Excited atoms incident upon the entrance port of a maser cavity will be reflected half of the time, if the atoms are slow enough, even when the maser field is in its vacuum state. This happens because the interaction strength, between the atom and the maser field, changes strongly when passing from the exterior to the interior of the cavity.


With the gradual development and standardization of services-oriented computing (SOC), it becomes a rapidly growing software developing pattern to composition Web services into applications. Since Web services composition are long-lasting, loosely coupled and cross application and administrative boundaries, it is essential to choose proper services to compose the composite Web services to meet user's requirements. This paper presents a QoS evaluation method for aggregation services when failure occurs and defines QoS evaluation model of the common aggregation patterns of transaction compensation. Experiment results show that when it is used to evaluate the QoS of composite Web services, QoS evaluation method of aggregation transaction compensation is much better than the Web services composition method based on random selection, and it is feasible and effective.


The influence of phosphate (P) on cadmium (Cd) adsorption was examined in a savanna soil with long history of different fertilizer amendment. The soil was incubated with P at 0, 250 and 500 mg P kg -1 soil and left to equilibrate for 2 weeks. Cd was added to the P-incubated soil at concentrations ranging from 27, 49 and 83 mg Cd kg soil. Addition of phosphate as KH2PO4 increased Cd adsorption by the soil. The amount of Cd adsorbed at 250 mg P kg -1 treatment was more than the amount of Cd adsorbed at 500 mg P kg -1 at low equilibrium Cd concentration. The sorption maxima and the distribution coefficient also increased; but the distribution coefficient and binding energy at 250 mg P kg -1 were higher than those at 500 mg P kg -1 . Fitting the experimental data to adsorption, isotherm indicated a shift from the L-curve to the H-curve isotherm with P-amendment indicating a possible precipitation of Cd-P compounds. The Langmuir sorption maxima increased from 61 to 99.3 with P addition while the distribution coefficient also increased from 13.9 to 29.4. Our results indicated that Cd in the presence of phosphate can act as a bridging element between phosphate and organic matter.


This paper reports on a project which uses two full-scale, three-bedroom standard houses to identify the impact of changes in building elements and materials on indoor environmental quality. The lightweight, timber framed, stand-alone houses are characteristic of New Zealand construction, and meet the requirements for the current New Zealand Building Code in terms of materials and insulation. One of the houses served as the test case for the research and incorporated high performance argonfilled Low-E double glazing. The second house acted as a control, with identical design and location but built using standard construction practice including conventional double glazing. The paper details the impact of the Low E argon filled double glazing on internal temperature during a monitoring period which ran over the New Zealand winter. It compares results for this wintertime period to the results of previous testing of the same houses over the summertime period, and also examines results in relation to the short-term laboratory-predicted impacts of material thermal performance. Findings indicated that throughout the wintertime period, both houses performed similarly. In both cases the most notable issue was the high internal temperatures reached on cold sunny days. There were minor performance differences between the standard double glazing and the Low-E glazing. The temperatures reached in the Low-E test house on cold sunny days were less extreme than in the control house, but overnight and early morning temperatures were lower with the high performance glazing. On cold overcast days there was negligible difference between the two double glazing types. Conference theme: Buildings and energy


The assessment centre method has received considerable historical attention as an effective tool for management selection and development. The method, originally developed by German psychologists, was used extensively during World War II by the Office of Strategic Services. Refinement of the method occurred at the American Telephone and Telegraph Company during the mid‐1950s in the Management Progress Study under the leadership of Dr Douglas W. Bray. The method found increased acceptance due, in part, to court decisions finding it in compliance with EEOC guidelines. The process used proposes to evaluate the relative strength within an individual of up to ten personality traits using exercises simulating job conditions and events. Studies performed years after assessment show impressive figures regarding the method′s ability to predict management success. Continuing research has shown a use for this method at all levels within an organisation.


The role of ceramic particles, calcium and rare earth elements on magnesium alloys during solidification from the melt and after hot rolling has been studied by microstructural investigations, texture measurements and mechanical tests. Different ceramic inoculants like silicon carbide or zirconium diboride and two different rare earth elements (cerium and lanthanum) forming intermetallic compounds were used. Both, ceramic particles and intermetallic phases, modify the texture evolution during hot forming. The rolled alloys exhibited a basal fibre texture which is weakened by ceramic particles and intermetallic phases respectively. This weakening of the basal texture is capable of lowering the anisotropy of the yield stress and improving the formability of sheet material. Influences of the alloying contents on microstructure, texture evolution and mechanical properties will be discussed.


We show that the resistance of the ν = 5/2 quantum Hall state, confined to an interferometer, oscillates with the magnetic field consistent with an Ising-type non-Abelian state. In three quantum Hall interferometers of different sizes, resistance oscillations at ν = 7/3 and integer filling factors have the magnetic field period expected if the number of quasiparticles contained within the interferometer changes so as to keep the area and the total charge within the interferometer constant. Under these conditions, an Abelian state such as the (3, 3, 1) state would show oscillations with the same period as at an integer quantum Hall state. However, in an Ising-type non-Abelian state there would be a rapid oscillation associated with the "even-odd effect" and a slower one associated with the accumulated Abelian phase due to both the Aharonov-Bohm effect and the Abelian part of the quasiparticle braiding statistics. Our measurements at ν = 5/2 are consistent with the latter.


The gene for the bacterial enzyme carboxypeptidase G2 (CPG2) was expressed internally in mammalian cells. Mammalian-expressed CPG2 had kinetic properties indistinguishable from bacterially expressed CPG2. Human tumor cell lines A2780, SK-OV-3 (ovarian adenocarcinomas), LS174T, and WiDr (colon carcinomas) were engineered to express constitutively either CPG2 or bacterial beta-galactosidase. These cell lines were subjected to a gene-directed enzyme prodrug therapy regime, using the prodrug 4-[(2-chloroethyl)(2-mesyloxyethyl)amino]benzoyl-L-glutamic acid (CMDA). The lines which expressed CPG2 had enhanced sensitivity to CMDA. Comparing IC50S, WiDr-CPG2 and SK-OV-3-CPG2 were 11-16-fold more sensitive, whereas A2780-CPG2 and LS174T-CPG2 were approximately 95-fold more sensitive than the corresponding control lines. CPG2-expressing cells and control cells were mixed in differing proportions and then treated with prodrug. Total kill occurred when only approximately 12% of cells expressed CPG2 with the WiDr and SK-OV-3 lines and when only 4-5% of cells expressed CPG2 with the LS174T and A2780 lines, indicating a substantial bystander effect. These results establish this CPG2 enzyme/CMDA prodrug system as an effective combination for the gene-directed enzyme prodrug therapy approach.


The reactions of poly(aspartic acid) syntheses were carried out in the microwave reactor. The cyclic form obtained, i.e. polysuccinimide [PSI, formula(IV) in Scheme A] was then subjected to alkaline hydrolysis in the presence of NaOH to reach finally the linear form, sodium salt of poly(aspartic acid) (PAspNa) [formula (V) in Scheme A presents its anion]. D,L-aspartic acid being a monomer [formula (III)] was dispersed in propylene carbonate and polimerized without the catalyst at temp. 160―230 °C for 41 min. The polymer obtained was precipitated with non-solvent, filtered and washed first with the same non-solvent and then with distilled water, and dried at room temperature. The effects of weight ratio monomer:solvent and the type of non-solvent on the reaction yield and molecular weight and polydispersity of the product were investigated changing the parameters mentioned.


This study takes a high-level approach to evaluate computer systems without regard to the specific method of interaction. This document analyzes the commands that Airway Facilities (AF) use across different systems and the meanings attributed to the different commands. Human factors researchers collected data on AF systems and equipment, identifying 25 different systems monitored and controlled by AF specialists. Different AF systems had different means of interfacing with the computer (e.g., graphical user interface, menus, and command line interface). The researchers summarized data on the interaction types across AF systems to find that most AF systems used menus as the primary means of interaction. Among the 25 systems monitored and controlled by AF, they uncovered more than 1500 options for accessing, interacting with, and controlling the equipment necessary to National Airspace System operations. They analyzed the options for frequency of occurrence and defined meanings for each of the most frequently used options. The result of this analysis is a set of core commands that are common across a number of systems.


In order to model the elasto-plastic behavior of steel-concrete beams in high-rise buildings correctly and conveniently, plastic hinge method is used. Based on experimental and theoretical research on composite beams, the trilinear moment-curvature skeleton curve of steel-concrete composite beams is amended by numerical simulation and theoretical analysis. And the 4 poly-line moment-curvature skeleton curve model is suggested for elasto-plastic analysis of steel-concrete composite beams. The elastic-plastic model is then used for real composite beams under monotonic load experimental analysis to verify its precision. The suggested model can lay a foundation for the dynamic analysis under strong earthquake for the globe steel-concrete composite structures.


We evaluate the hypothesis that genetic factors influence the use of health services and prevention behaviors in a national sample of adult twins in the United States. The analysis compares the correlation of these outcomes between identical twins, who share all their genes, to the correlation between nonidentical twins, who share, on average, only one-half of their genes. Because the environmental similarities of twins are assumed to be the same for identical and nonidentical twin pairs, researchers can partition the variance in behavioral outcomes that are due to genetic and environmental factors. Using established methods in this field, we find evidence of significant genetic influences on preferences toward prevention, overall prevention effort, routine checkups, and prescription drug use. Use of curative services does not appear to be influenced by genes. Our findings offer several implications for policymakers and researchers and suggest that genetics could be informative for health services and policy research.


