Background: The Q-switched neodymium: yttrium aluminum garnet laser (QS-Nd:YAG) is effective in the treatment of tattoos and different pigmentary conditions; however, little has been published regarding the removal of facial cutaneous pigmented lesions. The aim of this study was to determine the effectiveness and safety of QS-Nd:YAG laser in the treatment of facial pigmentary lesions in Indian patients. Methods: Data of 100 patients with pigmented facial lesions treated with QS-Nd:YAG laser were analyzed. Clinical improvement of skin lesions was assessed by the physician's global assessment of two blinded observers. This was done based on photographs taken at the baseline and after the last treatment session. Side effects were recorded if present, and patient satisfaction was evaluated after each treatment session. Results: The majority of the patients had post-inflammatory hyperpigmentation (n=41), followed by melasma (n=19), photomelanosis (n=15), nevus of Ota (n=5), periorbital melanosis (n=5), nevus spilus (n=3), Riehl melanosis (n=3), Cafe-au-lait macules (n=2), freckles (n=2), lichen planus pigmentosus (n=2), compound nevus (n=1), Hori's nevus (n=1), and pigmentary demarcation lines (n=1). 10% of patients showed more than 50% improvement in pigmentation from the baseline level; no response was seen in 22% of patients, while 7% experienced worsened pigmentation. Conclusion: The degree of improvement and efficacy in clearing pigmentation is partial, variable, and inconsistent. Worsening of pigmentation may be seen and needs to be discussed with the patient prior to treatment


In order to reduce the detrimental effects of inter-area oscillations on system stability, it is possible to use Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) to design a multi-objective state feedback control. The LMI optimization comes up with a control law that stabilizes numerous operating conditions simultaneously using a polytopic model of the system. However, the number of cases to be considered is limited by computational complexity and increased chances of infeasibility. In order to circumvent this problem, this paper presents a method for solving multiple polytopic problems having a common base case. The proposed algorithm determines which polytopic control is necessary for a particular contingency and classifies them as belonging to that polytopic domain. The technique was tested on an 8-machine, 13 bus system and provided satisfactory results.


ABSTRACT The aim of this study was to model fusarium mycotoxins against agronomic factors in order to identify those that have the greatest impact on mycotoxin levels in harvested wheat. To achieve this, fusarium mycotoxins levels were monitored, and associated agronomic data collected, in approximately 150 English wheat fields/year between 2006 and 2013. Results showed large seasonal variation in fusarium mycotoxin levels, with high levels in 2008 (13% and 29% exceeding legal limit for unprocessed soft wheat intended for human consumption for deoxynivalenol (DON) and zearalenone (ZON), respectively) and 2012 (10% and 15% exceeding legal limit for unprocessed soft wheat intended for human consumption for DON and ZON, respectively) and low levels in 2006 and 2011 (no samples exceeding legal limits for unprocessed soft wheat intended for human consumption for DON or ZON). Analysis of agronomic factors identified previous crop, cultivation and variety as the greatest risk factors. The greatest risk of mycotoxin development in grain was following maize as a previous crop and minimum tillage. The combined effect of these factors gave respective average DON and ZON levels 20 and 14 times higher than other previous crop and cultivation combinations. A newly quantified risk factor was harvest date. A 1-month delay in harvest resulted in a 10 and 25 times greater mean DON and ZON concentration, respectively, when compared to crops harvested around the long-term regional average harvest date. These results highlight the highly seasonal variation in fusarium mycotoxins in wheat and the agronomic factors that should be avoided to minimise fusarium mycotoxin levels in harvested wheat.


To avoid manual collections of a huge amount of labeled image data needed for training autonomous driving models, this paperproposes a novel automatic method for collecting image data with annotation for autonomous driving through a translation network that can transform the simulation
 CG images to real-world images. The translation network is designed in an end-to-end structure that contains two encoder-decoder networks. The forepart of the translation network is designed to represent the structure of the original simulation CG image with a semantic segmentation. Then the
 rear part of the network translates the segmentation to a realworld image by applying cGAN. After the training, the translation network can learn a mapping from simulation CG pixels to the realworld image pixels. To confirm the validity of the proposed system, we conducted three experiments
 under different learning policies by evaluating the MSE of the steering angle and vehicle speed. The first experiment demonstrates that the L1+cGAN performs best above all loss functions in the translation network. As a result of the second experiment conducted under different learning policies,
 it turns out that the ResNet architecture works best. The third experiment demonstrates that the model trained with the real-world images generated by the translation network can still work great in the real world. All the experimental results demonstrate the validity of our proposed method.


This book uses everyday objects to tell the story of the Great Patriotic War as never before. The book attends to a diverse array of things to show how a wide array of citizens became soldiers, and how the provisioning of material goods separated soldiers from civilians. The book reveals how the use of everyday items made it possible to wage war. The dazzling range of documents showcases ethnic diversity, women's particular problems at the front, and vivid descriptions of violence and looting. Each chapter features a series of related objects: weapons, uniforms, rations, and even the knick-knacks in a soldier's rucksack. These objects narrate the experience of people at war, illuminating the changes taking place in Soviet society over the course of the most destructive conflict in recorded history. The book argues that spoons, shovels, belts, and watches held as much meaning to the waging of war as guns and tanks. It describes the transformative potential of material things to create a modern culture, citizen, and soldier during World War II.


apparently encouraging figures quoted from the Rutherford report pertain to all road users; but they do not. They are for car occupants only, and so they have no bearing on the question whether seat belts save car occupants at the expense ofother road users. In seeking to explain away the rising numbers of pedestrian and cyclist deaths, Dr Mackay seems to be throwing three different kinds of dust in the reader's eyes. Firstly, he refers to the raw numbers of killed having increased, thereby hinting, with the use of the word raw, that the figures may later be revised-downwards, of course. Then he tells us that road traffic in the period concerned increased by 7%. If this explains the increased deaths it implies that pedestrian deaths go up as a matter of course as traffic increases. But this is not the case. The number of pedestrians killed yearly nowadays is substantially less than it was in 1927 the first year that figures were recorded, whelk traffic was 10 times less than at present. Thirdly, while not revealing that there has been a decrease in cycling as a whole-a fact Dr Adams draws attention to (12 October, p 1052)-he tells us, without quoting any authority, that there has been an increase in the use of bicycles by the under 15s, "perhaps because of the popularity of the BMX machines." But the important statistic, again pointed out by Dr Adams, is the large increase in the number of deaths of cyclists among the over 69s, a group not often seen riding BMXs. Finally, not only does Dr Mackay fail to explain he even conceals the fact that while the number of cyclists killed by cars and vans (both affected by the new law) has gone up, the number killed by vehicles not affected (lorries, buses, and taxis) has gone down. If the reduction in the numbers of deaths of car occupants is in fact being achieved at the expense of a rather smaller increase in deaths of other road users some may think that the net saving of life makes the new law worth while, but hardly, surely, "one of the most successful pieces of public health legislation ever," as Dr Mackay claims.


The prevalent approach to neural machine translation relies on bi-directional LSTMs to encode the source sentence. We present a faster and simpler architecture based on a succession of convolutional layers. This allows to encode the source sentence simultaneously compared to recurrent networks for which computation is constrained by temporal dependencies. On WMT'16 English-Romanian translation we achieve competitive accuracy to the state-of-the-art and on WMT'15 English-German we outperform several recently published results. Our models obtain almost the same accuracy as a very deep LSTM setup on WMT'14 English-French translation. We speed up CPU decoding by more than two times at the same or higher accuracy as a strong bi-directional LSTM.


Automatic Program Repair (APR) is a practical research topic that studies techniques to automatically repair programs to fix bugs. Most existing APR techniques are designed for imperative programming languages, such as C and Java, and rely on analyzing correct and incorrect executions of programs to identify and repair suspicious statements. We introduce a new APR approach for software specifications written in the Alloy declarative language, where specifications are not "executed", but rather converted into logical formulas and analyzed using backend constraint solvers, to find specification instances and counterexamples to assertions. We present ATR, a technique that takes as input an Alloy specification with some violated assertion and returns a repaired specification that satisfies the assertion. The key ideas are (i) analyzing the differences between counterexamples that do not satisfy the assertion and instances that do satisfy the assertion to guide the repair and (ii) generating repair candidates from specific templates and pruning the space of repair candidates using the counterexamples and satisfying instances. Experimental results using existing large Alloy benchmarks show that ATR is effective in generating difficult repairs. ATR repairs 66.3% of 1974 fault specifications, including specification repairs that cannot be handled by existing Alloy repair techniques. ATR and all benchmarks are open-source and available in the following Github repository: https://github.com/guolong-zheng/atmprep.


Gastro-tourists specifically travel to learn about new cultures through memorable food experiences. They span all ages, ethnicities, and incomes. These tourists plan more trips, stay longer, and spend more discretionary money when they travel. Interactions that include learning about regional foods and kitchen cultures and that foster relationships between the gastro-tourist and the gastro-host are more important to them than fancy amenities. Research that identifies characteristics and attributes of gastro-tourism experiences considered memorable is sparse. This inductive qualitative research study triangulated three data sources and two data collection methods (in-depth interviews and online surveys). Seven attributes linked to memorability are identified: (1) deliberate and incidental gastro-tourists, (2) travel stages, (3) foodie risk-taking, (4) interdependent co-created tourist–host relationships, (5) authenticity, (6) sociability, and (7) emotions. The attributes provide insights into the prevalent shift from product/service-dominant tourism to co-created experiential tourism opportunities and highlight the motivations that drive this emerging gastro-tourism market segment. By uncovering triggering moments that gastro-tourists value and find memorable, this study adds to the knowledge base of sustainable tourism development, destination branding promises, co-creation, and stakeholder theories.


