Abstract The majority of seed sprout-related outbreaks have been associated with Escherichia coli O157:H7 and Salmonella. Therefore, we aimed to find an effective method to inactivate these organisms on seeds before sprouting. Treatment with 8.7% (v/v) acetic acid at 55°C for 2-3 h reduced the population of E. coli O157:H7 and Salmonella inoculated on alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.) and radish seeds (Raphanus sativus L.) by more than 5.0 log CFU/g, and a longer treatment time completely eliminated the E. coli O157:H7 population. The E. coli O157:H7 populations were reduced to an undetectable level with a gaseous acetic acid treatment for 48 h. After enrichment, no E. coli O157:H7 were found in the alfalfa and radish seeds (25 g). However, these treatments were unable to eliminate Salmonella in both seed types. No significant difference between the germination rates of treated alfalfa seeds and control seeds was found, and germination rates greater than 95% were obtained for the radish seeds. Although chlorine washing is commonly used for seed decontamination, chlorine washing at 200 and 20,000 ppm resulted in a reduction of pathogens by less than or equal to 3 log CFU/g. Therefore, these results suggested that gaseous acetic acid is more effective than chlorine washing in controlling pathogenic bacteria on sprout seeds.


In order to develop high sensitivity micro sensors for bio-magnetic field using NiFe electroplated composite sensing elements, it is important to study how different plating processes can affect the magnetic properties in terms of the chemical composition and magnetic structure of the plated layer. In this study, to study the effect of the magnetic field on the magnetic structure of the electroplated NiFe layers, magnetic controlled plating in which a longitudinal magnetic field ranging from 0 to 400 Oe is applied during nanocrystalline electroplating of permalloy Ni80Fe20 layer of 2 µm thick onto a 20 µm diameter Cu wire. The magnetic structure of the plated layers is studied by investigating the Giant magneto-impedance (GMI) effect of the plated layer. GMI has been measured from a frequency range of 100 kHz to 50 MHz. It is observed that under conventional electroplating without an external magnetic controlling field, the anisotropy of the plated layer is generally circumferential as indicted by the double peaks of the MI curves in testing at high frequency. When a longitudinal magnetic field is applied during electroplating, the plated layer shows single peak MI curves, suggesting that the anisotropy is changed from circumferential to longitudinal. The results also show that the sensitivity and resolution of a magnetic field sensor is improved greatly by changing the anisotropy of the plated layer from circumferential to longitudinal.


The purpose of this study is to determine the views of students about blog use for supplementary purposes in courses. Survey research method was applied for the quantitative dimension of the study, and the semi-structured interview technique was used for the qualitative dimension. Regarding the quantitative dimension of the study, the participants were 68 undergraduates at a university in Turkey; as for the qualitative dimension, the participants were nine students from the same group. The research results revealed that the students' interest in courses, the duration of their preparation for exams, and their socialization did not differ with respect to the variables such as their gender and the availability of the Internet connection. On the other hand, the results demonstrated that there was a significant difference in favour of female students in terms of the variable of achievement. Also, in the study, it was revealed that the students who had frequently followed the course blog and their personal blogs had higher levels of achievement and interest in the course.


The United Kingdom and Norway have had close links since Norwegian independence. This study examines their defence relationship especially since the Second World War. In particular, their cooperation within NATO during the 1980s is charted and the British contribution to Norwegian defence evaluated. Suggestions are made concerning areas of future mutual interest.


Supplementation of the diet of 290 patients with chronic active hepatitis with whole camel's (group 1), mare's (group 2) and cow's (group 3) milk flavoured marked improvement of the subjective and objective status. There was also an improvement or normalization of the characteristics of blood clinical and biochemical analyses, an improvement of renal function as shown by hepatography and scanning and of the immunological characteristics of the blood serum. It should be noted that the positive shifts in the clinical and laboratory findings were more remarkable in the patients of the first two groups.


Benthic habitat maps of the nearshore marine environment of Vieques, Puerto Rico were created by visual interpretation of remotely sensed imagery. The objective of this effort, conducted by NOAA's Center for Coastal Monitoring and Assessment - Biogeography Branch in partnership with NOAA's Offic of Response and Restoration, was to provide spatially-explicit information on the habitat types, biological cover and live coral cover of Vieques' coral reef ecosystem. One-meter panchromatic and four-meter multi-spectral data from the IKONOS satellite sensor were purchased for the mapping area. Photo-interpreters accurately and reliably delineated boundaries of features from this IKONOS imagery as they appeared on the computer monitor using a software interface.


ABSTRACT Introduction: This study examines the utility of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory-2-Restructured Form (MMPI-2-RF) validity scales to detect invalid responding within a sample of active duty United States Army soldiers referred for neuropsychological evaluations. Method: This study examines the relationship between performance validity testing and performance on the MMPI-2-RF over-reporting scales. Specifically, mean differences between those who passed (n = 152; 75.6%) or failed (n = 49; 24.4%) performance validity testing were compared. Receiver operator characteristic analyzes were also conducted to expand available information on the MMPI-2-RF over-reporting sensitivity and specificity in an Army sample. Results: This study has two distinct findings. First, effect size differences between those passing and failing performance validity testing are classified as small to medium in magnitude (ranging from d = . 30/g = .32 on F-r to d = .66/g = .73 on RBS). Second, over-reporting scales have higher specificity and poorer sensitivity. Likewise, performance of the over-reporting scales suggests that those who exceeding recommended cut scores are likely to have failed extra-test performance validity measures. Conclusion: These findings suggest that many who fail external performance measures may be undetected on the MMPI-2-RF over-reporting scales and that those exceeding recommended cut scores are likely to have failed extra-test performance validity testing. Implications for research on, and practice with, the MMPI-2-RF in military populations are discussed.


When the cell pack is tested, it need low ripple charging current to ensure the tester accuracy. It is very necessary to set proper DC filter which has excellent filtering characteristic and wide input/output range. The inner resistance of a cell pack is very small but the system is indefinite. If the DC filter is designed by the type of traditional matched filter, the flat-fading would inevitably occur. This would reduce the power transmission efficiency. This paper discussed the design philosophy of the non-matched filter and proposed a non-matched Chebyshev DC filter design method aimed at the special resistive-capacitive property of the cell pack. The method is proved to be correct and feasible by simulation.


On the example of a free massless and conformally coupled scalar field, it is argued that in quantum field theory in curved spacetimes with the time-like Killing field, the corresponding KMS states (generalized Gibbs ensembles) at parameter β > 0 need not possess a definite temperature in the sense of the zeroth law. In fact, these states, although passive in the sense of the second law, are not always in local thermal equilibrium (LTE). A criterion characterizing LTE states with sharp local temperature is discussed. Moreover, a proposal is made for fixing the renormalization freedom of composite fields which serve as 'thermal observables' and a new definition of the thermal energy of LTE states is introduced. Based on these results, a general relation between the local temperature and the parameter β is established for KMS states in (anti) de Sitter spacetime.


This paper focuses on the working strategies nurses develop and employ in their day-to-day routine in an attempt to identify "red alerts" which enable them to maintain patient safety despite the load and interruptions characterizing their work environment. Based on insights gained from three studies (focusing on nurses' medication administration, use of protective measures and transferring information during handover) we develop a theoretical model that describes how understanding aspects of the day-to-day life in healthcare organizations, and the system of meaning that guides everyday life, can inform our understanding of workplace safety. The model illustrates how the chaotic, turbulent, and complex environment characterizing the nurses' workplace prevents them from fully complying with the declared safety goals practices and procedures. Yet even under these near-impossible circumstances, the nurses' main mission is to maintain patients' safety. Embracing a resilience strategy allows nurses to actively prevent something bad from happening or becoming worse, and to repair something bad once it has occurred, which of course contribute to patient's safety. Otherwise, nurses might rely on an implicit theories strategy, limiting the likelihood that they will discover their misperceptions, thereby putting patients' safety at risk. The model further describes how each of these two strategies is reinforced by positive feedback loops on the individual, ward, and organizational levels. Practical implications for managers include work practices that can encourage nurses' resilience by creating a work environment of professionalism, mindfulness and awareness of errors.


Motivation: In silico prediction of drug–target interactions from heterogeneous biological data is critical in the search for drugs and therapeutic targets for known diseases such as cancers. There is therefore a strong incentive to develop new methods capable of detecting these potential drug–target interactions efficiently. Results: In this article, we investigate the relationship between the chemical space, the pharmacological space and the topology of drug–target interaction networks, and show that drug–target interactions are more correlated with pharmacological effect similarity than with chemical structure similarity. We then develop a new method to predict unknown drug–target interactions from chemical, genomic and pharmacological data on a large scale. The proposed method consists of two steps: (i) prediction of pharmacological effects from chemical structures of given compounds and (ii) inference of unknown drug–target interactions based on the pharmacological effect similarity in the framework of supervised bipartite graph inference. The originality of the proposed method lies in the prediction of potential pharmacological similarity for any drug candidate compounds and in the integration of chemical, genomic and pharmacological data in a unified framework. In the results, we make predictions for four classes of important drug–target interactions involving enzymes, ion channels, GPCRs and nuclear receptors. Our comprehensively predicted drug–target interaction networks enable us to suggest many potential drug–target interactions and to increase research productivity toward genomic drug discovery. Supplementary information: Datasets and all prediction results are available at http://cbio.ensmp.fr/~yyamanishi/pharmaco/. Availability: Softwares are available upon request. Contact: email@example.com


