This is an explanatory research, which is titled ?Corporate Governance?s Structure in Financially Distressed Firms and Non Financially Distressed Firms (Study in Manufacture?s Companies Listed in Jakarta Stock Exchange)?. The purposes of this research are to know how corporate governance?s structure in financially distressed firms and non financially distressed firms, and is there differences in both firms group. Corporate governance?s structure examined in this research are size of board (director and commisioner), independency of board, and audit committee. The hypothesis used is there?s significant differences of corporate governance?s structure in financially distressed firms and non financially distressed firms. This research uses descriptive statistic to know corporate governance?s structure in both firms group, and in order to know the differences, it uses t-test independent. To complies the robustness result, the samples examined two times. The second test also uses t-test independent, but with different sample?s range. From the descriptive statistic, we know that corporate governance?s structure? s mean in financially distressed firms is fewer than corporate governance?s structure? s mean in non financially distressed firms. For t-test independent, the first and the second test to director, shows significant result. It is not different from test result for commisioner. However, the test result for independence director shows the inconsistence result, which there is the significant result in first test, but insignificant result in the second test. And also for independence commisioner. The last, test result for audit committee shows insignificant result in both firms group, financially distressed firms and non financially distressed firms. Keyword : struktur corporate governance, tekanan keuangan, uji t independen Link Terkait : http://skripsi.umm.ac.id/files/disk1/252/jiptummpp-gdl-s1-2008-dewisyahri-12563-PENDAHUL-N.pdf


In this paper, we study some quantum properties of a superposition of displaced squeezed two-mode vacuum and single-photon states, such as the second-order correlation function, the Cauchy–Schwarz inequality, quadrature squeezing, quasiprobability distribution functions and purity. These type of states include two mechanisms, namely interference in phase space and entanglement. We show that these states can exhibit sub-Poissonian statistics, squeezing and deviate from the classical Cauchy–Schwarz inequality. Moreover, the amount of entanglement in the system can be increased by increasing the squeezing mechanism. In the framework of the quasiprobability distribution functions, we show that the single-mode state can tend to the thermal state based on the correlation mechanism. A generation scheme for such states is given.


Polymer brushes are extremely versatile materials, as monomer choice allows the user to design a material with the desired physiochemical properties. Given the wide variety in monomer functionality, polymers can be fine-tuned for a specific application. In this work, polymer brushes bound to a silica support are designed and utilized to enhance performance of protein extraction and chromatographic separations. The effectiveness of an analytical method is strongly affected by matrix composition, however, the presence of species other than the target analyte is usually unavoidable. An excellent technique will be able to identify and/or quantify the analyte even when its concentration is low compared with interfering molecules. Protein analysis is particularly challenging, since many proteins of clinical and scientific significance are present in complicated matrices such as plasma or cell lysates. A common method to specifically separate a protein from a complicated matrix is solid phase extraction. In this method, a species (such as an antibody) with high specificity towards the target is immobilized onto a solid substrate (commonly beads or small particles for greater surface area). Next, the target is collected onto the surface, bound by the species. The solid substrate is rinsed of the liquid matrix, before elution of the target. Only the active species should interact with the analyte, and the surface should be otherwise inactive. However, nonspecific interactions lead to binding/adsorption of undesirable compounds. Therefore, an optimal substrate for protein extraction must be 1) easily and completely removable from the liquid phase, 2) have a high concentration of active sites for specific binding, and 3) exhibit low nonspecific binding. As part of this work, commercial magnetic particles were coated with a nonporous silica layer that tolerates the acid bath and silane coating necessary to attach a polymer layer. On the silane coating, a polymer layer was covalently bound; this layer contains epoxide active groups for immobilizing antibodies. These antibodies bind to the target molecule with high specificity, and low nonspecific binding. Obtained particles were evaluated for protein extraction, where antibodies as well as specifically engineered drug compounds were successfully bound to the particle surface.Glycosylation influences several physiopathological processes in proteins. Glycans can act as receptors, modify protein solubility, and participate in folding conformation. Altered glycosylation is a common feature in tumorous cells. As such, many modifications in glycoproteins have been related to cancer, including increased branching of N-glycans or augmented units of sialic acid. Therefore, characterization of glycoproteins is important not only as a diagnostic tool, but also to monitor patients' response to treatment. Furthermore, it is important in the growing field of monoclonal antibodies as drug carriers. Among different methods used for glycosylation analysis, Hydrophilic Interaction Liquid Chromatography (HILIC) has showed important advantages over time-consuming digestion-MS based techniques. An adequate HILIC stationary phase can be used to rapidly differentiate glycoforms present in a sample. In the second part of this work, a polymer brush based bonded phase was developed as a HILIC stationary phase. The new polymer improved the separation of a model glycoprotein compared with a commercial HILIC column, while also exhibiting enhanced stability over a previous bonded phase synthetized in our group.


OBJECTIVES
The aim of this article was to assess the success, safety, complication profile and factors associated with long-term patency of tunnelled peritoneal drains (PleurX) in the treatment of refractory malignant ascites.

METHODS
Over a 4-year period, 28 consecutive patients (32 drain insertions) with refractory malignant ascites were treated with a PleurX drain. The study group comprised 7 males and 21 females (mean age, 61 years). A combination of fluoroscopic and ultrasound guidance was used to insert 4 drains; the remaining 28 drains were inserted under ultrasound guidance alone. Patient history, biochemical profiles, pathological and procedural records and clinical follow-up until death were reviewed. Statistical analysis included multivariate logistic regression analysis and Kaplan-Meier curves (p<0.05 was considered significant).

RESULTS
There was a 100% technical success rate for the insertion of the drain; there were no procedure-related deaths and no major complications. Only minor complications were reported: three (10%) immediate; three (10%) early; and two (7%) late. Factors significantly associated with these complications included current chemotherapy, low haemoglobin levels, low albumin levels, high white cell count and high c-reactive protein levels. The length of time the drains remained in situ, and therefore patent, ranged from 5 to 365 days (mean, 113 days). Out of the original 28 tunnelled drains, 24 (86%) remained in situ and functioning until the patients' death. Four (14%) drains dislodged and a subsequent PleurX drain was inserted on the opposite side of the abdominal wall. These new drains remained patent until the patient's death. The annual event rate was 0.45 events per year. A comorbid diagnosis of renal disease or chemotherapy was significantly related to a decreased length of patency.

CONCLUSION
The use of tunnelled peritoneal drains is safe and effective and we would advocate their use as a first-line approach in patients with refractory malignant ascites. Care and regular follow-up is indicated following insertion of the drain in all patients, especially those on chemotherapy and those with a pre-procedure diagnosis of renal disease.


Two-dimensional process modeling has been complicated by the increasing complexity of the physical models needed to characterize modern processes. Present physical models for diffusion favor modeling of both the vacancies and interstitials as well as the dopant impurities. these vacancies and interstitials are important in two dimensions since the lateral characteristic lengths are on the order of a few microns, which is comparable to device dimensions. Hence, full two-dimensional solutions of the point defect equations are required to accurately model two-dimensional diffusion. Since the defects diffuse many order of magnitude faster than the impurities, the problem of solving the coupled equations is numerically stiff and the numerical techniques become critical. The numerical methods in SUPREM-IV are described. Since the numerical solutions are time consuming, suitable analytic solutions are considered as an alternative. These analytic solutions are compared to the numerical results to test the limits of the assumptions used in the analytic formulation. The comparison forces the conclusion that analytic solutions are of limited use in prediction of point defect profilesin two dimensions. >


Drop impact is important for numerous industrial processes. The recent progress in investigations of drop impact on heated solid surface covers the processes near and above the boiling temperature of the liquid. There is a gap in understanding of drop dynamics for the substrate temperature below the liquid boiling point. We conduct a detailed study of the interaction of the water drop of 10 μl impacting on a heated sapphire plate with a temperature varied within a range of 23–135◦C. Characteristic stages of drop interaction with a substrate at various temperatures are identified, namely impact, spreading, rollback, one liquid column splashing, microdrops detachment, formation, stabilization, breakup, boiling, and evaporation. We show that the spreading time and maximal spreading diameter of the droplet are dominated by inertia and practically independent of the temperature. The influence of the temperature on viscosity dissipation, which limits the maximum spreading diameter, is not significant. However, the temperature rise leads to a considerable decrease of the liquid column contact diameter and to an increase of the liquid column height at the splashing stage. It is revealed that the contact line velocity at the rollback stage depends on temperature. Microdrop detachment from the liquid column is observed for a substrate temperature of 60–100◦C. Beginning from the substrate temperature of 100◦C, the liquid column height is decreased again. The most important observation is the drop breakup into several sessile microdrops just after the spreading for 135◦C, which prevents the rollback and rebound. We show the possible importance of the Marangoni force for thin liquid film breakup and detect the presence of microbubbles, which is also potentially important for breakup.


This paper aims to discuss some issues related to artists' signatures during the XIth and XIIth centuries, focusing on a corpus of French inscriptions, broadly neglected in previous works. After a short introduction of the corpus, the second part of the article undertakes to evaluate the writing skills of those who executed these inscriptions. The last part deals with the value of theses signatures, traditionally considered as the artist's claim of authorship of a work, in order to obtain recognition of his talent and status. However, since the analysis of their exhibition contexts shows that they were often invisible to a large public, and that they were concentrated in symbolic spaces of the church, this study suggests their interpretation from a devotional and eschatological perspective. Sommario 1 Introduzione. – 2 Materiali. – 3 Problemi. – 4 Funzioni. – 5 Conclusioni.