The external reproducibility (2σSD) of Ca stable isotope ratio measurements (δ44/40Ca) using double-spike thermal ionization mass spectrometry (TIMS) shows a large range from <0.1‰ to 0.5‰. We demonstrate that using a 43Ca–48Ca double spike, which allows simultaneous measurements of δ44/40Ca and δ44/42Ca, and analyses at moderate signal strengths (40Ca ranging from 6 to 10 V), high precision δ44/40Ca (external reproducibility better than ±0.08‰, 2σSD) as well as δ44/42Ca can be obtained if samples and standards are analyzed under similar fractionation conditions. To monitor the fractionation conditions, the usage of a parameter β is proposed, which measures the deviation of the 43Ca/48Ca ratio of the sample–double spike mixture from that of the pure double spike. A novel, low-cost sample loading technique using a combination of Re and Ta filaments and a Ta2O5 activator is presented which results in a steady signal. We report the δ44/40Ca and δ44/42Ca values, calculated w.r.t. NIST SRM 915a and reported as deviations in parts per mil (‰), of NIST standards SRM 915a (0.01, −0.02) and SRM 915b (0.73, 0.32), NASS 6 (seawater, 1.80, 0.89), USGS silicate rock standards BHVO-2 (0.86, 0.47) and BCR-2 (0.89, 0.48), Geological Survey of Japan carbonate standards JCp-1 (coral, 0.85, 0.45) and JCt-1 (clam shell, 0.83, 0.46) and ECRM 752-1 (limestone, alternative name BCS-CRM 393) (0.83, 0.46) from the Bureau of Analyzed Samples Ltd. UK. The Ca stable isotopic compositions of JCt-1 and ECRM 752-1 are reported for the first time.


Since the break-up of the USSR in 1991 agriculture in European Russia has been going through sweeping reorganization that resulted in fundamental changes of land use practices. This transformation led a widespread land abandonment which resulted in old-field development on fields formerly used for grain production. These processes take place near stopover sites that are used by migrating greater white-fronted geese. This species uses a vast network of stopover sites across European Russia to rest and to forage on their way from Western Europe to the Russian Arctic and back. With old-field development near stopover sites in European Russia an ever increasing number of them should become unsuitable for migrating geese. This change might potentially reshape the migratory network of greater white-fronted goose across European Russia pushing the species to explore alternative migration routes.


The development of vaccine components or recombinant therapeutics critically depends on sustained expression of the corresponding transgene. This study aimed to determine the contribution of intragenic CpG content to expression efficiency in transiently and stably transfected mammalian cells. Based upon a humanized version of green fluorescent protein (GFP) containing 60 CpGs within its coding sequence, a CpG-depleted variant of the GFP reporter was established by carefully modulating the codon usage. Interestingly, GFP reporter activity and detectable protein amounts in stably transfected CHO and 293 cells were significantly decreased upon CpG depletion and independent from promoter usage (CMV, EF1α). The reduction in protein expression associated with CpG depletion was likewise observed for other unrelated reporter genes and was clearly reflected by a decline in mRNA copy numbers rather than translational efficiency. Moreover, decreased mRNA levels were neither due to nuclear export restrictions nor alternative splicing or mRNA instability. Rather, the intragenic CpG content influenced de novo transcriptional activity thus implying a common transcription-based mechanism of gene regulation via CpGs. Increased high CpG transcription correlated with changed nucleosomal positions in vitro albeit histone density at the two genes did not change in vivo as monitored by ChIP.


Overweight is a worldwide growing epidemic. The Netherlands is among the countries with the highest prevalence for overweight, together with the USA, UK, and Germany. This paper investigates differences in overweight between native Dutch and three immigrant groups in the Netherlands, and the effects of food habits and socioeconomic status on overweight. The results show that all immigrant groups have a higher prevalence for overweight than the Dutch, apart from Moroccans. Males are overweight more frequently than females. Takeaway food, eating out, and fresh vegetables decrease BMI, while convenience food, ready-to-eat meals, and delivery food (in some cases) increase BMI. In all groups, BMI increases with age. For Surinamese/Antilleans and Turks BMI increases with children living at home, whereas for native Dutch BMI decreases with children living at home. The national health expenditures due to overweight is 200 million to 4 billion Euro per year, which is 1 to 5 percent of the national health expenditures. The government and health insurance companies should try to prevent overweight and encourage healthy behavior.


Introduction: Asthma is one of the prevalent and costly diseases. Various studies have shown that self-care plays a major role in preventing the complications, improving the life quality, and reducing the care expenditures of asthma. Therefore, strengthening the asthma patients in caring for themselves and using planned trainings is highly necessary. Objectives: The present study aimed to investigate the effect of education on self-care learning in the patients suffering from asthma. Patients and Methods: The present interventional study was conducted on 80 patients referring to specialized clinics of Shiraz University of Medical Sciences who had the inclusion criteria of the study. The patients were selected through convenient sampling and randomly assigned to either the control or the intervention group. The educational intervention included five sessions of training on self-care. The study data were collected using a demographic questionnaire as well as a knowledge assessment test and the results were analyzed through the SPSS statistical software. Results: The study results revealed no significant difference between the two groups regarding the demographic variables. However, comparison of the mean of changes in the two groups› knowledge scores showed a significant increase in the intervention group›s knowledge score (P<0.001). Conclusion: The findings of this study confirmed the patients› need for learning self-care methods as well as the effectiveness of planned educational programs. Therefore, using and strengthening selfcare trainings are highly recommended for asthma patients in clinics.


In an attempt to precise the cellular distribution of protein-disulfide interchange enzyme activity within different compartments of the splenic lymphoid tissue, we have analyzed the protein-disulfide interchange (PDI) enzyme activity in adherent and nonadherent cell populations of normal and T-cell depleted CBA mice. In vivo depletion of T-cells, as evaluated by functional and cytotoxic tests, was achieved by two i. v. injections of anti-T monoclonal antibodies (Mab F7D5). Nonadherent cell populations were found to have levels of protein-disulfide interchange enzyme activity significantly higher than that of the adherent cells. Pretreatment with F7D5 monoclonal antibodies enhanced the protein-disulfide interchange activity in nonadherent cell population, thus indicating that the major source of the enzyme activity are nonadherent spleen cells, which do not bear T-cell marker, probably B-cells.


Learning from spatio-temporal data has numerous applications such as human-behavior analysis, object tracking, video compression, and physics simulation.However, existing methods still perform poorly on challenging video tasks such as long-term forecasting. This is because these kinds of challenging tasks require learning long-term spatio-temporal correlations in the video sequence. In this paper, we propose a higher-order convolutional LSTM model that can efficiently learn these correlations, along with a succinct representations of the history. This is accomplished through a novel tensor train module that performs prediction by combining convolutional features across time. To make this feasible in terms of computation and memory requirements, we propose a novel convolutional tensor-train decomposition of the higher-order model. This decomposition reduces the model complexity by jointly approximating a sequence of convolutional kernels asa low-rank tensor-train factorization. As a result, our model outperforms existing approaches, but uses only a fraction of parameters, including the baseline models.Our results achieve state-of-the-art performance in a wide range of applications and datasets, including the multi-steps video prediction on the Moving-MNIST-2and KTH action datasets as well as early activity recognition on the Something-Something V2 dataset.


This study explored the correlation between tourism-related popular words in search engines and the number of tourists, which is a topic worth discussing for the tourism industry. When individuals decide to sign up for a tour planned by travel agencies, they often have no idea whether the minimum number of participants will be reached until it is confirmed a few days before the departure, which is of great inconvenience when arranging itineraries. Hence, predicting whether the minimum number of participants in a tour can be reached is closely related to both the tourism industry and the tourists. In this regard, the number of Taiwanese traveling to Japan was predicted based on the popularity of keywords concerning travel in Japan searched on Google Trends. The scores of popular words concerning travel in Japan on the Google search engine and words concerning travel in Japan mentioned in tourism articles in e-news networks were also summarized. The experimental results indicated that the popularity of tourism keywords on Google was highly correlated to the number of Taiwanese tourists traveling to Japan. After the number of Taiwanese traveling to Japan within the following month was classified by the ANN model, the mean square error reached 0.13. Furthermore, by using the data of travel agencies in Taiwan to match the Google Trends data, the research predicted whether tours to Hokkaido would reach the minimum requirement for participants. The prediction accuracy of the ANN model was 68%.


The Late Iron Age settlement evidence is considered for a geographical area that contains amongst the highest known concentration of such evidence and which has formed much of the basis of understanding of the period. The thesis aims are to evaluate this evidence with respect to: a. the reasons for its geographical concentration, b. whether a critical examination of it can contribute to understanding of social and economic processes in the Late Iron Age. An assessment of the evidence concluded that deficiencies in the analysis of artefacts and environmental evidence substantially restricts the extent to which it can address the thesis aims. An assessment of geographical distortions also concluded that the potential for spatial analysis is limited by the pattern of archaeological fieldwork. An analysis of factors, for which it is considered that the evidence can usefully be used, concluded that there appears to be a preference for site location in river valleys and close to principal overland routes. It also concluded that earlier Iron Age settlement probably did not have a significant influence upon Late Iron Age settlement. An assessment of the evidence for defined activities concluded that few sites have such evidence, and most of it is for burial or ritual. Spatial analysis suggested that earlier prehistoric sites were influential in the location of some Late Iron Age ritual sites. Conjectured territories were also identified around some of the major settlements fi7om patterns in the location of Late Iron Age ritual sites. It is concluded that a combination of agricultural wealth, the bias of archaeological fieldwork, the archaeological visibility of ritual and burial evidence and the development of probably long-lived contacts with northern France, is the likely explanation for the large number of sites within the Study Area. it is also concluded that developments in ritual practices in the Late Iron Age may have been a key factor determining the nature of the archaeological evidence.


