A social network consists of people who interact in some way such as members of online communities sharing information via the WWW. To learn more about how to facilitate community building e.g. in organizations, it is important to analyze the interaction behavior of their members over time. So far, many tools have been provided that allow for the analysis of static networks and some for the temporal analysis of networks - however only on the vertex and edge level. In this paper we propose two approaches to analyze the evolution of two different types of online communities on the level of subgroups. The first method consists of statistical analyses and visualizations that allow for an interactive analysis of subgroup evolutions in communities that exhibit a rather membership structure. The second method is designed for the detection of communities in an environment with highly fluctuating members. For both methods, we discuss results of experiments with real data from an online student community


Recent developments in Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) have been claimed to add some sophistication onto quantitative research methods' usage in terms of their research versatility, efficiency and practicality in a range of disciplines including Information Systems, Marketing, and People Management research. Although covariance based SEM (CB-SEM) is most prominent, application of partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM) is an attractive alternative. This paper examines and applies the characteristics of PLS-SEM onto SMEs to see whether the efficiency, practicality and versatility assumptions, as claimed, do actually contribute to SMEs' business entrepreneurship in practice. The research question is therefore 'Do the embedded PLS-SEM assumptions of research versatility, practicality and efficiency actually translate into practical reality in SMEs operating in an emerging economy context?' We used a quantitative method data analysis technique as a precursor to help us identify the types of challenges faced by SMEs at both the micro and macro levels of analysis. Primary survey data from 212 Bangladeshi SMEs located at various geographic districts provide the study's population. We assess the application of the technique as a research methodological tool and its limitations provided the basis for us to develop and validate a partial least square based structural equation model (PLS-SEM) as part of a small scale survey-based research on SMEs. These methodological insights then led to a successful framing of SMEs in a model that contributes to a process of identifying which types of challenges are more critical for SMEs' growth. Our results show that for SMEs to be competitive, the business and research benefits of our modelling and methodological technique should be given foreseeable attention by both academics and business practitioners. This methodological perspective is yet to gain researchers and professional practitioners' attention from SMEs' business perspective. By applying the statistical PLS technique to Business and Management Studies research we are contributing to a deeper understanding and knowledge creation in examining the assumptions, the design and application of a sophisticated research tool for the development of People Management, Business and SME theory and practice with a focus on an emerging economy.


To determine the predatory mite family Phytoseiidae associated with spider mites in northwest Iran, a survey was carried out during 2006-2007. Nineteen species from 7 genera of the family Phytoseiidae were collected and identified. Measurements are given and some morphological characters are discussed. A key is provided to identify the adult females of the known 27 species of Phytoseiidae of that area. The following new synonymies are proposed: Neoseiulus vardgesi (Arutunjan, 1968) as a junior synonym of N. zwoelferi (Dosse, 1957); Transeius caspiansis (Denmark and Daneshvar, 1982) and T. patellae (Karg, 1982) as junior synonyms of T. wainsteini (Gomelauri, 1968); Phytoseius ciliatus Wainstein, 1975 as a junior synonym of P. juvenis Wainstein and Arutunjan, 1970; and Typhlodromus iranensis (Denmark and Daneshvar, 1982) as a junior synonym of T. (A.) kazachstanicus Wainstein, 1958.


The effects of dental grinding and sandblasting on ageing and fatigue behaviour of pressure less sintered biomedical grade Y-TZP ceramics were investigated. Disc-shaped specimens were sintered to high density for subsequent surface treatment and testing. Accelerated aging experiments by autoclaving in artificial saliva were performed under isothermal conditions at 1340C. The amount of monoclinic zirconia in the ground and sandblasted specimens was < 5% and about 15 %, respectively and the corresponding strength values were 920 MPa and 1290 MPa. After autoclaving for 24 hours, the amount of transformed monoclinic zirconia in as-sintered material was increased to 15 %, resulting in about 10% strength reduction. In contrast, no strength reduction was observed with the ground and sandblasted specimens subjected to prolonged ageing. At any ageing condition, the highest survival rate during mechanical fatigue testing was observed with the sandblasted samples and the lowest with the ground samples. The strength of the surviving specimens tested in air corresponded well to the mean flexural strength of the particular group before fatigue testing, whereas lower survival strength values and a larger variability in strength were obtained with specimens that were subjected to prolonged accelerated ageing prior to mechanical fatigue testing in artificial saliva.


Prosthetic joint infection remains one of the most devastating complications of arthroplasty. Debridement and retention of the prosthesis is an attractive management option in carefully selected patients. Despite this, there are no data investigating the cost of this management modality for prosthetic joint infections. The aim of this case-control study was to calculate the cost associated with debridement and retention for management of prosthetic joint infection compared with primary joint replacement surgery without prosthetic joint infection. From 1 January 2008 to 30 June 2010, there were 21 prosthetic joint infections matched to 42 control patients. Controls were matched to cases according to the arthroplasty site, age and sex. Cases had a greater number of unplanned readmissions (100% vs. 7.1%; p <0.001), more additional surgery (3.3 vs. 0.07; p <0.001) and longer total bed days (31.6 vs. 7.9 days; p <0.001). In addition they had more inpatient, outpatient and emergency department visits (p <0.001, respectively). For patients with prosthetic joint infection the total cost, including index operation and costs of management of the prosthetic joint infection, was 3.1 times the cost of primary arthoplasty; the mean cost for cases was Australian dollars (AUD) $69,414 (±29,869) compared with $22,085 (±8147) (p <0.001). The demand for arthroplasty continues to grow and with that, the number of prosthetic joint infections will also increase, placing significant burden on the health system. Our study adds significantly to the growing body of evidence highlighting the substantial costs associated with prosthetic joint infection.


Community is crucial for human beings not only because they are born with communal self but also because social
cooperation is more efficient than competition in many cases. Human beings are defined as Homo communicus living in
residential community which is important for the fulfillment of their primary needs. Residential community is an
'intimacy zone' where personal and emotional interactions are made. This study aims at examining the health of
residential community in Korea by exploring the level of place attachment and neighborhood trust. Previous studies
indicate that place attachment and trust are influenced by three dimensions such as residents' characteristics, house types
and regional environment. This study conducted a nationwide questionnaire survey and it shows that place attachment
moulds neighborhood trust. The results of path analysis demonstrates that place attachment and trust appear high in
detached house areas. Age of residents also gives positive influence on the level of place attachment and neighbourhood
trust. This result gives significant policy implications for the development of residential community in Korea. Residential
community as an intimacy zone has been eroded and desperately needs to be revitalized. For this, more concern should
be given to the issue of desirable size of residential community and the types of houses. Detached house area must be
supported by governmental policies.


The Uroflowmetry test is a commonly used method, which evaluates urine flow rates and volumetric analysis of patients. Flow rates and volumetric analysis are employed for assessing various urinary disorders such as Urethral Stricture, Bladder control problems, prostate etc. In this study, ten different Uroflowmetry signals of both abnormal and normal patients are processed. The Higuchi's fractal dimension computation is proposed for analyzing and investigating the characteristics of these signals. The Higuchi's method is an effective tool for measurement of fractal dimension of self-affine signals which is proposed for online monitoring of Uroflowmetry signals of patients and hence accelerated diagnose of urinary disorders.


Anthony Carter of Michigan, George Peoples of Auburn, Eddie Weaver of Georgia, Larry Kissner of Notre Dame, Nate Dozier of Louisville, Mike Reilly of  Oklahoma, and Cedric Anderson of Ohio State -- the reader may recognize these as names of major college football players in the early 1980's. However, they shared an additional attribute: all were Florida residents who competed for institutions outside the state. This paper describes certain geographic aspects of participation in major college football by Floridians during the 1981 season. It also addresses the county-level relationship between population and number of Floridians in major college football, and models their out-of-state migration.


This is a cross-sectional survey conducted from August to December 2010, which aimed to identify the presence and severity of fatigue in 140 elderly (mean age 69.8 years, 52.1% female) diagnosed with cancer undergoing chemotherapy in an outpatient unit. It was used a questionnaire for sociodemographic and clinical data and Piper Fatigue Scale-revised. The presence of fatigue was identified in 60 elderly (42.9%) and the attributed cause was cancer (64.1%), chemotherapy (32.8%) and treatment (3.1%). As relief factors, the elderly respondents reported "sleeping", "pray" and "dying", while 45% of them said "there was nothing to do" because fatigue could not be relieved. We hope that this study will alert the nurses to the relevance of fatigue and encourage them to identify and carry out nursing interventions aimed at proper management of this symptom in elderly cancer patient.


Mitochondrial DNA alterations, including point mutations, deletions, inversions and copy number variations, have been widely reported in many age-related degenerative diseases and tumors. However, numerous studies investigating their pathogenic role in cancer have provided inconsistent evidence. Furthermore, biological impacts of mitochondrial DNA variants vary tremendously, depending on the proportion of mutant DNA molecules carried by the neoplastic cells (the so-called heteroplasmy). The recent discovery of inter-genomic crosstalk between nucleus and mitochondria has reinforced the role of mitochondrial DNA variants in perturbing this essential signaling pathway and thus indirectly targeting nuclear genes involved in tumorigenic and invasive phenotype. Therefore, mitochondrial dysfunction is currently considered a crucial hallmark of carcinogenesis as well as a promising target for anticancer therapy. This chapter describes the role of different types of mitochondrial DNA alterations by mainly considering the paradigmatic model of colorectal carcinogenesis and, in particular, it revisits the issue of whether mitochondrial mutations are causative cancer drivers or simply genuine passenger events. The advent of high-throughput next-generation sequencing techniques, as well as the development of genetic and pharmaceutical interventions for the treatment of mitochondrial dysfunction in cancer, are also discussed.


