In this study, we investigated the effect of electron donor structures on the shelf life of three-component initiator systems which also included methylene blue (MB) as a photosensitizer and diphenyl iodonium salt (DPI) as an electron acceptor. For this research, N-phenylglycine (NPG), N-methyldiethanolamine (MDEA), N,N-diisopropyl-3-pentylamine (DIPA), and 1,4-diazabicyclo[2.2.2]octane (DABCO) were used as electron donors, with different of proton transfer efficiencies and radical/cation persistence. To aid characterization of the shelf-life or dark storage stability of three-component initiator systems, the relative polymerization kinetic profile of each freshly prepared initiator system was first obtained using photo-DSC. The standardized photopolymerization reactions were repeated after various dark storage intervals. Thermal stability of each initiator system was compared by applying a ramped temperature program to monomer samples in the DSC in the dark. To analyze the kinetic changes as a function of storage time more quantitatively, we suggested an equation and characterized the shelf-lifetime constant (k) of three-component initiator systems. From the experiments and analysis, we conclude that the order of shelf-life is consistent with the of radical cation (DH·+) persistence; DABCO > DIPA > MDEA > NPG, and inversely related to the proton transfer efficiency of the electron donor; NPG > MDEA > DIPA > DABCO. The effects of electron donor structures on thermal stability were consistent with the results of kinetic shelf-life experiments. This investigation provides an effective means to characterize as well as predict shelf lifetimes of initiator systems. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Appl Polym Sci, 2009


Generating laboratory flows resembling atmospheric turbulence is of prime importance to study the effect of wind fluctuations on objects such as buildings, vehicles, or wind turbines. A novel driving of an active grid following a stochastic process is used to generate velocity fluctuations with correlation lengths, and, thus, integral scales, much larger than the transverse dimension of the wind tunnel. The combined action of the active grid and a modulation of the fan speed allows one to generate a flow characterized by a four-decade inertial range and an integral scale Reynolds number of 2×10^{7}.


BACKGROUND
The literature contains many reports on the management of colorectal cancer from single institutions or groups of specialist surgeons. But there are few data on community-wide patterns of treatment or the outcomes of colorectal surgery. The aim of the present study was to use a population-based linked database to assess the trends in colorectal cancer incidence and mortality in Western Australia (WA) in the period 1982-95, and to evaluate the outcomes following surgical care.

METHODS
A population-based linked database was used to relate the cancer registry, hospitalization and mortality records of all patients with a diagnosis of colorectal cancer in WA during 1982-95. Data on surgical treatment and postoperative morbidity and mortality in this group of patients were available only in 1988-95. Patient records were selected using the international classification for diagnosis and procedure codes pertaining to colorectal cancer and surgery. Incidence and mortality trends in colon and rectal cancers were estimated by Poisson regression regression of age-standardized rates, and relative survival analysis was used to compare patient survival with the general population.

RESULTS
During the 14-year period, 9673 patients presented with a diagnosis of colorectal cancer. The sex distribution of patients with colon cancer was evenly divided, but rectal cancer was more common in men (ratio 1:4). The mean age at diagnosis was 67.8 years (SD: 12.7). During the study period there was a significant increase in the standardized incidence rate of rectal cancer in men, and in the mortality rates from colon cancer in women. The overall crude 5-year survival was 57%. Large bowel resections were performed on 71% of patients with an in-hospital postoperative mortality of 4.2%.

CONCLUSION
Colorectal cancer is a continuing major cause of morbidity and mortality in WA. The present study demonstrated increases in the incidence rate of rectal cancer in men and in the mortality rate from colon cancer in women in the period 1982-95.


The relative merits of any geophysical method in a given situation can be predicted by careful study of the expected message-to-noise1 ratio. For example, let us draw or deduce from the subsequent text, the anomaly formulas due to a spherical inhomogeneity in the subsurface and the symbols in each formula are explained in the text. The gravity, magnetic, resistivity, and induced-polarization surveys all are volume dependent, whereas the electromagnetic method is dependent only upon the area of the inhomogeneity, normal to the inducing field. Thus, a thin disk can give nearly the same electromagnetic anomaly as a sphere of the same radius.

If we can make a reasonable estimate of the physical property contrast anticipated to exist between ore and host, we can then predict the anomaly magnitude expected from the sphere, when buried at any given depth, via the geometric factor. Note that from this viewpoint, given the maximum or saturation value of unity for the physical property factor, the magnetic and resistivity methods theoretically give the same percent anomaly due to a sphere. The physical property function M–iN for the electromagnetic method has a maximum value of one half for a sphere while the change with frequency of the electrical resistivity contrast.

Thus, except for a factor of two, the magnetic, resistivity, electromagnetic, and induced-polarization methods should give the same maximum anomaly. Note that the geometry of the anomalous fields for each of these methods is an induced dipole with a resultant fall-off of peak anomaly proportional to the inverse cube of the depth to the center of the sphere below the measuring plane. In contrast, the gravity method exhibits an inverse second power fall-off due to an induced monopole. The density contrast between ore and host sometimes exhibits a maximum value of two. Thus f r om a maximum message viewpoint, one would be inclined to rate the methods in the order given above. However, we need to counter this bias by considering expected values of the physical property factor and the noise for any given geologic situation.

Let us look, then, at iron ore, massive sulfides, and disseminated sulfides, items treated i n Volume I. We should expect the following physical property ranges: A very wide range of properties is evident and hence the prediction of an anomaly magnitude looks hopeless.


Goal. To assess the therapeutic efficacy of the rotation of mid-wavelength ultraviolet therapy (311 nm) and PUVA therapy in patients with moderate to severe forms of psoriasis, and to assess the efficacy of mid-wavelength ultraviolet therapy (311 nm) in a multiple-course therapy. Materials and methods. The study involved 66 patients with moderate to severe forms of psoriasis who received multiple courses of treatment by methods of the PUVA therapy and narrowband mid-wavelength phototherapy (311 nm). The patients were divided into three groups: Group 1 (n = 20) - patients who received treatment in the form of mid-wavelength ultraviolet therapy (311 nm) after multiple courses of PUVA therapy; Group 2 (n = 26) - patients who received only multiple courses of PUVA therapy; Group 3 (n = 20) - patients who received only multiple courses of mid-wavelength ultraviolet therapy (311 nm). Results. The authors determined high efficacy (82.8%) of mid-wavelength ultraviolet therapy (311 nm) in patients with moderate to severe forms of psoriasis vulgaris who had previously received multiple courses of PUVA therapy. After multiple courses of long-term treatment by mid-wavelength ultraviolet therapy (311 nm), patients with moderate to severe forms of psoriasis had high efficacy of such multiple courses of treatment (85.78%). Conclusion. Patients with moderate to severe forms of psoriasis who had previously received multiple courses of PUVA therapy can be switched to mid-wavelength ultraviolet therapy (311 nm) with the maintenance of high efficacy of such treatment. The authors observed the absence of any adaptation to the spectral range of mid-wavelength ultraviolet therapy (311 nm) in case of multiple courses of treatment.


The purpose of this paper is to report the findings of the integration of a manufacturing case study to a freshman level mechanical engineering course at The University of Toledo. The approach to integrate this case study into the class was completed via weekly assignments analyzing the case, small group discussion, and weekly group discussion. The key findings from the study demonstrate that the integration of the case study into this course improved the students' attitudes towards engineering, higher-order cognitive learning, self-efficacy, ease of learning the subject matter, team working and communication skills. In addition, the retention rates in course improved by 4.5% and the final average grade improved by 3.3% over the previous year. The implications of these findings to educators are very positive. Based on student comments, the integration of the case study increased retention of the material and their satisfaction with the course and offered another mechanism for students to study and relate concepts of the course and understand its role in engineering and life. This, in turn, increased the students' confidence in engineering and should help to improve graduation rates. One key contribution from this study demonstrates that the case study method can effectively be applied engineering courses with positive results.


Objective. To investigate the annual rate of tuberculosis (TB) infection among newly employed nurses using both tuberculin skin test (TST) and QuantiFERON-TB Gold (QFT-G; Cellestis Limited) assay. Design. A prospective cohort study involving newly employed nurses. Setting. A tertiary care university hospital in South Korea. Methods. All participants (n = 196) were tested with the TST and QFT-G assay at baseline. After 1 year, the TST and QFT-G assay were reperformed for subjects who had negative TST results at baseline and for all subjects, respectively. Results. The baseline TST and QFT-G assays were positive for 101 subjects (51.5%) and 28 subjects (14.3%), respectively; 22 subjects (11.2%) had positive results of both tests. Although the overall between-test agreement was 54.9% (κ = 0.151 [95% confidence interval, 0.047–0.245]), agreement improved to 78.5% (κ = 0.462 [95% confidence interval, 0.007–0.917]) for subjects who had not received bacille Calmette-Guérin vaccination. After 1 year, the TST yielded positive results for 16 (21.3%) of 75 nurses with negative baseline results, and the QFT-G assay yielded positive results for 21 (14.4%) of 146 subjects with negative baseline Results. Collectively, 5 subjects (3.0%) experienced conversion to positive results with both tests, and 32 subjects (18.9%) experienced conversion to positive results with one of the tests. Neither the employing hospital department nor exposure to patients with TB affected test conversion status. Conclusions. The poor overall agreement between TST and QFT-G results may have been caused by the confounding effect of bacille Calmette-Guérin vaccination. The annual risk of TB infection among newly employed nurses was at least 3% on the basis of results of both the TST and QFT-G test. Stricter preventive strategies against TB spread should be implemented in our hospital.


