This article is one of three presented as a panel at the 2005 MLA Convention in Philadelphia (with poet Karl Kirchwey of Bryn Mawr College as panel chair and commentator):

"Are You Talking to Me?": Speaker and Audience in Louise Gluck's The Wild Iris

– Willard Spiegelman, Southern Methodist University

"I'll tell you something": Reader-Address in Louise Gluck's Ararat Sequence

– Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College

Louise Gluck's "I"

– Nick Halpern, North Carolina State University

Jane Hedley here introduces the three papers for Literature Compass. The full text of Willard Spiegelman's MLA paper itself follows this introduction:

Lyric Utterance and the Reader: Overheard, Performed, or Addressed?

In the first line of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," who is being addressed? "Let us go then, you and I": is Prufrock talking to himself, and has Eliot thereby put the poem's readers in a position to "overhear" an inner monologue? Is "Let us go then" addressed directly to the poem's hypocrite lecteur, who is presupposed to be the secret sharer of Prufrock's emotional paralysis? Or has the reader been offered the opportunity to step into the "I"-position and become, for the duration of the poem, the sort of man who would have this conversation with himself?

All three ways of conceiving of lyric utterance, and of what Northrop Frye terms its "radical of presentation," are concurrent among us, and the question of lyric address is one that is undergoing reconsideration in a number of critical and scholarly venues at the present time. William Waters chaired Special Sessions on poetry's "you" for three years running at the MLA convention, beginning in 1999. Recently published books and articles from Charles Altieri, Sarah Zimmerman, and Virginia Jackson have revisited the rhetoric of Romanticism from the standpoint of how the reader is implicated and/or addressed. In "Lyric Possession," Susan Stewart's 1995 essay for Critical Inquiry, the problematic of lyric address is given a memorably postmodern formulation with her suggestion that "when speakers speak from the position of listeners, when though is unattributable and intention wayward, the situation of poetry is evoked."

The conception of lyric utterance that was "canonized" by both Northrop Frye, in the Anatomy of Criticism, and T. S. Eliot, in The Three Voices of Poetry, is that the lyric is pre-eminently and distinctively the genre of self-communion. Paul De Man, Jonathan Culler, and Barbara Johnson are furthering this conception when they cite "apostrophe" as the rhetorical device that is generically constitutive of the lyric: by addressing himself to the west wind or to the sister who is also his soul mate, the lyric poet is turning away from the poem's readers the better to bring a distinctively lyric "self" into focus. W. R. Johnson has argued, contra Frye and Eliot, De Man and Culler, that the Romantic "meditative" lyric was a local aberration from the central tradition of the lyric; according to Johnson, and more recently William Waters, the lyric speaker and his hypothetical reader are always more or less explicitly in dialogue. Helen Vendler has meanwhile urged us toward yet a third conception of how the lyric engages its readers. Lyrics offer themselves to us, according to Vendler, as scripts for performance: "a lyric is meant to be spoken by the reader as if the reader were the one uttering the words." In these three position-pieces Willard Spiegelman, Jane Hedley, and Nick Halpern have undertaken to stage the conflict between these three differing approaches to the lyric. Their underlying premise is that it does matter which approach we take, but that none of them is simply mistaken – each has its uses.

Louise Gluck is a poet who has gone on record as preferring to read and write poetry that "requests or craves a listener"; but is the listener she envisions an overhearer, an interlocutor, or an alter ego who listens in order to transform himself into the speaker of her poems? Willard Spiegelman's essay on Gluck's Pulitzer Prize-winning volume The Wild Iris (1992) takes its departure from the traditional conception of lyric utterance as an interpersonal drama whose "persons" are all internal to the poem. Jane Hedley uses Gluck's 1990 volume Ararat to argue that Gluck is choosing to address the listener she craves directly, a choice that has rhetorical and characterological implications which will fail to emerge if we assume we are supposed to "overhear" her poems. Nick Halpern uses Gluck's 1996 volume Meadowlands to enact the claim that poems are neither overheard nor addressed to their readers, but challenge us to inhabit a process of thought and feeling the poem has scripted. According to Halpern we neither hear Gluck out, as Hedley would have it, nor do we overhear her, as Spiegelman supposes: instead, we are called upon to become her.

Jane Hedley, Bryn Mawr College


This paper explores the unique challenges and opportunities of communicating design and construction information at the jobsite and describes the format and content of an information delivery method that we call Virtual Huddles (VDC-aided morning jobsite meetings). The research method used is direct participation in a test case (the construction of the concrete structure for a multi-family housing project) using VDC methods on a daily basis for approximately 4 months to support more than 40 daily morning meetings with the contractor's field workers and staff. From the case observations and a structured interview, we observed that huddles are more effective when the content focuses on specific work instead of generic training or safety talks. However, it is not effective to deliver a high level of detail since workers will quickly forget it and come back later for specific dimensions. We also found that, on a daily basis, 3D models work better than 4D models. Some of the most important impacts of the huddles are a change in the structure of information distribution that empowers the laborers, a higher engagement of the laborers with the project, and an improvement in the communication between the contractor's site management staff and the laborers.


This article examines the discriminatory discursive strategies adopted in the online interactions between different power groups from Mainland China and Hong Kong in their response to two YouTube videos about the Hong Kong Umbrella, or Occupy Central, Movement. A corpus of 4329 comments made by 2157 posters from Mainland China and Hong Kong was coded regarding commenters' place of residence and their perceptions of the Umbrella Movement and then tagged based on Flowerdew et al.'s previous taxonomy of discriminatory discursive strategies. The results show that a wide range of discriminatory discursive strategies, used by two power groups from Hong Kong and one from the Mainland, were found in the majority of the comments, including four sub-strategies not identified by Flowerdew et al. While studies to date on the Umbrella Movement have mainly focused on Hong Kong data, our study contributes to the literature by adding the perspective from Mainland China. The findings of this study provide insights into the increasing social and political tensions between Hong Kong and its mother country as well as the current situation in the divided city.


Background Oral candidiasis (OC) is the most frequent opportunistic infection of the oral cavity caused by Candida species overgrowth. A wide variety of risk factor that contributes to yeast infection especially candidiasis. It might be acting as an early marker for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA). There are some risk factors for PLWHA associated OC at Wangaya hospital in Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia. Aim To identify risk factors of OC in PLWHA at Wangaya Hospital in Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia. Settings and Design Case control study was conducted from March 1, 2016 and July 30, 2019, included 448 participants (207 cases and 241 controls). Consecutive recruitment was employed. Methods Cases were PLWHA (18 to 60 years old) with OC and controls without OC. Diagnosis of OC based on the clinical features which are the pseudomembranous candidiasis; oral thrush. An interviewer administered a structured questionnaire used to collect information on risk factors. Statistical analysis used: bivariate analysis was performed on all variables. Chi-square test with statistically significant was at a level of 0.05. Results The participants included 207 (46.20%) PLWHA with OC and 241 (53.80%) PLWHA who did not have OC. The majority participants, 293 (65.40%) were male. OC was associated with age [p = 0.03; OR = 0.66 (95% CI:0.45–0.95)]; sex [p = 0.002; OR = 1.88 (95% CI:1.26–2.80)]; Xerostomia [p = 0.000; OR = 4.15 (95% CI:2.76–6.23)]; smoking [p = 0.000; OR = 6.83 (95% CI: 4.46–10.44)]; alcohol consumption [p = 0.000; OR = 5.76 (95% CI: 3.74–8.83)]; antibiotic usage [p = 0.000; OR = 4.49 (95% CI: 2.93–6.90)]; CD4 count [p = 0.000; OR = 3.29 (95% CI:2.24–4.86)]; HIV clinical stage [p = 0.000; OR = 3.58 (95% CI 2.39–5.37)]. No significant association between prothesis with OC. Conclusion We found that age, sex, xerostomia, smoking, alcohol consumption, antibiotic usage, CD4 counts and advanced HIV Clinical stage (AIDS) were significant associated risk factors for OC in PLWHA.


Abstract. Public Relations (PR) DIY DPRD plays an important role on the publication of activities DIY DPRD. Unpublished activities of DIY DPRD will raise negatives suspicions from the public. In order to suppress the bad things, Public Relations DIY DPRD needs to have a strategy in publicizing the activities of Parlement DIY. The purpose of this research is to know the strategy used by DIY Public Relations Coordinator in publicizing the activities of DPRD DIY. Some strategies and Public Relations become the researcher in researching, so that the reserch can be focused more and more. The type of this research is descriptive qualitative research with data collections techniques in the form of participant observation, interview, and supported by document. The result of this study indicate Public Relations DIY DPRD or institutional data referred to as Public Relations and Protocol Parliament DIY has ten strategies in publishing the activities of DPRD DIY. These ten strategies include, legitlat Mimbar, Advertoria/ Newspapers, Mass Media Mass, Suplement (koran), Radio Interactive Diolog, Live Broadcast Radio, Television Broadcast, TV Magazine, Website, Press Conference and Media Center.


In this paper, we introduce a novel method of relevance learning by a multi-layer perceptron. The relevance learning is regarded as learning from the relationship among two or more outputs of the network. The learning network architecture is based on a simple multi-layer perceptron with a modified back-propagation learning algorithm. Unlike the conventional multi-layer perceptron that learns from a set of an input feature vector and the target output, the proposed network can obtain a nonlinear mapping between a set of two or more vector inputs and the desired relevance. For instance, the desired relevance represents the dissimilarity among given objects. We show the performance of the proposed network with some experiments with four artificially generated data set. We then discuss the theoretical and mathematical background underlying the network learning with some related works. We evaluate the obtained arrangement of objects in comparison with the result of principle component analysis (PCA) and multidimensional scaling method (MDS). This work also contributes to the measurement of human subjective evaluation for multidimensional perceptual scaling. Some experimental results on the low-dimensional representation of color hue data set and emotional facial images were presented.