Background All types of diabetes can damage the heart, blood vessels, eyes, kidneys, nerves and increase the overall risk of disability and premature death. Diabetes mellitus requires a range of self-care practices, scientifically recommended to control the glycemic level and maintain the patient's health. However, perceived barriers that hinder patients from fully implementing these diabetes self-care practices and obstacles have not been thoroughly explored. Therefore, this study aimed to explore the barriers to diabetes patients' self-care practices from the perspective of health care providers in two public hospitals in Harar City, Eastern Ethiopia. Methods Researchers conducted an exploratory qualitative study among 26 health care providers working in two public hospitals from March to June 2021. The study participants were recruited from different disciplines working on diabetes care. Interviews were conducted in the Amharic language until the saturation point was reached. The interviews were tape-recorded, transcribed, and translated to English. Each transcript was read, re-read, and then exported to ATLAS.ti 7 software for coding. Field notes were used to supplement verbatim transcriptions. Initial codes were generated. The consistency between the two coders and their alignment with research questions were checked and applied to all subsequent transcripts after reached on consensus. The thematic analysis was employed in line with the primary set research question. Results Researchers identified barriers to diabetes patients' self-care practices such as system, health care providers, and patient-level. These barriers were categorized under three main themes: lack of organized diabetes care services, limited collaborative care practices, and perceived lack of knowledge on self-care practices. In addition, the lack of multidisciplinary team care, lack of training for health care providers on diabetes self-care practices, and availability of laboratory tests and diabetes medication were prominent barriers. Conclusion Multi-level barriers to diabetes patients' self-care practices such as system, health care providers, and patients were identified. Therefore, interventions targeting proper service integration, building providers' and patients' capacity on diabetes self-care practices, and ensuring the sustainability of laboratory tests and medication supplies are essential. These interventions need to be accomplished through multi-level stakeholders' engagement and one-to-one or group interventions covering the multi-level challenges.


Recent studies made great progress in video matting by extending the success of trimap-based image matting to the video domain. In this paper, we push this task toward a more practical setting and propose One-Trimap Video Matting network (OTVM) that performs video matting robustly using only one user-annotated trimap. A key of OTVM is the joint modeling of trimap propagation and alpha prediction. Starting from baseline trimap propagation and alpha prediction networks, our OTVM combines the two networks with an alpha-trimap refinement module to facilitate information flow. We also present an end-to-end training strategy to take full advantage of the joint model. Our joint modeling greatly improves the temporal stability of trimap propagation compared to the previous decoupled methods. We evaluate our model on two latest video matting benchmarks, Deep Video Matting and VideoMatting108, and outperform state-of-the-art by significant margins (MSE improvements of 56.4% and 56.7%, respectively). The source code and model are available online: https://github.com/Hongje/OTVM.


We propose a recurrent variational auto-encoder for texture synthesis. A novel loss function, FLTBNK, is used for training the texture synthesizer. It is rotational and partially color invariant loss function. Unlike L2 loss, FLTBNK explicitly models the correlation of color intensity between pixels. Our texture synthesizer generates neighboring tiles to expand a sample texture and is evaluated using various texture patterns from Describable Textures Dataset (DTD). We perform both quantitative and qualitative experiments with various loss functions to evaluate the performance of our proposed loss function (FLTBNK) --- a mini-human subject study is used for the qualitative evaluation.


Images acquired at the same day by the ETM+/Landsat-7 (30 m of spatial resolution) and MODIS/Terra (250 m) sensors were used to estimate areas of three major crops (soybean, sugarcane, and corn) with different landscape patterns in Southeastern Brazil. Majority filtering of ETM + classification results was applied to describe the behavior of 15 selected landscape metrics at distinct simulated spatial resolutions (90, 150, 210 and 270 m). By using regression models, the performance of MODIS and derived metrics to predict adequately the crop area, considering ETM+ data as reference, were analyzed. Results showed that the MODIS instrument overestimated the areas of soybean (15%) and sugarcane (1%), and underestimated the area of corn (12%). Multiple regression results indicated that coarse spatial resolution sensors can be used to predict adequately the area viewed by the 30 m spatial resolution instruments only for crops with low fragmentation pattern such as soybean. These sensors cannot be used to predict the area of corn due to aggregation pixel effects of the less fragmented crops (soybean and sugarcane) over the most fragmented one (corn), as demonstrated by the spatial resolution simulation using majority filtering of the ETM+ image. Landscape metrics improved MODIS area estimates only for sugarcane, as indicated by higher values of R2 for multiple than for simple regression. Only a small set of metrics was select to compose the multiple regression models because most of them were not preserved across different spatial resolutions (30 m and 250 m).


Reclaimed water quality has largely focused on meeting standards in the treated effluent. While the focus is well placed, reclaimed water may change before it is used at dispersed locations. Reclaimed water is a perishable product with a shelf life requiring packaging (i.e., piping) and preserving (with a disinfectant) during storage to minimize deterioration in quality. It typically contains higher nutrient levels compared to potable water. Based on an online survey, the challenges were characterized into nine categories in order of importance: infrastructure, water quality, customer relations, operational, cost (pricing), capacity/supply, regulation, workforce, and miscellaneous. The first five categories accounted for 80% of the challenges raised by the industry. A review of the literature provided various remedies to these challenges which can be incorporated into best management practices for controlling potential health and aesthetic issues associated with storage and distribution of reclaimed water.


Prostaglandin E (PGE) infusion in normal man inhibits the acute insulin response to glucose. In order to determine whether endogenously released PGE might also inhibit insulin secretion, glucose-stimulated insulin responses were investigated in normal volunteers after furosemide (40 mg i.v.), a stimulator of endogenous PGE synthesis. Acute insulin response to glucose (20 g i.v.) was significantly reduced by furosemide (response before furosemide: 36 ± 5 μU/ml; after furosemide: 26 ± 5 μU/ml, m ± SE, mean change 3−10 min, N = 8, P < 0.01), whereas glucose disappearance rates were not modified after furosemide, Infusion of lysine acetylsalicylate (LAS), ah inhibitor of endogenous PGE synthesis, completely reversed the inhibitory effect of furosemide on insulin secretion and also augmented acute insulin response to glucose (response before furosemide + LAS: 41 ± 6 μU/ml; during furosemide + LAS: 50 ± 7 μU/ml, N = 10, P < 0.02). This effect was associated with an increase in glucose disappearance rates (P < 0.05). These findings demonstrate that (1) furosemide inhibits glucose-induced acute insulin responses and (2) LAS completely reverses the inhibitory effect of furosemide and also accelerates glucose disposal. It is suggested that furosemide acts via the release of endogenous PGEs, which are known to inhibit insulin responses in man.


This paper examines tuning for statistical machine translation (SMT) with respect to multiple evaluation metrics. We propose several novel methods for tuning towards multiple objectives, including some based on ensemble decoding methods. Pareto-optimality is a natural way to think about multi-metric optimization (MMO) and our methods can effectively combine several Pareto-optimal solutions, obviating the need to choose one. Our best performing ensemble tuning method is a new algorithm for multi-metric optimization that searches for Pareto-optimal ensemble models. We study the effectiveness of our methods through experiments on multiple as well as single reference(s) datasets. Our experiments show simultaneous gains across several metrics (BLEU, RIBES), without any significant reduction in other metrics. This contrasts the traditional tuning where gains are usually limited to a single metric. Our human evaluation results confirm that in order to produce better MT output, optimizing multiple metrics is better than optimizing only one.


Abstract 4-(4-tritylphenoxy) phthalonitrile was synthesized and characterized. Copper, zinc and cobalt phthalocyanines were obtained by reaction of 4-(4-tritylphenoxy)phthalonitrile with CuCl2, ZnCl2, CoCl2 metal salts. New compounds were characterized by using electronic absorption, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, infrared. The aggregation investigation for phthalocyanine complexes carried out in different concentrations tetrahydrofuran. Copper, cobalt and zinc phthalocyanines were used as sensitizers in dye-sensitized solar cell structures (DSSC) by growing on TiO2 coated on FTO (Fluorine doped Tin Oxide) conductive glass substrates. Current density (J) versus voltage (V) measurements were applied to investigate the photovoltaic properties of the synthesized complexes. The calculated power conversion efficiencies (η%) of the complexes using the obtained current density (J) versus voltage (V) curves show that these devices can be used as promising sensitizers in solar cell applications.


OBJECTIVES
Were to determine whether plasma atrial natriuretic peptide (ANP) is increased in patients with systemic sclerosis (SScl) and to evaluate its relation to cardiac dimensions and function.

METHODS
Using radio-immunoassay, plasma ANP was determined in 30 patients with SScl and 48 age and sex matched controls. The plasma ANP level was related to cardiac structure and function as determined by two-dimensional echocardiography (2-D echo).

RESULTS
Plasma ANP was markedly elevated among patients as compared to controls (239,4 +/- 59 vs 178.2 +/- 36 pmpl/l, p < 0.0005). The left atrial long-axis and area were increased, and ANP was directly related to both measurements (r = 0.27, p < 0.05 and r = 0.40, p < 0.005, respectively). Plasma ANP was also related to the increased right atrial long-axis (r = 0.27, p < 0.05). The ANP level was not related to LV systolic function as estimated by ejection fraction, fractional area change and end-systolic wall stress, neither did these measures differ between patients and controls. However, there was an inverse correlation between ANP level and stroke volume (r = -0.35, p < 0.05), which was lower among the patients (p < 0.005). ANP displayed also an inverse relation to LV long axis diameter (r = -0.37, p < 0.005) and area (r = -0.42, p < 0.005) as well as to LV end-diastolic volume (r = -0.42, p < 0.005). Various measurements indicated LV hypertrophy among the SScl patients in spite of a small LV cavity. ANP was directly related to measures of LV hypertrophy, as interventricular septum thickness (r = 0.44, p < 0.005), LV posterior wall thickness (r = 0.34, p < 0.05), the wall thickness to cavity dimension ratio (r = 0.36, p < 0.05), and LV myocardial area (r = 0.36, p < 0.05). There was no relationship between ANP concentration and heart rate, blood pressure or total peripheral resistance.

