Among the several typologies of storage technologies, mainly on different physical principles (mechanical, electrical and chemical), hydrogen produced by power to gas (P2G) from renewable energy sources complies with chemical storage principle and is based on the conversion of electrical energy into chemical energy by means of the electrolysis of water which does not produce any toxic or climate-relevant emission. This paper aims to pinpoint the potential uses of renewable hydrogen storage systems in Europe, analysing current and potential locations, regulatory framework, governments' outlooks, economic issues, and available renewable energy amounts. The expert opinion survey, already used in many research articles on different topics including energy, has been selected as an effective method to produce realistic results. The obtained results highlight strategies and actions to optimize the storage of hydrogen produced by renewables to face varying electricity demand and generation-driven fluctuations reducing the negative effects of the increasing share of renewables in the energy mix of European Countries.


Aluminum is the most abundant metal on earth, known for its toxicity to humans and laboratory animals. Melatonin, produced by the pineal gland, has been shown to be an effective antioxidant. In this study, we investigated the possible protective role of melatonin in modulating toxicity and oxidative stress induced by chronic exposure to aluminum in the small intestine of rats. Wistar albino rats were divided into five groups. Group I served as the control and received only physiological saline, Group II served as the control for the melatonin group and received ethanol and physiological saline, Group III received melatonin, Group IV received aluminum sulfate, and Group V received aluminum sulfate and melatonin, injected three times per week for 1 month. Administration of aluminum caused degenerative changes in small intestine tissues, such as histological damage, increase in metallothionein immunoreactivity, and decrease in cellular proliferation index. Moreover, intestinal glutathione levels, and catalase, superoxide dismutase, glutathione peroxidase, sodium/potassium-ATPase, and glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase activities decreased, while lipid peroxidation and myeloperoxidase levels, and alkaline phosphatase, lactate dehydrogenase, and xanthine oxidase activities increased in the aluminum group. Administration of melatonin mostly prevented these effects. Consequently, we can say that melatonin protects the intestine from aluminum toxicity through its antioxidant and proliferative effects.


We believe that the consciousness-based/holistic medical toolbox has a serious additional offer to cancer patients and, as a consequence, designed a treatment for the patient with metastasized cancer. From a holistic perspective, cancer can be understood as a simple disturbance of the cells, arising from the tissue holding on to a trauma with strong emotional content. This is called "a blockage", where the function of the cells is allocated from their original function in the tissue to a function of holding emotions. We hope to be able not only to improve the quality of life, but also to improve survival and in some cases even induce spontaneous remission of the metastasized cancer. This paper describes how work with a patient with metastasized cancer can be done in the holistic clinical practice in 14 days on an individual basis, helping the patient to recover her human character, purpose of life, coherence, and will to live, thus improving quality of life and possibly also survival time. The holistic therapeutic work includes (1) teaching existential theory, (2) working with life perspective and philosophy of life, (3) helping the patient to acknowledge the state of the disease and the feelings connected to it, and finally (4) getting the patient into the holistic state of healing: (a) feeling old repressed emotions, (b) understanding why she got sick from a holistic point of view, and finally (c) letting go of the negative beliefs and decisions that made her sick according to the holistic theory of nongenetic diseases. The theory of the human character, the quality of life theories, the holistic theory of cancer, the holistic process theory of healing, the theory of (Antonovsky) coherence, and the life mission theory are the most important theories for the patient to find hope and mobilize the will to fight the cancer and survive. The patient went through the following phases: (1) finding the purpose of life and hidden resources; (2) confronting denial; (3) taking responsibility for being very ill; (4) severe existential crises with no wish to live while still fighting; (5) integration of many repressed feelings and negative decisions thus rehabilitating character; (6) confronting lack of intimacy and trust in others and this way rehabilitating the ability to love; (7) rehabilitating the will to live, breaking through and falling in love with life; (8) assuming responsibility for the social relations; and sometimes (9) quality of life is improved radically with indications of spontaneous remission of the liver tumors.


How to deal with a rising China constitutes one of the most seminal challenges facing the ANZUS alliance since its inception a half a century ago. Australia must reconcile its geography and economic interests in Asia with its post-war strategic and historic cultural orientation towards the United States. It must succeed in this policy task without alienating either Beijing or Washington in the process. The extent to which this is achieved will shape Australia's national security posture for decades to come. Three specific components of the 'Sino-American-Australian' triangle are assessed here: the future of Taiwan, the American development of a National Missile Defence (NMD), and the interplay between Sino-American power balancing and multilateral security politics. The policy stakes for Australia and for the continued viability of ANZUS are high in all three policy areas as a new US Administration takes office in early 2001. The article concludes that Australia's best interest is served by applying deliberate modes of decision-making in its own relations with both China and the US and by facilitating consistent and systematic dialogue and consultations with both of those great powers on key strategic issues.


The first hydrothermal field on the northern Gorda Ridge, the Sea Cliff hydrothermal field, was discovered and geologic controls of hydrothermal activity in the rift valley were investigated on a dive series using the DSV Sea Cliff. The Sea Cliff hydrothermal field was discovered where predicted at the intersection of axis-oblique and axis-parallel faults at the south end of a linear ridge at mid-depth (2700 m) on on the east wall. Preliminary mapping and sampling of the field reveal: a setting nested on nearly sediment-free fault blocks 300 m above the rift valley floor 2.6 km from the axis; a spectrum of venting types from seeps to black smokers; high conductive heat flow estimated to be equivalent to the convective flux of multiple black smokers through areas of the sea floor sealed by a caprock of clastic breccia primarily derived from basalt with siliceous cement and barite pore fillings; and a vent biota with Juan de Fuca Ridge affinities. These findings demonstrate the importance of off-axis hydrothermal activity and the role of the intersection of tectonic lineations in controlling hydrothermal sites at sea-floor spreading centers.


Social media use is now commonplace across journalism, in spite of lingering unease about the impact the networked, real-time logic of leading social media platforms may have on the quality of journalistic coverage. As a result, distinct journalistic voices are forced to compete more directly with experts, commentators, sources, and other stakeholders within the same space. Such shifting power relations may be observed also in the interactions between political journalists and their audiences on major social media platforms. This article therefore pursues a cross-national comparison of interactions between political journalists and their audiences on Twitter in Germany and Australia, documenting how the differences in the status of Twitter in each country's media environment manifest in activities and network interactions. In each country, we observed Twitter interactions around the national parliamentary press corps (the Bundespressekonferenz and the Federal Press Gallery), gathering all public tweets by and directed at the journalists' accounts during 2017. We examine overall activity and engagement patterns and highlight significant differences between the two national groups; and we conduct further network analysis to examine the prevalent connections and engagement between press corps journalists themselves, and between journalists, their audiences, and other interlocutors on Twitter. New structures of information flows, of influence, and thus ultimately of power relations become evident in this analysis.


Wavelet analysis was applied to detect the greatest deviation from the perfect circle for the roundness and cylindricalness of shaft-like components in the virtual manufacturing engineering. Based on the concepts of the roundness and cylindricalness, the least square method was adopted into the determination of the reference—the least square circle from which the deviation was calculated. In order to obtain the extremum of the errors, wavelet transform was carried out with binary wavelet from the time domain to frequency domain. A virtual probe was used to have the signals for the measured point by using WTnode_gettranslation() function. The accuracy of the measurement depends, to a large extent, on the length of individual step along the axis and the density of the measured points on the sections. Experiments have shown that the measuring processing was time-saving and the results from the wavelet analysis were much reliable.


In the past years, global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) have gained the core position concerning the geolocalization applications and services in urban environments. The major issue of the GNSS-based urban application expansion is related to the positioning service quality assurance, expressed in terms of accuracy, integrity, availability, and continuity of the localization service. The dense urban environments, such as city centers, are challenging to the GNSS signal reception causing the frequent blockage of the line-of-sight (LOS) signals and the multipath phenomenon, referred to as the reception of the diffracted/reflected echoes of the transmitted signal. These effects severely affect the pseudorange and Doppler measurements, used by a GNSS receiver for the user's position computation, which will further induce the computation of an erroneous positioning solution by the navigation processor down to a positioning loss in the presence of limited satellite visibility and few provided measurements. Therefore, advanced signal processing techniques do represent viable solutions aiming at the mitigation of these undesired effects in order to foster the accuracy and availability of the localization solution. This chapter will address in details the GNSS vector tracking (VT) receiver's configuration able to cope with the urban environment-induced effects.


Purpose: The objective of this study is to examine the relative contribution of firm-level, industry-level and country level variables to working capital at risk. Working capital at risk is treated as the value at risk for a portfolio of firm's current assets. As far as short-term liquidity is concerned, working capital at risk, being the maximum amount that a firm may lose at a certain confidence interval, must be the most important part that a firm's management must focus on.Design/methodology/approach: This study empirically examines the possible associations between wide range of variables and working capital at risk. The sample firms include 143 non-financial firms listed in Egypt stock exchange. The data cover the years 2000–2014. The statistical tests include the fixed and random effects, testing for linearity versus nonlinearity. The least squares dummy variables and discriminant analysis are utilized. The working capital at risk is classified into three levels: low, medium and high.Findings: The general findings of the study show that cash conversion cycle and the leverage are the most significant determinants of working capital at risk. Both determinants have significant influence on the level of volatility of working capital throughout the three categories of working capital at risk.Originality/value: This study offers a new approach that deals with working capital as a portfolio, rather than single ratios, that firm's management must decrease its volatility (value at risk), therefore, short-term liquidity can be improved significantly. This approach can be considered a financial engineering in terms of monitoring and managing short-term liquidity exposure.


