IntroductionSyringe-exchange programs (SEPs) have proven to be valuable sites to conduct tuberculin skin testing among active injection drug users. Chest x-rays (CXRs) are needed to exclude active tuberculosis prior to initiating treatment for latent tuberculosis infection. Adherence of drug users to referral for off-site chest x-rays has been incomplete. Previous cost modeling demonstrated that a monetary incentive to promote adherence could be justified on the cost basis if it had even a modest effect on adherence.MethodsWe compared adberence to referral for chest x-rays among injection drug users undergoing syringe exchange-based tuberculosis screening in New York City before and after the implementation of monetary incentives.ResultsFrom 1995 to 1998, there were 119 IDUs referred for CXRs based on tuberculin skin testing at the SEP. From 1999 to 2001, there were 58 IDUs referred for CXRs with a S25 incentive based on adherence. Adherence to CXR referral within 7 days was 46/58 (79%) among individuals who received the monetary incentive versus 17/119 (14%) prior to the implementation of the monetary incentive (P<.0001; odds ratio [OR]=23; 95% confidence interval [CI]=9.5-5.7). The median time to obtaining a CXR was significantly shorter among those given the incentive than among those referred without the incentive (2 vs. 11 days, P<.0001). In multivariate logistic regression analysis, use of the incentive was highly independently associated with increased adherence (OR=22.9;95% CI=10–52).ConclusionsMonetary incentives are highly effective in increasing adherence to referral for screening CXRs to exclude active tuberculosis after syringe exchangebased tuberculin skin testing. Prior cost modeling demonstrated that monetary incentives could be justified on the cost basis if they had even a modest effect on adherence. The current data demonstrated that monetary incentives are highly effective at increasing adherence in this setting and therefore are justifiable on a cost basis. When heath care interventions for drug users require referral off site, monetary incentives may be particularly valuable in promoting adherence.


Abstract Aeroacoustic power generation due to a self-sustained oscillation by an axisymmetric compact cavity exposed to a low-Mach-number grazing flow is studied both experimentally and numerically. The feedback effect is produced by the velocity fluctuations resulting from a coupling with acoustic standing waves in a coaxial pipe. A numerical methodology that combines incompressible flow simulations with vortex sound theory is used to predict the time-averaged acoustic source power generated by the cavity. The effect of cavity depth on the whistling is addressed. It is observed that the whistling occurs around a peak-whistling Strouhal number which depends on the cavity depth to width ratio. The proposed numerical method provides excellent predictions of the peak-whistling Strouhal number as a function of cavity depth. Given the oscillation amplitude, the numerical method predicts the time-averaged acoustic source power within a factor of two for moderate fluctuation amplitudes. For deep cavities the time-averaged acoustic source power appears to be independent of the cavity depth.


Modafinil is indicated for the management of excessive daytime sleepiness; however, recent studies have examined a broad range of potential uses. Given that clinical uses of modafinil may be expanding, this study compared modafinil and d-amphetamine effects on subjective and performance measures. Across 11 sessions, 11 healthy adults were tested after oral doses of placebo (5 sessions), modafinil (1.75 mg/kg, 3.50 mg/kg, or 7.00 mg/kg), and d-amphetamine (0.035 mg/kg, 0.070 mg/kg, 0.140 mg/kg) under double-blind, randomized conditions. Assessments of cognitive performance and subjective effects were completed before drug administration, 30 min after drug administration, and at hourly intervals after drug administration for 5 hr. Modafinil increased ratings on the Amphetamine and Morphine Benzedrine Group scales of the Addiction Research Center Inventory (ARCI) and increased ratings on the Vigor and Total Positive scales of the Profile of Mood States. d-Amphetamine increased visual analog ratings of feeling stimulated and liking the drug and increased ratings on the Morphine Benzedrine Group scale of the ARCI. Both medications significantly reduced visual analog scale ratings of feeling sleepy, and modafinil decreased ratings on the ARCI Pentobarbital-Chlorpromazine-Alcohol Group scale. Both medications sustained performance that deteriorated across time on the Sternberg Number Recognition Test. Modafinil also enhanced performance rate on the Digit-Symbol Substitution Task above baseline levels and increased response rate on the Repeated Acquisition of Response Sequences Task. These results suggest that modafinil engenders alerting effects and increases performance in healthy non-sleep-deprived individuals comparable with that of d-amphetamine.


