The investigation of strongly hydrogen bonded solid state materials and the hydrogen transfer processes therein are the subject of the present work. Strong hydrogen bonds are found whenever the hydrogen bonded species compete for the hydrogen atom, and are thereby on the verge of showing hydrogen transfer. Consequently, the strongly hydrogen bonded solid state materials investigated in this work are synthesised by co-crystallising chemical compounds which have a similar affinity for the proton.
The molecular complexes of isonicotinamide with oxalic acid crystallise in two hydrogenous polymorphs and, upon substituting the acidic hydrogen for deuterium, in two deuterated polymorphs, neither being isostructural to the hydrogenous forms. This phenomenon is known as isotopomeric polymorphism and is rarely observed in molecular materials. The four polymorphic forms are found to exhibit different degrees of hydron transfer. The hydrogenous forms show strong hydrogen bonding between the acid and the pyridine base. The nature of these strong hydrogen bonds is characterised by combined X ray charge density and single crystal neutron diffraction studies and found to be covalent in nature. The covalent hydroxyl bonds are considerably elongated, to an extent that in one polymorph the hydrogen atom occupies a near central position in the strong hydrogen bond. The structural work has been complemented by ab-initio computational studies, using the plane wave and localised atomic orbital methods, to evaluate the nature and the dynamics of the strong hydrogen bonds, and to establish an energy scale for polymorphism. It is found that the atomic orbital calculations yield results in good agreement with the experiment, while the plane wave calculations fail to reproduce the experimental hydrogen bond geometries.
A strong electronic delocalisation is observed in the difference electron densities of strong acid – pyridine base hydrogen bonds. The major contribution to the delocalisation is found to originate from the nitrogen lone pair density which in this type of strong hydrogen bond is found to be observed to low experimental resolutions in standard X-ray diffraction experiments. As a consequence, such hydrogen bonds are susceptible to misinterpretation, and can be misinterpreted as hydrogen bonds with a disordered hydrogen, altering the descriptive character of materials significantly from being neutral to being ionic. It is shown that a careful examination of the difference electron densities, with the knowledge of the presence of the nitrogen lone pair density, allows a reasonably accurate determination of nuclear hydrogen positions from X-ray diffraction experiments alone.
The hydrogen transfer behaviour in a series of strongly hydrogen bonded materials has been studied. For the molecular complexes of pentachlorophenol with the series of dimethylpyridines, a correlation is established between the dissociation constants determined in solution and the degree of hydrogen transfer from phenol to the pyridine bases in the solid state. The influence of additional strong and weak hydrogen bonding interactions in the vicinity of the strong hydrogen bonds on the hydrogen transfer behaviour is rationalised. Similar studies have been carried out on the molecular complexes of oxalic acid and fumaric acid with the dimethylpyridines, and on the molecular complexes of pentachlorophenol with 1,4-diazabicyclo[2.2.2]octane. The design approach leading to these materials and the hydrogen transfer behaviour observed in these materials is critically analysed.


9 pigs of a live weight at the beginning of the experiment of 33 kg received in 3 consecutive series of experiments (3 animals/group) a basic barley ration of 1.0-1.2 kg per animal and day. In groups 1 to 9 the following supplements were given: 1 = without N-supplement, 2 = 10.5 g urea, 3 = 79 g dried skim milk, 4 = 11 g urea, 5 = without N-supplement, 6 = 110 g horse bean coarse meal, 7 = without N-supplement, 8 = 95 g dried skim milk, 9 = 120 g horse bean coarse meal. In groups 1-6 the ration was supplemented with 150-165 g DM partly hydrolysed straw meal per animal and day. After 20 days the animals received a single dosis of 0.5 g/kg0.75 15N-urea (72.1 atom-% 15N-excess) with the morning meal of the first day of the experiment. During the four days of the experiment groups 1-6, due to the straw meal supplement, excreted significantly higher N-amounts than the corresponding groups 7-9. In comparison with the first day of the experiment (1 h after the morning meal) urea concentration in the blood decreased to the following percentage in the sequence 1-9: 64; 65; 77; 54; 64; 73; 82; 88; 84 on the second day of the experiment (1 h before the evening meal. Between the excretion of 15N-excess in faeces (y = mg) during the four days of the experiment and the concentration of urea in the blood (x = mmol/l) there was the following significant negative correlation: y = -40.1 X +340.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)


OBJECT
The authors used a fiber dissection technique to describe the temporal stem and explain the tendency of malignant tumors to spread within both the frontal and temporal lobes. The authors focused on the morphological characteristics and course of various fasciculi of the temporal stem, including the uncinate fascicle, occipitofrontal fascicle, anterior commissure, loop of the optic radiations (Meyer loop), and the ansa peduncularis.

METHODS
Eight previously frozen, formalin-fixed human brains were dissected under an operating microscope using the fiber dissection technique described by Klingler. Lateral, inferior, and medial approaches were made. Cross-sectional 3D MR images obtained in 10 patients without brain lesions demonstrated that fibers of the temporal stem, which were intermingled together in various ways, curved laterally within the basal forebrain. Various pathological entities affecting the temporal stem are described and discussed.

RESULTS
The uncinate fascicle has 3 portions: a ventral extension, an intermediary segment called the isthmus, and a dorsal segment. The inferior occipitofrontal fasciculus is a layer of more superficial white matter that appeared to be superior to the uncinate fasciculus. A short ventral portion of the radiations of the corpus callosum was sometimes noted to run ventrally to enter the temporal stem and to reach both temporal lobes.

CONCLUSIONS
To the authors' knowledge, a detailed anatomy of the temporal stem has not been previously described in the literature. The unique anatomy of the temporal stem provides a route for tumor spread between the frontal and temporal lobes.


