Adverse drug reactions (ADRs) in children are common but their predictors are not fully characterised. It is known that both increasing age and number of concomitant medicines increase ADR risk in children, and there is also some evidence that off-label and unlicensed medicine use may contribute. The purpose of the thesis was to characterise ADRs in children, focusing on known risk factors, which have not been adequately evaluated in the literature.
The contribution of off-label and unlicensed prescribing to ADR risk in children was assessed in two large prospective studies. In the first study, which evaluated ADR-related hospital admissions, off-label or unlicensed medicines were more likely to be implicated in an ADR than authorised medicines (relative risk 1.67, 95% CI 1.38, 2.02, p < 0.001). In a multivariate analysis, patients admitted under the care of oncology were more likely to have experienced an ADR (odds ratio (OR) 25.70, 95% CI 14.56, 45.38, p < 0.001). The following risk factors were also associated with increased ADR risk: increasing age (OR 1.04, 95% CI 1.00, 1.08, p = 0.045), number of authorised medicines (OR 1.25, 95% CI 1.16, 1.35, p < 0.001) and number of off-label or unlicensed medicines (OR 1.23, 95% CI 1.10, 1.36, p < 0.001). In a sub-group analysis which excluded oncology patients, age and number of authorised medicines predicted ADR risk (OR 1.05, 95% CI 1.01, 1.09, p = 0.023 and OR 1.33, 95% CI 1.23, 1.44, p < 0.001 respectively) but the number of off-label and unlicensed medicines did not (OR 1.04, 95% CI 0.89, 1.12, p = 0.627). The second prospective study examined ADRs occurring in paediatric inpatients. Again, off-label or unlicensed medicines were more likely to be implicated in an ADR than authorised medicines (OR 2.25, 95% CI 1.95, 2.59, p < 0.001). Medicines licensed in children but given to a child below the minimum age or weight recommended had the greatest risk of being implicated in an ADR. Multivariate analysis showed that increasing age (HR 1.04, 95% CI 1.02, 1.05, p < 0.001) and receipt of a general anaesthetic (HR 5.30, 95% CI 4.42, 6.35, p < 0.001) were positive predictors of ADR risk. Both the number of authorised (HR 1.22, 95% CI 1.17, 1.26, p < 0.001) and the number of off-label or unlicensed (HR 1.27, 95% CI 1.20, 1.34, p < 0.001) medicines were predictors of ADR risk.
ADR detection in the above studies was based on intensive surveillance. One possible method of detecting ADRs may be through the ICD-10 clinical coding system but this has not been investigated for paediatrics. Only 31.5% of the 241 ADRs evaluated from the prospective admissions study were coded correctly using at least one ICD-10 code. The clinical coding system could contribute to pharmacovigilance if deficiencies in how ADRs are recorded in the case notes and the clinical coding system can be addressed.
An important ADR detected in the admissions study was the occurrence of haemorrhage post-tonsillectomy which has been attributed to the use of dexamethasone. In order to analyse this further, a systematic review and meta-analysis of dexamethasone and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) use in paediatric tonsillectomy was undertaken. Although there were a large number of randomised controlled trials and observational studies in this area, analysis of all of these led to the conclusion that there was insufficient evidence to rule out an increased risk of haemorrhage with dexamethasone use whether in combination with NSAID or not (Peto odds ratio for dexamethasone versus another intervention 1.41, 95% CI 0.89, 2.25, p = 0.15). Further, well powered, well designed studies are needed in this area.
An important ADR detected in the in-patient study was post-operative nausea and vomiting. More detailed analysis was therefore undertaken to identify the risk factors for post-operative vomiting (POV), with a view to developing a risk score. The following were all identified as predictors of POV risk: age (OR 1.06, 95% CI 1.03, 1.10, p<0.001), duration of anaesthesia (OR 1.00, 95% CI 1.00, 1.01, p <0.001) and the use of intra-operative analgesics (OR 2.22, 95% CI 1.58, 3.12, p < 0.001). However, it was not possible to develop a robust model to predict the risk of POV because of the heterogeneity of the patient groups, the types of surgery, and the different clinical practices between different anaesthetists in terms of anti-emetic (choice, timing and doses).
The use of off-label and unlicensed medicines in children is common but necessary and these medicines are frequently associated with ADRs. The rational prescribing of medicines is an important measure in the reduction of ADR risk and a solid evidence-base is a pre-requisite. The aim should be that the minimum number of medicines is used safely and effectively, at the lowest dose possible, for the minimum duration necessary.


Cellular water can be removed to reversibly inactivate microorganisms to facilitate storage. One such method of removal is freeze-drying, which is considered a gentle dehydration method. To facilitate cell survival during drying, the cells are often formulated beforehand. The formulation forms a matrix that embeds the cells and protects them from various harmful stresses imposed on the cells during freezing and drying. We present here a general method to evaluate the survival rate of cells after freeze-drying and we illustrate it by comparing the results obtained with four different formulations: the disaccharide sucrose, the sucrose derived polymer Ficoll PM400, and the respective polysaccharides hydroxyethyl cellulose (HEC) and hydroxypropyl methyl cellulose (HPMC), on two strains of bacteria, P. putida KT2440 and A. chlorophenolicus A6. In this work we illustrate how to prepare formulations for freeze-drying and how to investigate the mechanisms of cell survival after rehydration by characterizing the formulation using of differential scanning calorimetry (DSC), surface tension measurements, X-ray analysis, and electron microscopy and relating those data to survival rates. The polymers were chosen to get a monomeric structure of the respective polysaccharide resembling sucrose to a varying degrees. Using this method setup we showed that polymers can support cell survival as effectively as disaccharides if certain physical properties of the formulation are controlled.


The WO3/BiVO4 heterojunction is regarded as one of the most promising photoanode materials for photoelectrochemical (PEC) water splitting. To improve the solar water splitting efficiency, maximizing the solar light absorption efficiency in a photoelectrode is still a critical issue. Here, to achieve the aforementioned need, we designed and fabricated a WO3 film consisting of yolk–shell structured nanoparticles via solution processing. A thin BiVO4 layer with a smaller bandgap was coated onto the surface and inside the WO3 shells, providing a rationally designed inner space between the particles and the shell for better electrolyte accessibility. The yolk–shell-shaped PEC photoanode not only induces efficient light absorption but also plays an important role in electron collection from BiVO4 due to an enlarged contact area. The structure–PEC performance relationship was studied by combining ultraviolet-visible (UV-vis) absorption spectroscopy with a specular and diffuse reflectance technique, which illustrates that the yolk–shell morphology has a superior light absorption ability than conventional hollow or dense film structures. The pure yolk–shell (Y-WO3/BiVO4) photoanode possessed a photocurrent density of 2.3 mA cm−2 and achieved a highest value of ∼5.0 mA cm−2 after adding a Fe–Ni co-catalyst at a bias of 1.23 V vs. RHE under AM 1.5 illumination (100 mW cm−2).


The global biodiversity and land degradation crises have brought about an urgent need and great demand for restoration actions. However, restoration outcomes are often less than ideal, indicating a need for improved restoration practices. Soil microbiota are extremely diverse and functionally important and should be further considered in restoration. However, despite their importance, there remains a gap in understanding of how soil microbiota respond following native plant revegetation. Several studies have used cross‐sectional study designs of restoration chronosequences to infer that revegetation causes the recovery of soil microbiota, but it is near‐impossible to determine cause and effect relationships with cross‐sectional study designs. Here we used high‐throughput amplicon sequencing of the bacterial 16s rRNA gene from soil samples collected at two timepoints, 6 years apart, at a revegetation chronosequence in South Australia. Our results show some indications of recovery but not the additional recovery in bacterial community composition toward the reference sites as expected after this 6‐year period—a result that appears at odds to the expected patterns of revegetation causing recovery of soil microbiota. Spatially dependent factors (e.g. soil chemistry), biotic and abiotic barriers, seasonal differences in sampling, and variability among the ecological reference sites could each help explain this apparent lack of additional microbial recovery. More detailed longitudinal and/or experimental manipulation work is required to further examine the cause‐effect relationships. Our study contributes important new information and highlights knowledge gaps in how soil microbiota respond to revegetation, and we urge caution when attempting to infer causation from cross‐sectional chronosequence studies.


Drug rash with eosinophilia and systemic symptoms (DRESS) syndrome is an adverse drug reaction caused by an apparent group of drugs which can cause 10-20% mortality. It is characterized by a latency period ranging from 3 weeks to 3 months after the introduction of the offending drug. The syndrome is defined by the presence of fever, rash, eosinophilia, atypical lymphocytes and multiorgan involvement. We present a 39-year-old woman who developed fever, nausea, a pruritic erythematous maculopapular rash and facial edema during her sixth week of the treatment with allopurinol as a case of DRESS syndrome. Diagnosis was confirmed by the drug rash, eosinophilia and systemic involvement including adenopathy, toxic hepatitis and pericardial effusion. Allopurinol was discontinued and intravenous prednisolone 60 mg/day was started. The patient's clinical appearance and eosinophilia improved within first 2 days. Awareness of hematologic abnormalities and systemic involvement along with drug rush, by physicians is critical for early diagnosis of this life-threatening syndrome. J Med Cases. 2014;5(7):420-422 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14740/jmc1811w


New emerging paradigms in Western culture have produced a new ethic. Not only social ethics in general but the ethics of marriage and family life are changing rapidly. This new ethic has inter alia a strong bearing on marriage and family life, relationships explained by traditional Christian ethics. The traditional idea of heterosexual official marriages is challenged by new forms of civil relationships such as cohabitation, temporary relationships and civil unions between gay couples. Scholars even speak of the postmodernist marriage that, according to them, differs entirely from the traditional Christian idea of marriage. This article focuses on the concepts of marriage and family life against the background of the emerging postmodern and post-secular ethic and its consequences for the traditional view of marriage as a biblical institution. The central theoretical argument is that the concept of marriage in the biblical testimony should be defined and developed within the doctrine of the covenant and that such as view, with certain modifications, can still provide ethical directives and new perspectives on marital life for Christians today. Keywords: Marriage; Covenant; Post Modernism: Secular; Family


Software reuse, and especially the paradigm of software components, is a promising approach to increase the efficiency of software development. One of the basic problems of software reuse, however, is the trade-off between the abstraction from project-specific aspects on the one side, and the actual contribution of a reusable component during the realization of a new system on the other side. Conventional components with fixed properties are trapped within the inherent tension between overly general and less efficient solutions satisfying a large number of niche requirements, and specifically optimized but less reusable designs for each point in the requirements space. Generic components which are designed and implemented to be mechanically adaptable to new application scenarios allow to overcome these limitations and help to drastically increase the efficiency of software development. This paper introduces the fundamental concepts of generic components and particularly discusses viable techniques to implement generic components. It furthermore shows how generic components may be instantiated automatically by tools and reports on our first experiences in using generic components for the construction of embedded operating systems.