ABSTRACT An important application of imaging spectroscopy or hyperspectral imaging is the classification or discrimination of pigments based on the obtained spectral reflectance information. As opposed to being a point-analysis tool, this non-invasive method captures the entire surface of interest. This means that its potential is not only in the discrimination of pigments but also in their mapping. However, the challenge lies in the fact that in a real painting, there is no clear-cut edge between regions with certain pure pigments or of the exact same mixture. Pigments and other paint materials mix seamlessly and continuously in the physical domain. In this article, we introduce a divergence-based approach to pigment discrimination and mapping. The methodology is then applied to Munch's masterpiece The Scream (1893), whose pigments and materials have been identified for several points in the painting in a previous study. Through the introduced methodology, we have been able to extend the point analyzes of pigments and materials to the entire surface of the painting, recto and verso.


This article examines the factors determining demand for module two programs in the University of Nairobi. The findings are based on a survey done randomly on university students enrolled in module II Masters in Education program regardless of the year of learning. Descriptive survey design was chosen as it allowed the gathering of information, summarising, analysing, presenting and interpreting over the past decade. This research is a survey descriptive study.  About 150 students registered under the module II Med programs were targeted to answer questionnaires. The questionnaires were mainly seeking factors influencing the choice of University of Nairobi as a university to further their studies. Of the targeted population only 88 students successfully answered and returned the questionnaires. Simple descriptive methods of data analysis were considered to interpret, inform and fill a knowledge gap to a future potential student and other stake- holders including university management Kenya has had a tremendous growth in the demand for higher education. This is evidenced by the number of students applying and admitted and the quantitative growth of universities. This article takes a step towards documenting factors that can guide higher education access policy in Kenya Keywords: Higher Education, Access, Demand, Module II, Kenya


SUMMARY In this paper, a new family of 3-degree-of-freedom planar parallel manipulators (PPMs), namely U-shape fixed base PPMs starting with an active prismatic joint on each leg, is proposed. In order to identify the best manipulators of this family, comparative kinematic and dynamic performance studies are performed. The kinematic performances are quantified through the local performance index, namely the kinematic isotropy. From the kinematic isotropy analysis results, it is observed that PPR-PRP-PRP, PRP-PRP-PRP and PRR-PRP-PRP configurations have better kinematic design aspects compared to other configurations of this family of U-shape fixed base parallel configurations. Further, from the workspace analysis, it is observed that the PPR-PRP-PRP configuration has a higher value of workspace to the total area required ratio compared to other configurations. This paper also presents a comparative dynamic performance analysis of these top-three U-shape fixed base configurations in terms of dynamic driving performance measures, and energy requirements for three different (fixed base size of the manipulators) aspect ratios under two different loading conditions. From the analyses results, it is perceived that the PRP-PRP-PRP configuration is requiring lower energy and dynamic driving performances than others. These analyses are done with the help of multi-body dynamic software, namely MSC ADAMS, and the results are validated through the help of real-time experiments conducted on in-house fabricated prototypes of these three PPMs. In specific, the energy consumption is measured and compared in this study. Experimental results demonstrated that the PRP-PRP-PRP manipulator displays a considerably better performance in terms of minimum energy requirement.


Some numerical parameters-sensitivity analysis has been conducted to evaluate the stability and propagation of the interface cracks at heel of concrete gravity dam. In this paper, utilizing the software ANSYS to simulate the stress and displacement fields of the tip of the interface cracks between concrete gravity dam and foundation, the stress intensity factor (SIF) of the interface crack is analyzed using facture mechanics. Three impacting factors have been discussed, such as the crack length, the angle of crack, and the water height. Critical length and loads of interface crack propagation are obtained using composite fracture criteria. The results indicate that the coarse interface retards the propagation of interface crack, and redounds to stability of gravity dam. It is found that the interface crack often propagates alone the interface between dam and foundation, simultaneously the branch crack kinks to foundation at the specific condition.


Vibration finishing which is often applied to the metal surfaces recently is the finishing method using a disk-type finishing tool with movements of rotational and orbital motion [1]. However, an application of this finishing method and an evaluation of finished surfaces require skills and sensory examinations. This is because the relations between finishing conditions and quality of finished surfaces are not clear. In recent years, image processing methods for evaluating finished surface roughness and texture analysis were proposed [2 - 5]. However, quantitative evaluation has not been fully done.


The Indian Railway Network is the fourth largest network in the world after USA, Russia and China. Railways have been an essential part of the Indian demography since its inception during the British rule. It provides effective means of transport and supply of essential commodities through length and breadth of the country. Railway was first introduced in Assam in 1881 from Dibrugarh to Margherita for transportation of tea and coal. The Northeast Frontier Railway operates in the entire northeast and parts of West Bengal and Bihar. With fast pace of commercialization and globalization, as has railway eased transportation so has also taken its toll on human lives. Railway incidents occur due to collisions, derailments, terrorism, suicides, technical and human errors. The spurt of such cases and casualties has augmented the study of such incidents, its trends and patterns. A retrospective study for 1 year (January to December 2017) was done on 100 cases of death victims of railway incident brought for autopsy to Mortuary, Dept. of Forensic Medicine, Gauhati Medical College & Hospital. The study revealed that males outnumbered females, majority were in 21–30 years age group and crush injury was the most common cause of death. The study highlights the epidemiological factors relevant to railway incidents and necessitates formulation and implementation of effective safety measures to reduce the burden of fatalities. Keywords: Railway incidents, casualties, trends, safety measures Cite this Article Md. Tausif Arafat Hazarika, Biswadeep Paul. A Statistical Analysis of Railway Traffic Fatalities brought for Medico-Legal Autopsy. Research & Reviews: A Journal of Toxicology . 2018; 8(2): 8–14p.


One of the most commonly found mutations in cancers is a mutation in p53. A mutation in p53 does not allow the cell to correct DNA damage or mutations properly, leading to uncontrolled growth and a tumor. α-Mangostin is a p53 activator found in a fruit from Southeast Asia, and when applied to cells, it will arrest them in the S phase. Paclitaxel is a chemotherapy that kills cells as they enter mitosis. Arrested cells will not enter mitosis and therefore will not be killed by paclitaxel. Because of mutated dysfunctional p53, cancer cells are not susceptible to arrest by the p53 activator and therefore can still be killed by paclitaxel. This technique of selectively killing cancer cells while protecting the healthy cells is called chemoprotection. It allows doctors to use higher dosages of chemotherapy without the side effects because of damage to the healthy cells. The purpose of this study is to determine if α-mangostin, a potential chemoprotectant, can be used to protect BHK cells from the cytotoxic effects of paclitaxel. Because α-mangostin is an anti-proliferative, treating the cells with α-mangostin decreases total cell number in a dose dependent manner. Interestingly, I found that pretreating cells with increasing concentrations of α-mangostin before treating them with paclitaxel increased the total cell number per well when compared to cells treated with paclitaxel alone until the toxic concentration of α-mangostin. This finding indicates that α-mangostin may be a good candidate for a chemoprotectant to be used when treating cancer patients.


The efect of the minimum wage on unskilled labor is not a very good one. To the contrary, it creates unemployment, and eventually excludes them almost entirely from the labor market. is is a tragedy, in that this cohort can least a ord the ravages of unemployment. is is not the rst article ever written about the aws in the minimum wage law. However, we do cast aspersions on it that are anything but widespread in the literature. Keywords: minimum wage law, unemployment, economic regulation, rights violation


It is shown that for a compressible flow with constant entropy the pressure rise maintains the direct relation to the circulation around the blades existing for incompressible flow. In contrast, however, the torque, and with it the power consumption, is increased because of sound waves traveling to infinity already at subsonic circumferential speeds.