The article builds on the Euro-CASE Policy Paper published in 2013 on "Transforming Manufacturing' A path to a Smart, Sustainable and Inclusive growth in Europe" [Euro-CASE 2013]. The industry is a very significant sector of the economy in the Czech Republic, it is crucial to follow new industry challenges as the upcoming digital revolution enables connectivity, automation, robotization etc. with the potential to change the productive structure and reorganise the value creation increasingly around digital platform ecosystems. Digital platforms refer to a technology-enabled business model that facilitates exchanges between multiple agents and offers a value that is proportional to the size and the quality of the engaged community. The exponential change of technology development and the globalization challenge the structure of production and manufacturing not only in the Czech Republic, but also on the European level. The paper raises discussion points on the above mentioned future challenges.


The perceptions of three groups of women regarding their body image, self-concept, total self-image, and self-esteem were compared. The groups included 64 women who had mastectomies and wore external breast prostheses, 31 women who had mastectomies and underwent breast reconstruction, and a control group of 78 women who had not experienced mastectomy. The body image, total self-image, and self-esteem mean scores indicated that the prosthesis and reconstruction groups had more positive feelings regarding their bodies than did the control group. There were no significant differences in self-concept among the three groups. These findings challenge a common assumption that mastectomy automatically results in psychiatric morbidity caused by an altered body image and suggest that health professionals should not make assumptions about how a woman will psychologically respond to mastectomy.


Type I resistance is a significant and powerful resistance component. Spraying inoculation covers reactions to both Type I and Type II. A significant synergetic effect was detected between Type I and Type II QTLs. It seems that Type I resistance at present cannot be directly measured, only as a difference between point and spraying inoculation. However, this does not influence the success of the selection. For breeding the spraying methodology is more suitable as it considers much wider genetic background than the point inoculation does. The highest resistance in the Szeged program was achieved by the use of exotic spring wheat sources in winter wheat, but excellent agronomy types were identified at a relative low ratio. Good or excellent resistance can be identified at a low rate in breeding material without exotic FHB resistance sources, but their agronomy value is much better. Ratio of high resistance is frequent in winter wheat lines created form winter and spring wheat resistance sources. An efficient phenotypic selection is inevitable. Repeatability of the test is generally good or excellent; LSD values are normally less than 10 % of the variation width. FDK and toxin measurements are integrant part of the program since 35 and 20 years, respectively. Several methodical considerations are discussed.


OBJECTIVE
Quercetin is an important member of dietary flavonoid family and widely present in red wine and Mediterranean diet. The major objective of the this study is to evaluate the beneficial effects of quercetin in protecting the myocardium from the deleterious effects of ischemia reperfusion (I/R) injury in chronic quercetin treatment with or without an acute quercetin infusion protocols.

METHODS
Forty male Sprague-Dawley rats were included in this experimental randomized study/ Langendorff perfused isolated rat hearts were subjected to 60-min of global ischemia period following 60-min of reperfusion. All animals were randomly divided into 4 groups. Group 1 animals were kept as controls. Group 3 and 4 animals received 50 mg/kg quercetin via an intragastric tube for 7 days for chronic treatment. Group 2 and 4 animals received an acute 15 mmol/L infusion for 30 minutes before the onset of ischemia. The myocardial postischemic recovery was compared using hemodynamic data (peak systolic pressure, end-diastolic pressure and +dP/dtmax), coronary flow, biochemical parameters (lactate dehydrogenase, creatine kinase-MB fraction, cardiac troponin I) from coronary effluent, and oxidative stress markers (malondialdehyde, glutathione, glutathione reductase and nitrite) from heart tissue homogenates in each group.

RESULTS
Quercetin has provided increased preservation in myocardial recovery in both chronic and acute treatment protocols compared to non-treated group. According to all estimated hemodynamic parameters, while the statistical difference between acute treated hearts and control hearts was significant (p<0.05); this significance was more clear in chronic treated groups (group 3 and 4) when compared to control (p<0.01). Likewise, biochemical and oxidative stress markers displayed significant differences in acute treated and chronic treated hearts when compared to control (p<0.05 and p<0.01, respectively).

CONCLUSION
As a major dietary flavonoid, due to its antioxidant and cytoprotective actions, quercetin has the capacity to protect the myocardial tissue against global ischemia and reperfusion injury. In instances where the molecule is administered for the purpose of acute therapy, this cardioprotective effect of a significant degree can be observed to; however, this potency is further accentuated upon administration as a chronic treatment protocol for seven days.


Managed care is becoming a critical factor of healthcare delivery which assures a lower cost without compromising the quality of care. However, this practice has increased the physicians' responsibilities in terms of cost containment and patient care. This study analyzed the perception of physicians on the impact of managed care on doctor–patient relationships, the ethical practice of medicine, and the quality of care. Data were gathered from a survey of physicians in Malaysia. Variables representing doctor–patient relationships, ethical practice of medicine, and quality of care were calculated using median. The findings showed that physicians have a positive perception of managed care on doctor–patient relationships, the ethical practice of medicine, and the quality of care in clinical practice.


: Two cases of "segmental multicystic renal dysplasia" are presented, both of which showed calcification. Arteriographic findings are described and the feasibility of preoperative diagnosis in such cases suggested.


The purposes of this study were to assess load-independent, end-systolic relationships in mice and compare these relationships to ejection phase indexes in assessing contractility. In 13 mice, ejection phase indexes (shortening fraction and velocity of fiber shortening) and end-systolic relationships [pressure-dimension relationship (ESPDR) and stress-velocity relationship (ESSVR)] were determined using M-mode echocardiography and simultaneous left ventricular pressure. Load was altered with phenylephrine and nitroprusside. Contractility was increased with dobutamine and decreased by induction of hypothyroidism. Ejection phase indexes increased with dobutamine infusion but were not significantly decreased with hypothyroidism. However, end-systolic relationships changed significantly with both dobutamine (gamma-intercepts: ESPDR from 22 to 48 mmHg, ESSVR from 3.7 to 6.6 circ/s, P < 0.05) and hypothyroidism (gamma-intercepts: ESPDR from 22 to 11 mmHg, ESSVR from 3.7 to 3.2 circ/s, P < 0.05). We conclude that end-systolic indexes can be accurately measured in the intact mouse by echocardiography with simultaneous left ventricular pressure recording and appear to be more sensitive to inotropic state than ejection phase indexes.


The Burrows-Wheeler Transform is a string transformation that plays a fundamental role for the design of self-indexing compressed data structures. Over the years, researchers have successfully extended this transformation outside the domains of strings. However, efforts to find non-trivial alternatives of the original, now 25 years old, Burrows-Wheeler string transformation have met limited success. In this paper we bring new lymph to this area by introducing a whole new family of transformations that have all the myriad virtues of the BWT: they can be computed and inverted in linear time, they produce provably highly compressible strings, and they support linear time pattern search directly on the transformed string. This new family is a special case of a more general class of transformations based on context adaptive alphabet orderings, a concept introduced here. This more general class includes also the Alternating BWT, another invertible string transforms recently introduced in connection with a generalization of Lyndon words.


Abstract This article analyses the resilience of domestic textile production in Java and sub-Saharan Africa to uncover how local industries coped with the effects of broader global and colonial forces in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. We demonstrate that many domestic handicraft manufacturers managed to survive due to specific competitive advantages. Strategies of product differentiation, responsiveness to shifting consumer needs, and flexibility in manufacturing methods enabled local producers to remain competitive in confrontation with mounting imports from early factories, typically constituting cheap, but lower quality and less unique products. Some local manufacturers could even compete based on price given the very low labour costs associated with seasonally-oriented handicraft production, which raises questions about the extent of the comparative advantage enjoyed by early-industrializing nations in the Global North. The capacity of domestic textile producers to remain competitive amid colonial policies aimed at capturing local markets – and raw cotton sources – highlights not only the importance of product differentiation and the specificity of local demand, but also the agency exercised by both producers and consumers under colonial rule.


Objective:Aneuploidy is an independent risk factor for forthcoming carcinogenesis in ulcerative colitis (UC). An inferior prognosis of patients with ulcerative colitis-associated colorectal cancer (UCC) compared with those with sporadic colorectal cancer (SCC) has been reported, but remains controversial. This prompted us to investigate if aneuploidy can be observed in UCCs as frequently as in their sporadic counterpart and if aneuploidy per se might be a driving feature of poor prognosis in UCC. Background Data:We obtained clinical follow-up for 257 SCC patients (average observation time 57 months) and 31 UCC patients (51 months). Touch preparation slides or tissue sections were prepared of all 288 carcinomas for ploidy analysis. Methods:Ploidy status was assessed for 260 SCCs and 31 UCCs by image cytometry and correlated to clinical features. Survival data were analyzed using Kaplan-Meier estimates. Results:Aneuploidy was detected in 74.6% of SCCs and in all 31 UCCs. Logistic regression analysis yielded age (odds ratio [OR], 1.05; 95% CI, 1.02–1.09; P = 0.003) and aneuploidy (OR, 4.07; 95% CI, 1.46–11.36; P = 0.007) as independent prognostic factors for R0-resected patients devoid of metastases. Diploid SCCs had a more favorable 5-year survival (88.2%) than aneuploid SCCs (69.0%) and UCCs (73.1%) (P = 0.074). Conclusions:UC-associated carcinomas presented aneuploidy at significantly higher frequency than sporadic colorectal carcinomas (P < 0.0006). UCCs and aneuploid SCCs share a similar prognosis inferior to that of diploid SCCs. Aneuploidy proved to be the strongest independent prognostic marker for R0-resected colorectal cancer patients overall.