CONCLUSION
These results suggest that the ANP production is not reduced in SScl. Rather, circulating ANP is elevated in relation to the degree of LV hypertrophy. This implies that ANP may be useful for the identification of cardiac involvement in patients with SScl.


The last twenty years we have witnessed a considerable revival regarding pilgrimage in Norway. This was first seen in the simple fact that pilgrims once again began arriving in Trondheim at the cathedral of Nidaros - the shrine of St. Olav.In 1992, the Ministry of Environment started a project in order to re-establish the pilgrimage route from Oslo to Trondheim, involving both church and national environmental authorities. This has further led to a broad response from a vast collaboration of actors, eager to play a part in re-establishing this old route and new pilgrimage activity.My objective has been to investigate these different actors and their specific ways of interpreting and ascribing meaning to the terms pilgrim and pilgrimage, in this re-creation process we are witnessing today. Further on, I would like to pinpoint how pilgrimage in Norway is a complex matter, with many different fields of interests. One must grasp the whole picture in order to properly understand the modern phenomena of pilgrimage within our specific context.The approach used is discourse analysis. The method is complex, and for this analysis I have applied the theoretical groundwork from Iver B. Neumann, a discourse analysis specially intended for social research.The method is applied on central written and published material from the most important actors. In the first part of my analysis I am searching for different views and understandings of the pilgrim both explicitly and implicitly presented in the texts. Three major actors are analyzed; National management authorities within natural and cultural heritage, The Church, and Public authorities within business development and value creation.The second part uses the results found in part one as a starting point for further discussion of the broad and complex social phenomenon pilgrimage. More specifically, I argue that pilgrimage must be seen in relation to a somewhat broader context than often applied, including outdoor recreation, cultural heritage and tourism.


Contours, object blobs, and specific feature points are utilized to represent object shapes and extract shape descriptors that can then be used for object detection or image classification. In this research we develop a shape descriptor for biomedical image type (or, modality) classification. We adapt a feature extraction method used in optical character recognition (OCR) for character shape representation, and apply various image preprocessing methods to successfully adapt the method to our application. The proposed shape descriptor is applied to radiology images (e.g., MRI, CT, ultrasound, X-ray, etc.) to assess its usefulness for modality classification. In our experiment we compare our method with other visual descriptors such as CEDD, CLD, Tamura, and PHOG that extract color, texture, or shape information from images. The proposed method achieved the highest classification accuracy of 74.1% among all other individual descriptors in the test, and when combined with CSD (color structure descriptor) showed better performance (78.9%) than using the shape descriptor alone.


JMP is a statistical software environment that enables scientists, engineers, and business analysts to make discoveries through data exploration. One powerful method for beginning the process of discovery employs statistically designed experiments. A well‐designed experiment ensures that the resulting data have large information content. We support this method with custom design, an innovative approach to the statistical design of experiments. But whether your results come from designed experiments or from an observational study, we provide analytical tools that put graphs up front. JMP's graphical user interface (GUI) makes these plots interactive and dynamically linked to each other and to the data. Moreover, in the design of JMP's user interface the priority was to make a smooth and natural workflow for data analysis. Notice how the data exploration flows in the following case study that investigates the relationship between life expectancy and health‐care spending for 166 countries. WIREs Comp Stat 2011 3 188–194 DOI: 10.1002/wics.162


Abstract The associations of blood cadmium levels with hypertension and plasma norepinephrine concentrations were determined in normotensive and hypertensive nonsmokers and smokers. Statistical analysis showed that after adjustment for age alone, the estimated mean values of blood cadmium and plasma norepinephrine in nonsmokers were significantly (P < 0.001) lower than in smokers. However, after adjustment for age and blood cadmium, the estimated mean values for plasma norepinephrine were not significantly different between nonsmokers and smokers or normotensives and hypertensives. In contrast the estimated mean value for blood cadmium as a function of blood pressure (i.e., normotensive versus hypertensive) and smoking habit was still significant after adjustment for age and plasma norepinephrine (P < 0.01). We suggest that smoking and blood pressure affect the level of blood cadmium, and through this change in blood cadmium the level of plasma norepinephrine is affected.


INTRODUCTION
Vitamin D deficiency is known to be very common in adolescent girls and elderly women.

AIM
To analyze vitamin D status, vitamin D intake and solar exposure of Spanish participants in The Five Countries Study of Optiford Project.

METHODS
Questionnaires approved and validated of lifestyle and food consumption frequency applied. The biochemical analysis of 25-hidroxivitamin D and PTH and the evaluation of the solar exposure (dosymeter UV VioSpor) were carried out.

RESULTS
The average solar exposure of adolescent girls (1,519 J/m²) was double than elderly women (740 J/m²). The vitamin D status of adolescent girls in summer and winter was better than elderly women.

CONCLUSIONS
Solar exposure habits are different between the two age groups. This fact, jointly to the lower body's capacity to synthesize Vitamin D through exposure to the sun in the elderly, may justify the worse vitamin D status in this age group.


Neology is a creative and innovative phenomenon which contributes to the evolution of languages, from a general perspective and in terms of specialized usage. The formation of new lexical and terminological units becomes an individual and collective conscious process. This article presents a comparative study of language enrichment process through neonyms in (European) Portuguese and (hexagonal) French, extracted from a corpus of comparable texts in French and Portuguese taken from press sources (since 2010) in the field of economics and finance. The first part of this paper is devoted to a preliminary theoretical presentation of language enrichment and lexical creativity. We then go on to explain, in the second part, the main observed neological processes using concrete examples.


Abstract. Not all continental rifts mature to form a young ocean. The mechanism and
duration of their cessation depend on the crustal structure, modifications in
plate kinematics, lithospheric thermal response, or the intensity of subcrustal
flow (e.g., plume activity). The cessation is recorded in the structure and
stratigraphy of the basins that develop during the rifting process. This
architecture is lost due to younger tectonic inversion, severe erosion, or
even burial into greater depths that forces their detection by low-resolution
geophysical imaging. The current study focuses on a uniquely preserved
Oligo-Miocene rift that was subsequently taken over by a crossing transform
fault system and, mostly due to that, died out. We integrate all geological,
geophysical, and previous study results from across the southern
Galilee to unravel the structural development of the Irbid failing rift in
northwest Arabia. Despite tectonic, magmatic, and geomorphologic activity
postdating the rifting, its subsurface structure northwest of the Dead Sea
fault is preserved at depths of up to 1 km. Our results show that a series of
basins subsided at the rift front, i.e., rift termination, across the southern
Galilee. We constrain the timing and extent of their subsidence into two main
stages based on facies analysis and chronology of magmatism. Between 20 and 9 Ma
grabens and half-grabens subsided within a larger releasing jog, following a
NW direction of a deeper presumed principal displacement zone. The basins
continued to subside until a transition from the transtensional Red Sea to
the transpressional Dead Sea stress regime occurred. With the transition, the
basins ceased to subside as a rift, while the Dead Sea fault split the jog
structure. Between 9 and 5 Ma basin subsidence accentuated and an uplift of their
margins accompanied their overall elongation to the NNE. Our study provides
for the first time a structural as well as tectonic context for the southern
Galilee basins. Based on this case study we suggest that the rift did not
fail but rather faded and was taken over by a more dominant stress regime.
Otherwise, these basins of a failing rift could have simply died out
peacefully.


Infantile hypertrophic pyloric stenosis (IHPS) is a relatively common disease. We report our experience with 24 IHPS infants admitted to the Departments of Pediatrics and Pediatric Surgery of Chang Gung Memorial Hospital in Kaohsiung over 4 years, from 1986 to 1989. Analysis disclosed a high male to female ratio (11:1) and a heavy preponderance of firstborn male (46%). Fifty per cent of our cases had symptoms beginning between the ages of 2-4 weeks. The fact that 67% of the patients had duration of symptoms longer than 2 weeks prior to admission, with a mean interval of 25 days of progressive symptoms, represented that there was delay in diagnosis and treatment in most of our cases. The major clinical manifestations were projectile vomiting (100%), palpable pyloric mass (66.7%) and visible gastric peristaltic waves (41.7%). Of the 18 cases receiving plain supine abdominal roentgenogram, 17 (94.4%) demonstrated typical pictures. A gastric air outline extending below L2 vertebra is the most helpful criteria. Preoperative sonography suggested that the determination of pyloric muscle wall thickness predicted IHPS more accurately than that of pyloric muscle length. All 24 cases received Fredet-Ramstedt pyloromyotomy, with no mortality and short hospitalizations.


We present a novel learning-based method for generating optimal motion plans for high-dimensional motion planning problems. In order to cope with the curse of dimensional- ity, our method proceeds in a fashion similar to block co- ordinate descent in finite-dimensional optimization: at each iteration, the motion is optimized over a lower dimensional subspace while leaving the path fixed along the other dimen- sions. Naive implementations of such an idea can produce vastly suboptimal results. In this work, we show how a prof- itable set of directions in which to perform this dimensional descent procedure can be learned efficiently. We provide suf- ficient conditions for global optimality of dimensional de- scent in this learned basis, based upon the low-dimensional structure of the planning cost function. We also show how this dimensional descent procedure can easily be used for problems that do not exhibit such structure with monotonic convergence. We illustrate the application of our method to high dimensional shape planning and arm trajectory planning problems.