MADAM: We describe a patient with classical rheumatoid arthritis (RA) and Kartagener's syndrome and we believe this association to be unique. CASE: A 61-year-old female presented with a 10-year history of polyarthritis. Previous treatment had been symptomatic. She had suffered recurrent sino-olO pulmonary infections consisting of infective bronchitis (four attacks a year), chronic sinusitis and otitis media causing secondary conductive deafness. She had a chronic cough with regular sputum production. There was no history of allergy. Physical examination revealed her blood pressure was 26.6/13.3 kPa (200/100 mmHg). The apex beat was palpated in the right anterior axillary line and an ejection systolic murmur radiating to the neck was audible. Rhonchi were heard in both lung fields. A large central perforation of the left tympanic membrane was noted and conductive deafness was demonstrated in both ears. There was synovitis of the hands, feet and left knee and ulnar deviation of the fifth right finger. There were also rheumatoid nodules on the extensor surfaces of both forearms. The relevant laboratory investigations were: haemoglobin, 123 giL; erythrocyte sedimentation rate, 40 mmlhr (Westergren); rheumatoid factor negative (Latex 1 :320, rheumaton 1 :32); antinuclear antibody negative, IgG, 14.4 giL (7.4 giL to 15.0 giL)' IgM, 1.5 giL (1.0 giL to 2.8 giL) IgA, 4.6 giL (0.9 giL to 4.0 giL); isohaemagglutinin A and B tit res 1 :32 and 1 :64 respectively (greater than 1 :8); Escherichia coli titre 1 :32 (greater than 1 :8); and baseline tetanus and salmonella titres were less than 1 :10. X-ray examinations of hands, feet and knees showed classical erosive destructive changes typical of RA and chest X-ray films demonstrated dextrocardia and situs inversus. Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae and Haemophilus influenzae were isolated from sputum cultures at different times. Administration of Sodium Aurothiomalate was commenced and reconstructive surgery was performed correcting the ulnar deformity of the right little finger. Five millicuries of radioactive yttrium were implanted into the left knee and myringotomy was carried out on the right ear. The patient's polyarthritis became quiescent. We concluded that this patient had classical RA and Kartagener's syndrome with significant sino-oto pulmonary infections. However, a defect in humoral immunity was not demonstrated. Kartagener's syndrome is uncommon. The incidence of situs inversus is 1 :10000 in the population and approximately 25% of those people with situs inversus will also have bronchiectasis and/or sinusitis.' Bronchiectasis and sinusitis are commonly associated with hypogammaglobulinaemia and agammaglobulinaemia. 2 ' Defects in humoral immunity in Kartagener's syndrome have not been demonstrated.' 4 The results of the limited assessment of humoral immunity in our patient are in keeping with these findings. We cannot comment on the low titres of tetanus and salmonella antibodies as the patient had not been challenged by vaccination. Furthermore assessment of cell-mediated immunity was not undertaken. The spectrum of arthritis, which includes RA in hypogammaglobulinaemia is well documented. s The association of sino-oto THE MEDICAL JOURNAL OF AUSTRALIA


Based on our experience of the ethnopsychiatric consultation directed by Tobie Nathan in Paris, we try to define the adaptations of the therapeutic setting necessary, according to him, in a transcultural situation, and by whom we can be inspired (work-group, participation of a translator, mobilisation of the traditional etiological interpretations). Then, we study the clinical case of a young Algerian girl living in Belgium. We analyze her acute delirious psychosis following the conceptions of Tobie Nathan: the particular situation of migrant children would be a proneness for the splitting of the ego. At least we show how important is in the psychotherapy the restitution of the original cultural framework.


Combat-related blasts have caused the majority of injuries in Operation Iraqi Freedom with traumatic brain injury (TBI) emerging as a preeminent injury. The purpose of this dissertation is to describe the scope of combat-related blast injuries and the career performance outcomes of service personnel injured in blasts. Factors associated with career performance outcomes in service personnel injured in blasts and specifically in those with mild TBI were also explored. The Combat Trauma Registry Expeditionary Medical Encounter Database (CTR-EMED) is a collection of datasets from frontline medical care in Iraq and subsequent hospital care. The CTR-EMED provided demographics of injured service personnel and injury episode information. Outcome variables were ascertained from the Career History Archival Medical and Personnel System, which is a database of career and medical information for service personnel. In the 4623 blast episodes examined, mild TBI was the most frequent single injury type (10.8%) and with extremity injuries combined, the extremities was the area most commonly injured. Surface wounds of the extremities comprised 27.6% of all injuries. When examining service discharge in 4255 personnel injured in combat-related blasts, 37.8% experienced normal attrition and 8.3% early attrition. In service personnel with a discharge code, 29.8% had a disability-related discharge. Both early attrition and disability discharge proportions were higher in those with PTSD. In those without PTSD, a dose response relationship existed between injury severity and both disability discharge and early attrition. In those with a PTSD diagnosis, injury severity was associated with these adverse outcomes but the relationship was more complex. In the 790 service personnel diagnosed with mild TBI after a combat-related blast, 24% experienced a disability discharge. The most common acute TBI symptoms documented were headache (63.0%), loss of consciousness (37.0%) and tinnitus (31.0%). In those without PTSD, disability discharge was associated with age, total injury severity, time to discharge and post-concussive syndrome, while disability discharge was only associated with post- concussive syndrome in those with PTSD. These results provide important information for acute and rehabilitative care providers. The impact of PTSD on recovery after combat-related blast injuries should be explored to maximize functional outcome in these service personnel


The aim of this study was to detect the sensitivity and specificity of rapid syphilis diagnostic tests (immunochromatographic strip [ICS] test and rapid test device [RTD]) performed by low-skilled paramedics in field clinics and by highly-skilled technologists in laboratories and compare them with the gold standard (rapid plasma reagin [RPR] and Treponema pallidum haemagglutination [TPHA]) tests for diagnosis of syphilis. A cross-sectional study was conducted among female sex workers (FSWs) in Dhaka, Bangladesh, from August 2004 to July 2005. Blood specimens were tested for syphilis using (i) ICS, (ii) RTD, (iii) RPR tests performed by low-skilled paramedics; and (i) ICS, (ii) RTD, (iii) RPR and (iv) TPHA tests by highly-skilled technologists. The sensitivity and specificity of the ICS and RTD test performed by low- and highly-skilled personnel were compared with the gold standard. A total of 684 FSWs were enrolled and the prevalence of syphilis among FSWs was 20.8% as determined by the gold standard. There was no significant difference in the performance of ICS test done by paramedics in the field when compared with the gold standard performed by highly-skilled technologists in the laboratory (sensitivity, 94.45%; specificity, 92.6%). The ICS test could fulfil the need for a non-invasive, rapid screening test for syphilis.


Digitalization is being adopted in many public services to increase the efficiencies of the required operations. Regarding this, there is an important interest in digitalizing the current building permit procedures since most of the buildings are designed digitally and as three-dimensional (3D). In addition, several countries are making an effort to realize the transition from two-dimensional (2D) cadastre to 3D cadastre. This is because 2D delineation of the legal rights may remain incapable to reflect the reality with respect to property ownership in multipartite buildings. The 3D city models should also be kept updated to effectively manage the occasions (e.g. natural disasters) and services (e.g. waterworks) in the living areas. In this sense, the open data standards (e.g. CityGML and Industry Foundation Classes (IFC)) have a vital role to enable interoperability between different domains such as Architecture, Engineering, and Construction (AEC) and Land Administration (LA). In this context, this chapter aims to show the current situation and opportunities on how to efficaciously benefit from open data standards for three significant issues. The issues can be listed as, 1) digitalizing the building permit procedures, 2) registering the condominium as 3D, and 3) updating the 3D city models. The examination in the chapter concerns the cases for Turkey.


Due to resource scarcity and worsening pollution on the environment, more and more people are attracted by green design. Some designs not only focus on energy saving, but also attach great importance to conveying green concept. Based on the case study of Japanese design and focusing on three aspects, material selection, structural design and style orientation, this article attempts to analyze the design works that reflect prominently the green concept. Therefore, people can deeply sense and appreciate the concept of environmental protection and eventually are beneficial educated and directed.


I present the results of a production experiment on the prosodic realization of doubly quantified sentences in Russian that tested the hypothesis (due to Kitagawa and Fodor 2003, Hirotani 2004) that native speakers (tacitly) impose surface scope-biasing prosody. If correct, the hypothesis could account for the rigid surface scope claims found in the literature. Target sentences were excised from contexts, evaluated for the degree of disambiguation and analized within the autosegmental-metrical framework (Pierrehumbert 1980). The results of our experiment support the main hypothesis, strongly suggesting that Russian prosody needs to be strictly controled for when eliciting quantifier scope judgements.


We study a variable length Markov chain model associated with a group of stationary processes that share the same context tree but each process has potentially different conditional probabilities. We propose a new model selection and estimation method which is computationally efficient. We develop oracle and adaptivity inequalities, as well as model selection properties, that hold under continuity of the transition probabilities and polynomial $\beta$-mixing. In particular, model misspecification is allowed.
These results are applied to interesting families of processes. For Markov processes, we obtain uniform rate of convergence for the estimation error of transition probabilities as well as perfect model selection results. For chains of infinite order with complete connections, we obtain explicit uniform rates of convergence on the estimation of conditional probabilities, which have an explicit dependence on the processes' continuity rates. Similar guarantees are also derived for renewal processes.
Our results are shown to be applicable to discrete stochastic dynamic programming problems and to dynamic discrete choice models. We also apply our estimator to a linguistic study, based on recent work, by Galves et al (2012), of the rhythmic differences between Brazilian and European Portuguese.


Recently, many wireless devices operate in the 2.4GHz ISM band. Wireless personal area network (WPAN) can suffer significant performance degradation due to the interference of WLAN and Bluetooth. This paper proposes an interference-aware topology control algorithm for WPANs. In the proposed algorithm, each node adjusts the transmission power dynamically by considering the interference effect. In the meanwhile, each node maintains its local topology adaptively to minimize the interference effect. The experiment results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms the previous algorithms in terms of the energy and the delivery performances in WLAN and Bluetooth interference environments.


