Human urinary C-peptide immunoreactivity (CPR) was measured by a double-antibody radioimmunoassay using synthetic human C-peptide. Urine CPR was stable as long as one year, if stored frozen. Urine CPR was eluted by gel filtration as a single peak in the region that corresponded to 125I-labeled C-peptide. Even in a patient with insulin antibody whose serum contained a CPR fraction with higher molecular weight, urine CPR was eluted in its expected region. Normal subjects excreted 81 ± 36 μg. CPR per day. Urine CPR excretion was very low in juvenile-onset diabetics, variable in adult-onset diabetics and liver disease patients, and increased in patients on corticosteroid treatment. Diurnal changes and a 50-gm. glucose tolerance test revealed that urine CPR excretion rate increased in parallel with plasma CPR levels. The responses of diabetic patients were smaller and more sluggish. Urine CPR excretion tended to be decreased in patients with renal diseases and extremely low in those on regular hemodialysis. CPR was positively correlated with serum creatinine. Urine CPR was not increased in patients with marked β2-microglobulin excretion. Highly significant correlations were observed between 24-hour urine CPR values and fasting plasma CPR or summed CPR after glucose load. Thus, urine CPR seems to provide a good means to assess B-cell function, and it is particularly suitable to monitor B-cell function continuously or when multiple blood samplings are not practical. Continuous measurement of daily urine CPR in diabetic patients on glibenclamide treatment revealed that improvement of blood sugar control could occur without preceding increases in total daily B-cell secretion.


ABSTRACT Introduction: Osteoporosis is a skeletal disorder characterized by loss of bone mass and strength affecting up to 30–50% of postmenopausal women worldwide. Current therapeutic options include antiresorptives such as aminobisphosphonates or denosumab and osteoanabolic compounds such as teriparatide. Areas covered: In this review, the authors summarize the clinical development, safety and efficacy profile of abaloparatide, a new osteoanabolic agent recently marketed in the US for the treatment of postmenopausal osteoporosis in women who are at high risk for fracture or who fail antiresorptive therapy. Expert opinion: Abaloparatide is a 1-34 PTH related peptide-like molecule that has been modified in order to potentiate the osteoanabolic effect. In its pivotal phase 3 trial in postmenopausal women with osteoporosis, subcutaneous abaloparatide 80 mcg/day reduced the risk of vertebral, nonvertebral, major osteoporotic, and clinical fractures compared with placebo and reduced the risk of major osteoporotic fractures compared with teriparatide. These results, together with a reduced prevalence of hypercalcemia and a lower cost of the marketed compound, point toward improved cost effectiveness with abaloparatide versus teriparatide. However, some concerns have been raised due to a somewhat higher occurrence of adverse effects (particularly with palpitations and increased heart rate) or the resultant discontinuation due to these adverse effects when compared to teriparatide.


Audience aesthetics and responses to popular culture genres which were once considered low brow have now long occupied the interests of the academy. This is a point to be taken seriously especially within children's literature circles, where reading and reception is often generalised about under the theoretical umbrella of 'the reader' and 'the spectator' who is 'drawn' into a range of largely unproven pathways by the text. This article explores youthful perceptions of real-life, close relationships, the projection of these relationships onto those seen in the media text and the resulting mediation of relationship ideals, desires and wishes. Analysing data from fieldwork with teen audiences of the Harry Potter series, this article argues that there is more to the mediation of relationships than the undoubtedly rich discussions of the media bringing people together at the moment of reception/use, whether online or offline. The findings presented in the article reveal the intricate and often perplexing ways in which children continue to introspect long after the act of reception, drawing parallels between relationships in their own lives and those they read about or view. The article draws attention to the introspective depth with which children use screen/text relationships as raw material to ponder emotional questions, ones, for instance, on love, hate, detachment, attachment and friendship, and the many ways the media mediate real-life relationships not by setting unreachable ideals to emulate but by offering interpretive pathways.


The nonlinear stability of cylindrically and spherically expanding detonation waves is investigated using numerical simulations for both directly (blast) initiated detonations and cases where the simulations are initialized by placing quasi-steady solutions corresponding to different initial shock radii onto the grid. First, high-resolution one-dimensional (axially or radially symmetric) simulations of pulsating detonations are performed. Emphasis is on comparing with the predictions of a recent one-dimensional linear stability analysis of weakly curved detonation waves. The simulations show that, in agreement with the linear analysis, increasing curvature has a rapid destabilizing effect on detonation waves. The initial size and growth rate of the pulsation amplitude decreases as the radius where the detonation first forms increases. The pulsations may reach a saturated nonlinear behaviour as the amplitude grows, such that the subsequent evolution is independent of the initial conditions. As the wave expands outwards towards higher (and hence more stable) radii, the nature of the saturated nonlinear dynamics evolves to that of more stable behaviour (e.g. the amplitude of the saturated nonlinear oscillation decreases, or for sufficiently unstable cases, the oscillations evolve from multi-mode to period-doubled to limit-cycle-type behaviour). For parameter regimes where the planar detonation is stable, the linear stability prediction of the neutrally stable curvature gives a good prediction of the location of the maximum amplitude (provided the stability boundary is reached before the oscillations saturate) and of the critical radius of formation above which no oscillations are seen. The linear analysis also predicts very well the dependence of the period on the radius, even in the saturated nonlinear regimes. Secondly, preliminary two-dimensional numerical simulations of expanding cellular detonations are performed, but it is shown that resolved and accurate calculations of the cellular dynamics are currently computationally prohibitive, even with a dynamically adaptive numerical scheme.


This article uses archive documents to consider the management of Orthodox priests serving in the Russian Navy in the 18 th century. The author describes the duties of the Holy Synod, bishops' administrations, and the Admiralty and naval ship commanders. Special attention is paid to ober-hieromonks and commanding hieromonks of the Navy. The author studies their responsibilities in different locations and presents new biographical information.


Abstract This paper is derived from an address at an Illinois agricultural conference an the specified topic, "Are weather patterns changing?" It examines three contrasting perspectives on the weather and climate of the recent past and immediate future evident in the contemporary literature. One standpoint has interpreted recent weather extremes and climatic fluctuations as evidence that the earth is undergoing a larger-scale climatic change towards a cooler and more variable regime, while an alternative view considers these extremes and fluctuations to be part of normal climate. The third perspective results from the recent pronounced increase in atmospheric CO2, which may induce a warm climate change. The request to provide this address offered the additional opportunity of drawing agriculturalists' attention to the research their scientists, economists, and sociologists must perform before the adverse socioeconomic effects of weather and climate variability can he minimized. It was also stressed, howev...


field-test methods were the FitCheck headphone (FCH) method, FitCheck in sound field (FCSF) method, and bone-conduction loudness balance (BCLB) method, all of which can be administered in small single-person audiometric booths such as are commonly found in industry. Twenty normal-hearing and audiometrically competent subjects naive to hearing protector use were tested with the laboratory and the three field-test methods in a repeatedmeasures design. Repeated-measures models with structured covariance matrices were used to analyze the data. Significant effects were found for method, frequency, and first-order frequency-by-gender and frequency-by-method interactions. These effects and interactions were expected given the different psychophysical tasks. The FCSF and BCLB methods provided attenuations that were not significantly different from those found with Method B. Although the attenuations measured for the FCH method were statistically different (greater) than the attenuations from the other methods, the differences were within the magnitude of acceptable test-retest audiometric variability. The results suggest that the FCH and FCSF methods were both feasible and reliable methods for field testing. The FCH method is limited to testing earplugs, and the FCSF requires additional equipment to outfit the test booth, but could be used for testing all types of protectors.


---Databases contains very large datasets, where various duplicate records are present. The duplicate records occur when data entries are stored in a uniform manner in the database, resolving the structural heterogeneity problem. Detection of duplicate records are difficult to find and it take more execution time. In this literature survey papers various techniques used to find duplicate records in database but there are some issues in this techniques. To address this Progressive algorithms has been proposed for that significantly increases the efficiency of finding duplicates if the execution time is limited and improve the quality of records. Keywords---Duplicate record detection,Sorted Neighborhood method, Blocking, Entity resolution.


A fast computational algorithm is presented for the analysis of multilayered nanolithography masks. The technique used is an exact field-theoretical approach which can model the diffraction effects in subwavelength propagation regimes. The field scattered by the mask pattern is obtained in two steps. First, a surface impedance generating operator (SIGO) that relates the tangential electric field on the boundary of each etched area to its equivalent surface electric current is computed. Second, the exterior problem is formulated based on the equivalence theorem in electromagnetics and is combined with the SIGO model. These two steps may be executed in parallel, making the lithography simulation fast and numerically efficient. For an arbitrary 2D mask illuminated by a TMy-polarized incident wave, the required Green's functions are obtained. The Green's function of the interior problem is calculated directly in the spatial domain while the complex images method is used for computing the Green's functions of the exterior multilayer problem. Based on this forward modeling procedure, a parameter sweep is performed and a binary mask pattern under normal incident coherent illumination is analyzed.