According to World Health Organization (WHO) report, anemia is the most common disease related to nutritional defects, which affects about 2 Billion people in the world, and among this huge population, children and pregnant women are the two major high risk groups. The purpose of the present study was to determine the prevalence of anemia in pregnant women and it's relationship to mother's age and gestational age. This study was done on 214 pregnant women visiting Yahyanejad Gyn & Obs clinic, during the period of March Aug 2000. Complete Blood Count (CBC) was done at the first visit and if Hemoglobin (Hb) was less than 11mg/dl in first & third trimester or less than 10.5 in the 2nd trimester, they were considered to have the anemia of pregnancy. For diagnosis the type of anemia, the other lab tests were done. Frequency of anemia in different age groups and mean pregnancy trimester were studied. Mean age of cases was 24.6 ± 5 years old and hemoglobin was 12.6 ± 1.6. mg/dl overall, 20 (9.4%) pregnant women had anemia, the highest frequency of anemia (12.78%) was seen in women at 21-30 year old group. Frequency of anemia in high risk pregnancies (mother's age of less than 18 & more than 35 years old ) was less than normal age group (19-34 years old ) (P< 0.05).Anemia was more common in third trimester than first & second trimesters.(P<0.05).Iron dificiency anemia was the most common anemia in pregnant women. Due to higher frequency of anemia in third trimester, it is highly advisable to start iron replacement therapy from second trimester and the mather's Hematocrit level be checked at early third trimester. Key word: Anemia, Pregnancy, Gestational age, Age, Hemoglobin and Prevalence. Corresponding address: Dr. Asnafi N., Obs & Gyn Dep., Yahyanejad hospital, Farhang Cross, Babol, Iran. Email: firstname.lastname@example.com D ow nladed fom hp://w w w .ri.ir


We describe a treatment made with interferonα (IFN-α) plus ribavirin of two patients with membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis (MPGN) induced by hepatitis C virus (HCV): Case 1 was a 22-year-old woman with leg and facial edema, hypertension and proteinuria, whose liver biopsy revealed chronic active hepatitis; and Case 2 was a 42-year-old man with anasarca, hypertension and proteinuria, whose liver biopsy indicated cirrhosis. Both had anti-HCV, HCVRNA and cryoglobulins. IFN-α (3 million units (MU), 3 times/week) and ribavirin (1 g/day) were administered for 12 months. The drugs were well tolerated by both patients. Serum alanine aminotransferase (ALT) levels normalized and HCV-RNA became negative. Cryoglobulins disappeared and an improvement in renal disease was seen after 6 months of therapy. However, after 9 months, Case 2 presented ALT elevation, and proteinuria was detected. Two years after the end of therapy, both patients were negative in repeated HCV-RNA and cryoglobulin tests. Case 1 was asymptomatic, with normal liver and renal tests, and Case 2 had normal blood pressure, with mild edema of the ankles. Based on the evolution of these two cases, the association of IFNα and ribavirin may be a therapeutic option for patients with MPGN related to HCV.


Former members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and organizers of peaceful civil rights organizations were interviewed to assess how these individuals interpreted the current social conditions in Post-Agreement Northern Ireland. Contrary to the intercommunity ideals of the Good Friday Agreement, our results suggest that people continue to exist in a society where political power is based on the division of communities, where ordinary people are not motivated to contribute to politics and where everyday life is fundamentally affected by the agreements of strongly opposed politicians. Analysis of transcripts revealed that people lived in a climate that presented violence as inappropriate yet effective. To that end, members of the community were negotiating a period of social psychological conflict and were described as living in a situation of unease rather than peace. Participants warned that conditions appear to be creating tensions that could lead to future violence.


Background
Depression and anxiety are frequent comorbid conditions in cardiovascular diseases (CVDs); they are related to poor prognosis and higher mortality risk. Health providers need a clinical tool to identify these psychiatric conditions. The 14-item hospital anxiety and depression scale (HADS) is a screening tool used in patients with different medical conditions.

Objective
The aim of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the HADS Mexican Spanish version in a broad sample of Mexican patients with CVDs.

Materials and Methods
A total of 953 individuals between 18 and 75 years old with ischemic or hypertensive cardiomyopathy were screened with the HADS Mexican Spanish version. Construct validity, internal consistency, and congruence coefficients of the scale were obtained.

Results
The results showed two clear factors which correspond to the original two designated domains of the HADS, anxiety, and depression, with adequate reliability values (alpha > 0.80) and high congruence coefficients (> 0.90) when compared to the sample of other validation studies of the HADS.

Conclusions
The present study adds evidence of the validity and reliability of the HADS to assess the presence of both depression and anxiety in Mexican patients with CVD. Its central contribution is that it demonstrates its capacity to differentiate the presence and severity of depression and anxiety in this population.


The performance of CdTe thin film photovoltaic devices are sensitive to process parameters. In this study, efforts are made to further understand the effects of process parameters like process temperature and variation in cadmium chloride passivation treatment on CdTe films deposited using a sublimation based deposition system. The effects on film microstructure are studied using advanced microstructural characterization methods like TEM, SEM, EDS and SIMS while electrical performance is studied using various electrical measurements such as current density vs. voltage and electroluminescence. The aim of this study is to provide new insight into the understanding of relationship between fabrication process, device performance and thin film microstructure.


A theoretical evaluation was conducted delineating how aeromechanical feedback control can be utilized to stabilize the inception of rotating stall in axial compressors. Ten aeromechanical control methodologies were quantitatively examined based on the analytical formulations presented in the first part of this paper (McGee et al, 2003a). The maximum operating range for each scheme is determined for optimized structural parameters, and the various schemes are compared. The present study shows that the most promising aeromechanical designs and controls for a class of low-speed axial compressors were the use of dynamic fluid injection. Aeromechanically incorporating variable duct geometries and dynamically re-staggered IGV and rotor blades were predicted to yield less controllability. The aeromechanical interaction of a flexible casing wall was predicted to be destabilizing, and thus should be avoided by designing sufficiently rigid structures to prevent casing ovalization or other structurally-induced variations in tip clearance. Control authority, a metric developed in the first part of this paper, provided a useful interpretation of the aeromechanical damping of the coupled system. The model predictions also show that higher spatial modes can become limiting with aeromechanical feedback, both in control of rotating stall as well as in considering the effects of lighter, less rigid structural aeroengine designs on compressor stability.Copyright © 2003 by ASME


For the first time in history, estimates of the overweight people in the world rival estimates of those malnourished. The World Health Organization (WHO, 2002) ranked obesity among the top 10 risks to human health worldwide. In the early 1960s, nearly half of the Americans were overweight and 13% were obese. Today some 64% of U.S. adults are overweight and 30.5% are obese. Even more alarming, twice as many U.S. children are overweight than were twenty years ago, a 66% increase. Non-communicable diseases impose a heavy economic burden on already strained health systems. Health is a key determinant of development and a precursor of economic growth (WHO, 2003). Previous research suggests that states with higher levels of educational attainment tend to be better off on measures of economic welfare (Post Secondary Opportunity, 2002). In the U.S. adults with less than a high school education have higher prevalence of both obesity (27.4%) and diabetes (13%), while adults with a college degree had prevalence of obesity of (15.7%) and diabetes (5.5%) respectively (CDC, 2002). This study explores the interrelationships among obesity prevalence, educational attainment, and state economic welfare. It is hypothesized that as a state"s educational attainment rises, their corresponding obesity prevalence goes down. This secondary analysis examines U.S. data from the Center for Disease Control, U.S. Census, and The Bureau of Economic Analysis for the year 2001. Fifty – one states (including D.C) were correlated with their obesity prevalence and high school graduation rates, bachelor"s degree recipients or more, per capita personal income, poverty rate, median household income, unemployment rate, and employed/population ratio. The growing body of literature on the globesity epidemic (world corpulence) suggests that individuals are not to blame, but globalization and development, with poverty as an exacerbating factor. Some of the problem in the U.S. and abroad might be partially economic, with massmarketed foods being cheaper, especially in urban areas, while fresh foods are becoming more expensive. In poorer countries people tend to get fatter as their incomes rise, while in developed and transitional economies higher income correlates with more slender bodies. Cultural factors might also be important in that many minority and lower income groups associate fatness with prosperity, a perception not shared with groups having higher living standards and education. Results show that states with a higher percent of the population 25 or older having at least a high school diploma are negatively correlated with Obesity Prevalence (r = -.45, p<.001). More striking were the percent of the population 25 or older having a bachelor"s degree and the corresponding negative correlation with obesity prevalence (r = -.55, p<.001). Other correlations with obesity prevalence are: median household income (r = -.46, p<. 001), per capita personal income (r = -.47, p<. 001), poverty rate (r = .38, p<. 01), unemployment rate (r = .35, p<. 05) and employment/population ratio (-.37, p<. 01). Findings seem to suggest that not only does obtaining bachelor"s degree provide for a better economic life style, but possibly a slimmer healthier one as well. If states are to improve minimum living conditions and health (as related to 3 OBESITY, EDUCATIONAL ATTAINMENT, AND STATE ECONOMIC WELFARE obesity) of their population, they ought to focus on high school graduation and increase the number of adults in their state who are at least high school graduates. However an "aiming high" state strategy would improve living standards well beyond minimum by increasing the proportion of the state adult population with at least a bachelor"s degree. The indirect affect might be to lower state obesity prevalence as more of a state"s population becomes better educated.


As an alternative to approaches based on entropy and information gain, we describe a system that uses a measure called the impurity level. The learning algorithm based on this measure, which we call FARNI, first induces fuzzy decision trees by using an impurity-level extension for selecting the best branch. This is similar to the way C4.5 and ARNI induce selections for crisp databases. Once FARNI calculates the fuzzy decision tree, it returns compact fuzzy rule sets that apply a pruning process


The objective of the Second Transport Sector Project for Mali is to provide better access and transport services to rural and urban communities by improving transport infrastructure in Mali. This environmental assessment (EA) document evaluated impacts and suggests mitigation measures including : air quality; climate and meteorology; natural and sensitive habitats; effects of pollutants on health; demographic and social status of the area of influence of the project; surface and groundwater contamination; damage to natural vegetation; cultural and archeological sites; resettlement and land compensation; risks to community health, safety and security; impact on tourists and cultural activities; increase of vehicular circulation on markets, mosques and schools; creation of local temporary and permanent employment; deforestation; damage to natural vegetation; cultural and archeological sites findings; and finally, adherence to Mali's legal and environmental policy legislation, and international conventions relatives to the protection of the environment of which the Mali is a signatory, and the Bank's operational safeguard directives on environmental and social matters.