Diabetic retinopathy (DR), branch retinal vein occlusion (BRVO) and central retinal vein occlusion (CRVO) are frequently complicated by macular oedema (MO), a condition that arises as a direct consequence of blood–retinal barrier (BRB) breakdown and the subsequent increase in vascular permeability. Accumulating evidence suggests that the upregulation of inflammatory factors or the downregulation of anti-inflammatory factors and a subsequent increase in leucocyte–endothelial interactions contribute to disruption of tight junctions and BRB breakdown.1 2

Recently, clinical treatment has become available to reduce the ocular expression of inflammatory cytokines. Intravitreal injection of triamcinolone acetonide (TA) is effective for reducing macular thickness in patients with diabetic macular oedema (DMO) and those with MO due to BRVO or CRVO.3 4 In addition, the intravitreal injection of antivascular endothelial growth factor (VEGF) antibody has been reported to be effective for reducing MO.5 6 At the usual concentration, intravitreal injection of TA is more effective for reducing DMO and improving the visual acuity than anti-VEGF antibody, suggesting that the pathogenesis of DMO is attributable not only to VEGF, but also to other mechanisms that are suppressed by the corticosteroid.7 Furthermore, the therapeutic effect of TA for MO due to BRVO and CRVO shows similarities.8 9 It has been unclear whether there is any difference in therapeutic effect and which inflammatory cytokines are increased or decreased in the clinical setting.

In this study, we measured the vitreous levels of VEGF and interleukin-6 (IL-6) in patients who had MO associated with DMO or MO due to BRVO and CRVO. The vitreous levels of VEGF and IL-6 were compared among patients with DMO, MO due to BRVO and MO due to CRVO in order to clarify the influence of these molecules on the response to treatment.

Samples of undiluted vitreous fluid (0.3 to 1.0 ml) …


Adequate ventilation is necessary for thermal comfort and reducing risks from infectious bio-aerosols in hospital wards, but achieving this with mechanical ventilation has carbon and energy implications. Natural ventilation is often limited to window-based designs whose dilution/mixing effectiveness are subject to constraints of wind speed, cross ventilation, and in the case of hospital wards, proximity of patients to external walls. A buoyancy-driven natural ventilation system capable of achieving dilution/mixing was shown to be feasible in a preceding study of novel system called natural personalised ventilation (NPV). This system combined both architecture and airflow engineering principles of space design and buoyancy and was tested and validated (salt-bath experiment) for a single bed ward. This research extends the previous work and is proof-of-concept on the feasibility of NPV system for multi-bed wards. Two different four-bed ward types were investigated of using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations under wind-neutral conditions. Results predict that NPV system could deliver fresh air to multiple patients, including those located 10 m away from external wall, with absolute flow rates of between 32 L·s−1 and 54 L·s−1 for each patient/bed. Compared to same wards simulated using window design, ingress of airborne contaminants into patients' breathing zone and summer overheating potential were minimised, while overall ward dilution was maximised. Findings suggest the NPV has potentials for enabling architects and building service engineers to decouple airflow delivery from the visualisation and illumination responsibilities placed upon windows.


Metabolic profiling is an omics approach that can be used to observe phenotypic changes, making it particularly attractive for biomarker discovery. Although several candidate metabolites biomarkers for disease expression have been identified in recent clinical studies, the reference values of healthy subjects have not been established. In particular, the accuracy of concentrations measured by mass spectrometry (MS) is unclear. Therefore, comprehensive metabolic profiling in large-scale cohorts by MS to create a database with reference ranges is essential for evaluating the quality of the discovered biomarkers. In this study, we tested 8700 plasma samples by commercial kit-based metabolomics and separated them into two groups of 6159 and 2541 analyses based on the different ultra-high-performance tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS) systems. We evaluated the quality of the quantified values of the detected metabolites from the reference materials in the group of 2541 compared with the quantified values from other platforms, such as nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), supercritical fluid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (SFC-MS/MS) and UHPLC-Fourier transform mass spectrometry (FTMS). The values of the amino acids were highly correlated with the NMR results, and lipid species such as phosphatidylcholines and ceramides showed good correlation, while the values of triglycerides and cholesterol esters correlated less to the lipidomics analyses performed using SFC-MS/MS and UHPLC-FTMS. The evaluation of the quantified values by MS-based techniques is essential for metabolic profiling in a large-scale cohort.


This paper examines the determinants of sexual behaviour with special reference to the effect of household socio-economic status as a proxy for poverty. The data are derived from the Nigeria Demographic and Health Survey; the analysis is restricted to 1831 never married females age 15-24. Both descriptive and analytical methods are used to assess the effects of each poverty-related factor when the effects of other demographic and socio-cultural factors are controlled statistically. The results show that 31.5% of the respondents have had sexual intercourse and more than half of these had an affair in the month preceding the survey. The median age of sexual debut is 17 years and there is little variation among socio-demographic and poverty-related indices indicating a generally early initiation of sexual activity. Condom use is low among the youth; only 15% have ever used condom and about 22% of the sexually experienced used condom the last time they had an affair. The results indicate that those who have access to the media and those of high socioeconomic status are more sexually exposed than their counterparts who do not have access to media or have less household facilities. Exposure to premarital sex increases with access to newspapers radio and television. The data do not support the view that the high level of sexual activity is a function of household poverty although poverty exposes the youth to reproductive health risks as a result of low usage of condom among those from less well-off homes. (authors)


Abstract The growth of fruits was evaluated during three growing seasons on four apple cultivars 'Angold', 'Jonagold', 'Rubinola' and 'Topaz'. The follow-up period was defined by the start of flowering, the date of attaining of T-stage by fruitlets and the start of optimal harvest ripening, which for each cultivar was determined on the basis of starch index, flesh firmness and soluble solids. The close relationships were detected between time of attaining the T-stage and term of harvest maturity for three of four studied cultivars.


Abstract. Existing automatic target recognition of synthetic aperture radar (SAR ATR) schemes mainly focus on target chips, but there is very little research for a large-scale and high-resolution SAR image that is more practical for SAR image interpretation. How to recognize targets efficiently and accurately from a large-scale and high-resolution SAR image is still a challenge. We present a scheme based on the combination of a salient detection approach, an active contour model (ACM), an affine-invariant shape descriptor, and the corresponding shape context. During the detection stage, the spectral residual approach is utilized to efficiently preselect salient regions. The proposed convex ACM, based on a ratio distance and distribution metric which makes it more robust to multiplicative speckled noise, is then adopted to get accurate candidate target chips. For the discrimination stage, a cumulative sum of multiscale lacunarity feature is proposed to select vehicle chips from clutter chips. Finally, affine-invariant shape features, obtained from the contours by our proposed ACM, are combined with a corresponding shape context to make the classification more accurate. Experimental results demonstrate that our SAR ATR system, integrating all the proposed methods, is feasible in ATR from a high-resolution and large-scale SAR image.


The decline in federal support of educational programs has made it difficult for libraries to apply new technologies to improve practices and services. While federal support has declined in constant dollars, there has been a modest increase in grants from private foundations. Current U.S. policies require federal agencies to recover full costs of rendering services (Circular A-25) and require the transfer of many federal service-oriented activities to the commercial sector (Circular A-76). Additionally, the Paperwork Reduction Act of 1980 is inhibiting the production and dissemination of federal publications. Government pursuit of these policies adds a heavy economic burden to libraries and threatens to reduce access to the scholarly and scientific record.


We investigate a method for entangling two singlet-triplet qubits in adjacent double quantum dots via capacitive interactions. In contrast to prior work, here we focus on a regime with strong interactions between the qubits. The interplay of the interaction energy and simultaneous large detunings for both double dots gives rise to the double charge resonant regime, in which the unpolarized (1111) and fully polarized (0202) four-electron states in the absence of interqubit tunneling are near degeneracy, while being energetically well-separated from the partially polarized (0211 and 1102) states. A rapid controlled-phase gate may be realized by combining time evolution in this regime in the presence of intraqubit tunneling and the interqubit Coulomb interaction with refocusing ${\pi}$ pulses that swap the singly occupied singlet and triplet states of the two qubits via, e.g., magnetic gradients. We calculate the fidelity of this entangling gate, incorporating models for two types of noise -- charge fluctuations in the single-qubit detunings and charge relaxation within the low-energy subspace via electron-phonon interaction -- and identify parameter regimes that optimize the fidelity. The rates of phonon-induced decay for pairs of GaAs or Si double quantum dots vary with the sizes of the dipolar and quadrupolar contributions and are several orders of magnitude smaller for Si, leading to high theoretical gate fidelities for coupled singlet-triplet qubits in Si dots. We also consider the dependence of the capacitive coupling on the relative orientation of the double dots and find that a linear geometry provides the fastest potential gate.


An evaluation of knowledge, attitude and behavioural patterns of high school students in Oyo and Osun States, Southwestern Nigeria, towards HIV/AIDS was undertaken. A structured questionnaire was administered to respondents from six secondary schools that were selected by systematic random sampling method from the two States. The questionnaire focused on specific aspects of knowledge, attitude and behavioural patterns related to HIV/AIDS, its mode of transmission and preventive measures. Results from the study showed that 362 (73%) of the 496 respondents had correct knowledge of the causative agent of AIDS, 69% had correct knowledge of the mode of transmission, 83.2% had correct knowledge of the people at risk and 80.2% had good knowledge of methods of prevention. Attitude toward AIDS victims was however relatively poor with 21% believing that AIDS patients should be isolated and avoided and additional 7% believing that people should not eat or share utensils with AIDS patients. Only 57.7% believed that people should relate freely with AIDS patients. This study showed an improvement in the knowledge and attitude towards HIV/AIDS over a previous one carried out over a decade ago in the same locality, highlighting the importance of mass media campaign programme embarked upon by the States over the years. However, there is need to further increase the awareness campaign especially as it relates to attitude towards AIDS patients and also on information dissemination, which should be more detailed and formal. Incorporating sex education into the curriculum of secondary schools will be a welcome development in stemming the tide of this dreaded disease. Keywords : knowledge, attitude, sexual behaviour, HIV, AIDS African Journal of Clinical and Experimental Microbiology Vol. 6 (3) 2005: 247-252


Videogame production events, particularly the Global Game Jam (GGJ), is an activity par excellence aimed at the development of the world's largest games, enhancing the form of personal expression, critical thinking, and appropriation of new media through collaborative work. The general objective is to explore the development process within the context of the GGJ, calculating the correlation between level of education and source of inspiration, the correlation between level of education and purpose of the game to be designed in the Global Game Jam and the correlation between level of education and skills. The main source of inspiration is defined by game genre, game mechanics, or other video game, in addition the purpose of the game is mainly due to learning a technical skill, enjoy doing it, and generate satisfaction in the players. Finally, the skills that prevail are 2D Design, Programming, and 3D Design. People with a high level of knowledge have the same passion as those who have just started in the multidisciplinary field of the development of video games motivated by creating an original game that has a good script and provides them a life experience.