If you never thought that language could provide hours of entertainment, these "games" will definitely change your mind -- and sharpen your brain! There's the most unusual Lexicon ever, with almost no definitions, but lots of unusual facts about each word's structure -- including which common word is the most difficult to spell. And delve into fun sidebars that explain surprising aspects of language from "Pronunciation Variants" to ways you can use the same word several times in a single sentence.


(I)The meaning of the word philosophy, "love of wisdom," the dominant interest of Socrates, the developments of Greek philosophy in Epicureanism and Stoicism, Kant's reliance on the practical reason as a clue to reality—all justify the direction of attention in this essay from the abstract theoretical to the concrete practical aspects of thought. Not that the two can or ought to be separated from, or opposed to one another; for human personality is a unity, and theory and practice must act and react the one on the other. The familiar saying: "More harm is wrought for want of thought than even want of heart," indicates that in moral activity under-standing of consequences is no less necessary than goodness of intention or motive. The preacher who declared that he was an Agnostic in mind, and a Christian in heart, if he really knew himself and was not deceiving himself with a rhetorical phrase, was in a perilous and unsatisfactory state of mental equilibrium.


It is well known that hyperspectral images (HSI) contain rich spatial-spectral contextual information, and how to effectively combine both spectral and spatial information using DNN for HSI classification has become a new research hotspot. Compared with CNN with square kernels, GCN have exhibited exciting potential to model spatial contextual structure and conduct flexible convolution on arbitrarily irregular image regions. However, current GCN only using first-order spectral-spatial signatures can result in boundary blurring and isolated misclassification. To address these, we first designed the graphbased second-order pooling (GSOP) operation to obtain contextual nodes information in non-Euclidean space for GCN. Further, we proposed a novel multi-stream hybridized convolutional network (MSHCNet) with combination of first and second order statistics in Euclidean/non-Euclidean spaces to learn and fuse multi-view complementary information to segment HSIs. Specifically, our MSHCNet adopted four parallel streams, which contained G-stream, utilizing the irregular correlation between adjacent land covers in terms of first-order graph in nonEuclidean space; C-stream, adopting convolution operator to learn regular spatial-spectral features in Euclidean space; Nstream, combining first and second order features to learn representative and discriminative regular spatial-spectral features of Euclidean space; S-stream, using GSOP to capture boundary correlations and obtain graph representations from all nodes in graphs of non-Euclidean space. Besides, these feature representations learned from four different streams were fused to integrate the multi-view complementary information for HSI classification. Finally, we evaluated our proposed MSHCNet on three hyperspectral datasets, and experimental results demonstrated that our method significantly outperformed stateof-the-art eight methods.


The diffusion of silicon has been studied in ^100& GaAs implanted with 1310 40-keV Si ions/cm. The Si concentration profiles were measured by secondary-ion mass spectrometry and nuclear resonance broadening techniques and the defect distributions by the Rutherford backscattering spectrometry channeling technique. The implanted samples were subjected to annealing in argon atmosphere in the temperature range 650 °C–850 °C. Two independent silicon diffusion mechanisms were observed. Concentration independent diffusion, observed as a broadening of the initial implanted distribution, is very slow and is assigned to Si atoms diffusing interstitially. Concentration dependent diffusion with low solubility and extending deep into the sample is quantitatively explained by diffusion via vacancies of Si atoms in the Ga and As sublattices. Diffusion coefficients together with carrier concentration as a function of Si concentration are given at different temperatures. The solid solubility of Si in GaAs has been determined and an exponential temperature dependence observed. An estimate of the amount of Si atoms residing on either Ga or As sites and the amount of SiGa 1 -SiAs 2 pairs is given. Finally, a fast method is presented for solving the diffusion equation numerically. @S0163-1829 ~97!03331-6#


This chapter was invited by the NSPCC for the Reader Fragile: Handle with Care. It outlines the impact of domestic violence
upon babies and young infants and the role of health care professionals in relation to support and protection. I also appear on
the accompanying video Fragile: Handle with Care (2001) talking about domestic violence. The Reader and Video form part of
the NSPCC training materials Fragile: Handle with Care (2001), focused on protecting babies under 18 months of age. It is
specifically aimed at health care professionals and is a widely used child protection training resource.


With more than 11 million unlawfully present immigrants living in the United States in 2014, a recent surge of migrants from violence-stricken countries, and a painfully slow economic recovery, states are rightfully concerned about the impact on their economy, culture and communities. In most matters of economic and cultural import, absent any discrimination, states make their own rules. But not so with immigration. The impact of unlawful immigration on state economies and communities is real, but jurisprudence over the last 150 years has tied the hands of state legislatures attempting to address this impact. I will argue that keeping states out of the immigration law enforcement business is wise public policy. I will examine the role of states in the enforcement of immigration law in light of a string of recent federal cases addressing state and local immigration enforcement laws. I will critique the questionable state justifications for new enforcement powers and explain how they already have adequate powers to protect their job markets and secure their communities against the potential impact of unlawful immigration. I will conclude with brief recommendations for ongoing public policy on immigration law enforcement.


An introduction and resources to publishing with Florida Online Journals for UF scholars. Florida OJ is an open source digitial publishing platform produced by the Public Knowledge Project. UF scholars have access and technical support via FALSC.


Urban driving is a demanding task for autonomous vehicles as it requires the development and integration of several challenging capabilities, including high-level route planning, interaction with other vehicles, complex maneuvers, and ultra-reliability. In this paper, we present a reasoning framework for an autonomous vehicle navigating through urban environments. Our approach combines route-level planning, context-sensitive local decision making, and sophisticated motion planning to produce safe, intelligent actions for the vehicle. We provide examples from an implementation on an autonomous passenger vehicle that has driven over 3000 autonomous kilometers and competed in, and won, the Urban Challenge.