Support for democracy in the population is considered critical for the emergence and stability of democracy. Macro-determinants and retrospective experiences have been shown to affect the support for democracy at the individual level. We investigate whether and how the individual life horizon, in terms of the prospective length of life and age, affects individual attitudes toward democracy. Combining information from period life tables with individual survey response data spanning more than 260,000 observations from 93 countries over the period 1994–2014, we find evidence that the expected remaining years of life influence the attitudes toward a democratic political regime. The statistical identification decomposes the influence of age from the influence of the expected proximity to death. The evidence shows that support for democracy increases with age but declines with expected proximity to death, implying that increasing longevity might help fostering the support for democracy. Increasing age while keeping the remaining years of life fixed as well as increasing remaining years of life for a given age group both contribute to the support for democracy.


This paper examines the effect of participation in government-sponsored R&D consortia on the R&D productivity of firms in the case of robot technology in Japan. We attempt to provide a new empirical analysis and discussions on the issue of government project evaluation by investigating the impact of the evolution of government programs, and to compare government-sponsored R&D consortia with collaborative R&D among firms. Using indicators of the quality of patents, which enables us to provide an estimation of quality-adjusted research productivity, we find that participation in government programs has a positive impact on the research productivity of participating firms. Moreover, the impact of participation became much higher after the design of government programs in this field changed in the late 1990s. Also, we find that participation in government-sponsored consortia has a greater impact on research productivity than participation in collaborative R&D among firms. This may support government involvement in R&D as a coordinator of R&D collaboration.


timing sequences, high/low readings, low battery, and functional indicators. When a high or low glucose reading is announced, it is desirable to clarify specific numbers, such as &dquo;below 20&dquo; or &dquo;above 400.&dquo; It is desirable to have speech output indicating such problems as error in strip placement, inadequate sample, damaged/outdated pads, dirty aperture, or temperature of machine error. A reminder to turn off the meter after


It is well-known that one-way permutations (and even one-to-one one-way functions) imply the existence of non-interactive commitments. Furthermore the construction is black-box (i.e., the underlying one-way function is used as an oracle to implement the commitment scheme, and an adversary attacking the commitment scheme is used as an oracle in the proof of security). We rule out the possibility of black-box constructions of non-interactive commitments from general (possibly not one-to-one) one-way functions. As far as we know, this is the first result showing a natural cryptographic task that can be achieved in a black-box way from one-way permutations but not from one-way functions. We next extend our black-box separation to constructions of non-interactive commitments from a stronger notion of one-way functions, which we refer to as hitting one-way functions. Perhaps surprisingly, Barak, Ong, and Vadhan (Siam JoC '07) showed that there does exist a non-black-box construction of non-interactive commitments from hitting one-way functions. As far as we know, this is the first result to establish a "separation" between the power of black-box and non-black-box use of a primitive to implement a natural cryptographic task. We finally show that unless the complexity class NP has program checkers, the above separations extend also to non-interactive instance-based commitments, and 3-message public-coin honest-verifier zero-knowledge protocols with O(log n)-bit verifier messages. The well-known classical zero-knowledge proofs for NP fall into this category.


Non-intrusive load monitoring (NILM) aims at decomposing the total reading of the household power consumption into appliance-wise ones, which is beneficial for consumer behavior analysis as well as energy conservation. NILM based on deep learning has been a focus of research. To train a better neural network, it is necessary for the network to be fed with massive data containing various appliances and reflecting consumer behavior habits. Therefore, data cooperation among utilities and DNOs (distributed network operators) who own the NILM data has been increasingly significant. During the cooperation, however, risks of consumer privacy leakage and losses of data control rights arise. To deal with the problems above, a framework to improve the performance of NILM with federated learning (FL) has been set up. In the framework, model weights instead of the local data are shared among utilities. The global model is generated by weighted averaging the locally-trained model weights to gather the locally-trained model information. Optimal model selection help choose the model which adapts to the data from different domains best. Experiments show that this proposal improves the performance of local NILM runners. The performance of this framework is close to that of the centrally-trained model obtained by the convergent data without privacy protection.


Abstract: The development of religious character for converts is very important so that their Islamic faith becomes perfect (kāffah). Perfection is marked by leaving the old religious teachings and practicing Islamic teachings in the fields of faith, worship, morals, muamalah, being able to read and memorize the verses of the Qur'an. This study is intended to answer the question: Why is religious character building needed for converts in Singkawang City? This problem is studied through qualitative field research. Research location as a source of data through free interviews, structured interviews, participant observation, and documentation study. All data were analyzed using a case study approach with descriptive-analytical techniques because: the research problem is holistic, complicated and interpretive. This study shows that: The development of religious character for converts in Singkawang City needs to be done because the status of converts itself requires guidance because converts are people who leave their ingrained beliefs, religions and life behaviors and replace them with religions that are already ingrained. new namely Islam; because of the problems of converts that need to be resolved, because converts after becoming Muslims encounter many problems, not only religious problems, converts also encounter various other problems including negative responses from family, insults, isolation to conflicts and acts of violence from family members, it is still difficult. abandoning some of the traditions and aspects of their old religious teachings, as well as Islamic religious guidance that they have not yet received maximally; to meet the needs of converts; and to demonstrate a brotherly commitment.
Keywords: Development, Character, Religious, Converts


Organic micropollutants such as food additives, pharmaceuticals and personal care products are found in rivers worldwide. Persistence is a key criteria in chemical risk assessment as micropollutants that are persistent pose an exposure hazard to humans and the environment. As biodegradation is the most relevant removal process for many micropollutants in rivers, persistence assessment relies on the estimation of the biodegradation half-life. This thesis presents new approaches to understand the biodegradation of organic pollutants in rivers. The application of Junge relationships (previously established for atmospheric pollutants), to river systems, was investigated in paper I to assess if biodegradation half-lives in the Danube river are correlated with variability in measured concentrations. Model scenarios show Junge relationships could potentially be found in measurements performed near the mouth of the river, but Junge relationships were not found in currently available monitoring data. In paper II an experimental design and response surface model were developed to study the effect of hyporheic exchange (induced by flowing water) and bacterial diversity in sediment on dissipation half-lives of two micropollutants in flumes. Faster dissipation was observed in flumes with high bacterial diversity and higher hyporheic exchange, and thus both variables are relevant to study dissipation processes in rivers. The influence of biological factors beyond bacteria diversity is explored in papers III and IV, by characterizing the bacteria community composition of sediment in OECD 308 bottle incubations (a standard test that is often recommended in risk assessment guidelines). In paper III, higher variation in half-lives (e.g. relative standard deviations > 50%) were found for micropollutants with longer half-lives (e.g. from 40 to more than 120 days). Higher variation in half-lives also corresponded to differences in bacteria community composition and specifically to increased or decreased abundance of certain bacteria genera. Although the exact bacteria genera involved in the biodegradation of the micropollutants cannot be determined in papers II or III, our results suggest bacteria community composition and diversity should be considered in the interpretation of biodegradation half-lives since they are related to variability in biodegradation and to understand extrapolation from laboratory to the field. Finally in paper IV, it is investigated if the bacteria communities are affected by the OECD 308 test conditions. Changes in the bacteria communities in the sediment between the initial river community, the beginning and the end of the incubation, at high and a low concentrations are reported. Overall, 8% of bacteria genera increased or decreased in relative abundance in all comparisons, and it is unclear if these small changes in bacteria communities could have had an effect on the observed half-lives in paper III. This thesis contributes to the understanding of physical and biological factors influencing biodegradation and potential implications for risk assessment of organic micropollutants in rivers.


Advantages of formal verification are offset by the difficulties in the generating of good system models. This paper presents an improvement to the existing method, which generates models from a set of simulation traces. The proposed methodology aims to improve model precision by introducing new derivative based discretization method. Furthermore, a fine control over model fitness is provided via a notion of data rule mining, a novel approach to finding recurring patterns in the input data.


This cross-sectional study examined the association between psychosocial factors (mothers' perception of own and child weight, maternal self-efficacy in feeding and involvement of the mother-in-law in child-feeding) and controlling feeding practices (monitoring, restriction, pressure to eat and passive feeding). Participants were 531 affluent-Indian mothers in Australia and Mumbai with children aged 1–5 years. The psychosocial variables and feeding practices were measured using a combination of previously validated scales and study-developed items/scales. Multivariable regression analyses were stratified by sample (Australia and Mumbai) to investigate psychosocial factors related to the feeding practices, adjusting for covariates. Self-efficacy in feeding was associated with each of the feeding practices in at least one of the samples (β values between 0.1–0.2, p= 0.04–0.005). The greater involvement of the mother-in-law in child-feeding was related to the higher use of restriction in both samples (β values ≥0.2, p=0.02). In contrast, maternal weight perceptions were not consistently associated with feeding practices in either sample. The findings highlighted that unique (self-efficacy in feeding) and culturally-specific (involvement of the mother-in-law) variables not extensively researched within the context of child-feeding were important factors associated with Indian mothers' feeding practices. Greater consideration of these factors may be required when tailoring child-feeding interventions for Indian mothers.


