This study presents a numerical tool for calculating storm surges from offshore, nearshore, and coastal regions using the finite-difference method, two-way grid-nesting function in time and space, and a moving boundary scheme without any numerical filter adopted. The validation of the solitary wave runup on a circular island showed the perfect matches between the model results and measurements for the free surface elevations and runup heights. After the benchmark problem validation, the 2013 Super Typhoon Haiyan event was selected to showcase the storm surge calculations with coastal inundation and flood depths in Tacloban. The catastrophic storm surges of about 8 m and wider, storm-induced inundation due to the Super Typhoon Haiyan were found in the Tacloban Airport, corresponding to the findings from the field survey. In addition, the anti-clockwise, storm-induced currents were explored inside of Cancabato Bay. Moreover, the effect of the nonlinear advection terms with the fixed and moving shoreline and the parallel efficiency were investigated. By presenting a storm surge model for calculating storm surges, inundation areas, and flood depths with the model validation and case study, this study hopes to provide a convenient and efficient numerical tool for forecasting and disaster assessment under a potential severe tropical storm with climate change.


Introduction: Thoracic ultrasound is accurate in the diagnosis of a wide range of respiratory diseases. Yet the extent of its use is unknown. Through a national survey, we aimed to explore the clinical use of thoracic ultrasound and the barriers to the diffusion of the technique in Italy. Methods: Accademia di Ecografia Toracica (AdET) developed a self-administered survey which was sent by email to Italian pulmonologists via national scientific societies and networks. Results: Of the 2010 physicians invited, 514 completed the survey (26% response rate). According to 99% of responders, thoracic ultrasound had a relevant clinical role. Seventy-nine percent of the responders used thoracic ultrasound at least once a month. The main settings were: 53% pulmonology ward, 15% outpatient clinic, 15% interventional pulmonology room, 10% internal medicine ward, 4% respiratory intensive care units, and 9% other. Thoracic ultrasound was primarily used: (1) with both diagnostic and interventional aims (72%), (2) as diagnostic imaging (17%), and (3) as guidance for interventional procedures (11%). The main clinical applications were: (1) diagnosis and management of pleural effusion, (2) pneumothorax, (3) pneumonia, (4) cardiac failure, and (5) acute dyspnea. Twenty-one percent of the responders do not use thoracic ultrasound. The main reported barriers were: (1) availability of an ultrasound system (52%), (2) lack of protected time and training (22%), and (3) use of the technique by other specialists (15%). Conclusion: Thoracic ultrasound is widely used by Italian pulmonologists and considered a clinically relevant tool. The availability of dedicated ultrasound systems seems to be a major limit of the use of the technique.


"This encyclopedia provides essays on nearly 200 films by 80 contributors from film and media studies programs worldwide… There is a little something here for all lovers of film. A chronological list and two A-Z lists itemize the films; entries are in English and in the language of origin… Each essay goes beyond the usual film criticism, delving into the historical, political, and social aspects of not only the film itself but also the times, places, and people involved with its making. Summing Up: Highly recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers." -R. J. Powell, SUNY Cortland, in CHOICE


Author(s): Voyles, Andrew Steven | Advisor(s): Bernstein, Lee A | Abstract: The future of nuclear medicine would appear to be the paradigm of personalized medicine — targeted radionuclide therapy to spare healthy tissue, and theranostic medicine, which pairs an imaging isotope with a therapeutic isotope to provide simultaneous, real-time dose delivery and verification, leading to drastic reductions in prescribed patient dose. Candidate isotopes to meet these needs have been identified based on their chemical and radioactive decay properties. This dissertation represents two extremes of cross section measurement for isotope production, as part of a larger campaign to address deficiencies in cross-cutting nuclear data needs. These studies will serve to facilitate the production of pre-clinical quantities of radioactivity for emerging and novel medical radionuclides. This dissertation details two experiments, focusing on production pathways for the radionuclides 90Mo, 64Cu, and 47Sc. Each of these experiments has been designed as part of efforts to measure production cross sections for emerging medical radionuclides and develop new methods for the monitoring of charged-particle beams. The discussion focuses on describing the experimental methods and analysis used for this measurement, and illustrates the importance of accurate knowledge of target composition. The experimental measurement of the 93Nb(p,4n) 90Mo reaction was motivated by its use as an intermediate-energy proton monitor, and was carried out through a stacked-target irradiation of thin niobium, copper, and aluminum foils at LANSCE-IPF. The work described herein is the first step in an effort to characterize this reaction as a robust and reliable, contamination-free monitor reaction channel for 40–200 MeV protons. In addition, it illustrates the potential for this 100 MeV proton beam as a production pathway for multiple novel radionuclides. The measurement of the 64Zn, 47Ti(n,p) cross sections was carried out at the recently-commissioned UC Berkeley High Flux Neutron Generator, a compact DD neutron generator designed originally for geochronology measurements. This work was motivated by the production of 64Cu and 47Sc, a pair of emerging medical radionuclides prized in particular for their capacity for theranostic applications. This measurement additionally provides context for the utility of neutron generators for isotope production, as well as introducing an efficiency quantification metric. Based on experience garnered from the LANSCE-IPF experiment, we have established a sister facility for measurements at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's 88-Inch Cyclotron. First experiments have already been performed, and one such measurement is briefly described here. The work described here may help to enable exciting new campaigns of investigation in basic science, disease biology research, and nuclear medicine. This dissertation serves as a pedagogical example to those who follow of how the assort- ment of unexpected difficulties in precision nuclear data measurements can make "simple" experiments not so simple, after all. One significant issue that was uncovered as a result of this work was the production of 22,24Na as the proton beam traversed the acrylic adhesive on the Kapton tape used to contain the individual stacked targets in these measurements. Reactions on the silicone adhesive would occur in any stacked-target activation experiments where adhesive-backed Kapton is used, and has the potential to systematically dampen the magnitude of reported cross sections by as much as 50%. This issue is discussed as a caution- ary note to future stacked-target cross section measurements. In addition, contributions to the slowing of charged particle beams due to the adhesive have often been neglected in much work performed to date. While this plays a limited role at high beam energies, it becomes increasingly important for proton energies below 25 MeV.


Explainable AI has the potential to support more interactive and fluid co-creative AI systems which can creatively collaborate with people. To do this, creative AI models need to be amenable to debugging by offering eXplainable AI (XAI) features which are inspectable, understandable, and modifiable. However, currently there is very little XAI for the arts. In this work, we demonstrate how a latent variable model for music generation can be made more explainable; specifically we extend MeasureVAE which generates measures of music. We increase the explainability of the model by: i) using latent space regularisation to force some specific dimensions of the latent space to map to meaningful musical attributes, ii) providing a user interface feedback loop to allow people to adjust dimensions of the latent space and observe the results of these changes in real-time, iii) providing a visualisation of the musical attributes in the latent space to help people understand and predict the effect of changes to latent space dimensions. We suggest that in doing so we bridge the gap between the latent space and the generated musical outcomes in a meaningful way which makes the model and its outputs more explainable and more debuggable.


While there is today a large consensus concerning the extent and causes of climate change and environment deterioration, as well as their mid-long term economic consequences if nothing is done, the international community remains divided regarding the nature, the scale and the schedule of the remedying actions that should be undertaken. In order to clarify the ongoing debates concerning these pending issues, economic analysis has proposed a series of interesting solutions based upon various institutional mechanisms and market devices. Paradoxically, environmental innovation occupies only a secondary role within this policy framework while many experts and analysts consider it as a key solution to environmental problems. Moreover, it is widely agreed that some environmental innovations should represent a considerable economic potential in the long term. How can one explain this paradox? The article explores the following idea: innovation is not a core component in the agenda of policy-makers in charge of environment and climate issues because innovation policies as well as environmental policies are usually inappropriate, and because these policies are usually designed and implemented without any due coordination among them. JEL: B52, E6, L5, O3, Q55


Involving many people in community-based research provides many benefits, such as more labor power and increased buy-in. Traditional meeting formats, however, are not well suited to attracting broad engagement. One way to address this challenge is to instead employ self-organizing meeting processes, which are designed to invite active participation from attendees, and do not predefine the agenda. This article describes three such processes, 1) Open Space Technology, 2) World Café, and 3) Dynamic Facilitation, followed by my observations on their advantages and disadvantages when employed in community-based research efforts. Their use requires giving up a great amount of control when compared with traditional, top-down meeting approaches, and may result in actions beyond, or even excluding, research. The strong possibility of failing to address organizers' own short-term goals, however, should be balanced with the higher likelihood of achieving the broader community's long-term goals.


Determining the exact latitude and longitude that a photo was taken is a useful and widely applicable task, yet it remains exceptionally difficult despite the accelerated progress of other computer vision tasks. Most previous approaches have opted to learn single representations of query images, which are then classified at different levels of geographic granularity. These approaches fail to exploit the different visual cues that give context to different hierarchies, such as the country, state, and city level. To this end, we introduce an end-to-end transformer-based architecture that exploits the relationship between different geographic levels (which we refer to as hierarchies) and the corresponding visual scene information in an image through hierarchical cross-attention. We achieve this by learning a query for each geographic hierarchy and scene type. Furthermore, we learn a separate representation for different environmental scenes, as different scenes in the same location are often defined by completely different visual features. We achieve state of the art accuracy on 4 standard geo-localization datasets : Im2GPS, Im2GPS3k, YFCC4k, and YFCC26k, as well as qualitatively demonstrate how our method learns different representations for different visual hierarchies and scenes, which has not been demonstrated in the previous methods. Above previous testing datasets mostly consist of iconic landmarks or images taken from social media, which makes the dataset a simple memory task, or makes it biased towards certain places. To address this issue we introduce a much harder testing dataset, Google-World-Streets-15k, comprised of images taken from Google Streetview covering the whole planet and present state of the art results. Our code can be found at https://github.com/AHKerrigan/GeoGuessNet.