ABSTRACT Greece has changed dramatically over the last two decades, given its economic reforms and its absorption into the EU as a full member. Marketing activities, in particular, have also changed during this period reflecting the harmonization of Greek business activities with the rest of the EU. To date, no study has examined how any particular European country has evolved in terms of its citizen's attitudes toward marketing practices. This study provides an historical analysis to determine if consumer attitudes towards marketing practices and consumerism in Greece have changed measurably from 1986 to 2003. The results indicate that Greek consumers continue to have some negative attitudes about these issues, but this negativity has declined. The negative attitudes about advertising have not changed appreciably since 1986, yet consumers now believe that Greek firms have become consumer oriented. The paper provides other commentary on these results and their implications.


This study aimed to evaluate the selectivity of the herbicides chlorimuron-ethyl, imazethapyr and cloransulam-methyl when applied in association with fomesafen on ten common bean cultivars. The experiment was carried out in Rio Verde-Goias during the growing season of 2005/2006, in a completely randomized block design, with three replicates, in split-plots. The herbicide treatments [fomesafen (225  g  ha-1 ), fomesafen (225  g  ha-1 ) + chlorimuron-ethyl (7.5  g  ha-1 ), fomesafen (225  g  ha-1 ) + imazethapyr (50  g  ha-1 ), fomesafen (225  g  ha-1 ) + cloransulam-methyl (30.24  g  ha-1 ), and control without herbicide] were tested in the plots and the cultivars (BRS Grafite, BRS Horizonte, Perola, BRS Pitanga, BRS Pontal, BRS Requinte, BRS Supremo, BRS Timbo, BRS Valente and BRS Vereda), in the split-plots. The plots were kept hoed to avoid weed interference. All treatments caused phytotoxicity to the cultivars, but the treatment with chlorimuron-ethyl showed more severe symptoms. This same treatment also resulted in greater reduction of plant height, shoot dry matter and an extended maturation cycle. The sole application of fomesafen caused a decrease in grain productivity of BRS Timbo, and BRS Vereda. When fomesafen was applied in a mixture with imazethapyr, a decrease in grain productivity was observed for the cultivars BRS Timbo, BRS Vereda, and BRS Supremo. Cloransulam-methyl addition led to a productivity reduction of these three cultivars and BRS Requinte, as well. The productivity of Perola, BRS Pitanga, BRS Pontal, and BRS Valente cultivars was not affected by the application of chlorimuron-ethyl + fomesafen. Imazethapyr presented potential to be used in common bean crop.


This study investigates whether an income reminder can reduce the divergence between the willingness-to-pay (WTP) estimates associated with the open-ended (OE) and dichotomous choice (DC) elicitation formats. Results show that without an income reminder, WTP estimate associated with DC elicitation format is about 1.66 times as large as that associated with OE elicitation format. With an income reminder, the WTP estimate associated with DC format decreased while the WTP estimate associated with OE format increased, and the divergence between the WTP estimates was almost eliminated.


Experimental evidence confirming single-event transient generation from ion strikes directly into the drain region of an InAlSb/InAs/AlGaSb high electron mobility transistor is presented. A rectifying drain alloy-buffer layer interface is shown to be responsible for the generation of single-event transients far from the active regions of the device. Charge collection in these depletion-mode devices is maximum at threshold, decreasing in both depletion and accumulation. In depletion, direct recombination of radiation-generated electrons at the drain dominates charge collection. In accumulation, the electric field in the channel strongly influences charge collection. In threshold, both source-to-channel charge injection as well as the electric field in the channel are simultaneously high, resulting in more charge collection than depletion and accumulation.


Dissertation submitted to Strathmore Business School, Strathmore University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters in Business Administration


The goal of this research is to develop a tool that can help students and the public better understand the total cost of owning and operating a personal vehicle over the lifetime of that vehicle, from vehicle purchase to vehicle disposal.  Lifetime vehicle operating cost consists of the vehicle purchase cost, as well as costs that are less obvious to the user (e.g., financing, fuel, maintenance, insurance, etc.).  Underestimating the hidden costs embedded in lifetime vehicle operating cost can lead people to choose vehicles that are unaffordable for their financial situations.  Hence, educating transportation planners, students, and the public about lifetime vehicle operating costs is important.To provide a more personalized calculation approach, the National Center for Sustainable Transportation (NCST) research team developed the Lifetime Vehicle Ownership and Operating Cost Calculator.  The NCST website provides users with data entry flexibility and a clear, intuitive, and interactive user-interface through which users can better understand their vehicle ownership costs.  Vehicle ownership costs are calculated using lookup data and user input for such elements as: purchase price, down payment, interest rates, loan term, annual insurance, maintenance, tire, smog check, parking, tolls, etc.  All lookup data can be modified as desired by the user.The NCST website is designed to provide students and the public with a tool that can be used in research and also at any educational level.  Users can calculate the cent/mile and total cost of vehicle ownership over the life of the vehicle, with cost estimates for each component specifically identified so that users can weigh the impact of each cost element in their vehicle purchase and use decisions.  From an educational perspective, this tool can be used as an instructional aid to specific courses.  For example, the tool has been used in the urban transportation planning course at Georgia Tech, where the students are asked to compare different vehicle choices based on a real-life case study.  In addition, the NCST team plans to introduce this tool to high school consumer economics classes to help students make reasonable vehicle purchase decisions and to assess vehicle operating costs over entire vehicle life cycles.The Lifetime Vehicle Ownership and Operating Cost Calculator is available at http://costcalculator.ce.gatech.edu/.View the NCST Project Webpage


Apoptosis is an extremely important and highly regulated function in neutrophils. As the most abundant, but shortest-lived white blood cells, they must initiate this process in the absence of pathogens and selectively release their potent cytotoxic components when pathogens are present. Many pathogens are able to modulate this process in neutrophils, either for the host's benefit or for their own. Previous work has shown that transmigration across a T84 intestinal epithelial crypt cell monolayer increases the ability of neutrophils to bind and kill Salmonella enterica serovar Typhimurium (S. Typhimurium). The goal of this work was to see how S. Typhimurium affects the cell death rate of human PMN. S. Typhimurium had little to no effect on inactivated neutrophils. When neutrophils were activated, either chemically through phorbol 12-myristate 13-acetate (PMA) or physiologically through transmigration, however, their normal apoptosis rate was delayed (p<0.0001). When S. Typhimurium was present at a ratio of ten bacteria to one neutrophil, apoptosis was significantly increased in these activated neutrophils more prominently when anaerobically grown (p=0.0027) compared to aerobically grown (p=.012). Caspase-3 (p=0 .0129), but not -8 or -9, was associated with bacterial induced apoptosis in these studies. We conclude that S. Typhimurium modulates the rate of apoptosis in neutrophils, but only once these host cells have become activated. Our results provide further insights into the early events involved in Salmonella infections.


This paper presents an optimization study of inlet temperature of methanol synthesis reactor of LURGI type by using commercial simulator Aspen Plus and Aspen Energy Analyzer. The optimization routine is coupled to a steady-state model of the methanol synthesis reactor. By investigating the influences on methanol production and heat exchanger network synthesis, the inlet temperature of the reactor is optimized. when the inlet temperature is 230°C, the economic benefits of the methanol plant is maximized which could be increased by $ 44883.28/ year.


This research carried out to analyze implementation of PEMP program to coastal community in Engulf Regency. Unit analyze in this research are input, process and output. Human resources as input in implementation PEMP characterized by age 25-65 year, experience 0-40 years and 0-270 workday each years. There is limitation of time in implementation PEMP program, so that processing of inputs become output is in optimal. Economic productive funds (DEP), equal to Rap 1.654.700.000, have been distributed to 395 persons and 3 Spin's within 4-11 months. Key words: human resources, limitation of time, economic productive fund


OBJECTIVE
To evaluate clients' experience of Bowen Technique in the treatment of frozen shoulder in terms of their pain, functional ability and well-being.

DESIGN
A case series that used primarily quantitative methods and qualitative interviews.

PARTICIPANTS
Twenty participants with frozen shoulder.

INTERVENTION
Bowen Technique, using 'frozen shoulder procedure'.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Range of active and passive motion (abduction, flexion, extension, medial rotation, lateral rotation and 'wall climb') in both shoulders, pain intensity scores, impact on well-being and health status.

MAIN RESULTS
Improvement in shoulder mobility and associated function for all participants. Median 'worst pain' pre-therapy score reduced from 7 (mean 7, range 1-10) to a median 'worst pain' score of 1 (mean 1.45, range 0-5) post-therapy. Fewer pain quality descriptors used by all participants. All participants experienced improvement in their daily activities.

CONCLUSIONS
Bowen Technique demonstrated an improvement for participants, even those with a very longstanding history of frozen shoulder. Further trials are warranted.


Abstract The levels of IFN-γ, TNF-α, IL-10, and TGF-β1 cytokines associated with Trypanosoma cruzi during pregnancy were determined by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA) in serum samples from peripheral, placental, and cord blood of chronic infected mothers with detectable and undetectable parasitemia, and in their uninfected newborns. Compared to uninfected pregnant women and mothers with undetectable parasitemia, the concentrations of IFN-γ were higher at the 3 sites in mothers with detectable parasitemia. In these mothers and their newborns, the TNF-α concentrations were higher in the periphery and cord in comparison to serum samples from non-chagasic pregnant women. TNF-α levels were higher in newborns of mothers with detectable parasitemia than in newborns of mothers with undetectable parasitemia. IL-10 and TGF-β1 levels at the 3 sites were unchanged and diminished, respectively, in samples from infected mothers with patent parasitemia in comparison with uninfected pregnant women. Cytokine concentrations did not change significantly in all samples from mothers with undetectable parasitemia; however, the concentration of TGF-β1 was significantly reduced in their peripheral samples but significantly higher in the placenta in comparison with uninfected mothers and mothers with detectable parasitemia, respectively. These results suggest that elevated numbers of circulating parasites in vivo elicit production of pro-inflammatory cytokines that control congenital T. cruzi infection.