Background: India had issued a set of regulation for new class of plant based drug 'Phytopharmaceutical drug' as an amendment to the Drugs and Cosmetic Rules 1945. Age old traditional systems of medicine practiced in India 'Ayurveda', 'Siddha' and 'Unani' medicines. Ayurvedic, Siddha or Unani drugs include all medicines in accordance with the authoritative books of Ayurvedic, Siddha and Unani tibb. systems of medicine specified in the first Schedule of Drugs and Cosmetics Act 1940. Objective: The article aims to analyse opportunities and challenges in development of phytopharmaceutical drug in India through SWOT analysis. Methods: The Strength, Weakness, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) in development of phytopharmaceutical drug in India was analysed through review of published literatures. Observation: The SWOT analysis showed that India being leader in the herbal industry has massive opportunity in national and international market for phytopharmaceutical drug. It was also observed that the phytopharmaceutical drug market has vital opportunity for expansion both in developed and developing countries. Conclusion: There is a need for investment and commitment in promoting research and development in the area of phytopharmaceutical drug. Key words: Phytopharmaceutical drug, SWOT, Drugs and Cosmetics rules, Opportunity, Challenges.


Fibromyalgia is a disabling, chronic pain condition of unknown etiology. Although many factors have been recognized as important contributors to the pain experiences and functional abilities of fibromyalgia patients, the factors that are most impactful (and therefore represent optimal targets for intervention) are still unclear. The aim of the present study was to examine the pathways among depression, self‐efficacy, pain, and physical functioning in a large sample of fibromyalgia patients over a 1‐year timeframe.


Evolution of new enzymatic activities is believed to require a period of gene sharing in which a single enzyme must serve both its original function and a new function that has become advantageous to the organism. Subsequent gene duplication allows one copy to maintain the original function, while the other diverges to optimize the new function. The physiological impact of gene sharing and the constraints imposed by the need to maintain the original activity during the early stages of evolution of a new activity have not been addressed experimentally. We report here an investigation of the evolution of a new activity under circumstances in which both the original and the new activity are critical for growth. Glutamylphosphate reductase (ProA) has a very low promiscuous activity with N-acetylglutamylphosphate, the normal substrate for ArgC (N-acetylglutamylphosphate reductase). A mutation that changes Glu-383 to Ala increases the promiscuous activity by 12-fold but decreases the original activity by 2,800-fold. The impairment in Pro and Arg synthesis results in 14-fold overexpression of E383A ProA, providing sufficient N-acetylglutamylphosphate reductase activity to allow a strain lacking ArgC to grow on glucose. Thus, reaching the threshold level of NAGP reductase activity required for survival required both a structural mutation and overexpression of the enzyme. Notably, overexpression does not require a mutation in the regulatory region of the protein; amino acid limitation attributable to the poor catalytic abilities of E383A ProA causes a physiological response that results in overexpression.


The decision of crop selection and the output of agricultural production are highly determined by the environmental factors, especially rainfall and water availability. In the tropical area, particularly in Malaysia, influences of these exogenous variables are so high that overall agricultural productions are now vulnerable. Crops are affected through rainfall in two different ways-high and low rainfalls. Avoiding the problem of low rainfall is nearly possible through irrigation, but over rainfall at the end of crop cycle causes destructive damages of the output. Approach: This study uses descriptive statistics to analyze the fact and uses unit root test to measure the predictability of rainfall. The raw data is taken from 8 stations from 1980 to 2007. Results: Shifting crop cycle is also not fruitful due to un-predictive changes of rainfall. All combination of crop cycle is also affected in a similar way. Government subsidy in agricultural sector is remarkably increasing, but farmers are not able to cope properly with the environmental changes, especially for the cash crops and seasonal crops production. Conclusion: Under this circumstance, in the short run, adaptation approaches should be followed in farmer level and policy level. In the long run, technological advancement will play the most crucial role to solve the problem.


The author provides the results of a clinicopsychological examination of time perception and surviving by 58 depressive patients with manic-depressive psychosis (MDP) and attack-like schizophrenia. The time surviving and counting off were done in the three clinical variants of depression: hypochondriacal, agitated and apathetic. The surviving of time violation was regarded in the structure of depersonalization disorders, particularly "Ego" stability in time as well as bearing in mind the duration, sequence, localization, rate, tempo and rhythm of the events and emotional experience. The most pronounced and diverse disorders of time surviving were recorded in hypochondriacal depression of MDP, less remarkable and latent in apathetic depression within the framework of schizophrenia.


We identified the clinical characteristics including disease status for expecting success outcome of empirical antifungal therapy for invasive fungal infection (IFI) using itraconazole in immunocompromised patients with hematological malignancies. The prospective multicenter observational study was performed at 26 medical centers for 9 months. Three hundred seventy six patients with hematological malignancies (median age 48) had been enrolled and analyzed. The patients with possible and probable categories for IFI according to the EORTC/MSG criteria were included. We excluded the patients with proven IFI. IV itraconazole was administered as routine schedule. Oral itraconazole solution was used after the IV itraconazole. Underlying disease consisted of 61% of AML and 15% of ALL. Overall success rate of empirical antifungal therapy with itraconazole was 196/376 (51%). Acute leukemia in non-CR status and advanced stage of MDS patients showed a lower trend of success rate. Combined co-morbidities, underlying lung disease, poor ECOG performance status (≥2), abnormal chest X-ray at the time of initiation of empirical antifungal therapy, no early initiation of empirical antifungal therapy (the duration of baseline neutropenic fever ≥3 days) and antifungal prophylaxis other than itraconazole were associated with decreased overall success rate. Multivariate analysis revealed that poor ECOG performance status (≥2) ( P =0.01, HR = 1.90, 95% CI 1.17–3.06) and abnormal chest X-ray ( P =0.02, HR = 2.00, 95% CI 1.12–3.58) were significantly associated with poor outcome of empirical antifungal therapy with itraconazole. Overall success rate of empirical antifungal therapy was not affected by antifungal prophylaxis. Defervescence in setting of neutropenia was 70% (264/276). Higher rate of defervescence was observed in the patients with early stage of MDS (92% vs. 40%, P = 0.02). Median time to defervescence after empirical itraconazole therapy was 3 days. Short mean time to defervescence was observed in the patients with acute leukemia in CR status ( P = 0.002) or early stage of lymphoid malignancies ( P = 0.03). Baseline fungal infections were diagnosed in 13 patients (3%). Of the patients with baseline fungal infections, 7 patients (54%) had a successful outcome. All 7 patients with successful outcome had baseline fungal infection with candidemia. The rate of breakthrough fungal infection was 4% (16/376). Breakthrough aspergillus infection was documented in the half of theses patients (8/16). The rate of breakthrough fungal infection also was not different according to the different disease status. Premature discontinuation of itraconazole therapy because of toxicity or lack of efficacy occurred in 35% (131/376). The proportion of patients who survived for at least 7 days after completion of itraconazole therapy was 90% (338/376). IV itraconazole followed by oral itraconazole solution is an effective regimen for empirical antifungal therapy in the haematological malignancy patients with persistent neutropenic fever. Poor performance status and abnormal chest X-ray were predictive factors for failure of empirical antifungal therapy with itraconazole in the patients with hematological malignancies. Table 1. Outcomes (overall success rate) according to the clinical characteristics


The aim of this work was to investigate the heat and mass transfer during thermal decomposition of a single solid fuel particle. The problem regards the pyrolysis process which occurs in the absence of oxygen in the first stage of fuel oxidation. Moreover, the mass transfer during heating of the solid fuels is the basic phenomenon in the pyrolysis-derived alternative fuels (gas, liquid and solid phase) and in the gasification process which is focused on the generation of syngas (gas phase) and char (solid phase). Numerical simulations concern pyrolysis process of a single solid particle which occurs as a consequence of the particle temperature increase. The research was aimed at an analysis of the influence of particle physical properties on the devolatilization process. In the mathematical modeling the fuel grain is treated as an ideal sphere which consists of porous material (solid and gaseous phase), so as to simplify the final form of the partial differential equations. Assumption that the physical properties change only in the radial direction, reduces the partial derivatives of the angular coordinates. This leads to obtaining the equations which are only the functions of the radial coordinate. The model consists of the mass, momentum and energy equations for porous spherical solid particle heated by the stream of hot gas. The mass source term was determined in the wide range of the temperature according to the experimental data. The devolatilization rate was defined by the Arrhenius formula. The results of numerical simulation show that the heating and devolatilization time strongly depend on the physical properties of fuel. Moreover, proposed model allows to determine the pyrolysis process direction, which is limited by the equilibrium state. ∗Corresponding Author. E-mail: email@example.com 54 I. Wardach-Święcicka and D. Kardaś


Urban sprawl bas been a major policy issue for some time in academia as well as in American politics because it has a significant impact on environmental characteristics of urban areas. Among others, it consumes large amounts of agricultural and forested lands, increases congestion, travel time and air pollution, and misallocates land resources. It also discourages development of public transportation as infrastructure costs become higher in scattered developments, resulting in inefficient use of energy. Most attention in the USA has been given to large cities because it is assumed that sprawl is only a phenomenon of the larger metropolitan areas. However, urban sprawl is a growing problem in smaller communities as well (Weber and Maret, 2003). This study examines a relatively small Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA), Auburn-Opelika, Alabama (population 115,092) by using the most recent Census Population and Housing Summary File 3 (STF 3) data and a geographic information system (GIS) technique to determine the potential impacts of urban sprawl on travel behaviors of the local population and its growing pressure on local watersheds over the period 1990-2000. Our measure of urban sprawl suggests that the urban growth pattern over the last decade has been more towards sprawl than the local planning commission's claim of smart growth. This sprawl like growth pattern over the last decade has increased commuting times for Auburn-Opelika residents. and furthermore, associated land use changes have increased pressure on local watersheds. This research implies that small MSAs should no longer be excluded from the discussion of potential impacts of urban sprawl in the US.


