Tuberculosis (TB) is a multifactorial disease governed by bacterial, host and environmental factors. On the host side, growing evidence shows the crucial role that genetic variants play in the susceptibility to Mycobacterium tuberculosis (Mtb) infection. Such polymorphisms have been described in genes encoding for different cytokines and pattern recognition receptors (PRR), including numerous Toll-like receptors (TLRs). In recent years, several members of the C-type lectin receptors (CTLRs) have been identified as key PRRs in TB pathogenesis. Nevertheless, studies to date have only addressed particular genetic polymorphisms in these receptors or their related pathways in relation with TB. In the present study, we screened the main CTLR gene clusters as well as CTLR pathway-related genes for genetic variation associated with pulmonary tuberculosis (PTB). This case-control study comprised 144 newly diagnosed pulmonary TB patients and 181 healthy controls recruited at the Bhagwan Mahavir Medical Research Center (BMMRC), Hyderabad, India. A two-stage study was employed in which an explorative AmpliSeq-based screening was followed by a validation phase using iPLEX MassARRAY. Our results revealed one SNP (rs3774275) in MASP1 significantly associated with PTB in our population (joint analysis p = 0.0028). Furthermore, serum levels of MASP1 were significantly elevated in TB patients when compared to healthy controls. Moreover, in the present study we could observe an impact of increased MASP1 levels on the lectin pathway complement activity in vitro. In conclusion, our results demonstrate a significant association of MASP1 polymorphism rs3774275 and MASP1 serum levels with the development of pulmonary TB. The present work contributes to our understanding of host-Mtb interaction and reinforces the critical significance of mannose-binding lectin and the lectin-complement pathway in Mtb pathogenesis. Moreover, it proposes a MASP1 polymorphism as a potential genetic marker for TB resistance.


This study aims to determine the management of women's leadership style to employee performance on home business. Building relationships with employees need experience in leading, Sources of development of the character of an entrepreneur also found in the family's internal education since childhood. The self-concept of an entrepreneur is a social product formed through the process of internalization and organization and psychological experiences. This psychological experience is the result of individual exploration of the environment and the reflection of himself received from others. Meet the needs of employees is a bond between leaders with subordinates to do, success is strongly influenced by internal and external environment, in the environment someone will be affected on psychological factors that are very supportive and influence the mindset of an entrepreneur, and have a desire to achieve a great job is also ready hard, diligent, have great confidence and perseverance in the fight. Leading patiently, with a sincere heart and always turning on two-way communication, has a successful self-concept and clear goal direction.


Maternal obesity is now considered one of the most commonly occurring risk factors in obstetric practice. A UK-wide observational study was conducted to determine the prevalence of class II and class III maternal obesity and to assess the pregnancy-related outcomes in this high-risk group of women. Every maternity unit in the UK was requested to report each woman with a pregnancy body mass index (BMI) ≥35 kg/m2 who gave birth during March and April 2009. Data relating to demographics, co-morbidities, anthropometric measures and pregnancy-related outcomes were collected. A total of 4751 women who had a calculated BMI ≥35 at any point during pregnancy were reported to have given birth during a 7-week period. The mean first-recorded antenatal weight was 104.9 kg and BMI 41.3 kg/m2. The majority (97.8%) of women gave birth in obstetric units, while 1.2% delivered in alongside-midwifery units, 0.3% in free-standing midwifery units and 0.6% at home. 46% of women had a spontaneous onset of labour, 33% were induced and 21% never laboured. Of the 4669 singleton deliveries, 55% were spontaneous vaginal births, 38% were Caesarean sections, 8% instrumental vaginal births and 0.2% vaginal breech births. Eight per cent of women undergoing Caesarean sections required general anaesthesia. Of the singleton babies, 1.3% had a confirmed congenital anomaly, 1% were stillborn and 0.2% had early neonatal deaths. Eight per cent of live born babies were admitted to the neonatal unit within 48 h of birth. Maternal obesity is associated with an increased risk of pregnancy-related complications and adverse outcomes.


Sugar is one of the major dietary components and any relation between sugar and behavior is of major interest. We review the scientific evidence supporting or refuting the relation between sugar and behavior or cognitive function. Little evidence supports the claim that refined sugar intake significantly influences behavior or cognitive performance in children. A few children may have idiosyncratic reactions or rare allergic syndromes and may therefore respond adversely, but this has yet to be substantiated by carefully controlled research. A role for glucose in the potentiation of memory processing appears clear. Further research is required to define the clinical relevance of this role and to elucidate the mechanisms involved. Sucrose may have a sedative effect, at least in infants, but there are no substantial data suggesting that any sugar has analgesic properties


In the recent past, risk and risk management in agriculture has risen on the agenda of farm managers. Amongst other things, the increased interest is inter alia attributed to the Capital Requirements Directives in the 'Basel II' agreement. In this article, we apply indicators of risk-adjusted returns, well known in the valuation of equity funds, to the context of pig production. Using a large data set of pig farm performance data, we demonstrate that different indicators of risk-adjusted returns do not necessarily lead to different results in the valuation of farms. We recommend using the Treynor Ratio in practical application. Our empirical analysis did not reveal a significant relationship between returns and risk.


Glucagon-like peptide 1 (GLP-1) is a 30-amino acid peptide hormone produced in the intestinal epithelial endocrine L-cells by differential processing of proglucagon, the gene which is expressed in these cells. The current knowledge regarding regulation of proglucagon gene expression in the gut and in the brain and mechanisms responsible for the posttranslational processing are reviewed. GLP-1 is released in response to meal intake, and the stimuli and molecular mechanisms involved are discussed. GLP-1 is extremely rapidly metabolized and inactivated by the enzyme dipeptidyl peptidase IV even before the hormone has left the gut, raising the possibility that the actions of GLP-1 are transmitted via sensory neurons in the intestine and the liver expressing the GLP-1 receptor. Because of this, it is important to distinguish between measurements of the intact hormone (responsible for endocrine actions) or the sum of the intact hormone and its metabolites, reflecting the total L-cell secretion and therefore also the possible neural actions. The main actions of GLP-1 are to stimulate insulin secretion (i.e., to act as an incretin hormone) and to inhibit glucagon secretion, thereby contributing to limit postprandial glucose excursions. It also inhibits gastrointestinal motility and secretion and thus acts as an enterogastrone and part of the "ileal brake" mechanism. GLP-1 also appears to be a physiological regulator of appetite and food intake. Because of these actions, GLP-1 or GLP-1 receptor agonists are currently being evaluated for the therapy of type 2 diabetes. Decreased secretion of GLP-1 may contribute to the development of obesity, and exaggerated secretion may be responsible for postprandial reactive hypoglycemia.


Objectives: The purpose of this study was to determine the association between anaemia severity and risk factors among breast cancer patients. Methods: A prospective study design was conducted in three different oncology centres in Malaysia where 120 anaemic breast cancer patients (haemoglobin < 12 g/dL) were identified through medical chart review. Patients were followed-up for three cycles of chemotherapy and data such as haemoglobin (Hb) levels and demographic or clinical data were also recorded on each follow-up. Data were analysed using SPSS. Results: The average mean of Hb level of all follow-ups was 10.34 ± 0.73 g/dL. A chi-square and multiple logistic regression analysis revealed a significant strong association between anaemia severity and associated risk factors, i.e., demographic data (age, body mass index [BMI], and marital status), chemotherapy data (dose delay, number of regimens, and type of chemotherapy), and cancer stage. Conclusion: Factors that have a great impact on anaemia severity were identified in which oncologist and healthcare professionals can take them into consideration to reduce the negative effect of anaemia on patients' health care. Besides, results of such studies could significantly help in developing effective treatment guidelines for this crucial medical issue.


The "Wassermann" blood test for syphilis is now generally recognized as a valuable aid to the clinician, not only in the diagnosis of the disease, but often as an indicator of the effect of treatment. It is not, perhaps, so generally appreciated, however, that the test, in order to be of real value, must be so carried out that a "positive" reaction will be obtained only in syphilis and in certain other conditions that are readily distinguished from syphilis. No one, thus far, has succeeded in so improving the efficiency of the test that in every case of syphilis with apparent lesions a positive reaction is obtained; so that as a diagnostic means a negative "Wassermann" reaction offers no guarantee of the absence of luetic infection; but properly performed, the test, when it resultspositively, must be expected to indicate either syphilis or certain other easily recognized conditions,


River deltas and individual delta lobes frequently face reduction of sediment supply, either from the geologic process of river avulsion or, more recently, due to human activities such as river damming. Using a process‐based shoreline evolution model, we investigate wave reworking of delta shorelines after fluvial input elimination. Model results suggest that littoral sediment transport can result in four characteristic modes of delta abandonment, ranging from diffusional smoothing of the delta (or delta lobe) to the development of recurved spits. A straightforward analysis of delta shape and wave characteristics provides a framework for predicting the mode of delta abandonment. The observed morphologies of historically abandoned delta lobes, including those of the Nile, Ebro, and Rhone rivers, fit within this framework. Our results provide quantitative insight into the potential evolution of active delta environments in light of future extreme reduction of fluvial sediment input.