Plant secondary metabolites exhibit a variety of biological activities and therefore serve as valuable therapeutics or flavoring compounds. However, the small amounts isolated from plants often cannot meet market demands. This led to the exploration of other, more profitable methods for their production, including plant cell culture systems, chemical synthesis and biotechnological production in microbial hosts. The biotechnological production can be pursued by reconstructing metabolic pathways in selected microbial systems. But due to their complexity, most of these pathways are not completely understood and require the expression of a multitude of genes in a foreign organism. Recently, next generation sequencing data and advances in gene silencing in plants allowed the elucidation of some biosynthetic pathways in more detail. Thus, the de novo production of some natural products, including morphine, strictosidine, artemisinin, taxol® and resveratrol, in extensively engineered microbial hosts has become feasible. This review highlights the reconstruction of these pathways, missing pieces and novel techniques employed.


Purpose: This study aims to empirically examine the immediate reaction of affected countries' stock market indices to COVID-19. Approach/Methodology/Design: The study applies an event study methodology using daily data series of stock price indices. Findings: Evidence from eleven global stock market indices shows that the first confirmed COVID-19 case announcement has had a significant negative impact on the returns. Moreover, these effects were more substantial following the WHO announcement of COVID-19 as a global pandemic on March 11, 2020. Practical Implications: The rapidly developing outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has depressed the affected countries' economies and caused turmoil in global financial markets. The results presented in this paper shed some light on the potential economic and social cost of COVID-19 concerns policymakers and other stock market stakeholders. Originality/value: The results suggest that stock markets have captured investors' expectations over potential adverse economic consequences of COVID-19. Moreover, there is evidence for an underreaction to the pandemic's announcement, as shown by the delayed response of stock markets in terms of significant CARs. These findings leave a wish list of topics for future research.


Space Law A Treatise by FRANCIS LYALL and PAUL B. LARSEN, Ashgate Publishing Ltd, Surrey, 2009, 1st Edition, 596 pp, Hardcover, 80[pounds sterling], ISBN: 978 07546 4390 6, eISBN 978 0 7546 9242 3 (ebook) Space has revolutionized telecommunication services, climate and weather forecasting, commerce, environmental management, security, banking, navigation and TV broadcasting. Consequently, in the lead up to the creation of the United Kingdom Space Agency (UKSA) on 1 April 2011 the publication of a space law monograph is timely. The authors of this book, Professor Francis Lyall and Adjunct Professor Paul Larsen, are recognised experts in the developing body of space law. In the Preface theys advise that they met several decades ago in 1963-64 as students in a Space Law class run by Ivan Vlasic in the Institute of Air and Space Law at McGill University. Their enthusiasm for the subject and enduring friendship has clearly grown in the intervening years. Indeed their careers over the past forty-five year can be said to match the actual develop of space law. Lyall is a distinguished retired academic, although he remains active in teaching and scholarship, and holds the position of Emeritus Professor of Public Law at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He is a Board Member of the European Centre for Space Law and a Director of the International Institute of Space Law. He is also a member of the INTELSAT Panel of Legal Experts and sits on the ITU Reform group. He has previously written a monograph on space law entitled, Law and Space Law Telecommunications (1989) as well as numerous journal articles and curiously has so far published five crime novels! His co-author, Larsen, is an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law School in the United States where he has taught Aviation Law, International Law and a Space Law Seminar. He studied at the Institute of Air and Space Law at Cologne University and Yale University. He is the author of several books on aviation and space law and practised law from 1970-1998 in the US Department of Transportation. A collaborative effort, the book is a companion to a collection of essays the pair edited in 2007 (1). The authors state that they "sought to present the bulk of space law as it stands in the 2000s" and that the book "is more akin to a mural than to an etching". This monograph builds on the seminal work of Space Law (1965) by J W Jenks and Vlasic's monumental treatise Law and Public Order in Space (1963) and later works in the French language Droit des activites spatiales (1992) by P-M Martin and the Italian Il Regime Internationale dello Spazio (1993) by F Pocar. It obviously adopts an international perspective and the authors clearly draw on their extensive experience in the field within the United Kingdom and the United States respectively. The authors are of the opinion that radical solutions have evolved for the problem of control of space relating to such issues as: (1) the basic principles of equality of access to space, (2) freedom of its exploration and use, (3) the prohibition of national sovereignty and finally (4) the lawfulness of only peaceful uses of space. Legal developments up to 1 January 2008 are explored in detail in the book. A clear advantage of the book is that there is certainly little competition in this highly specialised area of law. Further, although in hard cover it runs to a reasonable 596 pages in total, being reasonably competitively priced for a law book at 80[pounds sterling]. The book helpfully provides a list of abbreviations and acronyms as the space world is rife with acronyms that are not as familiar as NASA or ESA. There is also a succinct list of the space law Major Treaties. The Table of Contents organises the book into 18 chapters. Chapter 1 is an Introduction to the Actors, History and Fora of space law and culminates with Chapter 17 The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence and Chapter 18 The Future. …


Using literary texts in language teaching exposes learners to creative uses of language and generates creative responses from them. This chapter explores key issues relating to this by providing a brief historical background, before discussing reasons for using literature in language teaching; the nature of literary language and the implications for pedagogy; and the role of the reader in making sense of texts. The influence of communicative language teaching has resulted in more process-oriented, learner-centred approaches to using literature with language learners, ranging from language-based approaches which emphasise personal response to those which draw on literary theory or stylistics. Such approaches are discussed and evaluated, and key principles for classroom practice are suggested.

The chapter also focuses on future trends, including the recent call for more empirical research into using literature in the language classroom. The need for more empirical research is explained, key research to date is summarised, and the importance of practitioner-based research methods is discussed. Other future trends considered include the pedagogic implications arising from the rise of global Englishes; the possibilities offered by web-based interaction and multi-modal and hyperlinked texts; and the increasing integration of creative writing into language classrooms.


root canals, besides the flow of AH Plus (AHP) and Neo MTA Plus (NMTAP) sealers using different methodologies. Mandibular molars mesial roots with two root canals and degree of curvature between 20° and 40° were selected. The specimens were prepared with the ProDesign R system up to size 35.05 and were filled with the sealers by a continuous wave of condensation technique, Thermo Pack II (n=12). The teeth were scanned using μCT after root canal preparation and obturation. The volumetric percentage of filling material and voids were calculated. Flow was evaluated based on ISO 6876/2012 (n=10). Flow and filling were also evaluated in μCT using a glass plate with a central cavity and four grooves from the central cavity (n=6). Flow was linearly calculated into the grooves. The central cavity filling (CCF) and lateral cavity filling (LCF) were calculated in mm3. Data were submitted to non-paired t test with a significance threshold at 5%. The percentage of filling and voids between the root canals filled with AHP or NMTAP was similar (p>0.05). NMTAP presented the lowest flow in conventional test (p<0.05). Using μCT, sealers had similar CCF, LCF and linear flow (p>0.05). In conclusion, NMTAP and AHP had similar filling ability in curved mesial root canals of mandibular molars without presence of isthmus. Although AHP presented better flow than NMTAP using ISO methodology, there was no difference between these materials regarding volumetric filling when evaluated by μCT. F i l l i n g Ab i l i t y and F l ow o f Root Canal Sealers : A MicroComputed Tomographic Study


To meet the high reliability of structural design and safety evaluation on carbon fiber wound reinforced polymeric (CFWRP) pressure vessel, the traditional safety factor design was substituted by reliability design based on the reliability theory and statistical principle. Eight CFWRP pressure vessels were manufactured with the same material system by the same winding technique. And experiments were conducted to obtain the probabilistic distributions of design variables. Results derived from reliability design (fiber thickness) agreed well with experimental results and were much lower than that from conventional design. Through comparison among reliability design results with different statistics of fiber strength, significant effect of the variation of fiber strength on structural reliability of composite pressure vessel was demonstrated. The conventional design was verified to be not reasonable since it considers only the mean value of fiber strength without the effect of fiber strength distribution on structural resistance of pressure vessel.


Previous physiological and behavioral studies have shown that the nucleus raphe obscurus (nRO) modulates pelvic floor reflex function (Yamanouchi and Kakeyama [1992] Physiol. Behav. 51:575–579; Beattie et al. [1996] Soc. Neurosci. Abstr. 22:722.4; Holmes et al. [1997] Brain Res. 759:197–204). In the present study, small injections of fluorescent tracers were used to investigate direct descending projections from the rostral and caudal portions of the brainstem nRO to retrogradely labeled pudendal motoneurons (MN) in the male rat. The caudal nRO projects into the ventral and lateral funiculi of the spinal cord, with arborizations in the thoracic intermediolateral cell column; in laminae VII, IX, and X of the lumbosacral cord; and in the sacral parasympathetic nucleus (SPN). Many identified external anal sphincter and ischiocavernosus MNs appeared to be in direct apposition with fibers originating from the caudal nRO; and more than half of the bulbospongiosus MNs that were identified appeared to receive such descending input. In addition to the nRO spinal autonomic and pudendal motoneuronal targets, projections were observed to regions of the intermediate gray that contain interneurons organizing the pelvic floor reflexes and to MN pools that are involved in functionally related somatic activities. Finally, several neurons in the lumbar enlargement were labeled retrogradely with FluoroRuby after injections into the nRO and the immediately adjacent reticular formation. Thus, the nRO may be in a position to modulate the coordinated actions of autonomic preganglionic and functionally related skeletal MN activity involved in sexual and eliminative reflex functions. J. Comp. Neurol. 397:458–474, 1998. © 1998 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