In this paper, a new Hybrid Filter Bank (HFB) architecture called Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) is proposed for HFB-based A/D Converters (ADC). The TDM HFB architecture is firstly extracted considering the TDM components of analog input as new input vector. The TDM HFB-based ADC is then simulated using simply-realizable analysis filters to approve the mathematical formulation of the TDM model. At last, the output resolutions of TDM and classical HFB-based ADC are compared considering practical analog filters including realization errors. It is shown that the TDM architecture is less sensitive to the realization errors than the classical HFB. Besides, the TDM HFB can exploit a blind technique to correct the realization errors in opposite to the classical HFB case.


Once again, such familiar classics as Andrew Marvell's 'To His Coy Mistress', John Keats's 'To Autumn', T.S. Eliot's 'Journey of the Magi' and Robert Frost's 'Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening' take turns with an eclectic selection of lighter or less famous verses - Joyce Grenfell on the ages of woman, John Betjeman demolishing bad taste, Jon Silkin on the death of his son, and Ruth Pitter laughing at a potato. Ballads, laments, odes, satires, songs or prayers: these are poems for every mood and taste, illustrated with specially commissioned watercolours by a talented young artist.


During carrying out clinical trial on the base of Leningrad regional clinical hospital the incidence of basal cell skin cancer of the face and scalp has been studied in adults of different age groups, as well as peculiarities of clinical course of this disease in elderly and senile age. The most commonly encountered clinical form of basal cell cancer of the face and scalp in the Leningrad region was nodular-ulcerative, which was diagnosed in clinical practice in 38.3% of cases. The features of clinical course of superficial, nodular and destruida forms in people of middle, elderly and senile age are given. It is shown that the highest frequency of occurence of these clinical forms were in age of 61-70 years.


This is the first systematic large-scale study of lesbian health that has been
conducted in the U.K. Its purpose is to provide data about lesbians' breast
and cervical screening behaviour and experiences of health care. Comparable
studies in the U.S.A. suggest that lesbians do not attend for routine screening
tests and are less likely, than heterosexual women, to practise breast self examination.
A questionnaire (the Lesbians and Health Care Survey) was
distributed to 1066 lesbians in the UK. Four follow-up focus groups (n = 30)
were used to explore some of the issues arising from the survey. The major
quantitative survey findings include: 12 per cent of lesbians have never
attended for a cervical smear; 20 per cent have never practised BSE, and only
11 per cent attend for a mammogram every three years. The qualitative
survey data were content analysed in order to identify the reasons given by
lesbians for their healthcare behaviour. In the follow-up focus groups, breast
health is taken as a case study. This thesis contributes to defining a lesbian feminist
health agenda by its valuing of lesbians' own perspectives; by
providing alternative conceptions of lesbians' health that do not rely on
biomedical, disease models; and it locates lesbians' health experiences within
a socio-political framework. By providing a range of data about-lesbians'
health, the findings may help to inform the understanding of health providers
about lesbians' health needs, improve the practice of health care delivery for
lesbians and be of value to lesbians in making decisions about their health
care behaviour.


A B S T R A C T This study was carried out to determine the chemical and microbiological quality of buffalo milk. A total of 120 buffalo raw milk samples were collected monthly from beed district, throughout the year for this study. In the chemical analysis of buffalo milk samples the mean total solid value, non-solid fat, lipid, protein, lactose, ash and pH values were detected as 16.38%, 8.56%, 7.04%, 4.36%, 4.19%, 0.72% and 6.55, respectively. Total bacteria count (TCA), coliform, lactic acid bacteria (LAB), Escherichia coli, Staphylococcus aureus and yeast-mold (log10 cfu/ml) levels in the milk samples were detected as 6.36, 2.95, 5.74, 1.10, 2.46 and 2.63, respectively. K e y w o r d s Buffalo milk, chemical quality, microbiological quality


Despite the critical role of teachers in the educational process, few advanced learning technologies have been developed to support teacher-instruction or professional development. This lack of support is particularly acute for middle school math teachers, where only 37% felt well prepared to scaffold instruction to address the needs of diverse students in a national sample. To address this gap, the Advancing Middle School Teachers' Understanding of Proportional Reasoning project is researching techniques to apply pedagogical virtual agents and dialog-based tutoring to enhance teachers' content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. This paper describes the design of a conversational, agent-based intelligent tutoring system to support teachers' professional development. Pedagogical strategies are presented that leverage a virtual human facilitator to tutor pedagogical content knowledge (how to teach proportions to students), as opposed to content knowledge (understanding proportions). The roles for different virtual facilitator capabilities are presented, including embedding actions into virtual agent dialog, open-response versus choice-based tutoring, ungraded pop-up sub-activities (e.g. whiteboard, calculator, note-taking). Usability feedback for a small cohort of instructors pursuing graduate studies was collected. In this feedback, teachers rated the system ease of use and perceived usefulness moderately well, but also reported confusion about what to expect from the system in terms of flow between lessons and support by the facilitator.


Many tropical pholcid spider species are morphologically and behaviourally adapted to life on the underside of green leaves. The taxonomy of these cryptic spiders is mostly poorly known, and almost nothing is known about their biology. The present paper deals with seven West African leaf-dwelling pholcid species. Two of them are new to science: Pholcus kakum n. sp. and Spermophora dieke n. sp.; of three further species, the males are newly described: Crossopriza cylindrogaster Simon, 1907, Leptopholcus tipula (Simon, 1907), and L. guineensis Millot, 1941. Crossopriza cylindrogaster is remarkable for its inverted resting position (dorsal side pressed against the leaf), modifications of the lateral eyes that appear like additional lenses, lampshade webs with or without "ornaments" (puffs of silk), and tetrahedral egg-sacs. Finally, new morphological data and records are provided for Pehrforsskalia conopyga Deeleman-Reinhold and van Harten, 2001; Nyikoa limbe Huber, 2007 is newly recorded from Guinea.


I used video observations to quantify the diet of nestling Willow Flycatchers (Empidonax traillii) at six nests in two meadows (Middle Perazzo and Lacey) on the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, California. Prey fed to the nestlings consisted primarily of Diptera (24%), Odonata (22%), Ephemeroptera (16%), Lepidoptera (12%), and Raphidioptera (12%). Other less abundant taxa in the diet included Orthoptera, Coleoptera, and Hymenoptera. Aquatic insects such as Ephemeroptera and Odonata were fed more commonly at the five nests at Middle Perazzo Meadow, whereas terrestrial insects such as pollinating Diptera, Hymenoptera, Orthoptera, and Raphidioptera predominated at the single nest observed at Lacey Meadow. At Middle Perazzo Meadow nestlings in nests situated closer to the meadow's edge were fed more Raphidioptera, whereas those in nests farther from the edge were fed more Ephemeroptera and Odonata. Raphidioptera were fed more frequently in the morning and evening, whereas Diptera, Hymenoptera, Lepidoptera, Hemiptera, and Orthoptera were generally more frequently offered in the middle part of the day. Ephemeroptera were most often provided in the afternoon and evening while feedings with Odonata fluctuated little through the day.


Abstract Nannizziopsis guarroi, a keratinophilic fungus, is an important cause of dermatomycosis in companion lizards. At present, effective disinfection protocols are unknown and additional information is needed to prevent contamination of surfaces and equipment used in the care of these animals. To this aim, the qualitative in vitro–disinfecting capability of eight commonly used household and laboratory disinfectants (Novalsan®, 3% and 10% dilutions of commercial bleach, Virkon®-S, Lysol® household cleaner with hydrogen peroxide, 70% ethanol, 409®, and household cleaning ammonia) were tested at two different contact times (2 and 10 min) with three different aqueous fungal concentrations of four molecularly confirmed N. guarroi isolates. A positive control after contact with saline was also grown. After contact with disinfectant or saline, the isolates were incubated, and photographic images were taken of plate growth on day 10. Images of each plate were scored using a semiquantitative scoring system. The only disinfectant that completely inhibited growth for all four isolates at both contact times and at all three isolate dilutions was the 10% dilution of commercial bleach. All four isolates grew after contact with ammonia, regardless of contact time or isolate dilution, and the other disinfectants showed variable inhibition of growth that was either isolate or concentration dependent, or both. In conclusion, a minimum of 2 min of exposure to a 10% dilution of commercial bleach is recommended for disinfection of surfaces and instruments contaminated with N. guarroi.


Simulative communication and communicative allodoxia in the social history of the media. This paper deals with the problem of defining the different communicative, artistic or literary genres, which have in common both the explicit declaration of not wanting to represent reality, and the ability to credit their content as true, provoking reactions worthy of note in the public. The cases reported in this study are paradigmatic of a "simulative" kind of communication, in which the fiction plays the role of reality and in the viewer/reader a false opinion is created on the content and nature of the communication, definable as "communicative allodoxia". Hence "simulative communication" and "communicative allodoxia" are like two sides of the same "false" coin. The two elements hold each other because one generates the other.


The focus of this investigation is one the asymmetric effects of monetary growth Shocks in the pre-and periods of United States history. The downward Rigidity of nominal wages in the post -war period appears to be an important factor in Differentiating the slope of the aggregate supply curve over time. Accordingly, the Response of real output and price to expansionary monetary growth shocks is similar in The pre-and post-war periods. In contrast, the aggregate supply curve is flatter in the Face of negative monetary growth shocks in the post-war period, exacerbating output Contraction and moderating price deflaction. The apparent change in the asymmetric Effects of m onetary growth shocks deflation. The apparent change in the asymmetric States over time. [E30,E33,E34,E35]


BACKGROUND
The influence of sleep on the equine electroencephalogram (EEG) has not been well documented.

HYPOTHESIS
The objectives were to develop a noninvasive method of electrode placement for recording the EEG in horses and to establish normal EEG parameters for the various states of vigilance. Findings are compared with previously published reports on equine sleep based on electrocorticography (ECoG).