In crowdsourced testing, users can be incentivized to perform testing tasks and report their results, and because crowdsourced workers are often paid per task, there is a financial incentive to complete tasks quickly rather than well. These reports of the crowdsourced testing tasks are called "test reports" and are composed of simple natural language and screenshots. Back at the software-development organization, developers must manually inspect the test reports to judge their value for revealing faults. Due to the nature of crowdsourced work, the number of test reports are often difficult to comprehensively inspect and process. In order to help with this daunting task, we created the first technique of its kind, to the best of our knowledge, to prioritize test reports for manual inspection. Our technique utilizes two key strategies: (1) a diversity strategy to help developers inspect a wide variety of test reports and to avoid duplicates and wasted effort on falsely classified faulty behavior, and (2) a risk strategy to help developers identify test reports that may be more likely to be fault-revealing based on past observations. Together, these strategies form our DivRisk strategy to prioritize test reports in crowd- sourced testing. Three industrial projects have been used to evaluate the effectiveness of test report prioritization methods. The results of the empirical study show that: (1) DivRisk can significantly outperform random prioritization; (2) DivRisk can approximate the best theoretical result for a real-world industrial mobile application. In addition, we provide some practical guidelines of test report prioritization for crowdsourced testing based on the empirical study and our experiences.


Abstract: Based on phylogenetic and morphological characters, we revise the systematics of the natricid genus Fowlea in Sri Lanka, comprising two morphospecies. The taxonomy of the Sri Lankan populations has long been controversial, and one of the species has, for more than a decade, been listed as Xenochrophis cf. piscator. Although the Sri Lankan populations are morphologically allied to Fowlea piscator in India, they are genetically highly divergent from the eastern Indian F. piscator sensu lato with a p-distance of 9.9–12.3%, and from southwestern Indian Fowlea species with a p-distance of 4.9–11.1% in the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene. Here, we resurrect Müller's (1887) variety, Tropidonotus quincunciatus var. unicolor, as a distinct taxon, elevate it to the species level, and assign it to the genus Fowlea. Therefore, the population so far recognized as X. cf. piscator will be treated hereafter as F. unicolor and we redescribe it and its holotype (by monotypy). We tentatively restrict this species to Sri Lanka and state the possibility of a population in southern India too. The second distinct species, Fowlea asperrima, which is endemic to Sri Lanka, has long been confused with its sympatric congener, F. unicolor comb. nov., and we designate a lectotype and redescribe it herein. Currently, nine species of the genus Fowlea are now recognized, but it is likely that further species (including those regarded as subjective synonyms) remain unrecognized.


We present a novel technique, both flexible and efficient, for interactive remeshing of irregular geometry. First, the original (arbitrary genus) mesh is substituted by a series of 2D maps in parameter space. Using these maps, our algorithm is then able to take advantage of established signal processing and halftoning tools that offer real-time interaction and intricate control. The user can easily combine these maps to create a control map -- a map which controls the sampling density over the surface patch. This map is then near-optimally sampled at interactive rates allowing the user to interactively design a tailored resampling. Once this sampling is complete, a Delaunay triangulation and fast optimization are performed to perfect the final mesh. As a result, our remeshing technique is extremely versatile and general being able to produce arbitrarily complex meshes with a variety of properties including: uniformity, regularity, semi-regularity, curvature sensitive resampling, and feature preservation. We provide a high level of control over the sampling distribution allowing the user to interactively custom design the mesh based on their requirements thereby increasing their productivity in creating a wide variety of meshes.


Personality traits are hypothesized to be among the most important factors contributing to individual differences in identity development. However, longitudinal studies linking Big Five personality traits to contemporary identity models (in which multiple exploration and commitment processes are distinguished) are largely lacking. To gain more insight in the directionality of effect and the developmental interdependence of the Big Five and identity processes as forwarded in multilayered personality models, the present study assessed personality and identity in 1,037 adolescents 4 times over a period of 3 years. First, using cross-lagged path analysis, Big Five traits emerged as consistent predictors of identity exploration processes, whereas only one significant path from identity exploration to the Big Five was found. Second, using latent class growth analysis, 3 Big Five trajectory classes were identified, resembling the distinctions typically made between resilients, overcontrollers, and undercontrollers. These classes were characterized by different initial levels and (to a lesser extent) rates of change in commitment and exploration processes. In sum, important developmental associations linking personality traits to identity processes were uncovered, emphasizing the potential role of personality traits in identity development. Developmental implications and suggestions for future research are discussed.


were not detected. The estimate is based on the studies of Farkas and Levinel and Enzler2 who took radiographs of consecutive newborns and found a combined 18 clavicle fractures (2%) in 800 consecutive newborns. In our study3 of 626 newborns, Dr. Rosenfeld and I found 18 (2.6%) with clavicle fractures. Any conclusion that the authors draw relates to the 64 identified clavicle fractures, which represent the 10% of clavicle fractures that were probably most severe, and not to the 604+ clavicle fractures that were not detected. The 22 disease processes fall into two categories: (1) probably related to clavicle fracture and (2) possibly related to clavicle fractures, but I do not know why. I consider Erbs palsy to fall in the first category and all the others into the second. The presence of


This paper shows how the decoding energy of HEVC software decoders can be estimated when using high-level features of a coded bit stream. The investigated features comprise number of frames, resolution, bitrate, QP, and encoder configuration, where the proposed model reaches an average estimation error of 10%. While establishing this model, we closely investigated the influence of these high-level features on the decoding energy. Mathematical relations are derived that can, e.g., be exploited to control the decoding energy from the encoder side. To show the validity of our research, evaluations are performed on two different hardware devices and three different software solutions.


Animals experience variation in their environment because of natural changes. However, due to anthropogenic disturbance, the speed and severity of these changes have recently increased. This thesis investigates how reproductive behaviours may be affected by human induced environmental change. In specific, I investigate how visual and chemical changes in the aquatic environment, caused by eutrophication, affect mating systems and sexual selection in fish. Broad-nosed- and straight-nosed pipefish, which both have been studied in detail for a long period, were used as model organisms. These two species are particularly suitable model organisms since they perform complex courtship behaviours, including the advertisement of ornaments and a nuptial dance. Further, two distinct populations were studied, one on the Swedish west coast and one in the Baltic Sea, as these two locations vary in the degree and extent of environmental disturbance, in particular turbidity. I found that changes in the visual environment had no impact on the development of female sexual ornaments in these sex-role reversed pipefishes, but it hampered adaptive mate choice. Turbidity also had a negative effect on reproductive success in the Baltic Sea population. Changes in the chemical environment in the form of increased pH reduced the probability to mate, while hypoxia did not alter mating propensity. However, hypoxic water delayed the onset of both courting and mating. Hence, human induced change in aquatic environments may alter the processes of sexual selection and population dynamics.


Many microbial communities are associated with specific animal hosts, with major impacts on the ecological and evolutionary dynamics of both partners. We analysed gut microbial communities of eight dragonfly species in southern India. Adult dragonflies are generalist opportunistic predators; thus, we expected to find relatively high individual variation but low host-specific variation in their gut community composition. However, we find that each host species has a distinct gut bacterial community, with sampling location and month playing a small but significant role in shaping community structure. These patterns suggest that dragonflies either specialize on subsets of available prey, or their guts impose differential selective pressures resulting in distinct communities.


The aim of this paper is to investigate what part film music plays in the creation of stereo-types in the production of Swedish cinema, in the 1990s and early 2000s. This period of Swedish cinema was largely defined through the visualization of life in the smaller provinces of the country. The results were reached through the analyzing of four important works of this era, representing different provinces and genres. The examined movies have shown frequent use of extreme characters and a somewhat hostile environment in search of an interesting story. The music is used in ways of describing class differences amongst the inhabitants and to set the gen-eral mood of the concerned provinces: an agent often working in the unconscious of the viewer in order to affect the final results.


The degree of personalization that a Web site offers in presenting its services to users is an important attribute contributing to the site's popularity. Web server access logs contain substantial data about user access patterns. One way to solve this problem is to group users on the basis of their Web interests and then organize the site's structure according to the needs of different groups. Two main difficulties inhibit this approach: the essentially infinite diversity of user interests and the change in these interests with time. We have developed a clustering algorithm that groups users according to their Web access patterns. The algorithm is based on the ART1 version of adaptive resonance theory. In our ART1-based algorithm, a prototype vector represents each user cluster by generalizing the URLs most frequently accessed by all cluster members. We have compared our algorithm's performance with the traditional k-means clustering algorithm. Results showed that the ART1-based technique performed better in terms of intracluster distances. We also applied the technique in a prefetching scheme that predicts future user requests.


This paper studies real-time gross settlement (RTGS), which is a trend in interbank settlement systems. We provide a theoretical analysis of settlement efficiency by focusing on the importance of the interconnected features of underlying payment networks. Specifically, we develop a graph-theoretic model to investigate a general class of payment networks, and examine the network factors that contribute to the lower bound and upper bound of the required settlement fund. The lower bound and upper bound are considered through a relevant minimization/maximization problem formulated on a weighted multi-arrow directed graph. We succeed in characterizing the lower bound and upper bound with two kinds of network factors: domain factor and synchronization factor. For given obligations, each domain refers to how far one unit of a settlement fund can circulate to settle the obligations, and the synchronization factor refers to how those domains are mutually consistent in the dynamics of the settlement. The main contribution of this study is to reveal the qualitative aspect of the synchronization factor with regard to two original concepts (arrow-twisted and vertex-twisted) that are formally defined on a directed graph. We further examine the quantitative aspect of the synchronization factor for realworld payment networks, through examining networks with clustered structures and small-world structures. We show that increase of obligations has non-linear effect on the required settlement fund through the synchronization factor.