Remote sensing has facilitated extraordinary advances in the modelling, mapping and understanding of vegetation in remote Island ecosystems. With the unforgiving responses of Island ecosystems to anthropogenic influences, it is paramount that managerial strategies are put into place and vegetation conditions are quantified. The Five Islands group has an extensive history of anthropogenic alteration, resulting in widespread change in vegetation dynamics. In recent years introduced vegetation has overpopulated Big Island – The largest of the Island Nature Reserve – and made it inhabitable for protected burrowing and nesting seabird populations. As a result NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) are employing a 5-year rehabilitation plan to restore the Islands to their vegetation pre-human interference, in hope of the return of native seabird populations. This project in particular will utilize raster and vector based spatial mapping methodologies to resolve the following management questions: 1) How many Lomandra longifolia seedlings have survived, what is the health of the remaining plants and is there a correlation to distance from invasive Carpobrotus sp. 2) What are ideal Lomandra sp. densitys for areas that still need planting; 3) What vegetation is present on all Five Islands; 4) How effective was the weed treatment And 5) What is the spread of the invasive Carpobrotus sp between 2017 and 2018. These management queries were answered through the acquisition of aerial imagery with a 4-band UAV drone camera followed by spatial analysis through ArcGIS technologies. Vector based spatial analysis included point digitization of Lomandra sp. as well as polygon digitization of exotic Carpobrotus sp. It was found that Lomandra sp. survival was low (19.74%). The digitization of exotic Carpobrotus sp. in 2017 and 2018 resulted in a calculated growth of 1.89m2/day and a correlation (r=0.47) was found between Lomandra sp. health and distance from Carpobrotus sp. The raster based supervised and unsupervised classifications of vegetation classes on the five Islands led to the distinguishing of vegetation into 5 vegetation classes determined by the dominating species. The weed treatment on Big Island was deemed highly effective with a loss of up to 88.89% of exotic species. Both raster and vector based methodologies were found to offer unique methods to spatially analyse vegetation ground coverage and can ultimately be used to solve broader managerial issues associated with delicate Island ecosystems.


The X-ray transient MAXI J1836-194 is a newly identified Galactic black hole binary candidate. As most X-ray transients, it was discovered at the beginning of an X-ray outburst. After the initial canonical X-ray hard state, the outburst evolved into a hard intermediate state and then went back to the hard state. The existing RATAN-600 radio monitoring observations revealed that it was variable on a time-scale of days and had a flat or inverted spectrum, consistent with optically thick synchrotron emission, possibly from a self-absorbed jet in the vicinity of the central compact object. We observed the transient in the hard state near the end of the X-ray outburst with the European very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) Network (EVN) at 5 GHz and the Chinese VLBI Network (CVN) at 2.3 and 8.3 GHz. The 8.3-GHz observations were carried out at a recording rate of 2048 Mbps using the newly developed Chinese VLBI data acquisition system, twice higher than the recording rate used in the other observations. We successfully detected the low-declination source with a high confidence level in both observations. The source was unresolved (=0.5 mas), which is in agreement with an au-scale compact jet.


BACKGROUND
To identify the epidemiology and risk factors with influence in the outcome and mortality of a series of bacteriemic patients.

MATERIAL AND METHODS
A prospective study of bloodstream infections with clinical significance detected in a secondary hospital of 650 beds over period from May 1998 to May 1999. The true bacteriemia was defined in basis to the criteria both the physician and microbiologist. A total of 16 variables were defined and categorized such as clinical-epidemiologic, intrinsic risk factor, extrinsic risk factor, outcome and survival. We used SPSS statistical package: For cuantitative variables we carried out with the mean with confidence interval of 95%, for cualitative variables: number and %. Univariate analysis of the results was carried out with the X2 test and t Student, the survival was expressed with Kaplan Meyer graphics and the logistic regression model.

RESULTS
A total of 320 positive blood cultures were studied but only 272 blood cultures were considered true bacteriemia in 259 patients. The calculated incidence of significant episodes of bacteriemia per 1000 admissions/year was 13. The overall mortality was 22% whereas death attributable to bacteriemia was 16%. The mean age was 66.9 years (IC 95% 65-69), 59% episodes occurred in men. The 78% episodes occurred in patients hospitalized in medical services. 52% episodes were of nosocomial infection and 48% of community acquired infection. According to the severity of the underlying disease, 15% had fatal diseases and 35% episodes occurred in patients without underlying disease. According to the univariant analysis, the variables which where significantly associated with greater risk death were: etiology (fungus), septic shock, the inadequate antibiotic therapy, presence of extrinsic factors (central intravenous catheter, performance of invasive procedures, previous antimicrobial therapy) and the hospital stay of less than 10 days. According to the multivariable analysis showed that the factors remaining independent predictors of mortality were: septic shock (p < 0.0001, OR: 8), inadequate antimicrobial therapy (p < 0.005, OR: 6.7), existence of two or more extrinsic risk factors (p < 0.04).

CONCLUSIONS
The presence of septic shock was the most important variable which influenced in the mortality in our serie, together with inappropriate antimicrobian therapy and the association of various extrinsic risk factors. These variables could be modified partly, for this reason the aggressive hemodynamic control and the early and appropriate antibiotic therapy would be the support of the successful bacteriemia management.


The aim of this paper is to estimate what amounts to recoverable loss under the United Nations Convention on the International Sale of Goods (the Convention). It will do so by surveying a number of critical issues, not all, posed by the law of damages under the Convention.

In particular, it will engage with Article 74, which is the main damages provision in the Convention. A number of authors have made significant contributions to the subject of damages under the Convention, but the impression remains that the subject has received less attention than is warranted by its theoretical and practical importance.

The paper therefore deals with important issues, not all of which have yet had the attention they merit from the case law and literature. It is a paper, moreover, that may be seen as representing the priorities of a common lawyer, without imposing on the Convention a common law reading of its provisions.


A bacterial disease characterized by the development of rectangular lesions on the leaves of konjac (Amorphophalus konjac Koch.) is described. The size of the lesions increased rapidly under humid conditions, resulting in leaf blight. Leaves with severe blight drooped and finally decayed. The disease was identified from the symptoms as bacterial leaf blight on the basis of the descriptions made by Uyeda in 1910. The causal agent was, however, different from Xanthomonas conjaci (Uyeda) Burkholder in many respects and was found to be a new subspecies of Pseudomonas pseudoalcaligenes based on the results of a direct comparison of pathological and biochemical properties. The name Pseudomonas pseudoalcaligenes subsp. konjaci subsp. nov. is proposed for the new subspecies, and strain K2 (= ATCC 33996 = PDDCC 7733) is designated the type strain.


ABSTRACT Although nearly every college offers a major in computer science, many computer science teachers at the secondary level have received little formal training. This paper presents details of a project that could make a significant contribution to national efforts to improve computer science education by combining teacher education and professional development. A computer science endorsement program will prepare preservice teachers in: basic skills and concepts, programming, algorithm design, computer system components, data bases, and social issues related to computer use. A series of professional development workshops will improve the content knowledge of current teachers, enabling them to teach computer science concepts and information technology fluency. INTRODUCTION Strengthening the quality of teachers and teaching has been central to efforts to improve American education in recent decades. America's competitive edge in today's world depends on an educational system capable of producing young people and citizens who are well prepared in science and mathematics, including computer science. The National Science Board (NSB) report, America's Pressing Challenge - Building a Stronger Foundation (2006), expresses concerns with the condition of U.S. pre-college education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Science and Engineering Indicators, (2006) reinforces these continuing and growing concerns. The reports concluded that there is a need to make drastic changes within the nation's science and mathematics classrooms. If not, our nation risks raising generations of students and citizens who do not know how to think critically and make informed decisions based on technical and scientific information. The two reports recommended that our nation must devote the necessary resources to revitalize our pre-college STEM education system. The NSB reports identified priorities for ensuring a world-class education in STEM for all Americans. The reports consistently point to the critical role of teachers in helping students to learn and achieve. Today's teachers are being called on to provide the nation's children with a highquality education and to teach in new ways. Many of the NSB recommendations focus on improving pre-college education in STEM. The following two recommendations coupled with the author's long interest in research have motivated this project: 1. Higher-education leaders should work to strengthen teacher-education programs to provide school teachers with a deeper understanding of the content of mathematics and science. 2. Teacher professional development is essential to improving teacher quality. Changes in teaching practices will occur if teachers have consistent and high-quality professional training. BACKGROUND Computer Science is an established discipline at the collegiate and postgraduate levels. In the United States alone, nearly every undergraduate college offers a major in computer science, and more than 100 universities offer Ph.D. programs in computer science. Together, these programs produce about 45,000 baccalaureate and 850 PhD degrees each year (Tucker, 2004). Oddly, the majority of secondary computer science teachers across the nation have received minimal or no formal training in computer science (Pontier, 2005). One important reason for this anomaly is the lack of formal computer science education programs at institutions of higher education across the nation. Another important reason is the lack of training opportunities for existing teachers. This article addresses these two reasons and highlights a planned project that aims at providing teacher education and teacher professional development experiences at Ashland University. The planned project envisions providing significant contributions to the national efforts aiming at advancing STEM education in the USA. Toward this vision, the project contributes to the development of exemplary undergraduate computer science education by focusing on the following two related main areas: 1. …


