This study explores the impact of known risk factors on health and safety at work in men in early fatherhood. Becoming a father is a major challenge, for men have to face and balance two of the most central responsibilities in adult life, those of work and family. Research and literature has shown that employed fathers work longer than ever before, and that society expects fathers to increase their role in parenting activities. Engaging in long work hours and parenting might create work-family conflict, excessive daytime sleepiness and fatigue. The collective effect of which might impact on the father's safety behaviour at work. Currently, no research has been located that identifies the relationship between these variables and work safety behaviours.

A descriptive survey method was used to investigate known risk factors of work family conflict, excessive daytime sleepiness and fatigue in working men in early fatherhood and their relationship with safety behaviour at work. Fathers were recruited via antenatal and postpartum maternity services in the Gold Coast region of Queensland and Northern New South Wales, Australia, resulting in a convenience sample of 241 fathers. A questionnaire was sent to participating fathers during the first 3 months of their baby's life, at 6 weeks and 12 weeks. The questionnaire utilised previously published scales that measure work family conflict, excessive daytime sleepiness, fatigue and safety behaviour at work. To gain an indication of accidents experienced during the first 3 months postpartum, a researcher-developed scale was used to measure participants' self-reported history of workplace related incidents (incidents at work or driving to and from work).

This study revealed that working men during early fatherhood worked long hours at work and took very little parental leave after the birth of their baby. Furthermore, a large proportion of participants reported having work family conflict, excessive daytime sleepiness and fatigue. Inferential data analysis confirmed a statistically significant increase in work family conflict, excessive daytime sleepiness, and fatigue at 6 and 12 weeks, and a decrease in safety behaviour at 6 and 12 weeks. Moreover, subsequent fathers scored higher in work family conflict, excessive daytime sleepiness and fatigue than first-time fathers. Fatigue was the most significant contributor to safety behaviour at 6 and 12 weeks, and physical exertion at work significantly predicted the reporting of work-related incident at 6 and 12 weeks.

The results of this study provide a better understanding of the factors that impact on the work safety of men during early fatherhood and the risk factors they face in meeting both work and family commitments. What is more, the results of the study have clinical significance to midwives, community nurses and occupational health nurses in relation to their clinical practice and client education. The study also provides a basis for further investigation into the health and safety of men during early fatherhood as they balance work and family.


Health Promotion in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is currently facing many difficult challenges. Health status is worse than in any other region, with the midpoint data indicating that that SSA is not on track to achieve any of the Millenium Development Goals. This paper explores the history of health promotion in Africa, from before Alma Ata, through the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, and up to the present. Using examples from Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa during their transitional periods, and health promotion approaches adopted to tackle HIV/AIDS, diarrhoea and non-communicable diseases, the paper shows how the focus has shifted away from the ideals of the Ottawa Charter to an individualistic behaviour change approach. The reasons for the shift reflect political choices of governments that have favoured technocratic approaches over harnessing the popular mobilisations that have accompanied national struggles. The experiences of global movements, such as the Global Equity Gauge Alliance are considered as a way of enhancing local health promotion initiatives which, as presently conceived, are limited in their ability to address equity and the broader determinants of ill health.


The detection of terpene vapors, a group of biomarker vapors emitted by plants during their growth process, is an efficient way to monitor plant growth status and control plant pests and disease. In this study, a gas sensor based on the localized surface plasma resonance (LSPR) of Au nanoparticles (Au NPs) is proposed for the terpene vapors detection. Au ion sputtering method is used to deposit Au NPs on transparent glass substrates. The dependence of transmission spectra on the morphology of Au NPs prepared by different sputtering conditions is investigated. In order to enhance the sensitivity and selectivity of the sensor, thiolate modification is applied to form the selective soluble monolayer on the surface of Au NPs. The results indicate that different thiolates could form different steric capping layers, and the responding ability of the LSPR sensor is verified by a red-shift of the minimum transmittance in wavelength (Δλmin) and a decrease in the minimum transmittance (ΔTmin) upon exposure to terpene vapors.


ABSTRACT Tropical rainforests show the highest level of terrestrial biodiversity and may be an important contributor to microbial diversity. Exploitation of these ecosystems may foster the emergence of novel pathogens. We report the discovery of the first insect-associated nidovirus, tentatively named Cavally virus (CAVV). CAVV was found with a prevalence of 9.3% during a survey of mosquito-associated viruses along an anthropogenic disturbance gradient in Côte d'Ivoire. Analysis of habitat-specific virus diversity and ancestral state reconstruction demonstrated an origin of CAVV in a pristine rainforest with subsequent spread into agriculture and human settlements. Virus extension from the forest was associated with a decrease in virus diversity (P < 0.01) and an increase in virus prevalence (P < 0.00001). CAVV is an enveloped virus with large surface projections. The RNA genome comprises 20,108 nucleotides with seven major open reading frames (ORFs). ORF1a and -1b encode two large proteins that share essential features with phylogenetically higher representatives of the order Nidovirales, including the families Coronavirinae and Torovirinae, but also with families in a basal phylogenetic relationship, including the families Roniviridae and Arteriviridae. Genetic markers uniquely conserved in nidoviruses, such as an endoribonuclease- and helicase-associated zinc-binding domain, are conserved in CAVV. ORF2a and -2b are predicted to code for structural proteins S and N, respectively, while ORF3a and -3b encode proteins with membrane-spanning regions. CAVV produces three subgenomic mRNAs with 5′ leader sequences (of different lengths) derived from the 5′ end of the genome. This novel cluster of mosquito-associated nidoviruses is likely to represent a novel family within the order Nidovirales. IMPORTANCE Knowledge of microbial diversity in tropical rainforests is sparse, and factors driving the emergence of novel pathogens are poorly understood. We discovered and mapped the spread and genetic evolution of a novel mosquito nidovirus from a pristine rainforest to human settlements. Notably, virus diversity decreased and prevalence increased during the process of spreading into disturbed habitats. The novel virus, tentatively termed Cavally virus, contains genetic features common to members of the order Nidovirales (families Coronaviridae, Arteriviridae, and Roniviridae), including conservation of the replicase machinery and expression of subgenomic RNA messages, has a basal phylogenetic relationship to the family Coronaviridae, and clearly differs from the established nidovirus families. Inclusion of this putative novel family in the nidovirus phylogeny suggests that nidoviruses may have evolved from arthropods. Knowledge of microbial diversity in tropical rainforests is sparse, and factors driving the emergence of novel pathogens are poorly understood. We discovered and mapped the spread and genetic evolution of a novel mosquito nidovirus from a pristine rainforest to human settlements. Notably, virus diversity decreased and prevalence increased during the process of spreading into disturbed habitats. The novel virus, tentatively termed Cavally virus, contains genetic features common to members of the order Nidovirales (families Coronaviridae, Arteriviridae, and Roniviridae), including conservation of the replicase machinery and expression of subgenomic RNA messages, has a basal phylogenetic relationship to the family Coronaviridae, and clearly differs from the established nidovirus families. Inclusion of this putative novel family in the nidovirus phylogeny suggests that nidoviruses may have evolved from arthropods.


Philosophers of science are increasingly interested in engaging with scientific communities, policy makers, and members of the public; however, the nature of this engagement has not been systematically examined. Instead of delineating a specific kind of engaged philosophy of science, as previous accounts have done, this article draws on literature from outside the discipline to develop a framework for analyzing different forms of broadly engaged philosophy of science according to two key dimensions: social interaction and epistemic integration. Clarifying the many forms of engagement available to philosophers of science can advance future scholarship on engagement and promote more strategic engagement efforts.


In order to increase the multiplexing density of the fiber Bragg gratings (FBGs) for a low cost per-sensor, based on the analysis of the spectrum shadow distortion (SSD), a novel successive demultiplexing scheme for FBG sensors has been developed. It is based on the optical code division multiple access (CDMA) balanced demodulation. A high-density multiplexing-demultiplexing system for FBG sensors has been designed, and corresponding simulation carried out has demonstrated that the FBG sensors' reflective signals can still be obtained accurately and respectively, even if FBG sensors' operating bandwidths heavily overlap. The SSD has been greatly mitigated.


To examine whether salicylic acid (SA) can mitigate the deleterious effects of salt stress on vegetative and reproductive development in sunflower, a greenhouse experiment was conducted. The treatments consisted of two sunflower lines (Hysun-33 and SF-187), two salt levels (0 mM and 120 mM NaCl), three doses of salicylic acid (0, 100, 200, and 300 mgL-1) and four replicates arranged in a completely randomized design. Varying NaCl levels were raised at day 19 and SA was applied foliarly at day 24 after sowing.The growth and development of the sunflower lines was significantly affected under salinity stress. However, foliar spray of 200 mg L-1 of SA resulted in improved growth and achene yield. In addition, salt-induced reduction in achene yield and improvement in achene yield with SA application in both sunflower lines was found to be attributable to alteration in the size of both achene and capitulum. Photosynthetic rate of both lines increased due to foliar applied SA both under normal and salt regimes, specifically in line SF-187. Moreover, net CO2 assimilation rate was enhanced by 200 mg L-1 SA applied exogenously under salt treatment, which was positively associated with SA-induced increase in growth and yield. However, SA-induced changes in photosynthesis were not associated with stomatal conductance, but partially associated with photosynthetic pigments. Salt stress up-regulated the activities of leaf superoxide dismutase (SOD),catalase (CAT) and peroxidase (POD) in both sunflower lines. The SOD and POD activities were further improved both in stressed and non-stressed plants due to applied SA. However, the activity of leaf CAT was found to be unaffected due to SA applied exogenously. specifically being prominent in SF-187. In addition, SA-induced improvement in growth and photosynthetic performance in both lines was probably due to up-regulation in peroxidase activity caused by SA. Exogenously applied SA restricted the sunflower lines to absorb higher quantity of Na+ in their leaf tissues under saline conditions.The foliar applied SA induced both sunflower lines to absorb higher quantity of Ca2+ in their leaves and roots, notwithstanding, K+ accumulation remained almost unaffected under salt stress. In addition, SA application also caused accumulation of high amount of proline by the plants of both sunflower lines grown under saline substrate.Salt stress considerably reduced both achene oil quantity and quality of both sunflower lines.Contrarily, foliar applied SA caused improvement in achene oil percentage as well as quality of achene oil in terms of linolenic acid in both sunflower lines.Exogenous application of SA did not alter palmitic acid, stearic acid or oleic acid. Overall, salt tolerance in sunflower could be improved by foliar application of SA.