There is a relative lack of information on the course of corticohypoglossal projections in the human brain stem,1,2 especially in the medulla. Using transcranial magnetic stimulation and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in 11 patients with ischaemic lesions at different brain stem levels, Urban et al showed that pontine lesions at the ventral paramedian base close to the midline affected the contralateral corticohypoglossal projections, while lateral lesions at the pontine base affected the ipsilateral projections. Lesions of the dorsolateral and mediolateral medulla impaired only ipsilateral corticohypoglossal projections.3

We report a patient with contralateral glossoplegia in the ventromedial lesion of the upper medulla.

A 52 year old hypertensive …


The influence of the increase in internationalization capacity cannot be limited to export only since it also generates indirect impacts stemming through technology transfer, joint project development, trade technology partnerships, training, education and so on. All these activities increase the capabilities of the firms and are expected to have a positive influence on the future productivity, growth and development figures. Within this scope, this paper analyses the impacts of a specific internationalization program which is created by the Turkish Ministry of Trade and run by the Gazi Science and Technology Park (STP) on an ICT cluster of 20 companies for a period of three years.


Abstract We compared four orthogonal technologies for sizing, counting, and phenotyping of extracellular vesicles (EVs) and synthetic particles. The platforms were: single‐particle interferometric reflectance imaging sensing (SP‐IRIS) with fluorescence, nanoparticle tracking analysis (NTA) with fluorescence, microfluidic resistive pulse sensing (MRPS), and nanoflow cytometry measurement (NFCM). EVs from the human T lymphocyte line H9 (high CD81, low CD63) and the promonocytic line U937 (low CD81, high CD63) were separated from culture conditioned medium (CCM) by differential ultracentrifugation (dUC) or a combination of ultrafiltration (UF) and size exclusion chromatography (SEC) and characterized by transmission electron microscopy (TEM) and Western blot (WB). Mixtures of synthetic particles (silica and polystyrene spheres) with known sizes and/or concentrations were also tested. MRPS and NFCM returned similar particle counts, while NTA detected counts approximately one order of magnitude lower for EVs, but not for synthetic particles. SP‐IRIS events could not be used to estimate particle concentrations. For sizing, SP‐IRIS, MRPS, and NFCM returned similar size profiles, with smaller sizes predominating (per power law distribution), but with sensitivity typically dropping off below diameters of 60 nm. NTA detected a population of particles with a mode diameter greater than 100 nm. Additionally, SP‐IRIS, MRPS, and NFCM were able to identify at least three of four distinct size populations in a mixture of silica or polystyrene nanoparticles. Finally, for tetraspanin phenotyping, the SP‐IRIS platform in fluorescence mode was able to detect at least two markers on the same particle, while NFCM detected either CD81 or CD63. Based on the results of this study, we can draw conclusions about existing single‐particle analysis capabilities that may be useful for EV biomarker development and mechanistic studies.


Primary Sjögren's Syndrome (pSS) is an autoimmune disease with a large spectrum of clinical manifestations extending from an organ-specific involvement to a systemic process. The skin is affected quite commonly and the estimated frequency of inflammatory vascular lesions is from 20% to 30%. Two specific, clinically recognizable forms of cutaneous vasculitis predominate, palpable purpura and chronic urticaria, but erythema multiforme, erythema perstans, erythema nodosum, erithematous macules and subcutaneous nodules have also been described. The authors report the case of a 46-year-old female patient, diagnosed as primary SS, who presented ocular and oral symptoms, poliarthritis and laboratory alterations (with a positive ANA, anti-SSA, rheumatoid factor, and hypergammaglobulinemia). Ten years after the diagnosis, she presented leg ulcers. The biopsy confirmed the presence of vasculitic process, and the ulcers improved rapidly after the treatment with endovenous cyclophosphamide. There are only two reports of chronic ulceration of the legs as cutaneous manifestation of SS. The authors stress the importance of considering ulcers in the differential diagnosis of cutaneous involvement of primary SS.


Thirty patients who were surgically treated for hallux valgus by first metatarsal head osteotomies between 1975 and 1980 were reviewed. The average follow-up was 41 months, with the longest being 78 months and the shortest 16 months. Radiographs were obtained to determine if avascular necrosis of the first metatarsal head had occurred. Two cases of avascular necrosis were discovered.


Kohn-Sham density functional theory (DFT) has long struggled with the accurate description of strongly correlated and open shell systems, and improvements have been minor even in the newest hybrid functionals. In this Letter we treat the static correlation in DFT when frontier orbitals are degenerate by the means of using a semidefinite programming (SDP) approach to minimize the system energy as a function of the N-representable, non-idempotent 1-electron reduced density matrix. While showing greatly improved singlet-triplet gaps for local density approximation and generalized gradient approximation (GGA) functionals, the SDP procedure reveals flaws in modern meta and hybrid GGA functionals, which show no major improvements when provided with an accurate electron density.


Design and verification of complete microsystems require effective models of the micromechanical components for the simulation at system level. Particularly for force feedback S/D -architectures, long transient simulations are inevitable to characterize the system-inherent signal pro-cessing. In this paper we present an energy-based methodology describing a general approach to deriving marcomodels of flexible, squeeze-film damped, multi-electrode structures for use in a network simulator. The coupling scheme between the kinematics of the mechanical structure and the electrical field between the electrodes allows to incorporate additional interactions such as squeeze-film damping. The flexibility of our modeling method proves to be particularly valuable for the analysis of mechanically damped eigenmodes. Complete macromodels can be extracted from fully meshed FEM and BEM model data.


Dramatic improvements in information technology have the potential to transform healthcare delivery, and a key question is how such changes will affect the healthcare workforce of the future. In this brief, we present the state of knowledge of the effects of health information technology on the workforce. We first lay out the rapidly changing healthcare landscape due to the greater availability and use of information and communication technology (ICT) followed by a description of the evolution of employment, wages, and education across the wide variety of occupations in the healthcare sector since 1980. The healthcare sector has outperformed the rest of the economy and has proven resilient to the multiple downturns over the last four decades, although some groups have done much better than others. Next, we review the literature on the effects of ICT on productivity in terms of patient health outcomes and resource use, as well as the effects on healthcare expenditure. We find that there is evidence of a positive effect of ICT (e.g., especially electronic health records) on clinical productivity, but (i) it takes time for these positive effects to materialize; and (ii) there is much variation in the impact, with many organizations seeing no benefits. Looking at the drivers of adoption, we find that the role of workers is critical, especially physicians' attitudes and skills. Privacy laws, fragmentation, and weak competition are also causes of slow adoption. There is very little quantitative work that investigates directly the impact of new technology on workers' jobs, skills, and wages, but what there is suggests no substantial negative effects. Our own analysis finds no evidence of negative effects looking at aggregate data and hospital-level event studies. These findings are consistent with studies outside of healthcare, which stress the importance of complementary factors (such as management practices and skills) in determining the success of ICT investments. We conclude that management initiatives to increase the skills of workers will be required if the healthcare workforce and society more generally are to substantially benefit from the adoption of these powerful tools. Acknowledgments: We thank the MIT Task Force on the Work of the Future for financial support and comments on earlier drafts. We have benefited immensely from discussions with Catherine Tucker and Cason Schmit. Leila Agha, David Autor, and Tom Kochan have also given generous and detailed comments.


Alumina-supported titania photocatalytic membrane was prepared by coating of TiO2 spheres to remove humic acid from wastewater via photocatalytic oxidation degradation combined with physical filtration. TiO2 spheres with an average diameter of about 225 nm were synthesized by hydrothermal crystallization of titanium glycolate spheres with an average diameter of 280 nm. The X-ray diffraction results indicated that the resulting TiO2 spheres consisted of anatase and brookite phases. The transmission electron microscopy images showed that the TiO2 spheres consisted of small crystallites with sizes of about 10 nm and confirmed their crystal structures. The nitrogen sorption experiments indicated that the TiO2 spheres were mesoporous and had an average pore diameter of 10.2 nm and a Brunauer, Emmet and Teller surface of 86.7 m2/g. The alumina-supported TiO2 sphere membrane, which was prepared by 10% TiO2 coating solution, exhibited excellent photocatalytic property; in particular, it degraded 58% of humic acid after 240-min UV light irradiation. It also removed 92% of humic acid in filtration process and with aid of 15-min UV light irradiation interval throughout 3 h of filtration process. In addition, the permeate flux of the TiO2 membrane was improved because of reduced membrane fouling. © 2016 Curtin University of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


We investigate the radiative coupling between localized surface plasmon resonances (LSPRs) and Rayleigh anomalies (RAs) in periodic arrays of metallic nanorods with varying dimensions but equal lattice constants. The dimensions of the nanorods determine the energy and line width of the LSPR and, thus, enable tailoring of the mixed LSPR–RA states: surface lattice resonances (SLRs). We present variable angle light extinction experimental spectra for five arrays with different nanorod width and explain our results with numerical simulations. The numerical simulations are done for driven and undriven systems, with the latter revealing the SLR eigenmode properties for the first time. We provide a plane wave model that interprets the near- and far-fields of these eigenmodes, describing the intricate behavior of confinement and radiative loss versus in-plane momentum. The SLR line width, band gap associated with the coupled modes, and field extension into the surrounding dielectric are tunable via the dimensions...