Instructional videos are an important resource to learn procedural tasks from human demonstrations. However, the instruction steps in such videos are typically short and sparse, with most of the video being irrelevant to the procedure. This motivates the need to temporally localize the instruction steps in such videos, i.e. the task called key-step localization. Traditional methods for key-step localization require video-level human annotations and thus do not scale to large datasets. In this work, we tackle the problem with no human supervision and introduce StepFormer, a self-supervised model that discovers and localizes instruction steps in a video. StepFormer is a transformer decoder that attends to the video with learnable queries, and produces a sequence of slots capturing the key-steps in the video. We train our system on a large dataset of instructional videos, using their automatically-generated subtitles as the only source of supervision. In particular, we supervise our system with a sequence of text narrations using an order-aware loss function that filters out irrelevant phrases. We show that our model outperforms all previous unsupervised and weakly-supervised approaches on step detection and localization by a large margin on three challenging benchmarks. Moreover, our model demonstrates an emergent property to solve zero-shot multi-step localization and outperforms all relevant baselines at this task.


A phenomenographic study of students' experience of oral presentations in an open learning theology programme constituted three contrasting conceptions of oral presentations—as transmission of ideas; as a test of students' understanding of what they were studying; and as a position to be argued. Each of these conceptions represented a combination of related aspects of students' experience, namely, their awareness of the audience and their interaction with that audience, how they perceived the nature of theology, affective factors, and how they compared the oral presentation format with that of written assignments. The conception of the presentation as a position to be argued was associated with a particularly powerful student learning experience, with students describing the oral presentation as being more demanding than the written assignments, more personal, requiring deeper understanding, and leading to better learning. The study draws our attention to the various ways in which students may perceive a single form of academic task and their need to develop their understanding of assessment formats.


SMART, the acronym of scalable media adaptation and robust transport, is a suite of compression and transmission technologies for efficient, scalable, adaptive, and robust video streaming over the best-effort Internet. It consists of two indispensable parts: SMART video coding and SMART video streaming. The SMART video coding part is an efficient DCT-based universal fine granularity scalable coding scheme. Since the SMART video coding scheme adopts multiple-loop prediction and drifting reduction techniques at the macroblock level, it can achieve high coding efficiency at a wide range of bit rates. More importantly, it provides all sorts of scalabilities, that is, quality, temporal, spatial, and complexity scalabilities, in order to accommodate heterogeneous time-variant networks and different devices. The SMART video streaming part is a transport scheme that fully takes advantages of the special features of the scalable bit streams. An accurate bandwidth estimation method is first discussed as the prerequisite of network adaptation. Then, flexible error resilience technique and unequal error protection strategy are investigated to enhance the robustness of streaming SMART bit stream. The SMART system shows excellent performances with regard to high coding efficiency, flexible channel bandwidth adaptation, smooth playback, and superior error robustness in static and dynamic experiments.


Delegated Proof-of-Stake (DPoS) is an efficient, decentralized, and flexible consensus framework available in the blockchain industry. However, applying DPoS to the decentralized Internet of Things (IoT) applications is quite challenging due to the nature of IoT systems such as large-scale deployments and huge amount of data. To address the unique challenge for IoT based blockchain applications, we present Roll-DPoS, a randomized delegated proof of stake algorithm. Roll-DPoS inherits all the advantages of the original DPoS consensus framework and further enhances its capability in terms of decentralization as well as extensibility to complex blockchain architectures. A number of modern cryptographic techniques have been utilized to optimize the consensus process with respect to the computational and communication overhead.


Negative peer attitudes are generally recognised as being a major barrier to full social inclusion at school for children and youth with disabilities. The present study examined the attitudes of 1,872 grade nine high school students in Ontario, Canada toward their peers with disabilities. A bioecological perspective and a structural equation modeling approach were adopted to investigate how various aspects of school culture and student interpersonal factors influenced attitudes. The majority of students (61%) held attitudes toward peers with disabilities that ranged from slightly above neutral to very positive. However, a substantial number (21%) held slightly below neutral to very negative attitudes. Positive student relationships at the school level and a school goal task structure that promoted learning and understanding for all students, rather than social comparison and competition among students, were two aspects of school culture that had both direct associations with positive attitudes and indirect associations through student interpersonal factors. Teacher and student relationships at the school level was an aspect of school culture that had an indirect association with positive attitudes via interpersonal support from teachers. Results support the development of ecologically based programs aimed at promoting aspects of school culture that contribute to positive attitudes of students toward their peers with disabilities.


Background: For better perception of adolescent overweight and obesity as a global public health problem, systematic collection of baseline data is urgently needed in India. Objective: A community-based study was undertaken for better perception of the prevalence and correlates of obesity in an adolescent urban community in Katihar, Bihar. Materials and Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted among urban adolescents in the eastern part of India to find out prevalence of overweight and obesity and sociodemographic correlates by interview technique followed by clinical examination with ethical consideration. Results: Out of 400 adolescent study participants, 21% were overweight or obese. The study showed that there was a significant association between less consumption of vegetable foods, fruits, meals cooked outside the home, alcohol consumption, yoga practice, socioeconomic status, and the occurrence of overweight/obesity in the adolescents. Conclusions: We attempted to find out the prevalence and risk correlates of overweight and obesity among adolescents and found it quite alarming compared to developed countries. The urban underserved population in India has difficulty to access quality healthcare and not conscious enough to seek healthcare until critically ill. Community-based studies are required to highlight the problem of obesity among urban adolescents by a comprehensive approach.


A statistical model is proposed for estimating the chromatic dispersion in the passband of a filter using an arrayed waveguide grating (AWG) with random phase errors. The model is derived without assuming the independence of random errors and can be applied to AWGs with frequency-dependent array amplitude coefficients as well as conventional AWGs. The average and variance of the chromatic dispersion in the passband can be calculated by using simple expressions without random computation once the standard deviation and correlation of random phase errors are given. The behavior of the chromatic dispersion in a synchronized-router-based flat-passband filter consisting of a multiple-input AWG and cascaded Mach-Zehnder interferometers (MZIs) was investigated. The standard deviation of the chromatic dispersion monotonically increases with the standard deviation of random phase errors, and has a distinctive dependence on frequency. The average and standard deviation of the chromatic dispersion in the passband obtained by the model are in good agreement with those obtained by random simulation for both a synchronized-router-based flat-passband filter and conventional AWGs.


Greening the Budget regards the fundamental cause of environmental degradation as government and market failure and proposes the use of budgets as an instrument of environmental policy to rectify this problem. The book focuses on the elements of the public budget which currently affect the environment and explores the scope for greening both revenue and expenditure through specific measures.


During a 34-month period, 370 Medtronic-Hall valves were implanted into 310 patients. Twenty-four percent of patients had additional operative procedures. Hospital mortality was 7% and late mortality to date is 3%. No deaths were due to thromboembolic complications or mechanical failure of the valve. The overall embolic rate was 2.5 per 100 patient years. For mitral valve replacement, the embolic rate was 3.5 per 100 patient years. Patients with isolated mitral valve replacement were subjected to detailed clinical and echocardiographic assessment. Eighty-nine percent of patients with 29 or 31 mm mitral prostheses improved one NYHA class or more and 33% improved 2 classes or more. For the 25 mm mitral prostheses, the figures were 91% and 38% respectively. The peak rate of increase of left ventricular dimension in diastole (dD/dt) was measured echocardiographically in subjects with normal native mitral valves and in patients with 29 or 31 mm Medtronic-Hall valves, Björk-Shiley valves and Starr-Edwards valves. Peak dD/dt in the native valves was 15.8 +/- 0.8, in Medtronic-Hall valves 13.9 +/- 0.8, in Björk-Shiley 11.6 +/- 1.0 and in Starr-Edwards 9.5 +/- 0.6. The Björk-Shiley and Starr-Edwards valves differed significantly from normal (p less than 0.05 and less than 0.001 respectively) but there was no significant difference between the Medtronic-Hall valves and the native ones. We conclude that the Medtronic Hall valve is a safe and hemodynamically effective valve in the mitral position.


ABSTRACT Disseminated toxoplasmosis in the central nervous system (CNS) is often accompanied by a lethal outcome. Studies with murine models of infection have focused on the role of systemic immunity in control of toxoplasmic encephalitis, while knowledge remains limited on the contributions of resident cells with immune functions in the CNS. In this study, the role of glial cells was addressed in the setting of recrudescent Toxoplasma infection in mice. Activated astrocytes and microglia were observed in the close vicinity of foci with replicating parasites in situ in the brain parenchyma. Toxoplasma gondii tachyzoites were allowed to infect primary microglia and astrocytes in vitro. Microglia were permissive to parasite replication, and infected microglia readily transmigrated across transwell membranes and cell monolayers. Thus, infected microglia, but not astrocytes, exhibited a hypermotility phenotype reminiscent of that recently described for infected dendritic cells. In contrast to gamma interferon-activated microglia, Toxoplasma-infected microglia did not upregulate major histocompatibility complex (MHC) class II molecules and the costimulatory molecule CD86. Yet Toxoplasma-infected microglia and astrocytes exhibited increased sensitivity to T cell-mediated killing, leading to rapid parasite transfer to effector T cells in vitro. We hypothesize that glial cells and T cells, besides their role in triggering antiparasite immunity, may also act as "Trojan horses," paradoxically facilitating dissemination of Toxoplasma within the CNS. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first report of migratory activation of a resident CNS cell by an intracellular parasite.