The human respiratory tract is a major site of avian influenza A(H5N1) infection. However, many humans infected with H5N1 present with gastrointestinal tract symptoms, suggesting that this may also be a target for the virus. In this study, we demonstrated that the human gut expresses abundant avian H5N1 receptors, is readily infected ex vivo by the H5N1 virus, and produces infectious viral particles in organ culture. An autopsy colonic sample from an H5N1-infected patient showed evidence of viral antigen expression in the gut epithelium. Our results provide the first evidence, to our knowledge, that H5N1 can directly target human gut tissues.


Learning typical motion patterns or activities from videos of crowded scenes is an important visual surveillance problem. To detect typical motion patterns in crowded scenarios, we propose a new method which utilizes the instantaneous motions of a video, i.e, the motion flow field, instead of long-term motion tracks. The motion flow field is a union of independent flow vectors computed in different frames. Detecting motion patterns in this flow field can therefore be formulated as a clustering problem of the motion flow fields, where each motion pattern consists of a group of flow vectors participating in the same process or motion. We first construct a directed neighborhood graph to measure the closeness of flow vectors. A hierarchical agglomerative clustering algorithm is applied to group flow vectors into desired motion patterns.


When art students at Emily Carr University take a hybrid humanities/studio class with a scientific theme, they are challenged to materially transform abstract concepts. Students interact with physicists and make work on site at TRIUMF, Canada's National Laboratory for Particle and Nuclear Physics. Strategies for art and science partnership models are tested in a curricular Transformation Art Lab as well as the RAW DATA project, where students view studio faculty struggling with similar challenges.


This report presents the results of wind tunnel tests made to determine the interference drag arising from various arrangements of streamline struts and round struts, or cylinders. Determinations were made of the interference drag of struts spaced side by side, struts in tandem, tandem struts encased in a single fairing, a strut intersecting a plane, and struts intersecting to form a v. Three sizes of struts were used for most of the tests. These tests show that the interference drag arising from struts in close proximity may be of considerable magnitude, in some instances amounting to more than the drag of the struts themselves.


Three hundred-six sows were used to evaluate effects of the interrelationship among valine, isoleucine, and leucine on sow and litter performance. Eight dietary treatments were arranged as a 2x2x2 factorial with two levels of valine (.80 and 1.20%), isoleucine (.68 and 1.08%), and leucine (1.57 and 1.97%). Litter weaning weight, litter weight gain from d 2 to weaning, and sow backfat loss increased as dietary valine increased but were not affected by dietary isoleucine or leucine. Increasing dietary valine, isoleucine, or leucine did not affect milk fat, DM, CP, or lactose. These results confirm the importance of dietary valine for increased litter weaning weight, independent of either additional dietary isoleucine or leucine.;


Objective: To study the expression of the small heat shock protein, αB-crystallin (αBC), in inclusion body myositis (IBM). Background: In humans, αBC is constitutively expressed in the eye lens, muscle, and heart, but not in lymphoid tissues. Induced expression of αBC occurs under metabolic stress, in virus-infected lymphocytes, and in degenerative brain lesions, including neurofibrillary tangles and senile plaques in AD. The previously reported pathologic similarities between AD and IBM prompted us to study αBC expression in IBM. Methods: Immunolocalization of αBC in muscle of 11 patients with IBM, 50 patients with other muscle diseases, and 4 controls; and quantitative analysis of the frequency of fibers with 1) increased αBC expression in IBM and polymyositis and 2) structural abnormality (vacuolated, non-necrotic and invaded by mononuclear cells, Congo red–positive, SMI-31 positive, and ubiquitin positive) in IBM. Results: We detected enhanced expression of αBC not only in all structurally abnormal IBM fibers, but also, and with severalfold higher frequency, in IBM fibers without significant structural abnormality (X fibers) (p values in paired t-tests < 0.001). We also found enhanced αBC in abnormal fibers in other diseases; X fibers, however, were extremely sparse or absent, except in two atypical cases of polymyositis refractory to immunotherapy. Conclusion: That the X fibers are much more frequent than the structurally abnormal fibers in IBM points to a pathogenic stressor acting upstream to the development of structural abnormalities. The identification of this stressor is now of paramount importance for deciphering the enigma of IBM.


Dune fields are commonly associated with periodic patterns that are among the most recognizable landscapes on Earth and other planetary bodies. However, in zones of limited sediment supply, where periodic dunes elongate and align in the direction of the resultant sand flux, there has been no attempt to explain the emergence of such a regular pattern. Here, we show, by means of numerical simulations, that the elongation growth mechanism does not produce a pattern with a specific wavelength. Periodic elongating dunes appear to be a juxtaposition of individual structures, the arrangement of which is due to regular landforms at the border of the field acting as boundary conditions. This includes, among others, dune patterns resulting from bed instability, or the crestline reorganization induced by dune migration. The wavelength selection in fields of elongating dunes therefore reflects the interdependence of dune patterns over the course of their evolution.


An exploration was made to develop a determination method of a low-concentration analyte by NIR spectroscopy. An absorber, silica gel was employed to extract and enrich a low-concentration analyte of ethyl carbamate. The solid absorber with the enriched analyte was measured by NIR spectroscopy in the range of 800 - 2500 nm. Afterwards, PLS regression was performed between the NIR spectra and the concentrations of the analyte for quantitative analysis of the low-concentration analyte. The spectra of 20 solid samples of analyte-absorbed silica gel showed a good correlation with the concentrations of ethyl carbamate in the samples. A leave-one-out cross validation was applied to evaluate the prediction ability of PLS models built with the full spectra, spectra in the region of 1920 - 1970 nm and the region of 2250 - 2430 nm, respectively. The values of the root-mean-square error of the cross validation (RMSECV) were about 0.1 mg L^-1 (0.1 ppm).


This paper extends an economic geography model by tariffs to analyze their impact on welfare and sustainability of agglomerations. Policies with and without cooperation are compared, with the goal of maximizing aggregated welfare in the former and regional welfare in the latter case. The main result is that under cooperation poorer regions are worse off in two respects. In the short-run they loose even more welfare and in the long-run sustainable agglomerations in richer regions get more likely. Thus, although cooperation could generate aggregated welfare gains the potential losers face even in the short-run no incentive to remove tariffs unless they are compensated appropriately, for instance by transfers. In this sense transfers from the rich to the poor are not only a policy to reach the goal of equity but also a necessary precondition to reach aggregated efficiency.


Statins lower serum cholesterol and are employed for primary and secondary prevention of cardiovascular events. Clinical evidence from observational studies, retrospective data, and post hoc analyses of data from large statin trials in various cardiovascular conditions, as well as small scale randomized trials, suggest survival and other outcome benefits for heart failure. Two recent large randomized controlled trials, however, appear to suggest statins do not have beneficial effects in heart failure. In addition to lowering cholesterol, statins are believed to have many pleotropic effects which could possibly influence the pathophysiology of heart failure. Following the two large trials, evidence from recent studies appears to support the use of statins in heart failure. This review discusses the role of statins in the pathophysiology of heart failure, current evidence for statin use in heart failure, and suggests directions for future research.


This article is aimed to
elaborate the significance of detecting clinical features (subjectivity,
objectivity and assessment) of the Dysmorphophobic (DMP) psychiatric patients seeking
primary cosmetic rhinoplsty (PCR). DMP clients present as a fixation of their thoughts toward the trivial
flaws on their body's anatomy. They consider such minor defects as
major and show a great amount of anxiety for such negligible issues. Such dread affects their social, occupational and
family's life and trigger them to seek means of correcting such small blemishes
through medical and or surgical approaches. Considering to their nose, they crave to eliminate their minor defects through PCR operation. PCR is viewed as one of the most
prevalent aesthetic operations in the field of cosmetic surgery. Author's method of
approach in PCR is to select candidates after obtaining a meticulous health
history, physical exam and appropriate para clinical tests. In some uncertained
cases, based on their subjectivity and objectivity presentations, are referred for consultation
with a psychiatrist for final assessment. Most selected patients undergo PCR
via standby anesthesia through an incision on the nasal columella (open rhinoplasty),
or in others which their nasal tip alternation is not needed, PCR is approached
with no incision on the nasal columella (closed rhinoplasty). Due to the high demand of PCR in the
world, among many clients who are seeking for such surgery, might be some cases with DMP
disorder who are overlooked in spite of an accurate surgeon's screening.


"Risk of urban disasters is no longer a phenomenon that we can stop, avoid or deter, but rather they are part of complex ecological processes from which we are inseparable and must design with, in preparation for the next imminent disaster."  Miho Mazereeuw  (Mazereeuw, 2011. Pg 85)  Due to recent seismic activity across New Zealand, it has become widely speculated that Wellington is overdue for a major earthquake that could devastate the city. This has brought to light Wellington's unique vulnerabilities and physical lack of preparedness to survive a significant natural disaster. Until recently, pre-disaster planning has looked towards both architectural and engineering solutions that focus on resisting or deterring the effects of a natural disaster, leaving landscape architecture as a post disaster clean up tool. This thesis aims to demonstrate the potential of landscape architecture within the field of pre-disaster planning, changing the way we adapt to natural disasters within the urban environment. This research will develop a preemptive strategy for Wellington's Central Business District, or 'CBD' that utilises access ways and open space as emergency infrastructure to save lives in the event of a major earthquake, whilst enhancing the urban environment for day-to-day use.  This research proposes that access ways and open space are the catalyst in which landscape architecture could make a significant contribution to the pre-disaster planning of cities. More specifically, it tests the combination of a latent emergency infrastructure with quality urban design through a series of landscape architecture experiments that focus on Wellington's CBD as a site for design exploration. This exploration challenges the way in which we design our urban environments to allow a level of flexibility in times of distress or natural disaster.  Overall this thesis will generate new ideas and creative solutions to the idea of urban resilience, indicating that, not only can landscape architecture make a significant contribution to pre-disaster planning, but that spaces designed for an emergency function can still enlighten our everyday experience of the city.