Land cover plays a vital role in the chemistry and the quantity of runoff, and therefore can indirectly have an immense impact on the water quality of stream and river systems. Simulation models have become extremely useful tools available to watershed managers as geospatial environmental datasets become increasingly more available. The Soil and Water Assessment Tool (SWAT) is a deterministic hydrologic model that can predict hydrologic conditions over various temporal and spatial scales. This project evaluates the accuracy of the SWAT model for the Upper Neuse River Basin, while comparing two land use scenarios in an effort to identify sensitive regions in the watershed. A regression analysis between observed and predicted stream velocity demonstrated that the initial model required calibration of stream parameters in order to more accurately model the natural system. After calibration, stream sedimentation values were compared by subbasin between a current (2001) and future (2010) land use scenario, in order to identify areas in the watershed that were the most susceptible to degradation via urbanization. Out of the 138 catchments delineated in the watershed, 29 experienced no relative change while the remaining 109 all displayed an increase in the relative difference of the sedimentation rate between scenarios. Subbasins with the greatest potential for degradation were identified and prioritized for conservation efforts or further analysis. The subbasins experiencing the highest increase in both the relative change as well as the percent change in sediment yield are all in either Wake or Durham County, suggesting a need for conservation planning in these regions. Moreover, through examining the spatial variability of these results, the influence of regional characteristics like slope, land use and soil type can be exemplified. The tremendous variation in sediment yield that occurs with urbanization suggests that local spatial conditions can exert a noticable influential on water quality and should be taken into account to maximize future management efforts. Overall, environmental tools such as the SWAT model demonstrate their usefulness in helping inform land use decisions, and can assist environmental managers in protecting water quality.


What I hope I have demonstrated by these many examples is that an accelerator health physicist can make contributions in many fields of science. He can, in addition to the various operational tasks that he is charged with, support others in his laboratory. He can do this by designing shielding for new accelerators and storage rings, by consulting with experimenters on background radiation problems that they may encounter, by helping the high energy physicist select appropriate radiation sources for checking out his equipment, by providing him with low energy atomic and nuclear physics calculations, and many other ways. Most of all, he can perform and publish research using the many tools and techniques that are at his disposal at a high-energy accelerator laboratory. This he should do. I would like to end this lecture by quoting from a paper presented by Rindi at the Second International Conference on Accelerator Dosimetry and Experience that was held at Stanford University in 19698: "The health physicist working around high-energy accelerators has the advantage over identical professionals working in more conventional centers of being associated with the most advanced techniques in many scientific fields, particularly those connected with particle detection. Many of the peculiar problems they are bound to solve require the use of some of these sophisticated new techniques. Moreover, it is my opinion that it is also one of their duties to provide a linkage between the physics and the correlated technical activities that they are involved in (or look upon).


UNLABELLED
Sterilization is the reference method recommended to ensure the asepsia of an instrument used to perform cures. Chemical disinfection has shown itself to be highly effective in this process for endoscope equipment without there being definitive references about its efficiency on instruments used for cures.

OBJECTIVE
Evaluate the efficiency of chemical disinfection on instruments used for cures, with the reference method being sterilization.

METHODS
Prospective study in which the efficiency of glutaraldehyde-phenolate is compared to sterilization on 9 sets of instruments used for cures, each one having a dissection clamp and a Kocher clamp, used in 122 cures carried out in different wards at the León Hospital. Their efficiency was evaluated by means of microbiological studies after cures were performed and after disinfection or sterilization occurred.

RESULTS
There were no positive cultures after either the disinfection or the sterilization. The existence of positive cultures after cures was related to the type of wound treated, clean wounds were always negative while dirty wounds were frequently positive (p < 0.05).

CONCLUSION
Chemical disinfection with glutaraldehyde-phenolate is as efficient as sterilization in assuring the asepsia of instruments, while offering some clear advantages compared to sterilization since this chemical disinfection has a low cost, its use avoids the need to have duplicate instrument sets, it provides a longer life for these instruments and does not require moving instruments from their work site, thus preventing their loss.


Abstract The Kidcope (A. Spirito, L. J. Stark, & C. Williams, 1988), a brief screening measure of coping strategies for children and adolescents, was subjected to exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses in a sample of adolescents in Hong Kong. A 2-factor model was found to fit the data when only the 2 emotional regulation items were treated separately and were allowed to load on the 2 different factors. Further analyses showed that factor loadings, factor variances, and factor covariance were invariant across age and gender. On the basis of the factor analyses, the authors created 2 composite scores, representing control-oriented and escape-oriented coping strategies. Implications for the use of the Kidcope in research and preventive intervention are discussed.


Abstract— The Haughton impact structure has been the focus of systematic, multi‐disciplinary field and laboratory research activities over the past several years. Regional geological mapping has refined the sedimentary target stratigraphy and constrained the thickness of the sedimentary sequence at the time of impact to ˜1880 m. New 40Ar–39Ar dates place the impact event at ˜39 Ma, in the late Eocene. Haughton has an apparent crater diameter of ˜23 km, with an estimated rim (final crater) diameter of ˜16 km. The structure lacks a central topographic peak or peak ring, which is unusual for craters of this size. Geological mapping and sampling reveals that a series of different impactites are present at Haughton. The volumetrically dominant crater‐fill impact melt breccias contain a calcite‐anhydrite‐silicate glass groundmass, all of which have been shown to represent impact‐generated melt phases. These impactites are, therefore, stratigraphically and genetically equivalent to coherent impact melt rocks present in craters developed in crystalline targets. The crater‐fill impactites provided a heat source that drove a post‐impact hydrothermal system. During this time, Haughton would have represented a transient, warm, wet microbial oasis. A subsequent episode of erosion, during which time substantial amounts of impactites were removed, was followed by the deposition of intra‐crater lacustrine sediments of the Haughton Formation during the Miocene. Present‐day intra‐crater lakes and ponds preserve a detailed paleoenvironmental record dating back to the last glaciation in the High Arctic. Modern modification of the landscape is dominated by seasonal regional glacial and niveal melting, and local periglacial processes. The impact processing of target materials improved the opportunities for colonization and has provided several present‐day habitats suitable for microbial life that otherwise do not exist in the surrounding terrain.


This paper proposes a novel dissimilar coaxial rotor concept with significantly reduced rotor-rotor aerodynamic interaction. The performance of the proposed concept is systematically compared with regular coaxial and conventional single rotor configurations using validated BEMT based analysis for hovering flight condition. The hover performance among different rotor configurations is compared in two different ways: 1) equivalent rotor analysis with each rotor having same blade and disc area, and 2) a baseline main rotor is chosen and the performance of different anti-torque options are compared. The equivalent rotor analysis of dissimilar coaxial rotor predicts higher power consumption for the novel concept when compared to regular coaxial and equivalent single rotor, due to high profile power. The profile power is decreased by up to 50% by reducing the RPM of the anti-torque rotor to 50% of the baseline RPM. The proposed concept with reduced RPM of anti-torque rotor is predicted to consume 10-15% less power than equivalent conventional rotor without any tail rotor. The inclusion of tail rotor power for comparison of the performance of dissimilar rotor as an anti-torque concept shows a power reduction of 7–30% when compared to a single main rotor-tail rotor configuration. The analysis also predicts 10–12% less power consumption for dissimilar coaxial rotor design, when compared to a regular coaxial rotor. Within the scope of simplified analysis performed, the proposed concept appears to be an efficient alternative to conventional tail rotor for hovering flight condition.


Supercritical CO/sub 2/ (SCCO/sub 2/) clean/modification performance on a 300 mm tool with promising physical, electrical and reliability results for 65 nm low k dual damascene is successfully demonstrated in this work. The process is optimized to remove post-ash residues and modify the dielectric film damaged by O/sub 2/ plasma ash. The low-k value dielectric (LKD) surface is modified from hydrophilic to hydrophobic by the SCCO/sub 2/ treatment. Dielectric constant measurements before and after treatment show effective modification only on porous CVD LKD films. Leakage performance with 55% reduction and capacitance performance with 11% reduction by the process with respect to the conventional process demonstrate the benefits. The process is compatible with the 8 layer scheme. Promising electro-migration (EM), stress migration (SM) performance and better time-dependent dielectric breakdown (TDDB) results indicate that the process is more robust than the conventional one for future interconnects. For 65 nm generation and beyond, SCCO/sub 2/, clean/modification is demonstrated as a promising solution for Cu/low k integration.


The Yersinia pestis PhoPQ gene regulatory system is induced during infection of the flea digestive tract and is required to produce adherent biofilm in the foregut, which greatly enhances bacterial transmission during a flea bite. To understand the in vivo context of PhoPQ induction and to determine PhoP-regulated targets in the flea, we undertook whole-genome comparative transcriptional profiling of Y. pestis WT and ΔphoP strains isolated from infected fleas and from temperature-matched in vitro planktonic and flow-cell biofilm cultures. In the absence of PhoP regulation, the gene expression program indicated that the bacteria experienced diverse physiological stresses and were in a metabolically less active state. Multiple stress response genes, including several toxin–antitoxin loci and YhcN family genes responsible for increased acid tolerance, were upregulated in the phoP mutant during flea infection. The data implied that PhoPQ was induced by low pH in the flea gut, and that PhoP modulated physiological adaptation to acid and other stresses encountered during infection of the flea. This adaptive response, together with PhoP-dependent modification of the bacterial outer surface that includes repression of pH 6 antigen fimbriae, supports stable biofilm development in the flea foregut.