1. Upper eyelid position and velocity, and the electromyographic (EMG) activity of the orbicularis oculi muscle, were recorded bilaterally in alert cats during spontaneous, reflexively evoked, and conditioned eyelid movements. 2. Spontaneous blinks appeared randomly (0.2-0.5 per min) and consisted of a fast, large downward lid movement followed by a slower up phase. Blinks of smaller amplitude and slower velocity were also observed mainly accompanying behavioral movements, such as during peering and grimacing. 3. Eyelid response to air puffs applied to the cornea and tarsal lid skin consisted of a short-latency (9-16 ms), fast (up to 2,000 degrees/s) downward movement that lasted for 25-30 ms, followed by late, small downward sags that were sometimes still evident after stimulus offset. Blinks outlasted the duration of the stimulus by approximately 150 ms. Blinks elicited by flashes of light or tones showed longer latency (47.3 +/- 6.3 and 53.7 +/- 8.0 ms, mean +/- SD; respectively), smaller amplitude, and a quicker habituation than air-puff-evoked lid responses. 4. For the down phase of the blink, the peak velocity, but not its duration, increased linearly with blink amplitude. Because the rise time of the down phase remained constant, changes in blink amplitude seemed to be the result of increased blink velocity. The down phase of a typical 10 degrees blink was 10 times faster than the up phase of the same blink or than upward and downward lid saccades of the same amplitude. The peak velocity and duration of the up phases of reflex blinks and upward and downward lid saccades increased linearly with lid movement amplitude. 5. The initial down phase of air-puff-evoked blinks decreased in latency, increased in amplitude and peak velocity, and maintained the same rise time for increasing puff pressure. None of these parameters was dependent on puff duration. The duration of the blink also increased linearly with air puff duration. 6. The amplitude of air-puff-evoked blinks was inversely related to lid position, decreasing with further lid positions in the closing direction. In contrast, neither peak nor integrated EMG activity of the orbicularis oculi muscle was affected by lid position, being only a function of stimulus parameters and of the animal's level of alertness. 7. Air puffs > 20 ms and > 1 kg/cm2 evoked two successive bursts (R(ap) 1 and R(ap) 2) in the EMG activity of the orbicularis oculi muscle. Shorter and/or weaker stimuli evoked only the R(ap) 1 response.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)


Spatially localized phosphorus‐31 nuclear magnetic resonance (31P NMR) spectroscopy has been applied to the study of the normal canine myocardium to measure the relative content of high energy phosphates across the left ventricular wall. Transmural NMR data were acquired in five voxels spanning the wall of the left ventricle using the FLAX‐ISIS technique. The validity of the FLAX‐ISIS approach in acquiring localized spectra for transmural studies and in providing quantitative information from the localized spectra was examined rigorously by studies involving phantoms, intact rats, and the canine myocardium in vivo. The results indicated that (1) this technique yields spatially resolved spectra with partial overlap between adjacent voxels and virtually no overlap between every other voxel; (2) in the canine heart, signals from subepicardium, midwall, and sub‐endocardium can be detected separately without cross contamination; and (3) relative metabolite contents within a voxel and among voxels can be quantitated. Transmural 31P NMR spectra were acquired with cardiac gating on 29 separate animals either at early systole or late diastole, and at three different workloads with the heart rate peak systolic pressure product (RPP) increasing from 6000 mmHg/min to 35,000 mmHg/min. The data revealed that in the normal canine myocardium, the creatine phosphate (CP) content and the CP/ATP ratio was significantly lower in the subendocardium than in the subepicardium. ATP levels were transmurally constant. Both the CP content and the CP/ATP ratio measured for each voxel remained unaltered in relation to either the phase of the cardiac cycle or ∼ fourfold increase in workload. Free ADP levels calculated for each voxel showed that ADP was relatively higher in the subendocardium than the subepicardium, and in all transmural layers was higher than its apparent Km for oxidative phosphorylation. In this domain changes in ADP content with workload and MVO2 are not expected and were not observed. © 1990 Academic Press, Inc.


Forty-six cases of mesotheliomas of rats induced by asbestos, 2 cases of human mesotheliomas and 10 cases of adenocarcinomas were studied by light microscopy, electron microscopy, histochemical and immunohistochemical staining. The results indicated that mesothelioma probably originates from the multipotential subserosal cell which has the features of myofibroblast. In addition to the epithelial, fibrous and mixed types of mesothelioma classified by WHO, poorly differentiated type of mesothelioma can also be found in rats. Electron microscopy, histochemical and immunohistochemical staining are very helpful in differentiating mesotheliomas from adenocarcinomas.


Piroxicam is a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) used in the treatment of musculo-skeletal and joint disorders. The problem with this drug is its poor solubility in water and hence poor bioavailability after oral administration. In order to improve its solubility and dissolution behavior, hydrophilic additives such as starch, lactose, superdisintegrants including crospovidone (C.P), cross carmellose sodium (CCS), and sodium starch glycolate (SSG) were physically dry mixed with the drug by simple trituration. The improvement in the solubility in 0.1 N HCl was obtained as the amount of starch or lactose increased in the physical mixture, while for superdisintegrants, they further improve the solubility when they are present in small amount and the best improvement was gained with SSG. To study the effect of these additives on the dissolution of the drug, piroxicam capsules were prepared by simple trituration of the drug with starch or lactose or combination of lactose: starch (2:1)by weight with or with out the presence of SSG. The dissolution profiles of these preparations were analyzed using similarity factor f2. Best results were obtained when the drug was triturated with starch and SSG or with acombinaton of  lactose: starch (2:1) by weight with SSG . The dissolution profiles of these preparations were similar to that of the marketed Feldene ® Pfizer 20 mg capsules with f2 74.6 and 80.37 respectively.
Key words: Piroxicam, hydrophilic additives, superdisintegrant


For the processor working in the radiation environment in space, it tends to suffer from the single event effect on circuits and system failures, due to cosmic rays and high energy particle radiation. Therefore, the reliability of the processor has become an increasingly serious issue. The BCH-based error correction code can correct multi-bit errors, but it introduces large latency overhead. This paper proposes a hybrid error correction approach that combines BCH and EDAC to correct both multi-bit and single-bit errors for caches with low cost. The proposed technique can correct up to four-bit error, and correct single-bit error in one cycle. Evaluation results show that, the proposed hybrid error-correction scheme can improve the performance of cache accesses up to 20% compared to the pure BCH scheme.


Restaurant workers in the United States exhibit high levels of alcohol and drug use. However, there is a scant amount of qualitative research uncovering how and why restaurant employees use and abuse legal and illegal substances. Examining restaurant workers' self-reported risky health behaviors is important for improving employee and occupational quality of life. The purpose of this article is to investigate the health behaviors of restaurant workers and pathways to such outcomes. Specifically, this article explores the question of what social conditions and processes within restaurants relate to employee adverse health behaviors. Drawing on qualitative data collected between 2009 and 2014, this article focuses on a case study of restaurant employees, detailing their substance use and the ways in which they discuss and talk about taking health risks. An analysis of 52 in-depth, semistructured interviews with restaurant workers broadens the theoretical explanation for deviant health behaviors in the service sector. Results indicate that workplace characteristics—such as occupational socialization, norms and values, job stress and coping mechanisms, social networks and friendships, and personnel policies—permit and encourage substance use and risky health behaviors. Research implications include underscoring service industry adverse health behaviors and recommendations for positive social change in terms of personal, social, and job-related well-being.


The performance of electrically conductive CVD (called EC-CVD) diamond thick film possessing a high thermal diffusivity has been examined as an electrode for fine electrical discharge machining (EDM). The results indicate a possibility of zero wear in EDM as compared to copper and copper-tungsten (Cu-W) electrodes. It is particularly significant at short pulse EDM conditions, where the EC-CVD diamond electrodes showed increased machining efficiency and a remarkably low wear. In EDM of tungsten carbide, a very low electrode wear ratio of 0.3% was realized with the EC-CVD diamond electrode. Zero wear EDM could be achieved even for sharp V-shapes with included angles of 15 and 30° with V-shaped EC-CVD diamond electrodes. Thermal FEM analysis to examine the relation between the thermal diffusivity and temperature distribution at short pulse duration indicated lowest temperature on EC-CVD diamond electrode surface.


Background The limited exposure of pharmacy students to evidence of the role and impact of pharmacists does not contribute to encouraging the prospective evaluation and participation of pharmacy students in such research. Purpose The main objective was to assess the exposure of pharmacy students to the literature on the role and impact of pharmacists. The secondary objective was to assess their opinion of the website Impact-Pharmacie, an international platform for such evidence. Material and methods We developed a questionnaire of 29 questions designed to explore students' exposure to the literature on the role and impact of pharmacists. Students' opinions of the website Impact-Pharmacie were assessed with a scale from 1 to 10. We used an Annual Meeting of the International Pharmaceutical Students' Federation, held in Portugal 2014–08–05, to introduce a cohort of pharmacy students to the literature on the role and impact of pharmacists during a workshop. The website Impact-Pharmacie served as support for the presentation. We administered the questionnaire on a voluntary basis; descriptive statistics were performed. Results Thirty students participated in the survey (57% of participants). Respondents were from 15 different countries: Armenia, Austria, Canada, Egypt, France, Germany Portugal, Romania, Slovenia, Spain, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Tunisia, United Kingdom. Concerning exposure, 40% (12/30) of students had never read articles describing the role and impact of pharmacists, 43% (13/30) of students had read between 1 and 5 articles. Pharmacy students were in favour of using the best evidence on pharmacy practice models. Respondents considered the website Impact-Pharmacie to be clear (average score of 6.6), relevant (6.8) and applicable (5.9) for use in pharmacy curriculums. Conclusion Pharmacy students have limited exposure to the literature on the role and impact of the pharmacist. Students' found the website Impact-Pharmacie useful as a portal for this literature. Reference Guérin A, et al. Website on the impact of pharmacists. Eur J Hosp Pharm 2014;21:192 No conflict of interest.


Each year, Somali migrants around the world send approximately $1.3bn to Somalia in an expression of solidarity, faith, patriotism, and generosity. These flows represent a significant share of Somalia's economy and help to reduce Somalia's reliance on assistance from foreign governments and international organizations. Continued support from the Somali diaspora is essential for Somalia to successfully emerge from its protracted humanitarian emergency and political crisis and build the foundations for its long-term development. This briefing paper investigates the obstacles facing the free and secure flow of remittances from the United States to Somalia. Banks in the US perceive Somalia as a risky destination for money transfers. Many banks have closed money transfer operator (MTO) accounts, disrupting remittances from the US to Somalia. Further bank account closures could result in a remittance cutoff, which could endanger Somali lives and interrupt economic development in the country. If all the stakeholders—the Somali authorities, the US government, US banks, and Somali-American MTOs—make a concerted effort, they can prevent these disruptions and greatly enhance the security of the remittance system. This paper offers recommendations to achieve these goals.