1 Transmurally stimulated segments of the guinea‐pig ileum have been used to analyse the different adrenoceptors in the terminal (0 to 3 cm) and the proximal (> 50 cm from the ileocaecal valve) ileum. 2 The prejunctional adrenoceptors (located on the final, cholinergic, motor nerve terminals) and postjunctional adrenoceptors (located on the smooth muscle membrane) have been characterized according to their sensitivity to α‐ and β‐agonists and antagonists. 3 Phentolamine, phenoxybenzamine and yohimbine, in concentrations of 0.1 μm, transiently enhanced (up to 10%) the twitch response. At higher concentrations all the α‐ and β‐antagonists studied depressed the neurogenic twitches and relaxed the smooth muscle. 4 The twitch‐inhibitory effects of adrenoceptor agonists (noradrenaline, adrenaline and ephedrine) were not antagonized by phenoxybenzamine (0.1, 0.5 and 1 μm), carbidine (0.5, 1 and 5 μm) and propranolol (0.5, 1 and 5 μm); however, they were depressed by phentolamine (0.1, 0.5, 1.25 and 5 μm) and yohimbine (0.25, 0.5 and 5 μm). 5 The smooth muscle contractions induced by noradrenaline and adrenaline in the terminal ileum and by phenylephrine in both the terminal and proximal ileum were antagonized by phenoxybenzamine, carbidine and phentolamine but were not influenced by yohimbine and propranolol. 6 The smooth muscle relaxations of the proximal ileum induced by noradrenaline, adrenaline and ephedrine were inhibited by yohimbine, phentolamine, carbidine and phenoxybenzamine, and the isoprenaline‐induced relaxation was antagonized by propranolol. 7 All the agonists studied, except phenylephrine, elicited relaxations of the acetylcholine‐induced sustained contraction of both proximal and terminal ileum. The relaxation induced by isoprenaline was antagonized by propranolol, and the effects of noradrenaline and ephedrine by yohimbine. 8 It is concluded that in the guinea‐pig ileum there are postsynaptic β‐adrenoceptors and at least two types of α‐adrenoceptors: α1‐excitatory postjunctional adrenoceptors activated by phenylephrine, noradrenaline and adrenaline and antagonized by phenoxybenzamine, carbidine and phentolamine; α2‐inhibitory prejunctional adrenoceptors activated by ephedrine, noradrenaline and adrenaline and inhibited by yohimbine and phentolamine. The inhibitory postjunctional α‐adrenoceptors are more close to the α2‐adrenoceptors, since they were stimulated predominantly by ephedrine and noradrenaline and inhibited by yohimbine. 9 It has been shown that all α‐adrenoceptor subtypes are to be found at every distance (0 to 70 cm) from the ileocaecal valve and that they can be activated in the resting or in the acetylcholine‐contracted states.


Complement factor D is a serine protease regulated by a novel mechanism that depends on conformational changes rather than cleavage of a zymogen for expression of proteolytic activity. The conformational changes are presumed to be induced by the single natural substrate, C3bB, and to result in reversible reorientation of the catalytic center and of the substrate binding site of factor D, both of which have atypical conformations. Here we report that replacement of Ser94, Thr214, and Ser215 of factor D (chymotrypsinogen numbering has been used for comparison purposes) with the corresponding residues of trypsin, Tyr, Ser, and Trp, is sufficient to induce substantially higher catalytic activity associated with a typical serine protease alignment of the catalytic triad residues His57, Asp102, and Ser195. These results provide a partial structural explanation for the low reactivity of "resting-state" factor D toward synthetic substrates.


There is a need for a method of preliminary estimation of bioconcentration factors in fish and soil sorption coefficients for chemicals. A data base was assembled for 170 compounds having average values for these two parameters and also average values for water solubility and n-octanol-water partition coefficients. Binary regression equations between the logarithms of these values gave correlation coefficients that were all significant below the 1 percent level. Using these equations, measured average values for any of the four parameters could be used to estimate average values for the unmeasured parameters. The 95 percent confidence limits for the calculated values were about ′ 1 to 3 orders of magnitude of the measured values. The relatively large variation of the actual from the predicted values was due both to the variation in the type of methodology used to make the measurements and also to the intrinsic variation in values attributable to the nature of the chemicals, the characteristics of the soils and fish, and the environmental conditions employed in the studies. Much less variation between actual and predicted values has been achieved when more uniform methodology is adopted for measuring these parameters. Despite the variability, the data are useful for early assessment of the potential for bioconcentration and mobility in the environment. Knowledge of the two factors is needed for hazard assessment in the environment. Bioconcentration factor values for Daphnia appear to be as valid for correlation purposes as those for fish.


Different people perceive sounds differently. Though a seemingly obvious insight at first, these differences lead to questions about how sounds are organised into patterns perceived to be music or noise. Drawing on fieldwork in Freetown, Sierra Leone's capital, this paper tackles this conundrum. I start with some acoustemological vignettes about Freetown's sonic environments, juxtaposing these explorations of 'sonic sensibilities' with reflections on how sounds become perceived as noise. Building upon works from anthropology, musicology, and cognitive science, I then turn to a closely related question, asking what makes sounds become music. In the last part, I show that, within Freetown's social and sonic relationships, a main defining feature determining whether or not sounds are labelled music is the ability to dance to them. Ultimately, the danceability of Freetown's music takes me to matters of loudness because, more often than not, dance music audiences favour extensive uses of volume.


Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water that is underneath the earth; Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them; for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the father upon the children onto the third and fourth generation of them that hate Me; and showing mercy unto all of them that love Me and keep my Commandments. (Exodus 20: 4-6)


Abstract Traditionally, design opportunities and directions are conceived based on expertise, intuition, or time-consuming user studies and marketing research at the fuzzy front end of the design process. Herein, we propose the use of the total technology space map (TSM) as a visual ideation aid for rapidly conceiving high-level design opportunities. The map is comprised of various technology domains positioned according to knowledge proximity, which is measured based on a large quantity of patent data. It provides a systematic picture of the total technology space to enable stimulated ideation beyond the designer's knowledge. Designers can browse the map and navigate various technologies to conceive new design opportunities that relate different technologies across the space. We demonstrate the process of using TSM as a rapid ideation aid and then analyze its applications in two experiments to show its effectiveness and limitations. Furthermore, we have developed a cloud-based system for computer-aided ideation, that is, InnoGPS, to integrate interactive map browsing for conceiving high-level design opportunities with domain-specific patent retrieval for stimulating concrete technical concepts, and to potentially embed machine-learning and artificial intelligence in the map-aided ideation process.


This study is concerned with how host Chinese staff (HCS) make sense of their intercultural experiences in a Sino-foreign cooperative university from a sensemaking perspective. Specifically, the study qualitatively explores HCS's perceptions of and their responses to cultural differences.
The empirical findings show that: 1) HCS construct cultural differences from three perspectives: personality traits, communication styles, and cultural values. 2) HCS's responses to cultural differences are identified as three types: fight-flight, acceptance, and intercultural sensemaking which encompasses three concurrent processes: learning, identity construction, and relationship building. In addition, the findings also show the hindrances of intercultural sensemaking from the perspective of HCS: lack of language proficiency, lower self-esteem, lack of similarity, lack of availability, and perceived communication difficulties. 3) HCS's engagement in intercultural sensemaking can lead to the development of intercultural competence in terms of awareness of the self and the other, communicating across culture, acquiring cultural knowledge, intercultural responsibility building, and positive attitudes.
A model of HCS's intercultural interaction is developed based on the empirical findings. It provides a holistic overview of HCS's intercultural interaction, and highlights the dynamic nature of sensemaking.
The findings give valuable insights and have practical implications for multicultural organisations and individuals working or interested in working in multicultural organisations, especially in the context of China.


The ENU-induced cobblestone (cbs) mouse mutant exhibits severe defects in fore- and midbrain development. Via genomic mapping, the causative mutation for the cbsphenotype has previously been located on chromosome 14 in the proximity of the gene Ift88 (Intraflagellar transport, 88 kDa). The Ift88 protein is involved in intraflagellar transport and is required for genesis and maintenance of primary and motile cilia. In order to refine the genetic interval further, we performed fine-mapping analysis of the cbs mutant. The candidate region of the cbs mutation is shown to be situated in a region of 4.14 Mb on chromosome 14, containing the Ift88 gene, and excluding dozens of genes present in the roughly-mapped interval. However, neither sequencing of the core Ift88 promoter region nor of two conserved intronic sequences within Ift88 revealed any mutations, indicating that the responsible mutation lies in a transcriptional regulatory sequence within or near the Ift88 gene. Finally, other potential candidate genes in this genetic interval have been identified using synteny analysis on six other vertebrate genomes. This analysis is thus compatible with the idea that the mutation in cbs is located on the Ift88 gene, but it also allows the possibility of other candidate genes that lie near Ift88 to be involved in the phenotype. Abbreviations: cbs, cobblestone; Ift88, Intraflagellar transport, 88 kDa; SNP, single nucleotide polymorphism; ENU, N-ethyl-N-nitroso-urea; EGFP, enhanced green fluorescent protein


This study examines the problem of how teachers establish desirable positions of authority in their classrooms. The interpretive analysis draws on insights from narrative theory in order to consider the following question: How does one teacher establish authority in her classroom through the means of narrative performance? I articulate a rhetorical framework for exploring this question, particularly elaborating the notion of ethos, defined as the rhetorical invention of one's identity for persuasive purposes. I also establish a performance perspective to the study of narrative in teaching. In analysis, I have systematically examined one artful teacher's corpus of narrative performances in a 6-week Holocaust unit. This article overviews the occurrence of narrative events throughout the unit, characterizes the frame space of narrative discourse in the classroom, elaborates the variance in emerging ethos through narrative performances, and identifies and interprets the different types of narrative events in the class. I find that narratives serve as a hybrid frame space, allowing this teacher to establish a dynamically negotiated, yet nonetheless authoritative, ethos that emerged in response to the content material and to students.