Objective:To determine the utility of several perioperative adjuncts for parathyroid localization during parathyroid surgery, we prospectively compared the accuracy of sestamibi–single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) scanning, radioguided surgery, and intraoperative parathyroid hormone (ioPTH) testing. Summary and Background Data:Minimally invasive parathyroidectomy (MIP) is rapidly becoming the procedure of choice in patients with primary hyperparathyroidism (HPT). Several perioperative adjuncts can be used to localize parathyroid adenomas, including sestamibi-SPECT scanning, radioguided surgery, and ioPTH testing. However, the relative value of each of these technologies is unclear. Methods:Between March 2001 through September 2004, 254 patients with primary HPT underwent parathyroidectomy. All patients had preoperative imaging studies and underwent radioguided surgery with a gamma probe and ioPTH testing. The use of each perioperative adjunct was determined based on the intraoperative findings. Results:The mean age of patients was 61 ± 1 year. The mean calcium and parathyroid hormone levels were 11.4 ± 0.1 mg/dL and 136 ± 6 pg/mL, respectively. Of the 254 patients, 206 (81%) had a single parathyroid adenoma, 28 (11%) had double adenomas, 19 (8%) had hyperplasia, and one had parathyroid cancer. All resected parathyroid glands were hypercellular (mean weight = 895 ± 86 mg). The cure rate after parathyroidectomy was 98%. The positive predictive values for sestamibi scanning, radioguided surgery, and ioPTH testing were 81%, 88%, and 99.5%, respectively. Conclusions:This series is one of the largest to date that prospectively compares the use of sestamibi scanning, radioguided surgery, and ioPTH testing. Of all the perioperative adjuncts used during parathyroid surgery, ioPTH testing has the highest sensitivity, positive predictive value, and accuracy. Thus, the inherent variability of sestamibi scanning and radioguided techniques emphasizes the critical role of ioPTH testing during parathyroid surgery.


We study the eigenvalue behaviour of large complex correlated Wishart matrices near an interior point of the limiting spectrum where the density vanishes (cusp point), and refine the existing results at the hard edge as well. More precisely, under mild assumptions for the population covariance matrix, we show that the limiting density vanishes at generic cusp points like a cube root, and that the local eigenvalue behaviour is described by means of the Pearcey kernel if an extra decay assumption is satisfied. As for the hard edge, we show that the density blows up like an inverse square root at the origin. Moreover, we provide an explicit formula for the 1/N correction term for the fluctuation of the smallest random eigenvalue.


Museums belong to what we are used to thinking of as enduring institutions in European national cultures, resistant to change. Or in metaphorical language, as sanctuaries for material and immaterial reminiscences of own or distant cultures. Their status as safe sanctuaries is not so evident any longer. In Paris two renowned and venerable anthropological museums close their doors in 2003, to combine and reinvent themselves in the form of one transformed institution, a museum of art and civilisations. Another metamorphosis is the closing of the national museum for French popular culture (in Paris) and the subsequent birth (in Marseille) of a museum for European and Mediterranean civilisations. A third significant change is the (politically enforced) introduction of primitive art from the Third World in the Louvre, the bulwark of Western art. This article describes these transformations and the associated debates, and discusses the factors behind: paradigmatic changes and intrascientific developments within ethnology and anthropology, new ways of representing the nation, the European and the Other, as well as political power and public taste.


Aim The aim of this study was to evaluate the laparoscopic total extraperitoneal (TEP) approach with direct telescopic dissection and mesh hernioplasty for inguinal hernias. Patients and methods This study was conducted at the Gastrointestinal, Liver, and Laparoscopic Surgery Unit, General Surgery Department, Tanta University Hospital, over the period from 1 January 2014 to last of June 2015 on 20 patients having inguinal hernias. Results This prospective study included 20 adult patients with primary unilateral inguinal hernias, and all of them were males. The age of patients ranged from 22 to 64 years. There were 11 (55%) patients with right inguinal hernias and nine (45%) patients with left inguinal hernias. The mean operative time was 99.30±25.13 min (range: 60–160 min). The mean analgesia time was 3.75±1.62 days (range: 2–7 days). Twenty-four hours postoperatively, mean visual pain score was 2.8±1.15. There was one (5%) case with scrotal edema. Minor surgical emphysema occurred in two (10%) cases. Hospital stay ranged from 1 to 3 days, and the mean value was 1.35±0.67 days. The mean time until return to work was 14.8±4.26 days (range: 7–21 days). The mean follow-up time was 7.6±2.1 months (range: 6–12 months). There were no reported cases of hernia recurrences. Conclusion The laparoscopic TEP repair is an excellent alternative to open preperitoneal repair of inguinal hernias. The operative time was relatively long, but comparable with many studies discussing the TEP technique, which improved over the time of the study, indicating the need for a long learning curve. This technique was proved to be safe, as it was not associated with major morbidity or recurrence. The complication rate was average as compared with other studies, and there was no hernia recurrence during the follow-up period.


This paper investigates the effect of imperfect channel state information on the performance of the cooperative non-orthogonal multiple access (NOMA) transmission scheme, in which the cell-center user acts as a decode-and-forward relay to assist the information transmission. The cell-center user adopts a simultaneous wireless information and power transfer (SWIPT) technique to harvest energy for information forwarding. Based on two channel error models, a maximization problem is formulated to jointly design the robust beamforming and the power splitting ratio while satisfying the minimum data rate for the far user and the successfully decoding requirement for the information of the far user at the near user. For the worst case design under the deterministic error model, the successive convex approximation and the semidefinite relaxation technique are utilized to approximate the non-convex problem to an iterative convex problem. For the outage-constrained design under the stochastic error model, Bernstein-type inequality-based and large deviation inequality-based approaches are used to safely approximate the probabilistic constraints of the inner-level problem to the deterministic constraints, and a golden section search algorithm is employed to find out the optimal single variable of the outer-level problem. Furthermore, the rank proof is provided to prove that the relaxation is tight.


AS FRYE OBSERVED in the "Polemical Introduction" to The Anatomy of Criticism, teaching literature is actually the teaching of criticism of literature and aims at developing in the student a fluency in terms, categories, and critical approaches that permit a vision of the coherence of literature. But how do you do this without relying excessively on secondary sources and displacing the primary text? At the same time as one is setting out to accomplish lofty goals, a major challenge in college-level teaching is practical: how do I encourage students to read and make sense of the primary text without their feeling that they need the guidance of secondary sources in order to understand it? This is perhaps especially acute with a writer like Shakespeare, whose language can be difficult for many of us without the benefit of explanatory notes. Above all, I want students to read and take naive pleasure in the stories, characters, and themes of the plays, to discover literature itself and its intense pleasure and not simply other people's readings of literature, and to experience what overreliance on secondary material can shut students' minds to: the liveliness of the text right here, right now, in this classroom, and inside our own minds, and the openness of great literature to competing interpretations unprompted by secondary material. Aside from their both being major critics, and Frye the major influence on Bloom's own criticism, Northrop Frye and Harold Bloom are both useful in the college classroom because they focus on literature and the aesthetic, because their central critical insights are easy to summarize and share with students, and further because these insights can be keys that help students unlock the primary texts for themselves. Frye and Bloom offer the teacher a way of introducing criticism while keeping the primary text primary. Frye's criticism is everywhere rich in flexible schemes and categorizations (presented with Frye's habitual great wit) that can open our imaginations to literature, and many such schemes are condensed in Fools of Time, on Shakespeare's tragedies, and A Natural Perspective, on his comedies and romances (and on which I focus below). In turn, Bloom's criticism in Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human can generate exciting debates. Bloom is a passionate and opinionated reader whose insights are crystallized in helpful sound bites that students can then argue for or against. For all the interconnections of their work, Frye and Bloom also strongly contrast. Bloom's focus is character rather than the play, and he treats the characters as real people, while Frye describes the dramatic structure of the comedies and romances considered as a whole, and he warns of Bloom's kind of inquiry that "criticism devoted to the vividness of characterization in Shakespeare may get out of proportion ... Shakespeare tells a story that stylizes his characters" (13-14). In short, whether I want a discussion within or outside of proportion, Harold Bloom and Northrop Frye are my constant companions when I teach Shakespeare. The opening of Frye's A Natural Perspective begins my unit on As You Like It and Twelfth Night. Scholars often approach subjects making broad distinctions, Frye says, and while acknowledging that "these statements are clearly oversimplified, rhetorical rather than factual," he makes a similar broad distinction when it comes to literature and literary criticism: "All literary critics are either Iliad critics or Odyssey critics. That is, interest in literature tends to center either in the area of tragedy, realism, and irony, or in the area of comedy and romance" (1), and "This distinction rests on a much broader one, the distinction implied in the traditional view of the function of literature as twofold: to delight and to instruct. On the most naive level of literary study there is the contrast between the person who reads to improve his mind or his command of the language and the person who reads detective stories in bed" (1-2). …


Given the proliferation of consumer media recording devices, events often give rise to a large number of recordings. These recordings are taken from different spatial positions and do not have reliable timestamp information. In this paper, we present two robust graph-based approaches for synchronizing multiple audio signals. The graphs are constructed atop the over-determined system resulting from pairwise signal comparison using cross-correlation of audio features. The first approach uses a Minimum Spanning Tree (MST) technique, while the second uses Belief Propagation (BP) to solve the system. Both approaches can provide excellent solutions and robustness to pairwise outliers, however the MST approach is much less complex than BP. In addition, an experimental comparison of audio features-based synchronization shows that spectral flatness outperforms the zero-crossing rate and signal energy.


Michał Kosman's book is worthy of attention not just within the context of the ongoing discussions regarding deteriorating Polish-German relations. It deserves to be read for a number of reasons, in order to verify widespread opinions on the role of Germany in European politics in the final decade of the twentieth century. The most important of these reasons are: high competence of the young researcher (affiliated with universities in Bydgoszcz and Poznań), his balanced opinions and comments formulated on the basis of German-language publications and magazine articles, and thorough factographical presentation.