The Obama Administration has outlined a set of principles and practices to support Open Government in which citizens can collaborate with the government to solve problems. The Administration is using technology, especially web-based technology, to support Open Government in practice. Many of the government's websites include video. We examine the website built to support the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology (PCAST). We critique it and argue that a number of important design decisions made for the current site should be changed to better support Open Government. Key to our argument is what has come to be known as Open Video, an application of the ideals of Open Source Software to video. Our critique is followed by a discussion of a prototype system we have built to demonstrate an alternative to the current PCAST site. Our prototype is called Peer-to-PCAST to call attention to the similarities between our proposals and Peer-to-Patent, the first Open Government system built for a different context, the US Patent and Trademark Office [34].


Abstract Tritium is ubiquitous in and around nuclear plants, being formed via neutron capture by 2H, 6Li, 10B and 14N and via ternary fission. The highly mobile nature of 3H species results in widespread distribution of the radionuclide. Predictive modeling of 3H activity concentrations is challenging and direct measurement of 3H activities in materials is the preferred approach to underpin waste and environmental assessments. For well over a decade, the UK nuclear industry has engaged in a significant program of site decommissioning of its first generation reactors. This has resulted in a high demand for the rapid characterization of 3H in a diverse range of matrices, including concretes, metals, plastics, sludges, resins, soils and biota. To support such assessments, it has been necessary to develop dedicated instrumentation in parallel with robust radioanalytical methodologies; namely a multi-tube furnace and a high-capacity, closed (pressurized) oxygen combustion system. Data are presented on the development and validation of these instruments, designed specifically to enable the quantitative extraction of 3H (and other volatile radionuclides) from diverse sample types. Furthermore the furnace system has been employed as a tool to gain insights into the 3H association in decommissioning and environmental matrices exposed to 3H arising from nuclear power plant operations through tritium evolution with temperature profiling. The impact of the chemical speciation of 3H on analytical strategy is discussed. A major benefit of the multi-sample furnace is its ease of use and applicability to 3H determination in virtually any sample type. The complementary HBO2 oxygen combustion system has been developed for the quantitative oxidation of organic-rich samples (e.g. wood, plastic, oil, biota) and analytical data prove its effectiveness.


The brown cocoa mirid, Sahlbergella singularis (Hemiptera: Miridae), causes cocoa yield loss of about 30 % to 70 % in Cameroon. The pathogenicity of six indigenous isolates of Beauveria bassiana (BIITAC) and Metarhizium anisopliae (MIITAC) to the fourth and fifth nymphal stages of S. singularis was evaluated under laboratory conditions. Two methods of inoculation were tested at various conidial concentrations: (1) immersing the pod in 200 ml of the suspension for 3 min (ingestion method) and (2) immersing each insect in 1 ml of the suspension for 5 s (immersion method). Tween® 80 at 0.1 % (v/v) was used as a control. After 14 days from initial exposure to conidia, corrected mortality ranged from 35 to 100% for immersion and from 16 to 94.3% for ingestion. Mortalities due to fungi isolates were significantly different from that of their control (P < 0.05). The effect of immersion was more significant than that of ingestion, and mortalities increased with increasing spore concentration. Mycelial outgrowth and sporulation after seven days on some of the dead insects, kept on humidified filter paper in dark conditions, demonstrated that death was due to fungal infection (mycosis). Based on pathogenicity results, LC50, LT50 and LT90 fungal outgrowth, B. bassiana isolates BIITAC10.3.3, BIITAC6.2.2, MIITAC6.2.2 and the M. anisopliae isolate MIITAC11.3.4 could be selected for their virulence, and advanced to field trials for the development of microbial control.


Resting energy expenditure is abnormal in most patients with cancer and may contribute to cancer cachexia. These metabolic abnormalities may be a direct measure of tumor metabolism, or represent alterations in the size or activity of the body cell mass, or both. To unravel this pathogenesis, we prospectively studied 68 preoperative patients with cancer about to undergo curative resection by measuring resting energy expenditure before and after tumor resection. The preoperative measured resting energy expenditure was compared with expected resting energy expenditure based on Harris-Benedict resting energy expenditure predictions: 10 patients were hypometabolic (less than 90% Harris-Benedict); 35 were normometabolic (90% to 110% Harris-Benedict); and 23 were hypermetabolic (greater than 110% Harris-Benedict). Using each patient as his or her own control, resting energy expenditure normalized or remained normal following curative resection. In contrast, after palliative resection, resting energy expenditure remained hypermetabolic or significantly increased toward hypermetabolism. Tumor induces an abnormal metabolic rate, since tumor removal results in prompt normalization of resting energy expenditure. The abnormal energy expenditure of patients with cancer cannot be solely attributed to abnormal host body composition.


Transthyretin (TTR) amyloidogenesis requires rate-limiting tetramer dissociation and partial monomer denaturation to produce a misassembly competent species. This process has been followed by turbidity to identify transthyretin amyloidogenesis inhibitors including dibenzofuran-4,6-dicarboxylic acid (1). An X-ray cocrystal structure of TTR.1(2) reveals that it only utilizes the outer portion of the two thyroxine binding pockets to bind to and inhibit TTR amyloidogenesis. Herein, structure-based design was employed to append aryl substituents at C1 of the dibenzofuran ring to complement the unused inner portion of the thyroxine binding pockets. Twenty-eight amyloidogenesis inhibitors of increased potency and dramatically increased plasma TTR binding selectivity resulted. These function by imposing kinetic stabilization on the native tetrameric structure of TTR, creating a barrier that is insurmountable under physiological conditions. Since kinetic stabilization of the TTR native state by interallelic trans suppression is known to ameliorate disease, there is reason to be optimistic that the dibenzofuran-based inhibitors will do the same. Preventing the onset of amyloidogenesis is the most conservative strategy to intervene clinically, as it remains unclear which of the TTR misassembly intermediates results in toxicity. The exceptional binding selectivity enables these inhibitors to occupy the thyroxine binding site(s) in a complex biological fluid such as blood plasma, required for inhibition of amyloidogenesis in humans. It is now established that the dibenzofuran-based amyloidogenesis inhibitors have high selectivity, affinity, and efficacy and are thus excellent candidates for further pharmacologic evaluation.


Various methods have already been proposed for learning entity embeddings from text descriptions. Such embeddings are commonly used for inferring properties of entities, for recommendation and entity-oriented search, and for injecting background knowledge into neural architectures, among others. Entity embeddings essentially serve as a compact encoding of a similarity relation, but similarity is an inherently multi-faceted notion. By representing entities as single vectors, existing methods leave it to downstream applications to identify these different facets, and to select the most relevant ones. In this paper, we propose a model that instead learns several vectors for each entity, each of which intuitively captures a different aspect of the considered domain. We use a mixture-of-experts formulation to jointly learn these facet-specific embeddings. The individual entity embeddings are learned using a variant of the GloVe model, which has the advantage that we can easily identify which properties are modelled well in which of the learned embeddings. This is exploited by an associated gating network, which uses pre-trained word vectors to encourage the properties that are modelled by a given embedding to be semantically coherent, i.e. to encourage each of the individual embeddings to capture a meaningful facet.


Everyday rehabilitation of elderly constitute a large part of the home care aides daily work, where the occupational therapist can assist with including supervision and training for perso-nell. The purpose of this study was to determine home care aides experiences of how everyday rehabilitation in the home works and can be improved in the elderly care. The authors have used a qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews to collect data. The interviews were conducted in two municipalities in southeastern Sweden at both the municipal and private home care operators. The data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis, which resulted in four categories: "To enable everyday rehabilitation of older," "Consultation with colleagues and other authorities," "Working in the elderly person's home" and "Understanding and developing everyday rehabilitative approach." The results show that home care staff needs to update previous training continuously, but also the need for specific training in everyday rehabilitation. It also reveals the need for a closer collaboration with occupational therapists in order to highlight the specific knowledge of the various professions.


The health industry is always seeking innovative ways to use technology to create or improve the experiences of their professionals. Such improvements are seen in a variety of areas including the analysis of relevant health data and the establishment of new ways of communicating medical education and training. Advancements in head-worn augmented reality displays (HWDs), such as the Microsoft Hololens, present a unique opportunity to leverage technology in the ongoing challenge of creating meaningful and novel educational experiences. This paper will review contemporary HWD technologies, how these technologies are being used to enhance the work-training environment, and how these technologies might enhance the communication of health professionals.


This paper proposes a novel approach for segmenting and space partitioning data of sparse 3D LiDAR point clouds for autonomous driving tasks in urban environments. Our main focus is building a compact data representation which provides enough information for an accurate segmentation algorithm. We propose the use of an extension of elevation maps for automotive driving perception tasks which is capable of dealing with both protruding and hanging objects found in urban scenes like bridges, hanging road barrier, traffic tunnels, tree branches over road surface, and so on. For this we use a MultiVolume grid representation of the environment. We apply a fast primary classifier in order to label the surface volumes as being part of the ground segment or of an object segment. Segmentation is performed on the object labeled data which is previously connected in a spatial graph structure using a height overlapping criterion. A comparison between the proposed method and the popular connected-components based segmentation method applied on an Elevation Map is performed in the end.


To study the influence of fiber on the water stability of asphalt mixtures, the optimum dosage of asphalt and fibers are studied by the method of Marshall test and rut test. The results demonstrate that the optimum dosage of asphalt and fibers are 4.63% and 0.30%, respectively. Then the improved effects of basalt fiber on water stability of asphalt mixtures are evaluated through immersed Marshall test and freeze-thaw splitting test according to related specifications. The results show that the freeze-thaw splitting strength and splitting strength without freeze-thaw of fiber-reinforced asphalt mixture are improved to some extent compared with control mixture. Splitting strength without freeze-thaw of basalt, polyester and xylogen fiber-reinforced asphalt mixture is increased by 36.4%, 15.4% and 6.2%, and freeze-thaw splitting strength is increased by 55.2%, 28.7% and 14.5%. It can be concluded that fiber can remarkably improved the water stability of asphalt mixtures, besides; the improvement effects of basalt fiber are superior to polyester fiber and xylogen fiber.


