the system congestion and predict the total expected video quality for the set of active decoding tasks. Using this model, we develop a robust distortion-and delay-aware scheduling algorithm for video packets. This algorithm aims to maximize the sum of achieved video qualities over all of the decoded video sequences. Additionally, we propose a processor selection scheme intended to minimize the delays experienced by the queued video packets. In this way, the number of missed decoding deadlines is reduced and the overall decoded video quality is increased. We compare queuing-theoretic based scheduling strategies to media agnostic scheduling strategies (i.e., earliest-deadline-first scheduling) that do not jointly consider the decoding deadlines and distortion impacts. Our results illustrate that by directly considering the video application's properties in the design of a video decoding system, significant system performance gains on the order of 4 dB peak-signal-to-noise ratio can be achieved.


Continuations have proven to be useful for implementing a variety of control structures, including exception handling facilities and breadth-first searching algorithms. However, traditional continuations are not useful in the presence of concurrency, because the notion of the rest of the computation represented by a continuation does not in general make sense. Traditional continuations can also be difficult to use in nonconcurrent settings, since their global nature is sometimes problematic. This article presents a new type of continuation, called a subcontinuation. Just as a traditional continuation represents the rest of a computation from a given point in the computation, a subcontinuation represents the rest of a subcomputation from a given point in the subcomputation. Subcontinuations may be used to control tree-structured concurrency by allowing nonlocal exits to arbitrary points in a process tree and allowing the capture of a subtree of a computation as a composable continuation for later use. In the absence of concurrency the localized control achievable with subcontinuations makes them more useful than traditional continuations.


A few devices have been developed for the visually impaired to present figures using their tactile senses. They cannot display differences in various contrast/brightness because the common function of these devices is presentation of dots with pin-up or pin-down. In this paper, we examined preliminary experiment whether subjects could perceive whole figure by the system utilizing pen-tablet and loudspeaker-matrix, with using only one kind of sound (white noise). When the subject traced on the pen-tablet, the loudspeaker-matrix presented sound to indicate the line direction of figure corresponding to contact point. All subjects could trace outline of the figure composed of straight lines by the system.


Abstract The article presents a construction method and an example of a model of a technical object operation process as well as the main stochastic assumption which is a mathematical model of an object state changes. The model of the operation process was built using an analysis of the state space and operation-related events of the analyzed technical objects. An example of numerical simulation of the technical object state change process as a tool to be used to support the analysis of the considered process. Numerical simulation of the stochastic process being a model of a technical object state change process makes it possible to determine the process characteristics impossible to determine in an analytical way.


The soil moisture dynamics under seasonally fixed conditions are studied at a point. The water balance is described through the representation of rainfall as a marked Poisson process which in turn produces an infiltration into the soil dependent on the existing level of soil moisture. The losses from the soil are due to evapotranspiration and leakage which are also considered dependent on the existing soil moisture. The steady–state probability distributions for soil moisture are then analytically obtained. The analysis of the distribution allows for the assessment of the role of climate, soil and vegetation on soil moisture dynamics. Further hydrologic insight is obtained by studying the various components of an average water balance. The realistic representation of the processes acting at a site and the analytical tractability of the model make it well suited for further analyses which consider the spatial aspect of soil moisture dynamics.


A novel dual band patch antenna in a single layer substrate is investigated. The antenna structure developed combines the advantages of the CPW (coplanar waveguide) with the advantages of the aperture-coupled microstrip antenna, and simplifies the structure of the antenna by reducing the number of metallization levels, from 3 to 2, thereby making easier the integration of the active devices. One of the most promising aspects of the new antenna consists in the capability of matching the input impedance at two frequencies with a single feed point. It is worth noting that the use of two separated frequencies allows for the relaxation of the bandwidth requirements for each frequency. Such an antenna provides dual band with the same polarizations.