The legality of training language models (LMs) on copyrighted or otherwise restricted data is under intense debate. However, as we show, model performance significantly degrades if trained only on low-risk text (e.g., out-of-copyright books or government documents), due to its limited size and domain coverage. We present SILO, a new language model that manages this risk-performance tradeoff during inference. SILO is built by (1) training a parametric LM on Open License Corpus (OLC), a new corpus we curate with 228B tokens of public domain and permissively licensed text and (2) augmenting it with a more general and easily modifiable nonparametric datastore (e.g., containing copyrighted books or news) that is only queried during inference. The datastore allows use of high-risk data without training on it, supports sentence-level data attribution, and enables data producers to opt out from the model by removing content from the store. These capabilities can foster compliance with data-use regulations such as the fair use doctrine in the United States and the GDPR in the European Union. Our experiments show that the parametric LM struggles on domains not covered by OLC. However, access to the datastore greatly improves out of domain performance, closing 90% of the performance gap with an LM trained on the Pile, a more diverse corpus with mostly high-risk text. We also analyze which nonparametric approach works best, where the remaining errors lie, and how performance scales with datastore size. Our results suggest that it is possible to build high quality language models while mitigating their legal risk.


Radio spectrum is a finite resource. Demand for access to spectrum  is at an all-time high and  it is becoming increasingly difficult to find spectrum that can be made available either for new services or to expand existing ones since most of the spectrum has been assigned.  The recent migration from analogue transmissions to the spectrally efficient digital television transmissions has however freed up some portions of the spectrum in the Ultra High Frequency (UHF) and Very High Frequency (VHF)  bands for reallocation to other licensed uses and also for opportunistic secondary access. These portions of  unused  spectrum  are  known as white spaces or spectrum holes in TV transmission bands. With demand for wireless connectivity increasing, the exploitation of white space is an attractive way of making more efficient use of radio spectrum simply by sharing the spectrum such that if not used in one location or during a given time period by the primary user, then it can be redeployed and used opportunistically  by secondary users as long as they  will not interfere with the primary users hence making it ripe for deployment of Wireless  Regional Area Networks  (WRAN). TV white space has  immense potential in those parts of the geographical area which are very  difficult and expensive to reach by optical fiber techniques and other types of technologies. It's also very applicable to developing countries where the telecommunications infrastructure isn't in place and can potentially be a cost effective way of bridging this telecommunications gap easily.This  paper aims  to investigate the suitability of unlicensed use of the TV White Space (TVWS) in a wireless regional area network without causing interference to the incumbent primary users and will also analyze interference if any to the primary users from secondary users in TV White Spaces. Keywords—Wireless Regional Area Network (WRAN), Opportunistic Spectrum Access (OSA), TVWS (TV White Space)


This paper identifies a class of multiperiod agency problems in which the optimal contract is tractable (attainable in closed form). By modeling the noise before the action in each period, we force the contract to provide sufficient incentives state-by-state, rather than merely on average. This tightly constrains the set of admissible contracts and allows for a simple solution to the contracting problem. Our results continue to hold in continuous time, where noise and actions are simultaneous. We thus extend the tractable contracts of Holmstrom and Milgrom (1987) to settings that do not require exponential utility, a pecuniary cost of effort, Gaussian noise or continuous time. The contract's functional form is independent of the noise distribution. Moreover, if the cost of effort is pecuniary (multiplicative), the contract is linear (log-linear) in output and its slope is independent of the noise distribution, utility function and reservation utility. In a two-stage contracting game, the optimal target action depends on the costs and benefits of the environment, but is independent of the noise realization.


Grazing-incidence small-angle X-ray scattering (GISAXS) has been used to structurally characterize model hard and soft gratings of nanotechnological interest. The different gratings exhibit GISAXS patterns with characteristic features that can be associated with their level of order along the direction of periodicity and the length of the lines. Highly ordered gratings, made out of silicon by electron beam lithography, and those nanofabricated on spin-coated polymer films by nanoimprint lithography, exhibit characteristic semicircle-like GISAXS patterns with intensity spots periodically distributed on a semicircle whose radius is related to the incidence angle used. These gratings can be considered as one-dimensional crystalline lattices as provided by computer simulations. Less ordered polymer gratings prepared by the laser-induced periodic surface structuring method exhibit a GISAXS pattern characterized by periodic rod-like scattering maxima whose intensity decreases with increasing horizontal scattering angle. In this case the gratings can be considered as one-dimensional paracrystals. The transition from a rod-like to a semicircle-like GISAXS pattern has been simulated and attributed to the contribution of the form factor by changing the length of the line (ripple). A critical length value for the transition is located at around a few micrometres.


Interaction of aspartate aminotransferase with various aminooxycelluloses capable of reacting with carbonyl compounds to form oximes has been studied with respect to the distance of the H2NO-groups from the polymer matrix. Aminotransferase does not react with aminooxycelluloses, when the amono-oxygroups are located at small distances from the matrix. When these celluloses interact with the enzyme in the presence of the substrate amino acid, we manage to obtain the amino-form of amino-transferase containing no pyridoxylidine form quantitatively. The cellulose with the H2NO-groups located at considerable distances from the polysaccharide matrix, form the "aminotransferase oxime--aminooxycellulose" complex, which is subsequently split either to a choloenzyme or apoenzyme of PLP and aminooxycellulose, depending on the experimental conditions used. The adsorbents under study may present some interest both in terms of isolation and purfication of pyridoxal enzymes and their effects on enzymatic systems, which contain carbonylic compounds.


Abstract. This paper proposes a voxel-based approach for creating a digital twin of an urban environment that is capable of efficiently managing smart spaces. The paper explains the registration and localization procedure of the point cloud dataset, which uses the KISS ICP for scan point cloud combination and the RANSAC method for the initial alignment of the combined point cloud. The mobile mapping point cloud using Riegl VMX-250 serves as the reference map, and Velodyne scans are used for localization purposes. The point-to-plane iterative closest-point method is then employed to refine the alignment. The paper evaluates the efficacy of the proposed method by calculating the errors between the estimated and ground truth positions. The results indicate that the voxel-based approach is capable of accurately estimating the position of the sensor platform, which are applicable for various use cases. A specific use case in the context is smart parking space management, which is described and initial visualization results are shown.


Electroencephalography (EEG) is a common signal acquisition approach employed for Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) research. Nevertheless, the majority of EEG acquisition devices rely on the cumbersome application of conductive gel (so-called wet-EEG) to ensure a high quality signal is obtained. However, this process is unpleasant for the experimental participants and thus limits the practical application of BCI. In this work, we explore the use of a commercially available dry-EEG headset to obtain visual cortical ensemble signals. Whilst improving the usability of EEG within the BCI context, dry-EEG suffers from inherently reduced signal quality due to the lack of conduit gel, making the classification of such signals significantly more challenging. In this paper, we propose a novel Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) approach for the classification of raw dry-EEG signals without any data pre-processing. To illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, we utilise the Steady State Visual Evoked Potential (SSVEP) paradigm as our use case. SSVEP can be utilised to allow people with severe physical disabilities such as Complete Locked-In Syndrome or Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis to be aided via BCI applications, as it requires only the subject to fixate upon the sensory stimuli of interest. Here we utilise SSVEP flicker frequencies between 10 to 30 Hz, which we record as subject cortical waveforms via the dry-EEG headset. Our proposed end-to-end CNN allows us to automatically and accurately classify SSVEP stimulation directly from the dry-EEG waveforms. Our CNN architecture utilises a common SSVEP Convolutional Unit (SCU), comprising of a 1D convolutional layer, batch normalization and max pooling. Furthermore, We compare several deep learning neural network variants with our primary CNN architecture, in addition to traditional machine learning classification approaches. Experimental evaluation shows our CNN architecture to be significantly better than competing approaches, achieving a classification accuracy of 96% whilst demonstrating superior cross-subject performance and even being able to generalise well to unseen subjects whose data is entirely absent from the training process.


This study focusses on the concepts of significance to the knowledge economy and its characteristics in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Qualitative and quantitative research methodology design has been incorporated to validate the study. The outcome of the study exhibited that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has achieved progress according to the research and development index. The rate of expenditure as a ratio from the Gross Domestic Product is still negligent and modest in comparison with the international expenditure rates. It has been recommended to adopt an effective mechanism for the consolidation of the relations between the scientific research institutions and the productive and service sectors.
Keywords: Knowledge economy, digital economy, human development, information technology, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.


Aim: To implement the Case Management Model and to assess its effectiveness in patients with type 2 diabetes mellitas. Methodology: Two seveenteen patients groups were sampled. One was experimental and the second was a control group Study stages: a) selection of patients and training of the multi-disciplinary team, b) multi-disciplinary intervention, c) follow-up at home. Results: Experimental group: mean days of hospital stay were 4.88. Only 11.8% of patients had one hospital readmission within the six months after the discharge. Mean of glycosilated hemoglobin at hospital admission: 11.45%.At the end of intervention: 8.84%. The t student comparison of means showed a significant difference (p= 001). Control group: mean days of stay was 6.24. In the following six months 35.5% had from one to two readmissions Conclusions: The experimental group reported shorter stays and less readmission, more knowledge regarding the disease and treatment, higher family involvement in care, and better clinical control through glycosilated hemoglobin.


We examine the effects of resonant Auger destruction in modifying the intensities and flux distributions of Kα spectra from iron L‐shell ions. Applications include X‐ray irradiated stellar winds in X‐ray binaries and accretion disk atmospheres. Using detailed atomic models, we find that resonant Auger destruction is selective, in that only a subset of the emitted Kα lines is highly attenuated. We also show that that the local excitation conditions can have a dramatic effect on the Kα emissivity spectrum.