Churg-Strauss syndrome is a rare form of eosinophilic vasculitis associated with asthma. Several cases of eosinophilic conditions including Churg-Strauss syndrome have recently been reported in asthmatic patients being treated with antileukotriene receptor antagonists. However, whether these drugs have a direct pathogenic role remains controversial. We describe two patients who developed Churg-Strauss syndrome after starting treatment with montelukast.


Purpose - The main purpose of this paper is to investigate organizational development projects considered as ways of implementing new methods – technologies and ways of organizing work in organizations. Design/methodology/approach - The empirical study presents four organizational development projects (covering the organizations as a whole) run by four Danish upper secondary schools ("gymnasium"). The study included questionnaires as well as interviews with the management and staff, as well as a survey of selected written materials and documents. Findings - The empirical study offers a description of the activities actually organized by the projects, as well as the various ways in which different groupings among the staff and the management are relating to the project. A special focus is directed towards the different perspectives on the projects established by the staff and the management and what consequences these different perspectives have on what is actually learned. Another finding is the weak links that exist between what is known by the staff as "ordinary problems" of the organizations and the objectives and goals of the development projects. Practical implications - The possible transformation of management emerging through the development projects, should be outlined and discussed in an open and explicit manner instead of constituting a hidden – and often highly controversial – agenda for the projects. Originality/value - A typology of development projects is presented and discussed as a tool to describe and understand different ways of framing organizational learning processes. The study also points out a possible relation between loosely coupled organizations (Weick, 1976; Brunsson, 2003) and the learning outcome of organizational development projects.


OBJECTIVE
The purpose of this study was to determine the composition of the microbial flora present in teeth after the failure of root canal therapy in a North American population. These results were then compared with those of the previous Scandinavian studies.

STUDY DESIGN
Fifty-four root-filled teeth with persistent periapical radiolucencies were selected for retreatment. After removal of the root-filling material, the canals were sampled with paper points, and by reaming of the apical dentin. Both samples were grown under aerobic and strict anaerobic conditions. Then the bacterial growth was analyzed.

RESULTS
The microbial flora was mainly of 1 to 2 strains of predominantly gram-positive organisms. Enterococcus faecalis was the most commonly recovered bacterial species.

CONCLUSIONS
Bacteria were cultivated in 34 of the 54 teeth examined in the study. E faecalis was identified in 30% of the teeth with a positive culture.


Currently, state of the art libraries, like MAGMA, focus on very large linear algebra problems, while solving many small independent problems, which is usually referred to as batched problems, is not given adequate attention. In this paper, we proposed a batched Cholesky factorization on a GPU. Three algorithms -- non-blocked, blocked, and recursive blocked -- were examined. The left-looking version of the Cholesky factorization is used to factorize the panel, and the right-looking Cholesky version is used to update the trailing matrix in the recursive blocked algorithm. Our batched Cholesky achieves up to 1.8× speedup compared to the optimized parallel implementation in the MKL library on two sockets of Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs. Further, we use the new routines to develop a single Cholesky factorization solver which targets large matrix sizes. Our approach differs from MAGMA by having an entirely GPU implementation where both the panel factorization and the trailing matrix updates are on the GPU. Such an implementation does not depend on the speed of the CPU. Compared to the MAGMA library, our full GPU solution achieves 85% of the hybrid MAGMA performance which uses 16 Sandy Bridge cores, in addition to a K40 Nvidia GPU. Moreover, we achieve 80% of the practical dgemm peak of the machine, while MAGMA achieves only 75%, and finally, in terms of energy consumption, we outperform MAGMAby 1.5× in performance-per-watt for large matrices.


Prosocial behaviors have been studied in many ways. However, it is important to reveal the current status of the studies conducted in the context of adolescents and to make predictions for future studies. In order to do this, it is necessary to examine the keywords, concepts and sources used in related studies. Therefore, bibliometric analysis was utilized in this study. In the study, the Web of Science (WoS) database platform was completed using VOSviewer as the source of the analysis data. In total, a data set of 4237 studies was used. When the 25 authors with the most publications on adolescence and prosocial behaviors are examined, Gustavo Carlo ranks first with 107 studies. When the relationships between institutions were analyzed, it was determined that the strongest ties were at the University of Missouri with 107 link strengths and Leiden University with 97 link strengths. The 5 most commonly used words in the studies were Prosocial Behavior, Adolescents, Children, Adolescence and Aggression, respectively. The most critical limitation of the study is that it was not included in databases such as YÖK Thesis Archive, international databases such as SCOPUS and Pubmed, and sources that have not been circulated online.


Background: There is increasing evidence that continuous activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary adrenal axis and the central sympathetic nervous system contributes to the pathogenesis of central adiposity via increased psychological stress. The purpose of this study was to examine the link between central adiposity and the propensity for Chinese children to rehearse emotionally upsetting events, a dimension of psychological stress. Additionally, gender differences in this relationship were explored. Methods: Waist circumference, which is a marker of central adiposity and associated risks of developing cardiovascular disease, was measured and the propensity for rehearsal was assessed twice over two consecutive years in Hong Kong Chinese children (n = 194, aged 7–9 years), using a psychometric tool. Results: Children with waist circumference indicative of a risk of cardiovascular disease displayed higher rehearsal scores than children categorized as "not at risk", as did boys compared with girls. Our results suggest that central adiposity and the propensity for rehearsal of emotionally upsetting events may be linked in Chinese children. Conclusion: Future prospective studies examining the direction of causality between central adiposity and rehearsal can potentially have valuable clinical implications.


Self esteem is self-evaluation. This research was conducted to see the influence of the use of gadgets on student self esteem. Methods of study used quantitive methods and simple correlates. The purpose of this correlation study was conducted to determine the influence between the research objectives of correlation is done to know the influence between the free variable (independent variable) namely the intensity of use of gadgets and bound variables (dependent variable) i.e. self esteem. Research location at SMP 01 Islam Jember. Data collection is done by means of interviews, polls and documents. Based on statistical tests using the Pearson Product Moment test obtained a R value of 0.4022 with a range of correlation coefficients ranging between-1, 0 and 1 It can be concluded that there is a moderate relationship. From the result of the calculation by using T test, obtained t count by 10.07433 thereby hypothesis (ha) that said that there is influence of the intensity of use of gadgets against self esteem Students class VII SMP Islam Jember Received and hypotheses (HO) Be dipelling.
Keywords: Intensity Gadget, Self Esteem


Major studies on cell production have put the emphasis on technical factors (machine order/layout, family part grouping, workflow sequence, etc.), it is still insufficient to investigate how workers' aptitude affect the productivity of production cells. In this paper, we make an experimental study on the impact of workers' aptitude in cell production system. Our study is different from researches reported so far in that we carry out a laboratory experiment of cell production to measure the productivity of the workers in production cells. Meanwhile we designed a self-evaluation sheet to measure the workers' aptitude. It was clarified that only two of 11 self-evaluation items have significant relations to productivity of the production cells, and there are some issues to be dealt to measure the workers' aptitude objectively.


A network of circuits, with KorB and TrbA as key regulators, controls genes for conjugative transfer of broad host range plasmid RK2. To assess the importance of the TrbA regulon, mutational analysis was applied to the TrbA operator at the trbB promoter and then to other TrbA‐regulated promoters in the tra region. All identified TrbA operators are submaximal; in the case of trbBp, a G to A transition that made the operator core a perfect palindrome increased repression by about 50% compared to the wild type. When this change was introduced into the RK2 genome, decreases in transfer frequency of up to three orders of magnitude were observed, with bigger effects when Escherichia coli was the donor compared to Pseudomonas putida. Western blotting showed a significant decrease in Trb protein levels. These effects were much greater than the effect of the mutation on repression by TrbA alone. When KorB was introduced into the reporter system, the effects were closer to those observed in the whole RK2 context. These results indicate that co‐operativity, previously observed between TrbA and KorB, allows big changes in transfer gene expression to result from small changes in individual regulator activities.


Abstract Two new species, Cylindrolobus motuoensis and C. glabriflorus (Orchidaceae), from Southwestern China and north of Myanmar are described and illustrated with detailed photos. Cylindrolobus motuoensis is morphologically similar to C. gloensis and C. foetidus, but can be distinguished from them by having amplexicaul sterile bracts, dark red floral bracts, white flowers, falcate-lanceolate lateral sepals and central keel of lip running from base to the tip of mid-lobe. Cylindrolobus glabriflorus is similar to C. hegdei and C. tenuicaulis but differs from them by having longer and wider leaves, obovate bracts, and the reddish brown central papillate keel of lip.