The effects of climate change on human society and urban metropolises in the Global South, such as Bangkok, have been widely discussed in academic and policy circles. In the last few decades, debates on climate change and displacement have particularly captured the attention of the media, policymakers and academics. So-called "climate refugees" have advanced as the "human face of climate change". Critically examining the literature on the relationship between climate change and displacement that either sees this relationship as deterministic (so-called Maximalist position) or complex (so-called Minimalist position), this dissertation seeks to reorient debates on climate change and displacement to consider the link between both compounds as an emerging assemblage. The dissertation argues that such a perspective allows for a more-than Western ontology, a nuanced engagement with urban spaces such as Bangkok, in which climate change and displacement begin to materialise and contribute to a political quest for open futures.
Within this emerging assemblage, affective forces, human and non-human actors, the urban materiality of a fragmented waterscape shapes and influences the politics of climate change and displacement. Through an intra-urban comparative research design that utilises a range of qualitative and ethnographic methods (e.g. participant observations, semi-structured interviews, walk-along interviews), the emerging heterogeneous urban climate change and displacement assemblage is investigated. In three empirical chapters, the dissertation attends to the historical fragmentation of Bangkok's waterscape and its connections to contemporary and future climate change and displacement; the 2011 inundation in which wide parts of the city were flooded, involving diverse topologies of displacement; and finally two urban struggles over the re-engineering of Bangkok's waterscape, in which the political contestations that are at stake within the climate change and displacement assemblage are analysed and compared.
The dissertation argues that through re-framing debates on climate change and migration through an assemblage approach, a more sensory, nuanced, and ultimately more complex understanding of the political nature of the relationship between climate change and displacement is advanced.


Falling into Place is the eighth in a series of co-published partnerships, entitled Fabrications, initiated by Book Works and is a parallel publication to Heather and Ivan Morison's The Black Cloud, commissioned by Situations. In this book, the artists bring together a recent body of work, incorporating a range of shelters and escape vehicles in a narrative that is part science fiction, part history, part auto-biography, part fairytale. Referencing a dystopian outlook on humanity and its future, the Morison's book is a highly poignant wake-up call, bound in an engrossing novella that offers an extraordinary insight in a rich and intriguing artistic practice.


Vegetation mapping, identifying the type and distribution of plant species, is important for analysing vegetation dynamics, quantifying spatial patterns of vegetation evolution, analysing the effects of environmental changes and predicting spatial patterns of species diversity. Such analysis can contribute to the development of targeted land management actions that maintain biodiversity and ecological functions. This paper presents a methodology for 3D vegetation mapping of a coastal dune complex using a multispectral camera mounted on an unmanned aerial system with particular reference to the Buckroney dune complex in Co. Wicklow, Ireland. Unmanned aerial systems (UAS), also known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) or drones, have enabled high-resolution and high-accuracy ground-based data to be gathered quickly and easily on-site. The Sequoia multispectral sensor used in this study has green, red, red edge and near-infrared wavebands, and a regular camer with red, green and blue wavebands (RGB camera), to capture both visible and near-infrared (NIR) imagery of the land surface. The workflow of 3D vegetation mapping of the study site included establishing coordinated ground control points, planning the flight mission and camera parameters, acquiring the imagery, processing the image data and performing features classification. The data processing outcomes included an orthomosaic model, a 3D surface model and multispectral imagery of the study site, in the Irish Transverse Mercator (ITM) coordinate system. The planimetric resolution of the RGB sensor-based outcomes was 0.024 m while multispectral sensor-based outcomes had a planimetric resolution of 0.096 m. High-resolution vegetation mapping was successfully generated from these data processing outcomes. There were 235 sample areas (1 m × 1 m) used for the accuracy assessment of the classification of the vegetation mapping. Feature classification was conducted using nine different classification strategies to examine the efficiency of multispectral sensor data for vegetation and contiguous land cover mapping. The nine classification strategies included combinations of spectral bands and vegetation indices. Results show classification accuracies, based on the nine different classification strategies, ranging from 52% to 75%.


Abstract. Introducing an organization to the unstructured point cloud before extracting information from airborne lidar data is common in many applications. Aggregating the points with similar features into segments in 3-D which comply with the nature of actual objects is affected by the neighborhood, scale, features and noise among other aspects. In this study, we present a min-cut based method for segmenting the point cloud. We first assess the neighborhood of each point in 3-D by investigating the local geometric and statistical properties of the candidates. Neighborhood selection is essential since point features are calculated within their local neighborhood. Following neighborhood determination, we calculate point features and determine the clusters in the feature space. We adapt a graph representation from image processing which is especially used in pixel labeling problems and establish it for the unstructured 3-D point clouds. The edges of the graph that are connecting the points with each other and nodes representing feature clusters hold the smoothness costs in the spatial domain and data costs in the feature domain. Smoothness costs ensure spatial coherence, while data costs control the consistency with the representative feature clusters. This graph representation formalizes the segmentation task as an energy minimization problem. It allows the implementation of an approximate solution by min-cuts for a global minimum of this NP hard minimization problem in low order polynomial time. We test our method with airborne lidar point cloud acquired with maximum planned post spacing of 1.4 m and a vertical accuracy 10.5 cm as RMSE. We present the effects of neighborhood and feature determination in the segmentation results and assess the accuracy and efficiency of the implemented min-cut algorithm as well as its sensitivity to the parameters of the smoothness and data cost functions. We find that smoothness cost that only considers simple distance parameter does not strongly conform to the natural structure of the points. Including shape information within the energy function by assigning costs based on the local properties may help to achieve a better representation for segmentation.


Cholesterol-induced rabbit atherosclerosis was inhibited by the antihistaminic, chlorpheniramine, given orally at a rate of either 2, 4, or 8 mg./day/rabbit. Two attempts, both unsuccessful, were made to demonstrate directly the expected chlorpheniramine-mediated decrease in the permeability of the rabbit aortic wall to serum constituents: (1) study of sudan-red-stained frozen sections of aortas from rabbits fed a high-cholesterol diet for a few days, with and without added chlorpheniramine, and (2) a study of the effect of chlorpheniramine on the permeability of the inner aspect of the aorta to I13l-labeled serum albumin. A possible mechanism, based on aortic reaction to injury, is presented to account for the localization and development of atherosclerosis. This hypothesis led to the selection of chlorpheniramine for study as a possible atherosclerosis-inhibiting agent and underlies the belief that the atherosclerosis-inhibiting effect of this compound is due to inhibition of aortic reaction to injury.


The derivation, structure and application of a Water Quality Index (WQI) for the classification of surface water quality is discussed and the efficiency of the developed WQI is compared with the standard UK classification system of the National Water Council (NWC).The general WQI is developed through the objective and rigorous selection, transformation and weighting of determinands with rating curves based on legal standards and quality directives or guidelines. Three further indices intended for potable supplies and evaluation of toxicity are also discussed. The utility of the developed index for operational management is demonstrated by a comparative study with the NWC classification for a number of rivers in the Greater London region. The flexibility and advantages of a WQI approach in providing potential cost benefit/assessments for water quality on both temporal and spatial scales are also highlighted.


Frontal and coronal sections of adult male and female canary brain were stained with a monoclonal antibody to vimentin using an immunoperoxidase technique; some sections were counterstained with cresyl violet. The position of radial glia cells was mapped using a computer-linked microscope. The telencephalon was found to have a rich set of radial glia. The long processes of these radial glia showed a mediolateral orientation, and were much more abundant in some parts of the telencephalon (e.g., hyperstriatum, caudal neostriatum, and lobus parolfactorius) than in others (e.g., anterior neostriatum, archistriatum, and septum), which had few or no radial glia fibers. A small, elongated cell type not previously described in adult avian brain was frequently seen to be associated with the long processes of the radial glia, oriented in the same direction and often in close apposition. The position of these cells was also systematically mapped, and they were found to be virtually absent outside of the telencephalon. The relation between radial glia fibers and the small, elongated cells was most commonly seen close to the lateral ventricle of the forebrain, where the radial glia cells have their cell bodies. The above observations suggest that there may be a functional relation between radial glia and the small, elongated cells. We hypothesize that the latter cells are young migrating neurons. This hypothesis is tested in a separate publication (A. Alvarez-Buylla and F. Nottebohm, unpublished observations).


Call graphs have many applications in software engineering. For example, they serve as the basis for code navigation features in integrated development environments and are at the foundation of static analyses performed in verification tools. While many call graph construction algorithms have been presented in the literature, we are not aware of any that handle Scala features such as traits and abstract type members. Applying existing algorithms to the JVM bytecodes generated by the Scala compiler produces very imprecise results because type information is lost during compilation. We adapt existing type-based call graph construction algorithms to Scala and present a formalization based on Featherweight Scala. An experimental evaluation shows that our most precise algorithm generates call graphs with 1.1--3.7 times fewer nodes and 1.5--17.3 times fewer edges than a bytecode-based RTA analysis.