Understanding of short-term synaptic depression (STSD) and other forms of synaptic plasticity is a topical problem in neuroscience. Here we study the role of STSD in the formation of complex patterns of brain rhythms. We use a cortical circuit model of neural networks composed of irregular spiking excitatory and inhibitory neurons having type 1 and 2 excitability and stochastic dynamics. In the model, neurons form a sparsely connected network and their spontaneous activity is driven by random spikes representing synaptic noise. Using simulations and analytical calculations, we found that if the STSD is absent, the neural network shows either asynchronous behavior or regular network oscillations depending on the noise level. In networks with STSD, changing parameters of synaptic plasticity and the noise level, we observed transitions to complex patters of collective activity: mixed-mode and spindle oscillations, bursts of collective activity, and chaotic behaviour. Interestingly, these patterns are stable in a certain range of the parameters and separated by critical boundaries. Thus, the parameters of synaptic plasticity can play a role of control parameters or switchers between different network states. However, changes of the parameters caused by a disease may lead to dramatic impairment of ongoing neural activity. We analyze the chaotic neural activity by use of the 0-1 test for chaos (Gottwald, G. & Melbourne, I., 2004) and show that it has a collective nature.


Purpose: To compare the performance of external and internal surrogates for lungtumor tracking. Method and Materials: 5 healthy volunteers underwent a session of a single sagittal‐slice cine‐MRI with image acquisition frequency of 4Hz. A sagittal slice with a visible vascular structure was selected for imaging. The slice contained the target (vascular structure) and the surrogates (diaphragm, abdomen surface, and chest wall). Volunteers were asked to breathe under 4 different breathing conditions during the MRI session, each one of 5‐minute duration: 1) free breathing; 2) normal inspiration and elongated expiration; 3) irregular breathing; 4) regular inhale through the nose and impeded exhale through the mouth. Target's location was manually identified in all the frames, and the motions of diaphragm, abdomen, and chest wall were characterized using principal component analysis of a region of interest containing them. The correlation between the motion of the different surrogates (diaphragm, chest wall, abdomen) and the target motion was calculated and compared. Artificial neural network was used to estimate the error of using the different surrogates to obtain target motion. Performance of each surrogate has been evaluated in terms of the error at 95% confidence level e95. Results: Diaphragm is the surrogate that correlates best with target motion, even during irregular breathing patterns. The correlation of the abdomen surface with target motion is generally superior to that one obtained with the chest wall, except during some intervals in irregular breathing patterns. Diaphragm led to e95 of up to 1.4 pixels during regular breathing, and as large as 11 pixels during irregular breathing. Using abdomen and chest wall together improves individual tracking results, but does not achieve the performance of the diaphragm. Conclusion: Internal surrogates perform better than external surrogates. A combination of internal and external surrogates will be further investigated.


Gastrointestinal helminths are a major constraint to small ruminants in extensive husbandry systems of tropical regions. Yet, unavailability, high prices, side effects, and development of parasite resistance often limit the use of synthetic anthelmintics. Traditional medicinal plants might be an effective low-cost alternative. Therefore the in vitro anthelmintic activity of leaf extracts of the ligneous plants Capparis decidua , Salsola foetida , Suaeda fruticosa , Haloxylon salicornicum , and Haloxylon recurvum from Cholistan, Pakistan, was investigated against adult worms of Haemonchus contortus , Trichuris ovis , and Paramphistomum cervi . Various concentrations (from 7.8 to 500 mg dry matter ml^(−1)) of three extracts (aqueous, methanol, and aqueous-methanol) of each plant were tested at different time intervals for their anthelmintic activity via adult motility assay. Plant species (p<=0.01), extract type (p<=0.001), parasite species (p<=0.001), extract concentration (p<=0.001), time of exposure (p<=0.001) and their interactions (p<=0.001) affected the number of immobile or dead helminths. The 50% lethal concentration (LC_(50)) values indicated that the methanol and aqueous-methanol extracts of C. decidua , H. recurvum , and H. salicornicum as well as the methanol extract of S. fruticosa have the potential to be developed into plant-based remedies against the studied helminths. Further studies are needed to investigate the in vivo anthelmintic activity of these extracts, in order to develop effective, cheap and locally available anthelmintics for pastoralists in Cholistan and neighbouring desert regions.


The United States is the largest producer of goods and services in the world. Rainfall, surface water supplies, and groundwater aquifers represent a fundamental input to economic production. Despite the importance of water resources to economic activity, we do not have consistent information on water use for specific locations and economic sectors. A national, spatially detailed database of water use by sector would provide insight into U.S. utilization and dependence on water resources for economic production. To this end, we calculate the water footprint of over 500 food, energy, mining, services, and manufacturing industries and goods produced in the United States. To do this, we employ a data intensive approach that integrates water footprint and input‐output techniques into a novel methodological framework. This approach enables us to present the most detailed and comprehensive water footprint analysis of any country to date. This study broadly contributes to our understanding of water in the U.S. economy, enables supply chain managers to assess direct and indirect water dependencies, and provides opportunities to reduce water use through benchmarking. In fact, we find that 94% of U.S. industries could reduce their total water footprint more by sourcing from more water‐efficient suppliers in their supply chain than they could by converting their own operations to be more water‐efficient.


A stability analysis based on model calculations of the grand potential finds that the transition from hexagonal incommensurate to commensurate monolayer solid of xenon/graphite is continuous with increasing pressure, in agreement with experimental observations. An atomic-scale interaction model gives an internally consistent account of the thermal expansion of the solid at the two-dimensional sublimation curve and of the chemical potential increase for isothermal compression from monolayer condensation to the commensurate solid. An estimate is given for the corrugation energy of xenon/graphite.


Practice education is crucial to the current provision and future development of health and social care professional education programmes, although only in recent years has this been fully recognised. Practice learning is central to preparing competent and confident health and social care professionals, able to work collaboratively in providing complex care in a constantly changing context. This book is, therefore, timely and will be invaluable to teachers and practitioners from all health and social care professions who are involved in developing and delivering practice-based interprofessional education. This is essentially a practical book, designed to inform and assist the reader to gain a better understanding of different professional education programmes; it highlights key issues as seen from the perspectives of the different professions. It also offers opportunities for professionals to reflect on how they might learn with each other and to be more creative in facilitating student learning. The emphasis is on prequalifying undergraduate programmes and the focus is on practice learning in community settings. The book offers comparative information about the education of health and social care professionals, providing a comprehensive overview of the way in which nine professions educate and prepare undergraduates for professional practice. It highlights areas of similarity and difference which will be useful to those struggling to bring together in some way, different professional programmes. It will help a better understanding of the complex issues around the structure, organisation, culture and values underpinning the education of each of the nine professions represented and which challenge integration and collaboration in both education and practice. The way the book is organised, the thematic approach and guidance for the reader makes it very user friendly. The first two chapters set out the context and rationale for the approaches used and the authors have provided an excellent and comprehensive introduction to the book and the virtual community which is used throughout. The profession-specific chapters follow a set format making it easier to compare and contrast the professional programmes. 'Derby Street', a virtual community in which the professions work, is used in each chapter to illustrate student practice learning. Some authors have used it more effectively than others, providing excellent examples of student activity and highlighting more explicitly the process of learning. Others focus more on the structure and content of student learning, with less focus on practice learning. All identify issues that have challenged the professions and which are often context dependent, but may also be a significant factor across all professions. As an illustrative device, Derby Street is one of the book's greatest strengths, enabling scenarios to be used which reflect real professional practice and demonstrating the potential for student learning in practice. The final chapter focuses on interprofessional learning and reflects the ongoing issues around interprofessional education which remain, despite the growing number of professions which require students to experience learning with other professions. Successful interprofessional learning models are identified, but the authors are cautious about the level of genuine integration into professional education in health and social care; nevertheless, the evidence base is growing as is the number of programmes where integration into mainstream professional education is well established.


The effects of some anesthetics on the molecular arrangement in multibilayer of brain white matter lipids (of low cholesterol content) were studied by observing the ESR spectra of a spin probe derivative of cholestane intercalated in the lipid multilayers. ESR spectra were simulated by a stochastic method, with explicit inclusion of the molecular order parameter and two correlation times. By this method some insight was gained into the arbitrary index or ordering commonly used in these systems. Tetracaine, promazine, chlorpromazine, pentobarbitone, and mepivacaine increased the degree of order in multibilayers containing 5% cholesterol, but did not induce the same high degree of order found at high concentrations of cholesterol. Increasing the concentration of anesthetics eventually produced disorder in the multilayers. The ordering effects of tetracaine and pentobarbitone were reversible. The ordering effect of tetracaine, but not that of pentobarbitone, was potentiated by calcium ions at a concentration (5 mM) which had no intrinisc ordering effect. Multilayers containing up to 5% cholesterol showed a very low degree of order at the molecular level, but above this concentration striking changes in the ESR spectra indicated that the lipid molecules were tending to arrange their long axes close to the normal to the plane of the films. Multilayers of higher cholesterol content showed almost perfect order. The response to cholesterol took place over a very small range of cholesterol concentration, suggestive of a cooperative response. Despite the very large change in order parameter, cholesterol induced no change in the rotational correlation time (mobility).


Cavitation is a vaporisation process that commonly happens in high pressure injector nozzles nowadays. It has been shown by previous studies that cavitation has a significant influence on the subsequent atomization process, the quality of which would in turn heavily affect the quality of combustion. With the coming of the ever increasingly restrictive emission standard, studies into cavitation phenomena has attracted rapidly increasing amount of interest from both the academic and the industrial circle. However, due to the inheritant difficulties, cavitation still render itself a process that is hard to be quantified with the experimental facilities nowadays. While many of the commercial softwares, e.g. Ansys, STAR-CCM+, have integrated cavitation modules into their packages, the variety of models is still in a rapidly expanding phase. The open source CFD package OpenFOAM (Open Field Operation and Manipultation) has gone through a long developing stage and has been proved to be a highly matured and convenient CFD tool for many engieering applications. Although a great number of fundamental applications have been developed, the development of solvers and libraries which caters the need of specific physical problems remain to be an ongoing task. In this work, focus has been put specifically on the development of cavitation modeling. Several readily available cavitation models have been used, based on which, a more complicated stochastic ordinary differential equation (ODE) solver has been developed to facilitate a Monte-Carlo type treatment to the non-linear terms involved in the cavitation model.