ANIMALS
Five neurologically normal horses.

METHODS
Overnight EEGs were recorded digitally in association with simultaneous videotaping of the horses' behavior. Data were analyzed by visual inspection, states of vigilance were identified, and representative segments were quantitatively processed. Transient EEG events were examined.

RESULTS
Slow wave sleep (SWS) was significantly different (P < .05) in frequency and power from drowsiness and rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. Second-degree heart block was associated with SWS as were transient events commonly recognized in EEGs of humans. Drowsiness and REM sleep were similar. In both, background activity was low-amplitude beta activity admixed with prominent activity of approximately 4 Hz. Standing REM sleep was associated with numerous partial collapses in 1 horse.

CONCLUSIONS AND CLINICAL IMPORTANCE
Normative data for several states were described and probable benign variants identified. This information will serve as control data for sedative and anesthetic studies in this species. The sleep patterns observed during this study are those of horses removed from their usual surroundings, and thus may represent those encountered in a clinical environment.


The aim of this article is to present new models of acreage choices to describe short term production choices. Its construction combines concepts developed in the Positive Mathematical Programming and Multicrop Econometric literatures. They consider land as an allocable fixed input and motivate crop diversification by decreasing returns to crop area and/or implicit costs generated by constraints on acreage choices and by limiting quantities of quasi-fixed factors. Attractive re-parametrization of the standard quadratic production function and different functional forms for cost function are proposed to have parameters easily interpretable and to define econometric models in a very simple way.


In this study, I investigated the relation between moral judgment and the enjoyment of crime dramas by varying the relative severity of punishment levied for a crime. One hundred fifty-one participants rated their enjoyment of a video clip depicting a crime with the perpetrator being punished either excessively or not at all. In keeping with previous literature, I predicted that the different punishments would elicit different levels of moral judgment, which would then impact enjoyment. The results indicate that crime drama enjoyment was consistently predicted by certain social justice attitudes and resulting moral judgments about the content. The findings lend support to moral sanction theory and the integrated model of crime drama enjoyment and shed further insight into how viewer cognitions impact dispositional affiliations formed toward characters in media entertainment.


This paper deals with some applications of Virtual Instrumentation to electroanalytical measurements. Virtual Instruments (VIs) are software programmes that simulate the external appearance and functions of a real instrument on the screen of a computer. In this work, programmes have been developed to control the potential of a working electrode (through a suitable potentiostat), acquire the current response, process the acquired current signal, and control a peristaltic pump and injection valve. The sequence of operations was controlled by the VI. The programmes developed have been applied to amperometric and voltammetric measurements in static and flowing solutions. The Vl package that has been used was Lab VIEW 4.0.1 from National Instruments.


Previous research has suggested that communal self-descriptions might be less malleable than agentic ones. We propose that the communal self-concept is malleable as well, and that empathic perspective taking activates the communal self-concept. In two studies, participants watched a video and were either instructed to empathically take the perspective of the target person or to remain objective and detached. In Study 1, we used a repeated-measures design and found that participants' communal self-descriptions changed after empathic perspective taking, but not in the objective condition. In Study 2, we assessed the accessibility of the communal self-concept by measuring response latencies. Participants in the empathic perspective-taking condition responded faster for communal traits and judged more communal traits as self-descriptive than participants in the objective condition.


It is common that current mobile devices are equipped with multiple interfaces such as GPRS or UMTS for wireless WAN (WWAN) links as well as WiFi and/or bluetooth for local networking. Meanwhile, it is also possible that a number of mobile subscribers keep close for a period of time and fetch same content from Internet. Stimulated by these facts, we develop C5, a collaborative content fetching scheme for groups of mobile subscribers with common characteristics. C5 makes a number of new contributions over prior work: (a) a small scale P2SP framework of a hybrid mobile network which considers possible concurrent mobile Internet traffic to maximize the utility of WWAN links; (b) support of MAC layer multicast in community and a new community formation procedure with the multicast rate estimation; (c) an application-level fetching procedure for both server and peer clients. We also formulate the content fetching process in C5 into an optimization problem and give a simple method to estimate the bound of the objective function. Simulation results show that C5 can speed up the equivalent fetching rate for community members. Thus it can improve user experiences for mobile Internet subscribers.


Some bird species change their plumage colour on a seasonal basis, mostly between cryptic non-breeding plumage and conspicuous breeding plumage. Adult Common Terns Sterna hirundo moult their body feathers twice each year, resulting in two types of plumages, those typical to breeding and non-breeding seasons, which exhibit minor differences in the colours of some feathers, as well as the bare parts. Here, we report evidence of an abnormal plumage in adult Common Terns (sometimes referred to as 'portlandica'), with two individuals exhibiting non-breeding like plumage during the breeding season. These terns were documented in a breeding colony in Northern Israel. This report could lead to future research into the causes and consequences of plumage maturation avoidance in adult birds.


Synthetic peptides have been used to map linear B-cell epitopes of the third variable (V3) region of the feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) external membrane glycoprotein gp120. The analysis of sera from naturally and experimentally FIV-infected cats by Pepscan and enzyme immunoassay with four partially overlapping peptides evidenced three antibody-binding domains, two of which mapped in the carboxyl-terminal half of V3. In particular, the V3.3 sequence (Gly-392-Phe-413) turned out to be important for in vitro neutralization of the virus in that the peptide inhibited the FIV-neutralizing activity of pooled immune cat sera, and on the other hand, cat sera raised against this peptide effectively neutralized FIV infectivity for Crandell feline kidney cells.


Cold-hardened winter wheat (Triticum aestivum L. cv. Fredrick) and winter barley (Hordeum vulgare L. cv. Dover) were exposed to total flooding at 2 C. Dover seedlings were damaged more quickly than Fredrick, and after 3 weeks of flooding the survival of Dover was reduced to 10% and Fredrick to about 50%. Tissue moisture was slightly greater in Dover than Fredrick throughout the 4-week flooding period. Carbon dioxide and ethanol accumulated throughout the 4-week flooding period in both cultivars. Lactic acid increased rapidly during the 1st week of flooding, and remained relatively constant during the remainder of the flooding period. Oxygen consumption of seedling shoot tissue after exposure to flooding declined abruptly after only 1 day of flooding, but recovered somewhat during the subsequent 2 weeks. The effect of flooding was more pronounced on the ultrastructure of Dover than Fredrick. Although proliferation of endoplasmic reticulum was observed in the early stages of flooding in both cultivars, the occurrence of distinct parallel arrays and concentric whorls of membranes was prevalent in the flooded barley. Severe ultrastructural damage to a large proportion of apical cells in both cultivars was observed after 2 to 3 weeks of flooding.


Abstract:The key public health officials in the United States have been criticized for their work in the Ebola outbreak of 2014–15 by citizens, public officials, and health scholars from multiple disciplines. There are numerous grounds for these complaints, but underlying many of them was the perception of "failed leadership" that is here traced in substantial part to the embodiment of a positionality based in a presumed logos-based power instead of an ethos-based relationship between public health expert and public. Because any leader's public ethos is dependent on the cultural ethos of audiences who promote them to leadership, this essay combines the Aristotelian topoi for ethos (goodsense, goodwill, goodness) and contemporary redefinitions of ethos as cultural-level phenomena (either "dwelling places," ideologies, or ethical and cultural codes) to conceptualize ethos as the activation, rebuilding, or maintenance of relationships among different social positions: publics and institutions. The complexities of the Ebola epidemic—with its national and international dimensions and its partially faulty scientific grounding—make visible the predisposition toward positional gaps between publics and public experts regarding interests (eunoia) and goods (arête), with concomitant difficulties for the sharing of practical wisdom (phronesis). Aristotle was correct that such gaps cannot be bridged by logos, and the pervasive insistence on more logos as corrective therefore may contribute to public mistrust of all expertise.


The numerical simulation included solid blades with four different leading-edge thicknesses and four different leading-edge geometries. One of the geometries was square, one was ellipse A(ellipse ratio is 1), one was ellipse B(ellipse ratio is 2), and the other was ellipse C(ellipse ratio is 3). The four thicknesses were 0.7mm, 0.6mm, 0.5mm, 0.4mm. The results show increased efficiency loss for increased leading-edge thickness for square geometry. For ellipse geometries, there was no significant difference when the leading-edge thickness changed at the positive incidence range. For the same leading-edge thickness(0.7mm), square leading-edge caused more loss than ellipse leading-edge. For square geometry, the optimal incidence angle was about -8 degree(0.7mm). For ellipse geometries, the optimal incidence angle was about -30 degree(0.7mm). And with the decrease of leading-edge thickness, the square's optimal incidence angle was toward to zero degree, the ellipse's optimal incidence angle was toward to larger negative angle.


During epidemics of smallpox the anticipatory attitude of the physician's mind will often lead him to suspect as variola diseases which bear only a superficial resemblance to it. Contrariwise, in the absence of epidemic prevalence of smallpox, mild cases are apt to be overlooked. The latter error is much the more serious in its consequences, although the former may itself lead to embarrassing complications. The detection of smallpox in its pustular stage, particularly in well-marked eruptions, is a facile matter even for the merest tyro in medicine. The picture of a profuse pustular variola can scarcely be mistaken for anything else. The diagnosis of the disease, however, in the first or second day of the eruption in mild cases, and especially in the absence of an epidemic, may present perplexities. Before the appearance of the eruption the diagnosis is difficult and often impossible. It may be surmised, but it is


Obliq is a lexically scoped, distributed, object-based programming language. In Obliq, the migration of an object is proposed as creating a clone of the object at the target site, whereafter the original object is turned into an alias for the clone. Obliq has only an informal semantics, so there is no proof that this style of migration is safe, i.e., transparent to object clients. In previous work, we introduced ojeblik, an abstraction of Obliq, where, by lexical scoping, sites have been abstracted away. We used ojeblik in order to exhibit how the semantics behind Obliq's implementation renders migration unsafe. We also suggested a modified semantics that we conjectured instead to be safe. In this paper, we rewrite our modified semantics of ojeblik in terms of the π-calculus, and we use it to formally prove the correctness of object surrogation, the abstraction of object migration in Ojeblik.


