The objective of the paper is to investigate the direction of a further crack propagation from the interface between two elastic materials. The angle of crack propagation changes when the crack passes the interface. The suggested procedure makes it possible to estimate an angle of propagation under which the crack will propagate into the second material. The assumptions of linear elastic fracture mechanics and elastic behavior of the body with interfaces are considered. The finite element method was used for numerical calculations. The results obtained might contribute to a better understanding of the failure of materials with interfaces (e.g. layered composites, materials with protective coatings) and to a more reliable estimation of the service life of such structures.


myocardial infarction/unstable angina versus elective) and PCI volume. With the inclusion of PCI facilities without on-site CT surgery, median drive time for patients treated at those facilities decreased by 90.8 minutes ( P <0.001). Procedural need for emergent coronary artery bypass graft and mortality rates were low and similar between facilities. Adjusted 1-year mortality and myocardial infarction rates were similar between facilities (hazard ratio in PCI facilities without relative to those with on-site CT surgery, 1.02; 95% confidence interval, 0.87–1.2), and not modified by either PCI indication or PCI volume. Subsequent revascularization rates were higher at sites without on-site CT surgery facilities (hazard ratio, 1.21; 95% confidence interval, 1.03–1.42). Conclusions —This study suggests that providing PCI facilities without on-site CT surgery in an integrated health care system with quality oversight improves patient access without compromising procedural or 1-year outcomes. using log-rank tests and Kaplan–Meier curves. Cox regression mod- eling was used to adjust for covariates selected from the full model of the American College of Cardiology-NCDR PCI mortality risk pre- diction model. 17 For the 1-year MI models, we used covariates based on clinical reasoning and previous studies. 18–20 Covariates included age, sex, race, ethnicity, diabetes mellitus, dyslipidemia, hypertension, renal failure, cerebrovascular disease, peripheral arterial dis- ease, body weight, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, smoking, and previous MI. A robust estimator of the covariance matrix was used to account for clustering by site. For individual revascularization outcomes, we identified any PCI or CABG recorded in the combined CART and VA dataset as specified above. We also conducted subgroup analyses of 1-year outcomes by PCI indication (STEMI versus NSTEMI/UA versus elective) and high versus low procedural volume. Volumes were dichotomized based on the median volume of VA cath labs (165 PCIs per year), with high volume defined as equal to or greater than the median value. We also conducted a sensitivity analysis categorizing facilities into procedural volume quartiles. For both subgroup analyses, interaction terms (site CT surgery status * PCI indication; site CT surgery status * PCI volume) were entered into our regression models to determine whether significant effect modification was present. For the PCI indication subgroup analysis, we also added median drive time between patient home and their PCI facility as a covariate to our regression models. similar rates of procedural adverse outcomes and 1-year mortality and MI rates were seen at facilities without on-site CT surgery. The findings were not modified by either PCI indication or PCI volume. This study suggests that providing PCI facilities without on-site CT surgery in an integrated health care system with quality oversight improves patient access without comprising procedural or 1-year outcomes.


After Swift, there is no sure plan to furnish a replacement for the rapidly disseminated, high-precision GRB positions it provides, nor a new type of observatory to probe new GRB parameter space. We propose a new GRB mission concept, the Next Generation Rapid Optical–NIR (near infrared) Response GRB Observatory (NGRG) concept, and demonstrate, through analysis of Swift BAT data, studies of new GRB samples, and extinction predictions, that a relatively modest size observatory will produce valuable new measurements and good GRB detection rates. As with Swift, GRBs are initially located with a coded-mask X-ray camera. However, the NGRG has two distinguishing features: first, a beam-steering system to begin optical observations within ∼1 s after location; second, in addition to the optical camera, a separate near-IR (NIR) camera viewing the same field, greatly increasing sensitivity to extinguished bursts. These features yield the unique capability of exploring the rise phase of GRB optical-NIR emission. Thus far, among GRBs with optical afterglow detections, a peak is measured in only ∼26–40% of the light curves. The rise time for prompt, or pre-afterglow, optical emission is rarely measured, as is the transition to afterglow emission. Prompt or pre-afterglow NIR emission is even less frequently measured. Rapid-response measurements give new tools for exploration of many science topics, including optical emission mechanisms (synchrotron vs. SSC, photospheric emission) and jet characteristics (reverse vs. forward shock emission, baryon-dominated vs. magnetic dominated). The rapid-response capability also allows measurement of dynamic evolution of extinction due to vaporization of progenitor system dust. This dynamic dust measurement is the only tool we know of to separate the effects of star-system-scale dust and galactic-structure-scale dust; it is remarkable that this probe of small-scale phenomena can be used at the high redshifts where GRBs are observed. In this paper, we discuss techniques and the feasibility of these measurements, and give detection rate estimates using only measured Swift performance (without extrapolations). The NGRG will explore two new frontiers: optical and NIR GRB emission measured earlier than ever before, via rapid-response, and potentially fainter, more extinguished GRBs than ever before, via sensitive, early NIR measurements. In an era with little funding for new extragalactic science space missions, costs are important. Our modest NGRG concept will produce new GRB science, while providing crucial access to rapid GRB alerts for the community. An X-ray instrument barely 1/5 the detecting area of Swift BAT, 1024 cm2, will yield a significant fraction of BAT's GRB detection rate: more than 65 X-ray detections per year. With a 30 cm optical-IR telescope and modern cameras, more than 19 NIR and 14 optical band detections would be produced each year for community follow-up. In addition, active control of the beam-steering system, via feedback from a fast-read optical camera, would remove the need for arcsec pointing stabilization of the spacecraft platform, for a substantial cost saving and a wider range of potential space platforms.


The generation of energy via fossil fuel burning results in carbon emissions. These emissions contribute to the climate change of our world, particularly in terms of global warming. On the contrary, energy has become blood of life for the existence and functioning of our built environments. In order to control carbon emissions, the UK has taken lead among many countries around the globe and especially in Europe by passing a bill for the Climate Change Act 2008 which legally binds the UK to at least 80% reduction of carbon emissions by 2050 and 34% by 2020 which is fast approaching. However, the review of literature and models to date has revealed that to help meet these legal carbon cut targets set by the Act, there is a lack of unified knowledge-base approaches that could integrate all energy-related aspects of buildings in terms of these issues:
establishing 1990 base-level and current carbon footprint of a given building and then drawing
comparisons between the two to set milestones; breakdown of the energy consumption amongst various energy-consuming items of the building; identification of appropriate high energy- consuming items in the building; maintenance and refurbishment; fabric and non-fabric; implications of relevant terminologies; cost-benefit analysis of energy-saving technologies and pay-back time in connection to meeting aforesaid legal carbon cut targets. On the basis of identified knowledge gaps and attempting to bridge them, this paper develops and presents such an unified framework of a conceptual methodology that outlines fundamentals of a whole-system procedure while catering for all the aforesaid issues.


Head lice, Pediculis capitis De Geer, populations were investigated for permethrin and malathion resistance after initial establishment of a discriminating dose of topical application bioassay with body lice, Pediculus humanus L. For both insecticides, approximately 2 times the lethal dose (LD)95 at 4 h was selected, 2 ng of permethrin and 100 ng of malathion per head louse, respectively. Head lice were collected from heads of infested children in Denmark at 33 primary schools, one kindergarten, and seven boarding schools. The lice were collected by combing of dry hair, with a fine-toothed antilouse comb attached to a vacuum cleaner. A resistance survey covers head lice collected from 208 of 1,441 persons combed. The frequency of permethrin- and malathion-resistant head lice is high in Danish head lice populations. In 17 of 24 samples tested for permethrin resistance, all head lice survived the discriminating dose. Six samples had between 3 and 25% dead head lice, whereas one sample had 60% mortality. In nine of 25 samples tested for malathion resistance, all head lice survived the discriminating dose. Seven samples had <25% dead head lice, and four samples had a mortality of 50% or more at the discriminating dose. The connection between permethrin resistance and kdr-like mutations is confirmed by our findings. The frequency of the double mutation T929I-L932 F in the voltage-sensitive sodium channel gene associated with permethrin resistance was 0.95 in Danish head lice populations.


Objectives: To evaluate the prognosis and outcome of persistent left superior vena cava (PLSVC) in fetus with congenital heart disease. Methods: Retrospective study of 11 cases of PLSVC detected prenatally between 2003 and 2006 in our center. Maternal fetal medicine specialists and pediatric cardiologists did the prenatal evaluation. Posnatal follow–up was obtained in all cases. All cases were presented to the Prenatal Diagnosis and Fetal Advanced Therapy Committee of Colsanitas Clinic. Results: Eleven cases with PLSVC were diagnosed. The diagnosis was made in the three vessel and trachea view when a supernumerary vessel to the left of the pulmonary trunk was identified, and in the 4-chamber view when two signs–a cyst at the lateral wall of the left atrium and dilated coronary sinus–were seen. In nine cases we found a structural anomaly in the heart: left ventricular hypoplastic syndrome (n = 2), double outlet right ventricle (DORV)(n = 2), conotruncal anomaly (n = 2), partial anomaly vein drainage (n = 1) and ventricular septal defect (VSD)(n = 2). In two cases PLSVC was an isolated finding. Of the VSD that were associated with PLSVC, one fetus had trisomy 13 and the other had hydrops. The fetus wuth DORV had a left isomerism syndrome. Of nine cases with PLSVC and a structural heart anomaly, seven fetuses died in perinatal period. 85% of these fetuses had anomalies in other systems and 75% were associated with complex heart disease. Conclusions: We believe that PLSVC associated with complex heart disease could be considered a marker of a poor prognosis. PLSVC could be a marker of congenital heart disease and is an indication for a detailed ultrasonographic and echocardiographic study.