An index system for structure safety assessment was presented on the basis of analyzing and comparing of the domestic and foreign researchers. In addition, a method for structure safety measurement using Bayesian network, which has the excellent abilities of expressing and reasoning knowledge under uncertain environment, was proposed to construct a safety assessment model afterward. The assessment model is able to deal with complicated relationship as well as the different opinions of experts. The output of the safety assessment model can be used to predict and diagnose different safety conditions. Finally the model is applied to evaluate the security level of a certain overhead traveling crane.Its results show this method is effective and reasonable.


ABSTRACT Social technologies such as Weblogs, wikis, and social bookmarking are emerging both as information resources and as tools for research. This paper reflects on these technologies and suggests they may be well placed to build fluency in the higher-order thinking skills outlined in various information literacy frameworks, particularly in an educational context. A high proportion of today's learners are very comfortable with technology and Web 2.0 resources. The characteristics of the information they are accessing are also changing, bringing a stronger need for sophisticated evaluation and analysis skills. Where do social technologies fit within information literacy frameworks, and where can they be used in the day-to-day instruction of information skills? This paper suggests social technologies perform a dual role: they are not only useful sources of information but also resources to be used to develop ideas and research, using collaboration and community platforms that learners today are familiar with. Librarians who provide information literacy instruction would benefit from an awareness of these tools and where they sit within today's information environment.


The aim of this research is to determine based on a statistical analysis of the macroeconomic trends, the achieved level of recovery and development in the economy of the Western Balkan countries after 2008. In the global economic history, 2008 will be remembered as the year in which many developed and developing countries faced an economic crisis, which was reflected in the decline in general economic indicators.Some experts explain economic crises and recession as accumulated imbalances in relations between basic macroeconomic aggregates and in that sense the crisis is just one of the stages in business cycles. The paper deals with theoretical views regarding this topic, and the conducted empirical research included four countries of the Western Balkans, Serbia, Croatia, Montenegro and Bosnia and Herzegovina. The survey gives a clear overview of the macroeconomic trends of the Western Balkan countries with appropriate explanations, which enabled the selection of countries by set criteria. Comparative analysis between countries pointed to good and bad macroeconomic trends in certain periods.


THIS is an accurate translation of a very good book. The merits of the original it is not necessary to dwell on now as M. Henry's Pricis de Grammaire Comparie du Gfrec et du Latin has already been noticed in the Classical Review (vol. iii. p. 210). The highest ideal which the translator of a book of this sort could set before himself would be to rival the lucidity of the original, and the EDglish of Mr. Elliott is almost as clear as the French of M. Henry. Mr. Elliott like other translators of foreign philological works had to face to some' extent the difficulty of making for himself the technical terminology required. M. Henry, when dealing with the mysteries of ' Ablaut,' objects strongly to the German terminology which describes the eforms of a root as the ' middle' and the oforms as the ' strong ' grade. The objection is well founded and a new term (flichi) had to be invented which Mr. Elliott has translated by ' deflected.' As the word has not been used before so far as I know in Philology it is free from ambiguity, but can hardly be said to convey to the reader any very definite idea of the origin of the variation between e and o forms.


AIMS--To assess the current range of prices charged for gentamicin assays in United Kingdom laboratories; and to examine the laboratories' likely response to increases or decreases in the demand for the service. METHODS--A postal survey of the 420 members of the Association of Medical Microbiologists was used to establish the range of prices charged for aminoglycoside assays. Additionally, eight private institutions were contacted to determine what the private sector was charging for aminoglycoside assays. Reagent costs in the NHS laboratories were calculated by dividing the total cost of all aminoglycoside assay kits by the number of samples analysed. RESULTS--The NHS and the private institutions both showed a wide price variation. Prices charged to an in-hospital requester for a peak and trough assay ranged from 5.00 pounds to 68.20 pounds (n = 44), and to an external private hospital, under a bulk service contract, from 5.00 pounds to 96.00 pounds (n = 47). Prices charged by private laboratories ranged from 49.00 pounds to 84.00 pounds (n = 8). There was a log linear correlation in the NHS laboratories between the reagent costs per assay and the number of assays performed per year, and most laboratories thought that their price per assay would be sensitive to increases or decreases in demand. Laboratories which had purchased their assay machines had lower reagent costs per assay but higher repair and maintenance costs. Overall, number of assays performed and method of payment for assay machinery only accounted for 44.8% of the observed variation in assay kit costs. CONCLUSIONS--The price range for gentamicin assays in the United Kingdom is wide and is only partially explained by the number of assays performed. Most laboratories believe that they would experience a reduction in unit cost as output increases. The currently offered range of prices is, in part, due to variation in the laboratories' approach to costing the service provided and some laboratories charge prices which do not even cover the cost of assay kits. Overall, we believe that prices charged should be as close as possible to the marginal cost of the tests performed.


The composite materials constitute a significant portion of engineering materials ranging from every day product like door windows to sophisticated product like aircraft and space application. The biggest advantages of use of composite materials are due to their high strength, low weight apart from other properties like good corrosion resistance, low densities, low thermal conductivities & electrical conductivities, absorption of energy in shock and vibration and finally aesthetic color effect. The material design can be tailor made to specific application and properties requirements. Thus, the composite material offers wide business opportunity in all sectors of industries Environmental awareness today motivating the researchers, worldwide on the studies of natural fiber reinforced polymer composite and cost effective option to synthetic fiber reinforced composites. The availability of natural fibers and ease of manufacturing have tempted researchers to try locally available inexpensive fibers and to study their feasibility of reinforcement purposes and to what extent they satisfy the required specifications of good reinforced polymer composite for different applications. With low cost and high specific mechanical properties, natural fiber represents a good renewable and biodegradable alternative to the most common synthetic reinforcement, i.e. glass fiber. Despite the interest and environmental appeal of natural fibers, there use is limited to non bearing applications, due to their lower strength compared with synthetic fiber reinforced polymer composite. The stiffness and strength shortcomings of bio composites can be overcome by structural configurations and better arrangement in a sense of placing the fibers in specific locations for highest strength performance. Accordingly extensive studies on preparation and properties of polymer matrix composite (PMC) replacing the synthetic fiber with natural fiber like Jute, Sisal, Pineapple, Bamboo, Kenaf and Bagasse etc were carried out. These plant fibers have many advantages over glass fiber or carbon fiber like renewable, environmental friendly, low cost, lightweight and high specific mechanical performance.


Abstract. The large scale topographic map generation is mostly carried out using the aerial images while the high resolution satellite data are gaining popularity because of its large swath width that enables the efficient and economic mapping even over inaccessible areas. To use the satellite data for the 3D topographic mapping, the data should be acquired in the stereo mode and they requires to be aligned for the epipolar geometry. The accurate epipolar image resampling aligns stereo images to enable a stereo display on the computer monitor where human operators can easily identify and extract 3D features, such as points of interest, contours, building layers, and roads. The pushbroom type camera, which is used by most high-resolution satellites, has quite different epipolar geometry than the frame type of aerial or terrestrial cameras. Therefore, the piecewise approach should be used instead of the fundamental matrix approach that is the standard method for the frame type cameras. Regarding the sensor model, most high-resolution satellite data use RPCs (Rational Polynomial Coefficients) of RFM (Rational Function Model) while the frame type camera use the collinearity equation. But RPCs from the satellite image providers have not been accurate enough such that GCPs (Ground Control Points) are often required for improving the RPCs accuracy. The GCPs acquisition is not an easy task over the inaccessible areas and the positional accuracy of the old geospatial data such as orthoimages and traditional maps is relatively low. Fortunately, the positional accuracy of RPCs increases than the past such as up to several meters. The major problem to achieve high accuracy of stereo geometry is to ensure that the consistency between the stereo data is less than one-pixel level. Therefore, in this study, we first utilized the relative orientation method to improve the precision between the stereo data without using any GCP. The tie points are extracted using the robust stereo matching and they are used to generate quasi-GCPs by the space intersection based on the RPCs. The quasi-GCPs are projected back to the stereo data to model and remove the inconsistency in the image space. The improved RPCs were used to accurately align the stereo data for map production.


Speech, speaker, and language systems have traditionally relied on carefully collected speech material for training acoustic models. There is an overwhelming abundance of publicly accessible audio material available for training. A major challenge, however, is that such found data is not professionally recorded, and therefore may contain a wide diversity of background noise, nonlinear distortions, or other unknown environmental based contamination or mismatch. There is a critical need for automatic analysis to screen such unknown data sets before acoustic model development, or to perform input audio purity screening prior to classification. In this study, we propose a waveform based clipping detection algorithm for naturalistic audio streams and analyze the impact of clipping at different severities on speech quality measures and automatic speaker recognition systems. We use the TIMIT and NIST SRE-08 corpora as case studies. The results show, as expected, that clipping introduces a nonlinear distortion into clean speech data, which reduces both speech quality and speaker recognition performance. We also investigate what degree of clipping can be present to sustain effective speech system performance. The proposed detection system, which will be released, could contribute to massive new audio collections for speech and language technology development.