Abstract Settling nitrogen fluxes intercepted by sediment traps on the mid-slope and in the deep basin off Somalia show a consistent annual range of 3.4 ± 0.2‰ in their stable isotope composition. Seasonal minima in δ15N of 3.7‰ are associated with the moderate N fluxes derived from coastally upwelled water, which is rapidly carried offshore along eddy margins passing over the mooring sites during the SW monsoon (June–September). Coastal upwelling, offshore transport and deep wind mixing cease at the end of the SW monsoon, leading to enhanced utilization of the up to 20 μM of NO3− in the photic layer, maxima in the N export flux, and an increasing δ15N by Rayleigh distillation. Yet as stratification develops, nutrient exhaustion follows and export production collapses as the δ15N increases to over 7‰. Cyanobacterial N2 fixation probably diminishes the δ15N by 0.4–1.6‰ during the autumn intermonsoon (November–December) when settling N fluxes are lowest. Nutrient utilization remains high during the NE monsoon (January–March), when nutrient entrainment by deep wind mixing results in enhanced N export with maxima in δ15N of up to 7.4‰. Annual N fluxes have virtually the same δ15N of 6.0‰ in all traps despite considerable differences in both N flux and δ15N between the traps during the year and at different depths. In comparison with the annual δ15N of 6.0‰ arriving on the sea floor, core-top sediments are enriched by +0.6‰ on the upper slope (at 487 m) increasing to +2.9‰ in the deep basin (at 4040 m), whereas the N sediment burial efficiency declines from about 17% to 3%. It appears that the extent of oxic decomposition at the sediment-water interface is the most likely cause of such isotope enrichment. Similar positive gradients in δ15N with bottom depth have been reported from other continental margin transects and are generally attributed to increased nutrient utilization in the photic ocean with distance offshore. As for Somalia, nitrogen isotope fractionation as a result of oxic decomposition on the bottom rather than nutrient utilization at the ocean surface may account for the observed increase of sedimentary δ15N down continental margins in general.


This study presents options for a national disaster risk financing strategy in Indonesia, drawing heavily on international experience. The study discusses a series of complementary options for a national disaster risk financing strategy, based on a preliminary fiscal risk analysis and a review of the current budget management of natural disasters in Indonesia. It benefits from the international experience of the World Bank, which has assisted several countries in the design and implementation of sovereign catastrophe risk financing strategies. The rehabilitation and reconstruction fund is the main budget instrument for the Government of Indonesia (GoI) to finance public post-disaster expenditures, but it is under-capitalized. This study presents an optimal combination of risk-retention and risk transfer instruments that could help the GoI increase its immediate financial response capacity against natural disasters and better protect its fiscal balance. Building on the three-tier risk layering approach promoted by the World Bank and the preliminary fiscal risk assessment analysis, the following financial strategy could be considered by the GoI. This strategy would provide the GoI with access to immediate liquidity in the aftermath of a disaster at a competitive cost. The strategy would allow the GoI to access up to US$1.8 billion liquidity in the aftermath of a disaster in order to finance immediate post-disaster expenditures, such as grants for livelihood and low income housing reconstruction. Preliminary disaster fiscal risk assessment analysis shows that this would protect the GoI against disasters occurring every 100 years. The implementation of a national disaster risk financing strategy would require significant institutional capacity building.


Nature™ Inc. describes the increasingly dominant way of thinking about environmental policy and biodiversity conservation in the early twenty-first century. Nature is, and of course has long been, 'big business', especially through the dynamics of extracting from, polluting and conserving it. As each of these dynamics seems to have become more intense and urgent, the capitalist mainstream is seeking ways to off-set extraction and pollution and find (better) methods of conservation, while increasing opportunities for the accumulation of capital and profits. This has taken Nature™ Inc. to new levels, in turn triggering renewed attention from critical scholarship. The contributions to this Debate section all come from a critical perspective and have something important to say about the construction, workings and future of Nature™ Inc. By discussing the incorporation of trademarked nature and connecting what insights the contributions bring to the debate, we find that there might be what we call an intensifying dialectic between change and limits influencing the relations between capitalism and nature. Our conclusion briefly points to some of the issues and questions that this dialectic might lead to in future research on neoliberal conservation and market-based environmental policy.


The Location-to-Service Translation Protocol (LoST) describes an XML-
based protocol for mapping service identifiers and geospatial or civic
location information to service contact Uniform Resource Locators
(URLs). LoST servers can be located anywhere but a placement closer to
the end host, e.g., in the access network, is desireable. Such a LoST
server placement provides benefits in disaster situations with
intermittent network connectivity regarding the resiliency of
emergency service communication. This document describes how a LoST
client can discover a LoST server using the Dynamic Host Configuration
Protocol (DHCP).


This tutorial presents the holistic modeling concept in the context of metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect-transistors (MOSFETs). First, the standard MOSFET modeling approaches will be comparatively discussed. Subsequently, several factors impacting the operation of MOSFETs will be explained in terms of their physical origins and their modeling, as already undertaken in the literature. These factors include process variations, time-based degradation, as well as extreme environmental conditions, such as low or high temperatures and ionizing radiation. Subsequently, the need for considering these phenomena in joint configurations is demonstrated through experimental data. Finally, an implementation strategy for holistic modeling will be proposed by introducing 'extreme corners', which represent the combinations of conventional process corners with the mentioned factors at various values of interest.