Nanotechnology is a broad, revolutionary field with promising advantages for new medicine. In this context the rapid development and improvement of so called nanocarriers is of high pharmaceutical interest and some devices are already on the market. In our project we aim to develop well characterized nanoscaled drug delivery systems for an inhalative application. To this end, we focus on the most adverse side-effects within the lung, the cytotoxic and the proinflammatory responses to these nanoparticles (NPs). Before performing any animal experiments, we start with an in vitro screening for analyzing the cytotoxic and proinflammatory effects of the investigated particles on two murine lung target cell lines, the alveolar epithelial like typ II cell line (LA4) and the alveolar macrophage cell line (MH-S). Three different endpoints were estimated, (i) cellular metabolic activity, determined by the WST-1 assay, (ii) membrane integrity, by detection of LDH release and hemolytic activity, and (iii) secretion of inflammatory mediators. To analyze the relative particle toxicity we choose two reference particles as benchmarks, (i) fine a-quartz, and (ii) ultrafine ZnO particles. The investigation of dose-response and kinetics of proinflammatory and toxic effects caused to the named cell lines provide an insight to a close evaluation of our cell based screening strategy. oc-quartz is well known for its inflammatory and toxic potential caused by inhalation, and nanosized ZnO particles - used in a broad field of nanotechnology like electronics, but also cosmetics and pharmaceuticals - is to a high degree cytotoxic and proinflammatory in vitro. Preliminary experiments indicated not only particle and cell specific inflammatory responses, but also different susceptibilities of the cell types being exposed to our benchmark particles regarding their size and surface activities. Exposure to the μm-sized a-quartz particles affected the viability of epithelia cells less than that of macrophages, pointing to the impact of particle uptake by phagocytosis. In contrast, the nanosized ZnO particles caused much stronger decrease in cell viability and higher levels of LDH in the macrophage cell line compared to epithelial cells, even though the hemolytic activity was much higher for the a-quartz particles than for the nanosized ZnO. For the proinflammatory effects, we observed a clear dose-dependent release of acute phase cytokines (TNF-α, IL-6, G-CSF> CXCL10>CCL2) for both alveolar cell lines after Min-U-Sil exposure. After ZnO treatment the cytokine responses were negligible compare to control cells. In conclusion, our data attach value to the use of different cell types to detect different pathways of toxicity generated by different particle properties. Therefore, we will establish both lung target cell lines for an in vitro screening to analyze proinflammatory and cytotoxicity effects of nanocarriers. The implementation of the two reference particles facilitate the validated classification of the cytotoxic responses caused by the NPs investigated.


"electric control and PLC" is a specified course with much practicability. Its teaching content comes from producing practice. As the application field is extending, the content of courseware becomes more and more abundant. Therefore, to emphasize practical teaching and to reform the course generally has been imperative under the situation.in this paper, a new system of PLC Three-dimensional Teaching was adopt. The experience and methods in terms of making proper teaching objectives, optimizing teaching content, improving teaching manner, stressing practical teaching and training practical ability, were proposed in this paper, through experimental teaching, course design, production practice and integrated training, the students' engineering practice ability and creative ability have been improved dramatically. this did a significative exploration on improving teaching level and culturing engineering technology persons with high diathesis.


In two experiments, dark-cutting (DC) beef strip loins were used to test the effects of citric acidenhancement pH on visual and instrumental color of fresh and cooked steaks. Dark cutting and normal pH strip loin were injected to 111% of raw product weight with pH 3.5, 4.0, 4.5, or 5.0 solutions by mixing citric acid in either 0.05% phosphate solution or tap water (Exp 1), or with pH 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, and 3.5 solutions made by mixing citric acid in either a 0.5% orthophosphate solution (PO4) or a 0.5% tripolyphosphate solution (STP) (Exp2). Loin sections were cut into 2.5-cm-thick steaks and assigned to either simulated retail display for five days or cooked. Postenhancement pH of enhanced DC steaks did not (P ≥ 0.180) differ from that of non-enhanced DC steaks, regardless of solution pH (Exp 1); however, decreased linearly (P < 0.001) as solution pH decreased from 3.5 to 2.0, and the proportions of free and bound moisture of DC steaks enhanced with pH 2.5 solution were comparable (P ≥ 0.141) to that of CH (Exp 2). On d 1 and 3 of display, fresh color scores of enhanced DC steaks were greater (P < 0.001) than untreated DC (Exp 1), but color scores of CH steaks were greater (P < 0.001) than enhanced DC steaks (Exp 1 and 2). Conversely, in experiment 1, degree of doneness scores increased linearly (indicating greater doneness; P = 0.032) as solution pH increased from 3.5 to 5.0, and steaks enhanced with pH 4.0 and 4.5 solutions received lower (more red; quadratic, P = 0.012) cooked color scores than non-enhanced DC steaks, but neither score was comparable (P < 0.001) to those for CH steaks. While in experiment 2 enhancing DC sections with pH 2.5 solutions produced cooked color and degree of doneness scores that were similar (P ≥ 0.113) to nonenhanced CH steaks. Thus, enhancement with pH 2.5 citric acid solutions can effectively eliminate the persistent red cooked color typically associated with DC beef; however, citric acid enhancement failed to improve the fresh color of DC beef comparable to that of CH beef.


This article examines the impact of international student-athletes ("ISAs") participating in intercollegiate athletics in the United States. Particularly in certain collegiate sports, the predominance, and frankly, the competitive success of ISAs-both men and women-is gaining the attention, and, in some cases, the concern, of college coaches, players, parents of junior players, member institutions, fans, and commentators. A primary concern is whether many of the ISAs, coming from varied education and athletic programs, are properly evaluated in meeting the academic and amateur eligibility standards set by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Many ISAs are also on athletic scholarships, and, as a practical matter, the competitive playing and education opportunities at the collegiate level for local and domestic players, e.g., children of taxpayers, are commensurately diminished. Should this trend be construed as an outsourcing of college athletics, or, as an opportunity to enhance the collegiate athletic experience by embracing international talent? While a focus on international students may be perceived, or misconceived, as politically insensitive or even xenophobic, the realities are undisputed - U.S. colleges are recruiting worldwide, and ISAs have been a major factor on several collegiate championship teams and account for some of the best performers in college sports. The American public has learned to accept the globalization of business through technological advances, so is it time to accept the international face of American college sports? In short, what are the benefits and costs of ISA participation in U.S. collegiate sports?


Currently, the government is still having difficulties in distributing teachers. The current problem is not just about less teachers, but also more teachers in some cities. The problem of unequal distribution of teachers then became dependent on local government. The distribution of teachers now can not be centralized because of the decentralization system implemented in Indonesia. Clustering in data mining is useful for finding distribution patterns within a dataset that is useful for data analysis processes. Using clustering, identifiable densely populated areas, overall distribution patterns and attractive associations between data attributes. The purpose of this research is to apply ¿-means clustering algorithm to analyze distribution of high school teachers in Indonesia. This research uses three steps, namely dataset selection, preprocessing data, and application of k-means clustering. Testing is done by using k cluster, that is k = 12. The cluster results are analyzed to classify clusters into 3 categories, namely less, enough, and more teachers. Testing results obtained data Sum of Squared Error (SSE) with percentage 87.15%. While the clustering results produce clusters 3 and 5 in the category of less teachers. Cluster 1 and 9 in the category of enough teachers. While cluster 2,4,6,7,8,10,11,12 in the category of more teachers. Based on the results obtained it can be concluded that the accuracy of the algorithm used with 12 clusters is very high. The results of this clustering analysis can also be used as a reference for the distribution of teachers to region with less teachers, so as to solve the issue of uneven distribution of teachers.


Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is associated with high risk of malnutrition, primarily in older people; assessing nutritional risk using appropriate screening tools is critical. This systematic review identified applicable tools and assessed their measurement properties. Literature was searched in the MEDLINE, Embase, and LILACS databases. Four studies conducted in China met the eligibility criteria. Sample sizes ranged from six to 182, and participants' ages from 65 to 87 years. Seven nutritional screening and assessment tools were used: the Nutritional Risk Screening 2002 (NRS-2002), the Mini Nutritional Assessment (MNA), the MNA-short form (MNA-sf), the Malnutrition Universal Screening Tool (MUST), the Nutritional Risk Index (NRI), the Geriatric NRI (GNRI), and modified Nutrition Risk in the Critically ill (mNUTRIC) score. Nutritional risk was identified in 27.5% to 100% of participants. The NRS-2002, MNA, MNA-sf, NRI, and MUST demonstrated high sensitivity; the MUST had better specificity. The MNA and MUST demonstrated better criterion validity. The MNA-sf demonstrated better predictive validity for poor appetite and weight loss; the NRS-2002 demonstrated better predictive validity for prolonged hospitalization. mNUTRIC score demonstrated good predictive validity for hospital mortality. Most instruments demonstrate high sensitivity for identifying nutritional risk, but none are acknowledged as the best for nutritional screening in older adults with COVID-19.