Club soccer today is bigger than it has ever been. The passion people have for their respective clubs can almost certainly be paralleled to that of their national teams. As a sport soccer goes above and beyond the theatrics witnessed on the field. The mechanics involved behind the scenes more often than not determine a club's success, or lack of it. It is an international sport that elicits passion and pride among supporters culminating into a multimillion dollar business. And like any other firm in a market a club aims to maximise profits at the lowest possible costs. An unavoidable result of the manner in which the soccer market operates is the rather evident disparity that exists amongst soccer clubs today. We have grown accustomed to viewing soccer in an environment tainted with disparity. Over the years, we have been desensitised to how bigger clubs such as Real Madrid and Manchester United seem to only grow bigger. While smaller clubs such as, Xerez and Portsmouth, have to contend with comparatively trivial issues pertaining to merely surviving.


Objective: To determine the  frequency  of  compartment  syndrome  in  patients  presenting  with  fracture of tibia in a tertiary care facility.
Methods: In our descriptive cross-  sectional  studied  conducted  from  January  2018  to  June  2018  at the Department of Orthopaedics, Jinnah Postgraduate Medical Centre, Karachi,  we  included  136  pa- tients in this study with age range between 18 to 45 years of either gender presenting with closetibial      shaft fracture within 24 hours of  injury.  Brief  history  regarding  the  duration  of  fracture  and  comorbid like HTN was obtained. Patients with diabetes mellitus, chronic  bleeding  and  renal  disorders  and  I.V drug abusers were excluded from the study. Presence of any one or more of the following within 24       hours of injury were labelled as compartment syndrome: severe pain: VAS  score 7 or more, limb pa-  ralysis: unable to move limb, paraesthesia: mild or no sensation on pin prick, pallor, as compared to contralateral limb and pulselessness: absence of pulse on Doppler.
Results: Mean age of the patients was 35.01 ± 9.34 years.More patients (n=72, 52.9%) were found older than 35 years of age while 64 (47.1%) patients with ?35 years of age. There were 99 (72.8%) males         and 37 (27.2%) females. Mean weight, height and BMI of the patients were 60.11  ± 5.12 kg, 1.53 ±      0.06m and 27.23 ± 5.02kg/m2 respectively. Average duration of fracture was 21.85 ± 1.63 hours. Majority (n=114, 83.8%) of the patients presented with >20 hours. Compartment syndrome was found in 9 (6.6%) patients out of 136 cases. A significant association of compartment syndrome was found with age (p-    value 0.025), and BMI (p-value 0.043) of the patients. Out of nine patients with compartment syndrome, eight patients were older than 35 years. In contrast, BMI in eight patients diagnosed with compartment syndrome were less than 30. However, no significant findings were noted in relation to duration of frac-    ture (p-value 0.201), smoking status (p-value 0.097) and HTN (p-value 0.108).
Conclusion: Compartment syndrome is a surgical emergency, which needs timely diagnosis and im- mediate decompression to avoid complications including limb loss.


Technical education and Vocational training has existed in Kenya for almost as long as formal education. The introduction and expansion of technical and vocational education in Kenya was witnessed in large scale in the early 1970's. This was more ofthe government's reaction to public pressure for increase in practical skills in the field of general secondary education. Technical education was held under the 7-4-3 system before it was changed to the 8-4-4 system by the government in 1982. This change to the new system placed a great challenge to vocational and technical training programmes in the country. It also led to low levels of student performance in technical subjects in technical training institutes. A research done, (UNICEF, 1999), reported that "two major issues facing public TEC-VOC institutions are the inadequacies in the provision and maintenance of physical facilities (classrooms, lecture theatres workshops and laboratories). The literature reviewed was on studies done on motivation, attitudes, equipment and facilities. Sources of literature were from secondary sources mostly from research done by the Kenya Institute of Education (KIE). So the question was asked about the factors that influence performance of students in technical subjects. The general objective of this study was to find out the factors that affect performance of mechanical and automotive subjects in NTTI and KCITI. The research data was collected using questionnaires made up of both structured and unstructured questions. The target population were teachers and students. The data collected was analysed using statistical methods of data analysis and presented using tables. The findings of this study showed that NTTI had better performance than KClTI in spite of having old and obsolete equipment, location of the institute in a residential area and industrial attachment for the students.