The existing intrusion detection systems are of varied type and hence show distinct preferences in detecting certain types of attacks with improved accuracy, while performing moderately on the other types. With the advances in sensor fusion, it has become possible to obtain a more reliable and accurate decision for a wider class of attacks, by combining the decisions of multiple Intrusion detection systems. In this paper, an architecture using data-dependent decision fusion is proposed. The method gathers an in-depth understanding about the input traffic and also the behavior of the individual intrusion detection systems by means of a neural network supervised learner unit. This information is used to fine-tune the fusion unit, since the fusion depends on the input feature vector. For illustrative purposes three intrusion detection systems PHAD, ALAD, and Snort have been considered using the DARPA 1999 dataset in order to validate the proposed architecture. The overall performance of the proposed sensor fusion system shows considerable improvement in comparison to the performance of individual intrusion detection systems.


Theoretical and simulation results of using Hamming codes with the two-dimensional discrete cosine transform (2D-DCT) at a transmitted data rate of 1 bit/pixel over a binary symmetric channel (BSC) are presented. The design bit error rate (BER) of interest is 10-2. The (7, 4), (15, 11), and (31, 26) Hamming codes are used to protect the most important bits in each 16 by 16 transformed block, where the most important bits are determined by calculating the mean squared reconstruction error (MSE) contributed by a channel error in each individual bit. A theoretical expression is given which allows the number of protected bits to achieve minimum MSE for each code rate to be computed. By comparing these minima, the best code and bit allocation can be found. Objective and subjective performance results indicate that using the (7, 4) Hamming code to protect the most important 2D-DCT coefficients can substantially improve reconstructed image quality at a BER of 10-2. Furthermore, the allocation of 33 out of the 256 bits per block to channel coding does not noticeably degrade reconstructed image quality in the absence of channel errors.


We report the effect of temperature coupled with varying polymer molecular weight and carbon loadings on the performance of polymer-carbon black composite films, used as sensing media in the JPL Electronic Nose (ENose). While bulk electrical properties of polymer composites have been studied, with mechanisms of conductivity described by connectivity and tunneling, it is not fully understood how environmental conditions and intrinsic polymer and filler properties affect polymer composite sensor characteristics and responses. Composites of polyethylene oxide (PEO)-carbon black (CB) considered here include PEO polymers with molecular weights of 20K, 600 K and 1M. The effects of polymer molecular weight on the percolation threshold of PEO-carbon composite and incremental sensor temperature effects on PEO-carbon sensor response were investigated. Results show a correlation between the polymer molecular weight and percolation threshold. Changes in sensor properties as a function of temperature are also observed at different carbon loadings; these changes may be explained by a change in conduction mechanism.


: Purpose We evaluated leukemia-associated immunophenotypes (LAIP) and their correlation with fms-like tyrosine kinase 3 ( FLT3 ) and nucleophosmin ( NPM1 ) gene mutational status in order to contribute a better identification of patients at highest risk of relapse in AML. Experimental Design: Bone marrow samples from 132 patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) were analyzed by 9-color multiparametric flow cytometry (MPFC). We confirmed the presence of the mutation in diagnostic samples and in sorted cells by conventional RT-PCR and by patient-specific RQ-PCR. Results: Within the CD34+ve cell fraction we identified a discrete population expressing high levels of the IL-3 receptor alpha-chain (CD123) and MIC-2 (CD99) in combination with the IL-2 receptor alpha-chain (CD25). The presence of this population positively correlated with the internal tandem duplications (ITD) mutation in the FLT3 gene (r = 0.71). Receiver operating characteristics (ROC) showed that, within the CD34+ve cell fraction a percentage of CD123/CD99/CD25+ve cells ≥ 11.7% predicted FLT3 –ITD mutations with a specificity and sensitivity of >90%. CD34/CD123/CD99/CD25+ve clones were also detectable at presentation in 3 patients with FLT3 wild-type/ NPM1 +ve AML who relapsed with FLT3 -ITD/ NPM1 +ve AML. Quantitative real-time PCR designed at relapse for each FLT3 -ITD in these three cases confirmed the presence of low copy numbers of the mutation in diagnostic samples. Conclusion: Our results suggest that the CD34/25/123/99+ve LAIP is strictly associated with FLT3 -ITD positive cells.


1. The sedimentation pattern of Yoshida hepatoma ribosomes shows mainly a high dimer peak and an intermediate peak between those of monomer and dimer. 2. The treatment of the postmitochondrial supernatant with EDTA or potassium chloride leads to the dissociation of ribosomes into subunits, through a decrease ofthe ribosomal Mg(2+)/phosphorus ratio. Provided that the deprivation of endogenous Mg(2+) is not complete, the subunits reassociate into active polyribosomes after addition of magnesium chloride to the medium. If the Mg(2+)/phosphorus ratio is lowered below 0.01 (mumol/mumol), structural changes occur, that become evident by a loss of protein and by a decreased sedimentation rate, which render the subribosomal particles unable to reassociate. 3. In the re-formation of polyribosomes from subunits, during the progressive increase of the concentration of magnesium chloride in the medium, the formation of monomeric ribosomes seems to be intermediate. 4. A dimerization of monomers and subunits occurs at concentrations of magnesium chloride greater than those required for the re-formation of polyribosomes and a preincubation for 1h at 0 degrees C is necessary for the maximum dimerization, whereas the complete reconstitution of polyribosomes is immediate.


In this paper, changes of resistivity of carbon fiber reinforced cement (CFRC) under cyclic load at different stress levels (15%, 35% and 55% of the failure stress) were studied. Experimental results showed that resistivity decreased with the increasing stress and increased with the decreasing stress under cyclic compression load. The resistivity of CFRC was reversible and cyclic under cyclic load at low stress level. When stress increased to a certain value, the decreasing rate of resistivity with increasing stress slowed down. When stress increased further, CFRC specimen resistivity cannot return to the initial value, showing a certain irreversible behavior. The feasibility of CFRC used in testing concrete fatigue was also discussed based on the conducting mechanism of CFRC.


This study examines over-time trends in intergenerational class mobility based on cohorts of labour market entrants in Germany and the UK since the 1950s. We calculate absolute and relative mobility rates, separately for men and women, using the German Socio-Economic Panel (1984–2016), the UK Household Longitudinal Study (2009–2016), and the UK Labour Force Survey (2014–2017). Regarding absolute mobility, we find marked country differences in upward and downward rates. In Germany, downward mobility decreased, while upward mobility rose. In the UK, downward mobility increased, while upward mobility declined. We provide evidence that these differences can be linked to contrasting changes in the distribution of origin and destination classes. Regarding relative mobility, striking country similarities appear. For both countries, we observe increases in social fluidity for respondents entering the labour market during the 1950s and 1960s that cease to continue for cohorts thereafter. Comparisons between adjacent cohorts do not provide evidence that social fluidity follows cyclical developments of the economy or shorter-term volatilities in the labour market.


We present the cacher package for R, which provides tools for caching statistical analyses and for distributing these analyses to others in an efficient manner. The cacher package takes objects created by evaluating R expressions and stores them in key-value databases. These databases of cached objects can subsequently be assembled into packages for distribution over the web. The cacher package also provides tools to help readers examine the data and code in a statistical analysis and reproduce, modify, or improve upon the results. In addition, readers can easily conduct alternate analyses of the data. We describe the design and implementation of the cacher package and provide two examples of how the package can be used for reproducible research.


Introduction: A fundamental gap in correlation appears to exist between bystander Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation (CPR) and preservation of the gift of life for people who die each day awaiting organ transplantation. As a result, the incidence of bystander CPR as a bridge to organ donation has not been articulated. Hypothesis: We assessed the hypothesis that kidneys recovered with bystander CPR demonstrate equivalent survival rates with first responder CPR and or no CPR. Methods: We retrospectively analyzed our transplant database from 2008-2013. We also evaluated the nationwide, population-based database from the United Network for Organ Sharing. Results: A total of 643 deceased donors were utilized to sustain life in a sample size of 882 kidney transplant recipients at our center. There were 77 bystander CPR - mean age 49.8 (SEM 1.75), 192 first responder CPR - mean age 52.45 (SEM 1.05), and 613 no CPR - mean age 52.58 (SEM 0.63). The mean length of stay days were 9.42 (SEM 0.64) bystander CPR, 9.03 (SEM 0.51) first responder CPR, and 10.73 (SEM 0.49) no CPR. The mean one year graft survival rate was 97.4% (SEM 0.01, CI 94.85-99.94) bystander CPR, 93.8% (SEM 0.02, CI 90.46-97.03) first responder CPR and 94.1% (SEM 0.01, CI 92.33-95.86). The mean death-censored graft survival days were 2230 (SEM 67.98) bystander CPR, 2351.22 (SEM 38.02) first responder CPR, and 2292.41 (SEM 26.32) no CPR; with a Log rank p-value=0.338. The United States' data demonstrated 133,369 deceased donors with 44,469 receiving CPR (33.34%). The mean graft survival rate at one year was 92.62% (CI 92.18-93.06) with CPR and 91.54 % (CI 91.21-91.88) no CPR. No distinctions were made regarding the type of CPR in the national database. Conclusions: Bystander CPR saves lives both with the primary return to baseline function and the secondary gain of the gift of life. Intentional effort should be devoted to tracking the results of bystander CPR and the parallel consequence of organ donation.


In this paper we introduce Epiphany as a highperformance energy-efficient manycore architecture suitable for real-time embedded systems. This scalable architecture supports floating point operations in hardware and achieves 50 GFLOPS/W in 28 nm technology, making it suitable for high performance streaming applications like radio base stations and radar signal processing. Through an efficient 2D mesh Network-on-Chip and a distributed shared memory model, the architecture is scalable to thousands of cores on a single chip. An Epiphany-based open source computer named Parallella was launched in 2012 through Kickstarter crowd funding and has now shipped to thousands of customers around the world.