Both clinical and pathological features of seven horses suffering from a squamous cell carcinoma of the stomach are presented. The main complaints in the horses, aged six years or more, were loss both of weight and of condition. Metastases had often developed. The diagnostic difficulties and possibilities are discussed.


Acute necrotizing pancreatitis complicated with pancreatic pseudoaneurysm is a rare emergency associated with high mortality that demands immediate treatment to save the patient's life. We treated a 64-year-old man who presented with a bleeding pseudoaneurysm of the superior mesenteric artery caused by acute pancreatitis, using interventional embolizing therapy. In the present report we show that interventional treatment is an effective therapeutic modality for patients with acute necrotizing pancreatitis complicated with intra-abdominal bleeding.


The violence of the Crusades was instigated in part by provocative statements made by political and religious leaders who tapped into shared memories of traumatic warfare between Muslims, Jews, and Christians. The different recollections of wrongdoing by these large, religious, ethnic groups were fuel for renewing violence. As each of these faith traditions evolved, they brought with them stories of oppression and violence, often contained in Holy Scripture. Jews heard ancient accounts of enslavement and warfare with other tribes. Christians were oppressed for three centuries by Romans and blamed Jews for the killing of Jesus. Muslims quarreled among themselves in Sunni and Shia warfare—and in armed conflict with Christians. The retelling of ancient stories often resulted in what some psychologists describe as the transmission of trauma across generations. The hypothesis of this thesis is that psychological insights about trauma can illumine historical accounts of religious violence. A psychological perspective does not refute the findings of historians, but it may help understand how thousands of Christians were persuaded to leave their homes and travel more than a thousand miles to battle with Muslims in the Holy Land. Not only does psychology shed light on past events, it can provide lessons from violent episodes like the Crusades that may help prevent trauma from triggering conflicts in the future. The First Crusade was launched after exaggerated claims were made that Roman Catholics had been persecuted by Muslims in the Holy Land and mistreated by Eastern Orthodox Christians. The vastly different large-group identities made it possible for differing religious traditions to view "the other" as an enemy, even after they had lived peacefully together for many years. The perceived trauma of past encounters became fuel for violence—and a phenomenon that has continued long after the Crusades ended. Psychological insights increase our understanding of how those who feel their ancestors (and themselves) have been victims can themselves become victimizers and oppressors. Lessons from past violence can inform contemporary efforts at peacemaking and interfaith cooperation.


Pharmaceutical residues impose a new and emerging threat to aquatic environments and its biota. One of the most commonly prescribed pharmaceuticals is the antidepressant fluoxetine, a selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitor that has been frequently detected, in concentrations up to 40 μg L–1, in aquatic ecosystems. The present study aims to investigate the ecotoxicity of fluoxetine at environmentally relevant concentrations (0.3, 0.6, 20, 40, and 80 μg L–1) on cell energy and lipid metabolism, as well as oxidative stress biomarkers in the model diatom Phaeodactylum tricornutum. Exposure to higher concentrations of fluoxetine negatively affected cell density and photosynthesis through a decrease in the active PSII reaction centers. Stress response mechanisms, like β-carotene (β-car) production and antioxidant enzymes [superoxide dismutase (SOD) and ascorbate peroxidase (APX)] up-regulation were triggered, likely as a positive feedback mechanism toward formation of fluoxetine-induced reactive oxygen species. Lipid peroxidation products increased greatly at the highest fluoxetine concentration whereas no variation in the relative amounts of long chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (LC-PUFAs) was observed. However, monogalactosyldiacylglycerol-characteristic fatty acids such as C16:2 and C16:3 increased, suggesting an interaction between light harvesting pigments, lipid environment, and photosynthesis stabilization. Using a canonical multivariate analysis, it was possible to evaluate the efficiency of the application of bio-optical and biochemical techniques as potential fluoxetine exposure biomarkers in P. tricornutum. An overall classification efficiency to the different levels of fluoxetine exposure of 61.1 and 88.9% were obtained for bio-optical and fatty acids profiles, respectively, with different resolution degrees highlighting these parameters as potential efficient biomarkers. Additionally, the negative impact of this pharmaceutical molecule on the primary productivity is also evident alongside with an increase in respiratory oxygen consumption. From the ecological point of view, reduction in diatom biomass due to continued exposure to fluoxetine may severely impact estuarine and coastal trophic webs, by both a reduction in oxygen primary productivity and reduced availability of key fatty acids to the dependent heterotrophic upper levels.


Boundary extraction is a collective term that we use for the process of extracting the locations of faults, lineaments, and lateral boundaries between geologic units using geophysical observations, such as measurements of the magnetic field. The process typically begins with a preprocessing stage, where the data are transformed to enhance the visual clarity of pertinent features and hence improve the interpretability of the data. The majority of the existing methods are based on raster grid enhancement techniques, and the boundaries are extracted as a series of points or line segments. In contrast, we set out a methodology for boundary extraction from magnetic data, in which we represent the transformed data as a surface in 3D using a mesh of triangular facets. After initializing the mesh, we modify the node locations, such that the mesh smoothly represents the transformed data and that facet edges are aligned with features in the data that approximate the horizontal locations of subsurface boundaries. To illustrate our boundary extraction algorithm, we first apply it to a synthetic data set. We then apply it to identify boundaries in a magnetic data set from the McFaulds Lake area in Ontario, Canada. The extracted boundaries are in agreement with known boundaries and several of the regions that are completely enclosed by extracted boundaries coincide with regions of known mineralization.


Background: This paper investigates the possibility, arising from previous findings from our laboratories, that cannabis consumption may make a separate contribution to visuospatial memory deficits from those related to ecstasy (MDMA) consumption.

Method: Group was a between-participants independent variable at three levels; ecstasy and cannabis users (n = 11), cannabis users (n = 14), and controls (n = 14). Measures of self-reported substance use, IQ, mood, simple visuospatial span (ie. maintenance only), visuospatial working memory span (maintenance plus processing), and demographic variables were obtained.

Results: Cannabis users who had not used ecstasy showed significant deficits in both simple visuospatial span and visuospatial working memory span compared to the other two groups. Whilst performing consistently worse than controls, deficits in relation to cannabis users who had also used ecstasy depended upon the selection of covariates.

Conclusions: Deficits in simple visuospatial memory may be related to cannabis use, with differences in levels and patterns of its consumption between the two user groups possibly being responsible for these results. Lower ecstasy consumption than that reported by previous samples may have been responsible for the lack of a significant difference in visuospatial working memory performance compared to controls, in contrast to earlier findings.


Low content of soil organic matter and low availability of nutrients in Ultisol are major constraints of this soil to support growth and development of chili pepper. Application of organic fertilizer is required to increase content of soil organic matter as well as to improve other chemical, biological, physical properties of this soil. Wedelia ( Wedelia trilobata )  and Siam Weed ( Chromolaena odorata )  are potential sources of organic fertilizer. The aim of this study was to compare growth and yield of chili pepper under different time application of Wedelia and Siam Weed based organic fertilizer s . Greenhouse house experiment was conducted employing Completely Randomized Design with 2 factors namely Wedelia and Siam Weed composts as first factor and 5 (five) different time of application as second factor. Each treatment was replicated 5 times. The study showed that most variables observed in this experiment were not affected by types of compost. Only were plant height, canopy width and dry weight of biomass significant difference between the two composts. Siam weed compost applied two weeks before planting resulted in plant canopy wider than Wedelia compost. However, Wedelia compost applied at planting resulted in longer chili pepper as compared to Siam weed compost. The experiment also revealed that Wedelia compost produced higher plant height and root dry weight as compared to Siam weed compost.


SUBTITLE: THIS IS THE SEVENTH IN A SERIES OF EXCLUSIVE ARTICLES DESCRIBING HOW OWNER-OPERATORS CAN SPOT ILLEGAL MOTOR CARRIER LEASING PRACTICES.


In an experimental laboratory study with the megalopa stage of Armases roberti, a freshwater-inhabiting species of crab from the Caribbean region, we evaluated the combined, potentially antagonistic effects of odours from conspecific adults and of stepwise salinity reductions (simulating upstream migration, reaching within 1 week conditions of 2‰ or freshwater). Neither of these treatments affected the rate of survival, but the duration of development to metamorphosis was significantly (by about 25%) shortened, when odours from conspecific adult crabs were present, regardless of the salinity conditions. Our results indicate that the metamorphosis-stimulating effect of chemical cues from an adult population of A. roberti is far stronger than the potentially retarding effect of increasing hypoosmotic stress. This suggests that the final phase of larval development, including the processes of settlement and metamorphosis, occurs in this species in freshwater habitats, where conspecific populations live.


: Electricity is an important thing in human life. Currently, the source of electrical energy is obtained by utilizing fossil energy, such as coal and gas, which results in the longer the source of power generation, the less it will be while the need for electrical energy continues to increase due to the times and population growth. Thus, a micro-hydro power plant is a water-powered power plant that is made with the aim of meeting the need for electrical energy and as a renewable energy source that is practical to use. The vortex turbine is a micro-hydro power plant that works with a low head called a Gravitational Water Vortex Power Plant (GWVPP). The laboratory-scale Vortex turbine is called a whirlpool turbine because this turbine utilizes the input power of water that passes through the basin channel so that the water is pressurized and forms a vortex when it rotates the turbine blades, which will generate electrical energy due to the rotation of the blades. This research was conducted to find out which runners are suitable for application in laboratory-scale vortex turbines and to find out the performance of several runners, including Kaplan, Francis, and Vortex turbine runners, to determine the highest efficiency value of the types of runners so that they can be implemented on a larger scale. The research was carried out using the quantitative method by collecting data on runners that had been made with the specifications of 5 blades with a slope of 45° and a diameter of 12 mm given a constant flow rate of 240 l/min. The data taken includes torque (T), angular velocity (ω), water input power (Pa), and water output power (Pt). The data obtained will produce efficiency values for each runner, namely the Francis runner by 21%, Vortex by 21%, and Kaplan by 74%. It can be concluded that the vortex turbine is more suitable for use with Kaplan runners because these runners produce the highest efficiency compared to Francis and Vortex runners.