The Arctic, Antarctic and Tibetan Plateau are very sensitive to global climate change. Hence, it is urgent that we improve our understanding of how they respond to climate change, and how those responses in turn affect both regional and global climate. Against a background of current global warming, the three poles display climate diversities temporarily and spatially, which to different degrees affect the weather and climate over China. Enhanced monitoring of climate change in these three areas, as well as connected work on the responses and feedbacks of the three regions to climate change, will provide necessary support for adaptation and the sustainable development of the Chinese economy.


In electron ionization source, electrons are produced through thermionic emission by heating a wire filament, accelerating the electrons by high voltage, and ionizing the analyzed molecules. In such a system, one important parameter is the filament emission current that determines the ionization rate; therefore, one needs to regulate this current. On the one hand, fast responses control is needed to keep the emission current constant, but on the other hand, we need to protect the filament from damage that occurs by large filaments current transients and overheating. To control our filament current and emission current, we developed a digital circuit based on a digital signal processing controller that has several modes of operation. We used a smart algorithm that has a fast response to a small signal and a slow response to a large signal. In addition, we have several protective measures that prevent the current from reaching unsafe values.


In this paper we focus on modeling friendships between humans as a way of working towards technology that can initiate and sustain a lifelong relationship with users. We do this by predicting friendship status in a dyad using a set of automatically harvested verbal and nonverbal features from videos of the interaction of students in a peer tutoring study. We propose a new computational model used to model friendship status in our data, based on a group sparse model (GSM) with L2,1 norm which is designed to accommodate the sparse and noisy properties of the multi-channel features. Our GSM model achieved the best overall performance compared to a non-sparse linear model (NLM) and a regular sparse linear model (SLM), as well as outperforming human raters. Dyadic features, such as number and length of conversational turns and mutual gaze, in addition to low level features such as F0 and gaze at task, were found to be good predictors of friendship status.


Simultaneous wireless information and power transfer techniques for multiway massive multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) relay networks are investigated. By using two practically viable relay receiver designs, namely 1) the power splitting receiver and 2) the time switching receiver, asymptotic signal-to-interference-plus-noise ratio (SINR) expressions are derived for an unlimited number of antennas at the relay. These asymptotic SINRs are then used to derive asymptotic symmetric sum rate expressions in closed form. Notably, these asymptotic SINRs and sum rates become independent of radio frequency-to-direct current (RF-to-DC) conversion efficiency in the limit of infinitely many relay antennas. Moreover, tight average sum rate approximations are derived in closed form for finitely many relay antennas. The fundamental tradeoff between the harvested energy and the sum rate is quantified for both relay receiver structures. Notably, the detrimental impact of imperfect channel state information (CSI) on the MIMO detector/precoder is investigated, and thereby, the performance degradation caused by pilot contamination, which is the residual interference due to nonorthogonal pilot sequence usage in adjacent/cochannel systems, is quantified. The presence of cochannel interference (CCI) can be exploited to be beneficial for energy harvesting at the relay, and consequently, the asymptotic harvested energy is an increasing function of the number of cochannel interferers. Notably, in the genie-aided perfect CSI case, the detrimental impact of CCI for signal decoding can be cancelled completely whenever the number of relay antennas grows without bound. Nevertheless, the pilot contamination severely degrades the sum rate performance even for infinitely many relay antennas.


The ongoing megatrend of digitalization is significantly affecting societies and organizations. How organizations deal with the impact of digitalization may determine whether or not they will be competitive in the future. The board of directors may hereby play a key role for the organization to adapt to the changing strategic context. But based on various corporate failures, boards' work and their effectiveness have recently been questioned. Are todays' boards equipped to create values for organizations in the future? We address this important research question by introducing a framework where digitalization is predicted to influence boards in two areas. First, we argue that boards in the future consist of virtual networks of people where needs to monitor management diminish and shared leadership approaches are emphasized. Second, we suggest that boards work according to a dynamic board agenda based on organizational threats and opportunities. The agenda is built around learning and knowledge management and is reflected in the committee structure. Using dynamic capabilities arguments, we propose a framework with the ambition to contribute to the understanding of what makes boards fit future organizational needs. With such an approach, this is the first study that contributes to knowledge on boards by examining how boards need to adapt to meet the challenges in a digital world. The implications for theory and practice call for changed perspectives on what boards do and how they look like.


Abstract Strategies to empower the immune system to successfully attack cancers, including vaccination approaches, adaptive T cell therapies, and immune checkpoint modulators, have recently achieved remarkable success across a spectrum of cancer indications. Nonetheless, with rare exception, only a minority of patients with a given type of cancer respond to an immunotherapeutic when administered as single-agent therapy. Although under extensive laboratory and clinical investigation, the role of these approaches for glioma patients remains to be determined. While the central nervous system (CNS) is no longer regarded as an immunoprivileged sanctuary, nuances regarding immune responses in the CNS may impact on the activity of immunotherapy treatments of brain tumor patients. Furthermore, many common CNS tumors such as World Health Organization grade III and IV (high grade) gliomas utilize myriad, nonoverlapping strategies to dampen or extinguish antitumor immune responses. For these reasons, critical research efforts are focused on identifying biomarkers that predict patients with a heightened likelihood of therapeutic benefit as well as evaluating rationally designed combinatorial immunotherapy approaches with potentially complementary mechanisms of immune-activation for brain cancer patients.


This article is based on an early-2001 survey of more than 200 corporations conducted to gauge the degree by which FAS 133 has altered or may alter the behavior of corporate end-users of derivatives. It includes a detailed discussion of changes in exposure management, hedging, and hedge-effectiveness testing practices. Among the survey findings are that two-thirds of the respondents believe FAS 133 has imposed an excessive burden on their reporting requirements; required documentation demonstrating that hedges are expected to be highly effective, as a precondition for hedge accounting, appears to be most problematic in connection with hedges of variable-interest-rate funding; and that hedgers9 marked preferences for interest-rate swaps to hedge interest-rate exposures and forward contracts to hedge currency and commodity-price exposures have been enhanced at the expense of plain vanilla options, futures contracts, and other derivatives.


Milling of biomass is a necessary key step in suspension gasification or powder combustion. Milled biomass powders are often cohesive, have low bulk density and poor flowability leading to costly problems in fuel handling. Two different milling methods with four different biomass powders have been performed to correlate between particle and feeding properties. Charcoal, Torrefied Norway spruce, Norway spruce and reed canary grass where milled (knife mill or hammer mill) with a screen size of 1 mm. The resulting powders where analyzed using both mechanical sieving and optical sieveless particle size analysis. After bulk and tapped density tests, the powders were fed through a twin screw feeder onto an analytic scale that logged the weight data on a pc. Two tests were made, one with constant screw speed and the other using a built-in function called loss in weight feeding. The hammer mill produced more homogenous powders with more fines than the knife mill. They also had lower bulk and tapped density. The feeding tests were inconclusive as two materials where easier fed when hammer milled and two when knife milled. Hammer milled materials had better initial feeding stability. Another interesting observation was that two of the materials showed good agreement with a feeding rate that could be predicted if assuming tapped density while the other two behaved more similar to what would be the case for bulk density.


The inelastic supply of fossil energy in the international input market precipitates failure of Pigouvian taxation consequent to competition among governments, as imposition of an environmental tax increases (decreases) the marginal cost of domestic (foreign) firms. This paper demonstrates that unless the supply of fossil energy is perfectly elastic, cap-and-trade outperforms Pigouvian taxation in terms of the domestic welfare of adopting countries, and global welfare is maximized when all countries implement the alternative scheme. We further demonstrate that the linkage of permit markets, when the energy supply is sufficiently inelastic, improves global welfare.


Ionospheric time delay variations are highly variable and random in the low latitude Indian region. It is a key responsible parameter for the range error in Global Positioning System (GPS) ranging signals which is proportional to the total electron content (TEC). Dual frequency GPS receiver at KL University, Vaddeswaram (16.31° N, 80.37° E), India (falls under the transition zone of the Equatorial Ionization Anomaly in low latitude) is considered in the analysis. An Auto Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) model is implemented for short term forecasting of the VTEC (Vertical TEC) values. Three Geomagnetic storms occurred in the current solar maximum period (2013-2014) are considered to test the performance of ARMA model. The forecasted VTEC values are compared with original VTEC the values and IRI models. The forecasted results indicate that ARMA model would be useful to set up an early warning system of ionospheric disturbances.


Transmission of information is the basis for all societal activities and is the basis of communication all over the world and through space. Its importance in day to day activities cannot be overstated. Progress in human activities has been possible largely because of progress in the transmission of information. The explosion of information transmission in the information age has necessitated the use of wider bandwidths for different applications and this is conveniently accommodated in the radio frequency range. Information transmission systems can be broadly categorized into two groups, wired and wireless. Even though wired transmission form a part of all communications equipment, wireless applications support a wide variety of communications systems both on land, across the oceans and through space. Antennas form a necessary component for wireless systems for both transmission and reception of information and therefore students need to have a good practical understanding of antennas just as they learn the theory, and they need to appreciate how practical results conform to theory. The computer can be used to facilitate this process in the learning environment by providing the students with realizable concept of electromagnetic radiations. The versatility of the computer enables different types of antenna measurements to be made, and various parameters to be determined. This paper discusses the usefulness of computers in antennas laboratory exercises in a Telecommunications course. It also discusses student design experiments, and experiments planned for the next step of the learning experience.