The Calatrava Volcanic Province is characterized by an intra-plate alkaline undersaturated magmatic association of melilitites, nephelinites, alkali olivine basalts and leucitites that were extruded in the central Iberian Peninsula (Spain) during Late Miocene–Quaternary time. This volcanism can be related to the following two-stage scenario: (1) an initial mantle-diapir stage, during which magma generation would have occurred at the lithosphere/asthenosphere boundary triggering minor accumulation processes at the crust/mantle interface, and consequent weakening/extension of the upper crust; and, (2) a final indentation stage related to disruption effects caused by the tectonic welding of the Prebetic Arc onto the Iberian foreland.


Background The effects of SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) on the myocardium and their role in the clinical course of infected patients are still unknown. The severity of SARS-CoV-2 is driven by hyperinflammation, and the effects of SARS-CoV-2 on the myocardium may be significant. This study proposes to use bedside observations and biomarkers to characterize the association of COVID-19 with myocardial injury. Objective The aim of the study is to describe the myocardial function and its evolution over time in patients infected with SARS-CoV-2 and to investigate the link between inflammation and cardiac injury. Methods This prospective, monocentric, observational study enrolled 150 patients with suspected or confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection at Toulouse University Hospital, Toulouse, France. Patients admitted to the intensive care unit (ICU), regular cardiologic ward, and geriatric ward of our tertiary university hospital were included during the pandemic period. Blood sampling, electrocardiography, echocardiography, and morphometric and demographic data were prospectively collected. Results A total of 100 patients were included. The final enrolment day was March 31, 2020, with first report of results at the end of the first quarter of 2021. The first echocardiographic results at admission of 31 patients of the COCARDE-ICU substudy population show that biological myocardial injury in COVID-19 has low functional impact on left ventricular systolic function. Conclusions A better understanding of the effects of COVID-19 on myocardial function and its link with inflammation would improve patient follow-up and care. Trial Registration Clinicaltrials.gov NCT04358952; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04358952 International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID) DERR1-10.2196/24931


This paper presents the first analysis of ethnic discrimination in sentencing patterns in the People's Republic of China, focusing on drug cases in Yunnan province. We posit the ``problem minority" hypothesis, which holds that discrimination in an authoritarian system emerges when an ethnic group becomes associated with behavior that generates social instability. On average, minority defendants in Yunnan have sentences that are about 1.5 to 7.5 months longer than Han defendants that have committed similar drug crimes. Further analysis of data from all provinces reveals that this bias is largest for groups heavily involved in the drug trade, and in provinces with significant minority populations and drugs.


The textile industry has a long tradition in Portugal and is one of its most important sectors, despite the current economic crisis. The lack of quality and the practice of higher prices decrease a firm's competitiveness and can lead to the loss of clients. Thus, the implementation of quality-related measures plays an important role in this context. The objective of this analysis was to determine the importance of quality in the consolidation of textile firms in northern Portugal. To undertake our analysis, we examined data from 60 textile firms. In addition, we sent these firms a questionnaire to obtain information on the current state of the textile industry in Portugal. Most firms in our sample believed that quality improvement, business benefits, mobilizing employees' knowledge and business image were important factors to increase their competitiveness. Furthermore, we found that competition in the textile industry can be very intense and is mainly driven by price and not by product/service differentiation. Most firms undertook Total Quality Management measures to ensure the quality of their production, meet customer expectations and prevent errors. Quality was highlighted as an important factor for firm survival. Keywords Quality, Portuguese textile industry, Quality management system, Minho.


Shallow deposits of halite are well known to be impermeable to brines and hydrocarbons, yet recent studies of deeply buried salt point toward considerable water-halite interaction. We have resolved this apparent paradox via experimental determinations of the dihedral angle for the (static) halite-H 2 O system at temperatures of 20 to 300 °C and pressures from atmospheric to 2 kbar. The halite-brine dihedral angle, which controls pore-fluid connectivity and hence permeability, is found to be a sensitive function of both temperature and pressure. In sedimentary basins with normal geothermal gradients, halite bodies at depths exceeding 3 km will contain a stable interconnected brine-filled porosity, resulting in permeabilities comparable to those of sandstones. Our results explain recent observations of major salt-fluid interactions at depth, and suggest that deep-rooted salt diapirs may act as conduits for basinal formation water. They also have important implications for the flow of brines around heat-producing canisters of high-level nuclear waste buried in natural rock salt.


The reachable set estimation for linear systems subject to both discrete and distributed delays is considered in this study. By choosing appropriate Lyapunov-Krasovkii functionals, some sufficient conditions are established to guarantee that all the states starting from the origin are bounded by an ellipsoid. The problem of finding the smallest possible ellipsoid can be transformed into an optimisation problem with matrix inequality constraints. Moreover, the computational complexity is reduced since fewer variables are involved in the obtained results. These criteria are further extended to systems with polytopic uncertainties. It is shown that in the absence of distributed delay, the obtained condition is also less conservative than the existing ones.


Recent trends in distributed sensing networks have generated significant interest in the design of scalable micro-power generators. One such device exploits the galloping oscillations of a prism to harness energy from a moving fluid. Performance of galloping harvester's depends on the flow patterns around the prism, which, in turn, depend on its geometry and the Reynolds number of the flow. In this letter, we demonstrate that the useful range of the galloping instability can be extended by attaching a rigid splitter plate to the rear face of the prism. The plate provides a secondary flow reattachment point, which serves to improve the oscillation amplitude and power output of the generator. Experimental results demonstrate as much as 67% power enhancement for some prism geometries and a significant reduction in the cut-in wind speed of the generator.


Objective: The role of the inanimate environment in the transmission of healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) is increasingly recognized. Hence, several self-disinfecting surfaces have gained attention as new infection control strategies. The objective of this study was to assess the antimicrobial efficacy of membrane-active polycation (maPK) surfaces against Staphylococcus aureus (S. aureus) applying the in vivo Galleria mellonella (G. mellonella) contamination model.
Methods: In the first set-up maPK surfaces were contaminated with S. aureus and G. mellonella larvae were placed on the surface for 45 min. In the second set-up larvae were contaminated with S. aureus and transferred to maPK surfaces. Finally, the cross-over rates to larvae and maPK-surface were determined. Additionally, log reduction values (LRVs) of S. aureus on contaminated maPK and larvae were calculated.
Results: The first experimental set-up revealed a significantly higher cross-over rate of S. aureus to the larvae from contaminated control surface (~2 x 103 colony forming untis (cfu)/mL) when compared to maPK surface (~5.1 x 101 cfu/mL). In the second set-up the cross-over rate of S. aureus from larvae to the control surface was significantly higher (~5.1 x 103 cfu/plate) than to the maPK surface (~2.1 x 101 cfu/plate). In both experiments LRVs were superior on maPK with 98.1% (p=0.0117) and 99.5% (p=0.0001) reduction, respectively.
Conclusions: This in vivo study reveals the ability of maPK surfaces to reduce bacterial contamination and highlights the potential power to avoid cross-contamination from environmental surface.


INTRODUCTION
Medical and dental streams in today's date are considered highly demanding and stressful educational environments. Dental professionals, students and faculty, encounter great deal of stress in form of academic stress and job performance. Headache is a major and common neurological problem and is the main reason for decreased work performance, absenteeism and behavioral disturbances in dental professionals.

AIM
In current scenario of increasing stressful conditions in dental professionals, the present study was carried out with an aim to assess the prevalence and characteristic of headache in dental professionals in Udaipur, India.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
A cross-sectional questionnaire based study was conducted in a private dental teaching hospital in Udaipur. The undergraduate, postgraduate dental students and faculty members, who gave consent, were included in the study. Information regarding the reason for headache and its various parameters was collected. Statistical analysis was done using SPSS version 22 and descriptive statistics was used to compare the results obtained.

RESULTS
The headache was found to be prevalent in 87.1% of the subjects included in the study. Females (91.9%) were more frequently affected by headaches than males (87.1%).

CONCLUSION
It can be concluded from the present study that headache was the main cause of absenteeism at school and work, mood and behavioral changes and inappropriate work actions.


This set treats the whole of American literature, from the European discovery of America to the present, with entries in alphabetical order. Each of the 350 substantive essays is a major interpretive contribution. Well-known critics and scholars provide clear and vividly written essays that reflect the latest scholarship on a given topic, as well as original thinking on the part of the critic. The Encyclopedia is available in print and as an e-reference text from Oxford's Digital Reference Shelf. At the core of the encyclopedia lie 250 essays on poets, playwrights, essayists, and novelists. The most prominent figures (such as Whitman, Melville, Faulkner, Frost, Morrison, and so forth) are treated at considerable length (10,000 words) by top-flight critics. Less well known figures are discussed in essays ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words. Each essay examines the life of the author in the context of his or her times, looking in detail at key works and describing the arc of the writer's career. These essays include an assessment of the writer's current reputation with a bibliography of major works by the writer as well as a list of major critical and biographical works about the writer under discussion. A second key element of the project is the critical assessments of major American masterworks, such as Moby-Dick, Song of Myself, Walden, The Great Gatsby, The Waste Land, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Death of a Salesmanr, or Beloved. Each of these essays offers a close reading of the given work, placing that work in its historical context and offering a range of possibilities with regard to critical approach. These fifty essays (ranging from 2,000 to 5,000 words) are simply and clearly enough written that an intelligent high school student should easily understand them, but sophisticated enough that a college student or general reader in a public library will find the essays both informative and stimulating. The final major element of this encyclopedia consists of fifty-odd essays on literary movements, periods, or themes, pulling together a broad range of information and making interesting connections. These essays treat many of the same authors already discussed, but in a different context; they also gather into the fold authors who do not have an entire essay on their work (so that Zane Grey, for example, is discussed in an essay on Western literature but does not have an essay to himself). In this way, the project is truly "encyclopedic," in the conventional sense. These essays aim for comprehensiveness without losing anything of the narrative force that makes them good reading in their own right. In a very real fashion, the literature of the American people reflects their deepest desires, aspirations, fears, and fantasies. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature gathers a wide range of information that illumines the field itself and clarifies many of its particulars.