Statistical properties of the four IEEE ultra-wide bandwidth channel models are derived. In particular, the correlations and probability density functions for the gains and powers of different multipath components are calculated. It is shown that most multipath components are correlated, and that most multipath components donpsilat follow a lognormal distribution. These results are useful in evaluating performances of ultra-wide bandwidth systems. As an application, the bit error rate of a maximal ratio combining Rake receiver is analyzed.


Objective: This study investigated the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on intergenerational solidarities in Poland, specifically looking at flows between members of four family generations in the context of first-time motherhood.
Background: Unlike other crises, which typically mean that family members rely on one another for support, the pandemic challenges the scope of family solidarities. Little is still known as to how families navigate the particular vulnerability of first-time mothers who might face obstacles in accessing family assistance during lockdowns.
Method: The empirical material originates from a Qualitative Longitudinal Study (QLS) on transitions to motherhood in Poland (GEMTRA project, 2018-2021) and features case studies of intergenerational family triads (a first-time mother, her mother, and her grandmother). Two cases have been selected from a large pool of over 100 interviews conducted in two waves.
Results: We argue that the crucial stage of family life reified in welcoming the first child serves as special grounds for examining how family support and intergenerational solidarities are maintained, altered, or prioritized during the COVID-19 pandemic. We demonstrate that distinct types of associational, affectual, consensual, functional, normative and structural solidarities are variably affected.
Conclusion: We propose a new angle for identifying key support recipients within intergenerational solidarity flows in families during the crisis. Two directions of solidarity flows, towards younger and older generations, respectively, are presented.


Long non-coding RNA (LncRNA) are involved in chromatin remodeling, transcriptional control, and posttranscriptional processing. The LncRNA, Metastasis-associated lung adenocarcinoma transcript 1 (MALAT1) has been shown to be involved in metastasis for many cancers. In this review, we summarize recent findings of MALAT1 in lung cancer, colorectal cancer, breast cancer, cervical cancer, pancreatic cancer, hepatocellular cancer, gliomas, bladder cancer, esophageal cancer, stomach cancer, gall bladder cancer, nasopharyngeal cancer, osteosarcoma, ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, melanoma, tongue cancer, oral squamous cell carcinoma, and multiple myeloma.


I suspect that students learn more from our programming assignments than from our much sweated-over lectures, with their slide transitions, clip art, and joke attempts. A great assignment is deliberate about where the student hours go, concentrating the student's attention on material that is interesting and useful. The best assignments solve a problem that is topical and entertaining, providing motivation for the whole stack of work. Unfortunately, creating great programming assignments is both time consuming and error prone. The Nifty Assignments special session is all about promoting and sharing the ideas and ready-to-use materials of successful assignments. Each presenter will introduce their assignment, give a quick demo, and describe its niche in the curriculum and its strengths and weaknesses. The presentations (and the descriptions below) merely introduce each assignment. A key part of Nifty Assignments is the mundane but vital role of distributing the materials -- handouts, data files, starter code -- that make each assignment ready to adopt. The Nifty Assignments home page, http://nifty.stanford.edu, gathers all the assignments and makes them and their support materials freely available. If you have an assignment that works well and would be of interest to the CSE community, please consider applying to present at Nifty Assignments. See the nifty.stanford.edu home page for more information.


BACKGROUND Pancreatic cystic lesions (PCLs) are common in clinical practice. The accurate classification and diagnosis of these lesions are crucial to avoid unnecessary treatment of benign lesions and missed opportunities for early treatment of potentially malignant lesions. AIM To evaluate the role of cyst uid analysis of different tumor markers such as cancer antigens [ e.g. , cancer antigen (CA)19-9, CA72-4], carcinoembryonic antigen (CEA), serine protease inhibitor Kazal-type 1 (SPINK1), interleukin 1 beta (IL1- β ), vascular endothelial growth factor A (VEGF-A), and prostaglandin E2 (PGE2)], amylase, and mucin stain in diagnosing pancreatic cysts and differentiating malignant from benign lesions. This study included 76 patients diagnosed with PCLs using different imaging modalities. All patients underwent endoscopic ultrasound (EUS) and EUS-fine needle aspiration (EUS-FNA) for characterization and sampling of different PCLs. a slight female predominance (59.2%). Mucin stain showed high statistical significance in predicting malignancy with a sensitivity of 87.1% and specificity of 95.56%. It also showed a positive predictive value and negative predictive value of 93.1% and 91.49%, respectively ( P < 0.001). We found that positive mucin stain, cyst fluid glucose, SPINK1, amylase, and CEA levels had high statistical significance ( P < 0.0001). In contrast, IL-1 β , CA 72-4, VEGF-A, VEGFR2, and PGE2 did not show any statistical significance. Univariate regression analysis for prediction of malignancy in PCLs showed a statistically significant positive correlation with mural nodules, lymph nodes, cyst diameter, mucin stain, and cyst fluid CEA. Meanwhile, logistic multivariable regression analysis proved that mural nodules, mucin stain, and SPINK1 were independent predictors of malignancy in cystic pancreatic lesions. EUS examination of cyst morphology with cytopathological analysis and cyst fluid analysis could improve the differentiation between malignant and benign pancreatic cysts. Also, CEA, glucose, and SPINK1 could be used as promising markers to predict malignant pancreatic cysts. the of asymptomatic pancreatic cysts in the general population. Therefore, the proper diagnosis, meticulous differentiation, and staging of these pancreatic cystic lesions are crucial for proper management and avoiding unnecessary treatment of benign lesions and missing early treatment of the malignant/pre-malignant lesions. Endoscopic ultrasound examination of cyst morphology with cytopathological and chemical analysis and cyst fluid analysis could improve the diagnostic capability. Also, many developed markers are valuable for predicting a malignant pancreatic cyst.


This paper presents an empirical investigation into several performance measures for operational analysis on two-lane highways. The performance measures investigated are average travel speed, average travel speed to free-flow speed, percent followers, followers flow, followers density, percent impeded, impeded flow, and impeded density. Field data from 16 study sites in the states of Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and North Carolina representing Class 1, Class 2, and Class 3 highways were used in this study. The level of association between performance measures and some of the most important traffic variables was examined with graphical and statistical techniques. The traffic variables investigated in this study included combined flow in both directions of travel; proportion of traffic in the direction of travel, called in this study "traffic split"; percentage of heavy vehicles; and speed variance. Study results suggest that speed-related measures have weak associations with traffic variables compared with headway-related measures. Further, compound measures involving headway and traffic flow or density exhibited the highest associations with traffic variables. With regard to two-lane highway type, higher associations are exhibited at Class 1 sites compared with Class 2 and Class 3 sites. Performance measures showed the highest associations with combined flow and traffic split.


In DSP-based IQ modulators generating CPFSK signals, shortcomings in the implementation of the analog reconstruction filters result in the loss of the constant envelope property of the output CPFSK signal. These ripples cause undesirable spreading of the transmitted signal spectrum into adjacent channels when the signal passes through nonlinear elements in the transmission path and the consequent failure of the transmitted signal in meeting transmission standards requirements. Therefore, digital techniques compensating for these shortcomings play an important role in enhancing the performance of the IQmodulation system. Recently, several methods have been proposed in the literature to digitally compensate for the imperfections in the transfer characteristics of the analog reconstruction filters. Although these methods have been shown to be effective in removing the output envelope ripples, they result in filters of high orders and are therefore computationally demanding to implement on the DSP. Furthermore, previous techniques suffer from numerical instabilities as a result of matrix inversion in the process of calculating the solution vector. In this paper, we present two new techniques for designing the digital compensation filters by means of H∞ optimization to address the limitations of previous solutions. Design of control systems byH∞ optimization is now a standard technique. Simulation examples show that these techniques are effective and lead to substantial improvement of the output envelope ripples.


This book tells the story of how a parish women's meeting started in 1876 by a Victorian vicar's wife is now the most authentic and powerful organization of women in the new global Christianity. Its cross-disciplinary approach examines how religious faith and shifting ideologies of womanhood and motherhood in the imperial and post colonial worlds acted as a source of empowerment for conservative women in their homes, communities and churches. In contrast to much of feminist history, A History of the Mothers' Union 1876-2008: Women, Anglicanism and Globalisation shows how the beliefs of ordinary women led them to become advocates and activists long before women had the vote or could be ordained priests. Having survived an identity crisis over social and theological liberalism in the 1960s, the Mothers' Union provides a model of unity and reconciled diversity for a divided world wide church. Today it is hailed by the Archbishop of Canterbury and international development practitioners as an outstanding example of global Christian engagement with poverty and social transformation issues at the grass roots. The material is arranged both thematically and chronologically. Case studies of Australia, Ghana and South Africa trace how the Mothers' Union arrived with white British women but evolved into indigenous organizations. CORDELIA MOYSE is Adjunct Professor of Church History at Lancaster Theological Seminary, Lancaster, PA, USA.