The rapid expansion of the Internet and changes in the health market are giving rise to the emergence of web-based tools for seeking health information. As a result, the Web empowers consumers by allowing them to access important medical information that has traditionally been mediated through healthcare professionals. Along with this growing trend comes the challenge of establishing credibility in a digital environment saturated with health information. One way to begin addressing this challenge is to assess the projection of credibility of health information found online. The purpose of this paper is twofold. Firstly, to develop a better understanding of how projections of credibility might differ between traditional and non-traditional online health sources. The former defined as websites belonging to formal and conventional institutions and the latter defined as informal and unconventional organizations. Secondly, to develop some strategic approaches that might be employed to enhance perceptions of online credibility. This paper conducts a content analysis using the Health on the Net Foundation's Code of Conduct for medical and health websites and DISCERN, an instrument that assesses the quality of written
information about treatment choices (DISCERN, 2012).


Community banking plays an important role in financial intermediation in the United States, especially in the context of providing financing in smaller, rural markets and for small businesses. However, recent trends in regulation, the economic environment, and industry practices have led to a significant decline in the amount of FDIC-chartered institutions that qualify as community banks. In addition, the share of community-bank-held assets in the United States is declining as well. The decline of the community banking industry has significant implications for the efficiency and growth of the real economy, as larger banks may not be able to serve the community banking demographic as efficiently. In this study, we develop a dataset that allows us to analyze banking data collected from all FDIC-charted institutions and published by the FDIC. We use this data to analyze the community banking industry at the national, regional, state, and local levels. We are able to report the trends, strengths, and weakness of the community banking industry for the past twenty years. In addition, we develop two sets of community banking indexes meant to assess the relative and nominal changes in the strength of the community banking industry. One set of indicators simply measure market share, while others are composite community banking indexes that represent a unique contribution to the analysis of the industry. Finally, we analyze developments in the community banking industry across the tenures of the past three FDIC Chairs, which can provide context and guidance with respect to the perspective of key regulatory officials on community banking issues. Analysis of the data shows that the community banking industry is declining in the United States. However, the regional and local community banking industries, while still declining, have been relatively less affected. Our Community Banking Relative Growth Index (CRGI) shows that community banks have been weakening, relative to non-community banks, but the degree of weakening has been less at the local level. Our Community Bank Momentum Index (CMOM) shows that, on a nominal basis, the community banking industry has experienced nominal growth and that the regional and local banks are driving this trend.


The mouse Thy-1.2 gene was isolated from a C57B1/6 cosmid library and its nucleotide sequence was determined from an 8-kilobase-long EcoRI fragment. The predicted amino acid sequence indicates that the mouse Thy-i molecule contains a 19 amino acid leader peptide and the 112 amino acids reported previously from protein sequence analy- sis, plus 31 extra amino acids at the carboxyl terminus. These 31 amino acids contain a stretch of 20 amino acids, at positions 124-143, which is highly hydrophobic. RNA transfer blot analysis of RNA from mouse tissues indicates that the sequence coding for these 31 amino acids is present on poly(A)-containing RNA of brain and thymus tissues. This hydrophobic segment very likely provides the basis for integration of Thy-i within the plasma membrane. The entire coding sequence of Thy-i is distributed among three exons, encoding amino acid residues -19 to 8, -7 to 106, and 107 to 143, respectively. Comparison of the mouse and rat Thy-i genes shows that both have a similar gene organization and encode a highly conserved transmembrane segment.


Total hip replacement surgery is the mainstay of treatment for end-stage hip arthritis. In 2014, there were 28227 procedures (incidence rate 252/100000 population). Using administrative data, we projected the future volume of total hip replacement procedures and incidence rates using two models. The constant rate model fixes utilisation rates at 2014 levels and adjusts for demographic changes. Projections indicate 32248 admissions by 2025 or an annual growth of 1.22% (incidence rate 273). The time trend model additionally projects the evolution in age-specific utilisation rates. 34895 admissions are projected by 2025 or an annual growth of 1.95% (incidence rate 296). The projections show a shift in performing procedures at younger age. Forecasts of length of stay indicate a substantial shortening. By 2025, the required number of hospital beds will be halved. Despite more procedures, capacity can be reduced, leading to organisational change (e.g. elective orthopaedic clinics) and more labour intensive stays.


The macroscopic behavior of many physical systems can be approximately described by classical quantities. However, quantum theory demands the existence of omnipresent quantum fluctuations on top of this classical background – which, albeit small, should have some impact onto its dynamics. The correct treatment of this quantum back-reaction is one of the main problems in quantum gravity and related to fundamental questions such as the initial (big bang) singularity or the cosmological constant. By means of the qualitative analogy between gravity and fluid dynamics, we try to shed some light onto these problems and show some of the difficulties associated with the calculation of the quantum back-reaction starting from the classical (macroscopic) equation of motion.


Localization is a classic and complex problem in the field of mobile robotics. It becomes particularly challenging in an aqueous environment because currents within the water can move the robot. A novel localization module and corresponding localization algorithm for experimental autonomous underwater vehicles is presented. Unlike other available positioning systems which require fixed hardware beacons, this custom built module relies only on information available from sensors on-board the vehicle and knowledge of its bounded domain. This allows the user to save valuable time which would otherwise be devoted to the setup and calibration of a beacon or sensor network. The module uses three orthogonal ultrasonic transducers to measure distances to the tank boundaries. Using the measured tri-axial orientation of the vehicle, the algorithm analytically determines the robot's position within the domain in absolute coordinates. Certain vehicle states do not allow the position to be completely resolved by the algorithm alone. In this case, state estimation is used to estimate the robot position until its state is no longer indeterminate. The modular design of this system makes it ideal for application on underwater vehicles which operate in a bounded environment for research purposes. An experimental version of the module was constructed and tested in the WPI swimming pool and showed successful localization under normal conditions. ii Acknowledgements


Porous structures have emerged as a breakthrough of shape‐morphing hydrogels to achieve a rapid response. However, these porous actuators generally suffer from a lack of complexity and diversity in obtained 3D shapes. Herein, a simple yet versatile strategy is developed to generate shape‐morphing hydrogels with both fast deformation and enhanced designability in 3D shapes by combining two promising technologies: electrospinning and 3D printing. Elaborate patterns are printed on mesostructured stimuli‐responsive electrospun membranes, modulating in‐plane and interlayer internal stresses induced by swelling/shrinkage mismatch, and thus guiding morphing behaviors of electrospun membranes to adapt to changes of the environment. With this strategy, a series of fast deformed hydrogel actuators are constructed with various distinctive responsive behaviors, including reversible/irreversible formations of 3D structures, folding of 3D tubes, and formations of 3D structures with multi low‐energy states. It is worth noting that although poly(N‐isopropyl acrylamide) is chosen as the model system in the present research, our strategy is applicable to other stimuli‐responsive hydrogels, which enriches designs of rapid deformed hydrogel actuators.


: From 1950 to 1971 a total of 4,342 cases of carcinoma of the esophagus were reported to the Central Cancer Registry of the Puerto Rico Health Department. Fifty-eight patients with histologic proof of their diagnosis survived five or more years, for an absolute survival of 1.3 per cent. Neither location of the tumor or type of treatment made much difference in average survival. In fact, 20 of the 58 patients had metastasis or extension of the tumor to adjacent tissues at sometime in their clinical course.


Persons who are in one way or another had been involved in the Ethio-Swedish contacts, have not been well studied. The research behind the present study has purposes. First and foremost, it intends to trace personal files and memories with information significant to understand the Ethio-Swedish contacts, which could not be gotten from official archives. Secondly, to gain authentic sources which could not be obtain from other written literatures, and which could be used as an alternative for the interpretation of the changes of foreign relations that otherwise could not be understood by a scholar of a later generation. The situation, therefore, led the researcher to trace information from letters, correspondence, diaries, government reports, and archives of Abebe Reta, Haile Silassie's personal representative in his relations with Sweden in 1940s. Abebe Reta, who took his education from Swedish Evangelical Mission, played an important role in re-establishing relations with Sweden in the post-1941. In 1944, Abebe made efforts to find out qualified Swedish experts in the field of health, military and education to work in Ethiopia. The attempt to res-establish the contact with Sweden was, however, made secret in order not to challenge the Ethio-British relations. In sum, the enquiry to find Swedish co-operation was a commission accredited to Abebe by the Emperor. Thus, this research project brings to light how Abebe appeared to manage Ethiopia's foreign affairs in the critical hours.

 Key words: Ethio-Swedish contacts, Abebe Reta, Haile Selassie, Sweden.