Atomic simulations using machine learning interatomic potential (MLIP) have gained a lot of popularity owing to their accuracy in comparison to conventional empirical potentials. However, the transferability of MLIP to systems outside the training-set poses a significant challenge. Here, we compare the transferability of three MLIP approaches: i) Neural Network Potentials (NNP), ii) Physical LassoLars Interactions Potential (PLIP) and iii) Linear Potentials with Belher-Parrinello descriptors, trained over a small but diverse configuration of zinc oxide polymorphs. We compared the obtained models with density functional theory reference results for physical properties including bulk lattice parameters, surface energies, and vibrational density of states and showed the superiority of both NNP and PLIP models. However, the NNP model performed poorly when compared to the other two linear models for the structural optimization of nanoparticles and molecular dynamics simulation of liquid phases, which are systems outside the training-set. While providing less accurate prediction for solid Zinc Oxides phases, both linear models appear more transferable than NNP when testing for nanoscale systems and liquid phases. Our results are finally rationalized by a combination of different statistical analysis including spread in force evaluation, information imbalance, convex hull calculation and density in descriptor space.


To obtain the seismic responses of typical subway stations in Beijing, a nonlinear analysis was conducted using a pushover method for seismic analysis and design of underground structures. The analysis mainly focuses on stress in columns and side walls and relative displacement between top and bottom slabs under 3 different levels of PGA (peak ground acceleration). From the analysis, the column shows good ductility due to its high ratio of reinforcement, and it has a good performance under strong motions. Compared with columns, side walls suffer from brittle failure and lose bearing capacity prior to column for its lower ratio of reinforcement. The calculated displacement indicates that the relative displacement between top and bottom slabs is linear proportional to peak ground relative displacement (PGRD). And compared with peak ground acceleration (PGA), PGRD is a more reliable design parameter of ground motion for underground structures. And the typical subway stations in Beijng can withstand the earthquake with design PGA up to 0.2 g.


Contemporary discourse on the desert challenges colonial approaches to this landscape, yet there is a risk of remaining within an imperial theoretical framework. Departing from the dichotomy of "smooth" versus "striated" space conceptualized by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, this essay argues for the need to move beyond the notion of the desert as a spatial continuum. Considering the complex historical development of decolonizing Western Sahara, this paper argues for understanding the desert otherwise through a focus on three specific buildings. Mohammed Abdalah's tent offers a model for how traditional nomadic forms of living were entangled in the process of geographical expeditions of the Spanish colonial government in the first half of the twentieth century—a form of life that vanished with the establishment of new cities and a mining company in the African colony. While the population started settling in towns, the colonial government had the project of making a profit from the rich resources of phosphate in the national and international market: the ground itself became movable. That 'fluid movement' was achieved by constructing the world's longest conveyor belt, connecting the mine of Bou Craa with the port of El Aaiun, a moment in which the difference between spaces that are "smooth" and "striated" begins to blur. Finally, the construction of a fortifying wall of sand by the Moroccan army during the war with Western Sahara—a wall that still divides the contemporary territory—manifests the final iteration of the shifts of spatial understanding that have taken place, particularly since the 1980s. This essay accumulates this complex history in order to reveal how gray areas, ambiguous overlaps, and ill-defined borders configure a contemporary form of sovereignty over the desert. Highlighting the tensions between politics and geology, it argues that Western Sahara presents a case in which architecture arrests the movements and the trajectories of the nomadic paradigm.


We introduce CapstanCrunch, a force resisting, palm-grounded haptic controller that renders haptic feedback for touching and grasping both rigid and compliant objects in a VR environment. In contrast to previous controllers, Cap-stan¬Crunch renders human-scale forces without the use of large, high force, electrically power consumptive and ex-pensive actuators. Instead, CapstanCrunch¬ integrates a friction-based capstan-plus-cord variable-resistance brake mechanism that is dynamically controlled by a small inter-nal motor. The capstan mechanism magnifies the motor's force by a factor of around 40 as an output resistive force. Compared to active force control devices, it is low cost, low electrical power, robust, safe, fast and quiet, while providing high force control to user interaction. We describe the de-sign and implementation of CapstanCrunch and demon-strate its use in a series of VR scenarios. Finally, we evalu-ate the performance of CapstanCrunch in two user studies and compare our controller with an active haptic controller with the ability to simulate different levels of convincing object rigidity and/or compliance.


There are many uncertainties concerning stellar evolution of neutron stars. Neutron stars might possess multipolar architecture in lieu of a single dipole claimed by the conventional wisdom. The multipole issue cannot be resolved using a single observer reference point such as the Earth, but would require an additional non-terrestrial observer location with a significant offset. Without observing multiple beacons, we could not verify or deny the existence of multiple poles from observing the sweeping lighthouse effect from Earth. Moreover, a neutron starÂÂ's magnetic field may be created by differences between the neutron core and a gas surface layer of protons and electrons. These differences between the layers constitute charges and moving currents that result in a magnetic field supported by a fast moving rotating core. If electrons in Cooper pairs exist in a neutron star, then the amount of magnetism may increase by a similar order via superconductivity. By symmetry, proton pairs should also exist to produce similar charge redistribution. Observing the different layers where an electron gas probably evaporates, rotating a proton gas over a neutron core can develop a strong magnet. These issues warrant further discussions as well as a proposal that provides implications for developing a space propulsion scheme.


Communication is a multifaceted phenomenon involving the transmission or exchange of thoughts, ideas, feelings or information through verbal and non-verbal channels (Anderson 1959). Communication means not only talking but also listening to each other. Effective communication involves mutual sharing and mutual understanding. Its foundation is trust and mutual respect. Communication can be expressed in many different ways: it can be interpersonal, intrapersonal, written or visual. Athletes in different sports have to communicate with many different people in different ways. Athletes communicate in, before competition, in competition and after competition coaches find difficulties in communicating with an athlete due to a number of issues which includes the athlete's perception of something is different, the athlete may jump to a conclusion instead of working through the process of hearing, understanding and accepting, the athlete may lack the knowledge needed to understand what the coach trying to communicate and so on. Effective communication contains six elements: clear, concise, correct, complete, courteous and constructive. Improved communication skills will enable both the athlete and coach to gain much more from their coaching relationship. Good communication is the foundation of all successful coaching. It is well known that outstanding and effective coaches all have communication skills which can shift an athlete or a team from negative to positive attitudes, can express the intricate mechanics of movement in a manner which is clear and understandable, can lift a player from mediocre to elite performance by zoning in on an athlete's individual learning and motivation styles.


BACKGROUND:Morbidly obese patients are at high risk for perioperative complications, including surgical site infections. Baseline arterial oxygenation is low in the morbidly obese, leading to low tissue oxygenation, which in turn is a primary determinant of infection risk. We therefore tested the hypothesis that extending intraoperative supplemental oxygen 12 to 16 hours into the postoperative period reduces the risk of surgical site infection and healing-related complications. METHODS:Morbidly obese patients having open or laparoscopic bariatric surgery were given 80% inspired oxygen intraoperatively. Postoperatively, patients were randomly assigned to either 2 L/min of oxygen via nasal cannula or approximately 80% supplemental inspired oxygen after tracheal extubation until the first postoperative morning. The risks of surgical site infection and of major healing-related complications were evaluated 60 days after surgery. RESULTS:In a preplanned interim analysis based on the initial 400 patients, the overall observed incidence of the collapsed composite of major complications was 13.3%; the observed incidence of components of the composite outcome ranged from 0% (peritonitis) to 8.5% (surgical wound infection). The estimated relative risk of any ≥1 major complications occurring within the first 60 days after surgery, adjusting for study site, was 0.94 (95% confidence interval, 0.52–1.68) (P = 0.80, Cochran–Mantel–Haenszel). The Executive Committee thus stopped the trial for futility. CONCLUSIONS:Supplemental postoperative oxygen does not reduce the risk of surgical site infection rate and healing-related postoperative complications in patients having gastric bypass surgery.


With the establishment of British colonial rule the Marathi speaking people were geographically divided into three political regions as a part of the "divide and rule" policy. Konkan and Deccan remained with in Bombay Presidency, Vidarbha-Nagpur became a part of the Central Provinces and Berar, and Marathwada came under the rule of the Nizam state of Hyderabad. The state of Maharashtra came into being in 1960, with the bifurcation of the bilingual state of Bombay. Historically the state is divided into four main regions, namely, Konkan, Marathwada, Vidarbha and western Maharashtra (WM). Vidarbha witnessed prosperity during the colonial period due to expanded cotton cultivation, particularly following the American civil war and the Lancashire cotton famine. However, by and large, the region remained agriculturally backward owing to the absence of any irrigation and due to erratic monsoons. The Maha-Vidarbha movement which started in the early part of the 20th century demanding a separate statehood finally culminated in the Nagpur Agreement. Though the Nagpur Agreement was accepted as the basis for addressing regional inequality after the formation of Maharashtra State in 1960, excepting some symbolic changes such as the shifting of the legislative session to Nagpur and setting up of a high court bench, nothing substantial took place on the developmental front till the elapse of five successive five year plans. The process of agricultural development in Maharashtra over the last three decades indicates regional inequality in which WM remained much ahead of other regions in terms of major developmental indicators. However, compared to Vidarbha, the Marathwada region experienced better improvement in some respects. The Marathwada and Vidarbha regions were unable to compete effectively for a larger share of state*s resources due to the absence of a well-articulated structure of factions and alliances.