There is an increasing interest in assessing the strengths and weaknesses of remote sensing imagery and geographic information system products as they relate to estimating populations at risk before, during, and after natural hazards. This research examines the spatial and temporal effectiveness of satellites and extent of damage products that were created for Banda Aceh, Indonesia after the 26 December 2004 tsunami. SPOT, FORMOSAT, MODIS and Landsat ETM+ imagery provides high temporal resolution data within three days of the tsunami. However, high-resolution commercial satellites (Quickbird, IKONOS) provide the most accurate data that can be used to assess infrastructure damage in cities like Banda Aceh before and after natural disasters. Of the six extent of damage products (USAID, USGS, Dartmouth Flood Observatory, DLR, SERTIT, DPRC) created after the tsunami, DLR provided the most accurate data on the extent of damage in Banda Aceh (94% agreement with Quickbird imagery). When these products are combined with population data and digital elevation models, estimates of populations at risk can be created to identify the areas most severely affected by a natural disaster. Pre-tsunami and post-tsunami imagery combined with imagery collected two and a half years after the tsunami show an extensive reconstruction of all structure types. Satellite imagery and geographic information system methods used in this research are most effective in regions where field data is sparse or difficult to collect within the first week following a natural disaster.


Objective To understand the meanings, through the description of experiences that street merchants have of their interactions with children in a street situation in downtown of Medellin in 2013. Methodology Qualitative investigation with ethnographic approach. Observations were made in the zone at different times of the day. Twelve interviews with street merchants were held in their work places. Records were kept in a field journal. Results The street merchants and children in street situations share the same space. Both groups try to survive and their relationship is mediated by the trust-distrust that is established between them. The coexistence generates ambivalent feelings. For the street merchants, children in street situations are the result of abandonment by the family, the state and society. They live in a hard world in which they are exposed to a series of risks that they must face. Conclusion The interaction between street merchants and children in street situations is good to the extent that conflicts are avoided, establishing norms of coexistence. The element that determines this relationship is trust-distrust. In trust, strong affective ties are generated, considering each other family. Distrust generates a preventative attitude.


The structures and electronic properties of N-hydroxyamide ethoxycarbonylhydrazones were investigated by a quantum-chemical method AMl. The total energies, heats of formation, dipol moments, ionization potentials, proton affinities and energies of frontier molecular orbitals (EHOMO and ELUMO) were calculated and discussed. The stabilities of the tautomeric forms and of E and Z isomers for these compounds were determined. The complex forming ability of these compounds with metal cations was also studied. The geometry and electronic properties of the complexes formed by N-hydroxyacetamide ethoxycarbonylhydrazone with Ni2+ and Cu2+ were investigated using ZINDO/1 semiempirical method. Moreover, these complexes were synthesized and identified.


The mixture of CO and H2, known as syngas, is a building block for many substantial chemicals and fuels. Electrochemical reduction of CO2 and H2O to syngas would be a promising alternative approach for its synthesis due to negative carbon emission footprint when using renewable energy to power the reaction. Herein, we present temperature-controlled syngas production by electrochemical CO2 and H2O reduction on a cobalt tetraphenylporphyrin/multiwalled carbon nanotube (CoTPP/MWCNT) composite in a flow cell in the temperature range of 20–50 °C. The experimental results show that for all the applied potentials the ratio of H2/CO increases with increasing temperature. Interestingly, at −0.6 VRHE and 40 °C, the H2/CO ratio reaches a value of 1.2 which is essential for the synthesis of oxo-alcohols. In addition, at −1.0 VRHE and 20 °C, the composite shows very high selectivity toward CO formation, reaching a Faradaic efficiency of ca. 98%. This high selectivity of CO formation is investigated by density functional theory modeling which underlines that the potential-induced oxidation states of the CoTPP catalyst play a vital role in the high selectivity of CO production. Furthermore, the stability of the formed intermediate species is evaluated in terms of the pKa value for further reactions. These experimental and theoretical findings would provide an alternative way for syngas production and help us to understand the mechanism of molecular catalysts in dynamic conditions.


This article argues for the development of an approach to social justice issues that puts equality aside and brings differences into consideration. The emphasis here is placed not on an abstract and inevitably contested legal principle, such as liberty or dignity, or on an inherently comparative or relative measure, such as equality, but on the ways in which the universal subject who is to be governed by those principles has been constructed in both political and legal discourses. This approach begins with the recognition of universality or sameness among individuals (the fundamental equality position) but also considers the inevitable differences among them. The universality is found in the vulnerability that marks our existence as embodied and finite beings. The differences arise because there are different stages and manifestations of embodiment, as well as from the fact that we are differently embedded in social relationships and within societal institutions. This "vulnerability paradigm" makes forms of societally-produced differences a predominant focus because they provide the foundation for the assertion that we need a responsive state. Instead, what equality of treatment has provided is the passive toleration of inequality and complicity in the conferral of often unwarranted privilege on the few.


Purpose To determine the divergence of immunometabolic phenotypes of macrophages stimulated with macrophage colony-stimulating factor (M-CSF) and granulocyte-M-CSF (GM-CSF) and its implications for fluorine 18 (18F) fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG) imaging of atherosclerosis. Materials and Methods This study was approved by the animal care committee. Uptake of 2-deoxyglucose and various indexes of oxidative and glycolytic metabolism were evaluated in nonactivated murine peritoneal macrophages (MΦ0) and macrophages stimulated with M-CSF (MΦM-CSF) or GM-CSF (MΦGM-CSF). Intracellular glucose flux was measured by using stable isotope tracing of glycolytic and tricyclic acid intermediary metabolites. 18F-FDG uptake was evaluated in murine atherosclerotic aortas after stimulation with M-CSF or GM-CSF by using quantitative autoradiography. Results Despite inducing distinct activation states, GM-CSF and M-CSF stimulated progressive but similar levels of increased 2-deoxyglucose uptake in macrophages that reached up to sixfold compared with MΦ0. The expression of glucose transporters, oxidative metabolism, and mitochondrial biogenesis were induced to similar levels in MΦM-CSF and MΦGM-CSF. Unexpectedly, there was a 1.7-fold increase in extracellular acidification rate, a 1.4-fold increase in lactate production, and overexpression of several critical glycolytic enzymes in MΦM-CSF compared with MΦGM-CSF with associated increased glucose flux through glycolytic pathway. Quantitative autoradiography demonstrated a 1.6-fold induction of 18F-FDG uptake in murine atherosclerotic plaques by both M-CSF and GM-CSF. Conclusion The proinflammatory and inflammation-resolving activation states of macrophages induced by GM-CSF and M-CSF in either cell culture or atherosclerotic plaques may not be distinguishable by the assessment of glucose uptake. © RSNA, 2016 Online supplemental material is available for this article.


Human immunodeficiency virus infection has been implicated in multiple viral-based processes adversely affecting the renal system, including HIV-associated nephropathy (HIVAN), HIV-related immune complex disease, and the less well-described HIV-related thrombotic microangiopathy (TMA). While HIV nephropathy has an overall poor renal prognosis and is treated primarily with anti-viral therapy, the etiology of HIV-related (non-thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura-associated) renal TMA may be causally linked to viral amplification of a dysregulated alternate complement cascade. Thus, if detected in its incipient stages, the associated renal injury may respond similarly to complement-inhibitory modalities as has been observed in cases of non-virally-linked TMA (aHUS), thus yielding significant recovery of kidney function. We report a case of a 43-year-old male patient with a history of advanced HIV disease and chronic renal insufficiency, previously attributed to HIVAN, who presented with acute renal decline, microangiopathic hemolytic anemia and thrombocytopenia, and biopsy-proven renal TMA, whose acute renal decompensation responded favorably to terminal complement blockade (eculizumab). J Hematol. 2015;4(1):141-143 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14740/jh183w


The high absorption characteristics, the complex mechanism and the great potential application in detectors of micro-structural material aroused extensive attention. In order to understand the impact of the micro-structure, the optical simulation method based on Monte Carlo is used for reflection characteristics of micro-structural material with the cell of pyramid construction. In this simulation, the body material is made of gold, which can avoid the effect of tranmittance, with a number of 400 cells. The bottom square of each structure is 50×50 µm, and the height of cells is adjustable. Then the relationship between the height and reflectance can be built up. However, a very complex relationship between the reflectance and the input parameters, including refractive index, extinction coefficient and the structure of the material is showed from simulation result. Generally, the reflectance decreases while the height increases.


We examine whether low access to financial intermediaries works as an obstacle acquiring financial capital for Swedish firms by using information from the Community Innovation Survey indicating whether firms perceive the acquisition of external capital to be difficult. This perception is explained by the distance to the firms' nearest financial intermediaries and their total local supply. The results indicate that the distance to banks is related to a larger problem of obtaining external financial capital in rural areas.


Type 1 diabetes (T1D) and type 2 diabetes (T2D) are two distinct diseases, with different etiology and pathogenesis, but with a common outcome (hyperglycemia), caused by almost complete or reduced loss of β-cell functional mass, respectively. Although the causes that lead to β-cell failure are different (typically immune-mediated for T1D, while related to metabolic stress for T2D), the underlying molecular pathways are almost sim¬ilar in both forms of diabetes. In this review we try to highlight common molecular mechanisms of β-cells damage in T1D and T2D, which could suggest new promising common therapeutic targets.