Previous methods of enriching sperm with a higher percentage of Y-bearing sperm have been questioned because the claims that Y enrichment was present were based on quinacrine staining of the Y chromosome, and the enrichment was not confirmed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) or fluorescent in situ hybridization (FISH) techniques. A technique was evaluated that theoretically could increase the percentage of X-bearing sperm by isolating a fraction of the "heaviest" sperm by passing them through 12 layers of discontinuous Percoll gradient. Initially 12 specimens were checked both before and then after separation with 12 layers of Percoll for percentage of Y sperm. The median for baseline Y percentage was 49% and after processing the percentage of Y dropped to 10%. An additional 19 specimens were checked after separation only. The median was 19%. The sample with the lowest preseparation % of quinacrine staining sperm was 45% and the highest was 54%. After 12-layer Percoll, the lowest percentage was 3% and the highest was 24%. There have been claims that quinacrine staining can falsely increase apparent Y-bearing sperm enrichment following certain separation procedures, e.g., albumin separation, by nonspecific staining of autosomal chromosomes. If anything, then, it should falsely decrease X-bearing sperm enrichment. Thus, 12-layer Percoll separation may actually enrich for X-bearing sperm or possibly this procedure somehow nonspecifically inhibits the ability of quinacrine to stain the Y chromosome.


Solar thermal energy and biomass fuels are often available at locations where they can benefit from combined hybrid energy utilization methods for the generation of electricity, representing suitable and advantageous integration alternatives. The feasibility of concentrating solar power (CSP) systems depends on cost limitations, desired installed power capacity and direct solar insolation, where smaller scales and low-cost solutions can often be preferred to large-scale investment-intensive installations. Biomass residues of various types, on the other hand, can be considered as proven fuels for small-to-midscale utility or industry based power or cogen arrangements and utilized through various technologies. The thermodynamic integration between a biomass fired power plant and a CSP unit can help to significantly increase the availability of the plant, improve its partial load characteristics, compensate for the intermittency of the solar energy resource while preserving the purely renewable profile of the generated electricity, and at the same time showing better overall performance when compared to two separate plants while avoiding the need for costly energy storage solutions.Biomass fuels can help reach better steam conditions in a steam plant based on CSP-generated steam, and thus improve the efficiency of energy conversion for the integrated hybrid system if compared with two individual single-fuel power units. In this study, an overview of feasible solar-biomass integration concepts is presented. A deeper thermoeconomic analysis of a selected integrated utility-scale biomass and CSP electricity generation plant is attempted, with certain simplifications. Furthermore, a multiobjective optimization strategy is regarded as very necessary and thus included in the analysis, where several major environmental aspects plus the cost of electricity are involved and defined in terms of desired parameters and conditions representative to Central Europe and Southeastern United States. The results are compared with conventional power generation alternatives. On that basis, a low-parameter CSP solution integrated with conventional biomass-fired combustion unit, where solar-generated steam is being superheated by the biomass fuel, has been chosen as the focus of the analysis in this study.Copyright © 2013 by ASME


Synthetic aperture radar (SAR)-based motion estimation algorithms, which have been developed and validated for airborne SAR data, are now being extended to the RADARSAT-2 Moving Object Detection Experiment (MODEX). Several modifications of the classical along-track interferometry (ATI) approach are considered. Some of the first MODEX results are presented, demonstrating the estimation of target position and velocity from a commercial satellite using ATI methods.


Vibration isolators are often assumed to possess linear viscous damping which has well known consequences for their performance. However, damping may be designed to be or prove to be nonlinear. This study investigates the effect of cubic damping, as an example of damping nonlinearity, in a single degree of freedom (SDOF) vibration isolation system. The response behaviour due to two excitation types, namely harmonic and broadband excitations, was examined. For harmonic excitation, the Harmonic Balance Method (HBM) was applied to yield approximate closed form solutions and simplified analytical expressions implicitly show the influence of cubic damping for particular frequency regions. The HBM solutions were verified using direct numerical integration. The presence of cubic damping proves to be beneficial for the force excited case. It reduces response amplitude around the resonance frequency and has similar response to an undamped system in the isolation region. In contrast, for base excitation, the cubic damping is detrimental at high excitation frequencies as the base excitation and isolated mass move almost together. The effect becomes more pronounced for larger excitation amplitudes. The case of base excitation was then considered for broadband excitation. The responses using direct numerical integration were presented using power spectral densities. In contrast to harmonic excitation, the amplitude of the response does not appear to approach that of the input. Instead, a higher effective cubic damping results in a higher vibration level of the isolated mass at frequencies below the resonance frequency. It also does not reduce explicitly the response amplitude around the resonance frequency unlike the linear viscous damping. For a constant displacement amplitude random excitation, the excitation frequency bandwidth is found to be a significant factor in the level of effective cubic damping. A broader excitation bandwidth results in a higher level of cubic damping force. The theoretical and numerical results for both harmonic and broadband excitation were validated experimentally. The experimental investigation was performed using a SDOF base excited vibration isolation system possessing a simple velocity feedback control active damper to reproduce the nonlinear damping force. The predictions were shown to be in good agreement with measurements thereby verifying the effects of cubic damping on a SDOF system undergoing harmonic and broadband base excitation.


Conventional streaming solutions for streaming 360-degree panoramic videos are inefficient in that they download the entire 360-degree panoramic scene, while the user views only a small sub-part of the scene called the viewport. This can waste over 80% of the network bandwidth. We develop a comprehensive approach called Mosaic that combines a powerful neural network-based viewport prediction with a rate control mechanism that assigns rates to different tiles in the 360-degree frame such that the video quality of experience is optimized subject to a given network capacity. We model the optimization as a multi-choice knapsack problem and solve it using a greedy approach. We also develop an end-to-end testbed using standards-compliant components and provide a comprehensive performance evaluation of Mosaic along with five other streaming techniques – two for conventional adaptive video streaming and three for 360-degree tile-based video streaming. Mosaic outperforms the best of the competitions by as much as 47-191% in terms of average video quality of experience. Simulation-based evaluation as well as subjective user studies further confirm the superiority of the proposed approach.


This paper presents a preliminary observation of lightning signature at 2400 MHz. We believe this is the first time such observation was made in such frequency band. One positive ground discharge and one cloud discharge waveforms have been selected from a collection of waveforms recorded using fast and slow broadband antenna systems. In addition, waveforms recorded directly from 2400 MHz whip antenna associated with the selected ground and cloud discharges waveforms were observed. The measurements were carried out in Uppsala, Sweden in July 2012. We discovered a possible lightning signature at 2400 MHz with the existence of bursts of pulses happened to occur simultaneously with preliminary breakdown, negative return stroke and cloud pulses. These bursts of pulses possibly interfered in some ways with the transmitted bits leading to higher recorded error bits during the thunderstorm.


Aerobic training has been considered as a good strategy to improve physical conditioning, body composition and health promotion. The present study sought to analyze the influence of fasting aerobic training on the body composition of trained people. For this, a bibliographic review of the literature was carried out based on the survey of theoretical references already analyzed and published by written means such as books, theses and monographs and electronic bases such as Scielo and PubMed, seeking a clear analysis of the results requested in the body composition of individuals trained to apply fasting aerobics. In this work, it is possible to understand how fast aerobic training can influence body composition and be an alternative to reduce adipose tissue.


Even after recent amendments and proposed modifications, the Dutch law on special admissions to psychiatric hospitals ('Bopz') is still primarily a law on admissions, whereas what psychiatry and society in general urgently require is a law on treatment. In October, 2005, in Scotland a new law concerning the care and treatment of psychiatric patients came into force: the Mental Health (Care and treatment) Act 2003 ('Act'). This new law can in fact be designated a treatment law. In this article the Scottish Act is compared to the Bopz. The comparison shows that Scotland has in fact developed a law which may provide an answer to the inadequacies of the Bopz.


Impressive image captioning results (i.e., an objective description for an image) are achieved with plenty of training pairs. In this paper, we take one step further to investigate the creation of narrative paragraph for a photo stream. This task is even more challenging due to the difficulty in modeling an ordered photo sequence and in generating a relevant paragraph with expressive language style for storytelling. The difficulty can even be exacerbated by the limited training data, so that existing approaches almost focus on search-based solutions. To deal with these challenges, we propose a sequence-to-sequence modeling approach with reinforcement learning and adversarial training. First, to model the ordered photo stream, we propose a hierarchical recurrent neural network as story generator, which is optimized by reinforcement learning with rewards. Second, to generate relevant and story-style paragraphs, we design the rewards with two critic networks, including a multi-modal and a language-style discriminator. Third, we further consider the story generator and reward critics as adversaries. The generator aims to create indistinguishable paragraphs to human-level stories, whereas the critics aim at distinguishing them and further improving the generator by policy gradient. Experiments on three widely-used datasets show the effectiveness, against state-of-the-art methods with relative increase of 20.2% by METEOR. We also show the subjective preference for the proposed approach over the baselines through a user study with 30 human subjects.


The range of rotation of the mandible during virtual three-dimensional orthognathic surgery is small and may be similar to the hinge movement of the mandible. This current study offers a new method to move the mandible to the retruded contact position (RCP), a position of beginning hinge movement, during virtual three-dimensional orthognathic surgery. During this method, a three-dimensional skull model was reconstructed from the computed tomographic images in the Mimics software. Then the RCP in the patient could be obtained using Gothic arch tracer or swallowing method and was recorded using a wax plate, followed by transferring to plaster models. Subsequently, the plaster models in RCP were scanned using a dental surface scanner and imported into the Mimics software. Finally, we could move the mandible to the RCP based on the registration between the three-dimensional skull model and plaster model for simulating the hinge movement during virtual three-dimensional orthognathic surgery. This may be a small step forward for improving the accuracy of virtual three-dimensional orthognathic surgery.