The ventromedial hypothalamic nucleus (VMH) is an important central effector site involved in activating brown adipose tissue (BAT) or non-shivering thermogenesis. VMH neurons have previously been shown to be thermally responsive to changes in local temperature of the preoptic area/anterior hypothalamus (PO/AH). However, the thermoresponsiveness of VMH neurons of room temperature acclimatized and cold acclimatized rats to peripheral thermal stimulation has not been tested. In this thesis, a series of studies was designed to determine the thermoresponsiveness of VMH neurons to peripheral (scrotal) thermal stimulation of rats. Extracelluiar VMH neuronal activity was recorded from urethane anaesthetized male Sprague-Dawley rats, which were acclimatized either to room temperature (21°C for 4 weeks) or to cold (4°C for 4 weeks) prior to testing, during scrotal cooling and heating with glass-micropipettes filled with 0.5 M sodium acetate containing 2% pontamine sky blue. The rats' colonic temperatures were kept at normothermia (37°C), or hypothermia (33-35°C) during scrotal thermal stimulation. In the room temperature acclimatized rats, VMH neurons were temperature responsive to scrotal heating and cooling and were classified as warm responsive (WRN), cold responsive (CRN) and temperature non-responsive neurons (TNRN), based on their thermal coefficients. The ratio of VMH WRNs and CRNs was similar to that of thermoresponsive neurons observed in other brain regions (eg, the PO/AH and thalamus). VMH WRNs and CRNs were further classified as biphasic or monophasic in nature according to their thermal responses to scrotal heating and cooling. VMH neurons sustained their thermoresponsiveness to repeated trials of scrotal thermal stimulation with colonic temperatures maintained at 37°C or when colonic temperatures were acutely lowered from 37°C to 35°C and 33°C. In addition, scrotal thermal signals specifically altered neuronal activity of VMH thermoresponsive neurons, as changes in EEG activity did not occur with changes in VMH neuronal activity. Scrotal thermal inputs were functionally shown to be transmitted via the medial preoptic nucleus (MPO) prior to reaching the VMH nucleus because thermoresponsive VMH neuronal activity was blocked with the pretreatment of lidocaine into the MPO. Scrotal heating or cooling to 21°C-acclimatized rats did not increase IBAT temperatures, inferring that scrotal cooling had not evoked IBAT thermogenesis in this group. In cold acclimatized (CA) rats, prolonged (over 2 hours) and transient localized scrotal cooling caused IBAT temperatures to increase, inferring that scrotal cooling activated BAT thermogenesis. Mean basal firing rates of all recorded VMH neurons of CA-groups significantly increased, compared to those of VMH neurons observed in room temperature acclimatized (RA) groups. More VMH CRNs than WRNs were recorded in the CA-group and the thermoresponsiveness (ie, thermal coefficient) of VMH CRNs significantly increased during …


Enzymes catalyzing oxygen scavenging were embedded in latex-based coatings with and without barrier kaolin clay to produce material for active packages. The clay was used to create a porous structure, and the closed-structure matrix consisted of a biopolymer comprising either starch or gelatin to increase the water uptake of the coating. The effects of the porous open structure and of the water uptake of the coated layer on the oxygen-scavenging ability of the embedded enzymes were examined at both 75% and 100% relative humidity. The results showed that the porous clay structure led to higher oxygen-scavenging capacity than that of a closed structure at both test conditions by enabling a high diffusion rate for oxygen and glucose to the active sites of the enzymes. The addition of a water-holding biopolymer did not always significantly affect the oxygen-scavenging capacity. However for a less-porous layer at 100% relative humidity, an increase in the amount of biopolymer resulted in an increase in oxygen-scavenging capacity. The results were treated statistically using multiple-factor analysis where the most important factor for the oxygen-scavenging ability was found to be the addition of clay. The coatings were also characterized with respect to water vapor uptake, overall migration, porosity, and scanning electron microscopy images.


In the presented study, we proposed a design approach based on optimization algorithm to obtain mode order conversion in photonic crystal (PC) structures and experimentally verify the numerical result of the corresponding approach. The finite-difference time-domain method is integrated with an evolutionary algorithm to develop the introduced design method. Here, we designed two different mode order converter PCs with ultra-compact sizes that transform a fundamental mode to a higher order mode. The first designed structure realizes a mode order conversion in free-space host medium, and the second structure performs the same operation in a PC waveguide with optimized region. Also, asymmetric light transmission effect in PC waveguide structure is investigated. Additionally, we performed microwave experiments to confirm the numerical results of mode order conversion. In conclusion, we demonstrated a novel design approach to obtain mode order conversion, which can be feasible to design diverse photonic structures in the future applications of nanophotonics.


The 4000-year quest for God South Africans live in a time of growing unease amongst Afrikaansspeaking Christians about the traditional God-image of their childhood. As a con-sequence, churches are losing members – which is of concern to the church's leaders. By referring to Karen Armstrong's book, A History of God (1999), this article shows that rethinking the idea of God is not new and that healthy iconoclasm is part and parcel of religions as evolving and changing organisms. Over the past 4000 years, each generation created an image of God that worked for them. The article reflects on the God of Judaism, the Christian God, the God of Islam, the God of the philosophers, the mystics, the reformers and the thinkers of the Enlightenment to the eventual eclipse of God in twentieth-century Europe. The purpose of the exercise is to encourage Christians to engage with the process and create a sense of God for themselves by taking heed of the negative and positive moments in God's long history.


Both chlorophyll (Chl) a andb accumulate in the light in a Synechocystissp. PCC 6803 strain that expresses higher plant genes coding for a light-harvesting complex II protein and Chl aoxygenase. This cyanobacterial strain also lacks photosystem (PS) I and cannot synthesize Chl in darkness because of the lack ofchlL. When this PS I-less/chlL−/lhcb +/cao +strain was grown in darkness, small amounts of two unusual tetrapyrroles, protochlorophyllide (PChlide) b and pheophorbide (pheide) b, were identified. Accumulation of PChlide b trailed that of PChlide a by several days, suggesting that PChlide a is an inefficient substrate of Chl a oxygenase. The presence of pheide b in this organism suggests a breakdown of Chl b via a pathway that does not involve conversion to a-type pigments. When the PS I-less/chlL− control strain was grown in darkness, Chl degradation was much slower than in the PS I-less/chlL−/lhcb +/cao +strain, suggesting that the presence of Chl b leads to more rapid turnover of Chl-binding proteins and/or a more active Chl degradation pathway. Levels and biosynthesis kinetics of Chl and of its biosynthetic intermediates are very different in the PS I-less/chlL−/lhcb +/cao +strain versus in the control. Moreover, when grown in darkness for 14 days, upon the addition of δ-aminolevulinic acid, the level of magnesium-protoporphyrin IX increased 60-fold in the PS I-less/chlL−/lhcb +/cao +strain (only ∼2-fold in the PS I-less/chlL−control strain), whereas the PChlide and protoheme levels remained fairly constant. We propose that a b-type PChlide, Chl, or pheide in the PS I-less/chlL−/lhcb +/cao +strain may bind to tetrapyrrole biosynthesis regulatory protein(s) (for example, the small Cab-like proteins) and thus affect the regulation of this pathway.


During the 1960's Revista Medica de Chile started to request external peer reviews to assess the quality of the manuscripts received and an official Editorial Advisory Committee was incorporated in 1973. Since then, its members have been changed four times. The Committee has served the purposes of providing an external peer review independent to the editors, assessing manuscripts submitted, although many other experts have also contributed and their names have been acknowledged yearly in the July issues of the journal. At the present time, the journal receives an increasing number of manuscripts from a wider range of medical specialties as well as from basic scientists doing research in topics connected with clinical medicine. The overload of papers forces the editors to adopt policies to cope with it. One of them is to renew and enlarge the list of members of the Editorial Advisory Committee, including experts who have recently provided efficient help in reviewing manuscripts. They have also accepted to collaborate with the Editors in selecting other external experts able to participate in the peer-review process, while decisions on acceptance or rejection remain in the Editor and Associate Editors. As a Special Article in this issue, Revista Medica de Chile recognizes again the generosity of all those who along the recent decades have contributed as Members of the Editorial Advisory Committee to the educational, professional and scientific role of this journal.


The generalization properties of most existing machine learning techniques are predicated on the assumptions that 1) a sufficiently large quantity of training data is available; 2) the training and testing data come from some common distribution. Although these assumptions are often met in practice, there are also many scenarios in which training data from the relevant distribution is insufficient. We focus on making use of additional data, which is readily available or can be obtained easily but comes from a different distribution than the testing data, to aid learning.
We present five learning scenarios, depending on how the distribution we used to sample the additional training data differs from the testing distribution: 1) learning with weak supervision; 2) domain adaptation; 3) learning from multiple domains; 4) learning from corrupted data; 5) learning with partial supervision.
We introduce two strategies and manifest them in five ways to cope with the difference between the training and testing distribution. The first strategy, which gives rise to Pseudo Multi-view Co-training (PMC) and Co-training for Domain Adaptation (CODA), is inspired by the co-training algorithm for multi-view data. PMC generalizes co-training to the more common single view data and allows us to learn from weakly labeled data retrieved free from the web. CODA integrates PMC with an another feature selection component to address the feature incompatibility between domains for domain adaptation. PMC and CODA are evaluated on a variety of real datasets, and both yield record performance.
The second strategy marginalized dropout leads to marginalized Stacked Denoising Autoencoders (mSDA), Marginalized Corrupted Features (MCF) and FastTag (FastTag). mSDA diminishes the difference between distributions associated with different domains by learning a new representation through marginalized corruption and reconstruciton. MCF learns from a known distribution which is created by corrupting a small set of training data, and improves robustness of learned classifiers by training on "infinitely'' many data sampled from the distribution. FastTag applies marginalized dropout to the output of partially labeled data to recover missing labels for multi-label tasks. These three algorithms not only achieve the state-of-art performance in various tasks, but also deliver orders of magnitude speed up at training and testing comparing to competing algorithms.