Abstract: The incidence, prevalence, and hospitalization rates associated with heart failure (HF) are projected to increase substantially in the world. Among all medications used clinically to treat HF, valsartan (VAL) and spironolactone (SPL) have been shown to reduce morbidity and mortality. Recently, a novel cardiac gene cardiotrophin-1 (CT-1) has been shown to play a crucial role in the pathogenesis of HF. However, the ability of VAL and SPL to modulate the expression of CT-1 has not been investigated yet. Therefore, healthy and isoproterenol (ISO)-induced hypertrophy adult male Wistar albino rats were treated with either VAL or SPL for 14 days. Thereafter, cardiac markers of cardiotoxicity and hypertrophy, creatine kinase, heart weight/body weight ratio, and atrial natriuretic peptide mRNA levels were measured. In addition, CT-1 mRNA and protein levels were determined by real-time polymerase chain reaction and Western blot analysis. Our results showed that the increases in all HF markers, creatine kinase, heart weight/body weight ratio, and atrial natriuretic peptide mRNA levels in ISO-treated rats were significantly restored to their normal levels by VAL and SPL. In addition, induction of cardiac hypertrophy by ISO caused remarkable induction in CT-1 mRNA and protein expression levels by approximately 3.5- and 3-fold, respectively. Importantly, VAL and SPL significantly decreased the induction of CT-1 gene at the mRNA and protein levels in heart hypertrophied rats. On the other hand, treatment of cardiac–derived rat myoblast H9c2 cells with VAL and SPL significantly decreased angiotensin II–induced CT-1 mRNA levels through transcriptional mechanism, as demonstrated by the effect of transcription inhibitor, actinomycin D. In conclusion, VAL and SPL exhibited their cardioprotective effect through inhibiting the expression of CT-1 gene in cardiac hypertrophied rats.


ABSTRACT Background: Short stature (stunting) is a condition of chronic nutritional problems that results in failure of growth in children under five who only appear after the age of 24 months. This condition is caused by a lack of nutritional intake for a long time and a lack of knowledge of the mother so that the golden period is not realized in children at the age of 0-24 months. Health education as a prevention effort has a positive impact on changes in maternal knowledge and children's food intake (energy and protein). This study aimed to analyze the effectiveness of health education on mother's knowledge and food intake among stunting children in South Lampung, Lampung. Subjects and Method: This was an experimental study using a one group pretest-posttest design. This study was conducted in the working area of Sukadami community health center, South Lampung, from August to November 2019. The sample was 52 mothers who had stunted children aged 2-5 years and lived together. The dependent variables were maternal knowledge and food intake (energy and protein). The independent variable was maternal education. Maternal knowledge data was measured using a questionnaire and data on children's food intake was measured using a 24 hours food recall questionnaire. Data were analyzed using the Wilcoxon test. Results: Health education was improving maternal knowledge (Mean= 15.6; p<0.001); increasing energy intake (Mean= 13.2; p <0.001), and increasing protein intake (Mean= 21.5; p<0.001), and they were statistically significant. Conclusion: Health education is proven to have an effect on maternal knowledge and food intake (energy and protein) of stunting children in the working area of Sukadami community health center, South Lampung. Keywords: health education, stunting, food intake, maternal knowledge Correspondence: Dian Isti Angraini. Faculty of Medicine Universitas Lampung, Bandar Lampung, Indonesia. DOI: https://doi.org/10.26911/the7thicph.03.07


The ability for mobile devices to hold a growing amount of personal data, credits on digital portfolios, etc. increases the risks due to data leaks. Therefore, the need to improve the security in such devices has become paramount. Guided by this goal, in this paper we present an approach to identify at runtime whether an operation carried out in the device is normal (benign) or abnormal (malicious). For this, we monitor the previous behaviour of the user. An application has been created that collects data relating to the user's data traffic (such as wifi downloaded bytes) in the background, allowing us to establish whether a new operation on the device is in line with previous ones. This gives life to a new kind of security enforcement on the device. The experiments were performed by collecting data taken from Android devices and have shown that anomalous operations can be detected with a high probability.


The semi-preparative biosynthesis of photochrome transmembrane protein bacteriorhodopsin (output 8-10 mg), labeled with deuterium on functionally important amino acid residues - [2,3,4,5,6- 2 H 5 ]phenylalanine, [3,5- 2 H 2 ]tyrosine, and [2,4,5,6,7- 2 H 5 ]tryptophan was carried out with using a photo-organotrophic halobacterium Halobacterium halobium . The protein was isolated from purple membranes by cellular autolysis by distilled water, processing of bacterial biomass by ultrasound at 22 KHz, alcohol extraction of low and high-weight molecular impurities, cellular RNA, carotenoids and lipids, with the subsequent solubilization of final product with 0.5% (w/v) SDS-Na and fractionation by methanol. The homogeneity of the synthesized product, and the selectivity of deuterium incorporation into the molecule was proved by combination of preparative and analytical protein methods including electrophoresis in 12.5% (w/v) PAAG with 0.1% (w/v) SDS-Na, gel filtration chromatography on Sephadex G-200, and electron impact mass-spectrometry of methyl esters of N-Dns-[ 2 H]derivatives of amino acids after their separation by reverse-phase HPLC. Keywords : Halobacterium halobium, bacteriorhodopsin, [2,3,4,5,6- 2 H 5 ]Phe, [3,5- 2 H 2 ]Tyr, [2,4,5,6,7- 2 H 5 ]Trp, biosynthesis, EI mass-spectrometry, RP-HPLC.


Energy system integration enables raising operational synergies by coupling the energy infrastructures for electricity, methane, and hydrogen. However, this coupling reinforces the infrastructure interdependencies, increasing the need for integrated modeling of these infrastructures. To analyze the cost-efficient, sustainable, and secure dispatch of applied, large-scale energy infrastructures, an extensive and non-linear optimization problem needs to be solved. This paper introduces a nested decomposition approach with three stages. The method enables an integrated and full-year consideration of large-scale multi-energy systems in hourly resolution, taking into account physical laws of power flows in electricity and gas transmission systems as boundary conditions. For this purpose, a zooming technique successively reduces the temporal scope while first increasing the spatial and last the technical resolution. A use case proves the applicability of the presented approach to large-scale energy systems. To this end, the model is applied to an integrated European energy system model with a detailed focus on Germany in a challenging transport situation. The use case demonstrates the temporal, regional, and cross-sectoral interdependencies in the dispatch of integrated energy infrastructures and thus the benefits of the introduced approach.