Cardiovascular disease is characterized by impaired exercise capacity and endothelial dysfunction, i.e. reduced bioavailability of nitric oxide (NO). Phosphodiesterase-5 (PDE5) inhibition is a promising vasodilator therapy, but its effects on pulmonary and systemic hemodynamic responses to exercise in the absence, and particularly in the presence, of endothelial dysfunction have not been studied. We investigated the effects of PDE5 inhibitor EMD360527 in chronically instrumented swine at rest and during exercise with and without NO synthase inhibition (Nω -nitro-l-arginine; NLA). PDE5 inhibition caused a 19 ± 3% decrease in systemic vascular resistance (SVR) and a 24 ± 4% decrease in pulmonary vascular resistance (PVR) at rest. At maximal exercise, PDE5 inhibition caused a 13 ± 1% decrease in SVR and a 29 ± 3% decrease in PVR. NLA enhanced PDE5-inhibition-induced pulmonary (decrease in PVR 32 ± 12% at rest and 41 ± 3% during exercise) and systemic (decrease in SVR 24 ± 5% at rest and 18 ± 3% during exercise) vasodilation. Similarly, NLA increased the pulmonary and systemic vasodilation to nitroprusside and 8-bromo-cyclic guanosine monophosphate (cGMP), indicating that inhibition of NO synthase increases responsiveness to stimulation of the NO/cGMP pathway. Thus, PDE5 inhibition causes pulmonary and systemic vasodilation that is, respectively, maintained and slightly blunted during exercise. The degree of dilation in both the pulmonary and systemic beds were paradoxically enhanced in the presence of reduced bioavailability of NO, suggesting that this vasodilator therapy is most effective in patients with cardiovascular disease.


In our earlier work, we have proposed some modifications for the bandwidth broker framework. With our modifications, it is possible to use measurement-based admission control in addition to the more traditional parameter-based admission control. Moreover, we have presented a new flexible admission control scheme that has proven to be very efficient in terms of bottleneck link utilization. Two problems, however, have arisen: the use of scheduling weights in admission control and bursty connection arrivals. In this paper, we present that the former one can be dealt with the use of adaptive scheduling weights, while the latter one can be fought with adaptive reservation limits. The proposed new algorithms are validated through simulations and their performance is compared against the nonadaptive basic scheme.


Organisms from simple, single-celled bacteria to complex mammals have internal biochemical clocks that maintain the daily cycles of behavior known as circadian rhythms. In three reports published in this issue of Science(pp. 805,808, and 811), researchers have cloned a gene called timeless that makes a key protein component of the clock in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster. By studying how TIM, the protein made by timeless, cooperates with PER, the protein produced by the only other known fruit fly clock gene, researchers are getting a much clearer picture of the molecular workings of the fly's circadian clock.


The Mongols at China's Edge: History and the Politics of National Unity, by Uradyn E. Bulag. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2002. xi + 271 pp. US$80.00 (hardcover), US$36.95 (paperback). This is an insightful detailed study of ethnic identity and nationalism in China. Combining analyses of a wide range of topics, ranging through poetry, sexuality, children's stories and historiography, Uradyn Bulag takes the reader on a journey through the evolution of Mongolian identity in China and shows how such identities are woven into the fabric of Chinese national identity. Bulag also explains how China's contemporary nationalities policy is a product of "the debris of conflict between class and ethnicity" (p. 132) over the last half century. Part 1 of the book tackles the government's notion of a unity of ethnic peoples (minzu tuanjie). Bulag does so in part by tracing the history of a ritual dedicated to the god of Lake Kokonuur and by examining the various historical reincarnations of Wang Zhaojun, the Chinese princess offered to the Xiongnu ruler in a 'peace marriage' over 2000 years ago. Emphasizing the significance of ritual in Chinese politics, Bulag shows how the lake ritual was manipulated to serve different political interests under the Qing dynasty and the Republic, and later emerged as a symbol of the unity of the nationalities under the leadership of the Communist Party. Similarly, while Princess Wang Zhaojun has been represented as princess, loyal wife and civilizer of the barbarians, today her ancient marriage serves as evidence (rather farcically, thinks Bulag) of Chinese sovereignty over the Mongols. In Part II, the most insightful section of the book, Bulag discusses the tensions between the politics of class and ethnic equality. After a century of Chinese migration, Mongols had become a minority on their own soil and, as the original masters of the grasslands, many had become the landlords of later arriving Chinese farmers. Although the Mongols were designated an official national minority deserving of preferential treatment by the Communist Party-state, up to a quarter of the Mongol population were struggled against in the name of revolutionary justice. Chapter 4 introduces Ulanhu, the leader of Inner Mongolia until 1966, and the strategies he employed to protect Mongols from the worst consequences of land reform and class politics. Chapter 5 explores the role of "ethno-histories" in terms of power relations and as a rationale for the political status of nationalities in a "universal" socialist state. Part III offers an interesting and creative analysis of the use of myths and heroes in the construction of ethnic and national identities. …


: Many-years experiences of treatment of 1900 patients have shown high efficiency of the system of active surgical treatment. The method allows achieving recovery of many extremely critical patients earlier thought to be doomed. The method shortened terms of treatment, improved functional and cosmetic results, reduced lethality and invalidization of the patients which is of great social and economical significance.


This paper considers some methodological aspects of Joan Robinson's contribution to post-Keynesian growth theory. Joan Robinson's criticisms of equilibrium analysis, of the con fl ation of logical and historical time and of the uses (and misuses) of mathematical formalisation are scathing. But while many of her points are well taken, parts of her argument appear questionable. As a result, her methodological critique of equilibrium economics may be misleading. Moreover, she failed to appreciate the potential gains from mathematical formalisation. The further development of a Robinsonian analysis of economic growth calls for a reconsideration of these aspects of her legacy.


One of the most serious types of pollution affecting the Palestinian environment is the crime of noise pollution, the aim of which is to identify this crime in terms of its nature and impact on human health, its legal construction and the resulting sanctions. The researcher used the descriptive and analytical methods, supporting the examination of the decisions of the courts of cassation, and reached a number of conclusions: The crime of noise pollution is a crime of danger, and Palestinian environmental law does not specify noise levels. It is also difficult to account for and determine the conduct that makes up the physical component of the crime of noise pollution. The penalty established as a penalty for the offence of noise pollution also does not amount to the seriousness and prevalence of the offence. The researcher recommends that the Palestinian Environmental Quality Authority, in collaboration with the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Higher Education, raise awareness of the dangers of noise pollution through television programmes and seminars in schools and universities. The researcher also calls on the Palestinian legislator to add an implementing regulation to the Palestinian Environment Act clarifying noise levels and the mechanism for measuring noise. The researcher also calls on the Palestinian legislature to increase the penalty as a punishment for the crime of noise pollution and to lift the fine limit, commensurate with the gravity of the crime and its widespread prevalence in society.


Cognitive ability, externalising symptoms and internalising symptoms are correlated in children. However, it is not known why they combine in the general child population over time. To address this, we used data on 17,318 children participating in the UK Millennium Cohort Study and followed-up five times between ages 3 and 14 years. We fitted threeparallel process latent growth curve models to identify the parallel unfolding of children's trajectories of internalising symptoms, externalising symptoms and cognitive ability across this period. We also examined the effects of time-invariant (ethnicity, birth weight, maternal education and age at birth, and breastfeeding status) and time-varying covariates (maternal psychological distress and socioeconomic disadvantage) on the growth parameters of the trajectories. The results showed that the intercepts of the trajectories of cognitive ability and, particularly, externalising symptoms were inversely correlated. Their linear slopes were also inversely correlated, suggesting parallel development. Internalising symptoms were correlated positively with externalising symptoms and inversely (and more modestly) with cognitive ability at baseline, but the slope of internalising symptoms correlated -positivelyonly with the slope of externalising symptoms. The covariates predicted 9% to 39% of the variance in the intercepts and slopes of all domains, suggesting they are important common risk factors. Overall, it appears that externalising symptoms develop in parallel with both cognitive ability and internalising symptoms from early childhood through to midadolescence. Children on an increasing trajectory of externalising symptoms are likely both increasing in internalising symptoms and decreasing in cognitive skills as well, and are thus an important group to target for intervention.


Wireless networks-on-chips (WINoCs) hold substantial promise for enhancing multicore integrated circuit performance, by augmenting conventional wired interconnects. As the number of cores per IC grows, intercore communication requirements will also grow, and WINoCs can be used to both save power and reduce latency. In this article, we briefly describe some of the key challenges with WINoC implementation, and also describe our example design, iWISE, which is a scalable wireless interconnect design. We show that the integration of wireless interconnects with wired interconnects in NoCs can reduce overall network power by 34 percent while achieving a speedup of 2.54 on real applications.


ROBIN HOLLOWAY. Anthem: Since I believe (premiere)—7 March/Cambridge/St. Catherine's College Choir c. Frederick Stocken. Seascape and Harvest (US premiere)—1 April/Los Angeles/CBSO c. Simon Rattle. Cockfight: Concerto for saxophone, clarinet, and double chamber orchestra (premiere)—20 May/Queen Elizabeth Hall/John Harle (sax), Michael Collins (cl), London Sinfonietta c. Oliver Knussen. Horn Concerto (premiere)—16 June/London, Spitalfields Festival/Barry Tuckwell (horn), Northern Sinfonia c. Richard Hickox. SIMON HOLT. Ballade of the Black Sorrow (premiere)/ London, Royal Festival Hall/London Sinfonietta c. David Atherton.