Mobile apps enable ad networks to collect and track users. App developers are given "configurations" on these platforms to limit data collection and adhere to privacy regulations; however, the prevalence of apps that violate privacy regulations because of third parties, including ad networks, begs the question of how developers work through these configurations and how easy they are to utilize. We study privacy regulations-related interfaces on three widely used ad networks using two empirical studies, a systematic review and think-aloud sessions with eleven developers, to shed light on how ad networks present privacy regulations and how usable the provided configurations are for developers. We find that information about privacy regulations is scattered in several pages, buried under multiple layers, and uses terms and language developers do not understand. While ad networks put the burden of complying with the regulations on developers, our participants, on the other hand, see ad networks responsible for ensuring compliance with regulations. To assist developers in building privacy regulations-compliant apps, we suggest dedicating a section to privacy, offering easily accessible configurations (both in graphical and code level), building testing systems for privacy regulations, and creating multimedia materials such as videos to promote privacy values in the ad networks' documentation.


Local organic food supply chain partners face uncertainties such as poor collaboration, communication and information sharing that cannot be reduced through the application of traditional, quantitative supply chain design and management techniques. Such techniques are known to improve supply chain coordination and efficiency, but they do not adequately consider major aspects of local organic food supply chains such as ethics, sustainability and human values that influence decision making and thus, supply chain activities. Supply chain design and management approaches suitable to small-scale, local organic food enterprises are lacking and need to be developed.
The aim of this paper is to suggest Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) as a new and suitable approach to design and manage local organic food supply chains. We illustrate how SSM can be used to reduce uncertainties within local organic food supply chains based on a German case study within the organic cereal sector. This illustration serves to identify benefits of using SSM compared with ad hoc, pragmatic and less structured approaches. Organisation of thought, intervention and change, as well as action-oriented, meaningful and participatory decision making are the major benefits. SSM is a promising alternative to traditional supply chain design and management techniques, and an approach to enable long term collaboration, coordination and communication along local organic food supply chains.


The security of web services is nowadays one of the major concerns for Internet users. Web services may manage confidential information, monetary transactions, or even health-critical systems, such as those employed in public airports or hospitals. A key problem of web services is that they should work as expected even in the presence of malicious inputs. Unfortunately, with the increasing complexity of web services, this task becomes more and more challenging. In this paper we present SuStorID, a multiple classifier system which is able to model legitimate inputs towards web services, given a sample of web traffic. If anomalous inputs are detected, web services are protected according to a set of anomaly templates. Our experiments, performed on a production environment, highlight that our system can accurately detect web attacks and help security operators to protect their web services against known and unknown attacks.


This paper presents the development of a learning ecosystem using digital knowledge engineering through a MOOCs knowledge repository system. This system comprises four parts: (1) Stakeholders, including instructors and learners; (2) A digital knowledge engineering learning process that describes the roles of instructors and learners, learning activities, and instructional tools; (3) A MOOCs knowledge repository system, which is the software de-veloped to enhance digital entrepreneurs' competencies; and (4) Digital entrepreneurs' competencies, which describe learning outcomes using the digital knowledge engineering learning process. The suitability of the learning ecosystem was assessed by twelve experts possessing at least three years of related experience. They judged its suitability to be at the highest level. This study can be used to support further development of the MOOCs knowledge repository system assess digital entrepreneurs' competencies according to digital knowledge engineering learning process.


The development of the poultry industry in Albania is mainly based on the existence of intensive modern farms with huge capacities, which often are mixed with other forms. Colibacillosis is commonly displayed regardless of the type of breeding, delivering high mortality in poultry industry. The mechanisms with which pathogen enterobacters are able to cause the infection in poultry are not yet clear. The routine diagnose in the field, followed by isolation of E. coli and species of Salmonella genres in reference laboratories cannot lead in classification or full recognition of circulative strains in a territory, if it is not performed a differentiation among the present microorganisms in intensive farms and those in rural areas. In this study were isolated 1.496 strains of E. coli and 378 Salmonella spp. This study, presents distribution of poultry pathogenosity of E.coli and Salmonella spp., based on the usage of innovative diagnostic methods. Keywords—poultry, E.coli, Salmonella spp., Enterobacter


This paper has used the Arbitrage Theorem under binomial case to show that in a complete market with no transaction costs and no arbitrage, for any asset, the current spot price is a function of the risk-free interest rate, the future possible prices and their probabilities. These probabilities are the actual world probabilities, not the so-called risk-neutral probabilities. The paper also proves that for the levered firm, (i) under riskless debt, increasing the debt-equity ratio increases the variance of the rate of return on equity and has no effect on the rate of return on debt; and (ii) under risky debt, increasing the debt-equity ratio increases the variance of the rate of return on debt but does not affect the probability density function of the rate of return on equity. With the actual world probabilities, it can be shown that changes in the debt-equity ratio do not affect the expected rate of return on the equity of the levered firm. These findings refute the Modigliani-Miller second proposition that the expected rate of return on the equity of the levered firm increases in proportion to the debt-equity ratio. With the actual world probabilities, it is also found that increasing the variance of the underlying asset price may either increase or decrease the option prices.


It is well established that topological insulators sustain Dirac fermion surface states as a consequence of band inversion in the bulk. These states have a helical spin polarization and a linear dispersion with large Fermi velocity. In this article we report on a set of experimental observations indicating the existence of massive surface states. These states are confined at the interface and dominate equilibrium and transport properties at high energy and/or high electric field. By monitoring the AC admittance of HgTe topological insulator field-effect capacitors, we access the compressibility and conductivity of surface states in a broad range of energy and electric fields. The Dirac surface states are characterized by a compressibility minimum, a linear energy dependence and a high mobility persisting up to energies much larger than the transport bandgap of the bulk. New features are revealed at high energies with signatures such as conductance peaks, compressibility bumps, a strong charge metastability and a Hall resistance anomaly. These features point to the existence of excited massive surface states, responsible for a strong intersubband scattering with the Dirac states and the nucleation of metastable bulk carriers. The spectrum of excited states agrees with predictions of a phenomenological model of the topological-trivial semiconductor interface. The model accounts for the finite interface depth and the effect of electric fields. The existence of excited topological states is essential for the understanding of topological phases and opens a route for engineering and exploiting topological resources in quantum technology.


Over the last decade, IPv6 has established itself as the most mature network protocol for the future Internet. While its acceptance and deployment remained so far often limited to academic networks, its recent deployment in both core networks of operators (often for management purposes) and its availability to end customers of large ISPs demonstrates its deployment from the inside of the network leading to the edges. For many enterprises, the transition remains an issue today. This remains a tedious and error prone task for network administrators. In the context of the Cisco CCRI project, we aim at providing the necessary algorithms and tools to enable this transition to become automatic. In this report, we present the first outcome of this work, namely an analysis of the transition procedure and a model of target networks on which our automatic approach will be experimented. We also present a first version of a set of transition algorithms that will be refined through the study.


Co-trimoxazole is a less common cause of fixed drug eruption (FDE). The offending drug is usually sulfamethoxazole but reactions to trimethoprim have been reported. Fixed drug eruption is uncommon in children compared to adults as the drugs most commonly responsible are seldom or never used in children. We report four patients with FDE to co-trimoxazole, three of whom were children. All were given the offending drug for upper respiratory tract infections. Each of the patients had several episodes of FDE before the diagnosis was suspected. The patients, as well as the general practitioners, initially thought that the skin lesions were related to the infections rather than the drugs. One of the patients had FDE to trimethoprim and the intensity of his reaction appeared to be dose-related. As co-trimoxazole is being used more commonly, we would expect to see more FDE, even among the paediatric age group.


Trans TV as one of the private television station in Indonesia took part also enliven competition in seizing the hearts of viewers with a variety of programs from one to present them is the phenomenon Plus. An adult category shows a time slot late at night at around 24.00 this event broadcast on events or partially true story human life and various professions in an increasingly heterogeneous society today.
Impressions Plus phenomenon was trying to uncover a number of irregularities that occurred profession in the community, which is considered an honorable profession sometimes abused by individuals for their own interests. Issues raised tend leads to things that smelled of sex, promiscuity, the world or the world tonight sparkling which is becoming the trend for our society, especially community
living in urban areas, such as the phenomenon of college student who doubles as a chicken campus, plus massage parlors, or any other professional irregularities. Impressions seeks uncover the truth behind all of it by displaying one or some competent resource persons in accordance with the themes raised.
The purpose of this study was to determine the attitude of teenagers in particular members Karang Taruna "Works of Enchantment" Demangan Village Municipal Park District in Madison Plus Phenomena impressions on Trans TV. To answer the problem formulation approach used in this research is descriptive quantitative, with hopes of provide an objective picture of the respondents to the exposure response impressions Plus Phenomena in Trans TV.
Based on the results of research and discussion Based on the discussion we can conclude that the attitude of a member of Karang Taruna "Works of Enchantment" on the show Phenomenon Plus is positive results shown by Scale analysis, a score which ranges 360.57 located on the assessment criteria support / positive. These conclusions as well as answer formulation of the problem of how adolescent attitudes toward impressions Phenomenon Plus
on Trans TV, in other words the attitude of teenagers on the Youth "Work Enchantment" is The positive form of a positive attitude is a form of sympathy shown to the figures
appointed in the Phenomena Plus event on Trans TV. Another thing is the existence changes in respondents' feelings of figures raised in the show Phenomenon Plus Trans TV. While emotionally, the respondents are affected after seeing the show Plus Phenomena in Trans TV. Form a behavioral attitude shown by the support to the event Event Phenomena in Trans Plus TV.