This paper investigates the empirical role of violent conflicts for the causal effect of democracy on economic growth. Exploiting within-country variation to identify the effect of democratization during the "Third Wave", we find evidence that the effect of democratization is weaker than reported previously once one accounts for the incidence of conflict, while the incidence of conflict itself significantly reduces growth. The results show in turn that permanent democratic transitions significantly reduce the incidence and onset of conflict, which suggests that part of the positive growth effect of democratization arises because democratization reduces conflict incidence. When accounting for the role of violence during democratization, we find evidence that peaceful transitions to democracy have a significant positive effect on growth that is even larger than reported in the previous literature, while violent transitions to democracy have no, or even negative, effects on economic growth.


The pathways of fluorescent chromophores introduction into the cholesterol molecule are reviewed and physicochemical, optical properties and biological identity of fluorescent cholesterol derivatives (FCD) to the natural analogues are briefly characterized. Methods of the FCD incorporation into biological objects are discussed. The main part of the review is devoted to the use of FCD to investigate the model and biological membranes, blood plasma lipoproteins and their interactions with cells. The first attempts of the FCD application in the study of sterol-carrier proteins are discussed.


A 10-year follow-up of 327 civil servants with bronchitis (301 men and 26 women) is presented. A further 14 were lost sight of during the period, so that the follow-up was 96% complete. More than one half (54%) of the men died during the 10-year period, some 57% of the deaths being attributed to respiratory causes and a further 8% to carcinoma of the bronchus. Mortality from these diseases was higher than among the general population, but other causes of death showed the normal pattern. The degree of dyspnoea noted at the first interview gave a useful estimate of prognosis, the mild, moderate, and severe groups showing progressively higher death rates. Neither the length of history nor the age at onset of symptoms could be related to mortality. The proportion of smokers among the patients was greater than expected in the general population, and although this may have been a factor contributing to the excess mortality of the group as a whole, it was not possible to determine any effect of smoking within this study.


Cancer is the world's second leading cause of mortality and one of the major public health problems. Cancer incidence and mortality rates remain high despite the great advancements in existing therapeutic, diagnostic, and preventive approaches. Therefore, a quest for less toxic and more efficient anti-cancer strategies is still at the forefront of the current research. Traditionally important, curcumin commonly known as a wonder molecule has received considerable attention as an anti-cancer, anti-inflammatory, and antioxidant candidate. However, limited water solubility and low bioavailability restrict its extensive utility in different pathological states. The investigators are making consistent efforts to develop newer strategies to overcome its limitations by designing different analogues with better pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic properties. The present review highlights the recent updates on curcumin and its analogues with special emphasis on various mechanistic pathways involved in anti-cancer activity. In addition, the structure-activity relationship of curcumin analogues has also been precisely discussed. This article will also provide key information for the design and development of newer curcumin analogues with desired pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic profiles and will provide in depth understanding of molecular pathways involved in the anti-cancer activities.


SUMMARY: The content of ribonucleic acid (RNA), excess organic phosphate (XSP) in the RNA fraction, deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), acid-soluble inorganic phosphate (AI) and organic phosphate (AO), and the lipid phosphate (LP) and lipid weight (L) have been determined in some ten Gram-positive and ten Gram-negative organisms, grown in the same media and harvested at the same phase of growth. A statistical analysis of the results shows that the RNA and DNA contents of the Gram-positive and Gram-negative groups do not differ significantly; the percentage of lipid phosphorus is only half as great in the Gram-positive as in the Gram-negative group; and XSP is present in all the Gram-positive organisms, but absent from all the Gram-negative ones. We suggest that a lipid-polyglycerophosphate-protein component may be a common structural feature of the cell envelopes of all Gram-positive organisms. The mechanism of the Gram reaction is considered in the light of our observations.


A study was conducted to assess perceptions of potential barriers that might affect students' perceptions and likelihood of participating in international learning at the University of Florida's College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. To conduct the study, an 89 item webbased questionnaire was randomly sent to a sample of undergraduate and graduate students. In all, 256 students responded, for a response rate of 34%. Results showed that the most relevant barriers toward participating included concern about financial costs and overall time involved. Their ratings of a set of attributes related to skills possessed by students involved in international activities was above average, while their rating of the degree to which they possessed the attributes was in the average range. Areas which showed a substantial difference between importance and possession of attributes included "knowledge of the humanitarian issues between the U.S. and other countries," and attributes relating to exports, marketing and humanitarian issues. Perceived barriers was the most significant predictor of intent and perceptions toward international participation, followed by the perceived degree of importance of a set of attributes typically possessed by students who have engaged in an international experience. Based on these findings, possible strategies that may mitigate potential barriers and enhance students' willingness to participate in internationalization efforts might include focusing on educating students about specific attributes that may result from international experiences, as well as publicizing and promoting those "student success stories" where this effect is illustrated.


Economic theory shows that education is critical to economic development and to labor sector choice, yet there is little research to indicate the role school access plays in the agricultural transformation, the stage of development when the labor force shifts from primarily agriculture to non-agriculture. This paper identifies the impact of secondary school access on the probability of working in agriculture using 31 years of household panel data nationally representative of rural Mexico. The findings show that local secondary school access reduces the probability of working in agriculture at age 20 by 6.2 percentage points and the impacts grow as individuals age. The theoretical model shows that instrumenting for education using changes in school supply leads to inflated coefficient estimates when there are heterogeneous returns to education across labor sectors. This is consistent with the empirical literature, which typically finds greater returns to education using instrumental variables compared to OLS. Nevertheless, estimating the reduced form impacts of school supply on labor decisions has important implications for policy makers. The findings in this paper show that increased rural education is a significant contributor to the agricultural transformation, which leads to higher incomes in both the farm and non-farm sectors.


In Estate of Braden, the Arizona Supreme Court held 3−2 that the State of Arizona could not be a defendant under section 46-455 of the Adult Protective Services Act. The majority and the dissent both employed a comprehensive set of statutory interpretation tools in their analysis. This Case Note explores how the court used these tools of interpretation in Estate of Braden and in other recent decisions to illustrate how the current court analyzes ambiguous statutes. It concludes with two general observations about the Arizona Supreme Court's statutory interpretation theories. First, the court adheres closely to the text and is not easily persuaded to read requirements into statutes. Second, the court is open to considering a wide range of tools and sources when discerning the meaning of an ambiguous statute.


In this paper, a comparison of weak-form Galerkin and least-squares finite element models of Timoshenko beam theory with the von Karman strains is presented. Computational characteristics of the two models and the influence of the polynomial orders used on the relative accuracies of the two models are discussed. The degree of approximation functions used varied from linear to the 5th order. In the linear analysis, numerical results of beam bending under different types of boundary conditions are presented along with exact solutions to investigate the degree of shear locking in the newly developed mixed finite element models. In the nonlinear analysis, convergences of nonlinear finite element solutions of newly developed mixed finite element models are presented along with those of existing traditional model to compare the performance. © 2010 IAU, Arak Branch. All rights reserved.


Controlling complex networked systems to a desired state is a key research goal in contemporary science. Despite recent advances in studying the impact of network topology on controllability, a comprehensive understanding of the synergistic effect of network topology and individual dynamics on controllability is still lacking. Here we offer a theoretical study with particular interest in the diversity of dynamic units characterized by different types of individual dynamics. Interestingly, we find a global symmetry accounting for the invariance of controllability with respect to exchanging the densities of any two different types of dynamic units, irrespective of the network topology. The highest controllability arises at the global symmetry point, at which different types of dynamic units are of the same density. The lowest controllability occurs when all self-loops are either completely absent or present with identical weights. These findings further improve our understanding of network controllability and have implications for devising the optimal control of complex networked systems in a wide range of fields.


After many years of effort, recent technical breakthroughs have enabled the X-ray crystal structures of three G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) (b1 and b2 adrenergic and adenosine A2a) to be solved in addition to rhodopsin. GPCRs, like other membrane proteins, have lagged behind soluble drug targets such as kinases and proteases in the number of structures available and the level of understanding of these targets and their interaction with drugs. The availability of increasing numbers of structures of GPCRs is set to greatly increase our understanding of some of the key issues in GPCR biology. In particular, what constitutes the different receptor conformations that are involved in signalling and the molecular changes which occur upon receptor activation. How future GPCR structures might alter our views on areas such as agonist-directed signalling and allosteric regulation as well as dimerization is discussed. Knowledge of crystal structures in complex with small molecules will enable techniques in drug discovery and design, which have previously only been applied to soluble targets, to now be used for GPCR targets. These methods include structure-based drug design, virtual screening and fragment screening. This review considers how these methods have been used to address problems in drug discovery for kinase and protease targets and therefore how such methods are likely to impact GPCR drug discovery in the future.


In practice only imperfect channel state information (CSI) is available at the transmitter due to noisy and time-varying channel. In this paper, we consider optimal bit loading for orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) with imperfect CSI subject to channel estimation. The frame length comes in as an important control parameter, while soft channel estimation and the Cramer-Rao bound are used to include the effect of channel estimation. We modify the conventional water-filling to take the maximal allowed rate on each subcarrier into account while considering CSI error. Its continuous output rates are optimally quantized by a non-iterative algorithm. Simulations show that the frame length is an important system parameter and that the computing time for the proposed algorithm linearly increases with the increasing number of subcarriers N.