IZA DP No. 15698 NOVEMBER 2022 Empirical Evaluation of Broader Job Search Requirements for Unemployed Workers* This paper analyses data from a large-scale field experiment where unemployed workers were randomly assigned to an additional caseworker meeting with the purpose to impose a broader job search strategy. We find that the meeting significantly increases job finding and is cost effective. However, caseworkers differ substantially in the rate at which they impose broader job search. We exploit this heterogeneity in caseworker stringency and the random assignment of unemployed workers to caseworkers within local offices to evaluate the broader search requirement. Our results show that imposing the broader search requirements reduces job finding. We argue that restricting the job search opportunities forces unemployed workers to search sub-optimally which negatively affects labor market outcomes. JEL Classification: J22, J64, J65, J68, C93


Computing brings new opportunities and challenges to traditional philosophical activities changing the way philosophers understand foundational concepts, such as mind, consciousness, experience, reasoning, knowledge, truth, ethics and creativity. This trend in philosophical inquiry has been gaining momentum steadily. This paper builds on the author's previous important work (The Digital Phoenix: How Computers Are Changing Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell) and has played a major role in establishing philosophical inquiry as a mature area of philosophical investigation. This was the lead article of the journal which was subsequently published by Blackwell Publishing (2002) in a book series for new research, stressing considerations about philosophy.


BACKGROUND
Many listeners with hearing loss report particular difficulties with multitalker communication situations, but these difficulties are not well predicted using current clinical and laboratory assessment tools.

PURPOSE
The overall aim of this work is to create new speech tests that capture key aspects of multitalker communication situations and ultimately provide better predictions of real-world communication abilities and the effect of hearing aids.

RESEARCH DESIGN
A test of ongoing speech comprehension introduced previously was extended to include naturalistic conversations between multiple talkers as targets, and a reverberant background environment containing competing conversations. In this article, we describe the development of this test and present a validation study.

STUDY SAMPLE
Thirty listeners with normal hearing participated in this study.

DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS
Speech comprehension was measured for one-, two-, and three-talker passages at three different signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs), and working memory ability was measured using the reading span test. Analyses were conducted to examine passage equivalence, learning effects, and test-retest reliability, and to characterize the effects of number of talkers and SNR.

RESULTS
Although we observed differences in difficulty across passages, it was possible to group the passages into four equivalent sets. Using this grouping, we achieved good test-retest reliability and observed no significant learning effects. Comprehension performance was sensitive to the SNR but did not decrease as the number of talkers increased. Individual performance showed associations with age and reading span score.

CONCLUSIONS
This new dynamic speech comprehension test appears to be valid and suitable for experimental purposes. Further work will explore its utility as a tool for predicting real-world communication ability and hearing aid benefit.


Due to the high degree of control and performance that it affords, programmers use the C language for writing low-level systems software. That it is difficult to write programs in C is not a problem in and of itself. Modern languages deal with its safety issues through innovations in language design, programming interfaces and runtime environments. However, due to the amount and complexity of existing C code, rewriting all of it in modern languages is likely infeasible, and the absence of a modern replacement for C having all of its advantages ensures that it will continue to be used to create new software for the foreseeable future.
The goal of the Ivy compiler is to provide an evolutionary pathway from C to a language with stronger safety guarantees. Because rewriting software all at once is not an option, the design philosophy of Ivy is to provide ways for the programmer to transition software in a modular fashion from C to a language with the desired safety guarantees. Given these requirements, Ivy provides memory- and type-safety to sequential programs with two components, one called Deputy, and the other called Heapsafe. However, Deputy and Heapsafe are unsound when faced with multithreaded programs.
This dissertation presents SharC, an extension to Ivy that provides for safe concurrent programming, and Shelters, a deadlock-free, pessimistic implementation of atomic sections that avoids software transactional memory and whole-program analysis. SharC allows programmers to declare how objects in multi-threaded programs are shared among threads. SharC uses a combination of static and dynamic analysis to enforce these "sharing modes." Additionally, since objects in programs can go through several phases, SharC allows programmers to declare where the sharing mode of an object changes. SharC checks these sharing mode changes by requiring that there is only one reference to an object when its sharing mode changes. Further, SharC provides features for applying and changing these sharing modes across complex data structures. Finally, our shelter-based atomic sections are presented as a sharing mode of SharC that can provide the convenience of atomic sections while achieving performance comparable with explicit locking.
We evaluate our implementation of SharC and Shelters on over 1.5 million lines of application and benchmark code, and observe manageable overheads both in terms of performance and programmer effort.


A case of subacute parathion poisoning with an erysipeloid-like eruption of the left index finger is reported. Laboratory investigations showed no growth of pathogenic bacteria and cholinesterase activity in the blood showed a rise 10 days after the poisoning. Further blood investigations 6 weeks later showed subnormal levels of cholinesterase activity indicating chronic parathion poisoning.


Despite the high performance achieved by deep neural networks on various tasks, extensive research has demonstrated that small tweaks in the inputs can lead to failure in the model's predictions. This issue affecting deep neural networks has led to a number of methods to improve model robustness, including adversarial training and distributionally robust optimization. Although both of these two methods are geared towards learning robust models, they have essentially different motivations: adversarial training attempts to train deep neural networks against perturbations, while distributional robust optimization aims to improve model performance on the most difficult "uncertain distributions". In this work, we propose an algorithm that combines adversarial training and group distribution robust optimization to improve robust representation learning. Experiments on three image benchmark datasets illustrate that the proposed method achieves superior results on robust metrics without sacrificing much of the standard measures.