Given an input that undergoes a sequence of updates, a dynamic algorithm maintains a valid solution to some predefined problem at any point in time; the goal is to design an algorithm in which computing a solution to the updated input is done more efficiently than computing the solution from scratch. A dynamic algorithm against an adaptive adversary is required to be correct when the adversary chooses the next update after seeing the previous outputs of the algorithm. We obtain faster dynamic algorithms against an adaptive adversary and separation results between what is achievable in the oblivious vs. adaptive settings. To get these results we exploit techniques from differential privacy, cryptography, and adaptive data analysis. Our results are as follows. 1. We give a general reduction transforming a dynamic algorithm against an oblivious adversary to a dynamic algorithm robust against an adaptive adversary. This reduction maintains several copies of the oblivious algorithm and uses differential privacy to protect their random bits. Using this reduction we obtain dynamic algorithms against an adaptive adversary with improved update and query times for global minimum cut, all pairs distances, and all pairs effective resistance. 2. We further improve our update and query times by showing how to maintain a sparsifier over an expander decomposition that can be refreshed fast. This fast refresh enables it to be robust against what we call a blinking adversary that can observe the output of the algorithm only following refreshes. We believe that these techniques will prove useful for additional problems. 3. On the flip side, we specify dynamic problems that, assuming a random oracle, every dynamic algorithm that solves them against an adaptive adversary must be polynomially slower than a rather straightforward dynamic algorithm that solves them against an oblivious adversary. We first show a separation result for a search problem and then show a separation result for an estimation problem. In the latter case our separation result draws from lower bounds in adaptive data analysis.


Resistin is a polypeptide hormone of the adipokine-family, primarily, but not exclusively, produced by the adipose tissue. Recent studies suggested that resistin may affect the male and female reproductive activity. The study aim was to immunohistochemically evaluate the presence and distribution of resistin in the ovine uterus. Uterine samples were collected from two groups of ewes at the end of an experimental trial during which the animals of the first group (CTRL) were fed only by grazing while those of the second one (EXP) were supplemented with barley and corn. Using a monoclonal antibody against resistin, tested by Western Blot, the immunopositive reaction was identified in the cytoplasm of epithelial lining cells and uterine glands. The endogenous production of resistin seemed to be affected by different diet, as evidenced by staining differences between the CTRL and EXP groups. Our findings support the existence of a peripheral resistin system in the sheep uterus. It is possible that this system is involved in the functionality of the uterus, which is also affected by the animal's nutritional status.


We study the physical causes of the magnitude dependence of ground‐motion decay with distance that is observed on real data. Using stochastic simulations, we analyze the role played by anelastic attenuation Q (f), path duration, site effect (κ0), finite‐fault effect, and stress drop for a magnitude range between 4 and 7. We systematically look at peak ground acceleration, peak ground velocity, and pseudoabsolute spectral acceleration at different frequencies.

We find that path duration, κ0, and stress‐drop variations have a minor effect on this dependence. At close distances (typically distances smaller than the largest fault length), the main effect is the finite‐fault effect that tends to decrease the ground‐motion values of larger events. At larger distances (>30  km), it is the effect of Q (f) that is preponderant and tends to lower the ground‐motion values of smaller events.


The Jacobian matrix of a robot manipulator is central to the analysis, kinematics, dynamics, and control of robot manipulators. In many instances, the Jacobian and its inverse or pseudo-inverse are needed and utilized in the control equations of robot manipulators. In robotics, translations and rotations, transforms whose variables of motion, distance for translations, angles for rotations, combine to generate motions in a given workspace. Object motion and speed also combine units of angle and distance or angular and translational velocities. The mathematical complexities of the control process often obscure the interaction of units and lead to results that may be misinterpreted, erroneous, or simply arbitrary. The research results presented in this article indicate that control equations based on the manipulator Jacobian, its generalized inverse, or its pseudo-inverse may be erroneously combining quantities of different physical units thereby reaching arbitrary results.


SUMMARY Vibrio parahaemolyticus and Norovirus have been recognized as the cause of sporadic cases or outbreaks of diarrhoeal illness in association with the ingestion of raw or improperly cooked seafood. This report describes a foodborne outbreak of gastroenteritis caused by both Norovirus and Vibrio parahaemolyticus following the consumption of raw seafood in a restaurant in Terrassa (Catalonia, Spain) in September 2005. Measures are needed to reduce contamination of raw seafood. Consumers can reduce the risk of foodborne illness by avoiding consumption of raw or undercooked food.


In this paper, we address the large scale variation problem in crowd counting by taking full advantage of the multi-scale feature representations in a multi-level network. We implement such an idea by keeping the counting error of a patch as small as possible with a proper feature level selection strategy, since a specific feature level tends to perform better for a certain range of scales. However, without scale annotations, it is sub-optimal and error-prone to manually assign the predictions for heads of different scales to specific feature levels. Therefore, we propose a Scale-Adaptive Selection Network (SASNet), which automatically learns the internal correspondence between the scales and the feature levels. Instead of directly using the predictions from the most appropriate feature level as the final estimation, our SASNet also considers the predictions from other feature levels via weighted average, which helps to mitigate the gap between discrete feature levels and continuous scale variation. Since the heads in a local patch share roughly a same scale, we conduct the adaptive selection strategy in a patch-wise style. However, pixels within a patch contribute different counting errors due to the various difficulty degrees of learning. Thus, we further propose a Pyramid Region Awareness Loss (PRA Loss) to recursively select the most hard sub-regions within a patch until reaching the pixel level. With awareness of whether the parent patch is over-estimated or under-estimated, the fine-grained optimization with the PRA Loss for these region-aware hard pixels helps to alleviate the inconsistency problem between training target and evaluation metric. The state-of-the-art results on four datasets demonstrate the superiority of our approach. The code will be available at: https://github.com/TencentYoutuResearch/CrowdCounting-SASNet.


Propaganda of the Deed is a conceptual tradition which uses calculated and media-oriented terrorist violence with symbolic and strategic intent. This research examined how Propaganda of the Deed has endured over the last one hundred and forty years to influence the continuity of terrorism as a form of political discourse. This thesis illuminates previously unidentified paradigms and paradigmatic shifts in the use of Propaganda of the Deed.

Propaganda of the Deed was investigated using a comparative historical analysis. David Rapoport's Four Waves of Modern Terror theory provided the analytical framework. This delimited the research field, with one representative terrorist movement selected from each wave. The research methodology was based on analysis of terrorist propaganda, and situated using the historical context and empirical record. The use of Propaganda of the Deed by those focus movements was then cross analysed through six major themes found in terrorist propaganda. Those themes included advocating the theoretical purpose; justifying the transition to violence; celebrating the strategic methodology; advising on the tactics; its implementation as a systematic campaign; and glorifying the revolution and martyrdom.

This thesis aimed to address the gap in knowledge currently affecting Propaganda of the Deed in the history of terrorism. Established research in the field is lacking in historical analysis, being largely written by journalists, sociologists, and political scientists. An historical study using this methodology and framework has no precedent. Historical analyses provide an original comprehensive perspective, and yield new outcomes on how Propaganda of the Deed in terrorism has endured throughout history.

Research also involved an examination of whether later terrorist movements were familiar with the usage of Propaganda of the Deed by earlier movements. The study concluded that terrorist movements were often aware of the writings of earlier movements, though this was not referenced directly in the propaganda. Therefore it is plausible that terrorists were influenced by the actions of preceding groups. The historical context also suggests that there was an opportunity for the transmission of revolutionary knowledge, both directly and indirectly, through the movement of revolutionaries around the globe.

The thesis identified a series of previously unrecognised paradigms and paradigmatic shifts in the use of Propaganda of the Deed by the focus movements. These paradigmatic shifts were the result of changes in the historical context, technology, and ideology. The study thus establishes that Propaganda of the Deed is both traditional and innovative. It has changed incrementally in unique ways with each new wave, especially in regards to the manifestation of strategic and tactical methodologies. However, the overarching strategic intent, observed in the justification for violence and the theoretical purposes, demonstrated adherence to the traditional concept. Therefore, Propaganda of the Deed is innovative in transcending previous paradigms, while simultaneously conserving its traditional intent.


In order to master timely and accurately construction quality of high performance concrete, detection of compressive strength of high performance concrete can be tested non-destructively, rapidly and accurately. The paper did preliminary research on high performance concrete with redound method, furthermore, it established estimation model between rebound value and compressive strength. Experiment shows that rebound method can effetely test compressive strength of high performance concrete. Construction quality of Cement concrete structure or component can timely grasped in period of construction with the method.


Interleukin (IL)-12 plays a key role in determining the immune response pattern that results in maturation of Th0 to Th1 and Th2. To investigate the correlation between intracellular redox state and IL-12 production in macrophages, cells from the mouse cell line J774A.1 were treated with reagents modulating the glutathione-redox couple before stimulation with lipopolysaccharide (LPS). It was found that the glutathione reductase inhibitor, 1,3-bis (2-chloroethyl)-1-nitrosourea, markedly augmented LPS induced IL-12p40 production particularly when it was added for 24 h before LPS stimulation, whereas the glutathione-synthesis inhibitor, L-buthionine-(S,R)-sulfoximine, suppressed IL-12p40 production. The profile of IL-12p40 augmentation correlated well with the profile of intracellular glutathione oxidation (GSSG) and the activation profile of nuclear transcription factor kappaB (NF-kappaB), suggesting that GSSG is important in NF-kappaB activation which leads to IL-12p40 production. Our results indicate that the glutathione-redox couple plays an important role in the augmented production of IL-12p40 and thus in influencing immune response patterns.