Background: The Lori-Bakhtiari sheep breed is one of the most common native breed in the south-western parts of Iran. The peri-parturition period (2 weeks before to, 2 weeks after parturition), is generally of critical importance regarding the health, production and profitability of the ewes. OBJECTIVES: This study was carried out to compare the serum concentrations of glucose, non-esterified fatty acid (NEFA), β-hydroxybutyrate (BHBA), cholesterol, blood urea nitrogen (BUN) and calcium (Ca) during peri-parturition period in 30 single and 30 twin-bearing Lori-Bakhtiari ewes. METHODS: All blood profiles were determined in healthy ewes on days 14, 7 prepartum, and days 7 and 14 postpartum. RESULTS: Serum glucose levels were lower in twin-bearing ewes, compared to single-bearing ewes on prepartum and day 7 after lambing. Serum NEFA, BHBA and cholesterol levels were higher in twin-bearing ewes compared to single-bearing ewes during the peri-parturition period. Lower serum Ca levels were recorded 7 days before and after parturition in twin-bearing ewes, compared to single-bearing ewes. CONCLUSIONS: The results showed that NEFA and BHBA recorded significant (p<0.05) changes during the peri-parturition period in twin-bearing ewes. These significant differences could be related to increased metabolic demands of the fetuses in twin-bearing ewes.


Tunable external-cavity lasers with low power variation over a broad tuning range are demonstrated using asymmetric multiple quantum-wells with a wide and flat gain. For a 2.8-/spl mu/m-wide ridge waveguide laser of cavity length 380 /spl mu/m, when used in a grating external cavity and with an antireflection coating on one facet of laser diode chip, the power variation of less than -1 dB is obtained over a range of 80 nm. This extremely low power variation is a direct result of the spectrally flat gain.


We present the first broad overview of the factors determining corporate bond fund success and failure in terms of performance and survival. We show that the main determinant of survival is size. Performance matters only for small funds while large funds survive unconditionally, consistent with maintaining fee revenues. We neither find persistence in performance nor diseconomies of scale. This is due to advantages of larger funds in corporate bond trading. Other fund and family characteristics are unrelated to performance and survival, contrasting previous finings in equity funds. Thus, there are similarities but also important differences between the factors determining success and failure on the corporate bond and equity fund markets.


People have started to question mainstream, supposedly gender-neutral, entrepreneurship definitions and perceptions with the confrontations of feminist perspective. Considering entrepreneurship as a gendered concept, in this study we handled gender as a lens in entrepreneurship. The purpose of this study is to portray gender specific characteristics and perceptions of entrepreneurship in Turkey. With this objective, we analyzed interviews with entrepreneurs in two Turkish entrepreneurship-focused business magazines and one popular business blog consisting of valuable startup and women entrepreneurs' stories and interviews. We performed qualitative analysis on the content of these interviews to understand the perspectives of female and male entrepreneurs, and the differences between them as to their statements. We analyzed the choice of words and interviewees' discourses. As to the findings, the most referred element of gendered entrepreneurship is family embeddedness based on stereotypical beliefs and norm systems. In addition, this finding shows how culturally embedded beliefs deeply effect women's expectations/projections, barriers and needs concerning entrepreneurship. In Turkey, there is only a handful of studies concerning women entrepreneurship from the perspective of gender as a lens. Therefore, in this article, gender specific perceptions of entrepreneurship in Turkey as a developing and a masculine country were revealed.


Cold chain logistics provide the quality assurance for fresh agricultural products from production to consumption. The loss in agricultural products logistics not only cause huge losses in the financial, but also cause limited land resources and environmental resources wasted. Agricultural products cold chain logistics comprehensive service ability refers to the cold chain logistics enterprise provide customers with competitive advantage at the lowest possible total cost. It realized through a series of logistics function activities. That is the comprehensive service ability of the optimal transportation of agricultural products logistics function activities to ensure the quality of agricultural products, reducing wear and tear. Comprehensive service ability evaluation system was based on the characteristics of fresh agricultural products present situation and development trend and previous studies. It is a comprehensive system that includes seven aspects, such as warehousing, distribution, food detection ability, cost control, logistics, financial services, information management ability, and ability to meet customer demand. And it can be detailed into 29 indexes. Analytic hierarchy process was used to define the weight. Fuzzy comprehensive evaluation method was used to evaluate the overall. The innovation of this research is that including logistics financial services and information management capabilities in building of cold chain logistics comprehensive service ability evaluation system. And this made the evaluation system more comprehensiveness and more forwardlooking. The research results could be the reference for standard cold chain logistics enterprise service, the standard for the customer to evaluation and choose fresh agricultural products cold chain logistics enterprises, the advice for cold chain logistics enterprises to improve their service level.


To assess the association between the putative intestinal trophic hormone enteroglucagon and the development of intestinal tumours, four groups of 20 rats underwent either jejunal transection or 20%, 50%, or 80% proximal small bowel resection. Tumours were induced with azoxymethane 10 mg/kg weekly for 12 weeks. At 26 weeks there was a promotion of colonic neoplasia from a median of 0.5 (range 0-3) per rat in the transection group to 1.0 (0-3) in the 50% resected group (p less than 0.01) but no significant promotion in the 80% resection group. In the small bowel, increasing resection resulted in a progressive promotion of tumours from a median of 1.0 (range 0-3) per rat in the transection group to 2.0 (0-5) in the 50% resection group (p less than 0.001) and 3.0 (0-11) in the 80% group (p less than 0.01). Plasma enteroglucagon was measured at 2, 16, and 26 weeks and was raised seven-fold in the 80% resected group (p less than 0.001). There was a significant correlation between enteroglucagon concentrations and number of duodenal tumours but not colonic tumours. Crypt cell production rate in the duodenum increased from 11.5 +/- 1.9 to 29.2 +/- 1.4 cells/crypt/h in the 80% resected group (p less than 0.001) and showed a close correlation with both enteroglucagon levels and tumour promotion in the small bowel. There were no changes in crypt cell production rate in the colon with resection. This study shows a close association between enteroglucagon concentrations, promotion of tumours and crypt cell production rate in the duodenum but not in the colon.


We have carried out detailed measurements on the electric field vs. current density (E-J) characteristics of GdBa2Cu3O7−δ (GdBCO) coated conductors (CC) in a wide range of temperature and external magnetic fields. Four probe measurements were performed in a 20 T superconducting magnet system. Applying a constant electric field criterion, we have evaluated critical currents and n-values as a function of the temperature, the magnetic field and the field angle. Those results are relevant for the understanding of the practical performance of the tapes, and therefore to improve the process conditions effectively. The GdBCO CC was fabricated by the reel-to-reel PLD methods on the IBAD-MgO based substrate. The Self-field critical current per cm-width of the tape was above 400 A at 77 K. The results were also compared with our previous results on YBCO CC obtained from the similar deposition process. It is noted that the critical current of GdBCO CC is superior to those of previous YBCO CC over a wide range of practical external field and temperature.


Study Design. Automatic measurement of Cobb angle in patients with scoliosis. Objective. To test the accuracy of an automatic Cobb angle determination method from frontal radiographical images. Summary of Background Data. Thirty-six frontal radiographical images of patients with scoliosis. Methods. A modified charged particle model is used to determine the curvature on radiographical spinal images. Three curve fitting methods, piece-wise linear, splines, and polynomials, each with 3 variants were used and evaluated for the best fit. The Cobb angle was calculated out of these curve fit lines and compared with a manually determined Cobb angle. The best-automated method is determined on the basis of the lowest mean absolute error and standard deviation, and the highest R2. Results. The error of the manual Cobb angle determination among the 3 observers, determined as the mean of the standard deviations of all sets of measurements, was 3.37°. For the automatic method, the best piece-wise linear method is the 3-segments method. The best spline method is the 10-steps method. The best polynomial method is poly 6. Overall, the best automatic methods are the piece-wise linear method using 3 segments and the polynomial method using poly 6, with a mean absolute error of 4,26° and 3,91° a standard deviation of 3,44° and 3,60°, and a R2 of 0.9124 and 0.9175. The standard measurement error is significantly lower than the upper bound found in the literature (11.8°). Conclusion. The automatic Cobb angle method seemed to be better than the manual methods described in the literature. The piece-wise linear method using 3 segments and the polynomial method using poly 6 yield the 2 best results because the mean absolute error, standard deviation, and R2 are the best of all methods. Level of Evidence: 3


Bays and estuaries play important roles in the life history of leopard sharks Triakis semi- fasciata, yet these coastal environments are among those most impacted by human activity. To better understand habitat use, spatial associations, and ecological roles of leopard sharks in estuarine en- vironments, movements of leopard sharks were studied in Elkhorn Slough, California, USA. A total of 21 female leopard sharks (78 to 140 cm total length) were tagged with acoustic transmitters and tracked from August 2003 to February 2005. Eight sharks were manually tracked for 20 to 71.5 h, and 13 sharks were monitored for 4 to 280 d using an array of acoustic receivers. Female leopard sharks exhibited a high degree of fidelity to Elkhorn Slough. The distribution of tagged sharks changed sea- sonally and was likely associated with changes in temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen. Sharks used the area that comprises Elkhorn Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve (ESNERR) extensively throughout the year, but especially during spring and summer. When sharks occupied ESNERR, their habitat use was tidally influenced, with sharks using low intertidal mudflats exten- sively when available. Sharks using the main channel tended to remain in subtidal habitats at all tidal levels. These results suggest that efforts to protect important leopard shark habitats in bays and estu- aries should focus on preserving and restoring intertidal mudflats.