Retinal degenerative disorders are the leading cause of blindness in the developed world, resulting in loss of the photoreceptor cells and vision. Few treatments are available and none can reverse the loss of sight. Photoreceptor transplantation offers the potential to restore vision by replacing cells lost in disease. Previous work has demonstrated that, following transplantation, rod-precursor cells can migrate into the retina, differentiate into mature phenotypes and confer increased sensitivity to light in the rod range. However, rigorous assessment of whether transplanted photoreceptors can actually restore vision is required. In order to do this, we first optimized rod photoreceptor transplantation. To test the functionality of the transplanted rod photoreceptors, we selected a model in which improvements could be assessed unambiguously. The Gnat1-/- mouse, a model of stationary night-blindness, lacks rod a-transducin and thus has no rod function. We demonstrate that transplanted cells robustly integrate forming synaptic connections with the recipient. Integrated cells form inner/outer segments that appropriately expressed phototransduction proteins. Single cell recordings demonstrate that integrated cells are light responsive and intrinsic imaging of the visual cortex shows that visual signals generated by transplanted rods project to higher visual areas. These cells are also capable of restoring optokinetic head-tracking and visually-guided behavior in response to scotopic visual stimuli. A major question remains as to how amenable the heterogeneous diseases encompassed within retinal degenerative disorders will be to photoreceptor replacement and if treatment of late-stage disease is feasible. We performed a comprehensive assessment of photoreceptor transplantation in 6 murine models of inherited retinal degeneration encompassing different types and stages of degeneration. Transplantation is feasible in all models examined but disease type has a major impact on outcome, as assessed both by the morphology and number of integrated rod-photoreceptors. Integration can increase, decrease or remain constant with disease progression, depending upon the gene defect, with no correlation with disease severity. Robust integration into late-stage disease is possible in some disease types. We assessed features of the recipient microenvironment known to change during degeneration, namely gliosis, outer nuclear layer cyto-architecture and outer limiting membrane (OLM) integrity. Disruption of glial scarring and OLM integrity significantly increased integration to levels sufficient to restore optokinetic head-tracking responses in a model with an otherwise poor transplantation outcome. Together, these findings demonstrate the feasibility of photoreceptor transplantation as a strategy for the restoration of vision in retinal disease.


The FE model of a combined gantry milling machine was constructed. The joint stiffness of bolt fastening, ball screw, and roller guideway were calculated. The static analysis, modal analysis and harmonic analysis of the whole machine were carried out. The results indicated that the static stiffness and minimum dynamic stiffness of the spindle could satisfy the accuracy requirements of milling, but the stiffness of the X-axis feed system was comparatively low, while the stiffness of the rest and the cross-beam could be relatively abundant. The result of "considering joint stiffness" modal analysis was more accurate than "unconsidering joint stiffness", especially the 5th-order natural frequency had a difference of up to 52.2%. The harmonic analysis result showed that the response amplitude of the spindle center was comparatively large in three directions when the 1st-order and the 17th-order natural frequency were working, so the frequencies should be avoided while working.


Recently, SIWES has attracted studies from scholars in higher educational systems in Nigeria due to the deficiency or lack of proficiency of many graduates, mostly in the natural sciences. This shows that the scheme has not been effective in ensuring impartation of practical knowledge on students. Consequently, many employers of labour view this challenge as one of the causes of unemployment, an obstacle to achieving corporate goals and a serious obstacle to national development. Although SIWES stakeholders have been primarily indicted for its dysfunction, most especially, the Government, and the management of tertiary institutions, but none of such studies have compared SIWES in developed countries with a developing society like Nigeria with the aim of identifying the missing gap that needs to be filled to ensure students proficiency at work after graduation. Being a descriptive article, the present study used data from secondary sources to analyze and synthesize SIWES in four purposefully selected countries. By synthesizing SIWES activities in these countries, the study identifies factors responsible for the dysfunction of SIWES in Nigeria. These include poor quality of education from the elementary school to higher educational systems; short duration apportioned to SIWES in the curriculum of tertiary institutions; insufficient industries and closure of some of the few existing ones due to unfavourable environmental factors; inadequate equipment / facilities in existing few industries for effective practical training and poor leadership of SIWES stakeholders. The study concluded that SIWES in Nigeria could improve if these flaws could be effectively addressed.


Because of a high level of activity in manned space missions and hypersonic transport the ideas on waveriders are currently of great interest. Waveriders have been regarded as the best shapes for space planes. This derives from their high lift capability which will enable the vehicle to slow down at high altitude thus helping it alleviate the kinetic heating problem. The present study reports on the advantages of waveriders for their application to space plane shapes. The advantages of selecting waveriders as lifting shapes is attributed to their flow simplicity by using shapes defined inversely from a two dimensional flow as a basis of their construction. For these deceptively simple shapes initial estimates of the aerodynamic properties can be made through inviscid flow calculations. A historical preview of waveriders suggests that viscous effects are very important for accurate prediction of flowfield around these shapes. However, these effects were not included in the course of development of these shapes. In this study along with the classical theory of waveriders viscosity effects on the waverider design are highlighted. Also emphasised are the important relevant factors in hypersonic flow and the advantages of applying computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for simulation of the flowfield as compared to analytic and experimentation method. In the past, work has been reported on the inclusion of viscous effects by using the boundary layer for the viscous correction. The present study shows that, in the presence of strong viscous-inviscid interaction, viscous effects from these applications can only be reliably predicted using solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations. Based on this strategy numerical solutions of the Navier-Stokes Equations were applied to different waverider shapes to highlight the importance of viscous effects. Since the flow on typical waverider shapes is near conical, then a locally conical approximation was used for two reasons: it simplifies the problem from a 3-D to a 2-D one without compromising significantly accuracy ; it reduces the requirement of computing resources in terms of processor time and storage. Application of the Navier Stokes equations in locally conical form (LCNS) to simulate the flow around idealised waverider shapes revealed interesting off-design flow behaviour for on-design flow conditions. Sensitive effects on performance due to off-design behaviour are observed for caret wings. Results are obtained for 4 cases of caret wings optimised for free stream Mach numbers of 1.44, 1.74, 2.51 and 4.93 and 3 cases of a cone-wing configuration at Mach 10 with angles of attack of 5°, 10° and 15°. For caret wings results show how viscous effects have significant influence even at low Mach numbers. Flow simulation of these cases illustrates the advantage of using CFD on these shapes and shows how incorporating the NS equations provides a powerful tool to explore in detail waverider aerodynamics in on-design and off-design operation. Results also show how suitably it can deal with shock-shock, shock-boundary layer and shock vortex interactions, simultaneously. Also predicted was the effect on heat transfer due to the change in angle of attack of the shape. As caret wing and wing-cone combinations are thought to have limited applicability for practical aircraft shape the studies were extended to more general shapes. This study is the first to deal simultaneously with general shapes derived from both conical and wedge flowfields. General conical-derived shapes were constructed through a numerical approach based on flow around a cone using the Taylor Maccoll theory. For a general wedge-derived shape the base flow was the flow behind wedge induced oblique shock waves. Comparisons were made to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of each type of configuration generated. Results were discussed in the light of numerical prediction and experimental results published in the literature. It was recognized that if volume constraints are relaxed, then, there are some considerable advantages in using wedge flow as a basis, instead of conical flow. Also it was shown that a change in only the leading edge shape can considerably improve the performance characteristics of waveriders. Furthermore a wedge-derived waverider provides a higher lift than an equivalent cone-derived one and also at off-design conditions a wedge-derived shape shows less sensitivity than its conical counterpart.


While Western thinking considers change within a unique process stretching ad infinitum, Eastern thinking conceives change within a process that hold together repetition and transformation. Making sense to this is to simply recognize that the issues regarding time understanding in ontological and metaphysical terms, serve to support the idea that how we consider the nature of history it will impact the interpretation and conclusions drawn about history. But here the issue is less about history as content and more about the developing of a society; we will try therefore to observe how different conceptions of time can shape different imprint on the society as a whole.

 Key words: Time, eternal return, Buddhism, original sin, collectivism, individualism.


Bandwidth reservation for real-time networks offers an approach for real-time networking in a switched Ethernet or IP setting. In a switched network, switches prevent from indeterministic back-off times at collisions and here bandwidth reservation limits send rates to protects from overallocation of link bandwidth. The work in this paper aims at avoiding problems with a centralized bandwidth broker for resource reservation for bandwidth in a throttled real-time network. A centralized broker (such as a 'GlobeThrottle') is a single point of failure in a distributed system and is also a hot-spot resource, which all nodes of the system use for registering new real-time channels. To avoid both these problems we propose a distributed algorithm to be used instead of a central bandwidth broker. Also, the GlobeThrottle approach uses TCP/IP communication for channel allocation, which gives indeterministic time channel allocation. However, this problem is not addressed in this paper.In the proposed solution, Real-time Communication Through a Distributed Resource Reservation Approach (STRUTS), real-time channels are throttled and the throttle level for each sending node is agreed between all nodes. The agreement must be atomic to avoid transitional bandwidth over-usage due to temporary inconsistencies between nodes ('mutual inconsistencies') in throttling level information for different nodes. In this paper we use two-phase-commit (2PC) for atomic node agreements, where changes in channels information will be visible at the same time instant at all nodes. Thus, the throttling based on the agreed channel information will guarantee that the maximal bandwidth is not exceeded. Using a distributed agreement avoids the problems of a single point of failure and hot-spot behavior, and is thus scalable to some extent. However, 2PC commitment incurs other problems with scalability since it requires that the network is not partitioned and also that nodes are locked during the agreement process, which prevents other nodes from allocating channels for the same node concurrently. When using 2PC for agreement it is not possible to have deterministic channel allocation time when there are no guarantees for the maximum locking time on the channel data. We have through experimental results verified that by using STRUTS, we avoid overallocation of links.