OKT3 monoclonal antibody therapy was added to preexisting baseline immunosuppressive treatment with ciclosporin and steroids to treat rejection in 52 recipients of cadaveric livers and 10 recipients of cadaveric kidneys. Rejection was controlled in 75% of patients treated, often after high-dose steroid therapy had failed. Rejection recurred during the 17-month follow-up period, after completion of OKT3, in only 25% of the patients who had responded. The safety and effectiveness of this monoclonal therapy, added to ciclosporin and steroids, has been established in this study.


Non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAID's) are considered one of the most commonly prescribed drugs all over. The most recent and powerful NSAID's are COX-II inhibitors; which are clinically effective antiinflammatory agents with less gastrointestinal and renal toxicity, yet they had serious side effects like myocardial infarction. Therefore, there is still a need to develop better therapeutically effective and tolerable COX-II inhibitors. In this study, screening of various 2,3-disubstituted-4(3H)-quinazolinones, using the Molsoft ICM 3.5; a docking software; against the COX-II enzyme is reported. Various molecular structures of ligands were docked and scored to identify structurally similar ligands to celecoxib (reference ligand) in binding interaction to COX-II binding site. The results show that 2,3-disubstituted-4(3H)-quinazolinones moiety with cyclohexyl at C-2, and aryl moiety at N-3 binds directly or indirectly to the ring system with high binding affinity. The docked ligand has orientations completely different from that of the reference drug celecoxib.


Results: The resistance index in the pre-term pre-eclampsia group (mean = 0.7) was significantly higher (P < 0.0001) compared to the control group (mean = 0.54) as well as compared to the term pre-eclampsia group (P < 0.0001). In the term pre-eclampsia group, the resistance index (mean = 0.56) was just significantly higher compared to the controls (mean = 0.54, P = 0.02). ROC curves generated also showed that uterine artery Doppler had a very good sensitivity for predicting pre-term pre-eclampsia. The ROC data showed that uterine artery Doppler is not sensitive at all for predicting term pre-eclampsia (r2 = 0.99). Conclusion: These data showed that uterine artery Doppler had a good sensitivity for pre-term pre-eclampsia, but was not of value in predicting term pre-eclampsia. As uterine artery Doppler changes are known to reflect spiral artery transformation by the developing trophoblast, it is possible that defective transformation of spiral arteries is not a predisposing factor for term pre-eclampsia.


Singular perturbational approximations for linear continuous-time and discrete-time systems are developed in the frequency domain. It is shown that the familiar singular perturbational result is an approximation at the origin in the complex plane. However, if the system has multiple time-scale effects, other approximations can be obtained at different locations on the negative real axis to emphasize such behavior. The relationship between singular perturbational approximations and direct subsystem elimination is also investigated.


The first-branching lineages of the tribe Ceropegieae, Anisotominae, Leptadeniinae, and Heterostemminae, are the focus of the present study. In the ingroup we molecularly analysed 34 samples from southern and (north)eastern Africa and Asia for the nuclear internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region, and five plastid markers (trnT-L, trnL-F and trnH-psbA intergenic spacers, trnL, and rps16 introns). Maximum Parsimony and Bayesian analyses were conducted for phylogenetic reconstruction and Bayesian binary MCMC (BBM) analysis as implemented in RASP for testing biogeographic inference. Sister to the well-known hyperdiverse subtribe Stapeliinae (around 700 species) are the Anisotominae, an African subtribe of c. 30 species, with the tropical Neoschumannia in sister-group position to the remaining genera, Anisotoma, Emplectanthus, Riocreuxia, and Sisyranthus. Emplectanthus is sequenced in full for the first time, and its monophyly as sister to Anisotoma is documented. As in Sisyranthus, new sequences in Riocreuxia, especially in Riocreuxia torulosa s.l., reveal very low genetic variation pointing to an actively radiating and speciating group, possibly in adaptation to pollinator pressure. Molecular and morphological data necessitate the transfer of Brachystelma natalense to Anisotoma, and the new combination Anisotoma natalensis is proposed. Leptadeniinae are sister to the Stapeliinae–Anisotominae clade. The position of the strictly Asian, rheophytic Pentasachme could be resolved as sister to the remaining genera of Leptadeniinae, Conomitra, Leptadenia, and Orthanthera. The position of the S Asian/Australasian wet forest lianas of the genus Heterostemma as sister to the remaining Ceropegieae is confirmed, indicating a humid Asian origin for this tribe known for its arid-adapted African succulents.