This study is necessitated by the need for a fresh empirical investigation of the effects of international trade on domestic consumption. This field of global interest has captured Nigerian attention, but no model was used to measure the effects since the study requires a theoretical analysis. The study reviewed panel data of 59 developing nations from 1960-70 but emphasis was on Nigeria from 1981-2006 the regression model was adopted.     In the first regression analysis, real GDP has a positive beta coefficient with lower standard error while international trade has negative beta coefficient with higher standard error and a lower but negative t statistic. To ensure that the model is a best fit, stepwise regression was further employed and real GDP still has a positive beta coefficient while international trade was excluded from the model because of collinearity problem. International trade in the stepwise analysis also has negative t statistic, meaning that it is a biased and unreliable predictor of domestic consumption. The implication of this is more trade reforms in Nigeria. Export instability and commodity concentration are other issues in international trade but were not considered in the analysis and further research incorporating these variables is recommended. Further recommendations are export consolidation and stimulation of Local productivity.


observations obtained across Europe. To avoid drifts in the land-surface state in the models, soil moisture corrections are derived from errors in screen-level atmospheric quantities. With the in situ data it is assessed whether these land-surface schemes produce adequate results regarding the annual range of the soil water content, the monthly mean soil moisture content in the root zone and evaporative fraction (the ratio of evapotranspiration to energy available at the surface). DA considerably reduced bias in net precipitation, while slightly reducing RMSE as well. Evaporative fraction was improved in dry conditions but was hardly affected in moist conditions. The amplitude of soil moisture variations tended to be underestimated. The impact of improved land-surface properties like Leaf Area Index, water holding capacity and rooting depth may be as large as corrections of the DA systems. Because soil moisture memorizes errors in the hydrological cycle of the models, DA will remain necessary in forecast mode. Model improvements should be balanced against improvements of DA per se. Model bias appearing from persistent analysis increments arising from DA systems should be addressed by model improvements.


Background: Up to the point of writing this review, there is no scientific evidence of any effective medical therapy for coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). In this review, we attempted to discuss the current summary of evidence of some medication, currently in trial for the treatment of COVID-19.
Material and Methods: We have done an electronic literature search using the following database: PubMed, Medline, Scopus and Google scholar. These databases were searched using the keywords COVID-19 and pharmacological therapy.
Results: At present, there are no well randomized controlled studies which can give evidence for most of the therapy used for COVID-19. Several medications are in trials for COVID-19, among them: 1/ chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine;  2/anti-virals oseltamivir, remdesivir, lopinavir/ritonavir and other protease inhibitors; 3/antibiotics macrolide (Azithromycin); 4/cytokine therapy interferon; 5/ humanized monoclonal antibody tocilizumab; 6/adjunct therapies vitamins C, D, and herbal medicine; 7/ COVID-19 convalescent plasma; 8/systemic steroids; 9/expected COVID-19 vaccine. We have also included some of the herbal medicines that are commonly and widely used in the Middle East, Asia as well in Sudan, (black seeds, honey and Acacia Nilotica). It is worth mentioning that these herbal medicines have shown benefits in treating other diseases, but the evidence of their benefit in COVID-19 still needs to be established.
Conclusion: Currently there is no pharmacological therapy for the COVID-19. More research and randomized clinical trials are needed to find effective therapy or vaccine against COVID-19.
Keywords:
COVID-19, Pharmacotherapy, herbal medicine, Sudan


A. SVENSSON : Der Gebrauch ties bestimmten Artikels in der nachklassischen griechischen Epik. Pp. xii + 160. Lund: Gleerup, 1937. Paper. T H I S unusually solid and unusually well printed doctoral dissertation is by a pupil of Professor Wifstrand and deals in detail with a subject on which Wifstrand has himself touched. The examples of the article in epic from Apollonius to Nonnus and his school are collected and classified, the non-Homeric uses are distinguished, and a number of passages in which the poet's practice should be taken into account by his editors are discussed. There are appendixes on the colour of 6 avrjp, 6 AvSpairos and similar articulated substantives, and on certain aberrant examples of <5, 17, T& used with adversatives as introductory pronouns. The subject is not one from which epochmaking results were to be expected, but some of Dr. Svensson's statistics are surprising, and he appears to have settled some minor textual problems. The work was worth doing, and, so far as I can judge, has been done thoroughly and competently. It is to be followed by a similar study of didactic poetry. A. S. F. GOW. Trinity College, Cambridge.


We study the Higgs boson $(h)$ decay to two light jets at the 14 TeV High-Luminosity-LHC (HL-LHC), where a light jet ($j$) represents any non-flavor tagged jet from the observational point of view. The decay mode $h\to gg$ is chosen as the benchmark since it is the dominant channel in the Standard Model (SM), but the bound obtained is also applicable to the light quarks $(j=u,d,s)$. We estimate the achievable bounds on the decay branching fractions through the associated production $Vh\ (V=W^\pm,Z)$. Events of the Higgs boson decaying into heavy (tagged) or light (un-tagged) jets are correlatively analyzed. We find that with 3000 fb$^{-1}$ data at the HL-LHC, we should expect approximately $1\sigma$ statistical significance on the SM $Vh(gg)$ signal in this channel. This corresponds to a reachable upper bound ${\rm BR}(h\to jj) \leq 4~ {\rm BR}^{SM}(h\to gg)$ at $95\%$ confidence level. A consistency fit also leads to an upper bound ${\rm BR}(h\to cc) < 15~ {\rm BR}^{SM}(h\to cc)$ at $95\%$ confidence level. The estimated bound may be further strengthened by adopting multiple variable analyses, or adding other production channels.


Supplemental Digital Content is available in the text. Background: Increasing societal acceptance of transgender people has led to broader availability of gender surgery and rapid growth in transition-related operations. Facial gender surgery aims to modify patients' facial features to be more congruent with their physical expression of gender, reducing gender dysphoria and improving quality of life. Growth in research and technique evolution has not kept pace with growth in clinical volume. Therefore, the first International Facial Gender Symposium was held at Johns Hopkins University in 2019, convening surgeons who perform facial gender surgery to share ideas and assess the state of clinical evidence. Methods: To review the literature on facial gender surgery, the authors developed a search strategy for seven electronic databases (PubMed, PsycINFO, Embase, CINAHL, Web of Science, Cochrane, and Gender Studies) through May of 2019, following Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses systematic review guidelines. Results: Based on the English language literature and clinical experience, the authors suggest guidelines for screening, management, and appropriate surgical technique for patients undergoing facial gender surgery. They highlight facial gender surgery as a medically necessary intervention and identify shortcomings in current guidelines. Conclusions: Facial gender surgery represents a complex array of craniofacial and soft-tissue procedures that require application of advanced skills and decision-making. Facial gender operations are not cosmetic, are medically necessary, and require development of new CPT codes specific to facial gender surgery. It is imperative to create educational programs and methods to define sufficient training for facial gender surgery surgeons. Research priorities include better procedural outcomes data, more quality-of-life studies, and insight into variation in both patient and procedural subgroups.


Conjoined twinning is an exceedingly rare phenomenon occurring in one in every 50 000 to 1 00 000 pregnancies. Furthermore, ectopic conjoined twinning has been sparsely reported throughout the literature. To our knowledge, there have been no reported cases of ectopic conjoined twins diagnosed by ultrasound. We present a case of a 38 year-old African-American multigravida who presented to the emergency department with sudden onset rightsided abdominal pain and a quantitative serum beta hCG of 63 000 mIU per mL. The patient's history was significant for a postpartum tubal sterilization five years prior. After a thorough physical examination, the patient underwent a pelvic sonogram, which demonstrated a right adnexal ectopic gestational sac containing conjoined thoracopagus twins at 12 weeks' gestational age with single cardiac motion. An MRI supported the suspected diagnosis. At the time of exploratory laparotomy, a large right ampullary ectopic pregnancy was encountered and resected. Pathologic examination confirmed that the right fallopian tube contained a 12 week conjoined twin pregnancy. Previously reported cases of ectopic conjoined twins have been diagnosed only at the time of exploratory laparotomy. This case illustrates the capability of high-resolution ultrasound to accurately make the antenatal diagnosis of an ectopic conjoined twin pregnancy.


1,6-Diamino-2-oxo-4-[(10-oxo-4,6,7,8,9,10-hexahydropyrazolo[1,5-a][1]benzothieno[2,3-d]pyrimidin-3-yl)-1,2-dihydropyridine-3,5-dicarbonitrile (2) reacted with some mono electrophilic reagents such as acetic anhydride, carbon disulfide, chromone-3-carboxylic acid and anthranilic acid to give a novel series of triazolo[1,5-a] pyridines 3-6. Cyclocondensation of compound 6 with carbon disulphide and acetic anhydride afforded pyrido[1,2:2,3]triazolo[1,5-c]quinazolines 7,8. Also, the new pyrido[1,2-b][1,2,4]triazines 9-14 were yielded from interaction of, respectively. The effect of some α,γ-bifunctional electrophiles such as 2 compound 2 reacted with chloroacetyl chloride, oxalyl chloride, sodium pyruvate and/or benzyl -cyano-3,3-bis(methylthio)acrylonitrile, 2-cyano-3,3-bis(methylthio) prop-2-enamide,5-chloro-3-methyl-1-phenylpyrazole-4-carboxaldehyde, chromone-3-carbo-nitrile, 4-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile and/or ethyl 3-(4-chlorophenyl)-2-cyanoprop-2-enoate on compound 2 was also studied and gave some new pyrido[1,2-b][1,2,4]triazipines 15-21. The synthesized compounds were showed a low to high antimicrobial activity towards Gram- positive bacteria, Gram-negative bacteria, yeasts and the fungal strain.