The extraction of consensus segmentations from several binary or probabilistic masks is important to solve various tasks such as the analysis of inter-rater variability or the fusion of several neural network outputs. One of the most widely used methods to obtain such a consensus segmentation is the STAPLE algorithm. In this paper, we first demonstrate that the output of that algorithm is heavily impacted by the background size of images and the choice of the prior. We then propose a new method to construct a binary or a probabilistic consensus segmentation based on the Fréchet means of carefully chosen distances which makes it totally independent of the image background size. We provide a heuristic approach to optimize this criterion such that a voxel's class is fully determined by its voxel-wise distance to the different masks, the connected component it belongs to and the group of raters who segmented it. We compared extensively our method on several datasets with the STAPLE method and the naive segmentation averaging method, showing that it leads to binary consensus masks of intermediate size between Majority Voting and STAPLE and to different posterior probabilities than Mask Averaging and STAPLE methods. Our code is available at https://gitlab.inria.fr/dhamzaou/jaccardmap


Consumers choosing health insurance plans inside and outside the new marketplaces may face a tradeoff: narrower provider networks may lower premiums, but they may also limit access to care or increase out-of-pocket costs. This policy brief assesses the benefits and risks of policy options open to federal and state policymakers now reviewing requirements for plans' network adequacy. The authors find that no single policy can achieve the appropriate balance between insurers' flexibility to negotiate with providers and consumers' confidence that plans will deliver on promised benefits. Accordingly, the authors call on policymakers to protect consumers with a combination of regulatory standards, up-to-date information to facilitate consumer choices, and active monitoring of plans' actual performance.


The World Urban Database and Access Portal Tools (WUDAPT) is a community initiative to collect worldwide data on urban form (i.e., morphology, materials) and function (i.e., use and metabolism). This is achieved through crowdsourcing, which we define here as the collection of data by a bounded crowd, composed of students. In this process, training data for the classification of urban structures into Local Climate Zones (LCZ) are obtained, which are, like most volunteered geographic information initiatives, of unknown quality. In this study, we investigated the quality of 94 crowdsourced training datasets for ten cities, generated by 119 students from six universities. The results showed large discrepancies and the resulting LCZ maps were mostly of poor to moderate quality. This was due to general difficulties in the human interpretation of the (urban) landscape and in the understanding of the LCZ scheme. However, the quality of the LCZ maps improved with the number of training data revisions. As evidence for the wisdom of the crowd, improvements of up to 20% in overall accuracy were found when multiple training datasets were used together to create a single LCZ map. This improvement was greatest for small training datasets, saturating at about ten to fifteen sets.


Cooling air can be chilled for industrial gas turbines. By taking advantage of this feature, a deep digging fan-shaped film cooling hole equipped the function of a trench has been devised. The characteristics of this film cooling hole were investigated using quantitative measurement methods. It was revealed that this film cooling hole had high film cooling effectiveness at high mass flux ratio M of 1–1.5. It was also revealed that film cooling effectiveness could be greatly improved when the film cooling air was swirled. Cooled turbine blades may be manufactured with the additive manufacturing method in the future, and the relationship between the positions of the film cooling hole and internal cooling structure can determined. In this case, it becomes possible to design turbine blades utilizing the swirling flow generated by the internal cooling structure to attain high film cooling effectiveness.


Textile industrial effluent contains recalcitrant dyes which are becoming a serious threat for environment. Bioremediation is becoming an emerging technique to control pollution in effluent treatment. The extensive information has been provided within this review about the pollution being caused in the environment and water bodies by textile industrial effluents primarily consisting of recalcitrant dyes. Therefore, for the remediation of textile industrial effluents, the most efficient technologies/techniques have been discussed. Strategies to control these hazardous pollutants include physical, chemical, biological and electrochemical methods. In textile industry, synthetic dyes are being used and highly concentrated wastewater is discharged as the fabrics absorbs the dyes in a very less quantity. These colored compounds have detrimental effects on the environment including human heath, aquatic life and plants due to the reduced penetration of light, oxygen consumption and toxic heavy metals present in the synthetic dyes.


Digital wireless communication networks are vital in modern life. However, these networks rely on centralized infrastr ucture that is extremely vulnerable to disaster or attack. We s eek to improve the communication environment in post-disaster scenarios by developing groups of mobile communication relay robots, or commbots, that can be deployed to replace damaged infrastructure. The job of a commbot is to position itself so as to maximize overall network performance, which presents a rich and complex distributed learning and control problem. We have implemented three distributed algorithms and have tested them in simulation on a variety of instances of the commbots problem. We present results from these simulations and compare and contrast the different approaches.


The use of Destination Group Control (DGC), or Hall Call Allocation (HCA), in elevator traffic system group control is the current trend in intelligent and advanced supervisory control and is expected to dominate the market in the future. In the conventional elevator traffic design process, designers usually start with a simple calculation in order to obtain a conceptual estimate of the suggested design prior to moving onto simulation. But due to the lack of a suitable set of equations for elevator traffic calculation for DGC systems, designers are forced to carry out the elevator traffic design process for a system controlled by DGC solely by using simulation. Due to the dependence on the simulator and the algorithms it uses, different simulation packages will produce different resultant designs. Thus, the motivation for this paper is to use calculation in order to achieve more transparency and repeatability in the design of DGC systems. In order to enable the designer to carry out a calculation for the DGC system, equations are needed to evaluate the values of H (the highest reversal floor) and S (the expected number of stops in a round trip) in order to evaluate the value of the round-trip time under destination group control. Although equations are available to compute the highest reversal floor, H, and expected number of stops, S, of a DGC system, these equations assume idealized conditions. If designers use them to design the elevator traffic system, the design will be under-sized and inadequate. They do not take into consideration many of the practical implementation issues and non-ideal conditions such as: unequal floor population, real time call allocation of calls to elevator cars, and the different floor to sector arrangements, as well as the practicalities of allocating elevator cars to sectors. In this paper, more detailed consideration is given to the estimation of H and S under both offline and real-time call allocations. Three methods of sectoring are suggested to take care of different combinations of the number of floors, the number of elevators, the car capacity and the floor population distribution. The results of this research would help the designer carry out a more reasonable and practical calculation of the round-trip time under DGC and thus arrive at a transparent and repeatable elevator traffic design. The designer is still expected to move onto a simulation phase in order to understand the effect of the group controller on the system performance.


In this study, cheddar cheeses made with adjunct cultures L. casei ssp. casei 300 (CCA) and L. paracasei ssp paracasei 22 (CCB) were assessed for ACE inhibitory activity at different stages of ripening. ACE-inhibitory activity of the UF permeates of WSE of all the cheeses increased significantly (P<0.05), especially after the first two months of ripening. The inhibitory activity continued to increase in the cheeses made with adjunct cultures CCA (IC50 value 0.16 mg.ml-1) and CCB (IC50 value 0.20 mg.ml-1) up to third month and in CCC increased to this level after fourth month of ripening (IC50 value 0.20 mg.ml-1). The electrophoretic and RP-HPLC profiles indicated that the rate of degradation of proteins resulted in formation of smaller peptides which were higher in cheese made with adjunct cultures as compared to control cheese The result also indicated that cheeses with the addition of adjunct had higher ACE-inhibitory activity than control cheese.


The Slemenda Scholarship:
The Slemenda Scholarship is a program that was developed in 1998 for rising second year medical students in order for them to gain experience in the field of global health through the context of the AMPATH Consortium in Eldoret, Kenya. As a medical professional aspiring to work internationally, it is an invaluable experience to observe practices in a well-established partnership such as the one between Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital, Moi University, and Indiana University.
Community Experiences:
The first half of the summer was spent visiting and participating in various AMPATH initiatives. This included rounding on the medical, surgical, gynecological, and pediatric wards, volunteering with the child life team, visiting community health and microfinance projects, observing rural HIV clinics, and working at a school developed for street children in Eldoret.
Primary Project:
The second half of the summer was spent working with the Maternal Newborn and Child Health team, specifically in the Reproductive Health department. I worked as a research assistant for a new project seeking to develop an antenatal care clinic for young girls aged 10-19 in Uasin Gishu County at the Rafiki Centre for Adolescents at Moi Teaching and Referral Hospital. I developed recruitment materials and a database for qualitative and quantitative data collection for the project.
Moving Forward:
On returning to Indiana, it is my goal to champion the work of the AMPATH Consortium and attempt to ensure its longevity through the next generation of globally-minded physician-scientists. I will take the lessons I learned and observations I made in this setting and work to apply them to improving healthcare in underserved areas in our own community as well.


This paper presents a Discrete-time Model Predictivebased Control strategy for the voltage regulation of an islanded distributed generation (DG) unit. The DG unit includes a voltage source converter (VSC) interfaced to the grid through a switch and a coupling transformer. An RLC branch is also connected in parallel at the point of common coupling (PCC) at the DG-side of the switch. Assuming an open switch and an islanded mode of operation, the Discrete-time Model Predictive-based Controller (DMPC) is adopted to regulate the direct and quadrature (dq) components of the load voltages. The frequency of the load voltage is also regulated in an open loop. In this paper, the design procedure is detailed. Then adopting a laboratory scale setup, the performance of the proposed control strategy is experimentally evaluated. The test results verify the capability of the controller in regulating the load voltages in the nominal plant, and also in the presence of load parameters uncertainties and nonlinear loads.


We study a variant of the sparse PCA (principal component analysis) problem in the "hard" regime, where the inference task is possible yet no polynomial‐time algorithm is known to exist. Prior work, based on the low‐degree likelihood ratio, has conjectured a precise expression for the best possible (subexponential) runtime throughout the hard regime. Following instead a statistical physics‐inspired point of view, we show bounds on the depth of free energy wells for various Gibbs measures naturally associated to the problem. These free energy wells imply hitting time lower bounds that corroborate the low‐degree conjecture: we show that a class of natural MCMC (Markov chain Monte Carlo) methods (with worst‐case initialization) cannot solve sparse PCA with less than the conjectured runtime. These lower bounds apply to a wide range of values for two tuning parameters: temperature and sparsity misparametrization. Finally, we prove that the overlap gap property (OGP), a structural property that implies failure of certain local search algorithms, holds in a significant part of the hard regime. © 2022 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.