The phase transformation and the final microstructure were studied in a pipeline steel grade API-X80 by carrying out a number of physical simulations of the industrial hot rolling schedules. The deformation and the cooling parameters were simulated by means of hot torsion and dilatometry experiments. Torsion deformations in the same range as in the hot rolling schedule were applied in a multi-deformation cycle at various temperatures in the austenite region. Subsequently the following parameters were varied with respect to a reference status: the reheating temperature from 900 to 1200°C, the deformation step from 0.6 to 0.15 von Misses strain, the strain rate from 1 to 10 s-1, the inter-pass time from 0.4 to 2 s, the deformation temperature from 1,100 to 850°C, the cooling rate from 0.1 to 100°C/s and the cooling stop temperature from 650 to 25°C. The transformation product microstructures were observed with optical microscopy, scanning electron microscopy and electron backscatter diffraction. The experimental data were used to study the microstructure evolution of none-deformed austenite and highly deformed austenite (Von Misses strain of 3.2), and the corresponding CCT diagrams were constructed. The detailed microstructure characteristics obtained from the present work as well as the data from the CCT diagrams for undeformed and deformed austenite could be used to optimize the mechanical properties, strength and toughness of pipeline steel grades by thermo-mechanical control process.


It is our great pleasure to introduce Issue 2 of Volume 2023 of the Proceedings on Privacy Enhancing Technologies (PoPETs). PoPETs is a journal that publishes articles accepted to the annual Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS). To contribute to the free availability of scientific publications, PoPETs is published under the open-access Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivs license. PoPETs/PETS uses a hybrid conference-journal model, one that has since been adopted by many other conferences in the field. In this model, articles are published throughout the year at regular intervals, and the papers for the year are then presented at an annual conference. Reviewers can request revisions of submitted articles, which may then be revised and resubmitted in the same year. PoPETs publishes four issues per year. By enabling resubmission across these issues, PoPETs provides a high-quality peer-review process that enables authors and reviewers to work together to produce and recognize significant scholarly contributions. The PoPETs double-blind peer-review process is similar to other top-tier computer-security publications. The process includes initial review by the Editors-in-Chief for rules compliance and in-scope content, written reviews by multiple independent reviewers, author rebuttal, discussion among reviewers, and consensus decisions with disagreements resolved by the Editors-in-Chief. The output of the review process is a set of reviews, a meta-review summarizing the reviewers' opinions after discussion, and one of the following decisions: Accept, Accept with Minor Revisions, Major Revisions, Reject and Resubmit, and Reject. Reviewing by the Editorial Board is performed in two rounds. In the first round, the Editors-in-Chief assign two reviewers from the Regular Editorial Board and a meta-reviewer from the Senior Editorial Board to all papers, and at the end of the round early decisions are made to reject certain papers that have two reject scores (Reject or Reject and Resubmit) from the reviewers. The remaining papers receive additional reviews in the second round for a total of four reviews (in a few cases, submissions received fewer or more reviews). The meta-reviewer guides and summarizes the discussion into a meta-review and a decision recommendation to the Editors-in-Chief after the first or second round of reviewing. Many articles had an external review drawn from a pool of junior experts nominated by the community1. Further external experts were invited to review certain articles. All reviews were sent to the authors of papers that proceeded to the second round of review,


Segmented markets of sub-optimal size existing in fishery value chain do not ensure sizeable private investment in the different stages of the value chain in Nigeria. Supply-demand gaps are increasingly being filled by imports, thus dampening prospects for increased revenue generation by actors in the chain. Market failures in the fish value chain limited capability and performance of small scale fish enterprises at the various stages of the chain. As such this study is prompted by the need to determine and compare profitability of actors along the fish value chain with the use of survey data collected from fishery farmers, marketers and processors. Budgetary framework was used to estimate cost and returns to actors while regression framework was used to estimate determinants of profit at the small scale farm level. The results showed that lowest level of profitability was associated with the producers of fish at farm level. Across all stages, profitability was affected by changes in the cost of labour more than any other costs. In addition, the results showed that profit level declined by 0.04%, 0.51%, 0.01%, and 0.13%, respectively, for every one percent increase in the cost of labour, fertilizer and liming, feed and pond construction at the small scale farm level. Findings suggest that emphasis of new agricultural promotion policy should be on strengthening linkage and access of small scale operators in fishery subsector to adequate inputs, information, and innovation at reduced costs so as to drive increased investments and profitability in fishery value chain.


In the present study, I will discuss the distinction between interpretation and construction in the context of criminal law.
To that end, in the first part of the study I will elaborate the distinction in question by presenting in contrast the characteristics of interpretation and construction. Thus, I will distinguish between interpretation as a process of identifying the linguistic meaning of the legal norm and construction as a process aimed at the transformation of that linguistic meaning into legal content. Regarding the aforementioned distinction, I will conclude that interpretation is value neutral whereas construction involves the implementation of different values when offering a legal content to the interpreted norm.
In the second part of the study, I will present the main situations in which the construction of legal norms is necessary, using examples of criminal law provisions to illustrate various types of construction.
At the end of the study, I will relate the distinction between interpretation and construction to the methods of statutory interpretation, which will lead to the conclusion that only the literal method of interpretation constitutes a tool specific for interpretation, in a restrictive sense. The historical, logical, systematic and purposive methods are actually tools specific for construction. At the same time, I will underline that construction has the nature of a secondary process of rule creation carried out by the interpreter.


Numerous state, provincial, and federal governments in the United States, Canada, and Australia have created guidelines, legislation, and/or regulations (or are in the process of doing so) in response to public concerns about water contamination from hydraulic fracturing. This article will compare and analyze three national regimes in the leading states and provinces in which laws have been amended, proposed, or adopted to address public concerns about the chemicals and additives in hydraulic fracturing fluids used to produce unconventional hydrocarbons. New regulations, recent legislative amendments, and, in some cases, new statutes have been proposed or adopted in the past few years. Most of the state and provincial laws require public disclosure of some information about the contents of hydraulic fracturing fluids. At the same time, governments interested in attracting investment capital to develop their shale oil and gas resources recognize the importance of protecting the intellectual property rights (trade secrets) of those parties that have developed hydraulic fracturing fluids.


Although the extant literature has investigated how individuals engage in inappropriate behaviors based on the rational choice theory (RCT) (e.g., computer misconduct), the neutralization theory (e.g., IS security policies violation), and workarounds under normal situations, it has given little consideration to how individuals are involved in misuse of information systems with a good intention under the context of disasters. To fill this research gap, we propose a selfless misuse model, which offers a theoretical explanation for the concept of individuals' selfless misuse intention under uncertainty caused by disasters. In this study, we show why employees make decisions to misuse the information system to ensure delivery of health services and business continuity. In addition, we explore the way of reducing this misuse behavior by introducing the role of system resilience in assisting employees to make better decisions and act positively.


Objective: To compare the intraoperative characteristics and postoperative pain levels of single incision and conventional laparoscopic surgeries performed for surgical sterilization. Study Design: A single center prospective observational study was conducted to compare the conventional and single incision laparoscopic (SIL) partial salpingectomies performed for surgical tubal sterilization. In total of 110 women, 62 in the conventional laparoscopy and 48 in the SILS group participated in the study. The main outcome measures were peritoneal entry time, total operation time, amount of bleeding, intraoperative complications, post-operative pain scores, additional analgesic requirements, and length of hospital stay. Statistical analysis was accomplished using the chi-square test or Mann Whitney U test, where appropriate. Results: Demographical findings did not differ between the two groups (p>0.05). Similarly, total operation time, rates of intraoperative complications, conversion to laparotomy, length of hospital stay, pre and postoperative hematocrit levels were not significantly different between the groups. Peritoneal entry time was shorter in the SIL group (7.1 min. vs. 4.8 min., p 0.05). Conclusion: SILS seems a safe and feasible alternative to conventional laparoscopy for surgical tubal sterilization. Keywords: Partial salpingectomy, Tubal ligation, Contraception, Surgical sterilization, Single Incision Laparoscopy


Mucus hypersecretion is a distinguished feature of chronic inflammatory airway diseases. Interestingly, in this condition thyroid function is impaired with decreased level of triiodothyronine (T3), indicating potential link between low level of T3 and mucus hypersecretion. But the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. In this study we aimed to elucidate the effect of T3 on MUC5AC secretion in human bronchial epithelial HBE16 cells and further investigate how T3 regulates MUC5AC gene expression at transcriptional level. By RT-PCR and ELISA we showed that T3 inhibited MUC5AC mRNA expression and protein secretion in HBE16 cells. Furthermore, luciferase assay and site-directed mutagenesis analysis demonstrated that T3 repressed MUC5AC expression at transcriptional level and the mechanism might partly lie in the specific inhibition of Sp1 binding to the promoter. Our results suggest that decreased T3 level leads to the release of repression of MUC5AC expression and thus contributes to mucus hypersecretion.