Amounting evidence has demonstrated that phenethyl isothiocyanate (PEITC) is a strong inducer of reactive oxygen species (ROS) and functions as a selective killer to various human cancer cells. However, it remains obscure whether PEITC has potential selective lethality to malignant glioma cells. Thus in this study, we performed multiple analysis such as MTT assay, Hoechst 33258 staining, flow cytometry, foci formation, RT-PCR, Western blot, and transfection to explore the selective lethality of PEITC to malignant glioma cells and the underlying mechanisms. We found that PEITC induced a selective apoptosis and suppressed tumorigenicity and migration of malignant glioma cells. Furthermore, we found PEITC significantly induced GSH depletion, ROS production, caspase-9 and caspase-3 activation, and miR-135a upregulation in malignant glioma cells but not in normal cells. Moreover, PEITC activated the miR-135a-mitochondria dependent apoptosis pathway as demonstrated by downregulation of STAT6, SMAD5 and Bcl-xl while upregulation of Bax expression and Cytochrome-C release in malignant glioma cell lines but not in the immortalized human normal glial HEB cells. Correspondingly, the above PEITC-induced activation of the ROSMiR-135a-Mitochondria dependent apoptosis pathways in malignant glioma was attenuated by pre-transfection with miR-135a inhibitor, pre-treatment with multidrug resistance-associated protein 1 (MRP1) inhibitor Sch B, or combination with glutathione (GSH). These results revealed that PEITC selectively induced apoptosis of malignant glioma cells through MRP1-mediated export of GSH to activate ROS-MiR-135a-Mitochondria dependent apoptosis pathway, suggesting a potential application of PEITC for treating glioma.


The Surface Realization Shared Task involves mapping Universal Dependency graphs to raw text, i.e. restoring word order and inflection from a graph of typed, directed dependencies between lemmas. Interpreted Regular Tree Grammars (IRTGs) encode the correspondence between generations in multiple algebras, and have previously been used for semantic parsing from raw text. Our system induces an IRTG for simultaneously building pairs of surface forms and UD graphs in the SRST training data, then prunes this grammar for each UD graph in the test data for efficient parsing and generation of the surface ordering of lemmas. For the inflection step we use a standard sequence-to-sequence model with a biLSTM encoder and an LSTM decoder with attention. Both components of our system are available on GitHub under an MIT license.


Coccidiosis is a disease of great economic importance for the emerging poultry industry of Bangladesh. Sulfonamides have been used extensively for treatment and control of chicken coccidiosis. However, there have been complaints regarding failure of Esb 3 ® (sodium sulfachloropyrazine monohydrate; Ciba-Geigy) in treating clinical coccidiosis. Therefore this study was undertaken to examine the degree of sulfonamide resistance of field coccidian isolates. Four groups of 12-day-old chicks were infected with 104 sporulated oocysts of four field coccidian isolates. Each group contains four subgroups containing 8 chicks in each subgroup, among which one subgroup remained as infected untreated control and another 3 subgroups were treated with 30% Esb 3 ® @ 1 , 2, or 2.5 g/l of drinking water for 3 consecutive days. The sulfonamide resistance was assessed on the basis of faecal oocyst counts and clinico-pathological findings. There was no significant difference ( p >0.05) in weight gain between untreated chicks and the chicks treated @ 1 and 2 g/l. However, a significantly higher ( p <0.05) weight gains were noted in subgroups treated with Esb 3 ® @ 2.5 g/l. Chicks received treated with 2 g/l Esb 3 ® received similar clinical coccidiosis and histopathological changes but little less oocyst counts as found in untreated infected control chicks. Chicks treated with 2 g/l Esb 3 ® did not reveal clinical coccidiosis and revealed no or very minimal oocyst counts during the treatment period. But on histopathology, arrested or stunted parasitic stages were found during the treatment period whereas flourish parasitic development with subacute-chronic ulcerative caecitis was evident following withdrawal of treatment. These findings suggest that the drug only cause an arrested parasitic development rather than killing the parasite. Therefore, an alternative to the sulfonamides needs to find out for treating and controlling chicken coccidiosis. Keywords: Chicken; Coccidiosis; Sulfonamide; Resistance DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3329/bjm.v25i1.4860 Bangladesh J Microbiol, Volume 25, Number 1, June 2008, pp 60-64


Background: Epidemiology studies suggest that high magnesium intake may decrease the risk of stroke by reducing hypertension, endothelial dysfunction and carotid artery thickness, but the results are inconsistent. We therefore examined the association between magnesium intake and stroke type in a cohort with repeated measurement of diet, long duration of follow up, and a large sample size. Methods: We prospectively followed 86,149 women in the Nurses' Health Study, aged 35 to 55 years, who were free of diagnosed cardiovascular disease and cancer at baseline in 1980. Data on dietary intake were collected with a semi-quantitative food frequency questionnaire at baseline in 1980, 1984, 1986 and then every 4 years, while data on stroke, stroke risk factors and potential confounders were collected at baseline and updated biennially. Strokes were classified according to the National Survey of Stroke criteria; and strokes for which medical records were not available were classified as probable/unknown. We calculated the hazard ratio (95% CI) of stroke by quintiles of magnesium intake, using multivariate Cox proportional hazard models, adjusting for potential confounders. Results: During 28 years of follow-up, 3237 total strokes (1664 ischemic, 544 hemorrhagic and 1029 probable/unknown) were documented. In multivariate analyses adjusting for age, total calories, smoking, body-mass index, parental history of heart disease, alcohol intake, physical activity, menopausal therapy, history of hypertension, hypercholesterolemia and diabetes at baseline, as well as use of multivitamin, aspirin, and thiazides, women in the highest quintile of magnesium intake had a relative risk (RR) of 0.85 (95% CI, 0.72 to 0.96; P for trend=0.03) for total stroke; 0.86 (95% CI, 0.72 to 1.01; P for trend=0.05) for ischemic stroke; and 0.85 (95% CI, 0.62 to 1.08; P for trend=0.37) for hemorrhagic stroke, compared with those in the lowest quintile. Further adjustment for potassium and calcium attenuated these associations; for total stroke the risk estimate was 0.90 (0.75 to 1.06; P for trend=0.38). Conclusions: Low magnesium intake may contribute to higher risk of stroke, but distinction from potential effects of potassium and calcium is difficult.


This paper introduces and evaluates BioLab, a tool for teaching biosignal processing. BioLab has been used in the biomedical engineering module that is given in the second semester of the fifth year of the electronic engineering degree at the University of Valencia, Spain. This module and its correspondent curricular pathway are also reviewed. BioLab allows the results obtained with digital processing techniques to be shown interactively in the theory classes, and it also provides support in laboratory sessions. The graphic interface of BioLab simplifies its learning and use and provides access to processing and visualization functions by means of menus. The tool is based on Matlab since the students have had previous experience in this environment. BioLab also supports diverse formats of data files, which facilitate access to real records and their conversion to usable formats. The modular structure of BioLab allows it to be easily extended to other educational materials that are related to signal processing and to research applications. An evaluation of BioLab has revealed that students found it useful for understanding the general concepts of digital processing and biosignal processing in particular. The students also found BioLab very easy to learn and use


In this paper, the method of data intensive computing is studied for large amounts of data in computed tomography (CT). An automatic workflow is built up to connect the tomography beamline of ANKA with the large scale data facility (LSDF), able to enhance the data storage and analysis efficiency. In this workflow, this paper focuses on the parallel computing of 3D computed tomography reconstruction. Different from the existing reconstruction system with filtered back-projection method, an algebraic reconstruction technique based on compressive sampling theory is presented to reconstruct the data from ultrafast computed tomography with fewer projections. Then the connected computing resources at the LSDF are used to implement the 3D CT reconstruction by distributing the whole job into multiple tasks executed in parallel. Promising reconstruction images and high computing performance are reported. For the 3D X-ray CT reconstruction, less than six minutes are actually required. LSDF is not only able to organize data efficiently, but also can provide reconstructed results to users in nearly instantaneous time. After integration into the workflow, this data intensive computing method will largely improve the data processing for ultrafast computed tomography at ANKA.