Interest in bookbinding and the related arts has exploded in the past decade, inspiring artists to explore the unlimited possibilities of the form. This title showcases a beautiful range from the intricacies of an exotic Ethiopian binding with a show-stopping open spine to others that resemble mysterious puzzle boxes. The sublimely talented contributors include Jeanne Germani who displays her own handmade papers, made from such varied materials as recycled denim, thistle and other plant matter, Chris Bivin whose codex-style volume features curious, tiny, found objects and Laura Wait presents a piece with handsome raised-cord binding connecting a pair of stained-cedar covers with abstract aluminum letterforms attached. This new and provocative on-the-page gallery, richly illustrated with hundreds of breathtaking photographs, will appeal to a large and discerning audience.


In intelligent transportation systems, the collaboration between vehicles and the road side units is essential to bring these systems to realization. The emerging Vehicular Ad Hoc Network (VANET) is becoming more and more important as it provides intelligent transportation application, comfort, safety, entertainment for people in vehicles. In order to provide stable routes and to get good performance in VANET, there is a need of proper routing protocols must be designed. In this paper, we are working with the very well-known ad-hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol. The existing Routing protocol AODV-L which is based on the Link expiration time is extended to propose a more reliable AODV-AD which is based on multichannel MAC protocol. For the performance evaluation of routing protocols, a simulation tool 'NS2' has been used. Simulation results show that the proposed AODV-AD protocol can achieves better performances in forms of high Route stability, Packet Delivery ratio and packet loss rate than traditional AODV-L and traditional AODV.


The thesis presents several aspects related to the industrial and academic activities associated with monitoring and control of the machining process and machine tools A survey of the industrial situation identified some key factors for a successful implementation of monitoring and control techniques. Applicable, relatively simple, systems for cutting-process monitoring and adaptive control are available on the commercial market today but the degree of industrial utilisation of the technique is low because the systems are experienced as hard to operate and use, and are at the same time considered unreliable. In order to promote a higher degree of industrial utilisation more work has to be devoted raising the performance of the system solutions. An Integrated Supervisory Process Control (ISPC) concept is presented as an approach dealing with multi-purpose control requirements utilising the individual advantages of several sensors and modelling techniques. The ISPC system is supposed to operate as a conceptual integration of sensors, process models and different control modules. Two prototype systems, based on five-axis machining centres, for real-time control of the machining process are outlined. Different strategies for monitoring and control are developed, implemented and experimentally tried out, and the studies conducted demonstrate results that encourage further research work devoted to verification of the proposed control concept. The results obtained in the initial experiments utilising methods for process control and monitoring, such as double exponential smoothing technique (DES), multivariate monitoring applied to signal tracking and artificial neural networks applied to cutting torque control, reveal that the different techniques have potential to improve the performance of monitoring and control tasks, thus contributing to the creation of more sophisticated and reliable solutions in the ISPC concept.


Objective: To describe the longitudinal changes in maternal cardiac function during uncomplicated twin pregnancy. Materials and methods: In a series of twin viable pregnancies cardiac output (CO) and total vascular resistance (TVR) were longitudinally calculated at 20–23, 26–29 and 30–33 weeks of gestation. Cardiac output was measured by continuous-wave Doppler at the aortic valve. Patients were excluded with any of the following: delivery prior to 36 completed weeks; ascertained fetal anomalies; history of maternal disease or hypertensive disorder, perinatal death, IUGR of one or both newborns (birthweight < 5th percentile); maternal preeclampsia. In all cases delivery was electively performed by scheduled Cesarean section between 36 and 37 weeks. Results: Overall nine pregnancies were enrolled in the study. Maternal cardiac output significantly increased during pregnancy (6, 04 ± 0, 53 L/min at 20–23 weeks to 6, 92 ± 0, 72 L/min at 26–29 weeks and to 7, 03 ± 0, 80L/min at 30–33 weeks, p = 0,001). This was essentially due to a significant increase in heart rate (83 ± 9, 57 b/min at 20–23 weeks to 96 ± 14, 23 b/min at 26–29 weeks and to 101 ± 17, 04 b/min at 30–33 weeks, p = 0,004), while the stroke volume did not change significantly. On the other hand a non significant trend to fall in TVR (1091 ± 13 at 20–23 weeks, 989 ± 114 at 26–29 weeks, 1001 ± 68 dynes/s/cm5 at 30–33 weeks, p = 0,236) was observed after midpregnancy Conclusion: In uncomplicated twin pregnancies after midgestation maternal cardiac output seems to rise progressively due to increase in heart rate, while TVR do not show significant variations.


ABSTRACT The Reynolds Point Formation is the second lowest unit in the Late Precambrian Shaler Group of Victoria Island in the western part of the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. It has a maximum known thickness of about 1,100 m. The formation may be divided into four members. The lowest member is made up of shale followed by a sandstone-dominated sequence. The overlying lower carbonate member is thicker than the others. It is overlain by a second terrigenous sandstone unit (mainly tidalites) that is succeeded by the topmost, carbonate-dominated member. The lower carbonate member may be considered as three units. Unit I (the lowest) is about 100 m of fine-grained shaly carbonate with sole, and ball and pillow structures, together with some thick and extensive stromatolitic banks. Unit I is interp eted as representing minor subsidence of the depositional basin, followed by gradual infilling and stabilization. Unit 2 is about 100 m of shaly nodular dolostone and limestone that was probably deposited below wave base in a lagoonal system protected by a barrier complex. A thin purple shale in this unit is an excellent stratigraphic marker. Unit 3 (450 m) consists mainly of interbedded oolites (commonly associated with stromatolites) and shaly carbonates. This unit was deposited under a warm (dry?) climatic regime, adjacent to a continental area of low relief in a depositional setting comparable in some ways to that of the Persian Gulf The oolites probably formed on tidal bars or in tidal deltas from which they were spread into topographic lows that normally received fine-grained muddy carbonate sediment. The upper part of Unit 3 includes some thin cross-bedded fine-grained quartzarenites which were mainly deposited as subtidal sand sheets. Hematitic oolites in the northern part of central Victoria Island are interpreted as an early diagenetic replacement phenomenon. Molar-tooth structure is common in shaly carbonates interbedded with oolites of Unit 3. The molar-tooth is interpreted as being due to early dewatering of muddy carbonate sediment, controlled in part by interbedding of very permeable sediment (oolite) with water-saturated mud. Carbonate sedimentation was interrupted by the influx of fine silt and sand (upper clastic member; 130 m thick) that spread over the depositional area (from the east?) and was deposited mainly from tidal currents. A return to carbonate deposition (upper carbonate member; 200 m thick) was followed by the evaporitic-red bed sequence of the Minto Inlet Formation.


In Indonesia, the solar photovoltaic (PV) market is rapidly growing. However, studies on the outdoor performance of PV systems in this tropical rainforest country is lacking. In this work, we compare the performance of PV systems in Indonesia with PV systems in Australia (arid, desert, hot) and Italy (temperate, dry summer, hot summer). Monitoring data from 2008 to 2019, ranging from two to nine years, from fifteen PV systems of six technologies were analyzed. The performance of the PV systems was presented using their performance ratio (PR) and performance loss rate (PLR). PR was calculated using IEC standard 61724, and PLR was calculated using seasonal and trend decomposition, applying locally weighted scatterplot smoothing (STL decomposition) and the year-on-year approach from NREL/RdTools. The results showed that the CIGS (copper indium gallium selenide) system had the highest average PR value of 0.88 ± 0.04. The lowest average PR was found in the a-Si (amorphous silicon) PV systems (0.78 ± 0.05). The p-Si (polycrystalline silicon) systems in the Cfb (temperate, no dry season, warm summer) climate of Italy had a higher average PR of 0.84 than those operated in climates BWh (arid, desert, hot) of Australia and Af (tropical, rainforest) of Indonesia, with the same value of 0.81. The p-Si systems showed the lowest PLR, with a value of −0.6%/year. The fastest degradation was experienced by a-Si modules at −1.58%/year. The methodological differences in the calculation of PLR using both tested approaches resulted in a significant difference in the degradation value, which demands standardization of the term and calculation methodology.


With the introduction of combined positron emission tomography (PET)/computed tomography (CT) or PET/magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners, there is an increasing emphasis on reconstructing PET images with the aid of the anatomical side information obtained from X-ray CT or MRI scanners. In this paper, we propose a new approach to incorporating prior anatomical information into PET reconstruction using the nonlocal regularization method. The nonlocal regularizer developed for this application is designed to selectively consider the anatomical information only when it is reliable. As our proposed nonlocal regularization method does not directly use anatomical edges or boundaries which are often used in conventional methods, it is not only free from additional processes to extract anatomical boundaries or segmented regions, but also more robust to the signal mismatch problem that is caused by the indirect relationship between the PET image and the anatomical image. We perform simulations with digital phantoms. According to our experimental results, compared to the conventional method based on the traditional local regularization method, our nonlocal regularization method performs well even with the imperfect prior anatomical information or in the presence of signal mismatch between the PET image and the anatomical image.


Due to ongoing educational reforms administration alone is no longer able to lead schools on the way to efficient teaching. Educator-leaders, both formal (the department chairs, the staff developers, the head teachers, mentors, program coordinators, etc.) and informal (event initiators, educators active in participation in conferences, meetings, etc.) have become an absolute necessity. However, there are some grave obstacles to involving all teachers and lecturers in leading at least certain activities at their institutions and beyond. The article aims to find out the viewpoints on leadership at universities in Georgia. A survey was held in three universities with 96 lecturers as respondents. It applies a questionnaire with 10 close-ended items assessed via Likert scale and an open-ended question concerning the attitudes of lecturers towards leadership and their motives for wanting or not wanting to be leaders. It is concluded that lecturers, probably, do not realize the great need on educator-leaders of contemporary education in the time of continuous and intensive reforms. Lectures need to be educator-leaders in the classroom, among colleagues and in professional self-development. They have to lead some events, at least from time to time.