Two dimensional layered van der Waals (vdW) magnets have demonstrated their potential to study both fundamental and applied physics due to their remarkable electronic properties. However, the connection of vdW magnets to spintronics as well as quantum information science is not clear. In particular, it remains elusive whether there are novel magnetic phenomena only belonging to vdW magnets, but absent in the widely studied crystalline magnets. Here we consider the quantum correlations of magnons in a layered vdW magnet and identify an entanglement channel of magnons across the magnetic layers, which can be effectively tuned and even deterministically switched on and off by both magnetic and electric means. This is a unique feature of vdW magnets in which the underlying physics is well understood in terms of the competing roles of exchange and anisotropy fields that contribute to the magnon excitation. Furthermore, we show that such a tunable entanglement channel can mediate the electrically controllable entanglement of two distant qubits, which also provides a protocol to indirectly measure the entanglement of magnons. Our findings provide a novel avenue to electrically manipulate the qubits and further open up new opportunities to utilize vdW magnets for quantum information science.


Although depression is known to be an important complication in patients with rheumatoid arthritis (RA) or Sjogrens syndrome (SS), at present little is known about the mental states of RA patients who also have SS. To address that issue, we recently used a standardized questionnaire, the self-rating depression scale (SDS), to compare the mental states of patients with RA alone and those with RA complicated by SS. There were no significant differences between the two groups with respect to age, sex, arthralgia, patient global assessment or dosage of steroid. On the other hand, the SDS scores of RA patients with SS were significantly higher than those of RA patients without SS. Among the twenty items on the SDS questionnaire, RA patients with SS complained of "constipation" significantly more often than RA patients without SS. Collectively, our findings suggest SS exacerbates depression in RA patients. In discussing our findings, we describe the features of the depression seen in patients with RA, SS and RA with secondary SS, and make comparisons among these three groups.


The purpose of this study is to investigate the proportion and associated risk factors of hypertriglyceridemia in rural Vietnamese women. Research data were collected as part of the Korean Genome and Epidemiology Study (KoGES). A cross-sectional study of 957 Vietnamese women in their 20 to 30s was conducted in rural areas of Bavi, Vietnam. Subjects were classified as hypertriglyceridemic (serum TG ≥ 150 mg/dL). Demographic, socio-economic details, anthropometric measurements, and blood profiles were recorded. The proportion of hypertriglyceridemic subjects was 22.0%, and the mean age of hypertriglyceridemics subjects was older than that of normo-triglyceridemic subjects (p < 0.05). In hypertriglyceridemic subjects, height, HDL-cholesterol, and LDL-cholesterol were significantly lower, compared to subjects with normo-triglyceridemia, while weight, body mass index, waist hip ratio, body fat %, blood pressure, fasting blood sugar, total cholesterol, and atherogenic index were higher, compared to those with normo-triglyceridemia. Intake of cereal and cereal products, total plant food, and cereal/potato fiber in subjects with hypertriglyceridemia was significantly higher, compared to normo-triglyceridemic subjects. Hypertriglyceridemic subjects had a significantly lower intake of animal calcium and retinol than normo-triglyceridemic subjects. Significant positive relationships were observed between the prevalence of hypertriglyceridemia and consumption of total plant food [OR (95% CI) for the highest tertile, compared to the lowest: 1.764 (1.131-2.750); p for trend = 0.008] and crude fiber [OR (95% CI) for the highest tertile compared to the lowest: 1.651 (1.092-2.497); p for trend = 0.027]. In addition, a significant inverse rela tionship was observed between the prevalence of hypertriglyceridemia and cholesterol intake [OR (95% CI) for the highest tertile, compared to the lowest: 0.601 (0.400-0.901); p for trend = 0.012]. These findings may provide basic data for use by policymakers and dieticians in future development of nutrition and health programs to encourage healthier eating habits, and to prevent hypertriglyceridemia advancing cardiovascular disease in rural Vietnamese women. (Korean J Nutr 2013; 46(1): 15 ~ 25)


Background: Buprenorphine is currently under investigation as a pharmacotherapy to treat pregnant women for opioid dependence. This research evaluates buprenorphine (BUP), norbuprenophine (NBUP), buprenorphine-glucuronide (BUP-Gluc), and norbuprenorphine-glucuronide (NBUP-Gluc) pharmacokinetics after high-dose (14-20 mg) BUP sublingual tablet administration in three opioid-dependent pregnant women. Methods: Oral fluid and sweat specimens were collected in addition to plasma specimens for 24 hours during gestation weeks 28 or 29 and 34, and 2 months after delivery. Time to maximum concentration was not affected by pregnancy; however, BUP and NBUP maximum concentration and area under the curve at 0 to 24 hours tended to be lower during pregnancy compared with postpartum levels. Results: Statistically significant but weak positive correlations were found for BUP plasma and OF concentrations and BUP/NBUP ratios in plasma and oral fluid. Statistically significant negative correlations were observed for times of specimen collection and BUP and NBUP oral fluid/plasma ratios. BUP-Gluc and NBUP-Gluc were detected in only 5% of oral fluid specimens. In sweat, BUP and NBUP were detected in only four of 25 (12 or 24 hours) specimens in low concentrations (less than 2.4 ng/patch). Conclusion: These preliminary data describe BUP and metabolite pharmacokinetics in pregnant women and suggest that, like methadone, upward dose adjustments may be needed with advancing gestation.


This work proposes an interpretable radiomics approach to differentiate between malignant and benign focal liver lesions (FLLs) on contrast-enhanced ultrasound (CEUS). Although CEUS has shown promise for differential FLLs diagnosis, current clinical assessment is performed only by qualitative analysis of the contrast enhancement patterns. Quantitative analysis is often hampered by the unavoidable presence of motion artifacts and by the complex, spatiotemporal nature of liver contrast enhancement, consisting of multiple, overlapping vascular phases. To fully exploit the wealth of information in CEUS, while coping with these challenges, here we propose combining features extracted by the temporal and spatiotemporal analysis in the arterial phase enhancement with spatial features extracted by texture analysis at different time points. Using the extracted features as input, several machine learning classifiers are optimized to achieve semiautomatic FLLs characterization, for which there is no need for motion compensation and the only manual input required is the location of a suspicious lesion. Clinical validation on 87 FLLs from 72 patients at risk for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) showed promising performance, achieving a balanced accuracy of 0.84 in the distinction between benign and malignant lesions. Analysis of feature relevance demonstrates that a combination of spatiotemporal and texture features is needed to achieve the best performance. Interpretation of the most relevant features suggests that aspects related to microvascular perfusion and the microvascular architecture, together with the spatial enhancement characteristics at wash-in and peak enhancement, are important to aid the accurate characterization of FLLs.


The advanced design of a centrifugal compressor with high efficiency and wide operating range is a challenging task due to the complex flow field arising from the three-dimensional geometry, especially for the high-speed, highly loaded centrifugal compressor stage, which typically has a relatively narrow operating range. A great effort has been undertaken recently to solve the time-costly three-dimensional design problem with the assistance of a metamodel. Some effort has been done to gain insight into the design space with the assistance of the data mining method. However, the published works lack any study that systematically performs the data mining between the performance and three-dimensional geometry data due to two unsolved issues, i.e., lack of reliable systematic data mining model and unresolved high-dimensional data problem in the centrifugal compressor community. To tackle these issues, a systematic metamodel-driven data mining (MDDM) model including six general modules (i.e., problem understanding, data understating, metamodeling, data set preparation, knowledge discovery, and deployment) has been proposed and implemented to the knowledge discovery of the well-known Radiver high-speed centrifugal compressor stage. Particular attention has been paid to develop the design principle of operating range extension for the examined high-speed stage. Four specific data mining techniques, i.e., descriptive statistics, self-organization map, k–d tree, and Sobol index, were used for the statistical, correlation, cluster, and sensitivity analysis. The results showed the performance improvement probabilities, the trade-off relationships between efficiency and pressure ratio/operating range, and the characteristic variation of the performance. Specifically, the wide operating range design subspace and the narrow operating range design subspace were split away from the whole design space. In these subspaces, the two most sensitive geometry parameters that controlled the meridional curvature made a large contribution to the stage performance, especially for the meridional curvature at the shroud side near the impeller outlet. The appropriate variation ranges of the two sensitive geometry parameters were recommended, and the flow mechanism behind them was clarified. The statistical results showed that over 90% of the design stages in the recommended variation ranges had a wide operating range. A design case was chosen randomly in the recommended range to verify the performance improvement via computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations. The outcomes of this work are particularly relevant for the advanced design of compressors with high efficiency and a wide operating range for flexibility.


This paper presents an investigation into the development of an adaptive active control mechanism for vibration suppression using genetic algorithms (GAs). Active vibration control (AVC) consists of artificially generating cancelling source(s) to destructively interfere with the unwanted source and thus result in a reduction in the level of the vibration (disturbances) at desired location(s). This is realised by detecting and processing the vibration by a suitable electronic controller so that, when superimposed on the disturbances, cancellation occurs. Due to the broadband nature of the disturbances, it is required that the control mechanism in an AVC system realises suitable frequency-dependent characteristics so that cancellation over a broad range of frequencies is achieved. In practice, the spectral contents of the disturbances as well as the characteristics of system components are, in general, subject to variation, giving rise to time-varying phenomena. This implies that the control mechanism is further required to be intelligent enough to track these variations so that the desired level of performance is achieved and maintained (Tokhi and Leitch, 1991).