Plasmodesmata are cytoplasmic channels crossing plant cell walls allowing cell-to-cell transport of macromolecules. Plasmodesmata (PD) have critical functions in plant growth and development, allowing the transport of nutrients, signaling molecules, and developmentally important macromolecules such as transcription factors and RNA. The ability of PD to transport large molecules is tightly regulated throughout plant growth and development and in response to changing conditions. Despite extensive research, the regulation of PD transport remains poorly understood. The Arabidopsis thaliana embryo lethal mutant increased size exclusion limit 1 (ise1) was characterized. ise1 embryos exhibit increased PD mediated transport of fluorescent tracers and have a higher frequency of branched and twinned PD than wild type embryos. ISE1 encodes a plant-specific DEAD-box RNA helicase that localizes specifically to mitochondria. Mitochondrial metabolism is severely compromised in ise1 mutant embryos as their mitochondrial proton gradient is disrupted and reactive oxygen species (ROS) production is increased. Deep sequencing of mitochondrial RNA from ise1 suspension cells reveals that mitochondrial intron RNA is more abundant in ise1. Northern analysis confirms that ISE1 functions in the processing of mitochondrial intron RNA. Recent studies suggest that intercellular transport via PD is regulated by cellular redox state. However increased production of ROS has been associated with both increased and decreased intercellular transport via PD. Here we show that PD transport is positively regulated by ROS production in mitochondria following treatment with salicyhydroxamic acid and negatively regulated by ROS production in chloroplasts following treatment with paraquat. Additionally, silencing of two genes, ISE1 and ISE2, that both increase transport via PD, increases ROS production in mitochondria and decreases ROS production by chloroplasts respectively. The data together support a consistent model where PD transport is positively regulated by oxidation of the mitochondrial redox state and negatively regulated by oxidation of the chloroplast redox state.


Purpose: There is evidence from some studies that support an association between obesity in adults and higher intraocular pressure (IOP). However, this association has not been completely studied in children. Our aim is to evaluate the association between child body mass index (BMI) and IOP. Methods: Ninety-six children attending the Instituto de Medicina Integral Prof. Fer nando Figueira (IMIP) in Brazil were studied. Thirty-three were overweight/ obese with a mean BMI of 29.7 ± 5.2 and 63 with a mean BMI of 20.8 ± 3.3. IOP was measured using the Goldmann applanation tonometer and was corrected for corneal thickness. The coefficient of correlation between BMI and IOP was calculated. Results: There was no significant difference in the IOP of children with or without overweight/obesity. The mean IOP was 13.5 and 13.0 mmHg for the right eye and 13.1 and 12.9 mmHg for left eye, respectively (p=0.38 and p=0.71). The results remained the same after correction by pachymetry; 13.0 and 13.1 mmHg for the right eye and 12.4 and 12.9 mmHg for the left eye, respectively (p=0.88 and p=0.41). The coefficient of correlation between BMI and IOP was 0.070 (p=0.496). Conclusion: These results do not show a correlation between body mass index and IOP in children. Further studies are warranted to clarify the association between BMI and IOP in children.


Gift-giving customs are ubiquitous in social, political, and business life. Legal regulation and industry guidelines for gifts are often based on the assumption that large gifts potentially influence behavior and create conflicts of interest, but small gifts do not. However, scientific evidence on the impact of small gifts on business relationships is scarce. We conducted a natural field experiment in collaboration with sales agents of a multinational consumer products company to study the influence of small gifts on the outcome of business negotiations. We find that small gifts matter. On average, sales representatives generate more than twice as much revenue when they distribute a small gift at the onset of their negotiations. However, we also find that small gifts tend to be counterproductive when purchasing and sales agents meet for the first time, suggesting that the nature of the business relationship crucially affects the profitability of gifts. This paper was accepted by John List, behavioral economics.


Some new data on reinnervation of organs and vessels by means of transplantation of vegetative ganglia and sewing of neural branches are presented. When transplanting the cranial cervical ganglion to a muscle, and the caudal mesenteric ganglion to the urinary bladder wall, some neurocytes in the periphery of the ganglia are preserved; simultaneously, massive outgrowth of neural fibres occurs in the area of transplantation. These facts are considered as formation of a new local innervation center of the organ "recipient". The central part of the dog hypogastric nerve is sewed to the renal artery, in other experiments it is sewed into the rectum wall. A massive regeration of neural fibres along the course of the renal artery and the appearance of a neural ganglion in the rectum wall are stated. The sewed hypogastric nerve grows thicker, especially under the conditions of increased functioning of the organ "recipient". In a number of experiments, the large otic nerve is sewed to the common carotid artery. The development of a young connective tissue growing into the adventitia of the vessel is noted. Numerous regenerating neural fibres surrounding the vessel are noted in this tissue. Thus, a possibility of creating new or supplementary innervating connections of internal organs and vessels by means of sewing to them sensitive nerves or vegetative ganglia is morphologically substantiated.


This chapter analyzes and considers new business strategies in the area of ICT, where competition is intense, in regard to mechanisms for companies to achieve ongoing change as a means of realizing corporate innovation. As a case study, the chapter takes a look at Japan's Softbank, which in recent years acquired Sprint Mobile, a major U.S. carrier, to become the largest mobile communications carrier in the world. When the only vital element for achieving ongoing corporate innovation is the demonstration of top-down leadership as centralized leadership through the presence of certain charismatic leaders or a management team, it will be difficult for a company to achieve ongoing strategic innovation. The presence of not only leaders, managers, and staff who have centralized leadership to assist and foster the development of autonomous, distributed knowledge integration (creation) activities that occur locally in every department within a company, but also leaders, managers, and staff who apply dialectical thinking to various contexts and who promote creative knowledge integration (creation) activities locally through distributed leadership is essential. This chapter analyzes and contemplates mechanisms for achieving corporate innovation through the implementation of dialectical leadership where practitioners at every management layer dynamically differentiate between centralized leadership and distributed leadership or allow for both forms of leadership to coexist to respond to changes in the environment through holistic leadership.


We solve the time-dependent Schrödinger equation in three dimensions for H+2 in a one-cycle laser pulse of moderate intensity. We consider fixed nuclear positions and Coulomb electron-nuclear interaction potentials. We analyze the field-induced electron interference and diffraction patterns. To extract the ionization dynamics we subtract the excitations to low-lying bound states explicitly. We follow the time evolution of a well-defined wave packet that is formed near the first peak of the laser field. We observe the fragmentation of the wave packet due to molecular focusing. We show how to retrieve a diffraction molecular image by taking the ratio of the momentum distributions in the two lateral directions. The positions of the diffraction peaks are well described by the classical double slit diffraction rule.


The purpose of this article is to look at how information criteria, such as AIC and BIC, relate to the g%SD fit criterion derived in Waddell et al. (2007, 2010a). The g%SD criterion measures the fit of data to model based on a normalized weighted root mean square percentage deviation between the observed data and model estimates of the data, with g%SD = 0 being a perfectly fitting model. However, this criterion may not be adjusting for the number of parameters in the model comprehensively. Thus, its relationship to more traditional measures for maximizing useful information in a model, including AIC and BIC, are examined. This results in an extended set of fit criteria including g%AIC and g%BIC. Further, a broader range of asymptotically most powerful fit criteria of the power divergence family, which includes maximum likelihood (or minimum G^2) and minimum X^2 modeling as special cases, are used to replace the sum of squares fit criterion within the g%SD criterion. Results are illustrated with a set of genetic distances looking particularly at a range of Jewish populations, plus a genomic data set that looks at how Neanderthals and Denisovans are related to each other and modern humans. Evidence that Homo erectus may have left a significant fraction of its genome within the Denisovan is shown to persist with the new modeling criteria.


This study examined the impacts of the e-wallet fertilizer subsidy scheme on quantity of fertilizer use, crop output and yield in Nigeria. The study made use of the Nigeria General Household Survey (GHS)-Panel Datasets of 2010/2011 and 2012/2013 which contain 5,000 farming households in each of the panel. We applied relevant evaluation techniques to analyse the data. The results of the impact analysis demonstrate that the scheme has generally increased the yield, crop output and quantity of fertilizer purchase of the participating farmers by 38%, 47%, and 16%, respectively. The study concludes that increased productivity, which the scheme engenders, can help to reduce food insecurity in Nigeria. Provision of rural infrastructure, such as good road network, accessibility to mobile phones, radio, etc., will increase accessibility of the small-scale farmers to the scheme or any other similar agricultural schemes in Nigeria.


It is widely recognized that writing solid specifications for design interfaces is critical in this day of complex, multi-module hardware designs. However, many still resort to natural languages such as English to document interface protocols such as those of busses and IP (intellectual property) cores. Consequently, these protocols are often buggy and are frequently mis-communicated due to the inherent ambiguity of natural language specifications. Formal specifications, with precisely defined symbols and semantics, will resolve many of these problems, but in practice, they are seldom written. They are usually perceived as too difficult to develop and not very valuable beyond their role as documents.
A two-pronged approach to this problem will be presented. First, the thesis introduces a methodology that facilitates formal specification development for commonly used interface protocols. The popular PCI bus protocol and the Intel Itanium bus protocol (preliminary version) have been successfully specified with this method. Furthermore, the methodology's debugging techniques have uncovered previously unreported bugs and issues with these protocols.
Second, the thesis describes how formal specifications can be used to automate many procedures that are now done manually. For example, to verify a design using simulation, test inputs and checking properties must first be written, and this process require considerable expertise and effort. However, if there is a formal specification, the test inputs and the checking properties can be generated automatically from it. This technique was used to simulate and verify the I/O component from the Stanford FLASH project whereby new bugs were found in the design and manual work was kept to a minimum.