ABSTRACT: We have integrated southern mid- and high-latitude (Austral) radiolarian biozonations with the well-established low-latitude (Tropical) biozonation using new biostratigraphic and magnetostratigraphic constraints on radiolarian bioevents in the Southwest (SW) Pacific, Southeast (SE) Indian and Northwest (NW) Atlantic Oceans. Our primary study sites include Mead Stream, New Zealand, and DSDP Sites 277 and 207 (SW Pacific; 45-54 degrees South at 50 Ma), ODP Site 752 and IODP Site U1514 (SE Indian; 50 degrees South at 50 Ma), and IODP Site U1403 (NW Atlantic; 30 degrees North at 50 Ma). The Austral and Tropical zonal schemes have been calibrated to GPTS2020. We introduce new zonal codes to rectify current confusion surrounding use of "RP" zones. Austral zones are codified as "RPA" zones and Tropical zones are codified as "RPT". Our study finds that radiolarian datums are generally isochronous within the mid-latitude SW Pacific and SE Indian Oceans from Paleocene to middle Eocene and are also isochronous in the high-latitude Southern Ocean (>60 degrees South paleolatitude) over the late middle Eocene to Oligocene interval of overlap. Older radiolarian assemblages are not known from the Southern Ocean. Early to middle Paleocene radiolarian assemblages in the SE Indian Ocean (zones RPA2-RPA5) differ from coeval SW Pacific assemblages by lacking significant numbers of Cretaceous survivors. The reasons for this difference are uncertain. Although the late Paleocene to Eocene radiolarian assemblages in the SW Pacific and SE Indian Ocean lack many low-latitude index species, the timing of Indian Ocean bioevents agrees better with low-latitude biozonations than the SW Pacific, suggesting a stronger connection with low-latitude watermasses. Assemblages from NW Atlantic IODP Site U1403 include numerous low-latitude index species and can be correlated with zones RPT6-RPT13. Many of the species transitions in biostratigraphically important Eocene lineages, however, occur later than in lower latitudes.


Teaching is a multidimensional, complex activity as stated by Khandelwal (2009). At the same time, teaching is very important in every level including higher education. Therefore, many studies (e.g., Betoret & Artiga, 2004; Haigh, Kane, & Sandretto, 2012) have been conducted on teaching and its components. These studies have particularly focused on defining and explaining effective teaching and teacher for last two decades. Related concepts have been studied from primary to higher education in different educational systems (e.g., Mohidin, Jaidi, Thien Sang, & Osman, 2009; Kiziltepe, 2002; Trigwell, 2001) especially based on students' perceptions. Some related studies (Barnes, 2010; Devlin & Samarawisckrema, 2010; Khandelwal, 2009; Werbinska, 2009; Brown, Morehead, & Smith, 2008) have attempted to identify the concepts of effective teaching and effective teacher in higher education. On the other hand, it is observed that studies (Arnon & Reichel, 2007; Buchel & Edwards, 2005; Devlin & O'Shea, 2011; Korthagen, 2004; Minor, Onwuegbuzie, Witcher, & James, 2002; Ditcher, 2001; Northcote, 2009; Parpala & Lindblom-Ylanne, 2007; Postareff & Lindblom-Ylanne, 2008; Wachtel, 1998, Wilson, 1996) in higher education about this issue mostly investigated student teachers' viewpoints.Literature ReviewEffective teaching and effective teacher which are the key concepts of this present study have been explained from different viewpoints in the related literature. For example, according to Vries and Beijaard (1999), good teaching is also effective teaching and it leads students to success. On the other hand, Harris (1998, p. 179) states that effective teaching mostly depends on outcomes and aims of education. In a similar way, some researchers such as Parpala and Lindblom-Ylanne (2007), Kyricaou (1997) claim that the quality of teaching is related to students' achievement. Different from these researchers, Johnson (1997) states that effective teaching based on communication which is directed by a teacher who is competent in his/her field and good at classroom management. Additionally, researchers (e.g., Berliner, 1983; Slavin, 2003), point out the four characteristics of effective teaching: the quality of teaching, considering students' level, motivation and enough time for learning. Giovannelli (2003), for example, states that effective teaching consists of five components: the composite of effective teaching, classroom management, instructional behaviour, and classroom organization and teacher expectations. According to Ramsden (1992, cited in Khandelwal, 2009), there are six key principles of effective teaching in higher education as follows: interest and explanation, concern and respect for students and student learning, appropriate assessment and feedback, clear goals and intellectual challenge, independence, control and active engagement, and learning from students. It is obvious that research provide a number of such lists of the characteristics of effective teaching, which are essentially checklists of skills, practices and qualities, with little or no agreement as Devlin and Samarawickrema (2010) stated. In sum, what constitutes effective teaching in the context of higher education has proven rather elusive to describe (Khandelwal, 2009). Even though numerous attempts have been made to identify effective higher education teaching, there is no universally accepted definition (Johnson & Ryan, 2000; Trigwell, 2001; cited in Devlin & Samarawickrema, 2010). On the other hand, definitely, one of the most important components of effective teaching is teacher (Kyriacou, 1997). At this point, it is not surprising to question the characteristics of an effective teacher since it has been observed that in many studies teacher is an important player in this context. According to Cruicshank, Jenkins, and Metcalf (2003, p. 329), for instance, effective teachers are supportive, caring, competent in their field, excited for their job, and leader with good communication skills. …


In the UK, the legal processes underpinning the procurement system for cadaveric organs for transplantation and research after death are under review. The review originated after media reports of hospitals, such as Alder Hey and Bristol, retaining organs after death without the full, informed consent of relatives. The organ procurement systems for research and transplantation are separate and distinct, but given that legal change will be applicable to both, some have argued now is the time to introduce alternative organ transplant procurement systems such as presumed consent or incentive based schemes (despite inconclusive British and American research on the status of public attitudes). Findings are reported in this paper from qualitative and quantitative research undertaken in Scotland in order to ascertain the public acceptability of different procurement systems. Nineteen in depth interviews carried out with donor families about their experiences of donating the organs of the deceased covered their views of organ retention, presumed consent, and financial incentives. This led onto a representative interview survey of 1009 members of the Scottish public. The originality of the triangulated qualitative and quantitative study offers exploration of alternative organ procurement systems from different "sides of the fence". The findings suggest that the legal changes taking place are appropriate in clarifying the role of the family but can go further in strengthening the choice of the individual to donate.


Boreal forests maintain regionally important biodiversity and globally important ecosystem services, such as carbon storage and freshwater resources. Many boreal systems have limited anthropogenic disturbances and are preserved, in effect, to date largely by their harsh climates and remoteness. As of 2011, almost 10% of Canada is subject to some manner of formal protection, with 4.5% of this protected area found within the boreal zone. The management of existing parks and protected areas (PPAs) is shared amongst many federal, provincial, and territorial jurisdictions. Although there are currently low levels of anthropogenic development in some portions of the boreal zone (especially the north), if expansion of protected areas is of interest, there are challenges to traditional PPA networks that may be more prominent in the boreal zone than elsewhere: (1) the boreal zone is home to charismatic mammal species with area requirements much larger than typical PPAs; (2) the boreal zone is characterized by natural disturbance regimes that impact large areas; and (3) projected changes to climate for the boreal zone are among the greatest in the world, creating temporal considerations for conservation planning exercises. There is currently no PPA assessment specific to boreal Canada. To address this lack of an assessment, we developed a conservation gap analysis of the current PPA system with respect to a variety of environmental surrogates (ecozones, land cover, vegetation productivity, and landscape structure). The amount of formally protected land varied within each surrogate, with few commonly reported features meeting national or international conservation targets. Furthermore, few reserves met the areal requirements that have been previously recommended to protect large mammals or accommodate the disturbance regimes present. We also discuss considerations and implications of area-based versus value-based protection objectives. While recognizing that there are still scientific challenges around understanding and evaluating the effectiveness of PPAs, based upon our review and assessment, the following considerations should inform conservation options for the boreal zone: (1) representation of the distribution of natural features within the PPA network; (2) effective maintenance of habitat requirements and spatial resilience to both cyclical and directional changes in spatial patterns through large, connected reserves; and (3) implementation of sustainable forest management practices (where applicable) throughout the broader landscape, as traditional on-reserve protection is unlikely to be sufficient to meet conservation goals. The Canadian boreal is unique in possessing large tracts of inaccessible forested lands that are not subject to management interventions, thereby offering functions similar to protected lands. The question of how to more formally integrate these lands into the existing PPA network requires further consideration. Further, the important temporal role of landscape dynamics in designing an effective PPA needs to be further studied as well as development of a better understanding of design needs in the context of a changing climate.


Using data from a large-scale field experiment, we show that while there is no gender difference in the willingness to make risky decisions on behalf of a group in a sample of children, a large gap emerges in a sample of adolescents. The proportion of girls who exhibit leadership willingness drops by 39% going from childhood to adolescence. We explore the possible factors behind this drop and find that it is largely associated with a dramatic decline in "social confidence", measured by the willingness to perform a real effort task in public.


ELeGI, the European Learning Grid Infrastructure, has the ambitious goal of fostering effective learning and knowledge construction through the dynamic provision of service-based contextualised and personalised learning environments. The success of this venture will depend to a considerable extent on the usability of such environments, and their usability in turn will depend on a successful strategy for the dynamic integration and maintenance of sets of services. The concept of the portal is therefore of considerable interest as it is often portrayed as a means whereby a user can access an integrated set of related information and services. This paper reviews the portal concept with a view to its suitability as a design basis for enabling technology that will address usability concerns. The paper proceeds by summarising the usability requirements of learning environments, reviewing some of the ideas currently associated with different types of portals (enterprise portals, institutional portals, usercentric portals, Grid portals), and concludes by deriving a taxonomy of portal characteristics against which the usability requirements of ELeGI can be assessed.