The Sensory-Interactive Robotics Group at the National Bureau of Standards is producing PIPE, a pipelined image-processing engine, for research in low-level machine vision. PIPE processes sequences of images at field rates through a series of point and neighborhood operations. It is divided into a variable number of identical stages, each of which performs an independent set of operations on the image data stored in the stage. A stage control unit determines the sequence of operations performed within a stage on each image. This sequence is easily modified by a host computer during the inter-field interval when all of the stage control units can be totally reconfigured. Images flow through PIPE in several ways. In addition to the (standard pipeline) "forward" pathway, where an output image is sent to the next stage, an output image can also be sent to the same stage via a "recursive" pathway and to the previous stage via a "retrograde" pathway. As a result, PIPE can support relaxation operations, temporal neighborhood operations, and other local operations. Several processing modes are available in PIPE in addition to the usual "SIMD" mode of pipelined processors. In an "MIMD" mode, one of several operations is performed on a region of interest which can be defined by the host device or by previous image operations. PIPE also supports variable resolution pyramids where an image is compressed or expanded as it passes between stages.


The mammalian lamina-associated polypeptide 2 (LAP2) gene encodes six isoforms (LAP2alpha, beta, delta, epsilon, gamma, zeta) that are synthesised from alternatively spliced mRNAs. The mammalian LAP2alpha is one of the predominant isoforms and localised in the nucleoplasm whereas LAP2beta, delta, epsilon, and gamma are integral membrane proteins of the inner nuclear membrane. We have analysed the LAP2 gene structure of the zebrafish Danio rerio as an attractive lower vertebrate model organism. The zebrafish LAP2 (ZLAP2) gene without regulatory sequences spans approximately 19 kb of genomic DNA. It contains 15 exons that encode the isoforms ZLAP2beta, gamma, and omega which are localised in the inner nuclear membrane. By radiation hybrid mapping, we have located the gene onto linkage group 4 between EST markers fc01g04 (213.97cR) and fb49f01 (215.69cR). The identification of a chicken genomic clone comprising the complete coding region of the avian LAP2 gene enabled us to compare the LAP2 gene structure amongst vertebrates. In contrast to the mammalian LAP2 gene, the zebrafish and the chicken sequences do not encode for an alpha-isoform. In parallel we searched for an alpha-isoform in birds using polyclonal and monoclonal LAP2 antibodies specific for the common evolutionary conserved aminoterminal domain present in all isoforms. We detected LAP2beta as the predominant isoform but no LAP2alpha in tissues of 10-day-old chicken embryos and cultured chicken fibroblasts thus confirming the genomic analysis. The comparison of each zebrafish and chicken LAP2 exon with the corresponding exons of the human LAP2 gene demonstrates that the degree of identity at the amino acid level is much higher between the human and chicken than between the human and zebrafish sequences. By Blast search with the nucleotide and amino acid sequences of the human LAP2alpha, we did not find any significant homologies in databases of the zebrafish and chicken sequences. Our data suggest that LAP2alpha is a novelty of mammals.


Since 1998, Congress has provided funds to ERS to study and evaluate the Nation's domestic food and nutrition assistance programs. ERS has become the premier source of food and nutrition assistance research in the United States, sponsoring over 600 publications on a wide range of topics related to food and nutrition assistance. This report, prepared at the 10-year anniversary of the FANRP program, highlights some of the key research conducted during the program's first decade.


ABSTRACT Digital simulation models have become increasingly important to innovation processes. When used within organisations intent on innovating products, processes or services, the affordances of these technologies can enable the possibility to explain, experiment, and predict complex systems. As complex tools, however, models must become integrated into a social context characterised by differences in technical knowledge about when, how, and why the models are useful. In this paper, we draw on our experiences studying the labour of digital modelling work over the past 10 years to discuss some of the important social mechanisms through which models come to be trusted by stakeholders, and, consequently, integrated into innovation processes. By comparing three very different contexts we show that the work of trust-building requires modellers to create appeals to the credibility of the model's analysis, the utility of its outputs, and to negotiate unavoidable political issues that emerge from differing values among parties in the innovation process. Revealing this labour positions models as social objects, and leads us to provide practical recommendations for scholars and practitioners who hope to use modelling as a key process for digital innovation.


Seymour's Splitter Theorem is a basic inductive tool for dealing with $3$-connected matroids. This paper proves a generalization of that theorem for the class of $2$-polymatroids. Such structures include matroids, and they model  both sets of points and lines in a projective space and sets of edges in a graph.  A series compression in such a structure is an analogue of contracting an edge of a graph that is in a series pair. A $2$-polymatroid $N$ is an s-minor of a $2$-polymatroid $M$ if $N$ can be obtained from $M$ by a sequence of contractions, series compressions, and  dual-contractions, where the last are modified deletions. The main result proves that if $M$ and $N$ are $3$-connected $2$-polymatroids such that $N$ is an s-minor of $M$, then $M$ has a $3$-connected  s-minor  $M'$ that has an s-minor isomorphic to $N$ and has $|E(M)| - 1$ elements unless $M$ is a whirl or the cycle matroid of a wheel. In the exceptional case, such an $M'$ can be found with $|E(M)| - 2$ elements.


In the wake of President Trump's acquittal in the Senate impeachment trial, the United States will need to hold a presidential election in unprecedented circumstances. Never before has an incumbent president run for reelection after the opposing party in Congress has declared that the fairness of the election cannot be "assured" as long as the incumbent is permitted on the ballot. This uniquely acute challenge to holding an election that the public will accept as valid follows other stresses to electoral legitimacy unseen before 2016. The Russian attack on the election that year caused Americans to question their capacity to hold free and fair elections in a way that Americans had not questioned previously.

Given these challenges, this essay tackles the basic concept of what it means for the outcome of an election to be valid. It turns out that, because of the way American history has unfolded, this basic concept is contested now although it had been settled previously. Current circumstances require renewing a shared conception of electoral validity. Otherwise, participants in electoral competition — winners and losers alike — cannot know whether or not the result qualifies as authentically democratic. Accordingly, after reviewing the history that has led to the present difficulties, this essay offers a renewed conception of electoral validity and both explains the theoretical basis for this renewed conception and then applies it to some of the most salient threats to electoral validity that are foreseeable in this year's and future elections.

In brief, the proposed standard of electoral validity distinguishes sharply between (1) direct attacks on the electoral process that negate voter choice and (2) indirect attacks that improperly manipulate voter choice. Direct attacks undermine electoral validity, whereas indirect attacks do not. It is essential, however, that the category of direct attacks encompasses the disenfranchisement of eligible voters, which prevents them from casting a ballot, as well as the falsification of votes reported in the tallies of counted ballots.


Administrators of kinesiology departments (N = 101) completed a survey that requested information about online education, funding for online courses, and administrator perceptions of the rigor and future of online courses. More master's (n = 18) than undergraduate degree (n = 9) programs were totally online. Forty-nine percent of institutions provide funding to faculty and 37% provide funding to departments for online offerings. Respondents indicated concern about the rigor of online courses. Sixty-one percent indicated that academic rigor is a concern of faculty, 42% did not feel that totally online courses were as rigorous as face-to-face classes, and 65% indicated tests for online courses are not proctored. Despite concerns, 76% indicated they expect to have some or many online courses in the next 5-10 years. Few respondents indicated they expected to have no online courses or almost totally online delivery of courses. Online delivery of instruction is impacting kinesiology, and expansion of online edu...


Organic carbon (OC) inputs, stores and processing underpin river functioning. We examined patterns in OC reservoirs (total organic carbon, TOC), suspended OC, drifting coarse particulate OC (drift OC), organic debris and the biomass of in-stream primary producers in five geographically proximate small rivers in south-eastern Australia during base-flow conditions. Despite differences in the extent of land-use conversion (native forest-to-pasture) and geomorphology among all sites, we found greater within-river than 'within-land-use' similarities in OC reservoirs. Our predictions regarding the relationships between distant v. proximate land-use and the OC reservoirs were mostly not confirmed. Riparian canopy cover was correlated with the mass of organic debris but not with other OC reservoirs. Our predictions regarding longitudinal patterns in rivers were also not confirmed. Rivers draining catchments with conservation land-use only did not show consistent patterns that were different from rivers draining a combination of conservation and grazing land. Variability in the extent of land converted to other uses was not necessarily associated with greater longitudinal variability in OC reservoirs. Our results suggest: (1) strong within-catchment controls of TOC concentration that are maintained despite a certain level of catchment impairment and (2) between-river differences in TOC at a local scale as great as continental scale differences.


In this paper we develop a general method to enumerate the congruences of finite summations $\sum_{k=0}^{p-1} \frac{a_k}{m^k} \!\pmod{p}$ and $\sum_{k=0}^{p-1-h} \frac{a_k a_{k+h}}{B^k} \!\pmod{p}$ for the the infinite sequence $\{a_n\}_{n\ge 0}$ with generating functions $(1+x f(x))^\frac{N}{2}$, where $f(x)$ is an integer polynomial and $N$ is an odd integer with $|N|< p$. We also enumerate the congruences of some similar finite summations involving generating functions $\frac{1-\alpha x -\sqrt{1-2(\alpha+\beta)x + Bx^2}}{\beta x}$ and $\frac{1-\alpha x-\sqrt{1-2\alpha x+(\alpha^2-4\beta)x^2}}{2\beta x^2}$.