In this work, a radiofrequency identification (RFID) tag with an optical indicator for the measurement of gaseous oxygen is described. It consists of an O2 sensing membrane of PtOEP together with a full electronic system for RFID communication, all printed on a flexible substrate. The membrane is excited by an LED at 385 nm wavelength and the intensity of the luminescence generated is registered by means of a digital color detector. The output data corresponding to the red coordinate of the RGB color space is directly related to the concentration of O2, and it is sent to a microcontroller. The RFID tag is designed and implemented by screen printing on a flexible substrate for the wireless transmission of the measurement to a remote reader. It can operate in both active and passive mode, obtaining the power supply from the electromagnetic waves of the RFID reader or from a small battery, respectively. This system has been fully characterized and calibrated including temperature drifts, showing a high-resolution performance that allows measurement of very low values of oxygen content. Therefore this system is perfectly suitable for its use in modified atmosphere packaging where the oxygen concentration is reduced below 2%. As the reading of the O2 concentration inside the envelope is carried out with an external RFID reader using wireless communication, there is no need for perforations for probes or wires, so the packaging remains completely closed. With the presented device, a limit of detection of 40 ppm and a resolution as low as 0.1 ppm of O2 can be reached with a low power consumption of 3.55 mA.


The success of the Planck mission heavily relies on careful planning, design and implementation of its ground segment facilities. Among these, two Data Processing Centres (DPCs) are being implemented, which are operated by the consortia responsible for building the instruments forming the scientific payload of Planck. The two DPCs, together with the Mission Operations Centre (MOC) and the Herschel Science Centre (HSC), are the major elements of the Herschel/Planck scientific ground segment. The Planck DPCs are responsible for the operation of the instruments, and for the production, delivery and archiving of the scientific data products, which can be considered as the final results of the mission: · Calibrated time series data, for each receiver, after removal of systematic features and attitude reconstruction. · Photometrically and astrometrically calibrated maps of the sky in the observed bands. · Sky maps of the main astrophysical components. · Catalogs of sources detected in the sky maps of the main astrophysical components. · CMB power spectrum coefficients. During the development phase, the DPCs are furthermore responsible for the production of data simulating realistically the behaviour of the instruments in flight, and for the support to instrument testing activities. In this paper, some aspects related to the control of the Planck instruments, to the data flow and to the data processing for Planck are described, and an overview of the activities being carried out is provided.


The diel vertical migration (DVM) of the whole plankton community was investigated in the central and coastal Irish Sea. Generally, more than 60% of the plankton did not perform signifi- cant DVM. A correlation analysis of the weighted mean depths of different organisms and their potential predators suggested relationships between 2 groups: Oithona spp., copepod nauplii and fish larvae, and Calanus spp., Pseudocalanus elongatus and chaetognaths (Sagitta spp.). Organisms showing significant DVM were chaetognaths (Sagitta spp.), Calanus spp. and P. elongatus. Calanus spp. showed clear ontogenic variations in DVM and, along with P. elongatus, demonstrated great flexibility in both the amplitude and direction of migration. P. elongatus did not migrate in the coastal area and Calanus spp. showed a clear reverse migration. The direction of migration appeared to be related to the vertical position of the chaetognaths in the water column during the day.


Background and Aims: Three-in-one and femoral nerve blocks are proven modalities for postoperative analgesia following anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction. The aim of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of magnesium (Mg) as an adjuvant to bupivacaine in 3-in-1 block for ACL reconstruction. Methods: Sixty patients undergoing arthroscopic ACL reconstruction were randomly allocated to Group I (3-in-1 block with 30 ml of 0.25% bupivacaine preceded by 1.5 ml of intravenous [IV] saline), Group II (3-in-1 block with 30 ml of 0.25% bupivacaine preceded by 1.5 ml of solution containing 150 mg Mg IV) or Group III (3-in-1 block with 30 ml containing 0.25% bupivacaine and 150 mg of Mg as adjuvant preceded by 1.5 ml of IV saline). Post-operatively, patients received morphine when visual analogue scale (VAS) score was ≥4. Quantitative parameters were compared using one-way ANOVA and Kruskal–Wallis test and qualitative data were analysed using Chi-square test. Results: Demographics, haemodynamic parameters, intra-operative fentanyl requirement, post-operative VAS scores and total morphine requirement were comparable between groups. Time to first analgesic requirement was significantly prolonged in Group III (789 ± 436) min compared to Group I (466 ± 290 min) and Group II (519 ± 274 min), (P = 0.02 and 0.05). Significantly less number of patients in Group III (1/20) received morphine in the first 6 h post-operatively, compared to Group I (8/20) and Group II (6/20) (P = 0.008 and 0.03). No side effects were observed. Conclusion: Mg as an adjuvant to bupivacaine in 3-in-1 block for ACL reconstruction significantly prolongs the time to first analgesic requirement and reduces the number of patients requiring morphine in the immediate post-operative period.


Background and Objectives: As a learning strategy, Problem Based Learning (PBL) offers the potential to bridge the theory – practice gap in professional practice, through the recognition and evaluation of practice – based problems. It is based on principles and cognitive psychology, it differs from the much criticized traditional methods of learning which are largely teacher centered. The study was carried out to determine the opinions of faculty teaching members in nursing schools about PBL method Methods and Materials: The descriptive study conducted throughout the period of 1 January till 28 March / 2013. Convenience sample of (68) faculty members were attained; almost of them were baccalaureate –as a trainersand master in nursing, 82.4% of them were nursing faculty members and more than half of them (58.8%) had less than (6) years as a tenure in nursing schools. The sample was approximately equal distributed among the settings of the study (two nursing colleges and two nursing institutes). Anonymous questionnaire was structured depended on many previous related literatures, it consists of (46) items (Tutor-related=5, Student-related=12 and Design-related=29). Each item has five options (Strongly disagree=1 – Strongly agree=5). Validity of the instrument was checked by review of (5) experts in nursing, while reliability was measured through split-half technique (r=0.87). Results: The main results of the study were: low acceptable level of opinion about PBL method among faculty members, while the attributes of the sample didn't indicate any significant statistical differences. Conclusion: It concluded that nursing curriculums tend to be traditional method as lecture-based.


MapReduce offers a promising programming model for big data processing. Inspired by functional languages, MapReduce allows programmers to write functional-style code which gets automatically divided into multiple map and/or reduce tasks and scheduled over distributed data across multiple machines. Hadoop, an open source implementation of MapReduce, schedules map tasks in the vicinity of their inputs in order to diminish network traffic and improve performance. However, Hadoop schedules reduce tasks at requesting nodes without considering data locality leading to performance degradation. This paper describes Locality-Aware Reduce Task Scheduler (LARTS), a practical strategy for improving MapReduce performance. LARTS attempts to collocate reduce tasks with the maximum required data computed after recognizing input data network locations and sizes. LARTS adopts a cooperative paradigm seeking a good data locality while circumventing scheduling delay, scheduling skew, poor system utilization, and low degree of parallelism. We implemented LARTS in Hadoop-0.20.2. Evaluation results show that LARTS outperforms the native Hadoop reduce task scheduler by an average of 7%, and up to 11.6%.


Numeral recognition is an important research direction in field of pattern recognition, and it has broad application prospects. Aiming at four arithmetic operations of general printed formats, this article adopts a multiple hybrid recognition method and is applied to automatically calculating. This method mainly uses BP neural network and template matching method to distinguish the numerals and operators, in order to increase the operation speed and recognition accuracy. Sample images of four arithmetic operations are extracted from printed books, and they are used for testing the performance of proposed recognition method. The experiments show that the method provides correct recognition rate of 96% and correct calculation rate of 89%.


Remote sensing is a key instrument for monitoring sea ice surface properties over large areas. Synthetic Aperture Radar (sar) as well as Real Aperture Radar (rar) are two types of radars that are extensively used in this context and measure the backscatter of the surface that they illuminate. Backscattering of waves from rough surfaces is complicated and depends, among other things, on the roughness of the illuminated surface and the surfaces material properties. This thesis focuses on modeling the backscattering cross section from sea ice layers with rough surfaces on top of sea water, by designing a model that builds on the physical basis of electromagnetic wave theory and combines it with the Finite Element Method (fem) approach. The model is designed as general as possible and can be adapted to various sea ice scenarios by modifying the chosen surface and material properties. Temperature, Density and Salinity (tds) fieldwork measurements from Van Keulenfjord on Svalbard have been used to estimate realistic continuous permittivity profiles of sea ice using the Polder-van-Santen/de Loor mixture model and have been incorporated into the model. The model has been validated by comparing its results for a perfectly flat surface to the Fresnel equations and a perfect agreement was achieved. It was also successfully validated using the Bragg scattering phenomena for periodic surfaces. Furthermore, a comparison between the results of the model and the Small Pertubation Model (spm) was done for a slightly rough surface at different frequencies and permittivities, and clear similarities were observed. Based on the confidence from the validations, the backscatter cross section of a sea ice/sea water scenario with continuous permittivity profiles has then been modeled.


This thesis contributes to a small body of research that examines the 'sugar baby phenomenon' in a Canadian context. To date, most of what is known about sugar babies' experiences is through anecdotal accounts filtered through the media. By drawing on the content of one popular sugar baby forum, as well as data gathered from two in-depth qualitative interviews with two active sugar babies, this thesis explores the lived experiences and perceptions of the participants. In particular, this study seeks to determine whether sugar babies articulate shared motivations; how they navigate sugar dating's blurring of traditional romance and sex work; and how they exercise power and agency within their relationships. Key findings are that sugar dating's blend of conventional dating and sex work creates a new conceptual space that both enhances the degree of power and agency exercised by sugar babies, and constrains it in ways both traditional and novel.


Simulation of power converters has traditionally been carried out using simplified models to shorten simulation time. This will compromise the accuracy of the results. A proposed fast simulation method for simulating converter losses and device temperatures over long mission profiles (load cycles) is described in this paper. It utilizes accurate physics-based models for the device losses, and is validated with experimentally obtained results.