This paper determines the deadweight loss of operating and capital subsidies offered US public transit systems by extending previous research by Tullock (1997). It develops a method for calculating deadweight loss and using 2006 data for 227 single mode bus transit systems it estimates cost and share equations to obtain the coefficients needed to calculate this loss. It finds that deadweight loss from the subsidies is 6.83% of total cost or $0.861 million on the average and that operating subsidy accounts for $0.780 million of it while capital subsidy's share is $0.0503 million. A further decomposition of the deadweight loss among its sources using regression shows that the incentive tier of the federal operating subsidy, federal labor protection (Section 13(c)), fleet size, and the number of maintenance facilities owned are positively associated with it while leasing instead of owning maintenance facilities and absence of dedicated funding sources are negatively associated with it.


The influence of diabetes and its control on circulating levels of growth hormone and growth hormone-dependent, insulin-like growth factors (IGF) remains controversial. In the present study, the effect of a 1-wk period of intensive insulin therapy on growth hormone and IGF I and II has been determined in 19 young (age 13–22 yr), insulin-dependent (type I) subjects with diabetes mellitus. IGF I was low during conventional insulin therapy (198 ± 20 versus 438 ± 38 ng/ml in nondiabetic subjects, P < 0.001), and rose within the week of intensified treatment (to 255 ±15 ng/ml, P < 0.005), concomitant with a reduction in plasma glucose from 233 ± 16 to 110 ± 5 mg/dl. IGF I rose despite a significant fall in mean 24-h growth hormone levels from 14.1 ± 2.2 to 9.0 ± 1.2 ng/ml (P < 0.02). The mean IGF II value for the diabetic subjects (504 ± 39 ng/ml) was not significantly different from that of the nondiabetic control group (506 ± 30 ng/ml, P > 0.3) and was not altered by intensified therapy. However, four individual patients with very low IGF I also had depressed IGF II (248 ±16 ng/ml), which was corrected (to 377 ± 35 ng/ml) with improved metabolic control. These data suggest that elevated growth hormone levels in poorly controlled diabetes are ineffective in IGF I generation and that this defect is at least partially corrected by acute improvement in control. The rise in IGF I levels accompanying intensive insulin treatment may suppress the excessive secretion of growth hormone. IGF II levels appear to be affected only by the most severe reductions of growth hormone activity.


Dense amnesia can result from damage to the medial diencephalon in humans and in animals. In humans this damage is diffuse and can include the mediodorsal nuclei of the thalamus. In animal models, lesion studies have confirmed the mediodorsal thalamus (MD) has a role in memory and other cognitive tasks, although the extent of deficits is mixed. Anatomical tracing studies confirm at least three different subgroupings of the MD: medial, central, and lateral, each differentially interconnected to the prefrontal cortex (PFC). Moreover, these subgroupings of the MD also receive differing inputs from other brain structures, including the basal ganglia thus the MD subgroupings form key nodes in interconnected frontal-striatal-thalamic neural circuits, integrating critical information within the PFC. We will provide a review of data collected from non-human primates and rodents after selective brain injury to the whole of the MD as well as these subgroupings to highlight the extent of deficits in various cognitive tasks. This research highlights the neural basis of memory and cognitive deficits associated with the subgroupings of the MD and their interconnected neural networks. The evidence shows that the MD plays a critical role in many varied cognitive processes. In addition, the MD is actively processing information and integrating it across these neural circuits for successful cognition. Having established that the MD is critical for memory and cognition, further research is required to understand how the MD specifically influences these cognitive processing carried out by the brain.


An experimental program was conducted to investiga te the water-vapor sorption characteristics of smectite and kaolinite mixtures. End-member smectite and kaolinite were slurrymixed together at mass-controlled ratios corresponding to 0%, 20%, 50%, 70%, 80%, 90% and 100% smectite. Vapor desorption isotherms for the mixtures were measured at 248C for relative humidity (RH) ranging from ~95% to 0%. Results show that the amount of water adsorbed by the clay mixtures at a given RH increases systematically with increasing smectite content. Derivative analysis of the sorption isotherms shows evidence of transitions between the two-, oneand zero-layer hydrate-states for the smectite-rich mixtures. The transitions become less apparent as the smectite content decreases. Monolayer coverage, specific surface area, and heat of adsorption were estimated from the isotherms using BET theory. It is shown that monolayer coverage and specific surface for the clay mixtures can be reasonably approximated by weighted averaging of the end-member clay properties. General methodologies are presented for predicting the sorption behavior (i.e. soil-water characteristics) and effective specific surface area from measurements of the end-member sorption isotherms. Key Words—BET Analysis, Clay Liners, Kaolinite, Smectite, Sorption Isotherms, Specific Surface Area, Waste Containment .


In vitro prostaglandin (PG) and thromboxane B2 (TXB2) formation by isolated glomeruli from normotensive (N) and two-kidney, one-clip hypertensive (2K,1C) rats was determined. When calculated on the basis of glomerular protein content, PGE2, 6-keto-PGF1 alpha and TXB2 production of glomeruli from clipped kidneys was significantly greater than PG and TXB2 formation of glomeruli from the untouched kidneys. When PG and TXB2 formation was calculated per amount of glomeruli, only PGE2 formation was found to be significantly greater in clipped kidneys. No severe damage of glomerular structure was found in the kidneys when studied by light microscopy. In additional in vivo studies, the effect of the cyclooxygenase inhibitor indomethacin on blood pressure and glomerular filtration rate (GFR) was evaluated. Following indomethacin GFR in 7 of 13 clipped kidneys of 2K,1C rats decreased from 363 +/- 77 to 188 +/- 51 microliter/100 g body wt, whereas six kidneys developed anuria. No effect of cyclooxygenase inhibition on GFR was found in N rats and in untouched kidneys of 2K,1C rats. Mean arterial blood pressure in 2K,1C hypertension fell significantly, from 158 +/- 10 to 135 +/- 7 mmHg, after cyclooxygenase inhibition. No effect was seen in N rats. The data suggest that increased glomerular PG formation in the clipped kidneys of 2K,1C rats is involved in the pathogenesis of hypertension in this animal model.


Objectives: To test the construct validity of the modified Star Excursion Balance Test (SEBT) in predicting the strength of knee extensors and hip abductors and to compare performance between dominant and non-dominant legs. Strength, as measured using hand held dynamometry, has been used as one of a variety of measures in order to subgroup patients with patellofemoral pain. This method is not well received in clinical practice due to time constraints and cost. In contrast, the SEBT is a quick and simple functional measure of dynamic stability. This study examined the validity of the SEBT as an alternate strength measure. Design: Within subject correlation. Each participant recorded maximum isometric contractions for hip abduction and knee extension using a HHD and performed the modified SEBT, on both legs, within one test period. Paired t tests were used to compare dominant and non-dominant legs and Pearson's correlation analyses were used to explore for associations. Setting: Non-clinical environment, Participants: Eighteen healthy male amateur runner's between 18 and 39 years old (mean age 36.1 years). Main outcome measures: Knee and hip moments normalised for leg length (Nm/m) for the HHD and percent of leg length reach score for each SEBT reach as well as a composite of all three. Results: There was no significant difference between dominant and non-dominant legs for all the tests (knee extension p = 0.72, hip abduction p = 0.90, SEBT composite p = 0.86) therefore data was combined into one set. There was no significant relationship between either hip abduction strength (r = 0.28, p = 0.11), or knee extension strength (r= 0.16, p = 0.17), with any combination of the SEBT. A moderate relationship (r = 0.52, p = 0.38) between hip abduction and SEBT posterolateral reach was seen, however, this was not statistically significant. Conclusion: There was no statistically significant association between either knee extension or hip abduction strength with the modified SEBT. This suggests that strength is unlikely to be a primary construct of the test and the SEBT is not a useful replacement for the HHD when testing strength.


Scheduling problems at the university is a complex type of scheduling problems. The scheduling process should be carried out at every turn of the semester's. The core of the problem of scheduling courses at the university is that the number of components that need to be considered in making the schedule, some of the components was made up of students, lecturers, time and a room with due regard to the limits and certain conditions so that no collision in the schedule such as mashed room, mashed lecturer and others. To resolve a scheduling problem most appropriate technique used is the technique of optimization. Optimization techniques can give the best results desired. Metaheuristic algorithm is an algorithm that has a lot of ways to solve the problems to the very limit the optimal solution. In this paper, we use a genetic algorithm and ant colony optimization algorithm is an algorithm metaheuristic to solve the problem of course scheduling. The two algorithm will be tested and compared to get performance is the best. The algorithm was tested using data schedule courses of the university in Semarang. From the experimental results we conclude that the genetic algorithm has better performance than the ant colony optimization algorithm in solving the case of course scheduling.


Summary.  Adults with haemophilia and other bleeding disorders often develop lower limb musculoskeletal problems associated with bleeds into joints and muscles, which may affect balance performance and increase likelihood of falling. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effectiveness of an individualized balance and strength home exercise programme on improving balance and related outcomes for adults with haemophilia and other bleeding disorders. Twenty male adults with haemophilia and other bleeding disorders (mean age 39.4 years, 95% CI = 33.7–45.1) were recruited to participate. They underwent a comprehensive clinical and force platform assessment of balance and related measures. Based on assessment findings, the assessing physiotherapist provided an individualized home exercise programme of balance, strengthening and walking exercises. Re‐assessment occurred after the 4‐month exercise programme. Twelve participants (60%) completed the programme and were re‐assessed. There were no safety problems or dropouts associated with the exercise programme aggravating joint status. Although there were no statistically significant changes in any of the measures (adjusted for multiple comparisons), there were improvements of between 5% and 22% on 10 of the 16 measures, with the Neurocom modified Clinical Test of Sensory Interaction on Balance (P = 0.036) and Timed Sit to Stand (P = 0.064) approaching significance. A tailored home exercise programme targeting balance, strengthening and walking is feasible for adults with haemophilia and other bleeding disorders. These results suggest that positive physical outcomes including improved balance and mobility may be achieved with this type of programme.