Think tanks of the United States as a functional prototype of modern analytical centers are explored in the article. The main factors that determined the formation of think tanks in the United States in the early years of the twentieth century were distinguished, in particular: 1) the economic boom in the United States at the beginning of the 20th century; 2) course of administration of T. Roosevelt; 3) cartelization and trasification of the national economy. The process of formation of the official institutionalized elements of the system of expert-ideological influence in the 19101920 years was analyzed. The types of non-state structures of expert support of foreign policy processes of this period are distinguished, such as: 1) non-governmental think tanks, whose activities are directed on ideological substantiation, expert evaluation and advocacy support of foreign policy; 2) councils and associations created to coordinate with the assistance of scientists economic and political interests of business and the state. The influence of the first think tanks of the USA on the public decisions making process is considered. The influence of the Industrial Revolution, private philanthropy and the Great Depression on the formation and development of American think tanks is analyzed. The influence of the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Foundation on the process of the formation of think tanks in the United States is considered. The influence of the Second World War and the Cold War on the formation of expert-analytical organizations in the USA was determined. The peculiarities of the development of think tanks of the USA in the 40's - 50's of the twentieth century, which were caused by a new wave of expansion into the European market of American corporations and banks, were considered. The ideological and organizational changes in the work of think tanks of the USA in the 1960s were explored. The main political events that have created the context for the distribution of disproportionately large numbers of conservative think tanks in the 1970s are analyzed, in particular: 1) political mobilization of business and corporations; 2) political conversion and aggressive propaganda by the neo-conservative intelligentsia; 3) the political mobilization of evangelical and fundamentalist Christians; 4) the prevalence of neoclassical economic theory at universities and among key politicians. The reasons that prevented the creation of non-conservative think tanks in the 1960s-early 1970s are researched, namely: 1) the adoption by Congress of a tax reform law which has tightened restrictions on the political activity of private foundations that historically are major sponsors of think tanks; 2) reducing the resources of the Ford Foundation and reducing its interest in funding analytical centers; 3) a decline in the cost of research and development of the Ministry of Defense, historically another important source of funding for think tanks in the United States. The causes of the emergence and spread of ideologically oriented think tanks (lawyer type) in the USA in the 70s and 80s of the 20th century, which openly demonstrated commitment to a certain policy, party or ideology, carried out aggressive propaganda and sought to make influence the discussion of issues current policy are analized. The current condition of think tanks in the USA is considered. It is established that the process of developing strategic ideas by think tanks of the United States is closely linked with the applied orientation towards obtaining specific socio-economic and political results. American think tanks are directly influenced primarily by public interests and have a close connection with the interests of large American business. They are quite different from similar organizations in other countries, with the active participation of many of them in the political process and widely funded from various sources. American think tanks are directly and indirectly ready to participate in shaping public policy, and politicians, in their turn, are appealing to them for advice.


This marvelously intelligent study aid preserves the direct prose, understandable analysis, and colorful examples of the previous two editions. The third edition provides new material on the purposes of tort law, battery, sexual harassment, terminology and policies of negligence, health care malpractice issues, assumption of risk, strict liability, proof and causation, duty and proximate cause, duty to act, media torts and damages. Coverage also includes case summaries of "newsworthy issues" of headline interest throughout the text. A new chapter on fraud and heartbalm torts has been added as well. This text includes a substantial section of End Notes, useful for both professors and inquisitive students, packed with references to scholarly books and articles as well as case law.


In recent years, increasing importance of active day-to-day asset-liability management by banks and liquidity management by central banks renders that short-term seasonalities in monetary series should be studied minutely. Currency in circulation is a typical example of such a series that displays strong intra-month seasonality. Earlier, the intra-month seasonality in currency in circulation in India had been modeled by dummy variables pertaining to specific days of months (Bhattacharya and Joshi, 2001). The paper reports a parsimonious representation of the Bhattacharya and Joshi (2001) model by approximating the coefficients pertaining to the thirty-one 'day of the month' dummies by a polynomial. The extension is interesting because it provides an example of polynomial approximation of coefficients pertaining to a group of indexed dummy variables, rather than lagged dependent or independent variables as in a standard Almon (1965) scheme. For a degree four approximation, an empirical comparison of the two models reveals marginal difference in explanatory powers and forecasting abilities.


The task of seeking a given template in a given image is called Template Matching. A template matching algorithm gets two inputs. The first input is a small image, representing a pattern or a template. Such a template can be any object, like a face, a logo, or any other item. The second input to the template matching algorithm is a larger image, denoted as the target image. The output should be a box, locating the template inside the target image. Template Matching is a key component in many computer vision applications such as object detection, tracking, surveillance, medical imaging and image stitching. Our interest is in Template Matching "in the wild", i.e., when no prior information is available on the target image or the template. Also, the template might undergo severe appearance changes in the target image. Such appearance changes can be out of plane rotation, complex deformations, significant background clutter, and occlusions. All these changes are hard to model. Hence, many existing methods that assume a deformation model or a template prior, fail in these conditions. We propose a novel measure for template matching "in the wild" named Deformable Diversity Similarity – based on the diversity of feature matches between a target image window and the template. We rely on both local appearance and geometric information that jointly lead to a powerful approach for matching. Our key contribution is a similarity measure, that is robust to all the challenges stated above. Empirical evaluation on the most up-to-date benchmark shows that our method outperforms the current state-of-the-art in its detection accuracy while improving computational complexity.


Human intelligence has the remarkable ability to adapt to new tasks and environments quickly. Starting from a very young age, humans acquire new skills and learn how to solve new tasks either by imitating the behavior of others or by following provided natural language instructions. To facilitate research in this direction, we propose IGLU: Interactive Grounded Language Understanding in a Collaborative Environment. The primary goal of the competition is to approach the problem of how to build interactive agents that learn to solve a task while provided with grounded natural language instructions in a collaborative environment. Understanding the complexity of the challenge, we split it into sub-tasks to make it feasible for participants. This research challenge is naturally related, but not limited, to two fields of study that are highly relevant to the NeurIPS community: Natural Language Understanding and Generation (NLU/G) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Therefore, the suggested challenge can bring two communities together to approach one of the important challenges in AI. Another important aspect of the challenge is the dedication to perform a human-in-the-loop evaluation as a final evaluation for the agents developed by contestants.


Lodging incidence in cereal crops depends upon both crop management and environmental conditions. Ethephon [(2-chloro-ethyl)phosphomic acid] controls lodging, thus preserving yield. The objective of this study was no investigate the effects of ethephon on spring barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) with different N rates, irrigation treatments, or application rates of ethephon. Ethephon was applied at Zadoks Growth Stage 43 at 0.28 kg ha⁻¹ in the N and irrigation studies, and at rates between 0.1 and 0.5 kg ha⁻¹ in the ethephon rate study. Plant height and lodging were reduced by ethephon in each study; however, ethephon did not consistently reduce lodging at Belgian indices of 7.0 and above. Differences in cultivar response were observed. In the ethiphon rate trial, 0.1 kg ha⁻¹ ethephon reduced lodging of 'Harrington', while 0.25 kg ha⁻¹ was required to similarly reduce lodging of 'Leduc'. Ethephon reduced the number of kernels per spike, had variable effects on grain mass, and delayed crop maturity by up to 4 d. Whole plant protein was unaffected by ethephon. Ethephon reduced grain protein by 25% and decreased straw protein by 9% in 1986, and had no effect on grain protein in 1987. Ethephon was an effective antilodging agent only under moderate lodging pressures; it is not likely to preserve an increased yield under conditions of intense irrigation and high fertility. Contribution no. 692 of the Lacombe Research Station.


[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] EXECUTIVE SUMMARY * Small family private foundations are growing at a rate of six per day. This indicates a growing probability that CPA firms will be advising benefactors of family foundations. It is vital that CPA firms understand the complex tax rules related to private foundations. * Private foundations are not allowed to engage in transactions with "disqualified persons," which include foundation managers and substantial contributors, even if the transaction is conducted at fair market value. * Excise tax on the net investment income of private foundations is assessed at 2%. However, the rate is lowered to 1% for years in which the private foundation makes qualified expenditures in excess of the prior five-year rolling average qualified expenditure ratio plus 1% of current-year net investment income. * The minimum annual distribution of private foundations is roughly 5% of the average monthly fair market value of assets. Distributions in excess of this amount may be carried forward for five years to offset future required annual distributions. * Private foundations must pay an excise tax on "taxable expenditures." In general, these expenditures are made for any purpose other than religious, charitable, scientific, literary, educational or other public purposes. To ensure grants made to organizations other than public charities or exempt operating foundations are not classified as taxable expenditures, a private foundation must exercise expenditure responsibility. * Private foundations are not allowed to invest in risky investments, unless the investments are related to the exempt purpose of the foundation. Private foundations are also not allowed to invest in a business enterprise if the combined ownership interest of the private foundation and all disqualified persons exceeds 20% of the business enterprise. ********** In the arsenal of estate planning, private foundations have traditionally ranked among the big guns. With their relative formality and extensive tax rules, they have been considered the province of the truly wealthy--people with $1 million or more to dispose of charitably The belief that lesser largesse could be better served by donor-advised funds and certain types of supporting organizations (see "The Rich Truly Are Different," JofA, April 04, page 32) is changing. The Pension Protection Act (PPA) of 2006 has curtailed many of the tax and other advantages enjoyed by those two alternative philanthropic vehicles. Today, small family foundations with assets under $1 million make up nearly 60% of all foundations. One factor driving this growth is the unprecedented transfer of wealth to the post-boomer generation that has begun and is likely to accelerate in coming years. Often, these small foundations are administered by family members, who rarely have expertise regarding the complex tax regulations involved. For all these reasons, developing a niche practice in private foundations poses growth possibilities for CPA firms, according to Holly M. Pantzer, CPA, a partner with BKD LLP, one of the 10 largest CPA and advisory firms in the U.S., where her areas of expertise include advising private foundations. CPA firms are increasingly likely to be advising founding benefactors of family foundations. CPAs can be a valuable resource for monitoring compliance with the many tax laws unique to private foundations. Awareness of the nuances of private foundation laws is especially important now, given the increased scrutiny of all tax-exempt organizations by Congress and the IRS. Advisers can help prevent inadvertent but costly violations of the tax laws peculiar to private foundations. Key issues for benefactors considering a private foundation include: * Comparisons to other options (donor-advised fund or supporting organization) * Prohibitions on self-dealing * Excise taxes on net investment income * Taxes on undistributed income * Taxable expenditures and expenditure responsibility * Jeopardizing investments and excess business holdings Private foundations operate exclusively for religious, charitable, scientific or similar activities as described in IRC [section] 501(c)(3) and are exempt from income tax but commonly pay excise taxes on net investment income and, sometimes, as penalties. …