This paper describes the communication stack of the REMPLI system: a structure using power-lines and IP-based networks for communication, for data acquisition and control of energy distribution and consumption. It is furthermore prepared to use alternative communication media like GSM or analog modem connections. The REMPLI system provides communication service for existing applications, namely automated meter reading, energy billing and domotic applications. The communication stack, consisting of physical, network, transport, and application layer is described as well as the communication services provided by the system. We show how the peculiarities of the power-line communication influence the design of the communication stack, by introducing requirements to efficiently use the limited bandwidth, optimize traffic and implement fair use of the communication medium for the extensive communication partners.


Existing models often leverage co-occurrences between objects and their context to improve recognition accuracy. However, strongly relying on context risks a model's generalizability, especially when typical co-occurrence patterns are absent. This work focuses on addressing such contextual biases to improve the robustness of the learnt feature representations. Our goal is to accurately recognize a category in the absence of its context, without compromising on performance when it co-occurs with context. Our key idea is to decorrelate feature representations of a category from its co-occurring context. We achieve this by learning a feature subspace that explicitly represents categories occurring in the absence of context along side a joint feature subspace that represents both categories and context. Our very simple yet effective method is extensible to two multi-label tasks -- object and attribute classification. On 4 challenging datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in reducing contextual bias.


A principal challenge in ecology is to integrate physiological function (e.g. photosynthesis) across a collection of individuals (e.g. plants of different species) to understand the functioning of the entire ensemble (e.g. primary productivity). The control that organism size exerts over physiological and ecological function suggests that allometry could be a powerful tool for scaling ecological processes across levels of organization. Here we use individual plant allometries to predict how nutrient content and productivity scale with total plant biomass (phytomass) in whole plant communities. As predicted by our model, net primary productivity as well as whole community nitrogen and phosphorus content all scale allometrically with phytomass across diverse plant communities, from tropical forest to arctic tundra. Importantly, productivity data deviate quantitatively from the theoretically derived prediction, and nutrient productivity (production per unit nutrient) of terrestrial plant communities decreases systematically with increasing total phytomass. These results are consistent with the existence of pronounced competitive size hierarchies. The previously undocumented generality of these 'ecosystem allometries' and their basis in the structure and function of individual plants will likely provide a useful quantitative framework for research linking plant traits to ecosystem processes.


The external factors that influence the environmental, social and economic performance of logging companies were studied using a questionnaire submitted to 30 logging concessions in five countries of the Congo Basin. This paper analyses socioeconomic constraints and environmental impacts experienced by these concessions, as well as their response to major external drivers of change. Concessionaires considered investment and operating finance their main constraint, followed by insufficient technical and human capacities, and inconsistent application of official regulations. Environmental problems directly produced by concessions' operations represented around one-third of the total score for environmental problems reported. Damage caused by construction of logging roads and erosion were identified as the main issues. Induced problems (two-thirds of the total score) were dominated by hunting, with encroachment and illegal logging perceived as much less significant. Policies, infrastructure, markets and technology are key external drivers of change in concessions' practices, while regional and international forestry institutions reportedly have the least influence, reflecting an emerging scepticism about the proliferation of international institutions and initiatives promoting sustainable forestry.


We introduce a new method for reducing phase noise in oscillators, thereby improving their frequency precision. The noise reduction is realized by a passive device consisting of a pair of coupled nonlinear resonating elements that are driven parametrically by the output of a conventional oscillator at a frequency close to the sum of the linear mode frequencies. Above the threshold for parametric instability, the coupled resonators exhibit self-oscillations which arise as a response to the parametric driving, rather than by application of active feedback. We find operating points of the device for which this periodic signal is immune to frequency noise in the driving oscillator, providing a way to clean its phase noise. We present results for the effect of thermal noise to advance a broader understanding of the overall noise sensitivity and the fundamental operating limits.


The decrease of material cost for manufacturing fuel cell stack is strongly required for overcoming commercial restriction. The epoxy based graphite bipolar plate (BP) for polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cells (PEMFC) has been prepared and electrical, mechanical and thermal properties were compared. The density of graphite composite bipolar plate showed from 1.67 to 2.54 as graphite content is increased from 60 to 80w/o and decreased as expanded graphite was added. The contact resistance between epoxy/graphite bipolar plate and gas diffusion layer (GDL) had lower value using carbon cloth than carbon paper for GDL. The conformation of thermal stability, improvement of mechanical and electrical properties was accomplished by addition of expanded graphite powder.


Since our development of transoral endoscopic thyroidectomy vestibular approach (TOETVA) (1), many aspects of this innovative scarless thyroidectomy have begun to be investigated to ensure the safety of the procedure (2-6). Recently, we read a letter to the editor stating that postoperative pain for TOETVA in another institute required more analgesic use to achieve adequate pain control (7). This result was different from ours. Thus, we would like to provide clarification of our pain control protocol and the results achieved in our hospital.


School choice policies are intended to provide students in poorly performing schools the option of transferring to a better school. The associated loss of funding to new competitors is expected, in turn, to benefit students who remain in their assigned schools by spurring improved performance among the educators in them. The prospects for such systemic improvement are greatest if in fact student transfers and the market signals they provide are determined by school effectiveness rather than the social and racial characteristics of a district's students. To test this proposition, we employ a series of fixed effects regressions to analyze the relative influence of school effectiveness versus student demographic composition on participation rates in Michigan's charter school and inter-district choice policies. Our results indicate that school effectiveness has no systematic influence on participation rates for either choice policy, while the loss of students to choice options increases significantly in districts serving high concentrations of low-income students. Therefore, Michigan's school choice policies create financial pressures not on schools that are performing most poorly but rather on those that face the most difficult educational challenges.


We obtain sterols from the animal and plant food that we eat. How these plant and animal sterols are absorbed, transported around the body, and excreted has been the subject of much investigation. In a Perspective, Allayee and colleagues discuss a new study (Berge et al.) that implicates two new ABC transporter proteins in the efflux of plant and animal sterols from gut epithelial cells into the gut lumen.


A methodology is presented for generating compact models of substrate noise injection in complex logic networks. for a given gate library, the injection patterns associated with a gate and an input transition scheme are accurately evaluated using device-level simulation. Assuming spatial independence of all noise generating devices, the cumulative switching noise resulting from all injection patterns is efficiently computed using a gate-level event-driven simulator. The resulting injected signal is then sampled and translated into an energy spectrum which accounts for fundamental frequencies as well as glitch energy. Preliminary results demonstrate the validity of the assumptions and the accuracy of the approach on a set of standard benchmark circuits.


Historians of the African American experience after Reconstruction have tended to imply that the black elite served only their own interests, that their exclusive control of black institutions precluded efforts to improve the status of African Americans in general. In Leading the Race, Jacqueline M. Moore reevaluates the role of this black elite by examining how their self-interest interacted with the needs of the black community in Washington, D.C., the center of black society at the turn of the century.Immediately following Reconstruction, black elites did concern themselves with creating social distinctions, but, Moore argues, the conditions of Jim Crow segregation quickly forced their transformation into a racially conscious group. Studying this transformation in detail, Moore focuses on Washington, D.C., whose leading men and women would be equalled in brilliance only by those of Harlem in the 1920s.The small group who made up a black social elite in Washington from 1880 to 1920 faced many challenges to their economic and social status. The rise of segregation and disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South led to disillusionment with the Reconstruction promise of biracial cooperation and assimilation, and the end of Home Rule in the District cut the few political ties between blacks and whites.In the struggle to maintain their status, the black elite created new strategies of racial advancement that tied them inseparably to the black community while establishing their claim to lead it. This new elite became more open to men and women of exceptional abilities and achievements, basing judgments on merit rather than on family background or skin color. As these blacks lost faith in assimilation, they began to build a solid community base from which to speak out against racism.


The Center for Epidemiological Studies – Depression (CES-D) scale is a well-validated and frequently used measure for assessing symptoms associated with depression. This scale was developed primarily on the basis of American populations, however, and previous research has suggested that the original factor structure may not be appropriate for all populations. One such population is the Filipino population. This study represents the first study we are aware of to examine the factor structure of the CES-D scale in a sample of Filipino seafarers. Seafaring is considered a high stress and high risk occupation. Based on data collected from 135 Filipino seafarers, we conducted factor analyses to identify the appropriate factor structure for the CES-D in this population. We found that a three-factor structure better described the responses of Filipinos in our sample than the standard four-factor structure. The Filipino factor structure appears to collapse depressive affect and somatic factors found in previous research, while including a specific factor of social-focused symptoms of depression. This structure maintains the positive affect factor found in previous work. Implications of this for clinical psychology assessment and practice in the Philippines are discussed.


A number of laws and regulations in the United States mandate risk communication as part of the risk assessment and risk management process. Although these laws run to several volumes, making it difficult for anyone outside of the legal profession to really understand them, those who are communicating risk need to be aware of the laws affecting risk communication efforts and what these laws entail. This chapter highlights some of the major federal laws within the United States and selected international standards. The laws include comprehensive environmental response, compensation, and liability act, emergency planning and community righthtohknow act, national environmental policy act, occupational safety and health act, and resource conservation and recovery act. Check with federal agencies, state agencies, local governments, national and international standards organizations, and your own organization before beginning a risk communication effort to ensure that you understand and are in compliance with the requirements.