This book presents a thought-provoking case for looking at human resource management from an entirely different perspective. In the modern world, organizations have to optimally manage resources to achieve the best results, and the best way to do this is to identify humans as instruments of investment and not as resources. Humans use resources in an activity. Managing people, as a subject, was first studied as part of personnel management, and became known as human resource management (HRM) in the early 80s. However, the basic principles remained largely unchanged. The book argues that it is time that HRM is replaced by human investment management (HIM), where the entire approach of employee management in an organization shifts gears to human investment in activities. In this approach no human is considered bad in relation to an organization, if selected appropriately, and trained well. Everyone is productive, though the returns may differ. Humans can be invested in areas where they are best or can be trained to be the best according to various factors. Unlike any other investment instruments, humans' value can be continuously upgraded for higher returns. Thus the core of HIM is to maximize the return from each employee as an individual or as a member of the group with minimum expenditure and effort in him or her. HIM can therefore reengineer and replace HRM slowly and steadily at the desired pace where maximum attention is paid to employee investment for improved results. This is unlike HRM, which primarily focuses on employee relations. Turning around HRM to HIM will be the first step in inclusively aligning strategic human resource management with the overall human management. As such, HIM should be seen as a process by which the asset or capital value of individual humans can be increased by turning them into capital humans, an entirely different outlook from the oft-used term human capital


Destructive Xylella fastidiosa (Xf) outbreaks in Europe highlight this pathogen's capacity to expand its host range and geographical distribution. The current disease diagnostic approaches are limited by a multiple-step process, biases to known sequences, and detection limits. ABSTRACT Xylella fastidiosa (Xf) is a globally distributed plant-pathogenic bacterium. The primary control strategy for Xf diseases is eradicating infected plants; therefore, timely and accurate detection is necessary to prevent crop losses and further pathogen dispersal. Conventional Xf diagnostics primarily relies on quantitative PCR (qPCR) assays. However, these methods do not consider new or emerging variants due to pathogen genetic recombination and sensitivity limitations. We developed and tested a metagenomics pipeline using in-house short-read sequencing as a complementary approach for affordable, fast, and highly accurate Xf detection. We used metagenomics to identify Xf to the strain level in single- and mixed-infected plant samples at concentrations as low as 1 pg of bacterial DNA per gram of tissue. We also tested naturally infected samples from various plant species originating from Europe and the United States. We identified Xf subspecies in samples previously considered inconclusive with real-time PCR (quantification cycle [Cq], >35). Overall, we showed the versatility of the pipeline by using different plant hosts and DNA extraction methods. Our pipeline provides taxonomic and functional information for Xf diagnostics without extensive knowledge of the disease. This pipeline demonstrates that metagenomics can be used for early detection of Xf and incorporated as a tool to inform disease management strategies. IMPORTANCE Destructive Xylella fastidiosa (Xf) outbreaks in Europe highlight this pathogen's capacity to expand its host range and geographical distribution. The current disease diagnostic approaches are limited by a multiple-step process, biases to known sequences, and detection limits. We developed a low-cost, user-friendly metagenomic sequencing tool for Xf detection. In less than 3 days, we were able to identify Xf subspecies and strains in field-collected samples. Overall, our pipeline is a diagnostics tool that could be easily extended to other plant-pathogen interactions and implemented for emerging plant threat surveillance.


Background: Involving patients affected with rheumatoid arthritis or ankylosing spondylitis in clinical trials may be highly challenging: in a worldwide context of competitive rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis clinical research, patient engagement is key to optimize medical research and increase participation rates. Objectives: The aim of this study was to identify patients' motivations for and hindrances to joining a trail in order to increase participation rate by implementing tailored services and information. Methods: An online questionnaire was submitted from August 2017 to October 2017 to Carenity's French members affected with rheumatoid arthritis or ankylosing spondylitis. Results: 136 patients affected with rheumatoid arthritis (n = 55, 40%, mean age = 55 y/o, 71% of women) or ankylosing spondylitis (n = 81, 60%, mean age = 48 y/o, 80% of women) participated in the study. 10 patients (7%) already participated in a clinical trial. Non-participants (n=126) exposed the incentives that may increase participation rate: reimbursing the expenses related to the clinical trial can improve their motivation (median weight on motivation to join a trial = 10/10) as well as a better medical follow-up (8.0/10) or leveraging the trial's investigator notoriety (8.0/10). Patients' healthcare practitioners could be leveraged as well: their favorable opinion turns patients on to clinical trials (7.0/10). On the contrary, a doctor's negative opinion may strongly deter patients from joining a trial (median weight on reluctance to join a trial = 8.0/10). Communication should aim at reassuring them about side effects (9.0/10), potential risks for their health (8.0/10) and more generally the risk that the new treatment would not be better than their current one (8.0/10). Logistic challenges should also be taken into account: the trip between patients' home and the site of the clinical trial is perceived as an important burden (8.0/10). Implementing tailored services and information would be an efficient way to reassure patients and increase their willingness to participate. 81% of non-participants would be enticed to participate if they had access to a website to exchange with healthcare professionals or to follow the results of the trial. 79% would be interested in participants' testimonials and 74% in a 24-hour phone helpline. Spreading and clarifying information before the trial is also critical: 6/10 patients who participated in a clinical trial did not understand clearly if they will have out-of-pocket costs and 5/10 patients were also unclear on the terms and conditions for leaving the clinical trial. Informing patients via convenient channels is key: 88% of participants and non-participants think that an online patient community is a relevant medium to convey information about clinical trials and 81% of non-participants would like to have access to an information brochure about the trial process. Conclusion: This real-world study allowed to identify concrete levers to reassure patients affected with rheumatoid arthritis or ankylosing spondylitis about the benefits/constraints balance and to clarify information at each stage of the trial (before, during, after), which is essential to accelerate clinical trial recruitment. Disclosure of Interests: None declared


Purpose The Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS) subphenotype of FXS demonstrates severe hyperphagia leading to obesity in addition to more severe behavioral problems with a higher rate of autism than what is typically seen in FXS without the PWS subphenotype. Recently, the FMR1 protein (FMRP) was found to bind to additional proteins including CYFIP1 and CYFIP2 in carrying out its role as a transporter and regulator of translation of mRNAs. With the discovery that CYFIP1 is localized to the region critical for PWS at 15q, the possibility of molecular dysfunction in CYFIP1 in this subphenotype has initiated a detailed study of the clinical subphenotype and comparisons to the known phenotype of PWS. We report our clinical experience with 12 new patients with the (PWS) subphenotype of FXS. Methods All patients were clinically evaluated to exclude the presence of other disorders. The ADOS, ADI-R, and/or SCQ were completed to assess for autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The cognitive and adaptive ability of each patient was determined. The CGG repeat number, FMR1 mRNA level, and the percentage of FMRP were measured. Results All of the patients demonstrate severe hyperphagia beginning between 2 and 8 years. Fifty-four percent met criteria for autism based on the ADOS and/or ADI-R. There were lowered CYFIP expression levels in a subgroup of our sample. Conclusions The PWS subphenotype is associated with a higher rate of ASD. There appears to be a dysregulation in the CYFIP gene in most of the patients evaluated. The deficit in CYFIP expression does not appear to be related to the deletion of the region. Further evaluation of the CYFIP levels in this subphenotype may reveal abnormalities in gene regulation. Expression of CYFIP may be an important gene associated with autism and the PWS subphenotype.


Three hundred and ninety two strains of S. aureus isolated from bacteria carriers and patients with staphylococcal infections in different regions of the Soviet Union were investigated. 55.9 per cent of the isolates were able to produce exotoxin of toxic shock. No regular relation between resistance to definite antibiotics (tetracycline, chloramphenicol, benzylpenicillin, streptomycin, lincomycin, erythromycin, oleandomycin, gentamicin and methicillin) and the polyresistance range on the one hand and the ability to produce toxic shock exotoxin on the other hand was revealed.


Modern turbomachine designs feature reduced nominal clearances between rotating bladed-disks and their surrounding casings in order to improve the engine efficiency. Unavoidably, clearance reduction increases the risk of contacts between static and rotating components which may yield hazardous interaction phenomena. In this context, the deposition of an abradable coating along the casing inner surface is a common way to enhance operational safety while mitigating interaction phenomena thus allowing for tighter clearances. Nonetheless, interactions leading to unexpected wear removal phenomena between a bladed-disk and a casing with abradable coating have been observed experimentally. Beside of blade damages such as cracks resulting from high amplitudes of vibration, experimental observations included very significant temperatures increase, particularly within the abradable coating, to a point that thermo-mechanical effects may not be neglected anymore. The aim of this work is to investigate the numerical modeling of thermal effects in the abradable coating and the casing due to contact interactions. In particular, the proposed model provides insight on the sensitivity of engines to contact events when the plane had reduced tarmac times between two consecutive flights.
 A strongly coupled thermo-mechanical model of the casing and its abradable coating is first described. A 3D cylindrical mesh is employed, it may be decomposed in two parts: (1) along the casing contact surface, a cylindrical thermal mesh is constructed to compute the temperature elevation and heat diffusion in the three directions of space within the abradable coating, and (2) the casing itself is represented by a simplified cylindrical thermo-mechanical mesh to compute both temperature elevation and the induced deformations following temperature changes. This 3D hybrid mesh is combined with a mechanical mesh of the abradable layer, dedicated to wear modeling and the computation of normal and tangential contact forces following blade/abradable coating impacts. The heat flux resulting from contact events is related to the friction forces and only heat transfer by conduction is considered in this work. In order to reduce computational times, the time integration procedure is twofold: the explicit time integration scheme featuring reduced time steps required for contact treatment is combined with a larger time step time integration scheme used for the casing thermo-mechanical model. An extensive validation procedure is carried out from a numerical standpoint, it underlines the convergence of the model with respect to time and space parameters.