A kind of CWAO catalyst, RuO_2/γ-Al_2O_3, was prepared by dipping Al_2O_3 into the aqueous solution of
RuCl_3·3H_2O. XRD, SEM and TEM were used to determine the catalytic structure. Influences of the calcination temperature,
the initial pH of the feed solution and degradation temperature on the activity of the RuO_2/γ-Al_2O_3 catalyst were investi-
gated and the reaction mechanism was preliminarily studied. Results showed that uniform dispersion of RuO_2 crystallites
was observed on the surface of the catalyst. The activity of the catalyst was higher at calcination temperature of 300℃ for 3
h and the particle reunion occurred and some large RuO_2 crystallites were abundant at high calcination temperature of
500℃. The activity of the catalyst was better in the acid solution than in the alkaline solution. Increasing degradation tem-
perature and using the catalyst could shorten the indution periods so that the phenol and COD removal were increased. For
RuO_2/γ-Al_2O_3 ctalyst, the phenol and COD removal were respectively 98% and 80% in a temperature of 150℃, pH of 5.6
and pressure of 3 Mpa after a 2h reaction. This indicated that Ru/γ-Al_2O_3 catalyst had good activity.


Many philosophers reject the view that well-being over a lifetime is simply an aggregation of well-being at every moment of one's life, and thus they reject theories of well-being like hedonism and concurrentist desire satisfactionism. They raise concerns that such a view misses the importance of the relationships between moments in a person's life or the role narratives play in a person's well-being. In this article, we develop an atomist meta-theory of well-being, according to which the prudential value of a life depends solely on the prudential value of each moment of that life. This is a general account of momentary well-being that can capture different features of well-being that standard atomistic accounts fail to capture, thus allowing for the possibility of an atomism that is compatible with a variety of well-being theories. Contrary to many criticisms leveled against momentary well-being, this well-being atomism captures all of the important features of well-being.


Thermal characterization of composites is essential for their proper assignment to a specific application. Specific heat, thermal diffusivity, and thermal conductivity of carbon-carbon composites are essential in the engineering design process and in the analysis of aerospace vehicles, space systems and other high temperature thermal systems. Specifically, thermal conductivity determines the working temperature levels of a material and is influential in its performance in high temperature applications.There is insufficient thermal property data for carbon-carbon composites over a range of temperatures. The purpose of this research is to develop a thermal properties database for carbon-carbon composites that will contain in-plane (i-p) and through-the-thickness (t-t-t) thermal data at different temperatures as well as display the effects of graphitization on the composite material. The carbon-carbon composites tested were fabricated by the Resin Transfer Molding (RTM) technique, utilizing T300 2-D carbon fabric and Primaset PT-30 cyanate ester resin.Experimental methods were employed to measure the thermal properties. Following the ASTM standard E-1461, the flash method enabled the direct measurement of thermal diffusivity. Additionally, differential scanning calorimetry was performed in accordance with the ASTM E-1269 standard to measure the specific heat. The measured thermal diffusivity, specific heat, and density data were used to compute the thermal conductivity of the carbon-carbon composites. The measured through-the-thickness thermal conductivity values of all the materials tested range from 1.0 to 17 W/m·K, while in-plane values range from 3.8 to 4.6 W/m·K due to the effect of fiber orientation. Additionally, the graphitized samples exhibit a higher thermal conductivity because of the nature of the ordered graphite structure.Copyright © 2014 by ASME


The research objective is to highlight how the Popular Financial Reporting applied to a cultural sector can increase transparency and accountability involving citizens and members. Moreover, through the tool, it is possible giving immediate feedback on the transformation of the inputs into outputs and the absorption of resources provided by the public through funding in cultural impact. The analysis is conducted through a "Circolo dei Lettori" case study; it is a hybrid organization. The legal form is of a private foundation with public participation. The initiative of the Piedmont Region (Italy), the "Circolo dei lettori" is a cultural center. The role of the "Circolo dei Lettori" is to make melting 'pot expressive and influenced by the hurricane of stories, signals, and emotions from the digital society and revitalization of culture with presentations and meetings. The use of the resources made available is strictly linked to the sustainability of the creative industries. Therefore, an instrument that guarantees transparency, participation, and control at the same time is essential. Very often, there is not a real perception of the resources made available and of the results obtained, leading to a removal of the financing partners and the stakeholders. The integration of the theory developed through reality, together with different currents of thought in conjugation with practical evidence, is essential to define knowledge better. In particular, the analysis highlights the characteristics of the Popular Financial Reporting used for the first time in the cultural sector to increase sustainability, transparency, and accountability.


In the summer of 1956, a group of mathematicians and computer scientists took over the top floor of the building that housed the math department of Dartmouth College. For about eight weeks, they imagined the possibilities of a new field of research. John McCarthy, then a young professor at Dartmouth, had coined the term "artificial intelligence" when he wrote his proposal for the workshop, which he said would explore the hypothesis that "every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it." • The researchers at that legendary meeting sketched out, in broad strokes, AI as we know it today. It gave rise to the first camp of investigators: the "symbolists," whose expert systems reached a zenith in the 1980s. The years after the meeting also saw the emergence of the "connectionists," who toiled for decades on the artificial neural networks that took off only recently. These two approaches were long seen as mutually exclusive, and competition for funding among researchers created animosity. Each side thought it was on the path to artificial general intelligence.


National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) provides guidelines to assess the performance of Positron Emission Tomography (PET). A PET/CT scanner, Discovery IQ, GE Medical systems, Milwaukee, USA was installed in our department which has high a sensitivity PET component. We have performed the NEMA NU-2 2012 quality control tests to evaluate this system on site before clinical use. Performance measurements of the PET scanner were made using the NEMA NU2-2012 procedures for spatial resolution, scatter fraction, sensitivity, count rate loss and random coincidence estimation, Noise Equivalent Count Rate (NECR) and image quality. As per NU2 2012, spatial resolution was measured at 1 cm, 10 cm and 20 cm vertically from the centre and at each of these points resolution was measured at tangential, radial and axial directions. Sensitivity was measured at centre and 10 cm off center vertically from the center. The system sensitivity is reported as an average of the two measured values. Scatter fraction and NECR measurements, Image quality test was also performed. The tangential, radial and axial FWHM were 4.99 mm, 4.20 mm and 4.79 mm at 1 cm off centre, 5.49 mm, 4.69 mm and 4.81 mm at 10 cm off centre and 7.99 mm, 5.07 mm and 4.95 mm at 20 cm off centre respectively. The absolute sensitivity of this scanner was found to be 20.1 cps/kBq. The scatter fraction calculated from the decay method was 37.94% and NECR was 125 kcps. The peak NECR was achieved at activity concentration of 8.7 KBq/ml and the count loss below the peak NECR was found to be 0.68%. Image quality test for, contrast recovery, background variability and lung error residual mean met all specifications. Overall PET performance of Discovery IQ whole-body scanner was satisfactory and the scanner met all the performance specifications required by NEMA 2012.


ConclusionThe present investigation described the influence of viscosity and content of HPMC on dipyridamole release using 32 full factorial design. All formulations had desired floating lag time (<2 minutes) regardless of viscosity and content of polymeric matrices. Results of multiple regression analysis indicate that both factors significantly affect the diffusion exponent (n), release rate constant (k), and percentage drug release at 1 hour, 4 hours, 6 hours, and 12 hour, (P<.05). Mechanism of drug release was found to be anomalous type to case-II transport depending upon the viscosity and content of polymer. It was found that content of HPMC had a dominant role in the initial phase of drug release, while in the later phase viscosity of HPMC Predominated.


A variety of legacy and emerging health applications are designed to monitor sensed information about a person's physiological signals over time. Such applications include systems for tracking heart conditions that have been in use by cardiologists for decades to recent prototypes for monitoring elders in cognitive decline. This thesis focuses on addressing the challenges inherent in an interactive monitoring system how and when to interact with a user. This research aims to improve these systems in two main ways: 1) explore how to interact through social-emotional, relational dialogue, and 2) explore when to interact by adjusting the timing of these interruptions. An interactive, health application has been developed for data collection, annotation, and feedback that is part of a longer-term research plan for gathering data to understand more about stress, the physiological signals involved in its expression, and the interplay between stress and interruptibility. The system has been developed on a mobile platform and uses affect and interruption-sensitive strategies to engage users and allow for real-time annotation of stress, activity and timing information through text and audio input. The platform supports continuous, wireless, and non-intrusive collection of heart signal data, accelerometer, and pedometer information, as well as automatic labeling of location information from context beacons. This system is the first of its kind to be affect and interruption-responsive to use physiological data to adjust the timing of interruptions, as well as to adaptively respond with dialogue and relational strategies that specifically address the user's stress levels and the disruption the device may be incurring upon the user. The system has been evaluated with seven subjects who used either the responsive or nonresponsive system for four days, then used the opposite system for another four days, and finally, were asked to choose which system to continue interacting with for the last four days. The affect and interruption responsive system was rated as significantly less stressful on users, and five out of seven of the subjects chose to continue working with the responsive system. This study has demonstrated that designing platforms that are relational and responsive to a person's affect can facilitate a less frustrating and more enjoyable experience over time, even in tasks that are highly disruptive. Overall, this thesis has contributed not only a new system for gathering annotations useful for studies of stress, but also provided new insights into the value of using relational and attentional strategies in a task that involves a large number of interruptions. Thesis Supervisor: Rosalind W. Picard Title: Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences A Personal, Mobile System for Understanding Stress and Interruptions by Karen Kay-Lynn Liu


The specific problem of non-converted reactant accumulation encountered in fed-batch reactor is a challenging task of process safety. In order to avoid such situation that may lead to a runaway reaction, the reaction kinetics and reactor dynamic must be known. In this work, an innovative approach to determine an optimal feed profile, based on a reaction kinetic and reactor dynamic, is presented. This approach was applied to the reaction system involved in the Morton International Inc. incident. Great improvements were observed in the control of the accumulation, decreasing the number of necessary experiments needed for the scale-up studies.