Many bacteria enter the viable but non-culturable (VBNC) state to maximize resources and increase their tolerance to harmful conditions to cope with environmental stress, which has been described for a plethora of important human and foodborne pathogens. VBNC pathogens can potentially present a serious risk to human health as they are invisible to routine microbiological culture-based methods. Of high importance is the increased tolerance to antibiotics or disinfectant measures while in the VBNC state. The greatest remaining challenge for such investigations is the lack of an appropriate, cost-effective multi-species screening method due to experimental constraints. In this study, we investigated if de novo ATP production of cells in the VBNC state is a suitable indicator for overall cell viability that can be utilized to determine the minimum ATP inhibitory concentration (MAIC) of antibiotics and other antimicrobials. To validate this approach, heat-stress time-kill experiments were performed with both culturable and VBNC cells. We developed a comprehensive experimental setup and demonstrated the applicability of this VBNC–MIC assay for testing the tolerance of 12 strains of 4 important bacterial species (Escherichia coli, Bacillus cereus, Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and Listeria monocytogenes) in the VBNC state to eight important antimicrobials including four different antibiotics. We confirmed that bacteria in the VBNC state were resistant to all tested antibiotics (ampicillin, imipenem, ciprofloxacin, and gentamicin) and additionally insensitive to disinfectants (benzalkonium chloride and trioctylmethylammonium chloride) and preservatives (bronopol and sodium azide). These data emphasize the need for further research regarding the characteristics of bacterial pathogens in the VBNC state and present the advantages and high-throughput capabilities of ATP determinations to investigate tolerance of VBNC pathogens to antimicrobials. The presented method should be helpful in order to identify appropriate countermeasures, treatments, or disinfectants when confronted with bacterial pathogens in the VBNC state.


This monograph analyses the historical evolution of the laws of occupation as a special branch of international humanitarian law (IHL), focusing on the extent to which this body of law has been transformed by its interaction with the development of international human rights law. It argues that a large part of the laws of occupation has proved to be malleable while being able to accommodate changing demands of civilians and any other persons affected by occupation in modern context. Its examinations have drawn much on archival research into the drafting documents of the instruments of IHL, including the aborted Brussels Declaration 1874, the 1899/1907 Hague Regulations, the 1949 Geneva Conventions and the 1977 Additional Protocol I. After assessing the complementary relationship between international human rights law and the laws of occupation, the book examines how to provide a coherent explanation for an emerging framework on the rights of individual persons affected by occupation. It engages in a theoretical appraisal of the role of customary IHL and the Martens clause in building up such a normative framework.


BACKGROUND & OBJECTIVES
Kerala State is a harbinger of what will happen in future to the rest of India in chronic non-communicable diseases (NCD). We assessed: (i) the burden of NCD risk factors; (ii) estimated the relations of behavioural risk factors to socio-demographic correlates, anthropometric risk factors with behavioural risk factors; (iii) evaluated if socio-demographic, behavioural and anthropometric risk factors predicted biochemical risk factors; and (iv) estimated awareness, treatment and adequacy of control of hypertension and diabetes, in Kerala state.

METHODS
A total of 7449 individuals (51% women) stratified by age group, sex and place of residence were selected and information on behavioural risk factors; tobacco use, diet, physical activity, alcohol use, measured anthropometry, blood pressure was collected. Fasting blood samples were analysed for blood glucose, total cholesterol, high density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglycerides in a sample subset.Using multiple logistic regression models the associations between socio-demographic and anthropometric variables with biochemical risk factors were estimated.

RESULTS
The burden of NCD risk factors was high in our sample. Prevalence of behavioural and each of the biochemical risk factors increased with age, adjusting for other factors including sex and the place of residence. The odds ratios relating anthropometric variables to biochemical variables were modest, suggesting that anthropometric variables may not be useful surrogates for biochemical risk factors for population screening purposes.

INTERPRETATION & CONCLUSIONS
In this large study of community-based sample in Kerala, high burden of NCD risk factors was observed, comparable to that in the United States. These data may serve to propel multisectoral efforts to lower the community burden of NCD risk factors in India in general, and in Kerala, in particular.


This abstract compiles the abstracts of the individual thesis chapters.

Anaerobic acid stage fermentation of carbohydrates can generate a variety of desired or undesired end-products. Besides physical parameters such as pH and temperature, the types of carbohydrate being fermented influences the fermentation end-products. The results of the current study indicate that under uncontrolled pH, microbial mixed cultures from activated sludge and anaerobic digester sludge anaerobically produced ethanol from glucose while producing lactic acid from starch conversion. This trend was confirmed by batch and chemostat trials. After shifting from glucose to starch feed or vice versa the chemostat enrichment culture responded by shifting from ethanol to lactic acid or the reverse. Results also showed that only 25% of starch was converted to the lactic acid. The low conversion yield could be explained by the low pH in the broth that is known to become inhibitory already at a pH of below 5.

As maltose is an intermediate sugar derived from the digestion of starch, it was tested as a fermentation substrate and compared to glucose fermentation. Results showed that independent of the inoculum source maltose supported lactic fermentation while glucose led to ethanolic fermentation. The trend was confirmed in batch as well as chemostat culture. Under uncontrolled pH, fermentation of maltose ceased with the production of small amounts of lactic acid and acetate as the main metabolites, while fermentation of glucose continued and produced ethanol as the main end-product. Further investigation with other disaccharides (lactose and sucrose) showed that lactose was fermented to lactic acid and acetate as the main metabolites while sucrose formed ethanol as the major fermentation end-product.

Comparative experiments showed that mixed microbial consortia and chemostat enrichments reproducibly produced lactate from maltose fermentation and ethanol from glucose fermentation. However, when using rumen bacteria as the inoculum, lactic acid was the key fermentation end-product, suggesting that rumen microflora comprises larger populations of lactic acid producing bacteria. Lactic acid accumulation in the rumen is a well-known problem known as rumen acidosis and was investigated further in this study. Acute ruminal acidosis can occur when pH in the rumen drops below 5.0. This condition can completely disrupt rumen microbiota leading to the mortality of ruminants. The results of the current study showed that acidosis could occur within 6 hours of incubation in the rumen culture fermenting sugars or starch. Along with the formation of lactic acid, acetic acid alone or in mixture with ethanol was found to be the reason for high acid build-up in the rumen. Acidosis resulted even with only 20% of a normal daily feed load for all soluble and non-soluble carbohydrates. DNA-based microbial analysis revealed that Prevotella was the dominant species present in the rumen fluid, which is considered as the main lactic acid producing bacteria.

The phenomenon of acidosis comprises at least two components, a dramatic drop in pH and the over-production of lactic acid. Two approaches can be used to ameliorate the effects, the addition of pH buffering or neutralizing species, or the addition of active microbial cultures that can degrade lactate at a rate that reduces lactate accumulation. The former can be harmful to the animal when the buffering is locally too concentrated due to a lack of uniform distribution; the latter can be costly, if produced as a pure strain. The results of the current study showed that from rumen cultures, mixed microbial lactic acid utilizing bacteria (LUB) could be enriched and subsequently used as a controlling agent against in vitro acidosis. The addition of liquid cultures of LUB enrichments to a rumen culture that was producing lactic acid from fermentation of starch resulted in a reduction of lactic acid, and produced VFA with acetate and propionate as the main metabolites. Breeding lactate utilizing bacteria (LUB) from rumen fluid that can be used as probiotics is potentially useful for the cattle industry. This is because probiotics can be used as a supplement to prevent lactic acidosis when ruminants are fed with readily fermentable carbohydrates. The results of the current study showed that the addition of concentrated cell suspensions of LUB as probiotics to rumen cultures fermenting corn starch successfully prevented lactic acid accumulation, and could also be used as a therapy by converting lactic acid accumulated in rumen cultures into volatile fatty acids (VFA) with acetate and propionate as the main end-products. The combination of concentrated cell suspensions of LUB with buffer could prevent lactic acid accumulation, and rapidly degrade lactic acid without the use of excessive amounts of LUB probiotics. Metagenomic sequencing analysis showed the key LUB that was enriched to include Bacteroides, Acinetobacter, Oscillospira, Clostridium, Dysgonomonas and Pseudomonas.


This study is aimed to compare and relate the performance of students with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and with good academic performance in the perceptual-visual-motor and reading processes, and to verify the eye movements' pattern of students with ADHD during reading. Twenty students from primary school, both male and female, and aged between eight and twelve years old, participated in this study. They were divided into two groups: Group I (GI): composed of 20 students with an interdisciplinary diagnosis of ADHD, and Group II (GII): composed of 20 students with an equal good academic performance according to gender, age group and education with GI. All students were submitted to the Reading Processes Assessment protocol (PROLEC), Developmental Test of Visual Perception 3 (DTVP 3). PROLEC text reading test was administered to the students, also through the computer support. During this activity, the Gazepoint GP3 Eye Tracker equipment was used, which records the eye movements and analyses their properties by using the Gazepoint Analysis UX Edition Software for capturing eye movement during reading. These procedures were applied individually with students from both groups. The results were statistically analyzed, and revealed that the difficulties of students with ADHD in the reading processes could be justified by the perceptual-visual-motor deficit, and the shorter fixing time for capturing the information of each word read. This compromises the ability to identify and decode words, leading to difficulty in accessing meaning at the level of words and texts.


Induction magnetometer observations of dayside Pc1 activity at Barentsburg (BAB, Spitsbergen archipelago, 78.05°N, 14.12°E) are combined with data from two magnetometers located in Scandinavia and the Kola peninsula. Seven events with very large negative IMF Bz components were considered. For all of the events, the cusp location was expected to be significantly shifted equatorward from the statistical position such that the BAB magnetometer was located well inside the polar cap. The DMSP particle data indicated that the BAB magnetometer was indeed inside the polar cap, whereas other magnetometers were collocated with the ionospheric projections of the cusp, the low-latitude boundary layer or the boundary plasma sheet. Pc1 magnetic pulsations were observed only at BAB. In three cases, for which SuperDARN convection data were available, the Pc1 activity correlated with intervals of large-scale convection reconfiguration, such that the plasma flow crossing the BAB location was associated with newly-reconnected magnetic flux tubes drifting tailward. The convection reconfigurations were in response to a decrease in the IMF By component. We argue that the source of the observed Pc1 pulsations is anisotropic plasma of the depletion layer within the magnetosheath. The plasma anisotropy supports the excitation of electromagnetic ion cyclotron waves that are detectable with a ground-based magnetometer when the flux tubes containing the unstable plasma become connected to the Earth's ionosphere in the course of the dayside reconnection processes.