This paper presents a new method for extracting roads in Very High Resolution remotely sensed images based on advanced directional morphological operators. The proposed approach introduces the use of Path Openings and Closings in order to extract structural pixel information. These morphological operators remain flexible enough to fit rectilinear and slightly curved structures since they do not depend on the choice of a structural element shape and hence outperform standard approaches using rotating rectangular structuring elements. The method consists in building a granulometry chain using Path Openings and Closing to perform Morphological Profiles. For each pixel, the Morphological Profile constitutes the feature vector on which our road extraction is based.


Multiple myeloma is very frequently diagnosed too late. In ten patients in whom the diagnosis was ultimately made in the course of one year, the early symptom of back or skeletal pain was at first most frequently misdiagnosed as osteoporosis and so treated. Such symptoms as loss of weight, increased sedimentation rate and increase in gamma-globulins should have led to further tests, for example sternal puncture, radiological survey of the entire skeleton, and immuno-electrophoresis.


The model program for the LHC main dipoles is dedicated to the study and validation of design variants and assembly parameters to achieve reproducible performance and optimise components and assembly costs. The topics investigated in the last year include the material of the coil end spacers, the use of polyimide films from different manufacturers, the definition of optimum azimuthal and longitudinal coil pre-stress values, shimming of coil ends, collaring around the "cold bore" and different layouts of the yoke ends. This paper presents the main characteristics of such recent models, the results obtained during cold tests and the plans for the final phase of the model program for the LHC dipoles.


Literature on cancer in animals shows a scarcity of neoplasms in the guinea pig, which is noteworthy, considering the large number of these animals which pass through the hands of the research worker. Stilling (1) suggests as an explanation that since they are largely used in lethal experiments few live to their cancer age. The First Scientific Report of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (1904) reports no cases of tumors in the guinea pig. Beatti (2), discussing tumors in animals in 1916 reports no guinea-pig tumors, and more recently Wolf (3) mentions neoplasms in guinea pigs only to comment on their rarity. However, Teutschlaender (4) on the same subject mentions several cases which had been reported at that time. Wood (12) in 1916 reported a sarcoma in a guinea pig. Sternberg (5) reported a case of metastasizing adenocarcinoma of the mammary gland. Jones (6) also reported a case of adenocarcinoma of the mammary gland in an old female, which had not metastasized but which he transplanted through a series of eight animals, two of which showed metastases. Murray (7) reported a liposarcoma of the region of the mammary gland which has been transplanted through many generations. No metastases are observed. Miguenz (8) reported a round-cell sarcoma of the tissues of the neck with metastases in liver, kidney and pancreas, which he transplanted through nine passages. Lubarsch (9) reported two cases: one of a spindle-cell sarcoma of the muscles of the back with metastases in the spleen, and one of a spindle- and giant-cell sarcoma of the neck with multiple metastases. Both were successfully transplanted. Leo Loeb (10) reports and discusses ten examples of what he regards as tumors of the ovary showing a picture similar to chorioepithelioma. He believes they develop from embryonic placenta tissue and are connected with parthogenesis in cases with atresic follicles. Teutschlaender in discussing these speaks of them as "hyperplastic luteal cells" and "transitory tumors."


Purpose – This article examines the notion of value propositions (promises of reciprocal value between service providers and their customers), value-in-exchange and value-in-use, all within the conceptual context of service-dominant (S-D) logic. Design/methodology/approach – Responding to calls in the recent literature for an academic critique of S-D logic, its key constructs, and its application in marketing situations of varying complexity, the article presents a conceptual analysis of the determinants of value emphasis in value propositions from the S-D perspective. Findings – Four guiding principles are derived from a rigorous analysis of the relevant literatures. Ways are discussed in which firms might achieve greater flexibility in designing their market offerings, and thus manage different customer segments using different value propositions. The general conclusion is that the ability to communicate a firm's value propositions strategically and effectively is a new area for the development of competence at the core of competitive advantage. Research implications – The findings pave the way for empirical research into the dynamics of value propositions. Since the main focus of the conceptual framework is on the customer-provider dyad, future studies should broaden coverage to multilateral settings and networked environments. Practical implications – Factors that determine the relative emphasis in value propositions between value-in-exchange and value-in-use are discussed, and the management implications derived from each of the four principles identified.


ABSTRACT Antibiotics are a common medical waste that can cause antibiotic resistance in humans and harm aquatic life. One of the most effective approaches for treating medical wastewater is the aqueous two-phase extraction process (ATPS). ATPS is considered an ecologically benign technology. Nine ATPS chemical systems were developed to extract Amoxicillin from simulated hospital wastewater using various salts and organic solvents. The criteria that determine the most efficient system were explored in order to maximize the separation process. After assessing the performance of the considered systems, amoxicillin extraction was carried out utilizing an ATPS comprised of PEG6000 as an extractant and K2HPO4 as a separating agent. Complete amoxicillin removal was attained at room temperature and a mixing speed of 500 rpm for 540 mins. The extraction efficiency was found to increase with temperature, salt concentration, and the volume ratio of the solvent (PEG6000). Based on the experimental design methodology, the optimum amoxicillin removal efficiency of 96.4% was attained at a temperature of 44.3°C, 42.6 wt.% of salt, and a 0.5 volume fraction ratio of PEG6000. The stagewise application of the process was also performed within five separation stages. This approach outperforms traditional extraction methods in terms of efficacy and duration. GRAPHICAL ABSTRACT


Families of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) can be differentiated according to sociodemographics and environmental risk factors characterized by stress parental, the use of coping strategies and social support. The aim of this study was to analyze the behavioral, emotional and social manifestations of children with ASD, related to different types of families characterized according risk factors as families with "high risk", with "moderated risk" and with "low risk". Participants were 52 mothers and their children between 7 and 11 years old with ASD without intellectual disability. All mothers provided information about children's behavior through the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire, which includes the following scales: emotional symptoms, behavioral problems, hyperactivity/inattention, peer problems and prosocial behavior. Comparisons analysis showed that children belonging to the high family risk group exhibited less prosocial behaviors and a higher level of emotional problems compared to the low risk group. The findings from the present study illustrate the importance of considering the characteristics of entire family system in the emotional and social development of children with ASD. The role of family counseling to enhance emotional regulation skills and prosocial behaviors is underlined due to their impact on long-term social adjustment.


Bioactive gibberellins (GAs) are phytohormones that regulate growth and development throughout the life cycle of plants. DELLA proteins are conserved growth repressors that modulate all aspects of GA responses. These GA-signaling repressors are nuclear localized and likely function as transcriptional regulators. Recent studies demonstrated that GA, upon binding to its receptor, derepresses its signaling pathway by binding directly to DELLA proteins and targeting them for rapid degradation via the ubiquitin-proteasome pathway. Therefore, elucidating the signaling events immediately downstream of DELLA is key to our understanding of how GA controls plant development. Two sets of microarray studies followed by quantitative RT-PCR analysis allowed us to identify 14 early GA-responsive genes that are also early DELLA-responsive in Arabidopsis thaliana seedlings. Chromatin immunoprecipitation provided evidence for in vivo association of DELLA with promoters of eight of these putative DELLA target genes. Expression of all 14 genes was downregulated by GA and upregulated by DELLA. Our study reveals that DELLA proteins play two important roles in GA signaling: (1) they help establish GA homeostasis by direct feedback regulation on the expression of GA biosynthetic and GA receptor genes, and (2) they promote the expression of downstream negative components that are putative transcription factors/regulators or ubiquitin E2/E3 enzymes. In addition, one of the putative DELLA targets, XERICO, promotes accumulation of abscisic acid (ABA) that antagonizes GA effects. Therefore, DELLA may restrict GA-promoted processes by modulating both GA and ABA pathways.


The ever-increasing computational complexity of deep learning models makes their training and deployment difficult on various cloud and edge platforms. Replacing floating-point arithmetic with low-bit integer arithmetic is a promising approach to save energy, memory footprint, and latency of deep learning models. As such, quantization has attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. However, using integer numbers to form a fully functional integer training pipeline including forward pass, back-propagation, and stochastic gradient descent is not studied in detail. Our empirical and mathematical results reveal that integer arithmetic seems to be enough to train deep learning models. Unlike recent proposals, instead of quantization, we directly switch the number representation of computations. Our novel training method forms a fully integer training pipeline that does not change the trajectory of the loss and accuracy compared to floating-point, nor does it need any special hyper-parameter tuning, distribution adjustment, or gradient clipping. Our experimental results show that our proposed method is effective in a wide variety of tasks such as classification (including vision transformers), object detection, and semantic segmentation.


Half of the world's population has limited access to drinking water and in 2025 2.3 billion
people will have no constant fresh water supply. In coastal areas with scarce precipitation
but a frequent occurrence of fog, fresh water can be harvested from the fog. This means that
the wind carrying fog is pushed against vertically set-up fog meshes. The fibers of the fog
mesh intercept the fog droplets, the droplets coagulate and with reaching a significant mass,
they pour down the mesh to a collecting channel and from there to a storing tank. The
"Raschel"-type meshes currently in use in several fog harvesting projects around the world
show several disadvantages such as a low yield and inadequate mechanical stability. The
main goal of this project therefore is to identify a fog harvesting material with improved
characteristics, in this case, the highest yield.
Five different materials which may be suitable for fog harvesting were examined using
experiments and modeling techniques. They range from very simple meshes used e.g. for
shading to three-dimensional structures that were specifically designed for this purpose. The
experiments were conducted in a climate chamber where fog was sprayed on the different
materials and the yield efficiency, along with the pour-off characteristics and rest water
amount were measured. Additionally, the yield was calculated from hydrodynamic theory.