The paper presents long-term results of conservative surgical treatment of 148 patients with renal cell carcinoma (RCC). Cancer-specific survival, local recurrence and distant metastases rates were estimated. Overall cancer-specific survival reached 91.8%. For patients with imperative indications this survival was 79.6%, for elective patients--98%. Recurrent RCC was observed in 10(6.8%) patients: imperative group--8(5.4%), elective group--2(1.3%). Distant metastases were detected in 7(4.7%) patients. The elective group had no metastases. General level of multifocality of sporadic renal cancer was 6.7%, for tumors < 4 cm--1.2%. The basic criterion of the decision on organ-saving operation is tumor size under 4 cm. The size of the primary tumor determines the level of local recurrences and distant metastases. To select the optimal group of patients, genetic markers of tumor multifocality should be identified.


As the nineteenth century progressed into the twentieth, novels about politically active women became increasingly common. Until now, however, no one has studied this body of writing as a distinct tradition in American literature. In "Romancing the Vote", Leslie Petty not only recovers this tradition but also examines how the fiction written about the women's rights and related movements contributed to the creation and continued vitality of those movements. Petty examines the novels as paradigms of feminist activism and reform communities and elucidates how they, whether wittingly or not, model ways to create similar communities in the real world. She demonstrates how the narratives provide insight into the hopes and anxieties surrounding some of the most important political movements in American history and how they encapsulate the movements' paradoxical blend of progressive and conservative ideologies. The major works discussed are Elizabeth Boynton Harbert's "Out of Her Sphere" (1871), Lillie Devereux Blake's "Fettered for Life" (1874), Henry James's "The Bostonians" (1886), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper's "Iola Leroy" (1892), Hamlin Garland's "A Spoil of Office" (1892), Marjorie Shuler's "One Pedestal - for Rent" (1917), Elizabeth Jordan's edited volume "The Sturdy Oak" (1917), and Oreola Williams Haskell's "Banner Bearers: Tales of the Suffrage Campaigns" (1920). Although these novels discredit many traditional notions about gender and inspire their readers to seek fairness and equality for many American women, they often simultaneously perpetuate discriminatory ideas about other marginalized groups. They not only privilege the experiences of white women but also rely on widespread anxieties about racial and ethnic minorities to demonstrate the need for gender reform. By elucidating tensions such as these between conventional and unconventional ideas about gender, race, and class, Petty shows how the fiction of this period helps to situate first-wave feminism within a larger historical and cultural context.


Theoretical background and the development of new techniques for the implementation of hybrid methods in online fast-transient stability assessment are presented. For evaluation of transient energy margin (TEM) along a trajectory, a transformed transient energy function (TEF) is defined. It is proved that along a postfault trajectory the transformed TEF is conserved. Based on the conservation principle and using techniques such as integration stopping criteria and location of the main potential energy peak, an improved pseudofault method for TEM evaluation is reported. These techniques have been tested on several test power systems with different system models. Results show that the proposed techniques are useful. An example shows the improvement of the techniques over the recently published hybrid method.


Egg quality traits and their repeatability estimates were studied using a flock of 179 divergently selected crossbred normal feather (F), naked neck (a) and frizzle feather (FF) chickens. The high body weight line birds had heavier egg weights with the frizzle individuals (HFF) recording the highest egg weight of 54.22g at 42 weeks. The frizzle birds in the low body weight line (LFF) also had the heaviest egg weight of 50.05g while the naked necks (La) had the lowest egg weight of 34.64g. Shell thickness was not significantly different in both body weight lines, while yolk index (YI) was highest in the high naked neck line (Ha; YI = 0.59). Haugh unit was generally high and above 90% in both lines. Repeatability estimates for egg weight were low to moderate and ranged from 0.22 in HF to 0.41 in HFF while estimates of repeatability for shell thickness and Haugh unit were higher in the heavy body weight lines when compared to their low weight line counterparts. The magnitude of repeatability estimates for these traits seem to indicate that improvement for them could be achieved more by enhancing their non genetic factors. Keywords: Egg quality traits, repeatability estimates, divergent body weights, crossbred indigenous chicken.


BACKGROUND
Transdermal alcohol monitoring is a noninvasive method that continuously gathers transdermal alcohol concentrations (TAC) in real time; thus, its use is becoming increasingly more common in alcohol research. In previous studies, we developed models that use TAC data to estimate peak breath alcohol concentration (BrAC) and standard units consumed when the rate of consumption was tightly controlled.

METHODS
Twenty-two healthy participants aged 21 to 52 who reported consuming alcohol on 1 to 4 days per week were recruited from the community. The final study sample included 11 men and 8 women. Both TAC and BrAC were monitored while each participant drank 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 beers in the laboratory on 5 separate days. In contrast to previous studies, a self-paced alcohol administration procedure was used.

RESULTS
While there was considerable variation in the times it took to consume each beer, key TAC parameters were not affected by pace of drinking. TAC data were then used in combination with the previously derived equations and estimated peak BrAC and standard units of alcohol consumed.

CONCLUSIONS
Transdermal alcohol monitoring can be used to reliably estimate peak BrAC and standard number of units consumed regardless of the rate of consumption, further demonstrating its usefulness in clinical research.


Abstract We study the transmission channels from central banks' quantitative easing programs via the banking sector when central banks start purchasing corporate bonds. We find evidence consistent with a "capital structure channel" of monetary policy. The announcement of central bank purchases reduces the bond yields of firms whose bonds are eligible for central bank purchases. These firms substitute bank term loans with bond debt, thereby relaxing banks' lending constraints: banks with low tier-1 ratios and high nonperforming loans increase lending to private (and profitable) firms, which experience a growth in investment. The credit reallocation increases banks' risk-taking in corporate credit.


This editorial introduction describes the aims and scope of the special issue of the ACM Transactions on Interactive Intelligent Systems on Behavior Understanding for Arts and Entertainment, which is being published in issues 2 and 3 of volume 5 of the journal. Here we offer a brief introduction to the use of behavior analysis for interactive systems that involve creativity in either the creator or the consumer of a work of art. We then characterize each of the five articles included in this first part of the special issue, which span a wide range of applications.


The fabrication and characterization of a field effect transistor using a radial core/shell structure based on ZnTe nanowires is reported here. The electronic and photoconductive performance of the devices is successfully controlled by tuning the shell to core ratios in the integrated devices. The ZnO shell around the ZnTe nanowire has a significant effect on the optical properties of the transistor, and the photo-to-dark current ratio, responsivity and photoconductive gain are greatly enhanced to 199, 196 and 8.12 × 104% respectively for the 17.5% shell/core ratio. The ability to control the core/shell ratio presented here is promising in device design for optoelectronic applications for covering a wide range of wavelengths.


Different computer programs used in the architectural design process serve different purposes. However, the number of computer programs used is increasing at a rate that designers find it difficult to adapt to. Accordingly, the possibility arises to use more than one computer program during the architectural design process, and it is important to make the correct choice of which ones are most appropriate to use. This is also true for undergraduate students of architecture, and hence a pilot study was made, which focused on the use of multi-software within the scope of the architectural design studio. The relationship between the students' use of multi-software and their attitude toward computer and technology was evaluated statistically, by means of Pearson product moment correlations. The results showed that the attitude of the students toward computers and technology influences how they use multi-software.


PURPOSE
To prospectively evaluate accuracy of gadolinium-enhanced three-dimensional (3D) magnetic resonance (MR) angiography with gadodiamide and gadopentetate dimeglumine (0.1 mmol/kg), with intraarterial DSA as reference standard, for imaging abdominal and iliac arterial stenoses.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
The study was approved by all institutional review boards; informed consent was obtained from each subject before procedures. Two hundred forty-seven subjects were included; 240 received either contrast agent and were available for safety analysis; 222 were available for accuracy analysis. Enhanced 3D MR angiography and DSA were performed; image data were evaluated in a double-blinded randomized study. Stenoses were classified as not relevant (<50% stenosis) or relevant (> or =50%). For detection of main stenosis, accuracy with enhanced 3D MR angiography compared with that with DSA was determined.

RESULTS
The difference in accuracy for imaging with gadodiamide and gadopentetate was 3.6%. Noninferiority was inferred because the lower bound of the exact two-sided 95% confidence interval was -10.1 and was above the noninferiority margin (-15%). Accuracy for detection of the main stenosis was low, 56.4% for gadodiamide and 52.8% for gadopentetate group. Subgroup analysis with exclusion of inferior mesenteric artery and internal iliac arteries and the most false-positive stenosis classifications yielded better results: 76.6% and 71.6%, respectively. Sensitivity, specificity, and negative and positive predictive values did not differ substantially between study groups. In the main analysis, values were 44%, 96%, 35%, and 97% for gadodiamide and 44%, 83%, 30%, and 90% for gadopentetate, respectively. In the subgroup analysis, values were 66%, 95%, 61%, and 96% for gadodiamide and 63%, 86%, 58%, and 88% for gadopentetate, respectively.