Chapter 1: Titanium Nitrides: Synthesis and Reactivity as Powerful Nucleophiles. In this chapter we explore the synthesis and reactivity of a titanium nitride anion complex [?2-K(OEt2)]2[(PN)2Ti≡N]2, supported by two phosphino anilido ligands (PN− = (N(2-(diisopropylphosphino)-4-methylphenyl)-2,4,6-trimethylanilide). Reactivity studies discussed include the synthesis of a series of imide moieties including rare examples such as methylimido, borylimido, phosphonylimido, and a parent imido. For the parent imide, using various weak acids allowed us to narrow the pKa range of the NH group to be between 26–36. The synthesis of the nitride was accomplished by reductively promoted elimination of N2 from the azide precursor (PN)2TiN3, whereas reductive splitting of N2 could not be achieved using the dinitrogen complex (PN)2Ti=N=N=Ti(PN)2 and a strong reductant. Complete N-atom transfer reactions could also be observed when the nitride complex was treated with ClC(O)tBu and OCCPh2 to form NCtBu and KNCCPh2, respectively, along with the terminal oxo complex, (PN)2Ti≡O, which was also characterized. A combination of solid state 15N NMR (MAS) in collaboration with Prof. Gang Wu and theoretical studies in collaboration with Prof. Balazs Pinter describe the shielding effect of the counter cation in the nitride anion as well as the discrete salt [K(18-crown-6)][(PN)2Ti≡N] and the putative anion [(PN)2Ti≡N]−, and also to probe the origin of the highly downfield 15N NMR resonance when shifting from dimer to monomer or to a terminal nitride (discrete salt). The upfield shift of the 15N nitride resonance in the 15N NMR spectrum was found to be linked to the K+ induced electronic structural change of the titanium-nitride functionality by using a combination of MO analysis and quantum chemical analysis of the corresponding shielding tensors. Chapter 2: Titanium Nitrides: Reactivity Spanning from the Generation of Nitridyl Radicals to Electrophilic Behavior. The titanium nitride complex discussed in Chapter 1 is instead showcased as a potent source of a nitridyl radical upon oxidation of the nitride with trityl chloride or iodine. This chapter presents a thorough mechanistic study that shows this nitridyl radical is capable of abstracting H-atoms from the PN ligand scaffold to make the rare parent imido discussed in Chapter 1. Alternatively, the nitridyl moiety is competent at oxidation of the phosphorous arm of the PN− ligand to form an asymmetric NPN' scaffold. A thorough reactivity study to detail all aspects of this mechanism is presented. Eventually, all intermediates result in the formation of halide complexes, (NPN')(PN)TiX (X = I, Cl), based on two mechanistic pathways. In addition to the oxidation of the nitride, we show that this nitridyl radical can also be formed from photolysis of the azido complex (PN)2TiN3, originally presented in Chapter 1. In addition to reactivity, we also explore matrix EPR studies of (PN)2TiN3 in collaboration with the de Bruin group. From a different reactivity viewpoint, we showcase that the titanium nitride can behave electrophilically in reactivity with isocyanides to form Ti(II) complexes [(PN)2Ti(NCNR)][K(solv)], where the R = Ad or tBu and the interaction of the countercation varies depending on the use of DME (not charge separated) or kryptofix (completely charge separated species). A discussion of the characterization of these complexes, complete with a discussion of other known Ti(II) chemistry is presented. Chapter 3: Extending Reactivity: Synthesis of A Molecular Zirconium Nitrido Superbase and A Transient Uranium Nitrido. In this chapter, the preparation and characterization of a zirconium complex having a terminally bound parent imide motif, (PN)2Zr≡NH is discussed, along with the zirconium nitride complex {(PN)2Zr≡N[μ2-Li(THF)]}2. This latter complex represents the first structurally characterized terminally bound Zr nitride complex. (PN)2Zr≡NH was prepared by reduction of trans-(PN)2Zr(N3)2 with KC8. Isotopic labeling and spectroscopic studies are described, which were prepared using the respective 15N enriched isotopologues, whereas solid-state structural studies confirmed some of the shortest Zr≡N distances known to date (Zr≡NH, 1.830(3) Å; Zr≡N‒, 1.822(2) Å). It was found that the nitride in {(PN)2Zr≡N[μ2-Li(THF)]}2 is super basic and in the range of −36 to −43 pKb units. Computational studies in collaboration with Prof. Balazs Pinter have been applied to probe the bonding and structure for this new class of zirconium-nitrogen multiple bonds. In addition to this study, the synthesis of U(III) and U(IV) complexes supported by the PN ligand is also discussed, which was conducted in collaboration with the Schelter and Baik labs. New complexes include the halide starting materials, (PN)2UI and (PN)2UCl2, which both yield (PN)2U(N3)2 when treated with NaN3. When reduced with potassium graphite, the azido complex produces a putative, transient uranium−nitrido moiety that undergoes an intramolecular C−H activation to form a rare example of a parent imido complex, [K(THF)3][(PN)UI(?NH)[iPr2P(C6H3Me)N(C6H2Me2CH2)]]. Select calculations performed in collaboration with the Baik group are also presented. Chapter 4: The (First) Structural Characterization of a Terminal Titanium Methylidene. The first example of a structurally characterized mononuclear, terminal titanium methylidene, (PN)2Ti=CH2, is presented in this chapter via one-electron oxidation of (PN)2Ti(CH3), followed by deprotonation using an ylide reagent or by H-atom abstraction using an aryloxyl radical. The use of the PN− ligand to stabilize this rare scaffold supports the molecular orbital discussion in Chapter 1, which shows this ligand scaffold to enforce an ideal orbital overlap for the formation of metal-ligand multiple bonds. The Ti=C distance was found to be 1.939(3) Å by a single crystal X-ray diffraction study. Multinuclear and multidimensional NMR spectroscopic experiments revealed the methylidene to engage in long-range interactions with protons on the ligand framework. Decomposition of the methylidene moiety in solution is also discussed. Computational studies in collaboration with the Baik lab are also presented, which showed that the Ti=C bond displays all the hallmarks of a prototypical Schrock-carbene. Chapter 5: Stabilizing Unusual Oxidation States with the PN Ligand. This section details the final story of reactivity of our early transition metal complexes with the PN− ligand, in which we use this scaffold to stabilize highly reactive oxidation states. Reduction of the group 4 transition metal precursors (PN)2MCl2 (M = Zr or Hf), both readily prepared by transmetallation of 2 equiv. of LiPN with MCl4(THF)2 with a slight excess of KC8, resulted in the isolation of the trivalent complexes (PN)2MCl (M = Zr or Hf). Structural characterization of Zr and Hf (III) complexes is extremely rare, especially in non-metallocene scaffolds. All complexes were identified by solid-state X-ray diffraction analysis. For the trivalent complexes, access to these rare oxidation states called for use of EPR to determine the location of the radical electron. Low temperature X-band EPR spectroscopy conducted in collaboration with the Meyer group allowed for the identification of these metal-centered d1 radicals. A comparison with the isostructural and isoelectronic but more stable (PN)2TiCl is also presented. Chapter 6: Phosphaethynolate Chemistry of Scandium to Stabilize Diisophosphaethynolate. This chapter takes a marked turn towards the experiments conducted with the phosphaethynolate reagent, Na(OCP)(dioxane)2.5. At the outset, a brief summary of the reactivity of this reagent with electropositive metals is described. Next, the reactivity with a do Sc precursor supported by nacnac ligands (nacnac− = [ArNC(CH3)]2CH) is described. The unprecedented OCPPCO ligand, diisophosphaethynolate, is formed via reductive coupling of a Sc−OCP precursor. Upon reduction with KC8, isolation of the dinuclear complex, namely [K(OEt2)]2[(nacnac)Sc(OAr)]2(OCPPCO), is observed, leading to a unique motif [OCPPCO]4−, stabilized by two scandium centers. Detailed NMR spectra of all complexes as well as IR and single-crystal X-ray studies were obtained to fully elucidate the nature of these complexes in solution as well as in the solid state. Theoretical calculations in collaboration with Prof. Balazs Pinter were used to probe the electronic structure and orbitals responsible for the bonding interactions in the Sc−OCPPCO−Sc skeleton, with comparison to to the linear mode observed in the precursor. Chapter 7: Phosphaethynolate Chemistry of Titanium to Form a Ti2P2 Complex. Looking to the right, we describe the reactivity of the phosphaethynolate reagent with the d1 precursor (nacnac)TiCl(OAr), which when treated with –OCP forms the complex [(nacnac)Ti(OAr)]2(?2:?2,?2-P2). The exact mechanism of this reductive decarbonylation of the phosphaethynolate ion, which serves as a P atom source, is discussed. This complex is the first structurally characterized Group 4 transition metal P2 complex. Additionally, its structure reveals the rhombic Ti2P2 core is essentially planar (as opposed to an expected butterfly shaped core), which when paired with alternating short and long Ti−P bonds, implies some degree of multiple bonding character between the Ti–P and P–P sites. In order to study the planar nature of the core, as well as the origin of the highly downfield 31P NMR spectroscopic signal, computational studies in collaboration with Prof. Balazs Pinter are reported. Chapter 8: Phosphaethynolato Chemistry of Vanadium: Challenging the Binding Mode of –OCP in Early Transition Metals. The last chapter to discuss the reactivity of –OCP, this chapter will focus on the use of the d2 precursor (nacnac)VCl(OAr). From many studies with –OCP, transmetallation has largely resulted in coordination according to classical Lewis acid–base theory. That is, for harder early transit


Abstract This article explores the removal or exclusion in the late 1940s of people in interracial marriages from two corners of the newly formed Commonwealth of Nations, Australia and Britain's southern African colonies. The stories of Ruth and Sereste Khama, exiled from colonial Botswana, and those of Chinese refugees threatened with deportation and separation from their white Australian wives, reveal how legal rearticulations in the immediate postwar era created new, if quixotic, points of opposition for ordinary people to make their voices heard. As the British Empire became the Commonwealth, codifying the freedoms of the imperial subject, and ideas of universal human rights "irrespective of race, color, or creed" slowly emerged, and claims of rights long denied seemed to take on a renewed meaning. The sanctity of marriage and family, which played central metaphorical and practical roles for both the British Empire and the United Nations, was a primary motor of contention in both cases, and was mobilized in both metaphorical and practical ways to press for change. Striking similarities between our chosen case studies reveal how ideals of imperial domesticity and loyalty, and the universalism of the new global "family of man," were simultaneously invoked to undermine discourses of racial purity. Our analysis makes a significant contribution to studies of gender and empire, as well as the history of human rights, an ideal which in the late 1940s was being vernacularized alongside existing forms of claim-making and political organization in local contexts across the world.