Follicular lymphoma (FL) represent the majority of indolent lymphoma in daily practice. The vast majority of patients present in advanced stage (Ann Arbor) III/IV. At first diagnosis painless palpable lymph nodes as well as B-symptoms and less frequently bone marrow infiltration with impairment of the normal hematopoiesis or hypersplenism are observed. The clinical course is usually characterized by only slowly progressive disease but constant relapses. During the last 10 years the clinical outcome especially in advanced stages has been remarkably improved by the introduction of antibody-based strategies (combined immuno-chemotherapy, rituximab maintenance, radioimmunotherapy) as well as optimized transplantation strategies (myeloablative high dose therapy, allogeneic transplantation with dose-reduced conditioning). Accordingly, current series report on an improved median overall survival of 15-20 years.


INTRODUCTION. This article reviews a gradual but decisive transformation in teacher education in Ireland. It traces, firstly, the outlines of traditional models of teacher education — based historically on UK patterns. These rarely addressed directly the ethical dimensions of professional learning. Such learning largely consisted of acquaintance with a body of theory on the one hand, and on the other, initiation into inherited attitudes and practices for survival in the workplace. The article examines successive efforts to change these models. METHOD. Taking as an illustrative study the efforts of one university to transform this pattern, we explore how a new rationale emerged during the 1980s and progressively came to fruition thereafter. Critical attention is paid to concerns like the teacher's ethical agency and reflective capacity. The research structure has five parts. The first sketches the historical context, revealing how key ethical questions often remained peripheral in teacher education. The second traces the different directions taken by teacher education in the UK and Ireland in the 1980s and provides a summary of the new rationale we developed at Maynooth. The third reviews the notion of teachers' ethical agency, and its importance for that rationale. The fourth illustrates how the new rationale changed the experience of becoming a teacher, specifically through the Higher Diploma in Education. The final section reviews the consequences of the new approach and its broader import for national policy at a time when Ireland's Teaching Council progressively embraced a critically reflective approach to teacher education as a whole. RESULTS. The results of the new approach are reviewed incrementally through the paper, to reveal how the ethical dimensions of professional learning became more central and more fruitful. DISCUSSION. The discussion, throughout the paper, focuses on the actions needed to make the ethical dimensions of professional learning more relevant and meaningful.


Spontaneous intracerebral haematoma caused by metastatic neplasies are reported in 11 patients, 8 males and 3 females, with age between 19 and 74 years. We had 7 melanomas, 3 carcinomas and one choriocarcinoma. The presenting symptoms were those of classical spontaneous intracerebral hemorrhage with a history of sudden headache, coma or stupor, hemiparesis or hemiplegia or other focal signal, and bloody cerebrospinal fluid. Three patients presented more than one hemorrhagic episodes. In four cases the computado-rized tomography revealed multiples lesions. Seven patients were operated by large craniotomy with evacuation of the hematoma and in one a cerebral biopsy reveled a melanoma and in the other six a large tumoral mass was removed. The average survival was 39 days.


A DNA fragment containing the SRM12/ADA1 gene sequence inserted into a recombinant circular plasmid improves its maintenance in budding yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) cells. Plasmid stabilization caused by the integrated SRM12 sequence does not require the SRM12 function complementing the srm12 mutation and depends on the orientation of the inserted fragment in the vector. This stabilization is mainly due to a decrease in spontaneous plasmid underreplication/copy loss rather than an increase in the fidelity of mitotic plasmid segregation.


Abstract:At the founding editor's invitation in 1991–92, the members of the editorial board and the department editors of Common Knowledge wrote individual and small-group calls for papers to be published in the inaugural issue of Spring 1992 and the succeeding issue, Fall 1992. This call for papers was published among the first group.


Due to non-productive infections, mice are not a good model to study some human adenoviruses. However, mice provide an excellent model to study the metabolic effects of human adenovirus, Ad36. Research interest in Ad36 is increasing rapidly, and consequently an increase in the use of mice as a model is anticipated. However, little is known about the transmission potential of Ad36 from infected mice to other laboratory animals or personnel. While underestimating the infectivity could promote inadvertent spread of Ad36, overstating it could drain valuable laboratory resources and animals. Therefore, we determined the duration of infectivity in female C57BL/6J mice that were experimentally infected with human adenoviruses Ad36 or Ad2. Other uninfected mice were co-housed for one week with the experimentally-infected animals, four or eight weeks postinfection. Additionally, uninfected mice were housed in the cages of mice that were infected with Ad36, 12 weeks earlier. The presence of viral DNA in tissues was used to indicate infection of mice. Although experimentally-infected mice harboured viral DNA at least up to 12 weeks, the horizontal transmission of infection was observed in co-housed mice only up to four weeks postinfection. Thus, Ad36-infected mice should be considered potentially infective for eight weeks and appropriate handling and barrier containment should be used. After eight week postinfection, horizontal transmission appears unlikely. This information may provide guidelines for animal handling, and experimental design using Ad36, which may increase safety for laboratory personnel and reduce the number of mice required for experiments.


Thank you very much for reading how therapists change personal and professional reflections. As you may know, people have look hundreds times for their favorite books like this how therapists change personal and professional reflections, but end up in malicious downloads. Rather than enjoying a good book with a cup of tea in the afternoon, instead they are facing with some infectious virus inside their laptop.


Experiences of past projects show that interventions would more likely succeed if these are designed considering the needs and resources of the target beneficiaries. To achieve this end, participatory rural appraisals (PRAs) were conducted in three barangays of Inopacan, Leyte with marginal upland areas. The PRAs were participated by 64 community representing almost all sectors. Tools used residents in data gathering were seasonal calendar, historical timeline, Venn diagram, household labor allocation, household decision-making, livelihood analysis, and problem tree analysis. Results showed that residents' main livelihood are farming and livestock raising. Major crops planted are coconut, corn, rootcrops, and banana; while animals raised include goats, swine, native chickens and carabaos. Due to limited water supply in the barangays, farmers have to depend on rainfed farming system. To augment family income, some women engage in backyard gardening, and in food processing and selling. Results also revealed that they have experienced problems like infertile soils, infestation which reduced and Brontispa longissima productivity of coconut. The FGD participants expressed that many people in their locality need other livelihood options to supplement their unstable income from coconut. The livelihood activities that can be enhanced through trainings and technical assistance include farming, animal raising and food processing. Results have implication in planning for more sustainable resource-based management.


A multimodal imaging system has been developed for tooth tissue imaging. This imaging system is designed to obtain one or more two-dimensional images of the tooth tissue, and those two-dimensional images are rendered with advanced algorithms to provide a high-contrast image. This system combines polarized reflectance imaging, fluorescence imaging, and optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging. The imaging system design, as well as some experimental results, will be discussed in the presentation.


Objective To understand the factors affecting the decision to self-report a concussion – particularly among sub-groups like athletes and future pilots. Design Survey. Setting A United States military academy. Participants Voluntarily participatingcadets (n=2,503, 23.9%=female). Assessment of risk factors NCAA Division I athlete status, future pilot status, gender, school year were examined as factors affecting self-report. Outcome measure Anticipated Self-Report (ASR) of concussion on a scale from 1–9 (most to least likely to self-report). Cadets completed a 2-page survey matching ASR to demographic risk factors (above), and to self-report questions assessing Costs, Rewards, Attitude, Subjective Norms, Self-Efficacy, and Social Support. Main results Cadets demonstrated an overall willingness to self-report a concussion – indicated by a mean ASR score of 6.07 (95% CI=5.97–6.17, SD=2.47, median=7.00, n=2.332) above the scale midpoint. Costs (r=−0.61, p<0.001), Rewards (r=0.67, p<0.001) and Attitude (r=0.70, p<0.001) were highly, significantly predictive of ASR. Cadet sub-populations revealed the importance of specific costs. Aspiring pilots – concerned about concussions affecting their pilot qualification status –steadily decreased ASR by year, while non-pilot cadets retained consistent ASR, shown by Future Pilot x Class Year ANOVA (F(3,2196)=11.78, p<0.001). NCAA Athletes, conversely, showed no ASR differences from non-athletes, t(2251)=0.16, p=0.87, CI =±0.23. Conclusions Symptom self-report is a crucial factor in all stages of concussion care. Costs and rewards affecting self-report may have unique contexts that drive unexpected self-report patterns. Here, aspiring pilots showed lower self-report behaviour while athletes showed average self-report behaviour – based on perceived costs to career aspirations. These data will be used to design interventions to increase to concussion self-report. Competing interests All authors received funding from the National Collegiate Athletic Association and Department of Defense (NCAA Mind Matters Challenge).


A greenhouse experiment was conducted to compare the agronomic effectiveness of four phosphate rock (PR) fertilizers from Togo (TPR), South Africa (SAPR) and Morocco (MPR) with single super phosphate (SSP) for corn (Zea mays L.) on an acidic P-deficient ultisol in Okinawa. The P rates used were 0, 100, 200, and 300 mg P kg-1 soil and corn was grown for six weeks. The relative agronomic effectiveness (RAE) of each PR with respect to SSP was calculated. The dry matter yield (DMY) and P uptake followed the order SSP>MPR>TPR=SAPR=control. The RAE values ranged from 8 to 78% and were significantly correlated ( r = 0.96**) with chemical reactivity of the PRs measured by extraction with ammonium citrate (pH 3). The DMY, P uptake and RAE values for MPR were statistically similar (P < 0.05) to SSP, suggesting that MPR can be used as a P source in Okinawa soils.