Phylogenetic reconstruction using concatenated loci ("phylogenomics" or "supermatrix phylogeny") is a powerful tool for solving evolutionary splits that are poorly resolved in single gene/protein trees (SGTs). However, recent phylogenomic attempts to resolve the eukaryote root have yielded conflicting results, along with claims of various artefacts hidden in the data. We have investigated these conflicts using two new methods for assessing phylogenetic conflict. ConJak uses whole marker (gene or protein) jackknifing to assess deviation from a central mean for each individual sequence, while ConWin uses a sliding window to screen for incongruent protein fragments (mosaics). Both methods allow selective masking of individual sequences or sequence fragments in order to minimize missing data, an important consideration for resolving deep splits with limited data. Analyses focused on a set of 76 eukaryotic proteins of bacterial-ancestry previously used in various combinations to assess the branching order among the three major divisions of eukaryotes: Amorphea (mainly animals, fungi and Amoebozoa), Diaphoretickes (most other well-known eukaryotes and nearly all algae) and Excavata, represented here by Discoba (Jakobida, Heterolobosea, and Euglenozoa). ConJak analyses found strong outliers to be concentrated in under-sampled lineages, while ConWin analyses of Discoba, the most under-sampled of the major lineages, detected potentially incongruent fragments scattered throughout. Phylogenetic analyses of the full data using an LG-gamma model support a Discoba sister scenario (neozoan-excavate root), which rises to 99-100% bootstrap support with data masked according to either protocol. However, analyses with two site-specific (CAT) mixture models yielded widely inconsistent results and a striking sensitivity to missing data. The neozoan-excavate root places Amorphea and Diaphoretickes as more closely related to each other than either is to Discoba, a fundamental relationship that should remain unaffected by additional taxa.


Professionalism is an ideal defined as the norms or values that orient the work of an occupation. In practice, research derived from country settings in the Global North shows how the ideal of professionalism competes with market and bureaucratic priorities. Less is known about how professionalism is nurtured or subjugated to market and bureaucratic institutions in postcolonial contexts in the Global South. This paper takes up the study of factors that promote or constrain professionalism in one postcolonial setting by contrasting South African social worker professionalism during and after apartheid. In the wake of calls for international research that is historically-grounded and sensitive to local context, data drawn from archival research and ethnographic fieldwork finds that social workers are prevented from asserting their professional values as a unified profession due to enduring race divisions in the profession. Another legacy of apartheid is the profession9s dependency on the state for funding social worker salaries, which constrains social workers ability to assert professional values independent of the state9s agenda. Finally, the organizational context employing social workers creates uneven opportunities for social workers to assert their professional values through policy advocacy.


In this letter, a multi-objective optimization problem (MOOP) is proposed for maximizing the achievable finite blocklength (FBL) rate while minimizing the utilized channel blocklengths (CBLs) in a reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-assisted short packet communication system. The formulated MOOP has two objective functions namely maximizing the total FBL rate with a target error probability, and minimizing the total utilized CBLs which is directly proportional to the transmission duration. The considered MOOP variables are the base station (BS) transmit power, number of CBLs, and passive beamforming at the RIS. Since the proposed non-convex problem is intractable to solve, the Tchebyshev method is invoked to transform it into a single-objective OP, then the alternating optimization (AO) technique is employed to iteratively obtain optimized parameters in three main sub-problems. The numerical results show a fundamental trade-off between maximizing the achievable rate in the FBL regime and reducing the transmission duration. Also, the applicability of RIS technology is emphasized in reducing the utilized CBLs while increasing the achievable rate significantly.


Next-generation, multi-core Internet of Things (IoT) processors use advanced technology nodes that have increased reliability issues such as Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI). Run-time feedback reliability mechanisms used on current multi-core processors incur too much area and power overhead leading to limited design space for IoT applications. In the typical ASIC design flow, switching activity files are used in order to model the reliability-driven performance loss. However, for multi-core ASIC design, the typical switching activity files lack multi-threaded software workload information thus lacking representation of modern workloads. The exact switching activity for a multi-core design can be established using a logic simulator, which captures the scheduling and execution order of multi-threaded workloads but suffer from long run times when dealing with real workloads. This paper proposes a method to obtain multi-threaded switching activity signatures in a short period of time using a performance (gem5) and a logic simulator (VCS) for IoT applications. These switching activity files are compiled into a workload signature and through this work, maintain compatibility with design tools. This workload signature is used in the standard ASIC design flow for lifetime improvement by mitigating the reliability issues such as NBTI at design-time. Experiments are performed using real workloads on an OpenSPARC T1 core. The default-sized T1 core is improved to have a reliability increase of 4.1×, leading to a desired reliability time of 10 years.


PURPOSE
In order to identify specific genes that may play important roles in maintaining the specialized functions of lens epithelial and fiber cells, we have analyzed the global gene expression profiles of these two cell types in the human lens. This analysis will also reveal those genes that are exclusively expressed in the epithelial and cortical fiber cells and those genes that may play important roles in the differentiation of epithelial cells to mature fiber cells.

METHODS
Oligonucleotide microarray hybridization was used to analyze the expression profiles of 22,215 genes between adult (average age greater than 56 years) human lens epithelial and cortical fiber cells. The expression levels of selected genes were further compared by semi-quantitative RT-PCR and selected genes were functionally clustered into common categories using the EASE bioinformatics software package.

RESULTS
Analysis of three separate microarray hybridizations revealed 1,196 transcripts that exhibit increased expression and 1,278 transcripts that exhibit decreased expression at the 2 fold or greater level between lens epithelial cells and cortical fiber cells on all three of the arrays analyzed. Of these, 222 transcripts exhibited increased expression and 135 transcripts exhibited decreased expression by an average of 5 fold or greater levels on all three arrays. Semi-quantitative RT-PCR analysis of 21 randomly selected genes revealed identical expression patterns as those detected by microarray hybridization indicating that the microarray data are accurate. Functional clustering of the identified gene expression patterns using the EASE program revealed a wide variety of biological pathways that exhibited altered expression patterns between the two cell types including mRNA processing, cell adhesion, cell proliferation, translation, protein folding, oxidative phosphorylation, and apoptosis, among others.

CONCLUSIONS
These data reveal novel and previously identified gene expression differences between lens epithelial and cortical fiber cells. The gene expression differences indicate distinct pathways and functions important for the specialization of lens epithelial and fiber cells and provide insight into potential mechanisms important for lens cell differentiation.


Master students and junior researchers within the Information Systems (IS) field often struggle to frame their knowledge contributions when reporting their research. In this paper, we investigated this research question: what are the forms of knowledge contributions that can be targeted in information systems research? We analysed a selection of NOKOBIT papers that were written by junior researchers, with their previous masters or PhD supervisors as co-authors. As expected, we found that all papers followed the same script of identifying a research gap and trying to fill it. While the practical contributions often can be acknowledged, the theoretical contribution can be more difficult to identify. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, we suggest a taxonomy of various forms of knowledge contributions in Information Systems research. Second, we present contribution-focused guidelines for junior researchers. This study should be of interest to master students and junior researchers, as well as to their supervisors.


The number of reported new cancer cases is increasing every year. The probability of surviving cancer is high and is continually improving. The cancer treatment may induce ovarian or testicular failure by damaging ovarian follicles in females and spermatogonia in the males. Gonadal failure may affect all aspects of reproductive health, including pubertal development, hormone production, and sexual function in adult life. Therefore, the primary goal for cancer treatment is to ensure the highest possibility of cure and to maintain the reproductive health. The cancer patients should be provided with maximal chance to make an optimal decision without any significant impact and delay in cancer treatment. As a result of treatment innovations, the survival rates of young people have increased substantially; therefore, the need of fertility preservation has increased as well. The sperm cryopreservation and embryo cryopreservation have been standard methods of fertility preservation. Recently, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine has removed the experimental label from oocyte cryopreservation. However, other fertility preservation options including ovarian tissue and whole ovary cryopreservation and testicular tissue cryopreservation for pre-pubertal boys are still considered experimental. A coordinated approach by gynecologists, urologists, oncologists, pediatricians, surgeons, fertility specialists and counselors is required to make use of available fertility preservation options. Timely and complete information on the impact of cancer treatment on fertility and fertility preservation options should be presented to all patients when a cancer treatment is planned. The possibility of fertility preservation removes a huge concern and enables cancer patients to concentrate on their treatment and getting better. The purpose of this review is to present different options currently available to preserve fertility in men, women and adolescent children diagnosed with cancer and undergoing gonadotoxic therapy. All options are listed in two tables for quick reference. Most of the information is extracted from recent publications and presented in such a manner that it is valuable for cancer patients and professionals associated with fertility preservation.


Solid Freeform Fabrication is a family of manufacturing processes that create threedimensional objects by depositing material, layer-by-layer. Traditionally, this technology has been used to fabricate passive parts, but recently it has been used for producing active components such as batteries and soft-polymer actuators. In this paper we demonstrate the ability of this process to fabricate a complete, active electromechanical system. Using only SFF processes, we reproduced the 1844 Vail register a landmark in digital communications history. With the techniques developed in this research, a range of solenoid devices can be fabricated and embedded into freeform fabricated devices. This could enable the realization of novel and otherwise difficult to manufacture electromechanical designs.


This review addresses research methods with Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) people using adult social care and support in England. During the last decade there have been considerable changes in how ethnicity is understood. Among these are exciting developments in research sensitive to ethnicity and the further development of anti-racist policy, practice and outcomes in social care. The review summarises these developments and offers practical advice on applying their lessons. Material from other disciplines including health and other disciplines is also drawn on for methodological advances relevant to social care research. The review is designed to be useful not only for researchers who are new to social care (and health care in particular) and hoping to learn more about this important topic, but to seasoned researchers, social care practitioners and students as well.