OBJECTIVE The aim in this study was to review the technique and outcomes of cable graft interpositioning of the facial nerve (FN) in lateral skull base surgeries. METHODS The authors retrospectively evaluated data from patients who had undergone cable graft interpositioning after nerve sacrifice during skull base tumor removal between June 1987 and May 2015. All patients had undergone lateral skull base approaches to remove tumors at a quaternary referral center in Italy. Facial nerve function was evaluated before and after surgery using the House-Brackmann (HB) grading system. RESULTS Two hundred thirteen patients were eligible for study. The mean follow-up was 44.3 months. The most common pathology was vestibular schwannoma (83 cases [39%]), followed by FN tumor (67 cases [31%]). Facial nerve tumors had the highest incidence of nerve interruption (67 [66%] of 102 cases). Preoperative FN function was normal (HB Grade I) in 105 patients (49.3%) and mild (HB Grade II) in 19 (8.9%). At the last postoperative follow-up, 108 (50.7%) of the 213 patients had recovered to Grade III nerve function. Preoperative HB grading of the FN was found to have a significant effect on outcome (p = 0.002). CONCLUSIONS Cable graft interpositioning is a convenient and well-accepted procedure for immediate restoration of the FN. The study results, over a large number of patients, showed that the stitch-less fibrin glue-aided coaptation technique yields good results. The best possible postoperative result achieved was an HB Grade III. The chances of a good postoperative result increase when FN function is normal preoperatively. Slow-growing tumors of the cerebellopontine angle had a favorable outcome after grafting.


In Reply. — Sudden infant death syndrome is the sudden death of an infant younger than 1 year that remains unexplained after a complete postmortem investigation, including autopsy, examination of the death scene, and review of the case history. The current registration of vital events in the United States does not include this recent and evolving definition of SIDS. However, the validity of the data presented in our article is strengthened by the high autopsy rate and the distinct age distribution of the infants classified as having died from SIDS. In addition, our study found a striking contrast in the seasonal pattern of SIDS compared with other causes of postneonatal death, such as injuries. The significance of the West-to-East gradient associated with SIDS among white infants remains to be determined. The hypothesis that this gradient may be due to racial misclassification among Hispanics is not supported by analysis of linked


The (salen)Cr(III)- and (salen)Co(III)-catalyzed copolymerization reactions between a variety of epoxides with CO2 were studied by computational methods, and these findings were compared with experimental observations. The displacement of a polymeric carbonate by an epoxide, followed by epoxide ring-opening, was found to be the overall rate determining step (ΔG‡ = 22–27 kcal mol−1), whereas carboxylation of the metal-bound alkoxide is fast (ΔG‡ = 6–8 kcal mol−1). Chromium(III)-catalyzed systems have higher free energy barriers than cobalt(III) systems, consistent with the fact that (salen)Cr(III)-catalyzed polymerization reactions have to be performed at higher temperatures; such differences are attributed to enthalpy. The metal-bound polymer carbonate and alkoxide backbiting reactions generally have higher barriers than when unbound, due to the terminal oxygen atoms' reduced nucleophilicity. Homopolymerization of epoxides to give polyether defects is negligible in both chromium- and cobalt-catalyzed systems. This is due to carboxylation (metal-bound or metal-free) being competitive, and because displacement of a polymeric alkoxide from the metal center by an epoxide is strongly endergonic.


In the online world, publishers place ads from advertisers adjacent to internet search results for a given keyword. To sell such advertising, web publishers auction multiple ad slots using a generalized second-price auction. In this paper, we compare two auction policies that publishers can use to determine the rank and payments of bidding advertisers. The first policy, the highest bid policy, ranks ads based on the bids submitted while the second policy, the highest profit policy, ranks ads based on the expected profit generated to the publisher. Interestingly, we find that the highest profit policy may generate lower publisher profits per keyword even though it uses more information. Subsequently, we use data from a search engine and empirically establish that the correlation between valuations and click through rates are positive, an important assumption in our theoretical model. This finding provides significant support for the theoretical results.


Outlier detection (OD) is widely used in many fields, such as finance, information and medicine, in cleaning up datasets and keeping the useful information. In a traffic system, it alerts the transport department and drivers with abnormal traffic situations such as congestion and traffic accident. This paper presents a density-based bounded LOF (BLOF) method for large-scale traffic video data in Hong Kong. A dimension reduction by principal component analysis (PCA) was accomplished on the spatial-temporal traffic signals. Previously, a density-based local outlier factor (LOF) method on a two-dimensional (2D) PCA-proceeded spatial plane was performed. In this paper, a three-dimensional (3D) PCA-proceeded spatial space for the classical density-based OD is firstly compared with the results from the 2D counterpart. In our experiments, the classical density-based LOF OD has been applied to the 3D PCA-proceeded data domain, which is new in literature, and compared to the previous 2D domain. The average DSRs has increased about 2% in the PM sessions: 91% (2D) and 93% (3D). Also, comparing the classical density-based LOF and the new BLOF OD methods, the average DSRs in the supervised approach has increased from 94% (LOF) to 96% (BLOF) for the AM sessions and from 93% (LOF) to 95% (BLOF) for the PM sessions.


International conventions and treaties are amongst the most important formal sources of modern international law, also termed as conventional sources. Though formally the most widely applicable and emanating source of international law (creating force of application), they are neither the only source nor the most authoritative one, for creating rights and obligations under international law. For any study of the sources of international law Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice is always the starting point, which is recognized as a definitive statement of the sources of international law. It states: 1. The Court, whose function is to decide in accordance with international law such disputes as are submitted to it, shall apply: (a) International conventions, whether general or particular, establishing rules recognized by the contesting States; (b) International custom, as evidence of a general practice accepted as law; (c) The general principles of law recognized by civilized nations; (d) Subject to the provisions of article 59, judicial decisions and the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations, as subsidiary means for the determination of the rule of law; 2. This provision shall not prejudice the power of the Court to decide a case ex aequo et bono, if the parties agree thereto. It is to be discussed in the essay whether is it exhaustive in detailing all the sources of international law? or there are other sources as well? What are the other sources? and is there any hierarchy between them? Discussing the term sources and various sources of international law the statements regarding authority of conventions and treaties as sole sources of international law will also be examined.


Important insights into biological processes have come from traditional in vitro biochemistry experiments and from static structures determined by x-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy. Now scientists seek to gain a quantitative understanding of how dynamic macromolecules function inside of cells. This special issue highlights technological advances that are facilitating progress in this field.

Knowing the players is fundamental to a quantitative understanding of cellular processes. To this end, the field of proteomics is aimed at the systematic analysis of all proteins in a cell or tissue. Mass spectrometry is central to most proteomic strategies, and Domon and Aebersold (p. [212][1]) describe how recent advances in mass spectrometry instrumentation are allowing not only descriptive studies that identify proteins and characterize posttranslational modifications, but also quantitative studies looking at changes in protein concentration between samples. But a cast list, even with exits and entrances marked, cannot tell the whole story. Ultimately, we would like to view the action as it happens. Giepmans et al. (p. 217) discuss developments in fluorescent probes and techniques to determine protein expression, activity, and function in fixed and live cells; and Xie et al. (p. 228) provide examples where single-molecule imaging techniques are used to follow gene expression, active transport, and metabolism in live cells.

Exciting as this global view is, it does not show us how each protein works. It has become clear that protein motions are important for function, with much of the experimental data coming from NMR spectroscopy. Mittermaier and Kay (p. 224) give an overview of NMR methods that allow internal motions to be probed with very high time and spatial resolution. Some of these methods were used by Koglin et al. (p. 273) to show that a protein that acts in nonribosomal peptide synthesis displays a double two-state conformational equilibrium that is important to its function. Computational methods provide additional tools to study dynamics. Masgrau et al. (p. [237][2]) used a combination of kinetic and crystallographic experiments and computer simulation to show that in one enzyme, short-range thermal motions are sufficient to explain hydrogen tunneling. An associated Perspective by Benkovic and Hammes-Schiffer (p. 208) suggests that looking outward from the active site may reveal a more complex picture.

In related online resources, Science 's Signal Transduction Knowledge Environment (STKE) ( ) features a Protocol by England on monitoring AMPA receptor trafficking and a Review by Vogel et al. discussing how to overcome potential pitfalls of fluorescence resonance energy transfer (FRET) analysis.

We look to a future where the tools described here, and those yet to come, will allow us to watch biochemical reactions in live cells and understand how each molecule plays its role.

 [1]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1124619
 [2]: /lookup/doi/10.1126/science.1126002


Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), which is caused by a new coronavirus-severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2)-is a pandemic with major impacts on the health care sector, and a broad view of the disease is of fundamental importance for any radiologist. The purpose of this review is to address the main clinical and imaging aspects of COVID-19, as well as guidelines for requesting and using imaging methods; measures to protect patients and health care professionals; systems for quantifying pulmonary findings and preparing integrated reports; and the main innovations that have emerged during this pandemic.


: The interaction of ethanol with drugs becomes more and more important because of a constant increase of the consumption of both. While most of the commonly used drugs do not alter the elimination of alcohol there exist a number of drugs which influence the degradation of ethanol by inhibition of the acetaldehyddehydrogenase. In combination with alcohol these drugs lead to an antabus-like reaction. In respect to the influence of ethanol on the metabolic degradation of drugs it must be destinguished between acute and chronic effects of alcohol. Upon acute influence of ethanol we observe an increased efficiency of many drugs. Chronical influence of ethanol on the other hand leads to a reduced action of drugs by enzyme inhibition. Besides the interaction on the level of biotransformation the interaction on the receptor-level is important. This mechanism especially leads to an increased efficiency of drugs which influence the central-nervous system.