The contents of the scale of Medical Stores for Service Afloat must provide adequate quantities of drugs to allow proper patient care in a variety of situations often remote from specialist support. The overall make up of the scale is difficult to envisage outside the context for which it was conceived. This study was designed to assess the accuracy of the make up of the scale in three RN ships over a six-month period during a detached deployment. During this time the usage of all consumable items was specifically recorded and the outcome subjected to rigorous analysis in relation to the present scale. The results of the study indicate that in the case of both HMS Ark Royal (AR) and the two smaller ships HMS Edinburgh and HMS Sirius (ES) the quantities of drugs in the majority of cases are in excess of requirements. Of the 290 (AR) and 266 (ES) individual drugs 68% and 40% respectively could safely be reduced by varying amounts, whereas only 7.6% and 4.9% respectively needed to be increased. Furthermore, when these changes are costed the savings that result are 7806 pounds for the AR scale and 1532 pounds for the ES scale. Extrapolation of these figures across the surface fleet produces an overall saving on the costs of drugs of over 87,000 pounds.


PURPOSE
We have previously shown that TGF-β3 (T3) stimulates extracellular matrix (ECM) assembly while maintaining antifibrotic characteristics in a model using human corneal fibroblasts (HCFs). This model, however, requires non-physiological levels of serum. In the current study, we tested whether T3 could stimulate human corneal keratocytes (HCKs) in vitro to assemble a functional ECM, while maintaining their characteristics.

METHODS
Human corneal keratocytes and HCFs were isolated and cultured using 1% or 10% serum, respectively ±T3. The constructs were processed for indirect immunofluorescence (IF), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and qRT-PCR, analyzing for keratocyte marker, keratocan, and ECM components, collagen (col) types I, III, and V.

RESULTS
Quantitative reverse transcriptase PCR data showed that keratocan, col I, and V were all upregulated in HCKs compared with HCFs, whereas col III was expressed at low levels in HCKs. Transforming growth factor beta 3 stimulation further enhanced the level of change. Without T3, HCK constructs were very thin, approximately 5 μm; however, as with HCFs, upon stimulation with T3, HCK constructs increased in thickness by approximately 5-fold. Cell counts and ECM production revealed that HCKs assembled more ECM per unit area compared with HCFs, and IF revealed downregulation of fibrotic markers, col III, and thrombospondin-1, with T3 stimulation. Transmission electron microscopy data revealed aligned ECM with long fibrils for all conditions except HCK Controls. Human corneal keratocytes+T3 also showed denser collagen fibrils with more consistent fibril diameter.

CONCLUSIONS
Overall, the data suggests that it is possible to stimulate matrix secretion and assembly by HCKs in vitro by using a single growth factor, T3.


The knowledge that Washington was a city for all Americans and a representative of the ideals and values of this country drove the members of the Senate Park Commission to make Washington the most beautiful the most healthful and the most successful city in the nation. In their manufacture of a comprehensive plan for the city they were influenced by District residents and citizens nationwide alike and they were under an immense amount of pressure personal political and professional to present a product of unrivaled quality and expertise. This paper argues that as citizens shaped the District into their idea of an ideal capital they revealed deep-seated values including the importance of education the efficacy of social activism and the value of nature which have become fundamental aspects of a uniquely American identity. Chapter 1 summarizes the field of Washingtoniana study and presents the sense of historical discomfort surrounding the capital's ambiguous aesthetic identity. Chapter 2 follows the rise of Americans' patriotic loyalty to their capital city in the first hundred years of its existence. Chapter 3 examines the national and local reform movements that fed the Senate Park Commission's thrust toward the ideal city and society and Chapter 4 explores how the Plan's reform initiatives specifically altered the capital's foundational plan and legitimized its American loyalties. As a study of the capital district this paper attempts to extrapolate meaning from the Senate Park Commission's plan for Washington in order to better understand American identity.


Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to determine to what extent a person's psychophysiological well-being is affected by misinformation and whether their level of information discernment has any positive or negative effect on the outcome.

Design/methodology/approach
Participants (n = 48) were randomly and blindly allocated to one of two groups: control group participants were told a person they were working with was a student; experimental group participants were additionally led to believe that this other participant had extreme religious views. This was both stigmatising and misinforming, as this other person was an actor. Participants completed a pre-screening booklet and a series of tasks. Participants' cardiovascular responses were measured during the procedure.

Findings
Participants with high levels of information discernment, i.e. those who are curious, use multiple sources to verify information, are sceptical about search engine information, are cognisant of the importance of authority and are aware that knowledge changes and is contradictory at times exhibited an adaptive stress response, i.e. healthy psychophysiological outcomes and responded with positive emotions before and after a stressful task.

Social implications
The findings indicate the potential harmful effects of misinformation and discuss how information literacy or Metaliteracy interventions may address this issue.

Originality/value
The first study to combine the hitherto unrelated theoretical areas of information discernment (a sub-set of information literacy), affective states (positive affect negative affect survey) and stress (challenge and threat cardiovascular measures).


OBJECTIVE
We investigated the user requirements of African-American youth (aged 14-24 years) to inform the design of a culturally appropriate, network-based informatics intervention for the prevention of HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STI).

MATERIALS AND METHODS
We conducted 10 focus groups with 75 African-American youth from a city with high HIV/STI prevalence. Data analyses involved coding using qualitative content analysis procedures and memo writing.

RESULTS
Unexpectedly, the majority of participants' design recommendations concerned trust. Youth expressed distrust towards people and groups, which was amplified within the context of information technology-mediated interactions about HIV/STI. Participants expressed distrust in the reliability of condoms and the accuracy of HIV tests. They questioned the benevolence of many institutions, and some rejected authoritative HIV/STI information. Therefore, reputational information, including rumor, influenced HIV/STI-related decision making. Participants' design requirements also focused on trust-related concerns. Accordingly, we developed a novel trust-centered design framework to guide intervention design.

DISCUSSION
Current approaches to online trust for health informatics do not consider group-level trusting patterns. Yet, trust was the central intervention-relevant issue among African-American youth, suggesting an important focus for culturally informed design. Our design framework incorporates: intervention objectives (eg, network embeddedness, participation); functional specifications (eg, decision support, collective action, credible question and answer services); and interaction design (eg, member control, offline network linkages, optional anonymity).

CONCLUSIONS
Trust is a critical focus for HIV/STI informatics interventions for young African Americans. Our design framework offers practical, culturally relevant, and systematic guidance to designers to reach this underserved group better.


A wideband low-noise amplifier (LNA) based on the current-reused cascade configuration is proposed. The wideband input-impedance matching was achieved by taking advantage of the resistive shunt-shunt feedback in conjunction with a parallel LC load to make the input network equivalent to two parallel RLC-branches, i.e., a second-order wideband bandpass filter. Besides, both the inductive series- and shunt-peaking techniques are used for bandwidth extension. Theoretical analysis shows that both the frequency response of input matching and noise figure (NF) can be described by second-order functions with quality factors as parameters. The CMOS ultra-wideband LNA dissipates 10.34-mW power and achieves S 11 below -8.6 dB, S 22 below -10 dB, S 12 below -26 dB, flat S 21 of 12.26 ± 0.63 dB, and flat NF of 4.24 ± 0.5 dB over the 3.1-10.6-GHz band of interest. Besides, good phase linearity property (group-delay variation is only ±22 ps across the whole band) is also achieved. The analytical, simulated, and measured results agree well with one another.


Over the years we have seen recommender systems shifting focus from optimizing short-term engagement toward improving long-term user experience on the platforms. While defining good long-term user experience is still an active research area, we focus on one specific aspect of improved long-term user experience here, which is user revisiting the platform. These long term outcomes however are much harder to optimize due to the sparsity in observing these events and low signal-to-noise ratio (weak connection) between these long-term outcomes and a single recommendation. To address these challenges, we propose to establish the association between these long-term outcomes and a set of more immediate term user behavior signals that can serve as surrogates for optimization. To this end, we conduct a large-scale study of user behavior logs on one of the largest industrial recommendation platforms serving billions of users. We study a broad set of sequential user behavior patterns and standardize a procedure to pinpoint the subset that has strong predictive power of the change in users' long-term visiting frequency. Specifically, they are predictive of users' increased visiting to the platform in $5$ months among the group of users with the same visiting frequency to begin with. We validate the identified subset of user behaviors by incorporating them as reward surrogates for long-term user experience in a reinforcement learning (RL) based recommender. Results from multiple live experiments on the industrial recommendation platform demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed set of surrogates in improving long-term user experience.


The survival of preterm babies has significantly improved over the last several decades in the high-income countries because of the availability of Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICU's) in both large and small hospitals, presence of specially trained physicians, nurses, and other health care personnel with easy access to sophisticated equipment. However, the bigger public health advances that saw improvements in socio-economic status of the populations, improvements in education and sanitation conditions and reductions in malnutrition and rates of infectious diseases were probably the main reasons for this improved survival rates for preterm neonates. Low in-come countries are currently highest bearers of the burden of preterm morbidity and mortality. The current preventive and care interventions do not reach all the neonates and their mothers, the coverage has remained low, access is poor and the quality of care is low. The aim of this chapter is to propose ideas on how the current preterm neonatal care interventions can be adapted for community scale up through community-based health system structures like community health workers to improve survival of neonates who have been delivered from home or after they have been discharged from hospital.


We use a unique data set of Chinese villages to investigate whether access to telecommunications, in particular, landline phones, increases the likelihood of outmigration. By using regional and time variations in the installation of landline phones, our difference-in-differences (DID) estimation shows that the access to landline phones increases the ratio of out-migrant workers by 2 percentage points, or about 51 percent of the sample mean in China. The results remain robust to a battery of validity checks. Furthermore, landline phones affect outmigration through two channels: information access on job opportunities and timely contact with left-behind family members. Our findings underscore the positive migration externality of expanding telecommunications access in rural areas, especially in places where migration potential is large.