Since the avian bornavirus (ABV) aetiology of the proventricular dilatation disease (PDD) was proven in 2008, ABV has been detected in many avian species. The aim of the present study was to detect ABV antibodies in parrots in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. A total of 142 birds were examined, including 37 birds with symptoms typical for PDD, 54 birds without PDD symptoms, and 51 parrots without any clinical symptoms of PDD but originating from one flock with a proven history of PDD. Sera from 142 birds were tested using the enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) for detection of antibodies against ABV nucleoprotein p40. Of 142 serum samples, 71 were positive (50%) and 71 negative (50%). In a group of birds with clinical symptoms of PDD, 77.1% showed to be ABV positive, whereas in the group of sick birds without suspicion of PDD the percentage of positive birds was 31.6%. In the birds that had a cage mate that was positive for ABV or died with PDD, 42.9% were ABV positive. Of the parrots without PDD symptoms but originating from the flock with a recent history of PDD, 62.8% of the birds were positive for antibodies against ABV nucleoprotein p40. The results suggest that PDD is common and there is a high percentage of asymptomatic carriers of ABV in the breeding facilities of parrots in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Birds, Psittaciformes, ELISA, nucleoprotein P40, proventricular dilatation syndrome


Spanish poet Juan Ramon Barat and Juan Manzanares, Lecturer in History, comment on this poem focusing on its political content and context.

There are plenty of references to the Spanish Civil War, the Franco dictatorship and how poetry and culture suffered during many years. Transcript of the video recommended.

The text of the poem can found in http://www.poesia-inter.net/raec004.htm

There are well known sung versions of this poem. Catalan singer Joan Manuel Serrat has produced the most popular one, which can be seen in websites such as youtube.


In recent years, efforts in developing high strength-low density materials are increasing significantly. One of the promising materials to attend this demand is the carbon nanotube (CNT), to be used mainly as a reinforcing phase in lightweight metal matrix composites (MMC). In the present work, the sol-gel technique has been employed to obtain TiO2 coating on the surface of commercial multiwall carbon nanotubes (MWCNT). The aim of such coating is to improve the thermal stability of MWCNT in oxidize environment, which is necessary in most of MMC processing routes. Calcination in inert atmosphere was performed in order to crystallize a stable coating phase. The hybrid CNT/TiO2 nanocomposite was characterized by X-Ray Diffractometry (XRD), Raman spectroscopy, Thermogravimetry (TGA) and Field Emission Gun Scanning Electron Microscopy (FEG-SEM). The coating structure was observed to change from anatase to rutile, as the calcination temperature increases from 500 to 1000oC. Results from thermogravimetric analysis showed that the samples calcined at 1000 oC were more resistant to oxidation at high temperatures.


Mardels, small closed depressions, are distinctive landforms on the Luxembourger Gutland plateau. In the present landscape most mardels are shallow fens, filled with colluvial sediments. The genesis of mardels has been studied intensively, inside and outside Luxembourg. Some researchers suggested a natural development and consider mardels as subsidence basins due to subsurface solution of gypsum veins, other researchers suggested cultural causes and consider mardels as prehistorical quarries. In the Gutland, mardels occur on various substrates. Mardels on the Strassen marls (li3) are abandoned quarries, related to clay excavation in Roman Time. Mardels on the Luxembourger sandstone (li2) are sinkholes, related to joint patterns in the sandstone formation. Mardels on the Keuper marls (km1,3) are originally subsidence basins, related to subsurface dissolutions of gypsum lenses and veins, filled with colluvial clay. The results of pollen analysis and archaeometrical tests demonstrate Roman extraction of clay for the production of ancient ceramics. So, the natural depressions have been enlarged to the present mardels. After excavation, the sedimentation of colluvium restarted in the abandoned quarries.


A spontaneous deletion in RNA 2 of Potato mop-top virus (PMTV) was identified by RT-PCR. The deletion occurred reproducibly during manual passage of two isolates of PMTV and during fungal inoculation of plants with viruliferous soil. The borders of the deletion were conserved in all instances and sequence analyses showed that a contiguous segment of 2113 nucleotides was deleted internally from the genomic RNA 2, leaving the 5'- and 3'-terminal sequences. RT-PCR experiments also showed that the deletion was present in preparations of PMTV particles.


Abstract:  Keizai Doyukai (The Japan Committee for Economic Development) proposed a unique management ideology known as "revised capitalism" immediately after World War II. Doyukai was a totally new business association established by young managers in 1946, and this was in sharp contrast with Keidanren, which evolved from its prewar predecessor. The concept of revised capitalism consisted in the equilibrium of management, labor, and capital on an equal power basis, and had a solid theoretical foundation. Although it was an important milestone in the history of management ideology, it has been misinterpreted to date. In particular, it is commonly believed that Banjo Otsuka, one of Doyukai's inaugurators, imitated the ideas of Western management thought in Burnham's The Managerial Revolution and Berle and Means's The Modern Corporation and Private Property in formulating revised capitalism. This comparative analysis reveals otherwise. I hold that Otsuka enhanced the role of labor and blended the prewar management thought of Japan with the ideologies of Burnham and of Berle and Means. The role of labor was critical because the initial occupation policy of SCAP (Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers) encouraged the labor movement. It also explains why revised capitalism disappeared so rapidly once SCAP changed its policy and started to suppress labor unions in 1948. In broader terms, this analysis has two theoretical implications: that political context can strongly influence the rise and decline of a management ideology; and that a management ideology can retain certain traditional elements even under radical political changes.


In three studies we examine the link between types of national identity and support for leaving the European Union (EU). We found that national collective narcissism (but not national identification without the narcissistic component) was positively associated with a willingness to vote Leave, over and above the effect of political orientation. This pattern was observed in a representative Polish sample (Study 1, n = 635), as well as in samples of Polish youth (Study 2, n = 219), and both Polish (n = 73) and British (n = 60) professionals employed in the field of international relations (Study 3). In Studies 2 and 3 this effect was mediated by biased EU membership perceptions. The role of defensive versus secure forms of in-group identification in shaping support for EU membership is discussed.


avoiding leaks in the breathing system. In this case there was a fault in the single-use sampling set, but we believe that this particular part is getting undue attention. In fact we performed some experiments and found out that with the sampling tube completely removed from the adapter, leaving a hole of 2 mm in diameter, the leak is approximately 7 I.min-' a t 10 cmH,O constant pressure. To compare the leak in the reported case, one has to make some calculations: the difference of the set 700 mol tidal volume and the measured 450 ml expiratory volume is 250 ml.breath-'. At the 10 breath.min-' frequency this gives a total leakage of 2.5 I.min-' at a pressure of 8 cmH,O. Because the leakage occurs only during the inspiratory phase, the actual leak is 7.5 Lmin-', assuming a typical I/E ratio of 1 : 2. Without having seen the individual sampling adapter, we are convinced that the opening must have been smaller than in our test specimen, and therefore the possibility cannot be excluded that the adapter was not the only source of leak in the system. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that the single-use sampling set would as such be more likely to leak than any other part in the system. Finally, the amount of useful information achieved from CO, monitoring certainly outweighs the addition of the smaller connector into the breathing system.


Aflatoxins are naturally occurring carcinogenic toxins associated with poor growth outcomes in young children. Although evidence supports mother-to-infant exposure during pregnancy and breastfeeding, evidence of its effect on growth is limited to the period after introduction of complementary foods. It is, therefore, unclear whether early maternal exposure to aflatoxins affects infant growth right from birth. Prevalence of aflatoxin levels of 40% has been observed in Nyanza region, Kenya, and 22.7% of children under 5 years are stunted. The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of maternal aflatoxin exposure on growth of infants 0-3 months old in Kisumu County, Kenya. Specific objectives were to: establish association between maternal baseline characteristics and aflatoxin exposure; establish association between infant baseline characteristics at birth and maternal aflatoxin exposure; determine effect of maternal aflatoxin exposure on infant growth indicators at 3 months of age. Out of 553 pregnant women who were screened for aflatoxin exposure, 137 exposed and 137 non-exposed women, matched for age and household income, participated in an 8-month cohort study. The women were followed up to delivery and their infants up to 3 months after delivery. Infant length and weight data was collected monthly. Length-for-age (LAZ), weight-for-length (WLZ)) and weight-for-age (WAZ) z-scores were generated. Aflatoxin levels were analyzed using Enzyme Linked Immunosorbent Assay (ELISA) in parts per billion (ppb). Effects of aflatoxin on infant growth outcomes were assessed using multi-variate linear and logistic regression. Effect of maternal aflatoxin exposure on infant length, weight, LAZ, WLZ, WAZ was determined using Cox regression with constant time at risk. Infants of exposed women had lower weight (95% CI:-0.85,-0.53), length (95% CI: -4.08, -3.36), LAZ (95% CI: -1.93, -1.16) and WAZ (95% CI:-1.03, -0.54) at 3 months of age, but there was no difference in WLZ (95% CI:-0.03, 0.74). Risk for stunting was higher in infants of exposed women (RR=4.08; 95% CI: 1.35, 12.29). There was no difference in the risk for underweight (RR=6.61; 95% CI: 0.80-54.33) and wasting (RR=0.37; 95% CI: 0.40, 3.39, P=0.38).These results underpin the need to reduce aflatoxin exposure in infants and young children who are very vulnerable.