The Contemptus sublimitatis, also known as Dialogus creaturarum, is a colection of 122 exempla written in the 14th century and quite famous till the 16th century. In the last years, the number of the manuscripts that are known to transmit this text has increased from 9 to 15 complete ones and a fragment. This paper, that is part of the research project of elaborating a critical edition of the Contemptus, aims at studying how the author of this collection used the auctoritates and how the manuscripts behave in relation to the sources quoted in the work.


The aim of the study was to translate, adapt and validate the original 13-item English version of Interpersonal Rejection Sensitivity Scale (IRSS; Rohner et al., 2020) into Urdu language to facilitate administration on Pakistani adults. The study followed three stages: Translation and adaptation, linguistic equivalence with cross validation, and establishing psychometric properties of translated Urdu version of IRSS. The sample for stage II comprised of 100 adults above 18 years of age selected through convenience sampling technique. The results showed significant correlation (r = .84) between both English and Urdu versions of the IRSS. Similarly, inter-item correlation of English items and Urdu items showed significant correlations with an exception of only item 3 and item 12. Moreover, value of Cronbach's alpha (α = .72) illustrated the internal consistency of Urdu version of IRSS. In stage III of the study, Exploratory Factor Analysis run on a separate sample (N = 200) of adults indicated that the Urdu version of the IRSS is a standardized measure like the original English IRSS as all the items were significantly loaded; only items number 3 and 12 that did not load on the scale. Therefore, after excluding item number 3 and 12 with the permission of Rohner Research Publications, it is concluded that the 11-item Urdu translation of IRSS is a valid and reliable scale (α = .83) to measure interpersonal rejection-sensitivity among Pakistani population.


SUMMARY: Syntrophism was demonstrated between strains of Lactobacillus plantarum and Streptococcus faecalis in a chemically defined medium which lacked phenylalanine and pteroylglutamic acid (PGA); however, the presence of p-aminobenzoic acid (PABA) was essential. Enumeration of the two organisms in syntrophic growth was found to be possible by the use of Trypticase soy agar+0.25% (w/v) glucose at pH 9.0 as a selective medium for S. faecalis. It was found that S. faecalis predominated in the early stages of the syntrophic growth, but that L. plantarum eventually predominated. Characterization by a bioautographic technique of the phenylalanine-active factor synthesized by S. faecalis and required by L. plantarum indicated that the factor was not identical with phenylalanine or shikimic acid. Microbiological assays of the culture fluid from cultures of L. plantarum indicated that three types of folic acid compounds were synthesized: (1) oxygen-stable compounds which supported the growth of Pediococcus cereviseae; (2) oxygen-labile compounds which supported the growth of P. cereviseae; (3) oxygen-stable compounds which supported the growth of S. faecalis but not of P. cereviseae.


Understanding and assessing the role played by geographical clusters in the resilience of industries' and firms' to adverse economic shocks is important to inform policy and to devise regional development strategies. Yet, surprisingly little is known about that topic. This report aims to fill this gap. To this end, we first use recent microgeographic techniques to measure the degree of clustering in the Canadian textile and clothing (TC mfa) during our study period, thus providing an ideal laboratory to examine the role of geographical clusters for resilience. We find a very limited impact of the initial level of clustering on subsequent changes in either industry-level employment, productivity, or revenue. Using detailed geocoded plant-level data, we further find that plants in clusters were more likely to exit than plants that were not part of a cluster and they downsized their employment more than non-clustered plants. These results suggest that clusters need not make industries or plants more resilient to adverse economic shocks. Furthermore, there is a composition effect of clusters. In the T&C industry, clusters contain larger plants that react to shocks by exiting or downsizing. In this respect, clusters were actually less resilient to shocks in the sense of providing local employment stability, which is usually the key concern for local policy makers. Plants in clusters were, however, more likely to switch into different industries following the end of the mfa. This suggests that being part of a cluster may help surviving plants to adapt in the event of a negative shock.


"The Art of Feeling" was commissioned by the Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness agency as part of their new identity. We developed a system to produce digital paintings from emotions. We asked each of their employees to think of an emotional memory then used an EEG headset to record their brainwaves.

We then used emotion recognition algorithms to determine what they were feeling and fed this data into a generative algorithm to create swarm paintings that represented each individual's state of mind at the time of recording.

These paintings have become a fundamental part of Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness' identity and exhibited in a gallery in London.

To produce complex and unique visualisations of the emotional memories of each employee we were inspired by bird swarms and used generative techniques. Swarm behaviour is the collective movement effect of a number of individual 'agents' that follow simple rules to guide their behaviour.

Each agent was represented as a tiny brush that moved on a canvas leaving an ink trail behind it. Emotional data extracted from the raw brainwaves was fed into the swarm visualisation system which resulted in complex, non-repeating patterns of colour.

The paintings of each employee's emotional memory were printed in high resolution, framed and exhibited in the Truman brewery gallery space in East London. The space was filled with emotional snapshots captured in paper such as the "The birth of my son" and "Going shark cage diving in South Africa".

In Saatchi & Saatchi Wellness' homepage we also created a real time version of the visualisation. The site uses webGL to create a highly optimised moving version of the swarm visualisations. Instead of brain data we turned to Twitter. The website gathers live tweets and processes them using a machine learning sentiment analysis engine. It then uses the quantified emotional output to create a moving digital painting that reflects the emotional state of the world in present time.


Objectives Non-inferiority (NI) randomized clinical trials (RCTs) commonly evaluate efficacy of new antiretroviral (ARV) drugs in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) patients. Their reporting and interpretation have not been systematically evaluated. We evaluated the reporting of NI RCTs in HIV patients according to the CONSORT statement and assessed the degree of misinterpretation of RCTs when NI was inconclusive or not established. Design Systematic review. Methods PubMed, Web of Science, and Scopus were reviewed until December 2011. Selection and extraction was performed independently by three reviewers. Results Of the 42 RCTs (n = 21,919; range 41–3,316) selected, 23 were in ARV-naïve and 19 in ARV-experienced patients. Twenty-seven (64%) RCTs provided information about prior RCTs of the active comparator, and 37 (88%) used 2-sided CIs. Two thirds of trials used a NI margin between 10 and 12%, although only 12 explained the method to determine it. Blinding was used in 9 studies only. The main conclusion was based on both intention-to-treat (ITT) and per protocol (PP) analyses in 5 trials, on PP analysis only in 4 studies, and on ITT only in 31 studies. Eleven of 16 studies with NI inconclusive or not established highlighted NI or equivalence, and distracted readers with positive secondary results. Conclusions There is poor reporting and interpretation of NI RCTs performed in HIV patients. Maximizing the reporting of the method of NI margin determination, use of blinding and both ITT and PP analyses, and interpreting negative NI according to actual primary findings will improve the understanding of results and their translation into clinical practice.


The extracellular matrix protein tenascin‐C plays a critical role in development, wound healing, and cancer progression, but how it is controlled and how it exerts its physiological responses remain unclear. By quantifying the behavior of live cells with phase contrast and fluorescence microscopy, the dynamic regulation of TN‐C promoter activity is examined. We employ an NIH 3T3 cell line stably transfected with the TN‐C promoter ligated to the gene sequence for destabilized green fluorescent protein (GFP). Fully automated image analysis routines, validated by comparison with data derived from manual segmentation and tracking of single cells, are used to quantify changes in the cellular GFP in hundreds of individual cells throughout their cell cycle during live cell imaging experiments lasting 62 h. We find that individual cells vary substantially in their expression patterns over the cell cycle, but that on average TN‐C promoter activity increases during the last 40% of the cell cycle. We also find that the increase in promoter activity is proportional to the activity earlier in the cell cycle. This work illustrates the application of live cell microscopy and automated image analysis of a promoter‐driven GFP reporter cell line to identify subtle gene regulatory mechanisms that are difficult to uncover using population averaged measurements. Published 2011 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


Abstract Current status and perspectives of an interdisciplinary knowledge domain including informatics, computer science, control theory, and IT applications were analyzed. Scientific-and-methodological and applied problems of IT integration with existing and future industrial and socio-economical structures were stated.


Corn (Zea mays L.) stover is a global resource used for livestock, fuel, and bioenergy feedstock, but excessive stover removal can decrease soil organic C (SOC) stocks and deteriorate soil health. Many site‐specific stover removal experiments report accrual rates and SOC stock effects, but a quantitative, global synthesis is needed to provide a scientific base for long‐term energy policy decisions. We used 409 data points from 74 stover harvest experiments conducted around the world for a meta‐analysis and meta‐regression to quantify removal rate, tillage, soil texture, and soil sampling depth effects on SOC. Changes were quantified by: (a) comparing final SOC stock differences after at least 3 years with and without stover removal and (b) calculating SOC accrual rates for both treatments. Stover removal generally reduced final SOC stocks by 8% in the upper 0–15 or 0–30 cm, compared to stover retained, irrespective of soil properties and tillage practices. A more sensitive meta‐regression analysis showed that retention increased SOC stocks within the 30–150 cm depth by another 5%. Compared to baseline values, stover retention increased average SOC stocks temporally at a rate of 0.41 Mg C ha−1 year−1 (statistically significant at p < 0.01 when averaged across all soil layers). Although SOC sequestration rates were lower with stover removal, with moderate (<50%) removal they can be positive, thus emphasizing the importance of site‐specific management. Our results also showed that tillage effects on SOC stocks were inconsistent due to the high variability in practices used among the experimental sites. Finally, we conclude that research and technological efforts should continue to be given high priority because of the importance in providing science‐based policy recommendations for long‐term global carbon management.