Residential and business buildings account for a large fraction of the overall world energy consumption. Despite the high energy costs and the raising awareness about the impact on climate changes, a significant part of energy consumption in buildings is still due to an improper use of electrical appliances. In this paper we propose GreenBuilding, a sensor-based system for automated power management of electrical appliances in a building. We implemented GreenBuilding as a prototype system and deployed it in a real household scenario to perform a prolonged experimental analysis. The obtained results show that GreenBuilding is able to provide significant energy savings by using appropriate energy conservation strategies tailored to specific appliances.


This thesis is concerned with the social and economic history of the communities of the Akwanga division of Plateau province in central Nigeria from the beginning of formal British administration in 1911 to the end of colonial rule in 1960. The thesis is divided into seven chapters. The first looks at the early history of the peoples of Akwanga with emphasis on their political, religious and economic organisation. It also discusses the effect of the nineteenth-century Sokoto jihad on settlement patterns in the region. Chapter 2 deals with resistance to the colonial conquest, which lasted up to 1925. Chapter 3 discusses the development of the indirect rule system and native administration, focusing on the creation of chiefs, divisional boundaries and the native administrative policies pursued by successive Governors of Nigeria. Chapter 4 looks at taxation and cash crop production and their impact on the peoples of Akwanga. Chapter 5 examines the use of local labour for building the infrastructure of colonial rule and for tin mining, which dominated the economy of Plateau province. Chapter 6 discusses the religious encounter between Islam, Christianity and indigenous belief and how these two world religions shaped the political identity of the people of the region. Chapter 7 focuses on the demise of indirect rule and the emergence party politics in Akwanga with emphasis on minority politics and the role of the educated groups in the politics and process of decolonisation.


Traditional measurements of molecular gas via rotational and hyperfine transitions of diatomic species such as CO, CH, and OH are only able to detect the cores and adjacent low-density molecular regions of interstellar molecular clouds. Longer than usual integration times of the CO(J = 1-0) line at 115 GHz and the OH 1667 MHz ground state, hyperfine, main line transition have revealed the presence of low-density, diffuse gas surrounding the molecular core MBM40. Using the Schlegel, Finkbeiner and Davis (1998) dust maps in conjunction with new CO and OH observations, the amount of molecular gas in the diffuse outer regions of MBM40 has been determined to be equal if not greater than the mass in the core region. This much mass was not expected to be found in the outer most regions of the cloud. In addition, a re-analysis of high-latitude CO survey data reveals that this low-density molecular gas may be widespread in the Galaxy. The relationship between the low-density, diffuse molecular component studied in this thesis and the recently identified "dark" molecular gas is discussed. Index words: ISM: clouds, ISM: molecules, radio, MBM40, CO, OH, CH Diffuse Molecular Gas in Cloud Envelopes and the Galaxy


OBJECTIVES
To compare characteristics, health conditions, and medication acquisition patterns by fee-for-service (FFS) or Medicare Advantage (MA) plan enrollment status for Medicare-eligible veterans.

STUDY DESIGN
Retrospective analysis of all female and a random 10% sample of male veterans.

METHODS
Data were derived from the US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and Medicare administrative databases. Demographic, geographic, and RxRisk-V risk classes were ascertained in 2008. Medicare Part D enrollment, medication acquisition, and use of high-risk medications (HRMs) were examined in 2009. A veteran was classified as an MA enrollee if he or she was enrolled in an MA plan for at least 1 month in 2008-2009. Descriptive and regression analyses were conducted to compare veterans' characteristics and medication acquisition patterns by plan enrollment type controlling for veterans' characteristics.

RESULTS
Veterans who resided in urban settings and in the West or Northeast and who had co-payments for their VA medications had greater odds of enrolling in MA programs compared with their counterparts. MA-enrolled veterans were more likely to be dual (32.3% vs 7.0%) or Medicare-reimbursed (31.1% vs 14.5%) pharmacy users and less likely to be VA-only pharmacy users (29.4% vs 48.7%) than FFS enrollees. Higher proportions of MA-enrolled veterans received HRMs compared with those in the FFS sector (17.0% vs 14.3%).

CONCLUSIONS
Providers both inside and outside of the VA should consider that substantial information about the medication use of veterans may be unavailable in their healthcare systems' electronic records.


Chatbots are emerging as the newest platform used by millions of consumers worldwide due in part to the commoditization of natural language services, which provide provide developers with many building blocks to create chatbots inexpensively. However, it is still difficult to build and deploy chatbots. Developers need to handle the coordination of the cognitive services to build the chatbot interface, integrate the chatbot with external services, and worry about extensibility, scalability, and maintenance. In this work, we present the architecture and prototype of a chatbot using a serverless platform, where developers compose stateless functions together to perform useful actions. We describe our serverless architecture based on function sequences, and how we used these functions to coordinate the cognitive microservices in the Watson Developer Cloud to allow the chatbot to interact with external services. The serverless model improves the extensibility of our chatbot, which currently supports 6 abilities: location based weather reports, jokes, date, reminders, and a simple music tutor.


Background Introducing 'The Liverpool Care Pathway for the Dying Patient' (LCP) to acute settings in the UK was intended to transfer hospice models of high quality end-of-life care onto hospital wards. Growing criticism and concerns, (from the public, media, politicians and healthcare workers), regarding when and how the LCP was used has culminated in an independent review recommending the LCP is phased out of use. Despite this, limited research exists exploring doctors' perceptions of the LCP. Aims To explore lived experiences of hospital doctors using the LCP, how these experiences have influenced their practices and perceptions of the LCP and how wider application in hospitals went wrong, in order to inform future interventions seeking to improve end-of-life care. Methods Following a systematic review of the literature on use of the LCP in hospitals prospective ethical approval was received to recruit participants. Consultants and registrars, from an acute hospital in England, were purposively selected for one-to-one in-depth interviews. The topic guide covered positive and negative experiences of the LCP, individuals' perceptions, external influences and training. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim for thematic analysis. Results In this paper we present our thematic findings and an interpretative analysis of lessons to be learned from the 'LCP experience' in hospitals. We will discuss how participants created meaning and constructed knowledge from their real life experiences. We will consider how these experiences, and external factors, influenced decision-making with respect to the LCP and end-of-life care more generally. Conclusions The need for high quality end-of-life care in hospitals remains, regardless of how history may judge the LCP from inception to withdrawal. Now is the time for specialist palliative care to learn the lessons of the LCP era and to work with generalists, the public, media and policy-makers to improve end-of-life care for the future.


Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) is increasingly establishing itself as a method in social research. QCA is a set-theoretic, truth-table-based method that identifies complex combinations of conditions (configurations) that are necessary and/or sufficient for an outcome. An advantage of QCA is that it models the complexity of social phenomena by accounting for conjunctural, asymmetric, and equifinal patterns. Accordingly, the method does not assume isolated net effects of single variables but recognizes that the effect of a single condition (that is, an explanatory factor) often unfolds only in combination with other conditions. Moreover, QCA acknowledges that the occurrence of a phenomenon can have a different explanation from its non-occurrence. Finally, QCA allows for different, mutually non-exclusive explanations of the same phenomenon. QCA is not only a technique; there is a diversity of approaches to how it can be implemented before, during and after the "technical moment," depending on the analytic goals related to contributing to theory, engaging with cases, and the approach to explanation.
 Particularly since 2012, an increasing number of scholars have turned to using QCA to investigate public administrations. Even though the boundaries of Public Administration (PA) as an academic discipline are difficult to determine, it can be defined as an intellectual forum for those who want to understand both public administrations as organizations and their relationships to political, economic, and societal actors—especially in the adoption and implementation of public policies. Owing to its fragmented nature, there has been a long-lasting debate about the methodological sophistication and appropriateness of different comparative methods. In particular, the high complexity and strong context dependencies of causal patterns challenge theory-building and empirical analysis in Public Administration. Moreover, administrative settings are often characterized by relatively low numbers of cases for comparison, as well as strongly multilevel empirical settings. QCA as a technique allows for context-sensitive analyses that take into account this complexity.
 Against this background, it is not surprising that applications of QCA have become more widespread among scholars of Public Administration. A systematic review of articles using QCA published in the major Public Administration journals shows that the use of QCA started in mid-2000s and then grew exponentially. The review shows that, especially in two thematic areas, QCA has high analytical value and may (alongside traditional methodological approaches) help improve theories and methods of PA. The first area is the study of organizational decision-making and the role of bureaucrats during the adoption and implementation of public policies and service delivery. The second area where QCA has great merits is in explaining different features of public organizations. Especially in evaluation research where the aim is to investigate performance of various kinds (especially effectiveness in terms of both policy and management), QCA is a useful analytical tool to model these highly context-dependent relationships. The QCA method is constantly evolving. The development of good practices for different QCA approaches as well as several methodological innovations and software improvements increases its potential benefits for the future of Public Administration research.