Multiple-valued Boolean minimization is proposed as a technique for identifying and extracting good Boolean factors which can be used as strong divisors to minimize the literal count and the area of a multilevel logic network. Given a two-level logic function, a subset of inputs to the function is selected such that the number of good Boolean factors contained in this subset of inputs is large. If the targeted implementation is a set of interconnected PLAs, the different cube combinations given by the subset of inputs are re-encoded to reduce the number of product terms in the logic function. A novel algorithm for the re-encoding is given that is based on the notion of partial satisfaction of constraints. Algorithms have been developed that identify a set of factors which maximally decrease the literal count of the logic network when they are used as strong divisors. Results obtained on several benchmark examples that illustrate the efficacy of the techniques are presented.<<ETX>>


Introduction
The emergence of drug resistance mutations (DRMs) has been a major threat for successful lifelong combination antiretroviral therapy (cART), especially for HIV-vertically infected children within the context of the prevention of mother-to-child transmission (PMTCT). This study aimed to evaluate DRMs amongst immune competent treatment-naïve children in Cameroon.

Methods
A cross-sectional study was conducted between 2015 and 2016 amongst 55 proxy consented HIV-1 positive children, aged 9 months to 6 years. They were all immune competent, cART naïve and with unknown history of PMTCT. CD4 cell counts and genotypic drug resistance testing were performed using standard methods.

Results
Levels of DRMs to protease (PR) inhibitors (PIs), nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs) and non-NRTIs were 27.6%, 3.7% and 40.7%, respectively. Only minor DRMs were observed for PR. The observed mutations for NRTI were K65R, T215I and K219E (33.0% each) and for NNRTI: V106M, Y181C and Y188H (6.0% each). Only minor accessory mutations were found in the integrase (IN) region.

Conclusion
Despite widely available cART we still observe naïve HIV children, especially from the rural communities. We observe that a proportion of study participants had HIV-1 drug resistance associated mutations (RAMs). Data generated could help strengthen the current PMTCT programmes within the country. There is a need to upscale approaches for drug resistance testing for children in Cameroon and many other resource-limited settings.


We present a new set of non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) tools for processing video. Our approach is to treat the video as a space-time volume of image data. Previous tools to process video for an impressionist effect have painted collections of two-dimensional strokes on each successive frame of video. In contrast, we create a set of "rendering solids." Each rendering solid is a function defined over an interval of time; when evaluated at a particular time within that interval, it provides parameters necessary for rendering an NPR primitive. Rendering solids can be rendered interactively, giving immediate feedback to an artist along with the ability to modify styles in real time.Benefits of our approach include: a more unified treatment of the video volume's spatial and temporal dimensions; interactive, aesthetic flexibility and control; and the extension of stylized rendering techniques for video beyond the impressionist styles previously explored. We show example styles inspired by impressionist, cubist, and abstract art of the past century.


In a weather prediction, information flows from the initial conditions to a later prediction. The uncertainty in the initial conditions implies that such a flow should be quantified with tools from probability theory. Using several recent developments in information theory, this flow is explored using a moderateresolution primitive equation atmospheric model with simplified physics. Consistent with operational experience and other methodologies explored in the literature, such as singular vectors, it is found that the midlatitude flow is mainly in an easterly direction. At upper levels, the flow is primarily steered by advection of the jet stream; however, at low levels there is clear evidence that synoptic dynamics are important and this makes the direction of flow more complex. Horizontal rather than vertical flow is generally found to be more important, although there was evidence for propagation from the mid- to upper troposphere of zonal velocity. As expected, as the length of the prediction increases, more remote areas become important to local predictions. To obtain reliable/stable results, rather large ensembles are used; however, it is found that the basic qualitative results can be obtained with ensembles within present practical reach. The present method has the advantage that it makes no assumptions concerning linearity or ensemble Gaussianicity.


In this article we conduct an experimental study of the enhanced distributed channel access mechanism of the upcoming 802.11e standard. The main focus of the study is on two applications of EDCA: traffic engineering and service guarantees. With traffic engineering we aim at distributing the bandwidth in the WLAN according to a given throughput allocation criterion. With service guarantees the objective is to ensure that the performance metrics (throughput and delay) experienced by a station meet a given quality criterion. We build a testbed with wireless cards that support a substantial subset of the EDCA functionality and analyze performance against different sets of requirements. Experimental results show that EDCA can effectively be used for traffic engineering purposes. The goal of providing service guarantees with EDCA is shown to be more challenging; we identify future research directions that need to be addressed in order to achieve this goal.


Within liberal political theory there is a general sense that death's meaning should be kept strictly private, 'quarantined' from political life; yet whether we are comfortable with the idea or not, attitudes about death powerfully shape how individuals engage in political relationships and practices. Mortal Democracy thus provides a way of acknowledging death directly as a part of contemporary political life, one amenable to democratic practices. I develop three distinct political accounts of death and its political meaning from Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, and Hannah Arendt; each read alongside an interlocutor from ancient Greek thought. The first chapter "The Wisdom of Silenus: Friedrich Nietzsche and The Politics of Death" develops a Nietzschean adaptation of Homeric "beautiful death," where persons are capable of transforming the contingent, painful experiences of death into moments of enacted personal or shared value. The second chapter, "A Vocation Unto Death: Max Weber, Modernity & Soldierly Politics" examines Weber's turn towards an absolutist soldierly model of meaningful death as a part of modern political life. I argue this view of death artificially suppresses the grounds of democratic compromise and amplifies extremist political conviction; a point I demonstrate by juxtaposition with the Periklean Funeral Oration from Thucydides. Chapter 3, titled "Death on the Stage: Hannah Arendt and the Disappearances of Death," develops an account of death alongside Aristotle's Poetics, where death "appears" as an absence subject to plural interpretations and narratives, yet retains a fundamentally hidden, private aspect. In the final chapter, "Mortal Ignorance: Socrates' Apology for Death," I develop a political orientation towards death through a critical reading of Plato's Apology. I argue that death's plural and contested meanings need not be quarantined from public life, but rather the polity can inoculate against death's excesses through a deliberately inclusive, open-ended, orientation towards death that takes its structure from the aporia at the heart of Socrates defense: mortal ignorance. I argue this perspective provides a critical vantage point from which we might acknowledge death's plural, contested place as a part of democratic political life. Doing so, we stand to more fully recognize the variety of perspectives and capacities we have before death. We also gain powerful tools for resisting those extremist and violent politics which have traditionally leveraged death's meaning for political ends, and which pose an increasing threat to democratic political practices in our contemporary world.


Purpose

This paper aims to present a new vision-based approach for both the identification and the estimation of the relative distance between the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and power pylon. Autonomous power line inspection using small UAVs, has been the focus of many research works over the past couple of decades. Automatic detection of power pylons is a primary requirement to achieve such autonomous systems. It is still a challenging task due to the complex geometry and cluttered background of these structures.

Design/methodology/approach

The identification solution proposed, avoids the complexity of classic object recognition techniques. Instead of searching the whole image for the pylon template, low-level geometric priors with robust colour attributes are combined to remove the pylon background. The depth estimation, on the other hand, is based on a new concept which exploits the ego-motion of the inspection UAV to estimate its distance from the pylon using just a monocular camera.

Findings

An algorithm is tested on a quadrotor UAV, using different kinds of metallic power pylons. Both simulation and real-world experiments, conducted in different backgrounds and illumination conditions, show very promising results.

Research limitations/implications

In the real tests carried out, the Inertial Navigation System (INS) of the vehicle was used to estimate its ego-motion. A more reliable solution should be considered for longer distances, by either fusing INS and global positioning system data or using visual navigation techniques such as visual odometry.

Originality/value

A simple yet efficient solution is proposed that allows the UAV to reliably identify the pylon, with still a low processing cost. Considering a monocular solution is a major advantage, given the limited payload and processing power of such small vehicles.


As part of the Medical Research Council randomized trial of vitamin supplementation in the prevention of neural tube defects (NTDs), maternal serum alpha-fetoprotein (AFP) was available for 19 NTD pregnancies. Each of these was matched with four unaffected controls, by maternal age, participating centre, and duration of sample storage. The samples came from women whose gestational age ranged from 6 to 14 completed weeks. The median AFP level in the affected pregnancies was 1.2 multiples of the median value in unaffected pregnancies of the same gestational age (95 per cent confidence interval (CI) 0.83-1.59). This confirmed the view that serum AFP measurement is of no practical value in the detection of NTDs in the first trimester of pregnancy. The study also showed that folic acid supplementation, used as a method of preventing NTDs, had no effect on the concentrations of maternal serum AFP up to 14 weeks of pregnancy.