In this paper, various reduced parts converter topologies and control strategies for power factor correction and motor control are reviewed and systematic design methodology is developed. From this investigation, the converter topologies could be mainly categorized into cascade type and unified type. The detailed operational principles are examined and the performance comparison is derived to illustrate merits and limitations of the converters. Simulation results are provided to help the better understanding of the theoretical description and several experimental results are presented on prototype induction motor and brushless dc (BLDC) motor drives, along with cascade and unified type converters.


Several phase-modulation functions have been reported to decrease the aberration variance of the modulation-transfer-function (MTF) in aberration-tolerant hybrid imaging systems. The choice of this phase-modulation function is crucial for optimization of the overall system performance. To prevent a significant loss in signal-to-noise ratio, it is common to enforce restorability constraints on the MTF, requiring trade of aberration-tolerance and noise-gain. Instead of optimizing specific MTF characteristics, we directly minimize the expected imaging-error of the joint design. This method is used to compare commonly used phase-modulation functions: the antisymmetric generalized cubic polynomial and fourth-degree rotational symmetric phase-modulation. The analysis shows how optimal imaging performance is obtained using moderate phase-modulation, and more importantly, the relative merits of the above functions.


The subject of this thesis is Poland's first post communist government (September 1989 - December 1990), formed under the premiership of the veteran 'Solidarity' activist Tadousz Mazowiecki. The threat of economic collapse and social disorder had prompted the communist authorities to grant the non-communist elements organised around the 'Solidarity' movement limited access to the Polish parliament through partially free elections. In June 1989 the results of these elections delivered a fatal blow to communist rule in Poland. 'Solidarity' triumphed in practically all the parliamentary seats the communist authorities had permitted it to contest. Bereft of ideological confidence and Soviet support, the Polish Communist Party rapidly disintegrated and the task of forming an administration fell to 'Solidarity'.

The new government, led by Mazowiecki and dominated by representatives of Solidarity's intellectual elite, was appointed in September 1989. In the months that followed, the new government took advantage of strong social support and popularity to introduce comprehensive political and economic reforms. The reforms introduced irrevocably dismantled the country's disastrous command economy and introduced a radical shift to market based criteria. Although they entailed austerity for much of Polish society, at least initially, the personal prestige of the new elite and its promise of the future benefits which would flow from the introduction of market rules seemed to guarantee an ongoing state of acquiescence.

The political reform process was admittedly slower but the removal of the last vestiges of communist power from the system progressed steadily. Within nine months the government had taken great strides in ending communist control of the police and military and was tackling the continued influence of the nomenklatura in the state bureaucracy. State control of the media and previous prohibitions on freedom of conscience, association and speech were ended. Completely free parliamentary and presidential elections were planned for the near future. It seemed that for the duration of the transition Poland would be led to a 'Western style' liberal-democratic polity and free market economy by a government composed of Solidarity's 'best and brightest'. Apolitical intellectuals would patriotically put the higher needs of the nation before the distractions of everyday political competitiveness. They would be supported in this by the Solidarity movement which would also act as a nursery for fledgling political parties. Over time these organisations would gather the societal support and organisational strength necessary to form a conventional, stable political system.


Background: The aim of this study was to evaluate and compare preprocedural dental anxiety levels and postprocedural pain perception in chronic periodontitis patients during conventional-staged root surface debridement (RSD) and single-stage RSD. Materials and Methods: Thirty-seven adult generalized chronic periodontitis patients requiring RSD were recruited in this study. Preprocedural anxiety levels were assessed using a self-reported questionnaire and postprocedural pain perceptions were assessed using 0–10 cm visual analog scale. The subject population was divided into two groups: staged RSD (n = 18) and single-stage RSD (n = 19). Staged RSD patients visited four times as opposed to single-stage RSD patients. Data were subjected to Pearson Chi-square test, Mann–Whitney U-test, and Spearman's rank correlation. Results: There was no statistically significant difference in dental anxiety levels or pain perceptions in both the groups. Within Group 1, there was statistical significant difference in dental anxiety levels between visit 4 and visit 3 (P = 0.037) and pain perception between visit 3 and visit 1 (P = 0.005), visit 4 and visit 1 (P = 0.002), and visit 4 and visit 2 (0.04) was statistically significant. There was a positive correlation of anxiety questionnaire (Q1–Q4) to the pain score in Group 1 which was statistically significant and in single-stage RSD. Conclusion: Conventional quadrant-wise RSD tends to cognitively condition the anxiety experience thus influencing pain experience.


The growing importance of information and knowledge in the business world means that computer-based electronic spaces will become the central space of the global accumulation of capital and dealings with that capital. These electronic spaces are also spaces where knowledge can be created and stored collectively and whose resources are freely accessible. They generate a new context of experience and provide us with new schemata in which we perceive the world and ourselves. These possibilities change the conditions for the constitution of subjectivity and the forming of socialness. The interlinking of technical and social developments affects the basic relationship between the subject and the world. And that is where education has a responsibility to become involved. What types of subject does education have to deal with nowadays and what task does it face in relation to this subject? To find answers to these questions, we need to take a look at what it means to grow up and live in a digital world, to use new technologies, to influence them and be influenced by them.


Purpose

The aim of this paper is to report on the adaptive e-contract information management reference architecture using the systematic literature review (SLR) method. Enterprises need to effectively design and implement complex adaptive e-contract information management architecture to support dynamic service interactions or transactions.

Design/methodology/approach

The SLR method is three-fold and was adopted as follows. First, a customized literature search with relevant selection criteria was developed, which was then applied to initially identify a set of 1,573 papers. Second, 55 of 1,573 papers were selected for review based on the initial review of each identified paper title and abstract. Finally, based on the second review, 24 papers relevant to this research were selected and reviewed in detail.

Findings

This detailed review resulted in the adaptive e-contract information management reference architecture elements including structure, life cycle and supporting technology.

Research limitations/implications

The reference architecture elements could serve as a taxonomy for researchers and practitioners to develop context-specific service e-contract information management architecture to support dynamic service interactions for value co-creation. The results are limited to the number of selected databases and papers reviewed in this study.

Originality/value

This paper offers a review of the body of knowledge and novel e-contract information management reference architecture, which is important to support the emerging trends of internet of services.


~~~~ N-Acetyl-P-glucosaminidase, P-glucuronidase and acid phosphatase activities were detected in cell-free extracts of Mycobacterium leprae (from armadillo liver). Extracts of bacteria which had been treated with 7-diazonaphthalene- 1,3-disulphonic acid to inactivate surface enzymes retained 3&45% of the activity of the glycosidases and 15% of the activity of the acid phosphatase. When intact bacteria were treated with 1 M-NaOH, the corresponding activity in the extracts was 4-9% for the glycosidases and 7% for the acid phosphatase. Inhibition studies with lactones and the use of concanavalin A-agarose showed differences between the glycosidases in extracts of M. leprae and those of armadillo liver. Inhibition studies with vanadate using extracts from NaOH-treated bacteria and extracts of armadillo liver showed differences between the acid phosphatases. Enzymes removed from the surface of M. leprae could have been adsorbed to the surface from host tissue (i.e. lysosomal enzymes) or they could have been extracellular enzymes or associated with the bacterial membrane.


Economists have analyzed incumbent responses to entry and exit by competitors as probative of competitive effects in several recent high profile mergers. This chapter argues that an incumbent's response to entry or exit may be probative of competitive effects of merger because these responses reveal whether premerger pricing is competitive and, therefore, whether the elimination of one competitive constraint through merger is likely to change competitive outcomes. This interpretation contrasts with the more common interpretation that simulates postmerger prices by equating the effects of entry and exit with merger. Such simulation may either overstate or understate the effects of merger, depending on the circumstances. This chapter also considers two types of issues that may arise in entry and exit event analysis. The first is in the interpretation of the estimated causal effects of entry and exit on incumbents. The second is in the estimation of these effects.


Male guppies use different methods to attract mates. Some, involve the swinging of a guppies sexual organs, others, however, include biting towards a female guppy (Magellan et al.2005). Some guppies are bigger and brighter, while, some guppies are not. A guppy with a bigger and brighter tail might be able to reproduce more, but might also be seen by more predators. According to the handicap hypothesis, bigger and brighter colored guppies, results in a handicap, which displays the guppy's genetic quality as well as its ability to survive (French 2015). Our hypothesis states, a male guppy will be more attracted to a female guppy with a bigger and brighter tail because it expresses the female's ability to survive. Our tests are designed to see what traits a female guppy should have for a male guppy to be interested in them. We are testing this experiment in a 38 liter tank while trying to remove as many variables as possible to prevent the fish from becoming scared or being distracted. We determined, based on our data, that our hypothesis was correct. Male guppies are more attracted to the female model fish with a bigger and brighter caudal fin.


A 47-year-old healthy Indonesian gentleman, presented with blurring of vision on the left eye associated with pain and redness after history of foreign body entering the eye. A general practitioner prescribed him some eye drops; however, his symptoms worsened. A corneal laceration wound measuring 0.5 x 3.5mm with a large stromal abscess measuring 9.0 x 5.0mm with flat anterior chamber was seen on the left eye. Emergency corneal T&S revealed a large descemetocele and cyanoacrylate corneal glue was applied on the area. C&S showed Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Patient was subsequently undergone penetrating keratoplasty as a definitive measure. This case highlights the rapid progression of pseudomonas keratitis, presented with a large descemetocele, which can be mistaken as an infected corneal laceration wound. Corneal cyanoacrylate glueing together with corneal suturing is a viable temporary method for large descemetoceles awaiting definitive surgery.