The benefits that students gain from designing and implementing their own independent undergraduate research projects is often presented as a valuable step in their academic career, and a stepping stone to graduate school success. However, it is not clear what benefits students receive when working as undergraduate research assistants on faculty research projects where they, the students, have little or no input into the project or its design. This paper reports on a survey of undergraduate students who participated as wage laborers on two separate faculty-directed research projects. The results of the study suggest that students gain valuable knowledge and skills that serve as constructive preparation for work, personal lives and graduate school careers; in addition, their participation in research enhances their overall undergraduate experience.


Scientists are trying to study the peculiarities of men and women by adding biological and social components of the human, however since gender is not the natural givenness, but a social construct assuming self-awareness and self-determination, the connections between these components will be refracted through a variety of conditions. The purpose of the article is an integrative study of non-linear relationship of biological and social characteristics of socialization and individualization in development of students of different sexes at different periods of their development based on psychological research. The nature of non-linear relationships was investigated in our study, using discriminant, correlation and factor analyses. The linear relationships were studied using Student's t-test for the control comparison. We have created models of sex and gender structure of integrated individuality of the taught boys and girls from preschool age to adolescence and conducted their comparative analysis. The psychological development programs have been developed that change the personality structure, increasing the number of flexible non-linear interdependencies of the biological and the social. Based on the research, we found that individuality of students with low level of development is characterized mainly by a high degree of genetic determination of the set of natural properties and a high role of objective conditions. High level of individuality development is characterized by non-linearity of interdependent biological and social properties and students of different sexes have their own specifics at different periods of their development. The essence of the author's approach to the training and education of the students is that the study of variable, multi-level non-linear relationships of the individuality's properties determines the specificity of social and biological potentiality of boys' and girls' development and opens great opportunities for the creation of optimum adaptation conditions of students in the educational environment and effective modalities for the training and education of students of different sexes.


At present, the extension of formal learning theory to the multi-agent case considers "teams" of agents sharing a common end. Success is achieved if one or more of the agents is successful, and cooperation is not involved in the team formation. Unfortunately, this is rarely the idea of "successful team" we have in mind. One generally expects agents' behavior to influence each other in a way that is not captured by the present paradigms. A real problem in extending single agent learning methods to multi-agent setting is thus determining paradigms of cooperation. This paper makes a contribution to the solution of this problem. First, we advance a paradigm of cooperation as a kind of two-person repeated game and compare it to a major paradigm of solvability for isolated agents. Second, we pay attention to a subset of unsuccessful agents who take advantage from teamwork. For these agents, cooperation is proved to be a key of success. The formal results are raised within the model-theoretic tradition of formal learning theory.


Duplicate groups of Atlantic salmon post-smolts were fed four purified diets supplemented with both vitamin E and the carotenoid astaxanthin (Ax) (+E, +Ax), or supplemented with either vitamin E or Ax (-E, +Ax and +E, -Ax) or deficient in both vitamin E and Ax (-E, -Ax) for 22 wk. There were no effects of diet on growth rate, but an extensive lipoid liver degenerative lesion was observed in 15% of fish fed diets deficient in vitamin E. Tissue vitamin E concentrations varied in accordance with dietary vitamin E in liver, muscle, heart, plasma, brain and eye; levels were reduced to approximately 3% in liver but only to 40% in eye of fish fed diets deficient in vitamin E compared with those fed diets supplemented with vitamin E. An interactive sparing of Ax supplementation on tissue vitamin E concentration was observed, but only in brain. Dietary deficiency of both vitamin E and Ax significantly increased the recovery of desaturated and elongated products of both [1-(14)C] 18:3(n-3) and [1-(14)C] 20:5(n-3) in isolated hepatocytes, suggesting that conversion of fatty acids to their long-chain highly unsaturated products can be stimulated by a deficiency of lipid-soluble antioxidants. The antioxidant synergism of vitamin E and Ax was supported by their ability to reduce malondialdehyde formation in an in vitro stimulation of microsomal lipid peroxidation and to reduce plasma levels of 8-isoprostane. The results of this study suggest that both vitamin E and the carotenoid Ax have antioxidant functions in Atlantic salmon.


The Crimes Amendment (Provocation) Act 2014 replaced the provocation defence, with a new defence of extreme provocation in New South Wales. The change in the law represents a marked departure from the Select Committee's report which proposed a new partial defence modelled closely on earlier recommendations of the Law Commission of England and Wales on the partial defences to murder. A number of the Law Commission's recommendations were taken forward in England and Wales in 2009, albeit with last minute, controversial government additions. Provocation was thereby abolished and replaced with a new loss of control defence, designed to accommodate the circumstances of the abused defendant (the 'primary victim'). Unfortunately, the decision to retain the loss of control requirement within both jurisdictions makes it easier for the abuser (the 'principal aggressor') to successfully claim these partial defences in femicide cases; and, in other cases, renders it potentially more difficult for the primary victim to rely on the defence when she utilises lethal force in response to a principal aggressor. This paper illustrates why this is the case, and advances proposals for optimal reform within these jurisdictions.


This paper looks at the civil aviation law for New Zealand, Australia, the USA and Canada in regards to the 'de-licensing' of participants in the aviation system. The comparative analysis is on each country's ability to take administrative action against an aviation participant on an 'on notice' basis and, in cases where there is an imminent threat to aviation safety, on a 'without notice' basis. Issues looked at include:  (a) The process the regulator must adhere to in bringing administrative action. (b) The appeal or review rights available to the aviation participant. (c) The availability of a stay to the aviation participant while he or she waits a full hearing. (d) The availability of a specialist tribunal with aviation expertise to hear an appeal.  The issues are examined in order to determine what, if any, improvements could be made to the New Zealand system. The paper concludes that the New Zealand system could be improved by providing for a more streamlined appeal or review process; a unified transport tribunal dealing with land transport, maritime and civil cases and an ability, in limited circumstances, for the Director's decision to be stayed pending a full hearing.


Delta-sigma modulation has become popular in modern analog-to-digital modulator design due to its relatively high immunity from process variations. We propose efficient characterization techniques to obtain the key performance parameters of the 1-bit first-order delta-sigma modulator which is intended to be used as an on-chip analog signal digitizer for BIST applications. Numerical simulations have been performed to validate the techniques and the results indicate that accurate estimation of the parameters can be obtained at the presence of noise.


As the popularity of mobile photography is growing constantly, lots of efforts are being invested now into building complex hand-crafted camera ISP solutions. In this work, we demonstrate that even the most sophisticated ISP pipelines can be replaced with a single end-to-end deep learning model trained without any prior knowledge about the sensor and optics used in a particular device. For this, we present PyNET, a novel pyramidal CNN architecture designed for fine-grained image restoration that implicitly learns to perform all ISP steps such as image demosaicing, denoising, white balancing, color and contrast correction, demoireing, etc. The model is trained to convert RAW Bayer data obtained directly from mobile camera sensor into photos captured with a professional high-end DSLR camera, making the solution independent of any particular mobile ISP implementation. To validate the proposed approach on the real data, we collected a large-scale dataset consisting of 10 thousand full-resolution RAW-RGB image pairs captured in the wild with the Huawei P20 cameraphone (12.3 MP Sony Exmor IMX380 sensor) and Canon 5D Mark IV DSLR. The experiments demonstrate that the proposed solution can easily get to the level of the embedded P20's ISP pipeline that, unlike our approach, is combining the data from two (RGB + B/W) camera sensors. The dataset, pretrained models and codes used in this paper are available on the project website: https://people.ee.ethz.ch/~ihnatova/pynet.html


Formation of microstructure defects at the phase boundaries in TRIP steels was investigated with the aid of microstructure analysis on a TRIP steel crystal, which was grown by the Bridgman technique. The microstructure studies comprised scanning electron microscopy (SEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), electron backscatter diffraction (EBSD), transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and transmission electron microscopy with high resolution (HRTEM). Initial XRD measurements revealed that the crystals under study consist of austenite and ferrite with extremely strong preferred orientations. Subsequent XRD pole figure measurements and EBSD scans have shown that the orientation relationship between austenite and ferrite can be described by the Nishiyama-Wassermann model. For a detailed description of the microstructure of the Bridgman crystal, the orientation distribution of crystallites within the individual phases was investigated using the XRD reciprocal space mapping and the rocking curve measurements. These experiments have shown that the density of microstructure defects is much lower in ferrite than in austenite. The direct information about the defect structures at the phase boundaries between austenite and ferrite was obtained from the TEM micrographs, which revealed complicated micro-twin structures at the boundaries between the neighbouring phases. HRTEM discovered very narrow stripes of ferrite embedded in austenite that were regarded as a source of the microstructure defects in austenite.


The impact of silvicultural practices (clearfelling, slash burning and sowing) on carabid beetle communities in tall wet Eucalyptus obliqua forests in southern Tasmania was examined using traplines of pitfalls in a chronosequence of regenerating coupes. Total species richness (n = 18) was modest compared to other temperate forests and was nor systematically changed by forest management, although it was considerably lower in 20 year old regrowth than in younger regrowth or old-growth controls, possibly due to habitat simplification. The Shannon-Weiner Index was at a minimum in intermediate aged regeneration. TWINSPAN analysis assisted recognition of beetle communities typical of broad stages in the forest succession, with a major dichotomy between most old-growth sites plus young sires and intermediate plus advanced regeneration sites. Vector fitting of environmental variables in an ordination of the sites by non-metric multidimensional scaling revealed a significant influence for the age of regeneration and litter depth, but not bare ground percentage or soil pH. Survival of carabids in the habitat mosaic created by commercial forestry activity is likely to depend on both reinvasion from edges and survival of individuals in the fire-protected refuges that exist within the coupes. Pioneer species were winged, small in size, and non-endemic whereas the opposite was true of the fauna in the older sites. Carabids in eucalypt forests have good potential as indicators but their seasonality in occurrence demands that sampling be extended over most of the year.