CONCLUSION
Noninferiority of gadodiamide versus gadopentetate was verified based on the primary end point, which was accuracy for detection of the main stenosis with enhanced 3D MR angiography compared with DSA.


This paper examines the significance of disability in Arab British novelist Selma Dabbagh's Out of It (2011). It underscores how disability engenders an identity transformation that Sabri Mujahed undergoes in the novel. The study highlights how disability triggers resistance strategies to the oppressive socio-political norms and occupying powers. The paper also draws attention to the psychological and socio-cultural impacts of disability on the life of Sabri Mujahed. Sabri turns his skills toward a great mission of writing the history of Palestinian resistance and exposing aggressive Israeli policies. The process of writing itself has a therapeutic effect that helps Sabri overcome his disability and channel his mental powers to a greater cause. Taking into consideration disability studies' tendency to provide a fresh approach to understand a disabled character's inner world, this paper employs disability studies as a theoretical and critical framework in light of which the novel is analyzed. The paper also foregrounds the socio-political, cultural and historical conditions and circumstances that Palestinians in Gaza experience and undergo. In this context, continuous Israeli military attacks, a stifling blockade and internal factional conflicts are some of the challenges that people in Gaza, including disabled Sabri, have to cope with on daily basis.


This study was performed to determine the contribution of the extrahepatic bile ducts to bile flow in the rhesus monkey. Bile flow from the two sides of the liver was divided. The major extrahepatic bile ducts remained connected to one side of the liver only. Bile flow, and the concentrations of [14C]erythritol, bicarbonate, bile acid, and bilirubin in bile samples from the two sides of the liver, in the fed state were measured and compared. An estimate of the net flow from the extrahepatic ducts was obtained from the [14C]-erythritol concentrations on the two sides of the liver and the bile flow rate on the side with the extrahepatic ducts. The [14C]erythritol bile-plasma ratio was significantly lower in bile collected from the side with the extrahepatic bile ducts, than in bile from the other side of the liver. About 10% of total hepatic bile flow originated in the extrahepatic bile ducts, in the fed state. The bicarbonate-[14C]erythritol concentration ratio was significantly higher in bile from the side with the extrahepatic bile ducts. Bicarbonate - bile acid, and bicarbonate-bilirubin concentration ratios were also significantly higher in bile from the side of the liver with the extrahepatic ducts. The extrahepatic bile ducts have a physiologically significant role in the secretion of bile water. Bicarbonate is secreted in association with water in the extrahepatic ducts.


In this paper, we introduce two simple quantum dynamics methods. One is based on the popular surface-hopping method, and the other is based on rescaling of the propagation on the bath ground-state potential surface. The first method is special, as it avoids specific feedback from the simulated quantum system to the bath and can be applied for precalculated classical trajectories. It is based on the equipartition theorem to determine if hops between different potential energy surfaces are allowed. By comparing with the formally exact Hierarchical Equations Of Motion approach for four model systems we find that the method generally approximates the quantum dynamics toward thermal equilibrium very well. The second method is based on rescaling of the nonadiabatic coupling and also neglect the effect of the state of the quantum system on the bath. By the nature of the approximations, they cannot reproduce the effect of bath relaxation following excitation. However, the methods are both computationally more tractable than the conventional fewest switches surface hopping, and we foresee that the methods will be powerful for simulations of quantum dynamics in systems with complex bath dynamics, where the system–bath coupling is not too strong compared to the thermal energy.


Wistar rats infected with Streptococcus pneumoniae (type III ATCC) rapidly develop an acute form of experimental lobar pneumonia (ELP) with death of 80-90% of the animals by 6 days after the infection. Prophylactic treatment of these animals with the novel immunomodulator Pidotimod, at the dose of 25 mg/kg bw, significantly increased their rate of survival as compared to the control group (50 vs. 90% respectively). Recovery from the infection appeared definitive since all the Pidotimod-treated survivors were alive and in good condition at the end of the observation period (45 days post infection). Prophylactic treatment with higher or lower doses of the drug was ineffective. Therapy with Pidotimod was not effective. This preliminary study suggests that Pidotimod may have contributed to activation of specific and non-specific immune effectors involved in the host response to S. pneumoniae infection.


I BELIEVE that it will be profitable to begin our discussion of adolescence with a few remarks about the Adolescent Unit at the Children9s Hospital in Boston: what it is and why it is. This Unit is a general medical clinic designed for the care and treatment of young people between the ages of 12 and 21. As there is often confusion in the minds of not only the physician but the laity as to whether this Adolescent Unit is a psychiatric clinic, I would like to stress that our Unit is a general clinic for all young people, whether their complaints be a backache, dysmenorrhea, acne, diabetes, seizures, or any other ailment which is either common or uncommon in adolescence. Our discussion will not be psychiatrically but rather psychologically oriented to this age group. It has not been our intention to create a new specialty, but rather to give special care to this somewhat neglected age group. In our Adolescent Unit we have pediatricians, internists, and general practitioners working side by side in a common effort to provide over-all medical care for these boys and girls. Young people deserve a clinic of their own just as do little children and adults. They need a place where they can tell their own story to their own doctor, and where their doctor can talk to them about what they should do to care for themselves. In addition to our primary function, which is to care for the adolescent and his or her ailment, the Unit also serves for the training of the physician in the care of these young people.


The study examined the impact of the societal perceptions of breast cancer among elderly women on both its care and prevention in south-eastern Nigeria. A representative sample of adult members of the population was drawn in three local government areas in Enugu State. The study drew its rationale from the recognition that the societal perceptions of the causes, nature and management of breast cancer can make a major difference in whether aged women in Nigeria afflicted by breast cancer survive or not. The data were collected using a multistage sampling technique that consisted of a questionnaire and in-depth interviews. It was found that there is a need for more awareness creation, sensitivity workshops and the committed involvement of social workers, counsellors and allied professionals in providing care and counselling for elderly women, as they are often perceived as lying beyond reproductive health ailments in popular discourse.


The private investigation industry in the United Kingdom has been challenged by dubious work practices arising from the activities of a number of private investigators undertaking work for The News of the World. The allegations of private investigators acting as a conduit for improper behaviour are not new; in Australia this assessment was borne out in the 1992 New South Wales Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) inquiry which found that investigators acted as the go-betweens in a 'massive illicit trade' in confidential information (Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC), 1992). The last study on private investigator's in Australia was undertaken by Prenzler (2001). In terms of public awareness the image of the private investigator remains a person of dubious character spying on domestic couples. Since the last study the private investigation industry has undergone significant changes in terms of licensing training, regulation and investigative services. These developments have not r...


Clathrin-coated vesicles from brain are primarily involved in synaptic vesicle recycling and are substrates for the constitutively expressed heat shock cognate hsc70 protein (uncoating ATPase). To investigate the regulation of clathrin coat turnover in other tissues the activity of hsc70 towards coated vesicles from other sources was examined. Concentrations of hsc70 which caused near-complete removal of clathrin from brain coated vesicles effected only partial uncoating of vesicles prepared from other tissues. The selective action of hsc70 could not be accounted for by tissue or species specificities of hsc70, but rather reflected differences in coat structure. Selective action was associated with two differences in the hsc70-dependent ATPase cycle. Firstly, uncoating of brain, but not placental vesicles, could occur under circumstances where ATP hydrolysis was prevented. Secondly, only brain coated vesicles could support multiple rounds of hsc70-dependent ATP hydrolysis. Implications of these findings for the mechanism of hsc70-dependent vesicle uncoating in non-neuronal cells and the organisation of the endocytic pathway in the axon are discussed.


Lignans are bioactive compounds that are especially abundant in the Norway spruce (Picea abies L. Karst.) knotwood. By combining a variety of chromatographic, spectroscopic and imaging techniques, we were able to quantify, qualify and localise the easily extractable lignans in the xylem tissue. The knotwood samples contained 15 different lignans according to the gas chromatography-mass spectrometry analysis. They comprised 16% of the knotwood dry weight and 82% of the acetone extract. The main lignans were found to be hydroxymatairesinols HMR1 and HMR2. Cryosectioned and resin-embedded ultrathin sections of the knotwood were analysed with scanning transmission X-ray microscopy (STXM). Cryosectioning was found to retain only lignan residues inside the cell lumina. In the resin-embedded samples, lignan was interpreted to be unevenly distributed inside the cell lumina, and partially confined in deposits which were either readily present in the lumina or formed when OsO4 used in staining reacted with the lignans. Furthermore, the multi-technique characterisation enabled us to obtain information on the chemical composition of the structural components of knotwood. A simple spectral analysis of the STXM data gave consistent results with the gas chromatographic methods about the relative amounts of cell wall components (lignin and polysaccharides). The STXM analysis also indicated that a torus of a bordered pit contained aromatic compounds, possibly lignin.


Information technology increasingly figures into the activities of health-care workers, patients, and their informal caregivers. The growing intersection of anthropology and health informatics is reviewed, a field dedicated to the science of using data, information, and knowledge to improve human health and the delivery of health-care services. Health informatics as a discipline wrestles with complex issues of information collection, classification, and presentation to patients and working clinical personnel. Anthropologists are well-suited as collaborators in this work. Topics of collaborative work include the construction of health and illness, patient-focused research, the organization and delivery of health-care services, the design and implementation of electronic health records, and ethics, power, and surveillance. The application of technology to social roles, practices, and power relations that is inherent in health informatics provides a rich source of empirical data to advance anthropological theory and methods.