Aim The goal of the study was to detect the presence of macrophage inflammatory protein (MIP)-1α and MIP-1β and to estimate their levels in gingival crevicular fluid (GCF) of children with Down syndrome. Materials and methods MIP-1α and MIP-1β levels were estimated in GCF samples of 20 healthy and 20 Down syndrome individuals. Gingival status was assessed by measuring the gingival index (GI), plaque index (PI), clinical attachment level (CAL), and probing pocket depth (PPD). The GCF samples were obtained from the subjects and MIP-1α and MIP-1β levels were quantified by enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay (ELISA). Results The mean MIP-1α concentrations in healthy and Down syndrome individuals were 209 and 1411 pg/μL respectively, and MIP-1α levels were 342 and 1404 pg/μL respectively. The levels of MIP-1α and MIP-1β in the GCF of subjects with Down syndrome were significantly higher than in the healthy individual, and statistically significant differences were present among the two groups. Conclusion The GCF showed dynamic changes according to the severity of periodontal disease, and the levels of MIP-1α and MIP-1β had a strong relationship with clinical parameters. The MIP-1α and MIP-1β can therefore be considered as novel biomarkers in the biological mechanism underlying the patho-genesis of periodontal disease. How to cite this article: Reddy VK, Kommineni NK, Padakandla P, Togaru H, Indupalli JP, Nanga SP. Evaluation of Chemokines in the Gingival Crevicular Fluid of Children with Down Syndrome. Int J Clin Pediatr Dent 2018;11(4):288-293.


In this paper, we examine the perception of emotions as well as the characterization and the classification of emotional body expressions based on perceptual body cues ratings. Emilya (EMotional body expression In daILY Actions), a database of body expressions of eight emotions (including Neutral) in seven daily actions performed by 11 actors, is used for these purposes. A perceptual study is conducted to explore four issues: 1) how expressed emotions are perceived by humans, 2) how emotion recognition by humans differs across daily actions, 3) how expressed emotions are characterized by humans through body cues, and 4) how emotions are automatically classified based on human rating of body cues. Across all the actions, most of the expressed emotions were correctly identified, but some were confused (e.g., Shame and Sadness). Confusions occurring at the level of emotion perception may be due to a lack of contextual factors (Emilya contains body movement of daily actions without reference to a context), to a similarity of bodily expressions, but also to the lack of other modalities that may contribute to a better recognition of bodily expression of these emotions (e.g., facial expressions). In the paper, we detail and discuss the results from these different studies.


Pain heel constitutes 15% of foot pain. Pain may be caused by plantar fasciitis, calcaneal fractures, calcaneal apophysitis, heel pad atrophy, inflammatory diseases or related with nerve involvement. Tibial, plantar and/or medial nerve entrapment are the neural causes of pain. Most of the heel soft tissue sensation is provided by medial calcaneal nerve. Diagnosis of heel pain due to neural causes depends on history and a careful examination. Surgery should not be undertaken before excluding other causes of heel pain. Diagnosis should be reconsidered following conservative therapy.


ABSTRACT This paper documents the changes in minority ownership of banks over the past decade, 1995-2004. The number (26 to 62) and percentage (.93% to 1.78%) of minority owned banks has increased from 1995 to 2004. The Asian and Hispanic groups experienced the most growth while the African-American group experienced the least. We segment our sample of community banks over the past decade into minority owned banks (MOB) and non-minority owned banks (NMOB). We find significant differences in the bank characteristics MOBs versus NMOBs. We also examine each minority group separately and determine that there are unique characteristics exhibited by each group. INTRODUCTION A financial institution is considered to be minority owned if 51% or more of the voting stock is owned by one or more minorities including African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Asian-Americans, Native-Americans, and women. One exception to this requirement occurs if the bank's board of directors is mainly minority run or if the bank is serving a community that is predominately made up of minorities. Since a large number of minority owned banks are located in low-income areas, they are often viewed as being the providers of economic stimulation to surrounding underdeveloped communities. The minority owned bank's willingness to make loans in small amounts, connect with the community, and provide other services targeted to minority or low-income groups gives them access to a banking niche that would otherwise not be served. Some critics believe that lending money to individuals and/or businesses in these poor communities is too risky since most minority owned banks do not have access to large amounts of assets (e.g. Brimmer (1971)). Yet, advocates have lobbied for the creation of government sponsored programs that assist minority owned banks through funding. The first government program created to aid minority-owned banks was the Minority-Bank Deposit Program (MBDP). It was designed by the Nixon administration and put into effect in October of 1970. The MBDP gives minority owned banks preferences to deposits that are made with funds from the federal government. It also encourages corporations to make deposits into minority owned financial institutions. This program was followed up with the Community Reinvestment Act which was passed by Congress in 1977. It was created in an effort to encourage banks to contribute to the communities that they served, especially low-income areas. The most recent act created to assist the minority banking community is the Community Development Banking Act. It was signed into law in 1994 by President Clinton with the intent of encouraging the creation of a group of community development banks. Beyond the reach of these programs, the FDIC has the ability to help minority owned banks survive even if they are being outperformed by their competitors if the MOB is viewed as being essential to the community that it serves. It has been debated whether or not these programs have met their goals and contributed to the communities in which they operate. According to the majority of studies, minority owned banks are consistently less efficient and profitable than non-minority owned banks. Some studies attribute the lower levels of efficiency and profitability of minority owned banks to the volatile nature of the large amounts of government deposits that they hold. Other studies have attributed these discrepancies to anything from location in low-income communities to less-qualified key employees. The varying conclusions that have been drawn by previous studies leave room for further exploration of this topic. This paper will not directly address these conflicting views but will rather document the evolution of minority owned community banks over the past decade from 1995 to 2004. We limit our sample to U.S. commercial banks with total assets between $100 million and $1 billion because this is where the majority of minority owned banks exist. …


Symbol boundary alignment, with respect to waveform selection, has an important impact on the numerology design for fifth-generation mobile applications. The current symbol boundary alignment, along with orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) waveform, strongly suffers from intercarrier interference (ICI) especially in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) communications. This happens when the mobility causes Doppler effect which results in loss of orthogonality in OFDM. The available solutions for overcoming the ICI problem suffer from high complexity, low spectral efficiency, and incompatibility with the current radio access technologies. This paper presents a novel symbol boundary alignment, called Low ICI Symbol (LICIS) boundary alignment numerology, to avoid the disadvantages of the available solutions. LICIS utilizes large subcarrier-spacing to reduce the ICI power (e.g., around 5-dB ICI power reduction with subcarrier spacing of 30 kHz in high-speed UAV communications). Moreover, LICIS is based on the same reference clock as local thermal equilibrium (LTE) which guarantees its compatibility with the current LTE numerology. In addition, this approach places only one guard-interval at the end of a sequence of OFDM symbols and creates a subslot. This leads to less overhead and preserves the spectral efficiency. Furthermore, a pre-fast Fourier transform (FFT) multipath channel equalizer is considered for removing the intersymbol interference between the OFDM symbols occurring within the subslot. Only one additional FFT and IFFT operations are required for the equalizer which creates an acceptable complexity increment compared to the complexity of other available solutions. Numerical and analytical evaluations show the superior performance of the proposed technique in terms of reliability and spectral efficiency


The paper firstly introduced the sensitive mechanism of micromachined airflow omnibearing level posture. Adopt micro-machine technology, octagonal sense organ is sensitive to omnibearing level posture. Signal processing circuit is composed by pre-signal circuit and digital circuit, to obtain voltage, omnibearing signal synthesis and resolution compensation of omnibearing tile angle signal. It is testified that: resolution<0.1°,the scope of azimuth is 360°,the scope of tile angle is 20°. The sensor is not only in small size but also in simply crafting. It is good in sensitive organ's output consistency,and suitable for mass production.


Traumatic or amputation neuromas are benign tumours formed by a proliferation of Schwann cells, axons and connective tissue elements. They are secondary to the partial or total section of a nerve pathway due to an accidental or surgical trauma. They can form at any site and affect any type of nerve. The presence of amputation neuromas is very frequent in major surgery but rare in simple excisions of skin tumours. We report two cases with neuroma localized in the neck, one after lymph node dissection for melanoma metastasis and the other after excision of a cutaneous melanoma with 3-cm margin on lateral neck. In both cases, the presence of the neuroma mandated a surgical excision to rule out a possible recurrence of melanoma.