Objectives: This study was carried out to rearrange and identify the characteristics of the quality elements of Consulting Service and aims to reinforce the competitive advantage after analyzing and improving it. Methods/Statistical Analysis: As for the study method, the consulting service quality elements were arranged by theoretical consideration, adapted Kano model for each service quality factors, and classified them into quality element categories such as Attractive, Must-be, One dimensional, Indifferent and Reverse quality elements. Also, as for the influence of customer satisfaction and dissatisfaction, CS-Coefficient (Customer Satisfaction Coefficient) was utilized to verify the result. Findings: This study reorganized the quality scale based on existing studies regarding consulting service quality, and classified the quality element scales defined by Kano model. In order to find quality awareness element for the competitive creation among the consulting service quality elements, the study adopted Kano model to see how to access to consulting service strategically as follows. First, among the 28 measurement items for the 6-scale elements, there were 3 attractive, 1 must-be, 1 questionable and 23 one-dimensional quality elements, and there were no reverse and indifferent quality elements. Second, the "E-1 (Consultant's individual interest to customer)" was One-dimensional quality element in Kano analysis, but in Timko's CS-Coefficient analysis, it was attractive quality element. Third, based on the fact that "E-1(Consultant's individual interest to customer)" and "R-5 (Securing customer information and company secret)" belongs to attractive quality element, the consulting workers will be able to utilize it as useful information in strategically decision making when improving the service competitiveness. Improvements/Applications: Distinguishing whether or not the subject group has the consulting service experience to examine the group difference is proposed for the future study.


Models containing networks of neuron-like units have become increasingly prominent in the study of both cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence. This article describes the basic features of connectionist models and provides an illustrative application to compound-stimulus effects in respondent conditioning. Connectionist models designed specifically for operant conditioning are not yet widely available, but some current learning algorithms for machine learning indicate that such models are feasible. Conversely, designers for machine learning appear to have recognized the value of behavioral principles in producing adaptive behavior in their creations.


Object of the paper is the Domitian Coast, belonging to the North-West of Campania Region, characterized by contrasting factors. The fertility of the soil and the considerable length of an easily accessible and available coastline are threatened by an indiscriminate exploitation of the ground for anthropogenic uses. The paper analyses the Domitian territory and the issues characterizing this particular area on the basis of three categories of elements. The second part indicates the possible intervention policies set up to redevelop this territory.


The Junggar Basin in north Xinjiang Province is regarded as one of the important dust sources in China. There is, however, a lack of information on long-term dust emissions originating from the basin. In these largely agricultural communities, wind erosion is a major concern that results in a threat to sustainable agriculture and environmental quality. This study assesses dust emissions from the agricultural community of the Junggar Basin in north Xinjiang based on soil and land use types extracted from remote sensing data in response to weather and climate over the past six decades. The Wind Erosion Prediction System (WEPS) was used to simulate annual soil loss and PM10 (particulate matter ≤10 μm in aerodynamic diameter) emissions at 11 meteorological stations across the Junggar Basin. From 1958 to 2018, annual soil loss and PM10 emissions significantly decreased 3.65 and 0.2 kg m–2 y–1, respectively. This decrease was likely due to decreasing wind speed, but also associated with increased precipitation and temperature, and decreased solar radiation. Wind erosion occurred most frequently during April and May, accounting for 39% of the annual soil loss and 40% of the annual PM10 emission. In contrast, no erosion occurred in January, February, and December as a result of low temperature (<–8.6°C), frozen soil conditions, and snow cover. Wind erosion risk appeared to decrease during the past six decades in response to observed climate change across the basin; however the southeast part of the basin experienced increasing wind erosion risk over the six decades. Projects to control wind erosion risk and combat dust emission should be given priority in the southeast part of the basin. Frequency of dust events was compared to simulated erosion; a strong linkage was found between simulated soil loss and frequency of dust storms based on regression analysis. This demonstrated that the modelling was acceptable in the conditions of this study and the results were prone to be reliable.


Waste management policy makers always face the problem of how to predict the future amount and composition of medical solid waste, which, in turn, helps to determine the most appropriate treatment, recycling and disposal strategy. An accurate prediction can assist in both the planning and design of medical solid waste management systems. Insufficient budget and unavailable management capacity are the main reasons for the scarcity of medical solid waste quantities and components historical records, which are so important in long-term system planning and short-term expansion programs. This article presents a new technique, using System Dynamics modeling, to predict generated medical solid waste in a developing urban area, based on a set of limited samples from Jenin District hospitals, Palestine. The findings of the model present the trend of medical solid waste generation together with its different components and indicate that a new forecasting approach may cover a variety of possible causative models and track inevitable uncertainties when traditional statistical least-squared regression methods are unable to handle such issues.


Objective: To analyse the extent to which traumatic life events, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and the neuropsychiatric disorder attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) can be contributors associated with burnout and the long-term sick leave that results from it. Subjects: Sixty-two individuals on long-term sick leave due to stress-related poor health and burnout, and 83 working individuals were screened for the presence of traumatic life events, PTSD and ADHD. Potential background factors involved in burnout were analysed using a multiple logistic regression. Results: Fifty-two per cent of those on long-term sick leave were judged to have PTSD and 24 per cent to have ADHD. The number of suspected/possible cases was even higher-71 per cent and 56 per cent, respectively. Nineteen per cent were judged to have both PTSD and ADHD; 56 per cent were judged to have PTSD andlor ADHD. PTSD, ADHD and traumatic life events in the form of sexual assault and severe human suffering were all strongly associated with both burnout and long-term sick leave. Conclusions: Since ADHD is almost never discussed and PTSD rarely so in the occupational rehabilitation of individuals with burnout, these results should act as a warning signal. Further studies are needed, however, including clinical examinations in order to establish with certainty if PTSD and ADHD can predict burnout followed by long-term sick leave.


While size and complexity of sensor networks software has increased significantly in recent years, the hardware capabilities of sensor nodes have been remaining very constrained. The predominant event-based programming paradigm addresses these hardware constraints, but does not scale well with the growing software complexity, often leading to software that is hard-to-manage and error-prone. Thread abstractions could remedy this situation, but existing solutions in sensor networks either provide incomplete thread semantics or introduce a significant resource overhead. This reflects the common understanding that one has to trade expressiveness for efficiency and vice versa. Our work, however, shows that this trade-off is not inherent to resource-constrained systems. We propose a comprehensive compiler-assisted cooperative threading abstraction, where full-fledged thread-based C code is translated to efficient event-based C code that runs atop an event-based operating system such as Contiki or TinyOS. Our evaluation shows that our approach outperforms thread libraries and generates code that is almost as efficient as hand-written event-based code with overheads of 1 % RAM, 2 % CPU, and 3 % ROM.


The phylogenetic diversity of bacteria isolated on solid media from the Baltic Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Southern CaMornia Bight, Skagerrak, Weddell Sea (ice) and Andaman Sea was investigated by means of 16s rRNA gene sequence analysis. Of the 128 sequenced isolates, 5 2 % showed similarity on the species level to previously reported bacteria, while as many as 18 % showed a sequence similarity below 93%, which in the closest case would represent difference at the genus level. A majority of the isolated y-Proteobactena could be assigned to known species, while half of the a-Proteobacteria were only identified to the genus level. Bacteria affiliated with the FlexibacterCytophaga-Bacteroides phylum showed the lowest levels of s d a r i t y to previously sequenced bacteria, mainly representing novel genera. Closely related isolates most often originated from the same geographic area. Nevertheless, our data also demonstrated that most genera have closely related representatives widely distributed between different sea areas. Isolates related to environmental clones, with a sequence similarity above the tentative genus level, were found in 51 cases, of which 17 were more similar to clones than to cultured bacteria. From this result we concluded that a large proportion of the great species richness of marine bacteria, found by culture-independent techniques, is likely to be verified through information from live and functional bacteria.


Market prices of agricultural land in the world have increased significantly in recent years. Important factors in regard to this trend are not only the fact that land is a basic, irreplaceable resource for the production of food and natural resources of each country, but also the fact that it is generally perceived as a favorable holder of capital, not succumbing to the effects of inflation. Market prices of agricultural land and the rent level in individual EU member countries are affected by historical development, the size structure of agricultural businesses, legislation, regulation of the land market, natural conditions and the intensity of agricultural production (e.g. the Netherlands). Market prices of agricultural land in the Czech Republic are monitored by the Czech Statistical Office (CSO), Institute for Agricultural Economics and Information (IAEI) and Ministry of Agriculture (MoA), but output of the data base is not comparable within a time series 1993-2012, as institutions work with differing methodology. On the basis of the description of prices of agricultural land and regression analysis, the hypothesis that the market price of agricultural land for agricultural use in the Czech Republic is affected primarily by its quality was not confirmed. The official (administrative) price is only an orientational and subsidiary tool for the determination of the market price. The development of the agricultural land market in the Czech Republic was affected by the privatization of land after 2000. According to an estimate (of the author), after the completion of privatization, and also in view of changes in tax policy, the prices of transacted land for agricultural use can decline within 3 years (2014) by up to 30%. It is probable that the demand will be focused on transactions with land for speculative and investment purposes, as, according to world trends, the average increase in value of investments in land in a time of economic crisis is higher (6-7% p.a.) as compared to investments in stock markets (1.8-2.2%). The article has been processed as part of VZ MSM 6046070906 "The economy of resources of Czech agriculture and their effective utilization within multifunctional agricultural-food systems†.