This thesis presents the analysis, design and development of a multi-axis machinery numerical control system. The purpose of this research is to provide a numerical control method to overcome the multi-axis numerical control problem. The control system includes an IBM-PC computer as a host processor, a plug in multimotor controller board based on commercial numerical motor controller ICs. These implement a software specified digital control algorithm and output a PWM control number. Six motors, their driven actuators, and digital incremental feedback encoders complete the system. IV The experimental aspects of the work included the design of the IBM-PC plug in motor controller board and the motor drive board, computer software for real-time control and the system testing. For the theoretical aspects of the work, control theory was used to develop the mathematical model of the system. This aimed at providing a tool to predict and optimize the system performance, therefore, to fulfill the high positioning and high precision control task.


Leaf is a sensitive plant organ in responding to abiotic stresses, especially drought stress. Objective of this research was to evaluate changes of relative leaf expansion rate (RLER) and other leaf-related indicators as affected by gradual drought stress. The stress was induced by withholding water supply to chili pepper (Capsicum annum L.) for up to 12 days. Afterward, the crops were allowed to recover. The research was conducted in two stages. The first stage was for finding a reliable leaf area (LA) estimation model. The second stage was for evaluating relevance of RLER, specific leaf fresh weight (SLFW), specific leaf water content (SLWC), and total leaf area (TLA) as indicators for drought stress in chili pepper. Combinations of five regression models (linear, zero-intercept linear, quadratic, zero-intercept quadratic, and power) and three predictors, i.e. leaf length (L), leaf width (W), and LW were evaluated as candidates of LA estimation model. Selection of the models was based on coefficient of determination (R) and geometrical principles. The selected model was used for calculating RLER, SLFW, SLWC and TLA. Results of this study indicated that dynamic changes of RLER were mainly driven by daily day-night cycle rather than long-term gradual drought stress. SLFW and SLWC did not significantly decrease during drought stress period. However, drought stress significantly inhibited TLA in chili pepper. Chili pepper was able to recover from short-term (4 days) exposure to drought stress; yet, this crop was unable to recover after 8 days exposure to drought stress or longer.


The study of flow configuration and regime transitions in a vertical pipe is of primary interest for the understanding of the fundamentals of two-phase flow dynamics. Also, it is useful for the calibration of both interfacial forces and population balance models. This simple geometry allows for the isolation of each effect as the dynamics takes place mainly along one dimension. Most investigations deal with the flow configuration for different flow rates of both phases. But further investigations and new interesting results can be obtained by changing the physical properties of the base fluids and analyzing their influence on the flow dynamics. In this work we show the effects of temperature and electrolyte concentration in the flow configuration. The rise of temperature produces an unaccounted acceleration of the transitional effects. The addition of NaCl produces a delay of such effects thanks to the inhibition of bubble coalescence.


BACKGROUND--Nucleoside-nucleotide mixture has been shown to improve gut morphology and reduce the incidence of bacterial translocation in protein deficient mice. AIMS--To compare the reparative effect of nucleoside-nucleotide mixture and their individual components on maintenance of gut integrity and bacterial translocation based on their differential metabolism and utilisation. METHODS--ICR (CD-1) mice were randomised into eight groups of 10 animals each and fed 20% casein diet (control), protein free diet, or protein free diet supplemented with 3 M cytidine, uridine, thymidine, inosine, guanosine monophosphate, or nucleoside-nucleotide mixture for four weeks. On the fourth week, each mouse was injected lipopolysaccharide intraperitoneally (50 micrograms/500 microliters) and the incidence of bacterial translocation, caecal bacterial populations, and the ileal histology, noted 48 hours later. RESULTS--The death rate in the control group was 40% compared with 10% in the nucleoside-nucleotide mixture and 20% each in the individual components groups, respectively. Bacterial translocation to the mesenteric lymph node did occur in 100% of the surviving mice fed the control diet in comparison with 44% (nucleoside-nucleotide), 50% (cytidine), 75% (thymidine), 75% (uridine), 63% (inosine), and 63% (guanosine monophosphate). Histologically, the damage to the gut was more distinct in the protein free diet group. Villous height, crypt depth, and wall thickness in the nucleoside-nucleotide mixture group mean (SEM) (5.01 (0.34); 0.87 (0.14); 0.33 (0.10)), were respectively, higher compared with the protein free diet (3.34 (0.34); 0.61 (0.03); 0.18 (0.04)) group. In the cytidine group, crypt depth (0.86) (0.08)), and wall thickness (0.30 (0.002)) were higher. The same measurements in the components groups tended to be higher than the protein free diet group. Caecal bacterial populations were, however, similar in all groups. CONCLUSIONS--These results suggest that dietary nucleosides and nucleotides are essential nutrients for intestinal repair; nucleotides or cytidine provide a better response.


A 45-year-old man was hospitalized with abdominal pain. He was diagnosed with superior mesenteric vein thrombosis with mesenteric ischemia and treated with partial small bowel resection and 2 weeks of enoxaparin while hospitalized. Three weeks later, he presented again with abdominal pain. A computed tomography (CT) scan demonstrated fluid collections adjacent to the ascending colon and bowel wall thickening with intestinal pneumatosis consistent with ischemic bowel. Superior mesenteric vein thrombosis was redemonstrated on CT scan. An intravenous course of piperacillin-tazobactam was started, and an exploratory laparotomy with bowel resection was performed. Postoperatively, intravenous heparin was started. One day following surgery, a CT scan demonstrated a new left femoral vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism. Laboratory data are shown in Table 1.