IThe transport of cadmium ions through a supported liquid membrane containing triethanolamine (TEA) as mobile carrier has been studied. The effects of Cd(II) concentration, HCl in feed and carrier concentration in membrane has been studied. Cd(II) concentration increase in feed leads to an increase in flux from 2.1×10 -7 to 8.4×10 -7 mol-cm -2 -sec 1 within Cd(II) ions concentration range (2.7×10 -4 M-16.37×10 -4 M) at 2.0M HCl in the feed and 3.0M triethanolamine in the membrane. Increase in H + ion concentration from 0.5M to 3.0M results in an increase in Cd(II) ions flux but a decrease is observed beyond 2.0M HCl concentration in feed. Increase in carrier concentration in the liquid inside the membrane enhances the flux with its maxima at 3.0M carrier. Further increase in the concentration of TEA leads to a decrease in transport due increase in viscosity of membrane liquid. The optimum conditions for Cd(II) ions transport are, 2.0M HCl in feed, 3.0M TEA in membrane, 0.1M NaOH as strip solution. Similar transport characteristics have been observed for Cd-EDTA complexed anions across TEA-cyclohexanone based SLM, thus indicating a cadmium anion transport coupled with protons and chloride or EDTA co-ions. © 2008 Trade Science Inc. - INDIA


In this paper, we proposed a new general additive watermarking model based on the content of digital images, called as CBWM (Content Based Watermarking Model). It provides a common basis to study many existing watermarking algorithms that are based on unitary transforms and to evaluate their performance and characteristics. CBWM is designed to address two important issues of digital watermarking. One is the requirement of robustness. In order to improve robustness and security, the embedded watermark is designed to be orthogonal to the feature vector of the original image, which means that watermarking casting is image content dependent. The second issue is watermark detection. CBWM presents a statistical approach to watermark detection based on the Neymann Pearson criterion and describes a method for computing the probability of false alarm and missing rejection during watermark detection. In experimental tests, CBWM is applied to the popular discrete cosine transform and promising results are obtained.


Background and Purpose We compared the incidence and severity of paraplegia following thoracic aortic cross-clamping in dogs for two anesthetic regimens. Animals were randomly assigned to receive methohexital (group M; n=9) or isoflurane (group I; n=9). We expected a better neurological outcome in animals administered methohexital because of superior neuronal protection and greater spinal cord perfusion pressure (mean arterial pressure below the cross-clamp site minus mean cerebrospinal fluid pressure). Methods After surgical preparation and a 30-minute stabilization period, dogs in group M received 14 ± 6 mg kg−1 IV methohexital to induce an isoelectric electroencephalogram followed by a continuous infusion of methohexital at 20 mg kg−1 h−1. Dogs in group I received 1.4 ± 0.2% end-tidal isoflurane (1 minimum alveolar concentration). The thoracic aorta was then occluded 2.5 cm distal to the left subclavian artery for 30 minutes and then released. Hemodynamics and cerebrospinal fluid pressure were measured at (1) baseline, (2) 2 minutes after aortic cross-clamping, (3) 20 minutes after aortic cross-clamping, (4) 5 minutes after aortic unclamping, and (5) 30 minutes after resuscitation. At 24 hours a neurological assessment was performed. After the clinical assessment the dogs were killed and the spinal cord removed immediately for histopathologic study. Results There were no differences in nasopharyngeal temperature, Paco2, pH, or hemoglobin at any time between groups. With cross-clamping, the spinal cord perfusion pressure decreased precipitously. However, there was no difference in spinal cord perfusion pressure between groups at any time (P=.5555). The neurological outcome, assessed at 24 hours after thoracic aortic cross-clamping by a veterinarian unaware of the anesthetic protocol, was not different between groups (P >.5, two-tailed Mann-Whitney rank-sums test). When anesthetized with methohexital 5 of 9 dogs were paraplegic; with isoflurane 7 of 9 dogs were paraplegic. By Spearman's rank test, a strong inverse correlation between the Tarlov score and the ratio of dead to total lumbar anterior spinal cord neurons was seen (Spearman's correlation coefficient = −.8358; P=.0001) Conclusions We conclude that no advantage was offered by the choice of anesthesia to neurological outcome after 30 minutes of thoracic aortic cross-clamping in this canine model.


This paper presents a new control method to drive an array of wet Shape Memory Alloy actuators utilizing a Matrix Manifold and Valve system (MMV). The MMV architecture allows a vast DOF robotic system to be controlled using limited number of resources. Using biological inspiration, the robotic system contains a network of "blood vessels" transporting fluid to the various "muscle" actuators. In general, an array of N2wet actuators can be controlled by 2N+2 fluidic valves, resulting in a scalable architecture. This would allow robots to contain a vast number of actuators like the human body, and be controlled in a scalable manner. The initial prototype contains a 4x4 array of 16 actuators controlled by 10 solenoid valves, where 25% of the actuators can be activated at any one time. Since only a subset of the actuators can be activated at any time, various methods of scheduling the resources (i.e. valves) are investigated, as well as various ways to define the error or difference between the desired and actual states of the array. The fluidic impedance of the system is taken into account in order to optimize the control. Results of simulation show that new scheduler options and definitions of error improve the performance of the system by a factor of 10 when operating the array near its maximum capacity.


In this work, a fluorometric and colorimetric analysis of alkaline phosphatase (ALP) activity was developed based on nanozymes. The nanozymes were composed of nucleotides (ATP, ADP and AMP) coordinated with copper ions. All three kinds of nanozymes (ATP-Cu, ADP-Cu and AMP-Cu) exhibited polyphenol oxidase (PPO)-mimic activity by catalyzing a chromogenic reaction of 2,4-dichlorophenol (2,4-DP) and 4-aminoantipyrine (4-AP). However, there were obvious differences in the PPO-like activity and the fluorescence of the three nanozymes produced from the same concentration of nucleotides (keeping the concentration of Cu2+ unchanged at 5 mM). The catalytic activities of produced ADP-Cu and AMP-Cu were obviously higher than that of ATP-Cu at a certain nucleotide concentration of 3 mM. In addition, when ATP was hydrolyzed into ADP and AMP by ALP, more nanozymes were produced and the catalytic activity of the system was enhanced, which resulted in an obvious increase of the colorimetric signal. The signal intensity was proportional to ALP concentration in the range of 0-30 U L-1, and the detection limit for ALP was 0.3 U L-1 from the colorimetric detection. Moreover, the fluorescence intensity of the produced nanozymes was also proportional to the ALP concentration in the range of 1-30 U L-1 and the detection limit was 0.45 U L-1 from the fluorescence detection. A fluorometric and colorimetric sensing ALP method was thus established. The method showed a high selectivity for ALP activity compared with proteins, amino acids and other interference components. Furthermore, the proposed method was also used to detect ALP activity in human serum samples, which showed great potential for diagnostic and practical purposes.


Pavement surface temperature is an essential requirement for the winter maintenance decision-making processes when determining suitable deicers and optimal application rates for transportation facilities such as parking lots. Currently, there are very few services/methods available to directly measure the pavement surface temperature. One method, the Road Weather Information System (RWIS), has less utility for parking lot and sidewalk maintenance purposes due to the operational constraints and high cost of using the RWIS service. This paper presents the results of a two-year field study focused on developing parametric and non-parametric models to forecast pavement surface temperature in parking lots based on a rigorous investigation of its correlation with common meteorological variables. The models were developed using available metrological data alongside measured pavement temperatures obtained through field observations. This study also evaluates the effects of different types of pavement (asphalt, interlocking bricks, and portland cement concrete) on pavement surface temperature. Evaluation results show that the developed models are able to predict pavement surface temperatures in different winter weather conditions with acceptable accuracy.


For investment bankers working in the restructuring and turnaround arena, innovation is a key tool. Each deal calls for creative ways to get the job done. This article looks at some of the alternatives to traditional financing when closing a deal is not an easy thing to do. It covers the state of the "traditional" financing market in late 2002 and early 2003, explores the role of mezzanine debt as an available alternative for troubled middle-market companies, and offers a few examples of financing that illustrate the creative solutions investment bankers have actually employed to obtain the needed financing to keep their clients alive.


Colorectal cancer (CRC) is the fourth leading cause of mortality, world-wide. Gut bacterial dysbiosis being one of the major causes of CRC onset. Gut microbiota produced metabolites, e.g. folate and butyrate play crucial roles in cancer progression and treatment, and thus, need to be considered for effective CRC management. A potential cancer therapy, i.e., use of silver nanoparticles (AgNPs), imparts cytotoxic effects by inducing high intracellular reactive oxygen species (ROS) levels. However, the simultaneous interactions of AgNPs with gut microbiota to aid CRC treatment has not been reported thus far. Therefore, in this study, variation of intracellular ROS concentrations, in Enterococcus durans (E. durans), a representative gut microbe, was studied in the presence of low AgNP concentrations (25 ppm). Increases were observed in intracellular hydroxyl radical and extracellular folic acid concentrations by 48% and 52%, respectively, at the 9thhour of microbial growth. To gain a systems level understanding of ROS metabolism in E. durans, genome scale metabolic network reconstruction and modeling was adopted. In silico modeling reconfirmed the critical association between ROS and folate metabolism. Further, amino acids, energy metabolites, nucleotides, and butyrate were found to be important key players. Consequently, the anticancer effect of folic acid was experimentally studied on HCT116 (i.e., colon cancer cell line), wherein, its viability was reduced to 79% via folate present in the supernatants from AgNP treated E. durans cultures. Thus, we suggest that the inter-relationship between gut bacteria and AgNP-based cancer treatment can be used to design robust and effective cancer therapies.