The Internet is a critical communication infrastructure servicing billions of end-users world-wide. Ongoing studies of the Internet's operations show that data loss and increased latency are occurring due to weaknesses in its interdomain routing protocol, BGP. Many solutions have been proposed, but few have experienced widespread adoption. Both the delayed discovery of the protocol's shortcomings, and apathy for its proposed solutions, are partially due to inadequate testing practices. Internet interdomain routing technologies are not evaluated at appropriate scale. Better testing is suggested, which incorporates the specification of large-scale experimental topologies. This is necessary, as BGP performs the distributed operation of interdomain routing across the thousands of networks composing the Internet. However, only small to moderately sized topologies can be currently accommodated by today's testing platforms.
 A modeling methodology based on path preserving scale-down is proposed to extend the topological scale of interdomain routing experimentation. A given Internet topology is reduced in terms of its autonomous systems (ASes) using a combination of Gaussian elimination and several graphical heuristics. The interdomain routing paths generated by BGP on this reduced topology are also preserved. Path preservation keeps the length, composition, and ordering of these routing paths unchanged. When the routing paths guiding Internet traffic among ASes are preserved across the size reduction, the large-scale traffic engineering induced by BGP can be estimated at much lower scales. Internet data losses due to certain inappropriate interdomain routing behaviors can be identified. As an example, a persistent multiple origin autonomous system (MOAS) conflict is characterized over a topology containing 8826 ASes. It is shown that this problem's large-scale characterization can be obtained using scale-down models that are 70% smaller, and thus more accommodating to common testing platforms (e.g., simulation and networking testbeds).


Reproductive function and duration of the reproductive life span are phenotypically plastic and programmed in response to the early-life environment. Such adaptive responses are described and rationalized in life history theory in the context of resource availability, but the molecular mechanisms responsible have remained enigmatic. In this study, we hypothesized that epigenetic modifications underlie adaptive reproductive strategies, and found distinct methylation patterns in buccal DNA of Bangladeshi women who grew up in Bangladesh or the UK. The later pubertal onset and lower ovarian reserve associated with Bangladeshi childhood was seen to correlate with more numerous childhood infections, so we adopted a mouse model of pre-pubertal colitis to mimic these conditions. These mice have a similarly-altered reproductive phenotype, which enabled us to determine its mechanistic basis. Several genes encoding proteins with known functions in follicle recruitment were differentially expressed in the mice ovaries, and were also differentially methylated in the women's buccal DNA. One of these, SRD5A1 which encodes the steroidogenic enzyme 5α reductase-1, was down-regulated in the mice ovaries and hyper methylated at the same putative transcriptional enhancer as in the women's DNA; the levels of methylation correlating with gene expression levels. Srd5a1 expression was down-regulated also in the hypothalamus where 5α reductase-1 catalyzes production of neurosteroids that regulate gonadotropin releasing hormone (GnRH). Chemical inhibition of this enzyme affected both GnRH synthesis and release, and resulted in delayed pubertal onset in vivo. The activity of 5α reductase-1 in hypothalamus and ovary and the sensitivity of SRD5A1 to epigenetic regulation attest to its role in directing long-term physiological strategies in response to environmental conditions. In the reproductive axis, this includes timing of pubertal onset, adult reproductive function and duration of the reproductive lifespan.


Objective: To assess the frequency of foot ulcers and their risk factors among diabetic patients visiting surgery department in a university teaching hospital in Ajman, UAE especially in relation to gender, nationality and age, blood glucose levels and lipid profile. Materials and Methods: This hospital-based retrospective record analysis was conducted for patients with diabetes mellitus visiting department of surgery for a period of 8 years from 2002 to 2010. Diabetic patients with foot ulcers were cases and those without were controls. Results: Among the diabetic patients recruited for this study, 75% were males and 25% were females. Among these diabetic patients, 76.3% of male patients were diagnosed with foot ulcers as opposed to 23.8% of female patients. Majority of diabetic patients were from Asia (53.1%) and Middle- East (33.8%). Diabetic foot ulcers were reported more in Asian patients (57%) compared to patients from Middle East (29.1%). Diabetic foot ulcers were most prevalent in the age group 50 to 59 years (42.5%) and least prevalent in the age group 20 to 29 years (5%). The mean HDL, total cholesterol, LDL and VLDL were all higher for diabetic patients with foot ulcer than controls with levels of only HDL being statistically significant (p<0.05). Mean HDL levels for cases was 37.3±8.3 whereas that for controls was 31.3±7.9. The mean Post Prandial blood glucose is 286.4 mg/dl for diabetic patients without foot ulcer which is significantly higher than diabetic patients with foot ulcer who had a mean value of 249.6 mg/dl but there was no significant difference in mean fasting glucose values. Conclusion: Asian middle-aged male diabetics are most likely to have foot complications. HDL levels were high whereas post-prandial blood glucose levels were comparatively low in diabetics with foot ulcers than without.


Allopatric isolation in glacial refugia has caused differentiation and speciation in many taxa globally. In this study, we investigated the nuclear and mitochondrial genetic differentiation of the long fingered bat, Myotis capaccinii during the ice ages in south‐eastern Europe and Anatolia. The mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analyses indicated a suture zone similar to those recorded in other animal species, including bats, suggesting the association of more than one refugium with the region. Contrary to most of the other species where a suture zone was seen in Anatolia, for M. capaccinii the geographical location of the genetic break was in south‐eastern Europe. This mitochondrial differentiation was not reflected in the nuclear microsatellites, however, suggesting that the lack of contact during the ice ages did not result in reproductive isolation. Hence taxonomically, the two mitochondrial clades cannot be treated as separate species.


The Universal Declaration of Human Rights represents a remarkable expansion in the recognition of the fundamental rights of all peoples. Nonetheless, consensus on the implementation of these rights is elusive. Two commonly referenced obstacles to achieving such a consensus are: (1) the United States' practice of unilaterally exempting itself from international human rights treaties, i.e., American exceptionalism; and (2) resistance from those who see the international human rights movement as a means of imposing Western values on non-Western cultures. Considering these as related issues, both deriving from the Eurocentric nature of contemporary international law, this essay suggests that a truly universal consensus will require a decolonizing of the underlying framework of human rights law.


spregsdm estimates Maximum Likelihood Estimation Spatial Durbin Cross Sections Regression spregsdm calculates Spatial Autocorrelation, Non Normality, Heteroscedasticity, and Total, Direct, and InDirect Marginal Effects and Elasticities, spregsdm can fit continuous and truncated dependent variables models.


The purpose of this study is to analyze the effect of mobile banking, internet banking and sms banking at subsidiary office Mandiri Bank east Jakarta to the the costumer satisfaction. The variables in this study consisted of mobile banking,internet banking, and SMS banking as independent variables and customer satisfaction as the dependent variable. The population in this study consisted of students and employees. Determination of the research sample using the accidental sampling method and obtaining a sample of 100 respondents based on certain criteria. The results showed that mobile banking, internet banking and SMS banking simultaneously had a significant effect on customer satisfaction. In addition, this study proves that partially Mobile banking, Internet banking, Sms banking has a significant effect on customer satisfaction.


Regret minimizing strategies for repeated games have been receiving increasing attention in the literature. These are simple adaptive behavior rules that exhibit nice convergence properties. If all players follow regret minimizing strategies, their average joint play converges to the set of correlated equilibria or to the Hannan set (depending on the notion of regret in use), or even to Nash equilibrium on certain classes of games. In this note we raise the question of validity of the regret minimization objective. By example we show that regret minimization can lead to unrealistic behavior, since it fails to take into account the effect of one's actions on subsequent behavior of the opponents. An amended notion of regret that corrects this defect is not very useful either, since achieving a no-regret objective is not guaranteed in that case.


Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) play important roles in tissue repair and cancer progression. Our recent work suggests that some mesenchymal cells, notably myofibroblasts exhibit regulated exocytosis resembling that seen in neuroendocrine cells. We now report that MSCs also exhibit regulated exocytosis. Both a G-protein coupled receptor agonist, chemerin, and a receptor tyrosine kinase stimulant, IGF-II, evoked rapid increases in secretion of a marker protein, TGFβig-h3. The calcium ionophore, ionomycin, also rapidly increased secretion of TGFβig-h3 while inhibitors of translation (cycloheximide) or secretory protein transport (brefeldin A) had no effect, indicating secretion from preformed secretory vesicles. Inhibitors of the chemerin and IGF receptors specifically reduced the secretory response. Confocal microscopy of MSCs loaded with Fluo-4 revealed chemerin and IGF-II triggered intracellular Ca2+ oscillations requiring extracellular calcium. Immunocytochemistry showed co-localisation of TGFβig-h3 and MMP-2 to secretory vesicles, and transmission electron-microscopy showed dense-core secretory vesicles in proximity to the Golgi apparatus. Proteomic studies on the MSC secretome identified 64 proteins including TGFβig-h3 and MMP-2 that exhibited increased secretion in response to IGF-II treatment for 30min and western blot of selected proteins confirmed these data. Gene ontology analysis of proteins exhibiting regulated secretion indicated functions primarily associated with cell adhesion and in bioassays chemerin increased adhesion of MSCs and adhesion, proliferation and migration of myofibroblasts. Thus, MSCs exhibit regulated exocytosis that is compatible with an early role in tissue remodelling.