In a multi-user environment with a large shared database, it is necessary that the security of data in the database is considered. To enforce security of data in a database, we start with an access control model. The model defines which users have what privileges to which information. There are three different types of access control policies: discretionary access control (DAC), mandatory access control (MAC), and role-based access control (RBAC). A discretionary access control specifies users' privileges to different system resources, including their ability to transfer their privileges to other users. In a mandatory access control, the access of data by users is based on authorized security clearance levels. MAC policies are of concern in multi-level databases, which are databases that contain information of different security levels. A role-based access control manages access to data based on a user's responsibility within an organization. Each role has an associated collection of privileges. This collection is automatically transferred to a subject who plays the role.
Most of the current access control models in database systems are developed for relational databases. Since the object-oriented database (OODB) model differs substantially from the relational model, results obtained for relational databases as well as models proposed for relational databases are not necessarily applicable to OODB systems. Amongst other issues, inheritance and the encapsulation of methods in the database information pose challenges in designing new authorization models for OODB systems. It is therefore necessary to extend the research on secure databases to include the O-O model. This thesis presents a study of security in OODB systems. Access control protection forms a substantial component of this work.
Principles from the O-O model are used to express rules for computing implicit privileges from explicit ones. It requires an efficient mechanism which evaluates implicit rights each time an access is requested. A cryptographic mechanism which is based on unique and secure access keys for each entity (object or class) is proposed. The proposal ensures that access keys for implicit authorizations were derived from related entities by applying pseudo-random and SIFF functions during query processing. The security of the system is based on the difficulty of predicting the output of pseudo-random functions and finding extra collisions for SIFF functions. Both are known to be computationally difficult.
Another major requirement for the access control model is the implementation of content-dependent authorization. The content-dependent authorization incorporates the value of attributes in the access control model. The accessible data are determined by checking the requested attributes. A content-dependent access control model based on views is proposed. Rules for computing an implicit authorization from the explicit ones are also formulated.
Finally, a new design approach for a secure multi-level OODB system based on views is proposed. The central idea is to provide the user with a multi-level view derived from a single-level secure OODB system. Hence the database operations performed on the multi-level views are decomposed into a set of operations on the single-level objects. They can then be implemented on any conventional mandatory security kernel.


One of the major problems of data mining systems is the identification of classes, categories, and concepts. We introduce a new framework for categorization which is based on the concept of "pattern conception" (a term that may be contrasted to "pattern recognition", "pattern matching", "pattern perception", etc.). There are important distinctions between pattern conception and the mainstream pattern recognition models; furthermore, these distinctions lead us to new categorization information-processing architectures. The first major distinction tells us that there is more than one correct conception for each individual pattern. Each pattern may have numerous segmentations and descriptions which are fundamentally distinct but equally correct in a deep sense. Another striking distinction of pattern conception is the capability to "see as", in which context will guide the interpretation of data such as that one object may be seen as if it were another type of object, or as if it were occupying the position or role of other objects. A final and related distinction is that there should be a 'relativity theory' view of concepts and categories, in which concepts are both dejlned by their relations to other concepts and activated from the spread of activation of other concepts. In this work, we analyze how these distinctions appear under three distinct application domains: (I) the notorious case of Bongard problems; (ii) letter-string analogies; and (iii) the game of chess (viewed as a pattern analysis problem). It may be concluded that data mining methods must be able to handle these distinctions if they are to be effective at pattern conception, and, thus, to a wide class of information categorization problems.


Abstract This paper presents a general approach to automatically compile e-learning models to planning, allowing us to easily generate plans, in the form of learning designs, by using existing domain-independent planners. The idea is to compile, first, a course defined in a standard e-learning language into a planning domain, and, second, a file containing students learning information into a planning problem. We provide a common compilation and extend it to three particular approaches that cover a full spectrum of planning paradigms, which increases the possibilities of using current planners: (i) hierarchical, (ii) including PDDL (Planning Domain Definition Language) actions with conditional effects and (iii) including PDDL durative actions. The learning designs are automatically generated from the plans and can be uploaded, and subsequently executed, by learning management platforms. We also provide an extensive analysis of the e-learning metadata specification required for planning, and the pros and cons on the knowledge engineering procedures used in each of the three compilations. Finally, we include some qualitative and quantitative experimentation of the compilations in several domain-independent planners to measure its scalability and applicability.


A decentralized model reference adaptive controller (MRAC) for a class of large-scale systems with unmatched interconnections is developed in this paper. A novel reference model is proposed for the class of large-scale systems considered and a decentralized, full-state feedback adaptive controller is developed for each subsystem of the large-scale system. It is shown that with the proposed decentralized adaptive controller, the states of the subsystems can asymptotically track the desired reference trajectories. To substantiate the performance of the proposed controller, a large web processing line, which mimics most of the features of an industrial web process line, is considered for experimental study. Extensive experiments were conducted with the proposed decentralized adaptive controller and an often used decentralized industrial proportional-integral (PI) controller. A representative sample of the comparative experimental results is shown and discussed


13.53◦ (95% CI: 13.28◦–13.78◦, 5th–95th percentile: 10.4◦–16.9◦). In 22 fetuses with facial clefts (median gestational age: 23 weeks, range: 19+1–29+6 weeks) the mean MNM was 20.6◦ (95% CI: 18.2◦–23.0◦). In all fetuses (n = 3) with intact alveolar ridge the MNM angle was normal. In 13 fetuses with unilateral interruption of the alveolar ridge the MNM angle was above the 95th percentile in 62% (n = 8) and normal in 38% (n = 5) of the cases. In all (n = 6) fetuses with bilateral interruption of the alveolar ridge the MNM angle was above the 95th percentile. Conclusions: The MNM angle can quantify the amount of maxillary protrusion in fetuses with facial clefts. A MNM angle above the 95th percentile indicates an (at least unilateral) interruption of the alveolar ridge.


Sleep-wake disturbances, particularly insomnia, are among the most prevalent and distressing symptoms experienced by patients with cancer. As a result of extensive interdisciplinary research conducted since 2000, cognitive-behavioral therapy now is considered the standard of care for the treatment of insomnia in the general population and also has been upgraded to "likely to be effective" in the Oncology Nursing Society Putting Evidence Into Practice weight of evidence category. Cognitive-behavioral therapy is a multicomponent psychological and behavioral treatment designed to eliminate the perpetuating factors of insomnia. The most frequently used strategies are stimulus control, sleep restriction and relaxation therapies, paradoxical intention, sleep hygiene, and cognitive restructuring. Although this insomnia treatment recommendation has been well publicized, the nursing literature has not effectively translated the theories and principles of cognitive-behavioral therapy into practical guidelines or considerations for use by oncology staff nurses and advanced practitioners. This article attempts to demystify cognitive-behavioral therapy and provide nurses at different levels of practice a foundation from which to evaluate and potentially deliver this promising insomnia intervention.


Approximately one-third of orchid species offer no reward to their floral visitors and instead trick them into pollination. Typically, these deceptive systems have low visitation and fruiting rates because pollinators can learn to avoid non-rewarding species. Consequently, pollination ecology studies in these species often require long hours in the field to witness relatively few floral visitations relative to rewarding plants. Cypripedium parviflorum is a food-deceptive orchid with a pouch-like trap that temporarily imprisons pollinators. To escape, pollinators exert pressure on the stigma which facilitates pollination and widens the escape holes located near each anther. This study reports the use of a ribbon and clip to block the escape passageway of this species in order to retain and observe visiting insects. The device was tested in a large population and was shown to increase significantly the probability of observing floral visitors by nearly three-fold. Ten species of hymenopteran visitors in the families Andrenidae, Apidae, Halictidae and Megachilidae were observed, with two female Adrena tridens and one male Adrena perplexa successfully removing pollen. Insect visitation to the orchids occurred during the first half of the flowering period and was significantly associated with warm, clear days. © 2009 The Linnean Society of London, Botanical Journal of the Linnean Society, 2009, 160, 1–10.


We are living in the era of internet and smartphones. Almost everybody in developing countries has at least one smartphone or connection to the internet through any other mobile device. So developing mobile software for the people or government is a big chance to make people life easier. The time has become a very important factor for which you can't even pay for extra time, so making life easier for those people who don't have time is big chance not losing it. All the data that are generated from the software or services is the best match to store those data on cloud, with which we don't care about privacy and protection, availability to access them, manipulation of them and so on. In this paper, we describe how this newly emerged paradigm of cloud computing can be helpful for mobile e-Governance. Using cloud of course has a cost, but if you can't give the same conditions that cloud gives, it is best choice to store the data on cloud. If we use cloud you don't have to pay for all the IT staff who cares about the data, servers, databases, networks, with those money you can pay for cloud services. We start by an introduction about the cloud and e-Government, continuing with what the benefits and challenges of the e-Government and cloud are computing, the relationship of e-Government and cloud computing, mobile e-Governance in cloud and some examples of some countries that are using mobile e-Government in cloud. Keywords: e-Government, e-Governance, Cloud Computing, Mobile, Data Storage


Abstract Growth of an andesitic lava dome at Soufriere Hills Volcano, Montserrat, beginning in November 1995, caused instability of a hydrothermally altered flank of the volcano. Catastrophic failure occurred on 26 December 1997, 14 months after the instability was first recognized. Two months before failure a dome lobe had extruded over the unstable area and by 25 December 1997 this had a volume of 113 x 106m3. At 03:01 (local time) the flank rocks and some dome talus failed and generated a debris avalanche (volume 46 x 106 m3). Between 35 and 45 x 106 m3 of the dome then collapsed, generating a violent pyroclastic density current that devastated 10 km2 of southern Montserrat. The failure of the flank and dome formed two adjacent bowl-shaped collapse depressions. The most intense activity lasted about 11.6 minutes. The hummocky debris avalanche deposit is composed of a mixture of domains of heterolithic breccia. The pyroclastic density current had an estimated peak velocity of 80-90 ms-1, and minimum flux of 108 kgs1. The current was largely erosional on land with most deposition out at sea. Destructive effects included removal of houses, trees and large vehicles, and formation of a scoured surface blackened by a thin (3-4 mm) layer of tar. Two discrete depositional units formed from the pyroclastic density current, each with a lower coarse-grained layer and an upper fine-grained stratified layer. These deposits are overlain by an ashfall layer related to buoyant lofting of the current. Flank failure is attributed to loading of hydrothermally weakened rocks by the dome. The generation of the pyroclastic density current is attributed to failure and explosive disintegration of the dome, involving release and violent expansion of gases initially at high pore pressures.