A 30-year-old woman pre- sented with a 6-month history of pain and swelling over the sole of her right foot. Plain radiograph showed a cal- cified mass in the heel pad, which appeared to be arising from the spur on inferior aspect of calcaneum. Magnetic resonance imaging showed a lesion, hypointense on T1-weeighted and hyperintense on T2-weighted images over the plantar aspect of the foot. Open biopsy of the mass was indicative of periosteal osteosarcoma, the variety that has never been reported in calcaneum. Below-knee amputation was done with no recurrence or distance metastasis seen at 24 months of follow up.


Phosphorus (P) is one of the six essential macronutrients in plants. Plants only assimilate P in the form of phosphate (Pi). Plants have developed various adaptations to enhance Pi acquisition and its efficient use. The low availability of Pi in the soil, means many crop plants rely on Pi fertilisers to maintain their growth and development. The overuse of fertilisers pollutes the environment. To overcome this problem, it is crucial to understand the physiological and molecular mechanism of plant Pi uptake and use.
Revealing candidate genes underlying trans e-QTL hotspots on chromosome A06 of B. rapa, Phosphate transporter PHO1 (PHO1) genes provide insights on the putative genes which are responsible for Pi transportation and remobilisation in plants. DNA sequencing of five Bacterial Artificial Chromosome (BAC) clones of B. rapa ssp. pekinensis cv. Chiifu revealed the occurrence of four PHO1 paralogues in tandem in the genome sequence. However, only three PHO1 paralogue transcripts could be confirmed by cloning.
Membrane lipid remodelling occurred in 24 cultivars of Brassica napus and Brassica rapa R-o-18 photosynthetic membranes under Pi deficient conditions. Plants change their phospholipid compositions to non-phosphorus galactolipid and sulfolipid to release Pi for other cellular functions. Analysis of lipid profiles and expression of lipid metabolism genes in Brassica rapa R-o-18 grown under Pi starvation showed highly responsive lipid metabolism genes are Glycerophosphodiester phosphodiesterase 1 (GDPD1), Monogalactosyldiacylglycerol synthase 3 (MGD3) and Sulfoquinovosyl transferase 2 (SQD2).
Analysis of transcript abundance in leaf samples of B. rapa R-o-18 under Pi deficiency through qPCR showed increased transcript abundance for Aluminium activated malate transporter 1 (ALMT) by 7.6-fold, which is involved in organic acid (OA) exudation to improve phosphorus uptake efficiency (PUpE). Whole transcriptome sequencing using RNA-seq revealed 630 transcripts whose expression changed during Pi deficiency across five investigated B. napus lines; 481 genes were upregulated, and 148 genes were down-regulated in response to Pi deficiency. High throughput RNA-seq contributed to molecular identification and regulation underlying biochemical and physiological adaptations to Pi deficiency. These advances provide information of on candidate genes which might be useful in developing future crops with tolerance to low Pi availability.


In the present study a theoretical analysis is presented for determining the stability characteristics of clamped non-homogeneous shells on the elastic foundation subjected to the lateral pressure. The basic equations have been derived for the shell, the Young modulus of which varies exponentially in the thickness direction and rests on the elastic foundation. By applying the Galerkin method to the basic equations, the expressions for the critical lateral pressure of the non-homogeneous shell with or without an elastic foundation are obtained. Finally, the e ects of the non-homogeneity, elastic foundation and shell characteristics on the critical lateral pressure have been studied.


Individuals vary in how they produce speech. This variability affects both the segments (vowels and consonants) and the suprasegmental properties of their speech (prosody). Previous literature has demonstrated that listeners can adapt to variability in how different talkers pronounce the segments of speech. This study shows that listeners can also adapt to variability in how talkers produce lexical stress. Experiment 1 demonstrates a selective adaptation effect in lexical stress perception: repeatedly hearing Dutch trochaic words biased perception of a subsequent lexical stress continuum towards more iamb responses. Experiment 2 demonstrates a recalibration effect in lexical stress perception: when ambiguous suprasegmental cues to lexical stress were disambiguated by lexical orthographic context as signaling a trochaic word in an exposure phase, Dutch participants categorized a subsequent test continuum as more trochee-like. Moreover, the selective adaptation and recalibration effects generalized to novel words, not encountered during exposure. Together, the experiments demonstrate that listeners also flexibly adapt to variability in the suprasegmental properties of speech, thus expanding our understanding of the utility of listener adaptation in speech perception. Moreover, the combined outcomes speak for an architecture of spoken word recognition involving abstract prosodic representations at a prelexical level of analysis.


Abstract A major objective ofthe Food Security Act of 1985 was to make the United States more competitive in world markets. U.S. wheat exports in 1987/88 were 75 percent above their 1985/86 level. This paper analyzes the change in U.S. competitiveness in wheat exports by quantitatively assessing those factors responsible for this export expansion. The results indicate that about half of the increase can be attributed to the provisions ofthe 1985 Act. About 40 percent ofthe increase is due to nonprice factors in the Soviet Union and China—namely production shortfalls and domestic policies—that increased import demand. The rest is due to reduced competitor yields.


An implicit force control scheme for flexible link manipulators is considered in this article. The control output is composed of feedforward and a feedback term. The feedforward torque component compensates the underlying rigid arm dynamics along the desired trajectory. The feedback component regulates the joint coordinate error perturbations. The minimization of a linear quadratic frequency-shaped cost functional yields the time-varying feedback controller gains. The frequency shaping dependence is included to eliminate undesirable effects associated with control and observation spillover. The proposed control scheme is employed in simulation studies on a two link rigid-flexible manipulator. Sufficient conditions for spatial tracking bounds and temporal gain switching bounds for the linearized rigid body error dynamics are provided. The effects of the linearized unmodelled error dynamics related to the flexible states on these bounds are also examined.


Reduction of elevated cholesterol in adults decreases risk of coronary heart disease. Despite evidence of atherosclerosis development at early ages and studies confirming cholesterol tracking from childhood into adulthood, many physicians are reluctant to screen for hypercholesterolemia in children and adolescents. Targeting screening only to children of high-risk families fails to identify as many as two-thirds of at-risk children. Dietary modification and medical therapy appears safe and effective in this age group. Recommendations for screening of all children by age 5 are made, with guidelines for managing elevated cholesterol.


Chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) begins as an indolent disease in which the myeloid lineages in the bone marrow and blood gradually expand. Untreated, this chronic phase of CML inexorably progresses to an accelerated phase and finally to a blast crisis, in which large numbers of blast cells appear in the bone marrow and blood. The hallmark of CML is the Philadelphia chromosome, which corresponds to a t(9;22) translocation in which sequences of BCR that encode the N-terminal region of the BCR protein fuse with the tyrosine kinase catalytic domain of the ABL oncogene. This chimeric gene (BCR-ABL) is central . . .


Proteins work as highly efficient machines at the molecular level and are responsible for a variety of processes in all living cells. There is wide interest in understanding these machines for implications in biochemical/biotechnology industries as well as in health related fields. Over the last century, investigations of proteins based on a variety of experimental techniques have provided a wealth of information. More recently, theoretical and computational modeling using large scale simulations is providing novel insights into the functioning of these machines. The next generation supercomputers with petascale computing power, hold great promises as well as challenges for the biomolecular simulation scientists. We briefly discuss the progress being made in this area.


Naturally occurring bromophenols and commercially available halogenated phenols were investigated kinetic inhibition study and a comparison of inhibitory activity against mushroom tyrosinase. All four bromophenols investigated showed noncompetitive inhibition from the results of Lineweaver-Burk plots. The inhibitors may bind another site of the active site and combine with either free enzyme or enzymesubstrate complex. Among them, inhibition constants of symmetric bromophenol dimers, bis(2,3dibromo-4,5-dihydroxyphenyl)methane and bis(2,3-dibromo-4,5-dihydroxybenzyl)ether, exhibited low values compared to ones of asymmetric dimers. Additionally, 2,3-dibromo-6-(2,3-dibromo-4,5dihydroxybenzyl)-4,5-dihydroxybenzyl methyl ether showed the most potent inhibition among the compounds investigated. Chlorinated phenols, 2,4-dichlorophenol and 2,2'-methylenebis-(4chlorophenol), exhibited moderate inhibition against mushroom tyrosinase among commercially available phenols. These results suggest that inhibition of halogenated phenols against mushroom tyrosinase requires a catechol moiety and/or halogen substitution in the one ortho-position of phenolic hydroxy group and vacant substitution in the other ortho-position.


Electric vehicles have recently been introduced to market in Europe. Policy makers as well as car manufacturers have great interest to understand the first group of electric vehicle users, the so-called `early adopters'. Several studies have tried to determine the potential early adopters of electric vehicles from different angles. However, the number of available studies is limited and little is known about the actual statistical significance of characteristics for this important user group. Here we characterize the potential first users of electric vehicles from an economic perspective and ask which driving profiles make an electric vehicle cost-effective. To this end, we analyze a large database of German driving profiles and find the share of potential first users from different city sizes and statuses of employment. We first find the potential and in a second step study the statistical significance and robustness of the result by (1) performing Chi-square tests of the differences between potential early adopters and other vehicle owners and (2) varying important input parameters of our estimates. We find our characterization of the early adopters to be robust if battery prices and consumption costs are sufficiently favorable for a not too small group of users.