Wireless Networks of Embedded Systems (WNES) are notoriously difficult and tedious to program. The difficulty is mostly originated from low-level details in system and network programming. This includes distributedly managing and accessing resources from a dynamic set of nodes in hostile and volatile networks. To simplify WNES programming, we propose Declarative Resource Naming (DRN) that abstracts out the mentioned low-level details by programming a WNES in the large (i.e., macroprogramming). DRN provides programming simplicity, expressiveness, tunability, on-the-fly reprogrammability, and in-network data aggregation for energy savings. None of existing macroprogramming paradigms supports all of the mentioned features. Furthermore, DRN is an integration of declarative and imperative programming. The low-level details are declaratively abstracted out, but the main algorithm remains procedural. This allows programming simplicity without an adverse impact on the expressiveness. We have implemented and evaluated DRN on two platforms: Smart Message and Maté. Our result indicates that DRN enables programmers to develop energy-efficient applications with the desired flexibility and quality.


The design and evaluation of tag recommendation methods have historically focused on maximizing the relevance of the suggested tags for a given object, such as a movie or a song. Tag relevance can be defined in two perspectives. In an object-centered perspective, a tag is relevant if it correctly describes the content of the target object, while in a personalized perspective, a relevant tag not only describes well the content of the target object, but also matches the interests of the target user. However, even enriched by a personalized perspective, relevance by itself may not be enough to guarantee recommendation usefulness. Promoting novelty and diversity in tag recommendation not only increases the chances that the user will select some of the recommended tags, but also promotes complementary information (i.e., tags), which helps cover multiple aspects or topics related to the target object. Yet, no prior work has tackled novelty and diversity in the specific context of tag recommendation. In this thesis, we aim at proposing novel solutions that effectively address multiple aspects related to the tag recommendation problem, notably, relevance, novelty, diversity and personalization of the suggested tags. We evaluate our strategies using real data from five Web 2.0 applications, namely, Bibsonomy, LastFM, MovieLens, YahooVideo and YouTube. Our experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our new methods over state-of-the-art approaches, and attest the viability to effectively increase novelty and diversity with only a slight impact (if any) on relevance. We also found that our proposed syntactic attributes are responsible for significant improvements (up to 17% in precision) over the best relevance-driven method in a cold start scenario. In addition, we assessed the benefits of personalization to provide better descriptions of the target object, with average gains of 15% in relevance over the best object-centered approach.


Abstract The growth of the food-gathering systems of Ordovician crinoids illustrates the solutions evolved to avoid or minimize problems of suspension feeding and maintenance. The column has low metabolic requirements and may even be self-sufficient; little or no food need be diverted from the crown to the column. The tissue that the food-gathering system supplies with food is all or mostly in the crown. The volume of tissue in the crown is isometric with its volume. Distal arm branches, ramules, or pinnules form throughout growth of most taxa. The number of arm branches is constant in hybocrinids and porocrinids. The length and number of plates in the food-gathering system show marked positive allometry relative to crown volume. Food grooves become wider in larger crinoids but growth rates vary greatly. Branch density declines in all species studied. The tubefoot spacing can be constant, increase, or decrease in larger crinoids. Food-gathering capacity is the number of food-catching tubefeet multiplied by the average food-groove width, and it is positively allometric in terms of crown volume. The food-gathering ratio (food-gathering capacity: crown volume) declines somewhat, remains the same, or increases slightly during growth. The food-gathering parameters are correlated with arm structure. Crinoids with pinnulate arms exhibit the highest food-gathering ratios, high values of tubefoot spacing and branch density, and narrow food grooves, and they catch small food particles with small and closely spaced tubefeet. The lowest food-gathering ratios are seen in crinoids with unbranched and nonpinnulate arms which possess low tubefoot spacings and branch densities and wide food grooves. On average these organisms ate larger food items collected by larger and more widely spaced tubefeet. Larger food-gathering ratios are associated with greater resistance to fluid flow through the arms and tubefeet. The allometry of the food-gathering systems of Ordovician crinoids suggests that their metabolic rates could be proportional to body mass0.75 as in many living animals and plants.


The agri-food trade between Mexico and the United States grew substantially after the implementation of NAFTA in 1994. While some analysts argue that NAFTA has contributed the most to the dramatic expansion of this trade, others have emphasized the role played by the exchange rate in this process. An attempt is made in this paper to address this issue by quantifying the effects of NAFTA, the Mexico-US exchange rate changes and its volatility on the fresh tomato imports into the United States from Mexico using the maximum likelihood cointegration analysis. The results from the cointegration analysis show that while changes in exchange rate have a positive effect on trade flows, volatility of the exchange rate has a significant negative effect on trade flows. The results from the error-correction model show that both NAFTA and the exchange rate have significant positive influence on fresh tomato imports in the United States from Mexico. However, the effects of exchange rate changes outweigh the effects of NAFTA in the short-run


The global population is aging and the prevalence of age-related diseases, such as stroke, is predicted to increase. A vitamin B12 deficiency (vit. B12 def.) is common in the elderly, because of changes in metabolism. Clinical studies have reported that a vit. B12 def results in worse outcome after stroke, the mechanisms through which a vit. B12 def. changes the brain requires further investigation. This study investigated the role of vit. B12 def. on stroke outcome and mechanisms using aged female mice. Eighteen month old females were put on a control or vit. B12 def. diet for four weeks, after which an ischemic stroke was induced in the sensorimotor cortex. After damage, motor function was measured and animals were euthanized and tissues were collected for analysis. Vit. B12 def. animals had increased levels of total homocysteine in plasma and liver, choline levels were also increased in the liver. Vit. B12 def. had larger damage volume in brain tissue and more apoptosis. In the cecum, changes in creatinine and methylmalonic acid were observed in vit. B12 def animals, pathway analysis showed dysfunction in B12 transport. Analysis of mitochondrial metabolomics in brain tissue showed reduced levels of metabolites involved in the TCA cycle in vit. B12 def animals. Meanwhile, pathway analysis showed significant, widespread dysfunction in phenylalanine, tyrosine, and tryptophan biosynthesis. Motor function after stroke was impaired in vit. B12 def. animals. A dietary vitamin B12 deficiency impairs motor function through increased apoptosis and changes in mitochondrial metabolism in brain tissue.


Learning to program is vital to novice programming students. During their learning process, particularly when they are making a program, affect plays a significant role. Affect may either motivate them to logically think and effectively respond to the programming activities or, it may make them to disengage or even withdraw from the programming task. Negative affect detection in the context of novice education can cue an intervention. When negative affect is detected, it opens an opportunity for either the teacher or an automated system to change the novice's disposition. Hence, this study aims to develop affective models for detecting negative affective states, particularly boredom, confusion, and frustration, of novice programming students through keyboard dynamics and mouse behavior. It attempts to discover patterns that reflect the relationship of student affect with keystrokes and/or mouse features. The features were extracted from a customized mouse-key logs gathered from 55 novice C++ students and were labeled with the affective state observed from the corresponding video logs, which were gathered simultaneously with the mouse-key logs. Features that are highly correlated to affect detection were selected through a data mining tool and these were used to train well known classifiers. The results were analyzed in terms of some measures such as accuracy rate and kappa statistic to determine the acceptable models and to identify notable patterns that reflect the recognition of negative affect in terms of the selected features. Lastly, the models were tested using a pre-labeled test set.


Aim: To evaluate the influence of chemotherapy agents and their accessories on oral manifestations of children who have acute lymphoid leukemia. Material and Methods: After the stipulated period for the research, the total sample reached was of  68children. Nevertheless, only 46 children had continued for the second period. Children from 2 to 12 years of age who had been diagnosed with ALL – and would be submitted to treatment at Ophir Loyola Hospital, in Belem, State of Para – had been included in the research. The first evaluation has been held before the chemotherapy treatment and had offered anamnesis and clinical exams. The second evaluation has been held in 10 to 15 days after the beginning of chemotherapy treatment and has offered a new clinical exam and annotations of the drugs which had been utilized during the chemotherapy. Results: From the drugs given at Ophir Loyola Hospital, it has been observed that 14 to 24mg (83%), vincristine 0,6mg to 1 g (80%), ARA-C 20mg to 1600mg (74%), cardioxane13mg to 340mg (65%), methotrexate  12mg to 2400mg (63%), cyclophosphamide 104mg to 1540mg (59%), asparaginase 50UI to 9600UI (57%) andmesna 75mg to 510mg (54%)  have been used the most. No drug has presented statistic at 5% levelin Fisher exact test, when crossing with the presence of the main mouth manifestations: mucositis, xerostomia, toothache,and dysphagia. Conclusions: In the face of the results, it can be concluded that there has been no influence of the chemotherapy agents and their accessories in the oral manifestations of acute lymphoid leukemic children; nevertheless, these patients may present any kind of lesion on the mouth cavity during or after the beginning of chemotherapy. The dental surgeon needs to recognize the oral manifestations and intervene on the buccal health of the ALL patients, contributing and helping with his/her treatment.


The 2010s was a busy decade for the Northern Sea Route (NSR). It started with the first shipping season to feature the international use of the NSR for commercial purposes, followed by a significant reform of the domestic legal regime, as well as the adoption of the Polar Code. The traffic has gradually picked up, and although the expectations of a significant surge in trans-Arctic navigation have not materialized, the NSR's annual turnover has grown beyond the old records set by the USSR. While the Russian authorities have struggled to find the most optimal means of development of the NSR, the latter has recently been re-marketed as a Polar Silk Road, part of the grand Chinese One Belt One Road initiative. While Russia has been rebuilding its military presence in the Arctic, the French Navy vessel BSAH Rhone unexpectedly navigated through the NSR, inciting strong political, but yet not legal, response. The present article aims to take stock of the last decade, paying primary attention to the Russian State practice in developing, adopting, and enforcing legislation in the NSR. By describing the current status and identifying some of the regulatory trends, the article will draw cautious predictions on the role of the law of the sea in the management of the NSR in the near future.