Canada announced plans to phase-out coal-fired electricity generation by 2030. Therefore, in 2014, the province of Ontario has phased out the use of coal in the production of electricity. Former coal powered generating stations have been converted to use biomass. Ontario Power Generation, Ontario's largest producer of electricity, has converted former coal powered Thunder Bay Generating Station (TBGS) to use advanced wood pellets (AWP), which are produced from thermally treated biomass. The thermal treatment with steam explosion makes the AWP more durable and water resistant as compared to conventional wood pellets, hence allowing TBGS to use the same handling and storage equipment they used for coal, including outside storage of AWP. However, the quality properties of AWP may degrade due to exposure to weather conditions while stored outside, affecting their performance as a fuel. The purpose of this study was to analyze the degradation of AWP while stored outside, and to give recommendations for the most effective storage approach to the industry. We examined the trends and level of degradation of AWP quality properties, while stored outside in uncovered and covered piles, through a period of 11 months. Additionally, we monitored internal temperature trends of the piles, to assess if there is any risk of self-heating, and tested fresh factory samples, which served as a baseline. The results showed that AWP moisture content is highly influenced by weather conditions (in the first place precipitation), with moisture content directly or indirectly affecting the rest of the properties. Furthermore, the covered pile displayed significantly better preservation of properties, while self-heating was not observed in any of the piles. We recommend covering AWP piles, especially in the winter months, to reduce snow pack that could thaw and penetrate into the pile in the spring. This study also contributes to the existing knowledge in the biomass area, since there are very few studies done on AWP storage and quality properties.


In the early twentieth century, Hindutva, or Hindu nationalism, was a philosophy premised on exclusivist notions of "nation-ness" and "nation-state-ness." India, proponents claimed, had since the earliest times been the pitrabhumi and the punyabhumi of Hindus—their fatherland and holy land. This ideal realm was corrupted by Muslim and Christian "invaders," foreigners who defiled and split asunder "Akhand Hindustan," the one India of Hindus. In the context of British rule of the subcontinent, Hindu nationalists mirrored colonial claims and held up the native princely states as exemplars of "tradition," as territories unspoiled by foreign hands and thus representative of the "true India." The idea behind Akhand Hindustan came from a prominent member of the princely state bureaucracy, K. M. Munshi. Here the author explores how and why princely states were idealized in the Hindu imaginary and what role reformers, particularly Munshi, played in perpetuating this hard-line ideology. By exploring the regions on which early Hindu nationalism was mapped, the author illuminates the teleology of Hindutva while providing a better understanding of the place of princely states in the politics and society of colonial India.


ABSTRACT Workers with disabilities have functional limitations that affect their productivity in some, but not necessarily all, jobs. Workers who find a job that is a good match for their functional limitations (i.e. a job where their limitations have little or no impact on important job functions) should expect better employment outcomes (e.g. higher wages, longer job tenure) than workers with similar disabilities who are mismatched in their jobs. Merging data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation with O*Net data on job demands, we construct two continuous measures of job mismatch for workers with physical disabilities. We then extend the literature on disability and employment by exploring relationships between duration of disability, job mismatch, wages and hours worked. The results indicate that workers with long durations of disability are employed in jobs that are a better match to their physical limitations than are similar workers with shorter durations of disability. And, workers who are mismatched earn lower wages and work fewer hours than their counterparts whose jobs are a better match. Overall, the findings suggest that disability employment policies should include systematic efforts to help workers with disabilities find good job matches.


Throughout the development of China's Internet industry for more than 20 years, we can tease out three stages that can represent the trend of the times: the first stage can be called "the Portal Era" with the entire Internet industry dominated by portal websites. However, with several major portals 'transitions after being unable to maintain effective operation of their profit model, the Portal Era came to an end. The second stage we call "Social Network Era", represented by Sina Mircroblog and WeChat. The former had successful transitions after several ups and downs and the latter is trending and promising. Also vigorously developing are various social websites and mobile apps. In the midst of the laughter of those entrepreneurs, the industry came to a third stage of development: The Era of E-business. These three stages did not appear one after another in chronological order. Social networks and e-business platforms in fact exist simultaneously with two groups of people hitting on different roads that lead to the same destination. Social networks and business platforms are now already inescapably intertwined with each other: social networks attract traffic for e-business platforms while e-business platforms provide profit in return. What is more, big Internet giants aim to create a "theme park" magnificently situated in the internet world to provide one-stop services like portal browsing, e-business, third party payment, social networking and entertainment. At the same time, social network leaders also gradually provided e-commerce .and the third party payment service without willing to pave way for others. Longer ago, with the smart phones sweeping the world, the mobile internet era approached quietly while online and offline businesses increasingly converged. Therefore, we have reasons to believe that the next important stage of Internet development will be named as the era of multi-functional integrated Internet platforms.


The effects associated with the change of the deformation path - such as the replacement of homogeneous multi-slip by heterogeneous deformation and a decrease of global strain hardening - have been utilised in the metal forming operation termed KOBO technology. In the case of extrusion it consists in reversible, cyclic twisting of a billet under the extrusion force. The technology enables extrusion of metals with very large deformation in one operation at low temperature. A complex scheme of straining, large cumulated deformation and low temperature of the process results in a fine grained microstructure of the extruded material (product). The new technology requires detailed studies of the mechanism of the plastic deformation with the specific geometry of the zone of metal flow during extrusion. Essential in these studies is the information on the texture and microstructure in the deformation zone. The aim of this work is therefore to disclose the deformation mechanisms on the basis of the observations of microstructure and texture evolution in the zone of plastic flow of the extrudate. Coarse grained polycrystalline billets of magnesium alloys AZ31 were extruded by KOBO at room temperature and also by a conventional method at about 400°C. Methods of texture topography as well as optical observations reveal the specific microstructure and texture in mezzo and micro scale of heavily deformed material after extrusion. It is worth mentioning that the KOBO process leads to compact and rather homogeneous extrudates even in the case of AZ alloys. These hexagonal metals cannot be cold-formed to a high reduction with conventional techniques.


This study aims to reformulate (reconstruct) of Arabic learning. The research site chosen is IAIN  Metro Lampung. This university is one of Islamic Universities in Indonesia that requires the students to learn and master Arabic. This study formulate steps that are tailored to the characteristics of student in IAIN Metro, especially for students who are not studying at Arabic language education. After the data has been analyzed and reviewed, the conclusion of the formulation of the reconstruction of Arabic learning is to reformulate the general and specific instructional objectives, to reformulate teaching materials, learning strategies and assessment strategies.


Abstract. One of the important tracks leading to natural risk prevention, disaster mitigation or the reduction of losses due to natural hazards is the vulnerability assessment of an "at-risk" region. The majority of researchers propose to assess vulnerability according to an expert evaluation of several qualitative characteristics, scoring each of them usually using three ratings: low, average, and high. Unlike these investigations, we attempted a quantitative vulnerability assessment using multidimensional statistical methods. Cluster analysis for all 89 Russian regions revealed five different types of region, which are characterized with a single (rarely two) prevailing factor causing increase of vulnerability. These factors are: the sensitivity of the technosphere to unfavorable influences; a "human factor"; a high volume of stored toxic waste that increases possibility of NDs with serious consequences; the low per capita GRP, which determine reduced prevention and protection costs; the heightened liability of regions to natural disasters that can be complicated due to unfavorable social processes. The proposed methods permitted us to find differences in prevailing risk factor (vulnerability factor) for the region types that helps to show in which direction risk management should focus on.


System identification is an inherently iterative process. Yet, limited attempts have been made so far to implement the whole identification loop in a single device. This paper discusses the difficulties of the task and presents a solution based on a Matlab toolbox and a set of virtual instruments. During the identification session, the obtained models may call for refinement or validation by new experiments. Using this integrated software-hardware tool, these subsequent experiments can be accomplished online with the identification procedure. As a demonstration, the modeling of a hairdryer is described. The universal applicability of this solution is believed to be guaranteed by the modular architecture of virtual instrumentation and the general definition of the software interface developed. The interface allows combining Matlab-based identification packages with virtual instruments or pure hardware interfaced to Matlab.


ABSTRACT To estimate the diversity of extended-spectrum β-lactamases in Brazil, 18 strains from different species of the familyEnterobacteriaceae exhibiting a positive double-disk synergy test were collected by a clinical laboratory from several hospitals in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1996 and 1997. Four strains (Proteus mirabilis, Enterobacter cloacae,Enterobacter aerogenes, and Citrobacter amalonaticus) hybridized with a 550-bp CTX-M probe. The P. mirabilis strain produced a CTX-M-2 enzyme. The E. cloacae, E. aerogenes, and C. amalonaticus isolates harbored a bla gene which was identified by cloning and sequencing as ablaCTX-M gene. E. coli HB101 transconjugants and the E. coli DH5α transformant harboring a recombinant plasmid produced a CTX-M β-lactamase with an isoelectric point of 7.6 conferring a resistance phenotype characterized by a higher level of resistance to cefotaxime than to ceftazidime, as observed with the other CTX-M enzymes. The deduced protein sequence showed a novel Ambler class A CTX-M enzyme, named CTX-M-8, which had 83 to 88% identity with the previously described CTX-M enzymes. The phylogenic study of the CTX-M family including CTX-M-8 revealed four CTX-M types, CTX-M-8 being the first member of a new phylum of CTX-M enzymes. The evolutionary distances between the four types of CTX-M were large, suggesting that the four clusters branched off early from a distant unknown enzyme and that intermediate enzymes probably existed.