The purpose of this study is to demonstrate the value of ERTS-I data as a supplement to mineral reconnaissance techniques. Field studies have revealed that the major mining districts in Lander and Eureka counties, Nevada, tend to be aligned in northwestsoutheast belts with ore deposits occurring in carbonates which have been exposed by domal windows through the upper plate of the Roberts Mountain thrust. Analyses of composite color images of ERTS-l data obtained from a digital image-edit~ng system indicated that many of the ore districts are related to lineaments not previously mapped either by aerial or field studies. These lineaments very likely indicate deep zones of structural weakness along which igneous rocks and related ore-bearing fluids have penetrated. An isolineament intersection map prepared from the imagery displays a concentrated band of lineament intersections that coincides with the previously mapped mineral belts. Within that band, a strong correlation exists between areas of intersection concentration anp domal windows associated with major districts. Based on this correlation, two major intersection concentration areas which have no known associated ore deposits are interpreted to be buried domal areas and potential exploration targets.


This paper tackles the problem of parts-aware point cloud generation. Unlike existing works which require the point cloud to be segmented into parts a priori, our parts-aware editing and generation are performed in an unsupervised manner. We achieve this with a simple modification of the Variational Auto-Encoder which yields a joint model of the point cloud itself along with a schematic representation of it as a combination of shape primitives. In particular, we introduce a latent representation of the point cloud which can be decomposed into a disentangled representation for each part of the shape. These parts are in turn disentangled into both a shape primitive and a point cloud representation, along with a standardising transformation to a canonical coordinate system. The dependencies between our standardising transformations preserve the spatial dependencies between the parts in a manner that allows meaningful parts-aware point cloud generation and shape editing. In addition to the flexibility afforded by our disentangled representation, the inductive bias introduced by our joint modeling approach yields state-of-the-art experimental results on the ShapeNet dataset.


Speech therapy consists in a wide range of services whose aim is to prevent, diagnose and treat different types of speech impairments. One of the most important conditions for obtaining favourable and steady results is the "immersing" of the subject as long as possible into therapeutic context: at home, at school/work, on the street. Since nowadays portable computers tend to become habitual accessories, seems a good idea to create virtual versions of human SLTs and to integrate them into these devices. However one of the main distinction between a Speech and Language Therapist (SLT) and a Computer Based Speech Therapy System (CBST) arise from the field of emotion intelligence. The inability of current CBSTs to detect emotional state of human subjects leads to inadequate behavioural responses. Furthermore, this "unresponsive" behaviour is perceived as a lack of empathy and, especially when subjects are children, leads to negative emotional state such as frustration. Thus in this article we propose an original emotions recognition framework - named PhonEM - to be integrated in our previous developed CBST - Logomon. The originality consists in both emotions representation (a fuzzy model) and detection (using only subjects' speech stream). These exceptional restrictions along with the fuzzy representation of emotions lie at the origin of our approach and make our task a difficult and, in the same time, an innovative one. As far as we know, this is the first attempt to combine these techniques in order to improve assisted speech therapy and the obtained results encourage as to further develop our CBST.


A rare case of factor XI (PTA) deficiency was discovered in a Saudi family in the Riyadh area. Nine members of the family were studied. Two were found to have a severe PTA deficiency; levels of factor XI clotting activity were 0.01 i.u./ml and 0.02 i.u./ml respectively. Both plasmas were markedly deficient in factor XI antigen and appeared to be negative for cross-reactive material (CRM-). The parents were first cousins and both were found to have a minor PTA deficiency. Factor XI levels were: mother 0.048 i.u./ml and father 0.33 i.u./ml. Another sibling was found to have a FXI level of 0.47 i.u./ml. Menorrhagia and bleeding for 1 day after tooth extraction were the main bleeding manifestations found in one member with severe PTA deficiency. Clinically this member presented with iron deficiency anaemia. Other family members had no significant history of bleeding tendency. This is the first report of a Saudi Arabian family with PTA deficiency.


Mutual fund industry in Romania has undergone significant growth in recent years in the number of investors and the net assets managed, but still very small compared to other European countries. Capital market development in Romania, the emergence of new investment instruments provides a greater variety of mutual funds investments. Managers decide on the structure of the portfolio by selecting categories of assets in accordance with the rules set out in the Prospectus and according to the degree of risk. In this paper we propose to realize an analysis of mutual investments system in Romania, the progress and their efficiency.


Technical and environmental efficiency of some coal fired thermal power plants in India is estimated using a methodology that accounts for firm's efforts to increase the production of good output and reduce pollution with the given resources and technology. The methodology used is directional output distance function. Estimates of firm specific shadow prices of pollutants (bad outputs), and elasticity of substitution between good and bad outputs are also obtained. The technical and environmental inefficiency of a representative firm is estimated as 0.10 implying that the thermal power generating industry in Andhra Pradesh state of India could increase production of electricity by 10 per cent while decreasing generation of pollution by 10 percent. This result shows that there are incentives or win-win opportunities for the firms to voluntarily comply with the environmental regulation. It is found that there is a significant variation in marginal cost of pollution abatement or shadow prices of bad outputs across the firms and an increasing marginal cost of pollution abatement with respect to pollution reduction by the firms. The variation in marginal cost of pollution abatement and compliance to regulation across firms could be reduced by having economic instruments like emission tax.


The institution of local self-government occupies an increasingly important position in Ukrainian society. However, the contemporary system of local self-government in Ukraine is still not consistent with the principles of the European Charter of Local Self-government. In areas such as access to sources of revenue, policy initiation and citizen involvement in local governance, municipal governments in Ukraine frequently fall significantly short of expected European standards. In part, this is due to the lingering influence of the Soviet totalitarian past on the mentality of both the Ukrainian legislators and the representatives of local governments who are working to create democratic principles of true people's power. Too often, the creation of independent self-governance authority conflicts with the strong desire of some political forces to transform local self-government into an appendage of state (national government) power under rigid and comprehensive control. But, in spite of this, democratic principles are finding their way into the re-thinking of the role of local self-government in Ukranian society.


We argue theoretically and document empirically that aging leads to greater (industrial) automation, because it creates a shortage of middle-aged workers specializing in manual production tasks. We show that demographic change is associated with greater adoption of robots and other automation technologies across countries and with more robotics-related activities across U.S. commuting zones. We also document more automation innovation in countries undergoing faster aging. Our directed technological change model predicts that the response of automation technologies to aging should be more pronounced in industries that rely more on middle-aged workers and those that present greater opportunities for automation and that productivity should improve and the labor share should decline relatively in industries that are more amenable to automation. The evidence supports all four of these predictions.


The current cancer treatment scenario lacks drugs acting as both radiosensitizer and radioprotector agents. In this context, the radiomodulatory properties exerted by an aqueous extract from the fruits of the Italian Prunus avium cv. Della Recca (PaDRw) were investigated. The extract, obtained through an environmentally-friendly ultrasound-assisted extraction, seemed to act as a radioprotector at lower tested doses (25 and 50 μg mL-1) and a radiosensitizer at 400 and 500 μg mL-1 dose levels towards the neuroblastoma SH-SY5Y cell line, irradiated with four graded X-ray doses (0, 0.5, 2, and 4 Gy). The fractionation of PaDRw by Amberlite XAD-4 non-ionic polymeric resin, coupled to LC-UV-MS/MS techniques, proved to be efficient also in the disclosure of lower constituents. About 63% of the whole PaDRw extract was constituted of hexitol, followed by fructose (∼22.8%) and glucose (∼10.7%). Chlorogenic acids and flavonoids, which accounted only for ∼2.2%, were hypothesized to be the main actors in PaDRw-induced radiomodulation.

publisher-specific, author manuscript: http://rsc.li/journals-terms-of-use


Linear Robust Regression (LRR) seeks to find the parameters of a linear mapping from noisy data corrupted from outliers, such that the number of inliers (i.e. pairs of points where the fitting error of the model is less than a given bound) is maximized. While this problem is known to be NP hard, several tractable relaxations have been recently proposed along with theoretical conditions guaranteeing exact recovery of the parameters of the model. However, these relaxations may perform poorly in cases where the fitting error for the outliers is large. In addition, these approaches cannot exploit available a-priori information, such as cooccurrences. To circumvent these difficulties, in this paper we present an alternative approach to robust regression. Our main result shows that this approach is equivalent to a "self-scaled" ℓ1 regularized robust regression problem, where the cost function is automatically scaled, with scalings that depend on the a-priori information. Thus, the proposed approach achieves substantially better performance than traditional regularized approaches in cases where the outliers are far from the linear manifold spanned by the inliers, while at the same time exhibits the same theoretical recovery properties. These results are illustrated with several application examples using both synthetic and real data.