Objective: To assess outcomes of women with uterine fibroids (UFs) and heavy menstrual bleeding (HMB) treated with 300 mg elagolix twice daily plus add-back therapy (E2 1 mg/NETA 0.5 mg once daily) or placebo who were not considered responders in pooled analysis of two phase 3, 6-month randomized clinical trials (Elaris UF-1 and UF-2). Methods: Responders were defined as women who met both primary end point bleeding criteria (<80 mL menstrual blood loss [MBL] during the final month and ≥50% reduction in MBL from baseline to the final month) and either completed the study or discontinued due to predefined reasons. Thus, women termed nonresponders who were analyzed in this study who met neither or one bleeding end point or met both criteria but prematurely discontinued treatment because of adverse events, perceived lack of efficacy, or required surgical or interventional treatment for UFs were analyzed in this study. This post hoc analysis assessed mean changes from baseline in MBL, as well as adverse events. Results: Among 367 women receiving elagolix with add-back with observed data, 89 (24%) were not considered responders. Within this subset, 17 (19%) women met both bleeding criteria but prematurely discontinued treatment for the reasons mentioned above, while 23 (26%) met one bleeding criterion and 49 (55%) met neither bleeding criteria, regardless of discontinuation status. Among all nonresponders, a numerical trend toward greater mean reductions in MBL was observed in those receiving elagolix with add-back, compared with placebo group nonresponders. No differences in adverse events were observed between responders and nonresponders. Conclusion: Forty of 89 (45%) women with HMB and UFs who were classified as nonresponders in the UF-1 or UF-2 trials may have had a clinically meaningful response to elagolix with add-back therapy because they met at least one of the objective bleeding criteria. Clinical Trial Registration: Clinicaltrials.gov, NCT02654054 and NCT02691494. (NEJM 2020; 382:328–340) DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1904351


Background China is highly relevant in today's economic environment and will be even more important in the upcoming years, since the Chinese economy, including its domestic consumer market, will keep growing. The country has changed from a merely manufacturing nation to a fast growing consumer market that offers promising marketing opportunities for Western companies. However, successful branding in China remains a challenge. In order to operate successfully, global companies need to position themselves strategically and adjust their marketing strategies to address this very diverse target market. This includes the branding of products. Since consumers' cultural backgrounds shape their perception of brands, applying brand names to the Chinese market becomes a challenging task for multinational companies. Purpose The purpose of this thesis is to explore different factors that are crucial for brand naming in China. The findings derived from a thorough literature review will be evaluated in front of empirical research and tested of their applicability to the practice of brand naming in China. Method A qualitative research approach has been chosen in which the findings of a profound theoretical study are crosschecked via semi- structured in-depth interviews with multiple experts that are currently working in the field of branding in China. Conclusuion This thesis concludes with stating different factors that have been confirmed and elaborated throughout the research. These factors are categorized in four different perspectives that have been established in the theoretical framework of this thesis: marketing, sociocultural, linguistics and legal. Moreover, the authors conclude that the four different perspectives cannot be seen independently and emphasize their interrelation. Thus, a model is provided that incorporates the crucial factors for brand naming in China and illustrates their interrelation. The authors emphasize that the results cannot be seen as conclusive, however, they provide valuable insights and a sound foundation for further research.


A single-feed dual-frequency dual-sense circularly-polarized (CP) printed slot antenna etched on a single substrate is proposed. This antenna is composed of an annular slot and a cross slot, which produce two different frequency bands. The lower band and the upper band are controlled by the annular slot and the cross slot respectively. By introducing asymmetry on both annular slot and cross slot, CP radiation at the two frequencies can be obtained. The method of impedance matching has been discussed in detail. The key parameters of the design are investigated to show how to obtain dual-frequency and dual circular polarization. Two antenna prototypes are fabricated and measured, experimental results show that good CP radiation performances are obtained at both frequencies.


We introduce Probabilistic Resilient Multicast (PRM): a multicast data recovery scheme that improves data delivery ratios while maintaining low end-to-end latencies. PRM has both a proactive and a reactive components; in this paper we describe how PRM can be used to improve the performance of application-layer multicast protocols especially when there are high packet losses and host failures. Through detailed analysis in this paper, we show that this loss recovery technique has efficient scaling properties-the overheads at each overlay node asymptotically decrease to zero with increasing group sizes. As a detailed case study, we show how PRM can be applied to the NICE application-layer multicast protocol. We present detailed simulations of the PRM-enhanced NICE protocol for 10 000 node Internet-like topologies. Simulations show that PRM achieves a high delivery ratio (>97%) with a low latency bound (600 ms) for environments with high end-to-end network losses (1%-5%) and high topology change rates (5 changes per second) while incurring very low overheads (<5%).


Effects of a training program utilized to teach how to conduct functional analysis process to teachers of children with developmental disabilities was examined. Furthermore, teachers' opinions regarding this process were investigated. A multiple probe design across subjects with probe conditions was used. Teacher training was in two phases. In the first phase, teachers were given information about functional analysis methods. Then, in the second phase, teachers were asked to implement the functional analysis process with their students who had problem behaviors. Results showed that the training program was effective in teaching special education teachers how to conduct a functional analysis process. However, teachers needed intensive consultation about how to conduct the functional analysis process during the study. Responses of teachers to Social Validity Form revealed that opinions concerning functional analysis changed positively after training.


This is a study of how electoral Manifestos have evolved in the 20th century, with a special case study of how Manifesto undertakings in one policy area, that of Reform of the House of Lords, have been delivered by a party when in government. An examination of the Manifestos issued by the Labour, Conservative and Liberal parties for the 27 elections between 1900 and 2001 shows a substantial increase in size on various dimensions and a certain convergence between the parties in their approach to presentational characteristics. A statistical analysis of the overall set of data collected could not confirm that the variations observed were not due to chance. Examination of the relationship between pledges in Manifestos and action taken to reform the House of Lords shows that these pledges were neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for reform to take place. Several reforms have been introduced which had not been pledged in electoral Manifestos whilst several pledges put forward have not been followed up. The study is making several modest contributions to the literature and is highlighting a few areas where further research could be undertaken.


This paper presents the power quality evaluation of a 1.2-MW tidal power plant. The results show that the unit works well and that the power quality impact is moderate to low and for future units which most likely will have more turbines, the power quality impact will be very low. The wind turbine power quality standard IEC 61400-21 was used in this investigation, and was adequate; however, regarding the connecting transients, there could be a need for a specific standard. It is found that the power level is well controlled at higher water speeds; the maximum 10-min power is found to be 1.21 MW. The maximum 2-s value is found to be 1.46 MW and the maximum 60-s value is found to be 1.30 MW. The reactive power exchange with the grid is negligible; at full load, the power factor is 0.99. The flicker coefficient is between 1 and 5, depending on the grid impedance angle. Finally, it can be said that the maximum total harmonic distortion (THD) for the voltages is found to be 1.2% and for the current 0.65% during operation with the complete power plant.


Synechococcus is a major contributor to the primary production in tropic and subtropical oceans worldwide. Responses of this picophytoplankton to changing light and CO2 levels is of general concern to understand its ecophysiology in the context of ocean global changes. We grew Synechococcus sp. (WH7803), originally isolated from subtropic North Atlantic Ocean, under different PAR levels for about 15 generations and examined its growth, photochemical performance and the response of these parameters to elevated CO2 (1,000 μatm). The specific growth rate increased from 6 μmol m–2 s–1 to reach a maximum (0.547 ± 0.026) at 25 μmol m–2 s–1, and then became inhibited at PAR levels over 50 μmol m–2 s–1, with light use efficiency (α) and photoinhibition coefficient (β) being 0.093 and 0.002, respectively. When the cells were grown at ambient and elevated CO2 concentration (400 vs. 1,000 μatm), the high-CO2 grown cells showed significantly enhanced rates of electron transport and quantum yield as well as significant increase in specific growth rate at the limiting and inhibiting PAR levels. While the electron transport rate significantly increased at the elevated CO2 concentration under all tested light levels, the specific growth did not exhibit significant changes under the optimal growth light condition. Our results indicate that Synechococcus WH7803 grew faster under the ocean acidification (OA) treatment induced by CO2 enrichment only under limiting and inhibiting light levels, indicating the interactive effects and implying that the picophytoplankton respond differentially at different depths while exposing changing light conditions.


Stanich, K., Cliff, M. A., Hampson, C. R. and Toivonen, P. M. A. 2014. Shelf-life and sensory assessments reveal the effects of storage treatments with 1-methylcyclopropene on new and established apples. Can. J. Plant Sci. 94: 1427-1439. This research used shelf-life and sensory assessments to explore the influence of 1-methylcyclopropene (1-MCP) on four apples (Aurora, Fuji, Nicola™, Salish™). Maturity (internal ethylene concentration, starch clearing index), quality (soluble solids, titratable acidity, firmness) and sensory determinations were conducted on fruit that had undergone air (AIR) or controlled atmosphere (CA) storage treatments with and without 1-MCP. Trained panelists evaluated apples, along with industry standards (Gala, McIntosh and either Fuji or Ambrosia), for eight attributes (crispness, hardness, juiciness, skin toughness, sweetness, tartness, sweet-tart balance and flavour). Data were analyzed using analysis of variance and principal component analyses (PCA) to compare the treatment and cultivar responses. Cultivars responded very differently to CA and 1-MCP. Fruit from AIR with 1-MCP were very similar to CA fruit without 1-MCP; further improvements were not observed when 1-MCP was applied to CA fruit. PCA bi-plots of the shelf-life and sensory assessments revealed that treated Salish™ fruits were more similar to one another than to cultivars from other treatments. This work successfully documented the unique changes associated with the use of 1-MCP on new and established apple cultivars. It will assist industry in applying appropriate storage practices for new and established apple cultivars.


result is an extraordinarily moving book precisely because facts are allowed to speak for themselves. Since the book is based on a series of lectures that Professor Bauer, the head of the Institute of Contemporary Jewry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, gave at an American university, it begins with a chapter on 'The Holocaust and American Jewry'. In it he shows how American Jews were incapable of turning the information they did have about the fate of their brethren in Europe into real knowledge and into a programme of purposeful action. The result has been to this very day, really mystification, which is the theme of the second chapter: both Jews and Gentiles have refused until now to face the truth, because the truth is too painful. Bauer offers a plethora of examples that substantiate his case. The third section of the book describes in some detail the complex relationship between Jew and Gentile in all the countries concerned. The author insists that it would be wrong to generalize, since motivations and actions differed from country to country. The Christian reader is given much to think about the attitude of his own church, as well as that of his country, but will be heartened by the conclusion that 'in the darkness of Gentile attitude to Jews there are many bright lights'. Hopefully, he will also share this reviewer's opinion that, in the multitude of scholarly books on the Holocaust, this one shines as


The autonomous vehicle ("AV") industry faces the following ethical question: "How do we know when our AV technology is safe enough to deploy at scale?" The search for an answer to this question is the "AV Problem." This essay examines that question through the lens of the July 15, 2021 filing on Form S-4 with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the going public transaction for Aurora Inventions, Inc.