Chromobacterium violaceum infections are highly fatal and rarely reported in domestic animals. This report describes a fatal case of C. violaceum septicemia in a 7-day-old female beef calf. The calf had necrosuppurative omphalophlebitis, necrotizing interstitial pneumonia, necrosuppurative hepatitis and splenitis, anterior uveitis with hypopyon, suppurative polyarthritis, and disseminated hemorrhagic meningitis with multifocal necrotizing encephalitis. Histologically, clusters of gram-negative bacilli were found in many of the lesions. C. violaceum was isolated in high numbers from the lungs, liver, spleen, carpus, and in pure culture from the cerebrospinal fluid. To our knowledge, this is the first case report of chromobacteriosis in a calf.


China's approach to developing a world-class science system includes a vigorous set of programmes to attract back Chinese researchers who have overseas training and work experience. No analysis is available to show the performance of these mobile researchers. This article attempts to close part of this gap. Using a novel bibliometric approach, we estimate the stocks of overseas Chinese and returnees from the perspective of their publication activities, albeit with some limitations. We show that the share of overseas Chinese scientists in the USA is considerably larger than that in the European Union. We also show that Chinese returnees publish higher impact work and continue to publish more and at the international level than domestic counterparts. Returnees not only tend to publish more, but they are instrumental in linking China into the global network. Indeed, returnees actively co-publish with researchers in their former host system, showing the importance of scientific social capital. Future research will examine the impact of length of stay, among other factors, on such impact and integration.


As the potential range of applications for sensor networks expands, the need for security mechanisms grows. Security relevant problems are limited mostly to areas such as key distribution and cryptographic algorithms, due to severe resource constraints in wireless sensor networks. Even if it is not possible to cover all threats, a security architecture for sensor networks should provide mechanisms on several levels, in order to maximize the obstacles for attackers. This paper presents an architecture that provides basic security components for wireless sensor networks on multiple system levels. Since robust and strong security features require powerful nodes, the security architecture uses a heterogeneous sensor network. In addition to a large number of simple (cheap) sensor nodes providing the actual sensor tasks, there are a few powerful nodes (cluster nodes) that implement the required security features. The basic component of the architecture offers authenticated broadcasts to allow recipients to authenticate the sender of a message. On the basis of this basic component, our security architecture provides a key management, used for exchange of secret keys among nodes. In order to bind nodes to their neighborhood, keys and their owners are linked together. This ensures a certain grade of location relationship. To protect the sensor network against routing attacks, the security architecture includes a probabilistic multi-path routing protocol, which supports the key management and the authenticated broadcasts. The security system also provides functions to detect forged sensor data by verifying data reports en-route. In order to evaluate the efficiency of our security architecture, we simulated different sizes of sensor networks. Furthermore, the security architecture is successfully evaluated in a real test environment with two different kinds of sensor boards. Key–Words: wireless sensor network, security architecture, key management, energy efficiency, multi-path routing, en-route filtering


The conditional mutual information I(X; Y|Z) measures the average information that X and Y contain about each other given Z. This is an important primitive in many learning problems including conditional independence testing, graphical model inference, causal strength estimation and time-series problems. In several applications, it is desirable to have a functional purely of the conditional distribution py|x, z rather than of the joint distribution pX, Y, Z. We define the potential conditional mutual information as the conditional mutual information calculated with a modified joint distribution pY|X, ZqX, Z, where qX, Z is a potential distribution, fixed airport. We develop K nearest neighbor based estimators for this functional, employing importance sampling, and a coupling trick, and prove the finite k consistency of such an estimator. We demonstrate that the estimator has excellent practical performance and show an application in dynamical system inference.


In this essay, the authors describe the results of a study that measured the use of English and French as perceived by one group of female managers and employees working in logistics and global supply chain management positions in Francophone Africa, Women in Logistics-Africa. The goal was to determine if "mandating English as the common corporate language," sometimes called Englishnization (Neeley, 2012), has attained a significant presence within corporations operating in Francophone Africa. The 124 subjects from 94 companies in Francophone Africa, responded to a 14-question survey; 24 subjects participated in follow-up interviews. The results indicate that English is highly valued among the vast majority of respondents and is mostly used in exchanges between the French-speaking employees and their English-speaking bosses, clients, and suppliers. French, however, remains the dominant workplace language used overall as the 124 French-speaking professionals communicate almost exclusively in French with co-workers and French-speaking clients and suppliers. Consequently, English is not always the business lingua franca as claimed by Neeley (2012, 2017), and other Business English as a Lingua Franca (BELF) researchers (see e.g., Kankaanranta et al., 2015, 2018). Instead, the findings in the current study add to an increasing pool of evidence of multilingual workplace settings, even among multinational corporations where English is the official language (Ehrenreich, 2009; Janssens & Steyaert, 2014; Sacco, 2017, 2019a).


To extend the research on Gibrat's law in transformational countries, this article uses quantile regression to test whether the Law holds for Chinese listed companies in six industries from 1997 to 2003. Results indicate that Gibrat's law demonstrated a behaviour dependent on the length examined. Although it was rejected in four out of six industries for the 6-year period, it received strong support in five industries year by year, which implied that size convergence was a slow process in China. Results also show that Gibrat's law is conditional on industrial characters. It received unbalanced support from different industries, suggesting that the industries examined had distinct growth trajectories.


Abstract Background Young people may have elevated risk for poorer mental health during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, yet longitudinal studies documenting this impact are lacking. This study assessed changes in mental health and help-seeking since COVID-19 restrictions in young Australians, including gender differences. Methods Data were drawn from a recent subsample (n = 443; 60% female; Mage = 22.0) of a prospective cohort originally recruited in secondary school to complete annual surveys. The subsample completed an additional COVID-19 survey during COVID-19 restrictions (May–June 2020), which was compared to responses from their latest annual survey (August 2019–March 2020). Mixed effect models with time and gender as the primary predictors were conducted for: (i) scores on the Patient Health Questionnaire Depression 9-item (PHQ-9) and Generalised Anxiety Disorder 7-item (GAD-7) modules assessed before and during COVID-19 restrictions, and (ii) self-reported help-seeking from a health professional in February 2020, and the month preceding May–June 2020. Results Mean symptom scores increased from before to during COVID-19 restrictions on the PHQ-9 (coefficient: 1.29; 95% CI 0.72–1.86) and GAD-7 (0.78; 95% CI 0.26–1.31), but there was no increase in help-seeking over time (odds ratio 0.50; 95% CI 0.19–1.32). There was no evidence of differential changes by gender. Conclusions This study found increases in depression and anxiety symptoms but not greater help-seeking among young Australian adults during the first wave of the pandemic. Increasing availability and awareness of accessible treatment options and psychoeducation is critical, as well as further research into risk and protective factors to help target treatment to this vulnerable age group.


Wireless local area networks (WLAN) are rapidly becoming a core part of network access. Supporting user mobility, more specifically session continuation in changing network access points, is becoming an integral part of wireless network services. This is because of the popularity of emerging real-time streaming applications that can be commonly used when the user is mobile, such as voice-over-IP and Internet radio. However, mobility introduces a new set of problems in wireless environments because of handoffs between network access points (APs). The IEEE 802.11i security standard imposes an authentication delay long enough to hamper real-time applications. This chapter will provide a comprehensive study on fast authentication solutions found in the literature as well as the industry that address this problem. These proposals focus on solving the mentioned problem for intradomain handoff scenarios where the access points belong to the same administrative domain or provider. Interdomain roaming is also becoming common-place for wireless access. We need fast authentication solutions for these environments that are managed by independent administrative authorities. We detail such a solution that explores the use of local trust relationships to foster fast authentication. (Less)


Details: This work, for indeterminate solo string instrument, has received six international performances, including Samtida
Musik, Stockholm; York; Durham; Aviero, Portugal; and Baltimore, USA. The Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival
premiere was broadcast on BBC Radio 3 Hear and Now.

Portfolio: 1) songs only as sad as their listener (2006), for solo trombone. 2) I, purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips (2006),
for solo voice and live, computer-generated pitch material. 3) The Pleats of Matter (2007), for electric guitar with three outputs
and digital/analogue processing. 4)Programmes available on request.

Context: In this work the sonic surface is driven by physical states – the interface between the body of the player and the body
of the instrument, and physical gestures. The notation employs a detailed, multi-layered tablature that independently controls
the movement up/down the fingerboard, the spacing width of the fingers, the contact between fingers and strings, as well as the
actions of the bow and right hand. Because it is physical movement that is prescribed, the piece can be performed on a variety
of string instruments (any bowed, non-fretted instrument with at least four adjacent strings) and with a variety of scordature
(following a series of guidelines given in the score). The work is the first of a series of works employing idiomatic extended
tablature notations for a variety of instruments, including songs only as sad as their listener; I, purples, spat blood, laugh of
beautiful lips; and The Pleats of Matter. Each explores the possibilities of highly prescribed physical actions coupled with highly
indeterminate sonic results. A discussion of The Crutch of Memory can be found in Mieko Kanno, 'Prescriptive notation: limits
and challenges', Contemporary Music Review, vol.26, no.2, April 2007, pp.231–54; ISSN 0749-4467 (pp.249–53).