An algorithm has been implemented that can solve the equations of motion of an incompressible tissue that is able of active contractions in multiple directions. This algorithm is used for the construction of a three‐dimensional computational model of the human tongue. In the model, muscle fibers are represented as vector fields in a reference configuration, and the equations of motion are formulated in that reference configuration. The finite element method is applied for the numerical approximation, using 8 node or 27 node elements (for linear or quadratic interpolation). The muscular stresses are computed with a simple model of muscle tissue, in which the active stress depends on activation parameters and on the elongation in the direction of the muscle fibers and its rate of change. The activation parameters change the constitutive equations of the tissue. Incompressibility during the deformation is maintained by using a reduced stress calculation in which the components of the stress tensor, which cau...


This paper investigates whether media attention impacts the extent to which managers hoard bad news in general and whether the effect applies to conspicuous news, such as earnings news. We find that greater media attention escalates managerial bad news hoarding; however, such an effect does not apply to bad earnings news. These findings imply that managers selectively hoard bad news that is not as regulated and as conspicuous as earnings news. In the cross-sectional analyses, we find that typical corporate governance mechanisms are not effective in mitigating bad news hoarding; rather, we find that the effect of media attention on bad news hoarding is amplified when management is more short-term oriented.


Background: Acute myocardial infarction is one of the most common presentations of coronary artery disease (CAD). Although coronary angiography remains the gold standard for identification of the infarctrelated artery (IRA), conventional 12-lead electrocardiography (ECG) is an essential tool for diagnosis, risk stratification and prognosis. If specific ECG patterns can be recognized, it will be possible to determine the IRA and size of the ventricular area that is jeopardized. The existing ECG algorithms have good sensitivity for the right coronary artery (RCA) and good specificity for the left circumflex artery (LCx) as predictors of IRA in patients with acute inferior-wall myocardial infarction (IWMI), while the specificity for the RCA and sensitivity for the LCx are modest.
OBJECTIVE: To evaluate deviations in lead aVR to predict IRA in patients with IWMI, and to validate several commonly used 12-lead ECG characteristics.
Methods: A total of 585 consecutive patients with a first occurrence of acute IWMI were analyzed for the association between ECG and IRA diagnosed using coronary angiography. Subsequently, the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, negative predictive value and accuracy of depression in lead aVR, along with various commonly used ECG criteria for predicting the IRA, were estimated using coronary angiographic findings as the gold standard.
Results : The RCA and the LCx were found to be the IRA in 415 (71%) and 170 (29%) patients, respectively. It was observed that the absence of ST depression in lead aVR, ST depression in lead I ≥0.5 mm, ST depression in lead aVL >1 mm and ST elevation in lead III > ST elevation in lead II had excellent sensitivity and specificity in predicting the RCA as the culprit vessel. Similarly, ST depression in lead aVR ≥0.5 mm, the ratio of ST depression in lead V3 to ST elevation in lead III >1.2 had excellent sensitivity and specificity in predicting the LCx as the culprit vessel.
Conclusion: These findings reveal that evaluation of ST deviations in lead aVR offers good sensitivity and specificity for LCx and RCA occlusions. The authors believe that using multiple ECG criteria may provide earlier and better identification of the IRA.


The induced power supply noise (sinusoidal waveform) that injected to Vdd pin will cause unwanted spike at the positive amplitude and negative amplitude to the DC input voltage. At certain limit this spike will cause the mouse sensor unable to function properly and it may interrupt the communication line for read and write operation between mouse sensor and microcontroller. In this paper we report the characterization results of power supply noise for optical mouse sensor. A laboratory test setups that consist of digital oscilloscope, function generator and VEE-Pro software are used to evaluate three different samples of optical mouse sensor known as SS skew, FF skew and nominal skew. Results suggest that the all mouse sensor with different skew was able to withstand beyond of 100 mVpp power supply noise without any interruption.


China is one of the countries with the richest bird biodiversity in the world. Among the 1372 Chinese birds, 146 species are considered threatened and three species are regionally extinct according to the officially released China Biodiversity Red List in 2015. Here, we conducted the first extensive analysis to systematically investigate the patterns and processes of extinction and threat in Chinese birds. We addressed the following four questions. First, is extinction risk randomly distributed among avian families in Chinese birds? Second, which families contain more threatened species than would be expected by chance? Third, which species traits are important in determining the extinction risk in Chinese birds using a multivariate phylogenetic comparative approach? Finally, is the form of the relationship between traits additive or nonadditive (synergistic)? We found that the extinction risk of Chinese birds was not randomly distributed among taxonomic families. The families that contained significantly more threatened species than expected were the hornbills, cranes, pittas, pheasants and hawks and eagles. We obtained eleven species traits that are commonly hypothesized to influence extinction risk from the literature: body size, clutch size, trophic level, mobility, habitat specificity, geographical range size, nest type, nest site, flocking tendency, migrant status and hunting vulnerability. After phylogenetic correction, model selection based on Akaike's information criterion identified the synergistic interaction between body size and hunting vulnerability as the single best correlate of extinction risk in Chinese birds. Our results suggest that, in order to be effective, priority management efforts should be given both to certain extinction-prone families, particularly the hornbills, pelicans, cranes, pittas, pheasants and hawks and eagles, and to bird species with large body size and high hunting vulnerability.


Mobile mapping systems (MMSs) are based on advanced technologies for automatically collecting roadway inventory data. A host of advanced technologies, such as the Global Positioning System for collecting georeferencing data and digital cameras for collecting roadway data, are used in current MMSs. An MMS is driven on a subject roadway, collecting positional data and digital images of the roadway. Through photogrammetric software packages, roadway data are extracted from images. Although there have been studies evaluating the accuracy of positional data collected by MMSs, there have been limited studies of the descriptive data accuracy they provide. In this paper the results of an evaluation of the accuracy of descriptive inventory data collected by three different MMSs are discussed. Each system was tested in three different roadway environments, and five different types of inventory elements were included in each test. The accuracy of collected data was compared with ground truth data. Analysis of these data indicated that the roadway environment and the type of inventory element affect the accuracy of descriptive inventory data collected by MMSs.