With the rapid growth and extensive applications of the spatial dataset, itpsilas getting more important to solve how to find spatial knowledge automatically from spatial datasets. Spatial co-location patterns represent the subsets of features whose instances are frequently located together in geographic space. Itpsilas difficult to discovery co-location patterns because of the huge amount of data brought by the instances of spatial features. A large fraction of the computation time is devoted to generating the table instances of co-location patterns. The essence of co-location patterns discovery and three kinds of co-location patterns mining algorithms proposed in recent years are analyzed, and a new join-less approach for co-location patterns mining, which based on a data structure - CPI-tree (Co-location Pattern Instance Tree), is proposed. The CPI-tree materializes spatial neighbor relationships. All co-location table instances can be generated quickly with a CPI-tree. This paper proves the correctness and completeness of the new approach. Finally, an experimental evaluation using synthetic datasets and a real world dataset shows that the algorithm is computationally more efficient than the join-less algorithm.


The usually negative relationship between school bonds and juvenile delinquency implies that adolescents with strong ties to school are less likely to engage in delinquency. Still, it is not always clear whether the impact of school bonds on delinquency is direct or mediated by other, more proximate causes. This article examines the dynamic interrelations between social bonds and the acceptance of legal norms over the course of adolescence. Results reveal that school bonds directly affect the acceptance of legal norms, but not delinquency. However, norms are directly and reciprocally related to delinquency. Therefore, school bonds can be considered an indirect preventive factor for delinquent behavior. Moreover, the closely related school bond and norm dimensions share a common developmental pattern during adolescence.


»Wertschöpfung, Erwerbstätigkeit und Investitionen in der Industrie Ostdeutschlands, 1950-2000: Daten, Methoden, Vergleiche. Eine Einleitung«. Industry was the most important economic sector in the GDR. Of all the countries within the Eastern Bloc (Comecon), only the USSR achieved higher added value per capita than the GDR's industrial sector. The quantitative description of industrial output in the GDR nevertheless continues to be characterized by significant data gaps and a lack of comparable, long-term time series for important performance and expenditure values calculated in accordance with contemporary statistical standards. This HSR Focus presents new calculations for added value, employment and capital expenditures which close these gaps at both an overall industrial level and branch level between 1950 and 1989. The calculations take the form of backward projections carried out in accordance with the current conceptual and methodological principles of national accounting (ESA95). The incorporation of current data for the new German federal states from 1991 onwards into the data base facilitates the extension of the time horizon for the time series. This yields a comparable reflection of the development of economic indicators for the industrial sector in Eastern Germany over a 50-year period (1950-2000). The time series determined pave the way for a new, fact-based assessment of the real results achieved by the GDR economy. The presentation of the data assessed is accompanied by a thorough description of the methods and sources used. This paper serves as an outline for the entire HSR Focus.


Low oxygen tension, or hypoxia, is a common occurrence in solid tumors. Hypoxia is a master regulator of cellular phenotype, and is associated with increased tumor invasion and aggressiveness as well as adverse patient prognosis. Oxygen has recently been linked with the selective movement of different cancer cell types in three-dimensional invasion assays utilizing paper-based scaffolds. It has remained unclear, however, if cells in these paper-based invasion assays are experiencing hypoxia. In this manuscript, we adapted cell-based methods to measure oxygen tension in our 3D invasion assays: the adduction of pimonidazole to free thiols in the cell, indicative of a reducing environment; the localization of hypoxia inducible factors to the nucleus; and the expression of hypoxia-regulated gene products. We utilized each method to compare the oxygen tension in different locations of the paper-based invasion stacks and found an oxygen gradient is indeed forming. Specifically, we found that the extent of pimonidazole binding, as well as the levels and activities of nucleus-localized HIF-α proteins, increase as the distance between the cells and the source of fresh medium increases. These complementary cell-based readouts not only confirm the selective invasion we observe is due to an oxygen gradient, they also show the gradient is temporal in nature and evolves with increasing culture period.


India's nuclear programme has suffered from a shortage of uranium. As elsewhere in the world, the main uranium deposits are located on lands belonging to indigenous or tribal peoples. This paper discusses the unfolding controversy relating to uranium mining in the West Khasi Hills of Meghalaya. The government-owned Uranium Corporation of India has for long been trying to get access to the deposits of uranium, but has failed due to local opposition. During the past two years the government has stepped up its efforts to allow mining in Meghalaya and seeks to win over local people with promises of development. Although a reasonable proposition for some, there is also a strong opposition to this, usually citing either health reasons or issues having to do with ethnic sovereignty and indigenous rights. Allowing uranium mining, it is argued, would lead to the


Objective Emergency Departments and out-of-hours General Practitioner services collaborate increasingly in Urgent Care Collaborations (UCCs) by sharing one combined entrance and joint triage. The aim of this study is to examine the difference between UCCs and providers who operate separately with respect to the efficiency of patient flow. Methods This study had a cross-sectional observational design comparing three regions with UCC with three regions with usual care. Outcome measures were efficiency of patient flow, defined as a reducing length of stay (LOS), waiting time (WT) and the mean number of handovers. Data were obtained from electronic medical records. Results LOS (median 34:00 vs. 38:52 min) and WT (median 14:00 vs. 18:43 min) were statistically significantly longer in UCCs compared with usual care. This difference is mainly explained by the prolonged LOS and WT for consulting a General Practitioner. The mean number of interunit handovers was larger in UCCs. Conclusion The results indicate that, on average, UCCs do not enhance the efficiency of patient flow. The median LOS and WT are longer in UCCs and more handovers occur in UCCs compared with usual care.


One cannot convene a group of academics to discuss the current status of pharmacy education without the conversation turning at some point to faculty colleagues who lack the intellectual curiosity and drive to be successful scholars. A review of recent papers in the Journal indicates curiosity and drive are critical and essential for faculty development and promotion. All colleges and schools of pharmacy expend significant resources developing methods and tools to promote, enhance, and quantify faculty scholarly activities.1-5 The importance of scholarship for faculty and students is also emphasized in the current accreditation standards.6 Furthermore, missions, educational philosophies, and curricular outcomes often include the importance of intellectual curiosity as a cornerstone skill for lifelong learning and professional growth.

It was Albert Einstein who reminded us that "intellectual growth should commence at birth and cease only at death." The foundation for any successful lifelong career as a health care professional is centered on intellectual growth, starting the moment students enter colleges or schools of pharmacy. Not surprisingly, the pharmacy admissions process in most cases favors applicants who enter a program with experience in an area of scholarly activity. If we value pursuit of scholarly interests as a component of intellectual growth, and intellectual growth begins when students enter a degree program, what then is our responsibility? Do we provide sufficient time for students to pursue scholarly activities during their pharmacy education? Colleges and schools of pharmacy spend time and effort in documenting how we are meeting the educational learning outcomes needed for graduates to become successful entry-level practitioners, the types of learning (eg, cognitive, affective, and psychomotor), and levels of learning (eg, knowledge, understanding, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation). As we continue to add more to the professional curriculum through classroom, laboratory, discussion/small group, or experiential settings to address desired curricular outcomes, are we minimizing or losing opportunities for students to grow intellectually? Intellectual development and growth is more than a set of courses, laboratories, and other educational experiences. It requires commitment of time and energy.

It is critical for faculty members to step back during any curricular revision process and evaluate whether time and flexibility have been incorporated into the programs for students to pursue interesting questions or engage in scholarly activities as a means of promoting their intellectual development. If students are to engage in scholarly activities or projects, ranging from research in the pharmaceutical, biomedical sciences, clinical sciences, or social-administrative sciences, as well as the scholarship of teaching and learning, the key elements are time and opportunity! There is certainly no lack of important questions or challenges in the current health care system, the sciences, or professional practice for talented students to use their enthusiasm and intellect to pursue while in a doctor of pharmacy program. We must honestly ask ourselves: "Are we giving our students the chance to explore the questions they encounter during their professional education?" "Are we including sufficient time or electives focusing on independent scholarly activities throughout our curriculum and professional program?" We need to evaluate to what extent a pharmacy curriculum offers the flexibility for students to explore their curiosities and unanswered questions. Furthermore, what is a PharmD program doing to encourage, recognize, and reward those students who excel in scholarly activities? How many pharmacy colleges and schools provide encouragement/mentoring, financial support, and time for those pharmacy students to present or even publish the results of their scholarly activities? How many colleges and schools highlight in graduation booklets those students who have successfully engaged in a scholarly pursuit? If student intellectual development and scholarly pursuits is indeed a priority in the academy, faculty members and administrators must continue to champion financial support from their institutions or through other organizations. At a minimum, we can begin by implementing local and/or national recognition programs for outstanding scholarly research activities or projects by our pharmacy students. One can envision an exciting future of unlimited possibilities for recognizing the scholarly or intellectual activities of pharmacy students and future successful academicians if our councils, sections, or special interest groups would include this as a priority in their goals, activities, and meeting programs.

The academy continues to express concerns about attracting pharmacy students to academic careers, and assisting the newest generation of academicians to enhance their scholarly activities and intellectual development. Could the lack of time and opportunities for intellectual growth through scholarly activities or projects while in pharmacy school be one of the reasons we see too few students pursuing academic careers? How many pharmacy students have been given the opportunity to be "bitten by the research bug" and feel the enthusiasm that arises when confronted with an interesting question or problem needing to be solved or investigated?