The genome of human parainfluenza virus type 3 (PIV3) is a single negative-sense RNA strand (vRNA) that is 15,463 nucleotides in length. A cDNA was constructed to encode an 898-nucleotide, internally deleted version of PIV3 vRNA, PIV3-CAT vRNA, in which the viral genes were replaced with the bacterial chloramphenicol acetyltransferase (CAT) reporter gene. The CAT gene was flanked in turn by sequences representing (i) nontranslated sequences of the first and last genes in the PIV3 genome, (ii) PIV3 gene-start and gene-end sequences, which are presumed to be transcription signals, and (iii) 3' extracistronic (leader) and 5' extracistronic (trailer) terminal regions of PIV3 vRNA. A second cDNA was constructed to encode the exact complement of PIV3-CAT vRNA; this positive-sense RNA, PIV3-CAT vcRNA, would correspond to the predicted replicative intermediate of PIV3-CAT vRNA. When synthesized in vitro by runoff transcription with T7 RNA polymerase and transfected separately into PIV3-infected cells, both PIV3-CAT vRNA and vcRNA were rescued with similar efficiencies; that is, they were expressed to yield CAT and were packaged into particles that could be used to infect fresh cells. Rescue of PIV3-CAT vRNA was strictly dependent on complementation by PIV3; PIV3 could not be replaced by respiratory syncytial virus or, unexpectedly, by a bovine strain of PIV3. Passage was blocked by prior incubation with neutralizing monoclonal antibodies specific to the PIV3 attachment protein. Also, during nine serial passages, the expression of CAT by PIV3-CAT vRNA increased more than 3,000-fold. These results indicated that the 3'-terminal 111 nucleotides and the 5'-terminal 115 nucleotides of PIV3 vRNA, which are present in PIV3-CAT vRNA, contained all of the cis-acting RNA sequences required for replication, gene expression, and transmission.


In recent years, many neural network models have been proposed for pattern classification, function approximation and regression problems. This paper presents an approach for classifying patterns from simplified NNs. Although the predictive accuracy of ANNs is often higher than that of other methods or human experts, it is often said that ANNs are practically "black boxes", due to the complexity of the networks. In this paper, we have an attempted to open up these black boxes by reducing the complexity of the network. The factor makes this possible is the pruning algorithm. By eliminating redundant weights, redundant input and hidden units are identified and removed from the network. Using the pruning algorithm, we have been able to prune networks such that only a few input units, hidden units and connections left yield a simplified network. Experimental results on several benchmarks problems in neural networks show the effectiveness of the proposed approach with good generalization ability.


The width-thickness ratio of the rotation capacity of the HSB800 steel flexural members are evaluated in this study. First of all, the properties of high-performance steel are analyzed from the tension coupon test - SS400, SM490, HSB800. By the result, high-performance steel have the three properties - the high yield ratio, the low modulus of elasticity strain-hardening, and the low strain at tension stress. The rotation capacity of the HSB800 steel flexural members are evaluated using F.E. program. By the F.E result, the HSB800 steel flexural members are not satisfied in the current code that rotation capacity, R>3 in compact section. Based in the experiment and theories, this study suggested limiting the width-thickness ratio of HSB800 steel satisfied in the current code. So, the limitation of width-thickness ratio of the HSB800 steel are conservative than the width-thickness ratio in the code.


The current working model for fibroblast growth factor receptor (FGFR) dimerization and activation requires the assembly of a ternary complex of fibroblast growth factor (FGF), FGFR, and heparin or heparan sulfate proteoglycan (HSPG) on the plasma membrane. The recent FGF2-FGFR1-heparin crystal structure provides a detailed but static view of the FGF-FGFR-heparin complex. However, the kinetics of ternary complex assembly has yet to be investigated. Here, we characterize FGF2, FGFR1, and heparin interactions using surface plasmon resonance (SPR). Binding constants for binary FGF2/FGFR1 (KD = 62 nM), FGF2/heparin (KD = 39 nM), and FGFR1/heparin (KD = 3.2 microM) interactions correlate to the magnitude of binding interface observed in the FGF2-FGFR1-heparin crystal structure. Interestingly, comparison of sensorgrams of sequential injections of FGF2 and FGFR1 and equimolar FGF2-FGFR1 injections onto a heparin neoproteoglycan surface demonstrates that FGF2 dramatically enhances the association of FGFR1 with heparin and leads us to propose a model for the stepwise assembly of a ternary FGF-FGFR-HSPG complex. The weak binding affinity of the FGFR1-heparin interaction suggests that in this model, FGFR and HSPG are unbound in the absence of FGF ligand. The availability of FGF results in formation of initial FGF-HSPG complexes, which promotes the rapid binding of FGFR and creates a ternary complex capable of undergoing dimerization and subsequent FGFR activation. In contrast, alternative models for the kinetic assembly of a ternary complex in which binary FGF-FGFR or FGFR-HSPG complexes are intermediates do not conform well with the experimental data.


In this paper, we empirically examine how export pioneers emerge and how they are related to product creators/innovators, utilizing a rich plant-product level dataset from the Korean manufacturing sector for the period of 1990-1998. Our analysis covers the process from the appearance of product creators as well as product imitators to the emergence of export pioneers. We find, first, that product imitators are larger, more productive and older than product creators. Second, most export pioneers are nevertheless found to be product creators. This result is largely due to the fact that almost all export pioneers export the products in the same year as product creation. Third, there are similarities as well as differences between product creators and export pioneers. Plants that are more productive or larger are more likely to become product creators as well as export pioneers. However, previous exporting experience positively affects the probability of export pioneering only, while plants' engagement in R&D positively affects the probability of product creation only. We discuss possible explanations for our main empirical results as well as their policy implications.


The shear instability of the nanoscrystalline 3C-SiC during nanometric cutting at a cutting speed of 100 m/s has been investigated using molecular dynamics simulation. The deviatoric stress in the cutting zone was found to cause sp3-sp2 disorder resulting in the local formation of SiC-graphene and Herzfeld-Mott transitions of 3C-SiC at much lower transition pressures than that required under pure compression. Besides explaining the ductility of SiC at 1500 K, this is a promising phenomenon in general nanoscale engineering of SiC. It shows that modifying the tetrahedral bonding of 3C-SiC, which would otherwise require sophisticated pressure cells, can be achieved more easily by introducing non-hydrostatic stress conditions.


Purpose: Voluntary deep inhalation breath hold (DIBH) technique help reduce the heart toxicity during radiation treatment of the left breast. We present the results of the first study performed to quantify the reproducibility of heart position and the heartdose in daily setup for voluntary DIBH patients. Method and Materials: Ten left breast patients undergoing treatment with voluntary DIBH were studied. Each patient had two CT scans, one with free breathing and one with voluntary DIBH, to evaluate the dose under these two conditions to the Heart, anterior most point of left anterior descending (LAD) coronary artery, and left Lung. At the treatment machine, daily and weekly KV orthogonal images were acquired using onboard imaging for each patient. Mosaiq™ software was used to register the full bony anatomy of thorax (including the spine, ribs, anterior chest wall and heart) with KV images to the planning DRRs. Once the patient is aligned on the treatment machine using bony anatomy registration, the difference between the bony anatomy registration and the heart registration is the daily heart position. These differences were transferred into treatment planning system to obtain the delivered dose.Results: The dosimetric evaluation shows clinically significant reduced dose to heart,lung, and LAD in the DIBH case compared to the free breathing case, as previous studies have shown. The weekly heart position shifts are in the order of few mm. Dosimetric evaluations for these shifts indicate that dose to the heart in the daily treatment with DIBH remains low. Conclusion: The setup and breath hold accuracy and the daily delivered dose to the heart was evaluated for voluntary DIBH breast patients. Results indicate a clear reduction of dose delivered to the heart throughout the treatment when voluntary DIBH technique is employed.


Hybrid integrated cascaded 1 times 4 electrooptic (EO) polymeric digital optical switches (DOSs) are proposed and demonstrated. The hybrid integration of passive polymer on the same chip with EO polymer can lower the overall device loss without affecting the EO effects. The cascaded DOS can be controlled by only two voltage signal sources without bias stabling mechanism. The device can be operated as a 2-bit reconfigurable switch. The switching voltage is around 15 V for single arm driving with reasonable extinction ratio (9~12 dB) and the loss is improved by ~2.5 dB. This device is ideal for implementing variable optical delay network


This paper investigates an efficient placement and chaining of Virtual Network Functions (VNFs) to provide cloud based IoT services with minimal resource usage cost. We take into account bandwidth capacity and link delay of network connection between clouds where VNFs are allocated and underlying IoT networks where sensors and IoT gateways are deployed. Regarding the constantly changing network dynamics, input traffic of service components is considered at the lower granularity level of messages based on the communication between each VNF and corresponding sensors via IoT gateways. From the algorithm perspective, the specific topology of multiple edge clouds is leveraged to improve the solution. In this paper, we present an NFV-based high-level architecture for a system that enables the deployment of IoT services across multiple edges and clouds. We formulate the VNF placement problem using a non-convex Integer Programming model. Taking into account different IoT topologies, we devise two algorithms for small- and large-scale networks to find the near optimal solution: i) a customized Markov approximation with two techniques, i.e., multi-start and batching, and a node ranking-based heuristic. Simulation and experimental results show that the proposed solution improves the cost up to 21% compared to state-of-the-art schemes.