Concurrent (Study 1) and longitudinal (Study 2) associations between adolescents' aggression, victimization, and high status were examined to test the hypothesis that forms and functions of aggression most likely to affect the status hierarchy will be associated with reputation-based measures of popularity. In Study 1, 235 10th -grade adolescents' overt, relational, and reputational forms of aggression and victimization were assessed. Functions of aggression (instrumental, reactive, bullying) within each form were also examined. Results supported the general prediction that aggression is associated with high peer-perceived popularity, but low likability (i.e., social preference) among peers. Significant curvilinear trends revealed a subtle association between aggression and low levels of popularity as well. Regarding forms and functions, results indicated that both the provocateurs and targets of reputational aggression had high levels of peer-perceived popularity; proactive uses of aggression were also associated with high popularity among adolescents, while reactive aggression was associated with low social preference. Longitudinal analyses of the same participants in Study 2 indicated that high peer-perceived popularity and low social preference predicted all forms of aggressive behavior over a 17-month interval. Overall, the results reveal complex associations between aggression and status that help to explain possible social reinforcement associated with aggression and clarify the pattern of heterogeneous aggressive behaviors exhibited by adolescents at various points along the status continuum.


We study the multi-stage stochastic unit commitment problem in which commitment and generation decisions can be made and adjusted in each time period. We formulate this problem as a Markov decision process, which is "weakly-coupled" in the sense that if the demand constraint is relaxed, the problem decomposes into a separate, low-dimensional, Markov decision process for each generator. We demonstrate how the dual approximate dynamic programming method of Barty, Carpentier, and Girardeau (RAIRO Operations Research, 44:167-183, 2010) can be adapted to obtain bounds and a policy for this problem. Previous approaches have let the Lagrange multipliers depend only on time; this can result in weak lower bounds. Other approaches have let the multipliers depend both on time and the entire history of past random observations; though this provides a strong lower bound, its ability to handle a large number of sample paths or scenarios is very limited. We demonstrate how to bridge these approaches for the stochastic unit commitment problem by letting the multipliers depend on the current observed demand. This allows a good tradeoff between strong lower bounds and good scalability with the number of scenarios. We illustrate this approach numerically on a 168-stage stochastic unit commitment problem, including minimum uptime, downtime, and ramping constraints.


With around 1.5 million foreign workers and over a million permanent and long-term foreign residents, Japan is experiencing unprecedented levels of immigration. In 2019 three new residence statuses were added to the Immigration Control Act. Furthermore, the government promises to foster social integration by strengthening Japanese language education and providing public services in multiple languages. But access to non-temporary or even permanent resident is highly selective.

The migration industry plays a key role in international mobility in Asia. Taking a comparative look at the relations between the state and border spanning migration businesses in Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea Kristin Surak advances a taxonomy of the ways states partner with migration industries and discusses the possibilities and pitfalls of each. Her analysis focuses on low-paid temporary migrant work programs, including the Technical Intern Training Program (TITP), Japan's major gateway for temporary migrant labor from Asia.

Focusing on the recent additions to Japan's immigration control legislation, Naoto Higuchi identifies a shift from a preferential treatment of foreigners based on "blood ties" to a neoliberal model based on meritocracy. The new residence categories "Specified Skills 1 & 2" enable immigration authorities to select migrants and determine their rights and length of stay based on performance, gauged by language ability and skill acquisition. In contrast, the newly prepared visa status for fourth-generation Nikkeijin looks — at first glance — like a continuation of immigration based on ethnic selection criteria. Yet, the government changed its policy to exclude Nikkeijin from social integration by limiting their stay to maximum five-years, and the road to permanent residence is becoming increasingly based on meritocratic selection criteria. The new movements raise interesting puzzles for exploring the future of migration to Japan.


The softmax function is widely used in artificial neural networks for the multiclass classification problems, where the softmax transformation enforces the output to be positive and sum to one, and the corresponding loss function allows to use maximum likelihood principle to optimize the model. However, softmax leaves a large margin for loss function to conduct optimizing operation when it comes to high-dimensional classification, which results in low-performance to some extent. In this paper, we provide an empirical study on a simple and concise softmax variant, namely sparse-softmax, to alleviate the problem that occurred in traditional softmax in terms of high-dimensional classification problems. We evaluate our approach in several interdisciplinary tasks, the experimental results show that sparse-softmax is simpler, faster, and produces better results than the baseline models.


Various types of visual analogue scales (VAS) are used in epidemiologic and clinical research. This paper reports on a randomized controlled trial to investigate the effects of variations in the orientation and type of scale on bias and precision in cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses. This trial was included in the pilot study of the SU.VI.MAX (supplementation by antioxidant vitamins and minerals) prevention trial in France in 1994. Six types of VAS (simple, middle-marked, graphic rating, graduated, graduated-numbered, and numerical rating) and two orientations (horizontal and vertical) were used to measure three symptoms of ear, nose, and throat infection at 2-month intervals in 870 subjects. Differences between scales were analyzed by comparing variances (Levene's test) and means (variance-covariance analysis for repeated measures). Scale characteristics were shown to influence the proportion of zero and low values (i.e., there was a floor effect), but not mean scores. The precision of measurements varied cross-sectionally according to the type of scale, but no differences were observed in the precision of measurement of change over time. In conclusion, the characteristics of VAS seem to be important in cross-sectional studies, particularly when symptoms of low or high intensity are being measured. Researchers should try to reach a consensus on what type of VAS to use if studies are to be compared.


The concentration variation of hydrogen sulphide arising from its dispersion around Olkaria geothermal power station has been determined using an Eulerian model that was developed. The model quantitatively simulates the atmospheric interactions and relates the emission of hydrogen sulphide to the air quality. The fundamental principle of this thesis is that the dispersion of hydrogen sulphide in the atmosphere can be determined by solving a set of governing equations. This is in accordance with the existing mass conservation law. The governing equations are responsible for advection and diffusion (transport), depletion (sink) and accumulation (source) of hydrogen sulphide in the atmosphere. The equations were solved explicitly using the finite difference method. A computer program was developed using Cs+ programming language. The program divides the Olkariageothermal field and its environs into blocks and vertical layers. Then it distributes the hydrogen sulphide emitted from 'a source within the field to all the blocks and layers depending on the prevailing meteorological conditions. The results presented for the hypothetical situation show that the model responded well to wind speed, direction as well as gravitational settling as some of the factors that influence the advection and diffusion of hydrogen sulphide. Model validation indicates that hydrogen sulphide concentrations around the power statioll-:-varjTwith wind speed among other meteorological conditions. Generally, higher concentrations were recorded near the source. However the model underestimated all the concentrations compared to the measured concentrations and these was attributed to' the models inability to' accommodate the terrain and change in wind direction. Low levels of concentration were also attributed to' high background concentrations as a result of emissions from local sources such as evaporation at cooling towers, silencers, drainage and traps in the vapor ducts among others.


In this paper, the influence of YAG:Ce phosphor particle sizes on the lumen output and the conversion efficiency of both in-cup phosphor and top remote phosphor LED packages are investigated with 3-D ray-tracing simulations. The lumen output and the conversion efficiency of both types of phosphor-converted (pc) white LED packages are dependent on the size of YAG:Ce particles. The lumen output and conversion efficiency of both types of pc-white LED packages are minimal at the phosphor particle size with the size parameter of around one and are highest at the particle size in micron size. The simulation results show that both in-cup and top remote phosphor packages have the highest lumen output and the highest conversion efficiency at the particle size of around 20 mum.


Young people with English as an Additional Language/Dialect backgrounds are often identified in public health messages and popular media as 'bodies at risk' because they do not conform to the health regimens of contemporary Western societies. With increasing numbers of Chinese students in Australian schools, it is necessary to advance teachers' understandings of the ways in which these young people negotiate notions of 'health' and '(un)healthy bodies'. This paper explores the ways in which young Chinese Australians' understand health and (un)healthy bodies. The data upon which this paper focuses were drawn from a larger scale study underpinned by critical, interpretive, ethnographic methods. The participants in this study were 12 young Chinese Australians, aged 10–15 years, from two schools. Photographs of a variety of bodies were sourced from popular magazines and used as a means of interview elicitation. The young people were invited to comment on the photographs and discuss what 'health' and the notion of a '(un)healthy body' meant to them. Foucault's concepts of discursive practice and normalisation are used alongside Chinese concepts of holistic paradigms and Wen–Wu to unpack the young people's subjectivities on health and (un)healthy bodies. The findings invite us to move beyond Western subjectivities of health and (un)healthy bodies and highlight the multidimensional and diverse perspectives espoused by some of the young Chinese Australians in this study. The research findings can inform future policy and practice relevant to the exploration of health and (un)healthy bodies in health and physical education and health and physical education teacher education.