We estimate a measure of well-being efficiency that assesses countries' ability to transform inputs into subjective well-being (Cantril ladder). We use the six inputs (real GDP per capita, healthy life expectancy, social support, freedom of choice, absence of corruption, and generosity) identified in the World Happiness Reports and apply Data Envelopment Analysis to a sample of 126 countries. Efficiency scores reveal that high ranking subjective well-being countries, such as the Nordic countries, are not strictly the most efficient ones. Also, the scores are uncorrelated with a traditional (total factor) measure of economic efficiency. This suggests that the implicit assumption that economic efficiency promotes well-being is not supported. Subjective well-being efficiency can be improved by changing the amount (scale) or composition of inputs and their use (technical efficiency). For instance, countries with lower unemployment, and greater healthy life expectancy and optimism are more efficient.


A detailed study of the marine flora of Tunisia was conducted by assessing the seasonal variation of seaweed populations along a 35 m transect at one site (La Marsa), as well as by qualitatively describing the species composition throughout the country, and comparing the floristic affinities of the Tunisian flora with other Mediterranean and northeastern Atlantic areas. The occurrence and distribution of the Tunisian flora were correlated with a variety of parameters, including water temperature, salinity, substrata and currents. The seasonal studies at La Marsa, which is within the Gulf of Tunis, were undertaken monthly between October, 1974 and August, 1975. Sixty five taxa of seaweeds were recorded at the transect site. The Phaeophyta showed the most dramatic seasonal variation and sensitivity to temperature variations, with a 41% decrease in percent occurrence from fall to summer. In contrast, the Rhodophyta and Chlorophyta only decreased by 7% and 5%, respectively, during the same period. A total of 170 species of seaweeds was collected from 29 sites throughout Tunisia. Of these, 55 species are newly reported for the country. An additional 116 species have been reported by other investigators from Tunisia, primarily from deep water habitats. Thus, a total of 286 taxa of seaweeds are known from the country. Two distinct floristic regions are evident with Tunisia, namely, the northern and southeastern areas that are separated by a sill between Tunisia and Sicily. Using Cheney's floristic affinity ratio, (Chlorophyta + Rhodophyta)/Phaeophyta, it was shown that northern Tunisia had a cold water flora, while the southeastern Tunisia had a mixed vegetation with reduced numbers of cold water species. Northern Tunisia lies within the western cooler basin, while the southeast coast is in the eastern, warm basin. The pronounced temperature demarcation between the two regions probably accounts for their differential floristic composition. A comparison of the Tunisian flora with the Red Sea, as well as several northeastern Atlantic (Portugal, Spain, Morocco, Canary Islands) and Mediterranean sites were made using Jaccard's Similarity Coefficient. The highest percent similarity was between Tunisia and Sicily, while the lowest was between Tunisia and the Red Sea. The close geographical proximity of Tunisia and Sicily, as well as the similarity of their temperature, salinity, and current regimes probably accounts for their high floristic affinities. The phytogeographic distribution of the two major marine vegetational units within Tunisia, i.e., the Red SeaIndian Ocean and the northeastern Atlantic algal components, was compared throughout the Mediterranean. The northeastern Atlantic species were predominant in the western basin and the more northern portions of the Mediterranean, while the Red Sea-Indian Ocean component was evenly distributed throughout the Mediterranean but of reduced species diversity. More than 90% of the water in the Mediterranean comes from the Atlantic Ocean through the Gibraltar sill and upon its entrance major counterclockwise currents are established within the western and eastern basins. The above described currents carry the cold surface waters from the Atlantic and establish low water temperatures in the western basin; in turn they are primarily responsible for the dispersal of Atlantic taxa in the Mediterranean. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 was an important factor determining the migration of Red Sea biota into the Mediterranean. The Red Sea-Indian Ocean component occurs in low numbers probably because of a limited inflow of sea water from the Red Sea into the Mediterranean.


The effect of soil moisture and tillage depth was studied based on some mechanical properties for type tillage machine (moldboard plow)  and soil physical characteristics wene tested two soil moisture levels of 10-12%and 12-14% and three levels tillage depth of 14,16 and 18 cm. The experiments were conducted in a factorial experiment under a randomized complete block design with three replications. The results showed that the soil moisture 10-12 % was significantly better than the soil moisture 12-14% as while tillage depth at range 14cm was significantly superior to the other two levels 16 and 18 cm in all studied conditions. The results showed fuel consumption of 11.348 and 10.777 L.ha-1 , slippage percentage of 9.291 and 9.111 % power losses due to slippage of 2.689 and 2.414 kW, field efficiency of 68.358 and 68.967 %, drawbar power 12.226 and 12.001kw and specific resistance 9.045 and 8.553 N.cm-2 for soil moisture 10-12% and tillage depth 14 cm , respectively.