Problem. This investigation focuses on social dynamics in the third epistle of John. In the context of 3 John hospitality and patronage seem to be opposed as two non-compatible models of behavior. In what sense they are different and what makes them non compatible in a church setting is the main focus of this research. Method. A social approach is utilized in this investigation for the purpose of understanding the social system, values, and circumstances that shaped the events of 3 John. I first collect evidence to explain the ancient customs of hospitality and patronage in order to create a model for each. In the final step I contrast the two models. This exercise helps to visualize the differences and non-compatibility between the two models. Results. Hospitality is a host-guest relationship between non-kin individuals who deferentially alternate their roles by practicing balanced reciprocity, which brings them into a state of equality. On the other hand, patronage is a reciprocal patron-client relationship based on social inequality of the parties involved, where the patron uses his power to benefit his client as well as to benefit himself through that relationship, and the client looks for ways to satisfy his own needs, while being of use to his patron. Traditional ancient hospitality included an element of subordination of the host to the guest, as well as deference of the parties to each other. Patronage, however, selfishly exploits another person for the purpose of domination. Conclusion. In 3 John, Gaius has modeled hospitality and is encouraged to continue doing so. On the other hand, Diotrephes has followed patronage and his actions are condemned. The Elder wants to help avoid all the conflicts and power issues that result from the inequality inherent inpatronal relationships. That is why he recommends traditional hospitality as a relationship of equality which increases networking, cultivates deference of the parties involved, and produces a healthy local church. In that sense 3 John presents the model of hospitality versus the model of patronage.


America: Past and Present traces the origin and growth of American social, political, and cultural traditions from pre-colonial times through the twentieth century.-- Authentic readings and vocabulary building exercises-- Integrated grammar exercises-- Composition activities in every lesson-- Maps, illustrations, and timelines throughout


In order to bridge the gap between external consumer value and internal production quality, an understanding of consumers' needs is vital. Consumers' needs have to be translated through a firms' internal value chain to improve production quality. The Means-End Chain approach elicits consumers' needs in terms of product attributes, which further can be translated into engineering characteristics by using the House of Quality concept as the first step in Quality Function Deployment. Here, the relative importance of the attributes plays an important role for further processing. This paper' aims at identifying product attributes and their relative importance, as an input into the House of Quality within Quality Function Deployment. This is done in the case of wooden multi-storey houses in Sweden, since there is a documented gap between the external consumer value and the internal production quality. Based on the Means-End Chain approach, the Extended Association Pattern Technique was used for a two stage study to elicit product attributes. Results from 34 interviews and 503 returned questionnaires revealed ten product attributes ranked by importance, to be further translated into engineering characteristics within Quality Function Deployment.


Networks-on-chip (NoCs) have become the standard for interconnect solutions in industrial designs ranging from client CPUs to many-core chip-multiprocessors. Since NoCs play a vital role in system performance and power consumption, pre-silicon evaluation environments include cycle-accurate NoC simulators. Long simulations increase the execution time of evaluation frameworks, which are already notoriously slow, and prohibit design-space exploration. Existing analytical NoC models, which assume fair arbitration, cannot replace these simulations since industrial NoCs typically employ priority schedulers and multiple priority classes. To address this limitation, we propose a systematic approach to construct priority-aware analytical performance models using micro-architecture specifications and input traffic. Our approach decomposes the given NoC into individual queues with modified service time to enable accurate and scalable latency computations. Specifically, we introduce novel transformations along with an algorithm that iteratively applies these transformations to decompose the queuing system. Experimental evaluations using real architectures and applications show high accuracy of 97% and up to 2.5× speedup in full-system simulation.


Little is known about how cells regulate the size of their organelles. In this study, we find that proper flagellar length control in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii requires the activity of a new member of the cyclin-dependent kinase (CDK) family, which is encoded by the LF2 (long flagella 2) gene. This novel CDK contains all of the important residues that are essential for kinase activity but lacks the cyclin-binding motif PSTAIRE. Analysis of genetic lesions in a series of lf2 mutant alleles and site-directed mutagenesis of LF2p reveals that improper flagellar length and defective flagellar assembly correlate with the extent of disruption of conserved kinase structures or residues by mutations. LF2p appears to interact with both LF1p and LF3p in the cytoplasm, as indicated by immunofluorescence localization, sucrose density gradients, cell fractionation, and yeast two-hybrid experiments. We propose that LF2p is the catalytic subunit of a regulatory kinase complex that controls flagellar length and flagellar assembly.


The authors report their experience in the use of extra-long stems for total hip reimplantations, and they then compare them with the results obtained when short or standard stems were used. The use of the extra-long stem is reserved for special cases, such as those where there is osteolysis extending to the proximal femur and diaphysis, distal diaphyseal fractures, and when the trans-femoral technique is used to remove the stem. A total of 246 prosthetic stem reimplantations were carried out between 1985 and 1999, and in most of the cases (86.2%) the cause of reimplantation was aseptic loosening of the stem alone or of both prosthetic components, while in the remaining cases it involved the sequelae of endoprosthesis or cotyloiditis (8.5%), the sequelae of septic explantation (2.1%), breakage of the prosthetic head and cone wear (1.2%), breakage of the prosthetic stem (0.8%), fracture of the femoral diaphysis on a loosened cemented prosthesis (0.4%), breakage of the prosthetic neck (0.4%), dislocation of the prosthesis (0.4%). A stem equal to or longer than 22 cm had to be used in 13 cases (5.3%), while a short stem (12-13 cm) or a standard stem (17-18 cm) was sufficient in the remaining 233 cases. The results were worse for the extra-long stem group as compared to those for the short/standard group; that is, there was 1 case (7.7%) of septic loosening that resulted in explantation, as compared to 2.6% (6 cases) of explantation resulting from aseptic loosening (3 cases) or septic loosening (3 cases) of the short/standard group. As concerns radiographic assessment, extra-long stems show bone stability in 69.2% of cases, fibrous in 23.1%, and loosened in 7.7%, while 97.7% of short/standard stems show bone stability, 0.9% fibrous stability, 1.4% instability.


Thermal and structural austenite to martensite reversible transition was studied in melt spun ribbons of Ni50Mn40Sn5Co5, Ni50Mn37.5Sn7.5Co5 and Ni50Mn35Sn10Co5 (at. %) alloys. Analysis of X-ray diffraction patterns confirms that all alloys have martensitic structure at room temperature: four layered orthorhombic 4O for Ni50Mn40Sn5Co5, four layered orthorhombic 4O and seven-layered monoclinic 14M for Ni50Mn37.5Sn7.5Co5 and seven-layered monoclinic 14M for Ni50Mn35Sn5Co5. Analysis of differential scanning calorimetry scans shows that higher enthalpy and entropy changes are obtained for alloy Ni50Mn37.5Sn7.5Co5, whereas transition temperatures increases as increasing valence electron density.


This is a descriptive qualitative study using narrative inquiry to build upon research on mentoring and support for practicing teachers to advance how we think about retention. Each participant offers a specific case for consideration. Guided by the conceptual framework of Dewey's focus on experiences, this study has the potential to shed light on new and veteran rural educators by listening to their combined voices. The significance resides in the viewing of their 'lived expectations' and 'lived experiences' through a constructivist's lens of what the participants expected teaching to be like, what they experienced and are experiencing, and what the opportunity to reflect together meant to their practice. By providing a space for individual voices to be heard and honored, the study focused on the research question: What do new and veteran teachers have to say to us about their expectations and experiences in teaching? In a rural Georgia community, seven participants were purposely selected based on years of experience as teachers, new and veteran. Data collection included lists of expectations, individual open-ended interviews, focus groups, and reflections collected over an eight-month period. Throughout the inquiry process, narrative analysis was used in re-telling their storied educational experiences. The analysis and findings made visible the differences in these new and veteran teachers' expectations and indicated similarities in the teachers' experiences regardless of age or experience level, while acknowledging the bond with their community. Two proposals were made: (1) the new and veteran teachers' expectations of being a teacher were different; (2) these rural teachers had a background with a rural community or an attachment to the rural community in which they taught; acknowledged the supportive and challenging characteristics of experiences with people in rural communities; and, talked about similar educational experiences. As a result, this study contributes to the knowledge base in teaching and mentoring. The similar experiences in this study, despite the years of experience, require us to think more about 'teacher' as a role with very little variance. This study is a touchstone text for considerations regarding teacher preparation, retention, and how we think about mentoring. INDEX WORDS: New teachers, Veteran teachers, Pyramids of intervention, Rural community, Story, Narrative, Judgment, Propositions UNITING THE STORIES OF NEW AND VETERAN EDUCATORS: CASE STUDY NARRATIVES OF EXPECTATIONS AND EXPERIENCES


This dissertation submitted to the University of Dhaka, Dhaka, Bangladesh, in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of masters of philosophy in public administration.


Abstract Background Ascertaining involvement of left ventricular assist device (LVAD) in a patient presenting with bloodstream infection (BSI) can be challenging, frequently leading to use of chronic antimicrobial suppressive (CAS) therapy. We aimed to assess the efficacy of CAS therapy to prevent relapse of BSI from LVAD and non-LVAD sources. Methods We retrospectively screened adults receiving LVAD support from 2010 through 2018, to identify cases of BSI. Bloodstream infection events were classified into LVAD-related, LVAD-associated, and non-LVAD BSIs. Results A total of 121 episodes of BSI were identified in 80 patients. Of these, 35 cases in the LVAD-related, 14 in the LVAD-associated, and 46 in the non-LVAD BSI groups completed the recommended initial course of therapy and were evaluated for CAS therapy. Chronic antimicrobial suppressive therapy was prescribed in most of the LVAD-related BSI cases (32 of 35, 91.4%) and 12 (37.5%) experienced relapse. Chronic antimicrobial suppressive therapy was not prescribed in a majority of non-LVAD BSI cases (33, 58.9%), and most (31, 93.9%) did not experience relapse. Chronic antimicrobial suppressive therapy was prescribed in 9 of 14 (64.2%) cases of LVAD-associated BSI and none experienced relapse. Of the 5 cases in this group that were managed without CAS, 2 had relapse. Conclusions Patients presenting with LVAD-related BSI are at high risk of relapse. Consequently, CAS therapy may be a reasonable approach in the management of these cases. In contrast, routine use of CAS therapy may be unnecessary for non-LVAD BSIs.