The filing reveals that successful implementation of Aurora's business plan in the long term depends on the truth of the following proposition: A vehicle controlled by a machine driver is safer than a vehicle controlled by a human driver (the "Safety Proposition").

In a material omission for which securities law liability may attach, the S-4 fails to state Aurora's position on deployment: will Aurora delay deployment until such time as it believes the Safety Proposition is true to a reasonable certainty or will it deploy at scale earlier in the hope that increased current losses will be offset by anticipated future safety gains?

The Safety Proposition is a statement about physical probability which is either true or false. For success, AV companies need the public to believe the Safety Proposition, yet belief is not the same as truth. The difference between truth and belief creates tension in the S-4 because the filing both fosters a belief in the Safety Proposition while at the same time making clear there is insufficient evidence to support the truth of the Safety Proposition.

A moral hazard results when financial pressures push for early deployment of AV systems before evidence shows that the Safety Proposition is true to a reasonable certainty. This problem is analyzed by comparison with the famous trolley problem in ethics and consideration of corporate governance techniques which an AV company might use to ensure the integrity of its decision process for deployment. The AV industry works to promote belief in the safety proposition in the hope that the public will accept that AV technology has benefits, thus avoiding the need to confront the truth of the Safety Proposition directly. This hinders a meaningful public debate about the merits and timing of deployment of AV technology, raising the question of whether there is a place for meaningful government regulation.


: There are well-established methods for working in interdisciplinary natural resource management settings, but place-based cultural differences are often poorly integrated into interdisciplinary projects. Intercultural adequacy is necessary to ensure that water management strategies are acceptable within the local contexts of water users. In this study we followed four cohorts of graduate students from Canada, Chile, Cuba, and the United States that participated in an international graduate-level water resource management course hosted at the Universidad de Concepción in Chile. The North American students participated in post-experience surveys and interviews to assess changes in their interdisciplinary and intercultural comfort levels. The interviews and survey identified factors that enhanced or detracted from their progress towards integrating disciplinary and cultural differences into their work. Though course material promoted interdisciplinary collaborations across various disciplinary cultures, participants noted that traditional methods of integrating did not adequately bridge differences in place-based cultural worldviews. We propose a framework developed during the experience to integrate place-based cultural differences into all phases of the interdisciplinary research and natural resource management processes. of comfort working in an interdisciplinary (on the x-axis), intercultural (on the y-axis) setting.


We study an abstract optimal auction problem for selecting a subset of self-interested agents to whom to provide a service. A feasibility constraint governs which subsets can be simultaneously served; however, the mechanism may additionally choose to bundle unconstrained attributes such as payments or add-ons with the service. An agent's preference over service and attributes is given by her private type and may be multi-dimensional and non-linear. A single-agent problem is to optimizes a menu to offer an agent subject to constraints on the probabilities with which each of the agent's types is served. We give computationally tractable reductions from multi-agent auction problems to these single-agent problems. Our discussion focuses on maximizing revenue, but our results can be applied to other objectives (e.g., welfare).
 From each agent's perspective, any multi-agent mechanism and distribution on other agent types induces an interim allocation rule, i.e., a probability that the agent will be served as a function of the type she reports. The resulting profile of interim allocation rules (one for each agent) is feasible in the sense that there is a mechanism that induces it. An optimal mechanism can be solved for by inverting this process. Solve the single-agent problem of finding the optimal way to serve an agent subject to an interim allocation rule as a constraint (taking into account the agent's incentives). Optimize over interim feasible allocation profiles, i.e., ones that are induced by the type distribution and some mechanism, the cumulative revenue of the single-agent problems for the interim allocation profile. Find the mechanism that induces the optimal interim feasible allocation profile in the previous step.
 For a large class of auction problems and multi-dimensional and non-linear preferences each of the above steps is computationally tractable. We observe that the single-agent problems for (multi-dimensional) unit-demand and budgeted preferences can be solved in polynomial time in the size of the agent's type space via a simple linear program. For feasibility constraints induced by single-item auctions interim feasibility was characterized by Border (1991); we show that interim feasible allocation rules can be optimized over and implemented via a linear program that has quadratic complexity in the sum of the sizes of the individual agents' type spaces. We generalize Border's characterization to auctions where feasible outcomes are the independent sets of a matroid; here the characterization implies that the polytope of interim feasible allocation rules is a polymatroid. This connection implies that a concave objective, such as the revenue from the single-agent problems, can be maximized over the interim feasibility constraint in polynomial time. The resulting optimal mechanism can be viewed as a randomization over the vertices of the polymatroid which correspond to simple greedy mechanisms: given an ordering on a subset all agent types, serve the agents in this order subject to feasibility.
 Related work: Cai, Daskalakis, and Weinberg (2012) solve (independently) the single-item interim feasibility problem and use this solution to give tractable revenue-optimal multi-item auctions for agents with linear utilities.


An i-vector is a low-dimensional fixed-length representation of a variable-length speech utterance, and is defined as the posterior mean of a latent variable conditioned on the observed feature sequence of an utterance. The assumption is that the prior for the latent variable is non-informative, since for homogeneous datasets there is no gain in generality in using an informative prior. This work shows that extracting i-vectors for a heterogeneous dataset, containing speech samples recorded from multiple sources, using informative priors instead is applicable, and leads to favorable results. Tests carried out on the NIST 2008 and 2010 Speaker Recognition Evaluation (SRE) dataset show that our proposed method beats three baselines: For the short2-short3 core-task in SRE'08, for the female and male cases, five and six respectively, out of eight common conditions were beaten, and for the core-core task in SRE'10, for both genders, five out of nine common conditions were beaten.


With increasing interest from commercial players in developing insurance markets to meet the needs of low-income people, efforts to find sustainable products have expanded rapidly yet remain elusive. This is particularly true in the domain of health insurance, where the general challenges of offering voluntary private health insurance are often exacerbated by poor underlying health services and a lack of public health programs. In an effort to identify new opportunities, we analyze a rich data set from Pakistan to understand the influence of pregnancy on adverse selection and overall profitability of a micro health insurance product that is similar in design to others micro insurance products. Our results indicate that pregnancy-related benefits account for a significant source of claim counts and loss payments. We also find evidence of extensive adverse selection related to pregnancy claims, indicating significant take up by those who know they are pregnant prior to enrollment. Furthermore, households with only pregnancy claims tend to renew at lower rates than do households with other acute or chronic claims. We estimate that excluding coverage for pregnancy from market-based products, supplemented by government provision of maternity care may offer an avenue towards sustainability.


A total of 1,040 pigs (half barrows and half gilts) was used in a 42-day experiment conducted in a commercial research facility to determine the influence of graded levels of added fat on growth performance, feed cost per pound of gain and margin over feed of growing-finishing pigs. The four dietary treatments were based on level of added dietary fat (0, 2, 4, or 6%), with the diets fed for a six-week period from 158 to 232 lb. Adding fat to the diet for pigs weighing 158 to 232 lb decreased ADFI, improved feed efficiency, increased cost per pound of gain and had no effect on income over feed cost. The economics of whether fat should be added to the growing finishing pig diet will depend on the cost of corn, soybean meal and fat. The results of this experiment demonstrate that, with current prices, the lowest cost per pound of gain was obtained when no fat was added to the diet for pigs from 158 to 232 lb. But because of the numerically greater ADG income over feed cost (IOFC) was numerically similar when fat was added to the diet.


In this paper, a partially prism-gridded finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method is proposed for the analysis of practical microwave and millimeter-wave planar circuits. The method is featured by hybridizing the flexible prism-based finite-element method to handle the region near the curved metallization boundary and the efficient rectangular-gridded FDTD method for most of the regular region. It can be used to deal with shielded or unshielded planar components such as patch antennas, filters, resonators, couplers, dividers, vias, and various transitions between planar transmission lines. Although only representative structures, e.g., grounded via, through hole via, and coplanar waveguide to coplanar stripline transition, are analyzed in this paper, the underlined formulation is applicable to layered structures with arbitrary curved boundary in the transverse direction. The accuracy of this method is verified by comparing the calculated results with those by other methods. Also, by the analysis of computational complexity, the present method is shown to be as efficient as the conventional FDTD method, with negligible overhead in memory and computation time for handling the curved boundary.


Abstract We report the case of a young man who presented with right lower quadrant pain, while being treated for acute lymphatic leukaemia. Clinical findings were suggestive of appendicitis. Computed tomography scan of the abdomen was done and showed the presence of a neutropenic enterocolitis or typhlitis.


The modification process in corrections proceedingsAccording to the Corrections Code, execution of penalty or penal measure is subject to fulfillment of corrective and preventive goals. Since the 18th century, progressive tendencies regarding imprisonment indicated the need to corrective influence — motivating the perpetrator to exhibit socially-acceptable behavior in order to prevent his relapse into crime. The system of execution of deprivation of liberty imprisonment is called a system of slow progression, which means that the penalty can be modifi ed in case of progress in social adaptation or lack of such. The modification process is related to many procedures during execution of penalty. Based on diverse character of such procedures, one can classify them as incidental or autonomous, the latter leading to modification of penalty, e.g. external or internal, permanent, episodic, conditional or unconditional and others, all of which optimize the possibility of fulfillment of the primary goal of the penalty, that is preventing of relapse into crime.