The protective capabilities of three different armor steels of the HHA and UHA class against a long rod penetrator (LRP) were examined. Due to the lack of commercial availability of thick armor plates, the specific ballistic behavior under overmatch conditions, and unavoidable experimental scatter, we were unable to confirm any performance differences among the steels in ballistic testing, even when compared to standard RHA. In a second approach, numerical simulations of the ballistic behavior of the armor steels based on material testing (tensile tests and planar-plate-impact tests) were performed. The simulations provided the possibility to examine the steels in unavailable configurations, i.e. thickness. With this combined approach it could be shown that UHA steels may give a considerable protection increase against LRP in diminishing their maximum effective range by at least several hundred meters compared to HHA steel.


The aim of this investigation was to characterize the renal haemodynamic and tubular responses to somatic afferent nerve stimulation following the removal of afferent nerve input from the atria or the carotid sinuses in chloralose‐urethane‐anaesthetized Sprague‐Dawley rats and two‐kidney, one‐clip Goldblatt hypertensive rats. Bilateral stimulation of the brachial nerve plexi at 15 V, 1.3 Hz for 0.2 ms resulted in an increase in systemic blood pressure in each group of 10‐40%, while renal perfusion pressure was maintained at a constant level. There were significantly larger falls in left renal blood flow and combined left and right glomerular filtration rate in all groups following selective denervation of either the cardiopulmonary or the carotid sinus baroreceptors, respectively. Brachial nerve stimulation decreased urine flow rate and absolute and fractional sodium excretion from both kidneys in Sprague‐Dawley intact animals by 53, 65 and 59%; in vagotomized animals by 68, 77 and 63%; and in carotid sinus denervated animals by 86, 90 and 48%, respectively. The renal response in the Goldblatt group were similar to the normotensive group, but the main contribution of the total response was from the untouched left kidney. The inhibitory influence of the vagus and carotid sinuses on the renal sympathetic nerve‐mediated sodium and water resorption appeared to be enhanced in the Goldblatt hypertensive rats when compared with the normotensive rats. The renal functional responses to somatic afferent nerve stimulation appeared to be well preserved in the renovascular hypertensive rats, although there were important differences in the contributions to the responses from the left and right kidneys. Furthermore, the baroreceptors exerted a greater influence on basal renal function in the hypertensive rats.


In this paper, we introduce the prior knowledge, multi-scale structure, into self-attention modules. We propose a Multi-Scale Transformer which uses multi-scale multi-head self-attention to capture features from different scales. Based on the linguistic perspective and the analysis of pre-trained Transformer (BERT) on a huge corpus, we further design a strategy to control the scale distribution for each layer. Results of three different kinds of tasks (21 datasets) show our Multi-Scale Transformer outperforms the standard Transformer consistently and significantly on small and moderate size datasets.


A high performance liquid chromatographic procedure for the determination of propyl gallate (PG), 2,4,5-trihydroxybutyrophenone (THBP), tert-butylhydroquinone (TBHQ), nordihydroguaiaretic acid (NDGA), 2- and 3-tert-butyl-4-hydroxyanisole (BHA), 2,6-di-tert-butyl-4-hydroxymethylphenol (Ionox-100), and 3,5-di-tert-butyl-4-hydroxytoluene (BHT) was collaboratively studied by 8 laboratories. The 14 samples analyzed consisted of 10 vegetable oil samples spiked in matched pairs at about 200, 100, and 20 ppm and 4 lard samples spiked in matched pairs at about 100 and 40 ppm for each antioxidant except NDGA which was spiked only at the 2 lower levels in oil. In the method studied, the samples were dissolved in hexane and the antioxidants were partitioned into acetonitrile. The acetonitrile was concentrated and diluted with isopropanol to give isopropanol-acetonitrile (1 + 1). The antioxidants were separated by reverse phase gradient elution and detected at 280 nm. The results from one laboratory were rejected as outlying and were not considered in any calculations. For the remaining 7 laboratories, the overall mean recoveries for PG, THBP, TBHQ, NDGA, BHA, Ionox-100, and BHT were 93.2, 95.1, 95.6, 95.5, 98.3, 95.8, and 84.8%, respectively, and the overall mean coefficients of variation were 5.02, 7.74, 19.3, 4.36, 3.75, 6.33, and 3.45%, respectively.


Digital media are inevitable and inseparable part of our present and particularly the future. They largely define our ways of learning, working, communication and entertainment. Among other things, the ubiquity of Internet, the media which is constantly developing and introducing new functionality, has contributed to this. Internet is an integral part of lives of most children since early age. Children's use of Internet is diverse and variable.
For children who grow up with digital media is often a priori considered to understand them, and know how to use them in a functional way. Contrary to this, there are empirical evidence that suggest that some students need more time and effort to learn the different aspects of digital literacy and it has increasingly been emphasized the importance and the need of parents', friends' and teachers' support in this field. The digital gap which is observed in terms of access to computers and Internet has decreased, but there are more evident differences in the pupils' ability of Internet use with increasing availability of digital media and their acceptance in education. There are two important questions which are imposed. The first one is what the role of education is in developing digital literacy and the second is role of digital literacy in the lives of young people.
Defining digital literacy is the starting point for its measurement and giving support to students in its development. The main objective of this paper is to discuss the origin and the development of the concept of digital literacy. We tried to point out the structural elements of this concept and its relationship to other, similar concepts. We discuss, based on a review of relevant literature, the needs and opportunities of digital literacy in the lower grades of primary school.