Social marketing has been contributing historically for a better application of public policy, health and safety, environment, education and human rights. Specifically, four major areas that social marketing efforts have focused over the years are health promotion,injurprevention,environmental protection, and community mobilization. Social marketing, at an industrial organization, emphasizes exchange of ideas between the target audience (i.e. the employees) and the marketer (i.e. the employer). This exchange requires that the employees be persuaded to give up the unsafe behaviors that they are accustomed to, to gain an enhanced level of safety with a greater likelihood of preventing injuries in
the workplace. In an organizational context, the internal users are treated as customers and marketing inside the organization is an essential part of delivering value to the organization, and ultimately to the end customer. Therefore, effective management strategies are sought to develop the concept of internal marketing with a view to satisfy the employees and in turn, motivate them to do good work
and produce a better product or service. The success of any business enterprise largely depends on its manpower with regard to their professional skill level, positive attitude, job satisfaction, and involvement in quality improvement activities. The important aspect of corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the concern for safety and sound health of the workforce, so that employees feel secured and motivated. The concern becomes manifold when the workforce is exposed to menial tasks and occupational risk situations. To make a safe and conducive environment, an organization must build a solid foundation with a clear vision of the future and specific means by which it will achieve the safety mission of the organization. Safety, health and
environment systems needs a continual and systematically managed efforts in order to achieve sustainable growth. Presently, many industries are focusing attention on occupational health and safety (OHS) that may help to achieve competitive advantage. This research is concerned with the study of OHS issues in the context of injury prevention social marketing. A detailed study on workplace environment and safety climate makes the implementation of various social marketing principles easier. This may also be useful for the purpose of policy formulation on improving OHS in Indian industries. Three industrial sectors such as construction (Type 1), refractory (Type 2) and steel (Type 3) are considered in this study. These industries are generally viewed as hazardous due to usage of heavy
equipment, unsafe and primitive tools, injurious materials and dust produced during operation. The study covers such organizations where size in manpower and investment varies, both organized and unorganized workforce exists, both
public and private enterprises exist, and the level of sophistication of tools, methods, and work environment in terms of safety is poor. A study on risk perceptions and understanding of OHS has been conducted in three industrial sectors. Thirty four items are included in the questionnaire through review of related literature and discussion with a focus group. The items are framed to suit the local work practices and culture covering various aspects of OHS. Two hundred eighty eight (or 288) useful responses were tested to examine the validity and reliability of the scale to ensure a quantitative and statistically provenidentification of the responses. The test for quantitative variables was conducted by factor analysis on responses using the principal component method followed by varimax rotation to ensure that the variables are important and suitable for the model using SPSS 16.0. Finally, identified factors were again analyzed using discriminant analysis to highlight
statistical difference among practices existing in three sectors. The pattern of influence of input parameters on outputs such as injury level and material damage is difficult to establish, possibly due to existence of some nonlinear relationship among them. Therefore, an artificial neural network (ANN) is adopted to carry out sensitivity analysis and important deficient items have been
identified. A comparative evaluation on deficient items among three major types of Indian industries has been made. Quality function deployment (QFD) has been used to develop the system design requirements considering the deficient safety items as voice of customers. The interrelation among the system design requirements is represented in a digraph using Interpretive Structural Modelling (ISM) approach. A predictive methodology for forecasting various types of
injuries has been proposed using fuzzy inference system. As fuzzy inference system can be used with little mathematical knowledge and needs only expert knowledge, it can be easily implemented in the field to predict injury types.
Further, fuzzy inference system can deal effectively in imprecise and uncertain situations. In order to transfer best practices among various organizations, a benchmarking study has been carried out using data envelopment analysis
(DEA). The study finally provides some useful guidelines for the managers for improving safety performance in selected Indian industrial settings.


_______________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract Conditions conducive to the occurrence of trace element deficiencies and the different methods of identifying such deficiencies were discussed. Available information on the trace element nutritional status of grazers in the eastern regions of the Free State and Mpumalanga was evaluated. The evidence suggested that grazing animals in these regions tend to have a marginal deficiency in selenium, and a marginal copper deficiency is likely to occur in certain areas. It was recommended that grazers in these regions should benefit from the supplemetation of selenium and copper. _______________________________________________________________________________________


TiO2/TiB2 heterostructures were successfully synthesized by a facile hydrothermal approach in an aqueous solution of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). The influence of H2O2 on TiB2-based materials was systematically investigated using X-ray diffraction, scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM). The results show that TiB2 is prone to oxidize in the presence of H2O2. TiO2/TiB2 heterostructure which high-density anatase-TiO2 stand on the surface can be gained in the presence of H2O2 solvent and the final composition can be controlled by the temperature and time. The investigation may provide a path to further understand the chemical property of TiB2-based materials and synthesis method of heterostructure.


Changes in community composition are an important, but hard to predict, effect of climate change. Here, we use a wild-bee study system to test the ability of critical thermal maxima (CTmax, a measure of heat tolerance) to predict community responses to urban heat-island effects in Raleigh, NC, USA. Among 15 focal species, CTmax ranged from 44.6 to 51.3°C, and was strongly predictive of population responses to urban warming across 18 study sites (r2 = 0.44). Species with low CTmax declined the most. After phylogenetic correction, solitary species and cavity-nesting species (bumblebees) had the lowest CTmax, suggesting that these groups may be most sensitive to climate change. Community responses to urban and global warming will likely retain strong physiological signal, even after decades of warming during which time lags and interspecific interactions could modulate direct effects of temperature.


The reconfigurable computing has an increasing importance in the computational solutions because of its two main characteristics: performance and flexibility. This became possible with the technological advance of the complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs) and the field programmable gate array (FPGAs), which makes possible an increasing level of system integration (hardware and software). This integration can allow the construction of a complex system in a single device, the system on chip (SoC) technology. This is a multidisciplinary area, because it involves digital systems projects (some time analog systems also), firmware and operational systems development, beyond the specific knowledge of the areas of the systems applications. For this reasons the reconfigurable computation became part of the computer engineer formation. It is imperative that the new professionals have complete domain of this technology to be able to integrate it in the new computational systems. These computational systems reach a wide range of applications, from high performance computing to embedded systems, personal and mobile computing, to entertainment and mobile communication. In this direction, we present the evolution that happened in the Computer Engineering Program at UnicenP from the adoption of the technology of CPLDs and FPGAs in several courses, and the inclusion of a specific reconfigurable computing course


Supermarkets undergo various types of operating faults that can require costly preventive maintenance, service, and repairs. Because supermarkets are growing in number and in the variety of system types and characteristics, information about common faults and equipment is essential prior to investing effort on the development of new fault detection and diagnostics (FDD) methods or other improvements to system design and operation. A study was conducted to investigate supermarket equipment characteristics, such as the prevalence of central vs. distributed systems, condenser types, control strategies, and common operating faults such as refrigerant leakage, failed evaporator or condenser fans, failed compressors, etc. The data come from four sources: expert surveys, facility management system messages, service calls, and service records. Some of the results of the study are that centralized direct expansion systems with on/off compressor capacity control strategy and air-cooled condensers are the most common system types and refrigerant charge problems are the most common source of equipment failure. Case-related problems, in aggregate, are the most frequently occurring faults in supermarkets.


The study analyses application possibilities of filtration and thickening models in evaluation of papermaking suspension drainage rate. The authors proposed their own method to estimate the drainage rate on the basis of an existing Ergun capillary model of liquid flow through a granular material. The proposed model was less sensitive to porosity changes than the Ergun model. An empirical verification proved robustness of the proposed approach. Taking into account discrepancies in the published data concerning how the drainage velocity of papermaking suspension is defined, this study examines which of the commonly applied models matches experimental results the best.


The proliferation of on-demand internet services delivered over a network of a heterogeneous set of computing devices has created the need for high-performing dynamic systems in real-time. Services such as audio and video streaming, self-driving cars, the Internet of things (IoT), or instant communication on social networks have forced system designers to rethink the architectures and tools for implementing computer systems. Reactive programming has been advocated as a programming paradigm suitable for implementing dynamic applications with complex and heterogeneous architectural needs. However, there is no consensus on the core set of features that a reactive framework must-have. Furthermore, the current set of features proposed in reactive tools seems very restricted to cope with the actual needs for concurrency and distribution in modern systems. In this paper, several alternative semantics for distributed reactive languages are investigated, addressing complex open issues such as glitch avoidance, explicit distribution support, and constructs for explicit time management. First, we propose a reactive event-based programming language with explicit support for distribution, concurrency, and explicit time manipulation (ReactiveXD). Second, we present a reactive event-based semantic framework called Distributed Reactive Rewriting Framework (DRRF). The framework uses rewriting logic to model the components of a distributed base application, observables, and observers, and predicates supporting explicit time manipulation. Finally, to validate the proposal, the paper discusses the specification of the semantics of ReactiveXD and a scenario describing a case of intrusion detection on IoT networks.


Precision Segmented Reflector (PSR) technology is currently being developed for a range of future applications such as the Large Deployable Reflector (LDR). This paper outlines the structures activities at NASA Langley Research Center in support of the PSR program. Design concepts are explored for erectable and deployable support structures which are envisioned to be the backbone of these precision reflectors. Important functional requirements for the support trusses related to stiffness, mass, and surface accuracy are reviewed. Proposed geometries for these structures and factors motivating the erectable and deployable designs are discussed. Analytical results related to stiffness, dynamic behavior, and surface accuracy are presented and considered in light of the functional requirements. Results are included for both a 4-meter-diameter prototype support truss which is currently being designed as the Test Bed for the PSR technology development program, and for two 20-meter-diameter support structures. For the most likely ground support conditions, the maximum gravity-induced deflection of the Test Bed support truss (with 10 kg/m2 panels) was determined to be approximately 50 μm, and the rms surface error was 12 μm. For the same support conditions, the Test Bed fundamental frequencies were between 30 Hz and 40 Hz. It is shown that if the secondary optical system is supported by a simple tripod design, the first six vibration modes are likely to be dominated by the secondary system. The 20-meter-diameter support trusses were found to be quite stiff for structures of such large size, having maximum deflections on the order of 0.35 mm in a 1-g environment. When considered as part of a reflector system, these support trusses had maximum deflections of 6-11µm under slewing loads, and free-free fundamental frequencies of 6-8 Hz.


Bond Valence Sum (BVS) calculations were performed on neutron diffraction (ND) data measured at 12, 35, 55, 75 and 300 K on one sample (x = 0.3), of a series of La2-xDyxCa2xBa2Cu4+2xOz (La-2125) compounds. ND experiments have been carried out to study the effect of temperature on structure and to relate it with the superconducting properties. The sample, La1.7Dy0.3Ca0.6Ba2Cu4.6Oz (LD3) has been reported earlier, and exhibits superconductivity at 68 K. In this paper we discuss BVS calculations carried out on low temperature neutron diffraction data.