With the framework of the theory of planned behavior (TPB), this study explores factors explaining the motivations of women to use mail-order birth control. An online survey was conducted with 603 women aged 18-44 from states in the southern and midwestern US. Five in-depth phone interviews supplemented the numeric and verbatim data provided by the survey. Our study finds that women with positive attitudes toward purchasing birth control online are more likely to use such a service. Perceived norms also have a positive impact on their intention to purchase mail-order birth control. Women with prior experience of communicating with online doctors are more likely to order birth control online. However, women have mixed views on the advantages and disadvantages of online doctor-patient communication, insurance coverage, and the reliability of telemedicine. Previous strategies for promoting mail-order birth control have focused on reducing financial burdens or saving time. There is little to no research that addressed psychological factors that affect the purchase behavior of mail-order birth control. This study helps us better understand how women's attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived barriers influence the use of mail-order birth control services.


The Caslon Analytics profile on trademarks discusses the history of trademark protection, highlights academic and other resources, identifies registration processes and databases, and notes questions regarding geographical indications and marks based on sound or smell.


Understanding the patterns and causes of differential structural stability is an area of major interest for the study of language change and evolution. It is still debated whether structural features have intrinsic stabilities across language families and geographic areas, or if the processes governing their rate of change are completely dependent upon the specific context of a given language or language family. We conducted an extensive literature review and selected seven different approaches to conceptualising and estimating the stability of structural linguistic features, aiming at comparing them using the same dataset, the World Atlas of Language Structures. We found that, despite profound conceptual and empirical differences between these methods, they tend to agree in classifying some structural linguistic features as being more stable than others. This suggests that there are intrinsic properties of such structural features influencing their stability across methods, language families and geographic areas. This finding is a major step towards understanding the nature of structural linguistic features and their interaction with idiosyncratic, lineage- and area-specific factors during language change and evolution.


The metabolic lifetime of mRNA can be specified by specific cis-acting elements within mRNA. One type of element is an adenylate- and uridylate-rich element (ARE) found in the 3' untranslated region of many highly unstable mRNAs for mammalian early-response genes (ERGs). Among the better-characterized members of the ERG family are certain genes encoding nuclear transcription factors. Of particular significance was the finding that their mRNAs decay rapidly with kinetics similar to those of c-fos mRNA. Our previous studies of the c-fos ARE-directed mRNA decay have revealed the existence in this ARE of two structurally distinct and functionally interdependent domains, termed domain I and domain II. We proposed that the c-fos ARE-directed decay is a two-step mechanism in which rapid shortening of the poly(A) tail leads to the decay of the mRNA body and further hypothesized that this is a general mechanism by which the ERG AREs mediate rapid mRNA degradation. To test this hypothesis and to further address the generality of the critical structural characteristics within the c-fos ARE, the RNA-destabilizing functions of more than 10 different AU-rich sequences from various nuclear transcription factor mRNAs have been tested. Consistent with the above-mentioned hypothesis is the observation that mRNAs carrying the functional AREs display a biphasic decay, which is characteristic of the proposed two-step mechanism. Our results indicated that the presence of AUUUA pentanucleotides in an AU-rich region does not always guarantee an RNA-destabilizing function for this region. Our results also led to the identification of a novel class of AU-rich destabilizing elements which contains no AUUUA pentanucleotide. The results of sequence comparison and functional tests revealed that a continuous U-rich sequence is a unique feature among the functional AREs. Finally, our experiments further showed that the c-fos ARE domain II has an RNA decay-enhancing ability upon its fusion to heterologous AU-rich regions and defined for the first time an RNA decay-enhancing element, which we termed the RDE element.


Six species of marine turtles occur in the Azores Archipelago. The loggerhead, Caretta caretta (Linnaeus, 1758), is by far the most common species and is being constantly monitored and tagged by a joint project between the University of the Azores and the University of Florida since 1989. With the implementation of the tuna fishery observers (for dolphin safe seals), an increment of sea turtle reports has been verified as expected. The leather back turtle, Dermochelys coriacea (Vandelli, 1761) is the second most observed species in the Azores' EEZ, a fact probably also linked to the tuna fishery observation programme. All other species are occasional/vagrant albeit the green turtle, Chelonia mydas (Linnaeus, 1758) is more commonly seen than the others. Historically, sea turtles were occasionally taken for food in specific fishing villages and ports. Since 1986, sea turtles, as well as all marine mammals, are fully protected in the Azores although human-related activities (e.g. plastics, discarded fishing gear) do generate serious injuries and deaths.
 In this paper, we update sea turtle species' checklist for the Azores and give detailed geographic coordinates on their known occurrences.


Gastrointestinal (GI) opportunistic infections (OIs) are commonly encountered at various stages of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) disease. In view of the suppressive nature of the virus and the direct contact with the environment, the GI tract is readily accessible and is a common site for clinical expression of HIV. The subject is presented based on information obtained by electronic searches of peer-reviewed articles in medical journals, Cochrane reviews and PubMed sources. The spectrum of GI OIs ranges from oral lesions of Candidiasis, various lesions of viral infections, hepatobiliary lesions, pancreatitis and anorectal lesions. The manifestations of the disease depend on the level of immunosuppression, as determined by the CD4 counts. The advent of highly active antiretroviral therapy has altered the pattern of presentation, resorting mainly to features of antimicrobial-associated colitis and side effects of antiretroviral drugs. The diagnosis of GI OIs in HIV/ acquired immunodeficiency syndrome patients is usually straightforward. However, subtle presentations require that the physicians should have a high index of suspicion when given the setting of HIV infection.


Funding information Pacific Islands Oceanic Fisheries Management Project; 10th European Development Fund; Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade; New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade; CSIRO Julius Award Abstract The western and central Pacific Ocean supports the world's largest tuna fisheries. Since the 1990s, the purse‐seine fishery has increasingly fished in association with fish aggregating devices (FADs), which has increased catches of juvenile bigeye and yellowfin tunas and vulnerable bycatch species (e.g., sharks). This has raised concerns regarding the sustainability of these species' populations and the supporting ecosystem, but may provide improved food security of Pacific Island nations through utilisation of FAD‐associated byproduct species (e.g., wahoo). An ecosystem model of the western Pacific Warm Pool Province was used to explore the potential ecological impacts of varying FAD fishing effort (±50% or 100%) over 30 years. The ecosystem has undergone a significant change in structure since 1980 from heavy exploitation of top predators (e.g., tunas) and "fishing up the food web" of high‐trophic‐level non‐ target species. The ecosystem appeared resistant to simulated fishing perturbations, with only modest changes (<10%) in the biomass of most groups, although some less productive shark bycatch species decreased by up to 43%, which had a subsequent positive effect on several byproduct species, the prey of sharks. Reduction of FAD effort by at least 50% was predicted to increase the biomass of tuna species and sharks and return the ecosystem structure to a pre-industrial-fishing state within 10 years. Spatial disaggregation of the model and integration of economic information are recommended to better capture ecological and economic changes that may result from fishing and/or climate impacts and to develop appropriate management measures in response.


With increasing development of applications for heterogeneous, distributed computing grids, the focus of performance analysis has shifted from a posteriori optimization on homogeneous parallel systems to application tuning for heterogeneous resources with time varying availability. This shift has profound implications for performance instrumentation and analysis techniques. Autopilot is a new infrastructure for dynamic performance tuning of heterogeneous computational grids based on closed loop control. The paper describes the Autopilot model of distributed sensors, actuators, and decision procedures, reports preliminary performance benchmarks, and presents a case study in which the Autopilot library is utilized in the development of an adaptive parallel input/output system.


Noncommutative algebras, defined by the generators and relations, are considered. The definition and main results connected with the Grobner basis, Hilbert series and Anick's resolution are formulated. Most attention is paid to universal enveloping algebras. Four main examples illustrate the main concepts and ideas. Algorithmic problems arising in the calculation of the Hilbert series are investigated. The existence of finite state automata, defining thebehaviour of the Hilbert series, is discussed. The extensions of the BERGMAN package for IBM PC compatible computers are described. A table is provided permitting a comparison of the effectiveness of the calculations in BERGMAN with the other systems.


Rare pancreatic neoplasms have been reported that show both endocrine and exocrine differentiation in the neoplastic components. In addition, pancreatic endocrine tumors may contain small, cytologically bland ductules intimately admixed with the endocrine component. It was recently suggested that these ductules represent an intrinsic part of the tumor, ie, that the ductules are neoplastic, and the term "ductulo-insular tumors of the pancreas" was proposed. In the present study, the nature of the ductular component of 16 cases of ductule-containing pancreatic endocrine tumors was investigated at the molecular level. Molecular genetic changes often present in ductal pancreatic neoplasms were not found by immunohistochemistry for DPC4, p53, and ERBB2 and by sequence analysis of KRAS codon 12. An X-chromosome inactivation clonality assay of one such tumor from a female patient indicated that the neuroendocrine component was monoclonal, contrasting with the ductular component that was polyclonal. The lymph node and liver metastases from three patients only contained the neuroendocrine component, and no ductules were observed. Although certain morphologic features of ductule-containing endocrine tumors are reminiscent of the embryonic development of the human pancreas, none of the tumors expressed PDX-1, a transcription factor essential in pancreatic organ development. Based on our results, it is suggested that the ductular component occasionally found in pancreatic endocrine tumors is the result of entrapment of preexisting nonneoplastic ductules and that the tumors are otherwise not distinctive from conventional pancreatic endocrine tumors. Although the phenomenon is rare, it is important to recognize and to distinguish these tumors from true mixed ductal-endocrine neoplasms, which are generally more clinically aggressive. "Pancreatic endocrine tumors with entrapped ductules" would be the preferred nomenclature since it better reflects the nonneoplastic nature of the ductules.