Value at risk is a convenient and popular risk measurement tool. It represents the maximum potential loss on a specific portfolio of financial assets given a specific time horizon and a confidence interval. Principally value at risk is used in finance for risk management, financial reporting and capital requirement. In real estate, the calculation of this risk measurement is still rare even if it is now common to compute and disclose it in numerous other fields of finance. Indeed nowadays, financial institutions are facing the important task of estimating and controlling their exposure to market risk following a scope of new regulation such as Basel II, Basel III or Solvency II. It is in this context that financial institution may use internal models for estimating their market risk. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the possibility to use Cornish-Fisher expansion to assess real estate value at risk. Despite strong assumptions, we show how Cornish-Fisher approximation can give quickly accurate measurements. In addition, practitioners can find here a methodology to assess quickly value at risk without too many loss of relevancy due to normal hypothesis. After a review of literature on value at risk and of the existing methodologies, the paper describes the Cornish-Fisher expansion and how the expansion is used to compute value at risk. Then, we apply the proposed model to a set of real estate indices and compare the results obtained with the traditional variance-covariance method.


The aim of this study was the validation of the minimal Resistance Index (min RI) measured by colour Doppler sonography as parameter of tumour neoangiogenesis. 107 patients with clinically or radiologically diagnosed breast tumour with a sonographically detectable lump had preoperative measurements and analysis of blood flow in the tumour area and in the healthy parenchyma of both breasts. The min RI was compared with histology, menopausal status and age. In all 107 patients blood flow could be measured in the tumour area and in 98% of the bilaterally investigated quadrants. Irrespective of tumour status the mean min RI was lower in the tumour area (0.62) than in the other quadrants of the affected (RI = 0.65, p = 0.002) or contralateral breast (RI = 0.65, p = 0.0003). The mean min RI of benign tumours was 0.60 (+/- 0.11 SD) and of malignant tumours 0.64 (+/- 0.11 SD), this difference was not significant (p = 0.07). Irrespective of tumour status postmenopausal patients had a higher mean min RI than premenopausal patients. This was true for the tumour area (RI = 0.64 vs 0.60, p = 0.11) and also for the quadrants (RI = 0.68 vs 0.62, p = 0.0002). In postmenopausal women there was a statistically significant correlation with age (r = 0.58, p = 0.0001). We conclude that the min RI is of no diagnostic relevance for the classification of breast tumours as benign or malignant.


Robotic manipulators can be used to deposit materials on non-planar surfaces. Conventional sensor-based industrial robots can only work on stationary surfaces, relying on the scanned data prior to printing. As a result, performing depositions that involve changes in plane motion present significant challenges. The deposition of conformal materials on a time-varying deformable surface requires the manipulators to update coordinates in real time on the plane for positioning and orientation. This can be achieved by employing multiple sensors for manipulator motion planning and control, in order to prevent collisions between the tool and the surface. In this paper, we propose simple tool-center point calibration, initial point coordinate estimation, and a gap compensation scheme to combine real-time feedback control and direct conformal deposition. Combining these elements allows us to maintain a controlled gap between the tooltip and the deformable surface during the deposition. We test the efficacy of the proposed approach by printing a single layer of ink patterns with approximately 950 micron line width on a deformable surface. We also characterize the printing quality with different gaps and printing steps and show that sensor control is critical in smooth printing. Finally, the effects of changing the relative position of the tooltip, different surface colors, and laser sensor position are characterized.