We are asked to document many aspects of our professional programs in the current accreditation standards. Yet when we take a critical, thoughtful look at our programs during the accreditation process, how are we evaluating pharmacy students' scholarly activities, intellectual pursuits, or intellectual growth? Many of the important issues in pharmacy need to be investigated or solved, and we, as an academy, have enthusiastic pharmacy students with the outstanding academic and intellectual abilities to tackle the questions that need to be answered. The latest, highly qualified applicants to PharmD programs have the enthusiasm for learning, foundational knowledge, and potential for further intellectual development through scholarly activities and projects, but what do our colleges or schools do to further students' intellectual growth throughout their professional education and beyond?


1) Treatment with the differentiating agent, 5-Bromo-2-deoxyuridine (BrdU) was capable of inducing keratin (K8/ K18) expression in the poorly differentiated stem cell-like lung cancer cell line, DLKP and the more differentiated adenocarcinoma line, A549. The absence of keratin induction by BrdU in the Leukaemic cell line, HL60 suggested that this effect may be epithelial-specific. Immunocytochemical analysis of DLKP, treated with BrdU for one week and then continuously cultured in the absence of BrdU for 3 months, revealed that keratin filament formation was maintained in these cells.

2) RT-PCR and Northern blotting analysis revealed equal levels of K8/18 mRNAs before and after BrdU treatment suggesting that induction occurred at a posttranscriptional level. Since treatment of DLKP with a cocktail of protease inhibitors failed to induce K8 and K18, it would appear that proteolytic mechanisms are not in operation and that control is likely to be at the level of translation.

3) BrdU-treated lung cancer cell lines exhibited significant increases in the levels and phosphorylation of the important translation initiation factor, eIF-4E. On the other hand, levels and phosphorylation of this factor were decreased in BrdU-treated HL60s. eIF-4E may represent a key effector molecule in BrdU-mediated induction of K8/18 expression in epithelial lines, but since little increase in eIF-4E mRNA is observed it may not be the primary target gene for BrdU activation. BrdU almost certainly acts at the transcriptional level, ultimately.

4) Protein levels of the general translation initiation factor, eIF-2a also increased following BrdU treatment of both epithelial lung cancer cell lines.

5) Levels of c-Mycl protein, the growth inhibitory c-Myc isoform, increase following treatment of epithelial lines with BrdU. (Expression of this factor is known to be translationally regulated and dependent upon eIF-4E availability. In addition, c-myc has been reported to increase gene transcription of both eIF-4E and eIF-2a).

6) Since the transcription factor, YY1, has been shown to be induced by BrdU treatment, and it is known to be a regulator of c-myc gene transcription and c-Myc protein activity, we investigated its expression in this system. Levels of YY1 protein increase significantly in BrdU-treated epithelial cell lines, while they decrease in BrdU-treated HL60 cells.

7) Investigations using in-vitro translation suggested that DLKP may contain an inhibitor of K8/18 translation, whose activity is abrogated by BrdU treatment.

8) Transfection of DLKP cells with eEF-4E cDNA results in increased expression, not only of eIF-4E protein, but also of K8/18, YY1 and c-Mycl proteins.

9) Transfection of DLKP with YY1 cDNA resulted in increased expression, not only ofYYl protein, but also ofK8/18, eIF-4E and c-Mycl proteins.

10) From these results we have outlined a possible differentiation-inducing cascade that may be a target for BrdU activation. Emanating from the transcription factor, YY1 it culminates in the activation of a proposed differentiation-inducing feedback loop revolving around e!F-4E and c-Mycl expression, and the induction of keratin expression.

11) Exposure of DLKP to the physiological differentiating agent, Retinoic Acid (RA) resulted in growth inhibition but did not influence the expression of keratins 8/18. The growth inhibitory affects of RA were attributed to the expression of Retinoic Acid Receptor-a in DLKP. The lack or expression of a truncated form of the Retinoic Acid Receptor-P is offered as an explanation for the inability of RA to affect keratin expression in DLKP. RA was shown to be capable of altering K8/18 expression in the RAR-(3-positive cell line, A549. These findings may offer an insight into the poorly differentiated and aggressive nature of DLKP.


Clinico-morphologic parameters are described in 18 patients of reproductive age before and after hormonal treatment. There was no clear-cut correlation between morphofunctional endometrial state and endometrioid heterotopies. It did not seem possible to identify the phase of the cycle on the basis of the structural pattern of retrocervical endometriosis. Electron microscopic findings in endometriosis sites were suggestive of considerable variability of epithelial cell activity in different glands as well as within the same gland. Post-treatment structural pattern of retrocervical endometriosis does not exclude the possibility that steroids only block cyclic changes in the functional glandular epithelium, having no effect on nonactive cell elements. In spite of dystrophic changes, present in many retrocervical endometriosis sites, hormonal treatment did not eliminate endometrioid heterotopies, but only relieved pain.


Human mobility data have become an essential means to study travel behavior and trip purpose to identify urban functional zones, which portray land use at a finer granularity and offer insights for problems such as business site selection, urban design, and planning. However, very few works have leveraged public bicycle-sharing data, which provides a useful feature in depicting people's short-trip transportation within a city, in the studies of urban functions and structure. Because of its convenience, bicycle usage tends to be close to point-of-interest (POI) features, the combination of which will no doubt enhance the understanding of the trip purpose for characterizing different functional zones. In our study, we propose a data-driven approach that uses station-based public bicycle rental records together with POI data in Hangzhou, China to identify urban functional zones. Topic modelling, unsupervised clustering, and visual analytics are employed to delineate the function matrix, aggregate functional zones, and present mixed land uses. Our result shows that business areas, industrial areas, and residential areas can be well detected, which validates the effectiveness of data generated from this new transportation mode. The word cloud of function labels reveals the mixed land use of different types of urban functions and improves the understanding of city structures.


Phragmites australis is an Aquatic Nuisance Species (ANS) in Kansas, a non-native reed that threatens lake and river ecology, displaces desirable species, impedes movement of wildlife and humans, that can have detrimental economic effects on communities. The majority of Phragmites research is in brackish ecosystems and the effects of Phragmites in freshwater systems and especially on fishes is undocumented, even as many states and agencies invest substantial resources in management. As freshwater systems face a biodiversity crisis, prevention and control of invasive species is critical. Effective management therefore requires a thorough understanding of the effects these invaders have on ecosystems and the application of modem and efficient technologies. The strong trophic links of aquatic systems make them ideal communities to observe changes in trophic dynamics when invasive species establish. This project utilized UAS tools to spectrally identify Phragmites stands as a practical management application and measured ecological effects by assessing fish condition and zooplankton abundance in microhabitats. Juvenile fish condition was poorer in bays dominated by Phragmite vegetation. Zooplankton density was higher is bays dominated by Water Willow vegetation, however a greater abundance of invasive Daphnia lumholtzi was observed in these bays. These data and techniques inform fisheries and land managers of ecosystem effects and provide a framework to apply modem UAS tools to facilitate early detection and monitoring efforts. These findings emphasize the need for an ecological approach in invasive species management. As invasive species continue to establish, trophic cascades within aquatic communities have the potential to effect ecosystem services and accelerate the freshwater biodiversity crisis.


Tension tests on T700/EXOPY unidirectional laminates single-lap joints of spew fillets at overlap ends under uniaxial tensile loading are performed in the presented paper. Two different types of joints are designed and analyzed in order to study effect of spew fillets and no spew fillets at overlap ends on strength and failure mode of single-lap adhesive joints. According to the results, failure mode of two joints are characterized and analyzed. Shear stress—strain curves are analyzed and compared. At the same time, a finite element simulation is carried out to analyze the peel/shear stress fields inside the joint interface. It is found that joint strength was much affected by spew fillets in overlap ends. Nerveless, joints strength is decreased with the increasing thickness of spew fillets in overlap ends. The computational results are in good agreement with the experimental values.


The innovative value chain is the organic unity of the concept of innovation and the value chain. It emphasizes that all units of the value chain coordinate to increase in value and optimize the system so as to realize the w ho le innovative benefits. Based on the theory of technological innovation, this paper analyzes the traditional product development process and sums up its drawbacks; then constructs the model of enterprises' innovative value chain and puts forward that what the enterprise's innovative value chain emphasizes is taking the knowledge flows as the intrinsic power class, taking the service flow as the foundation, taking the value increment as the goal, taking the customer demand as the guidance and application through the innovation analysis of enterprise service activity flow.


Purpose: Veterans Affairs (VA) health care system investigators perform large clinical trials in prostate cancer treatment but potential differences between VA and other patient cohorts have not been explored systematically. Materials and Methods: Cancer of the Prostate Strategic Urologic Research Endeavor is an ongoing observational database of men with prostate cancer, comprising 7,202 patients treated at 35 sites across the United States. Three sites that together contribute 241 patients are VA medical centers. Demographic and clinical characteristics were compared between all VA and nonVA patients in the database and a multivariate model was used to explore the interactions between ethnicity and VA status for predicting clinical characteristics. Results: VA patients were 4 times as likely as nonVA patients to be black. They had lower income, less education and more co-morbidity at presentation (all comparisons p (cid:1) 0.0001). VA patients had higher risk disease. Mean serum prostate specific antigen at diagnosis was 20.1 vs 15.3 ng/ml for nonVA patients (p (cid:2) 0.003). Mean Gleason score was 6.4 for VA patients vs 6.0 for nonVA patients (p (cid:1) 0.0001). Differing ethnic distributions explained the differences in prostate specific antigen between VA and nonVA patients. However, VA status, socioeconomic level and ethnicity independently predicted Gleason score. VA patients were more likely to undergo watchful waiting or primary hormonal