This work analyses the tropical wood industry, considering its performance and economic efficiency. The study area was Sinop county, in the State of Mato Grosso. The methodology used were the foundations of the theory of production to examine the performance and economic efficiency of this timber industry. The general consideration of this study is that the saw mills of Sinop present a good performance in the processing of logs considering Amazon region patterns. However, the productivity of the labour and capital factors are low. If politics in the sense of contemplating the modernization of the wood industry integrated to sustainable forest management are not adopted, the social cost can spread to society as a whole due to loss of forest that could overcome the gains with wood processing.


GaSb samples were implanted by 100 keV hydrogen ions (H+) at room temperature with fluence values of 1  ×  1017 and 2  ×  1017 ions cm−2. Post-implantation annealing studies revealed that the samples implanted with a fluence of 2  ×  1017 ions cm−2 did not show blistering/exfoliation. For the lower fluence, the samples showed the formation of surface blisters/craters along with the large area exfoliation of the top H-implanted surface. Topographical investigations of the samples were carried out using Nomarski optical microscopy, atomic force microscopy and stylus surface profilometry. The lateral sizes and heights of the blisters varied between 2–5 µm and 5–20 nm respectively. The root mean square roughness of the exfoliated region was about 12 nm while the exfoliation depth was found to be 730 nm. The exfoliation depth in the H-implanted GaSb is close to the damage concentration peak as found from SRIM calculations. The Föppl–von Karman theory of thin plates has been used to understand the effect of internal pressure and stress on the surface blistering. Using the above mentioned implantation and annealing parameters, potential layer transfer of GaSb could be enabled.


The size of human factor VIII-related protein in plasma has been determined by sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) glyoxyl agarose electrophoresis. The protein was immobilized after the electrophoresis by coupling it to the modified agarose, and it was identified by autoradiography using purified rabbit anti-factor VIII-related antigen (VIIR:Ag). A series of multimeric forms was identified with Mr of 0.85-12 x 10(6). The distribution of VIIR:Ag multimers was the same in heparin and citrate anticoagulated plasmas and in serum, and the pattern was the same after freezing as in plasma kept at 37 degrees C from the time of venipuncture until the electrophoresis was complete. These observations indicate that VIIR:Ag circulates in normal plasma as a population of very large multimers and that the size distribution is not an artifact induced by purification methods, freezing, or calcium chelation.


A two-step phase shift profilometry method (2-step PSP) with prefiltering and postfiltering stages is proposed to reconstruct the 3-D profile of solder paste. Two sinusoidal patterns which are pi-out-of-phase are used in the 3-D reconstruction. The new method uses only two fringe patterns rather than four as the four-step phase shift profilometry (4-step PSP). In Fourier transform profilometry (FTP), a bandpass filter is required to extract the fundamental spectrum from the background and higher order harmonics due to camera noise and imperfectness of the pattern projector. By using two pi-out-of-phase sinusoidal fringe patterns, the background term can be eliminated directly by taking the average of the two fringe patterns. The fringe pattern which is close to its ideal form can also be recovered from the averaging process. Prefiltering is utilized in filtering raw images to remove noise causing higher order harmonics. Hilbert transform is then used to obtain the in-quadrature component of the processed fringe pattern. Postfiltering is applied for reconstructing an appropriate 3-D profile.


--Target Tracking is an important problem in sensor networks, where it dictates how accurate a targets position can be measured. In response to the recent surge of interest in mobile sensor applications, this paper studies the target tracking problem in a mobile sensor network (shortly called as MSN), where it is believed that mobility can be exploited to improve the tracking resolution. This problem becomes particularly challenging given the mobility of both sensors and targets, in which the trajectories of sensors and targets need to be captured. We derive the inherent relationship between the tracking resolution and a set of crucial system parameters including sensor density, sensing range, sensor and target mobility. We investigate the correlations and sensitivity from a set of system parameters and we derive the minimum number of mobile sensors that are required to maintain the resolution for target tracking in an MSN. The simulation results demonstrate that the tracking performance can be improved by an order of magnitude with the same number of sensors when compared with that of the static sensor environment.


IPv6 is an Internet Layer protocol for packet-switched networks providing endto-end datagram transmission across multiple domains. IPv6 was formally described for the first time in the Request for Comments (RFC) 2460, published in December 1998. In addition to offering a larger addressing space, IPv6 also defines some features not present in the previous version of the protocol (IPv4). For example, IPv6 simplifies the aspects of address assignment, network renumbering, and router announcements when changing network connectivity providers. Moreover, it simplifies packet processing in routers by placing the need for packet fragmentation at end points. IPv6-related patents cover issues or extensions not defined by RFCs. In this research article, we present and discuss the state of the art of such patents.


We consider the problem of off-policy evaluation for reinforcement learning, where the goal is to estimate the expected reward of a target policy $\pi$ using offline data collected by running a logging policy $\mu$. Standard importance-sampling based approaches for this problem suffer from a variance that scales exponentially with time horizon $H$, which motivates a splurge of recent interest in alternatives that break the "Curse of Horizon" (Liu et al. 2018, Xie et al. 2019). In particular, it was shown that a marginalized importance sampling (MIS) approach can be used to achieve an estimation error of order $O(H^3/ n)$ in mean square error (MSE) under an episodic Markov Decision Process model with finite states and potentially infinite actions. The MSE bound however is still a factor of $H$ away from a Cramer-Rao lower bound of order $\Omega(H^2/n)$. In this paper, we prove that with a simple modification to the MIS estimator, we can asymptotically attain the Cramer-Rao lower bound, provided that the action space is finite. We also provide a general method for constructing MIS estimators with high-probability error bounds.


Background: Frailty involves decrements in many physiologic systems, is prevalent in older ages, and is characterized by increased vulnerability to disability and mortality. It is yet unclear how this geriatric syndrome relates to a preclinical cumulative marker of multisystem dysregulation. The purpose of this study was to evaluate whether allostatic load (AL) was associated with the geriatric syndrome of frailty in older community-dwelling women. Methods: We examined the cross-sectional relationship between AL and a validated measure of frailty in the baseline examination of two complementary population-based cohort studies, the Women's Health and Aging studies (WHAS) I and II. This sample of 728 women had an age range of 70—79. We used ordinal logistic regression to estimate the relationship between AL and frailty controlling for covariates. Results: About 10% of women were frail and 46% were prefrail. AL ranged from 0 to 8 with 91% of participants scoring between 0 and 4. Regression models showed that a unit increase in the AL score was associated with increasing levels of frailty (OR = 1.16, 95% CI = 1.04—1.28) controlling for race, age, education, smoking status, and comorbidities. Conclusion: This study suggests that frailty is associated with AL. The observed relationship provides some support for the hypothesis that accumulation of physiological dysregulation may be related to the loss of reserve characterized by frailty.


By nature, the organizational structure of healthcare is distributed, being geographically spread and consisting of centers at different levels of complexity: from general hospitals down to individual general practitioners. The demands as well as the costs for healthcare are rising and productivity in the sector is declining. Patients are becoming more and more well informed and will demand higher quality healthcare and more control over their own health. Thus more efficient healthcare of a higher quality is needed demanded by market and politics.

Preserving individual specialties and autonomies, the various healthcare providers must be able to cooperate, with the aim of increasing the overall effectiveness of the activities carried out, in terms of prevention, caring and costs. The most promising applications in cross-organizational healthcare are the integrated Electronic Health Record (EHR) and Clinical Pathway support. The integration and electronic exchange of health information and the integration of healthcare processes across healthcare organizations will help to increase the overall quality of healthcare. The inter-organizational healthcare infrastructure lies at the basis of this and provides the functionality necessary to support applications such as the EHR and Clinical Pathway support.

In this research an architecture for an inter-organizational healthcare infrastructure is proposed based upon a standardized architecture framework. The architecture framework used in this research is a standard for architecture frameworks developed in the Netherlands named ArchiMate. The framework is generally comparable with other existing architecture frameworks but has never been used to develop architectures for inter-organizational healthcare infrastructures. This gives us the opportunity to compare the results of the infrastructure architecture developed in this research with the results of other inter-organizational healthcare infrastructure initiatives currently under development in the Netherlands. Compared to ArchiMate, other modeling languages ArchiMate offers important extra coverage for developing architectures.

The comparison of the developed reference architecture is done on two other inter-organizational healthcare infrastructures, the project for a national infrastructure, AORTA, and a regional healthcare infrastructure project called IZIT, which is one of the frontrunners in regional healthcare infrastructures.

The result of this comparison is that the architecture built with the ArchiMate framework has the basic functionality need to be used for both a national as well as a regional infrastructure. Furthermore, the need of regional infrastructures is certainly present, both on the field of data integration and in the field of interoperability between healthcare organizations. Many healthcare providers are not able to change their information systems so that they adhere to the requirements of AORTA. A regional healthcare infrastructure can help to do so by offering additional services such as data structure translation and new applications in the Shared Service Center model. On the field of interoperability is it is questionable if the national AORTA infrastructure is suitable for more advanced healthcare applications that make use of Service Oriented principles. At this moment the national infrastructure can be categorized as a Message Oriented architecture which lacks certain important properties that are found in pure Service Oriented Architectures.

This research contributes an alternative way of filling in the Dutch infrastructure for inter-organizational integration in Dutch healthcare with the use of the ArchiMate language. At the same time this is a test on the usefulness of ArchiMate in developing inter-organizational information systems. The experience with Archimate was gennerally positively. Visualizing different architecture viewpoints and their relationships with each other due to the use of the ArchiMate language is an important advantage over other architecture frameworks, although it is recommended to also use elements of other architecture frameworks as ArchiMate only covers a very narrow phase of the whole architecture design process.