Biofabrication is roughly defined as techniques producing complex 2D and 3D tissues and organs from raw materials such as living cells, matrices, biomaterials, and molecules. It is useful for tissue engineering, regenerative medicine, drug screening, and organs‐on‐a‐chip. Biofabrication could be carried out by microfluidic techniques, optical methods, microfabrication, 3D bioprinting, etc. Meanwhile, electrochemical devices and/or systems have also been reported. In this progress report, the recent advances in applying these devices/systems for biofabrication are summarized. After introducing the concept of biofabrication, biofabrication strategies using electrochemical approaches are summarized. Then, various electrochemical systems such as probes and chip devices are described. Next, the biofabrication of hydrogels for 3D cell culture, electrochemical modification on cell culture surfaces, electrodeposition of conductive materials in hydrogels for cell culture, and biofabrication of cell aggregates using dielectrophoresis is discussed. In addition, electrochemical stimulation methods such as electrotaxis are mentioned as promising techniques for biofabrication. Finally, future research directions in this field and the application prospects are highlighted.


Measures to reduce the risk of wrongly administering epidural infusions intravenously and better guidance for patients about anticoagulant drugs are among a series of risk management measures outlined this week to improve patient safety in the NHS.

The guidance from the National Patient Safety Agency comes after a number of avoidable deaths relating to the use of these and other drugs. Keith Ridge, the chief pharmaceutical officer for England, said that awareness of the importance of reducing weaknesses within healthcare systems was increasing.

The highest priority for the agency is the number of deaths associated with the use of anticoagulant drugs, such as warfarin, he said. In 2006 alone there were 120 deaths and 480 …


In this paper, silver nanoparticles were synthesized using citrus peel extracts from species such as Citrus sinensis (orange fruit, AgNP-Ora), Citrus reticulata (tangerine fruit, AgNP-Tan), and Citrus aurantifolia (lemon fruit, AgNP-Lem). The absorption spectra of the AgNP-Ora and AgNP-Tan colloids show localized surface plasmon resonance (LSPR) bands at 445 and 423 nm, respectively. For the same synthesis method, a low intensity LSPR band for AgNP-Lem is observed, indicating a low yield of this reaction. However, the transmission electron microscopy images show that the colloid prepared using lemon extract also presents AgNP larger than 5 nm (5–55 nm), which exhibit plasmonic properties. The synthesized silver nanoparticles are spherical in shape and are highly crystalline, and they were self-assembled on NH2-modified glass slides, forming AgNP aggregate substrates for all the three prepared silver colloids. We also explored the SERS activity of the AgNP substrates using 10−6 mol L−1 solutions of 4-aminobenzenethiol, rhodamine 6G, and methylene blue as Raman probe molecules. It was possible to detect with a high signal-to-noise ratio the SERS spectral pattern of all probe molecules on AgNP substrates. This simple, low cost, and greener method for synthesizing silver nanoparticles may be valuable in future studies about SERS sensor development and can be extended to catalytic applications.


The ability of honey to kill bacterial pathogens in vitro and quickly clear even chronic or drug-resistant infections has been demonstrated by several studies. Most current research is focused on identifying the bactericidal compounds in honey, but the action of the compounds discovered is not sufficient to explain honey's activity. By diluting honey to sub-inhibitory levels, we were able to study its impact on bacterial coordinated behavior, and discovered that honey inhibits bacterial quorum sensing (QS). Experiments to characterize and quantify honey's effect on the QS networks of Pseudomonas aeruginosa revealed that low concentrations of honey inhibited the expression of MvfR, las, and rhl regulons, including the associated virulence factors. This research also establishes that inhibition of QS is associated with honey's sugar content. Therefore, honey combats infections by two independent mechanisms acting in tandem: bactericidal components, which actively kill cells, and disruption of QS, which weakens bacterial coordination and virulence.


STUDY OBJECTIVES
There is increasing interest in the frequency and nature of comorbidities in patients with obstructive lung disease: COPD and asthma. We aimed to quantify baseline rates of comorbidities in COPD and asthma patients and to compare the risks to the general population.

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS
Within the UK General Practice Research Database, we compared incident patients with COPD (n = 2,699) and asthma (n = 7,931) physician diagnosed in 1998 with age, gender, time, and practice-matched cohorts. Rates were calculated and relative risks (RRs) were estimated for comorbidities in major organ systems and selected medical events of a priori interest.

MEASUREMENTS AND RESULTS
In both COPD and asthma, the total sum of diagnoses related to major organ systems was higher than in their matched population controls. Among incident COPD patients, a frequency > 1% within the first year after diagnosis was observed for angina, cataracts, bone fractures, osteoporosis, pneumonia, and respiratory infections, the highest being angina with 4.0%. Compared to the non-COPD cohort, COPD patients were at increased risk for pneumonia (relative risk [RR] = 16.0), osteoporosis (RR = 3.1), respiratory infection (RR = 2.2), myocardial infarction (RR = 1.7), angina (RR = 1.7), fractures (RR = 1.6), and glaucoma (RR = 1.3) [all p < 0.05]. Of note, 2.0% of COPD patients had cataracts recorded, but this rate was no different than that of the non-COPD cohort (RR = 0.9). Among incident asthma patients, the occurrence of events was generally lower, likely due to the younger age distribution, except for 4.0% with respiratory infection (RR = 1.84) and 1.7% with fractures (RR = 1.5). Angina prevalence was 0.7% in the asthma cohort and 1.4 times more common than in patients without asthma.

CONCLUSION
COPD and asthma are conditions associated with many comorbidities, albeit asthma to a lesser extent than COPD, which had not been systematically reviewed before. Baseline rates of cardiovascular-, bone-, and other smoking-related conditions are high.


Application specific is always a tradeoff among competing design goals (or design parameters). In addition to the well established area (cost) - time (performance) - power metrics specific applications imply a relatively limited market so design cost becomes an especially important consideration. As technology offers increasing transistor density with lower cost power constraints limit frequency as the primary avenue to performance. The alternative is to use area (transistors) to recover performance putting an additional strain on the design budget. The search for flexibility in design without paying a significant area - time - power cost remains the primary problem for application specific and system on a chip (SoC) design.


The problem of determining the mechanical states inside wound capacitor rolls is addressed through the application of two dimensional, linear elasticity. Allowances are made for heterogeneous wound construction of the capacitor, orthotropic material behavior of the capacitor constituents, and arbitrary winding tension. A key element in the formulation is the derivation of material properties for a wound, orthotropic layer which is equivalent in behavior to a stack of dissimilar plies such as are actually wound on the capacitor simultaneously during one turn of the mandrel. The dissimilar plies are necessary by virtue of the conductor and dielectric materials which must be present in a capacitor. The derivation of predictive equations is based on winding the equivalent layer on an appropriate mandrel, followed by a recovery of the individual ply responses. The capability to explicitly calculate the winding tensions which would be necessary to produce a required wound tension dependence upon capacitor radius is also developed. Numerical results for typical capacitor design and construction are presented, and justification for the application of optimization theory in capacitor development is demonstrated. 4 refs., 5 figs.


Background Recent national documents, such as One Chance to Get it Right and Ambitions for Palliative and End of Life Care, have highlighted the importance of high quality end of life care. In particular they have promoted the use of individualised care planning for the dying adult. Ashford and St Peters NHS Trust is a busy district general hospital in Surrey and has over 1000 deaths per year. To ensure that high quality care was delivered to all by all healthcare professionals an individualised care plan was devised. A baseline audit was undertaken before this was rolled out across the trust. Methods An audit tool was created based on the 5 priorities of care and NICE guidance for care of the dying adult. This was to assess the documentation of care given to the dying adult and their family. A retrospective notes review of the first 100 deaths in quarter 1 was undertaken. Results Recognition of dying on the wards ranged from 50%–100% and was initially documented by the medical team in 60%. Most patients were recognised as dying in the last 48 hours. Almost 80% of patients were unable to participate in decision making about their care, although family was involved in over 95%. Over 55% were prescribed anticipatory medication and over 20% had evidence of a holistic assessment. Less than 5% of notes reviewed showed evidence of adequate individualised care planning in the last days of life. Conclusion This audit has highlighted that health professionals were recognising dying. Late recognition leads to patients not being involved in their care planning and achieving their ?priorities of care. Documentation and care is reliant on individual health care professionals approach rather than an informed, standardised practice. Individualised care planning can support healthcare professionals in delivering and evidencing this care.


We hypothesized that the presence of monoclonal free kappa or lambda immunoglobulin light chains in monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS), as detected by the serum free light chain (FLC) assay increases the risk of progression to malignancy. Of 1384 patients with MGUS from Southeastern Minnesota seen at the Mayo Clinic from 1960 to 1994, baseline serum samples obtained within 30 days of diagnosis were available in 1148. At a median follow-up of 15 years, malignant progression had occurred in 87 (7.6%) patients. An abnormal FLC ratio (kappa-lambda ratio < 0.26 or > 1.65) was detected in 379 (33%) patients. The risk of progression in patients with an abnormal FLC ratio was significantly higher compared with patients with a normal ratio (hazard ratio, 3.5; 95% confidence interval [CI], 2.3-5.5; P < .001) and was independent of the size and type of the serum monoclonal (M) protein. Patients with an abnormal serum FLC ratio, non-immunoglobulin G (non-IgG) MGUS, and a high serum M protein level (> or = 15 g/L) had a risk of progression at 20 years of 58% (high-risk MGUS) versus 37% with any 2 of these risk factors (high-intermediate risk), 21% with one risk factor (low-intermediate risk), and 5% when none of the risk factors were present (low risk).