We recently described an oxidized avidin variant, named AvidinOX(®) , which is a product that chemically links to tissue proteins while maintaining the capacity to uptake intravenously administered biotin. Such product proved to be successful in targeting radionuclide therapy in a mouse model of inoperable breast cancer. Here, we show that the uptake of a single or multiple doses of biotin (up to five times), by the tissue-bound AvidinOX(®) , is stable for 2 weeks. Taking into account that oxidized avidin is the first chemically reactive protein to be proposed for clinical use, we evaluated its tolerability, immunogenicity and mutagenicity. Present in vitro data indicate that AvidinOX(®) (up to 10 μg/5 × 10(5) cells) does not affect cell viability or proliferation of PC3 human prostate cancer or 3T3 mouse fibroblast cell lines as well as primary mouse spleen cells. Safety pharmacology and toxicology studies were conducted using AvidinOX(®) up to the highest concentration compatible with its solubility (about 12 mg/mL), representing four times the product concentration intended for human use, and in the maximum administrable volume compatible with each study system. The intramuscular administration in rat and monkey induced a moderate to strong inflammatory response particularly after a second administration and consistently with the induction of an immune response. Interestingly, the intramuscular administration of AvidinOX(®) to rodents and monkeys exhibiting very high anti-avidin antibody titres was well tolerated with no systemic symptoms of any kind. Intravenous administration of AvidinOX(®) , performed to mimic an accidental injection of the dose intended for a local administration (15 μL of 3.3 mg/mL solution), showed significant localization of the product into the spleen not associated with uptake of the radiolabelled biotin intravenously injected after 24 hr, thus suggesting rapid inactivation. No mutagenic activity was induced by oxidized avidin in prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. Overall, the present data indicate that AvidinOX(®) is well tolerated in rodents and non-human primates, thus supporting its clinical use within protocols of radionuclide therapy of inoperable tumour lesions.


As stated in the original application to Nordbib's Focus Area "Policy and visibility" (Work Package 1), the purpose of the project was to increase the awareness and understanding of the principles of Open Access by providing a dialogue among stakeholders on authors' rights and Open Access principles. The Nordbib Board pledged the grant with clauses for the project framework thereby changing the project deliverables to the following: 1. Legal translation of the Knowledge Exchange "Licence to Publish" document into Swedish, Norwegian, Finnish and Icelandic, and disseminating these to the Nordic researchers in general. 2. Devising a strategy for substantial outreach with respect to "Licence to publish", authors' rights, self-archiving and the principles of Open Access, focusing on a number of cases in the Nordic social sciences and humanities but with the stipulation that the strategy be relevant and implementable to the STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) communities as well.


Bed-load movement experiments demonstrate that 35 percent of the variability of the distance a bed-load particle will move can be explained by the variability of the bottom velocity in the vicinity of the particle, and that 68 percent of the variability can be explained by the combination of bottom velocity and particle parameters. The experiments also indicate that movement of particles through pools is influenced predominantly by differences in particle parameters, whereas movement through riffles is most influenced by differences in bottom velocity.


Objectives The aim of this study was to evaluate and monitor the effect of low-level laser therapy (LLLT) and therapeutic ultrasound (TU) alone, or combined with intra-articular prednisolone (P) in Freund's complete adjuvant (FCA)-induced knee arthritis model in rats. Materials and methods A total of 56 adult male Wistar rats were divided into seven groups: control (C), disease control (RA), P, TU, LLLT (L), P + TU (P+TU), P + LLLT (P+L) groups. The skin temperature, radiography, joint volume, serum rheumatoid factor (RF), interleukin (IL)-1β, serum tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α), and histopathological evaluation of joint were performed. Results Thermal imaging and radiographic examination provided results consistent with the severity of the disease. The mean joint temperature (°C) was the highest in the RA (36.2±1.6) group on Day 28. The P+TU and P+L groups significantly decreased radiological scores at the end of the study. The rat serum TNF-α, IL-1β, and RF levels in all groups were significantly higher compared to the C group (p<0.05). Compared to the RA group, serum TNF-α, IL-1β, and RF levels were significantly lower in the treatment groups (p<0.05). The P+TU and P+L group was showed minimal chondrocyte degeneration and cartilage erosion and mild cartilage fibrillation and mononuclear cell infiltration of synovial membrane compared to the P, TU, and L group. Conclusion The LLLT and TU effectively reduced inflammation. In addition, a more effective result was obtained from the use of LLLT and TU combined with intra-articular P. This result may be due to insufficient dose of LLLT and TU, thus further studies should be focus on at higher dose ranges on FCA arthritis model in rats.


This study aims to longitudinally examine relationship patterns among attitude, criminal associates, and recidivism among Black (n = 109) and White men (n = 107) released from Allegheny County Jail in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Attitude and criminal associates belong to the "big four" risk factors for recidivism (Andrews & Bonta, 1998). Review of studies reveals that different dimensions of attitude predict different measures of recidivism in different offender populations. This study examines two new attitudinal dimensions - autosuggestion and attitude toward community-based services (CBS attitude in the following). Autosuggestion measures the reported likelihood of ex-inmates' future offending. CBS attitude is a meaningful measure among jail populations given short jail stays and the critical role played by community-based services in jail ex-inmates' reintegration. The original path model with three-wave data was split into four hypotheses because of inadequate bivariate correlations among focal variables. Longitudinal relationships between attitude and recidivism, and criminal associates and recidivism, and longitudinal reciprocal relationships between attitude and criminal associates were investigated. Each hypothesis was tested in the entire sample (with interactions) and in each subgroup by race, age, and offense type. Findings indicated that criminal associates predicted recidivism and attitude, but attitude failed to predict recidivism and associates with an exception that CBS attitude predicted recidivism in some groups. This latter finding illuminates the importance of the community-based services and CBS attitudes. Autosuggestion interacted with age and CBS attitude with race in predicting recidivism. Results suggest that "very likely" response of autosuggestion may contain two different meanings - criminal intention and acknowledgement of vulnerability, possibly leading to two different recidivism results. Improvement of the two attitude measurements is suggested necessary considering the double meaning contained in autosuggestion and cultural competency of CBS attitude measure. In addition, attitude was shown to change over time, and attitude change may make a better predictor for recidivism and criminal associates than attitude measured at a time. The original path model may be tested with attitude change as a predictor. Factors for attitude change, possibly including criminal associates, should also be investigated. Other points of discussion, and significance and limitations of the study are discussed.


Introduction: Traditional medicine use has grown significantly in the last few decades around the world. Similarly, in Jordan. The information regarding the percentages of older adults in Jordan who adopt a healthy life-style and consuming medicinal plants along with performing physical activity are limited.Objective: To evaluates the use of medicinal plants among a sample of Jordanian elderly population and the effect of physical activity and gender on their habitual medicinal plants usage.Method: A cross sectional study was conducted on 120 elderly Jordanian (62 women; 58 men) and evaluated for medicinal plant usage. A questionnaire was used for collecting personal, social, anthropometries and lifestyle information including the daily activities through a personal interview by the principal investigator.Results: In this study about 90% of all participates were using medicinal plants and 95% of males and females used medicinal plants were physically active. Females were used medicinal plants (100%) more than male (79.31%), the most medicinal plants used among elderlies were sage (88.33%), thyme (85.00%) and peppermint (81.67%).Conclusion: The study highlight the increasing number of herbal users among Jordanian elderlies especially females and physically active people and alarming about the possible risk associated with herbal/drug interactions among this age group.


OBJECTIVE
Therapy-related myeloid neoplasms (t-MN) account for approximately 10% to 20% of all cases of AML (acute myeloid leukemia), MDS (myelodysplastic syndrome) and MDS/MPN (myelodysplastic syndrome/myeloproliferative neoplasms), MDS, and MDS/MPN. In our study, we evaluated peripheral blood smear samples and hemogram values in breast cancer patients who were receiving adjuvant anthracycline regimens and were in remission.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
A total of 78 patients receiving anthracycline-based adjuvant chemotherapy treatment from Kayseri Research and Training Hospital and Mersin State Hospital were enrolled in the study. Their adjuvant treatments had been completed at least 18 months prior to the study.

RESULTS
Two patients complained of anemia (2.2%) (Hb<11 mg/dl), leukopenia was observed in seven patients (7.7%) (leukocytes<4000/ mm(3)), and thrombocytopenia was observed in four patients (4.4%) (PLT<150.000/mm(3)). In the blood smear samples, the following were observed: ovalomacrocytes (14%), macrocytes (37%), acanthocytes (1%), stomatocytes (12%), teardrops (12%), nucleated erythrocytes (1%), basophilic stippling (14%), and Howell-Jolly bodies (1%). Additionally, hypo-granulation (38%), Pelger-Huet abnormalities (26%), hypersegmentation (20%), immature granulocytes (8%), and blasts (6%) were observed. We also confirmed the presence of giant platelets (50%) and platelet hypogranulation (19%).

CONCLUSION
According to the peripheral blood smear assessments in our study, we suggest that breast cancer patients should be evaluated for MDS in the early stages, starting from month 18, even if the automated blood counts are normal.


AIMS AND OBJECTIVES
To review the literature on massage used to manage agitated behaviours in older people with dementia, assess its efficacy as a non-pharmacological approach and provide recommendations for future research.

BACKGROUND
Agitation has traditionally been managed with chemical or physical restraint. There has been a growing interest in complementary therapies such as massage.

DESIGN
A literature review.

METHODS
 Cooper's five-stage model of synthesising research guided the review process. The search terms 'massage', 'agitation' and 'dementia' were defined, and 10 databases were searched in October 2011. No date limitations were applied, although searches were limited to articles written in English. For relevant records, full-text copies were obtained and assessed in terms of inclusion criteria and methodological quality using the Validity Rating Tool (VRT). Data were extracted using a form constructed with reference to the checklist of items to consider in data extraction, produced by the Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions.

RESULTS
Thirteen studies met the inclusion criteria and were assessed on the VRT. One study was considered of adequate methodological quality to be included in the review. This prospective study found that massage significantly reduced levels of agitation in 52 cognitively impaired residents in two long-term care facilities.

CONCLUSIONS
There is a severe paucity of research that considers the effects of massage on managing agitated behaviours in older people with dementia. Whilst conclusions cannot be drawn from the one study included in this review, it did provide evidence to support the use of massage as a non-pharmacological approach to managing agitation in older people with dementia. More research, of better methodological quality, is needed.

RELEVANCE TO CLINICAL PRACTICE
There is a need for health practitioners to be aware of the limited evidence for massage as an intervention for agitation and to provide opportunities to validate massage practice.