Introduction Cycling performance depends on several physiological and biomechanical parameters (Faria et al. 2005). The influence of biomechanical factors such as pedalling technique is still an issue of debate (Leirdal and Ettema 2011). Several studies demonstrated that pedal force effectiveness (FE, %, ratio of the force perpendicular to the crank and the total force applied to the pedal) has also been used as a gold standard measure of pedalling technique in cycling. However, FE depends on several constraints such as power output (PO, W), pedalling cadence, body position, fatigue, and cycling experience (Bini et al. 2013). Studies showed that large increase in PO (i.e. from 60% to 98% of the maximal aerobic power [MAP]) led to higher FE. Additionally, a recent study showed that professional cyclists have better pedalling technique than elite or club cyclists (Garcia-Lopez et al. 2016). The purpose of this study was to assess the influence of PO on pedalling technique in cyclists of different competitive levels using FE as a performance clue.   Methods 37 male road cyclists of different competitive levels (elite [19] and professional [18]) performed all testing sessions on a Bikefitting ergometer (Shimano, Pedal Analyzer, Dynamics Lab, Sittard, Netherland) that has been used to assess FE in seated position. Firstly, the personal bike position of each cyclist was reported on the ergometer. Then, the cyclists were required to perform exercises at four level of PO (55, 70, 85 and 100% of MAP). In order to keep an individual combination between muscular force and pedalling cadence, the cyclists were asked to keep their preferred pedalling cadence during each level of PO. The main parameter measured was FE whereas the balance between propulsive and resistive forces (%) was also measured as a secondary parameter. A two-way ANOVA was used to analyse the influence of both the PO and the competitive level on FE.   Results The figure 1 shows an increase in FE with PO (+26.4% from 55 to 100% of MAP, p < 0.001). Even if the competitive level did not influence FE, the increase of FE according to PO was higher (+36.1%) in professional cyclists than elite cyclists (+19.1%). Additionally, the coefficient of variation (CV, %) decreased with PO (CV55% = 16.2 %, CV70% = 15.0 %, CV85% =   12.8 % and CV100% = 11.0%). For all PO and competitive levels, FE was correlated with both PO (r = 0.47, p < 0.001) and the balance between propulsive and resistive forces (r = 0.82, p   < 0.001). Finally, the resistive forces were significantly (p < 0.001) decreased from 15.8 to 5% between 55 and 100% of MAP during the upstroke.   Conclusions The main findings of this study show that FE was influenced by the level of PO and was independent of the competitive level. Yet, professional cyclists increased faster FE with the level of PO suggesting that their pedalling technique was further improved in high levels of PO as compared with elite cyclists. Previous studies showed that an increase in PO induced an increase in FE (Zameziati et al. 2006). In this study, for a given PO, the increase in FE was due to a lower resistive force. Concerning the effect of competitive level, previous studies have shown no difference in FE between cyclists of different competitive levels (Sanderson et al. 2000) whereas another study (Garcia-Lopez et al. 2016) demonstrated that professional cyclists had better pedalling technique than elite cyclists. Finally, it appears that with the increase of PO, the professional cyclists improve their pedalling efficiency both by increasing FE and decreasing the resistive force during the upstroke of the pedalling cycle.


Elk (Cervus elaphus) are increasing in fragmented landscapes that result from exurban human development throughout western North America, which increases human–wildlife conflicts and poses a challenge to wildlife managers. Elk hunting must often be intensively managed to reduce population growth rate, crop depredation, and habituation to humans. However, little was known about the indirect effect hunting has on anti-predator behavior, movement, resource selection, and human–elk conflicts. We outfitted elk with global positioning system (GPS) collars in the wildland–urban interface (WUI) of Missoula, Montana, USA, 2007–2009, to test the indirect effects of hunting on elk. We used data from 9 GPS-collared adult female elk during 3 hunting seasons with increasing hunting pressure (2007–2009) to test relationships between movement rates measured by first passage time (FPT) and resource selection. Elk movement rates were lower approximately 750 m from houses and trails, resulting in resource selection for areas approximately 1,200 m from houses and trails; this suggested that habituation to humans contributed to human–wildlife conflict. Movement rates increased with increasing hunting pressure, and were lower in general versus focal hunting seasons and with archery versus rifle hunting. Thus, intensive hunting seasons in the WUI increased elk movement rates and exposure to hunter predation risk, as predicted. These results support the hypothesis that elk modify their behavior in relation to temporal and spatial variation in human predation risk. In the intensively managed WUI, our results demonstrate that even small increases in the area hunted and increases in intensity can indirectly change resource selection and movement rates of elk, potentially reversing recent trends of increasing habituation in WUI elk populations. © 2012 The Wildlife Society.


Participation of members in cooperatives is essential if they are to remain democratic and responsive, yet there is a surprising lack of theory as to why, and under what circumstances, people participate. This article identifies different types of participation, and considers the possibility of deriving a theoretical model from existing literature. Having reviewed related literatures on political, economic and community participation, it finds a need to go back to basic social psychological theories with which to build up useful theory. Two theoretical models are presented: an individualistic theory from George Homans, and a mutual theory from Pitrim Sorokin. These are elaborated in relation to cooperatives; the individualistic theory is found to be useful where members have an instrumental attitude, but the mutual one is shown to be muchricher in explanatory value, and to point to ways participation can be improved.


Most transition countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) face enormous challenges in developing a viable land structure, requiring a set of measures which is unprecedented in its scale and intensity to speed up this process. Analysis of policy initiatives in CEE countries illustrates that options for solving fragmentation and small scale of farms have concentrated on particular instruments like land consolidation and land banking. From discussions in the expert network LANDNET it can be concluded that land governance in CEE countries has scope for better coherence and more balanced and focused use of various instruments. Land governance should be developed as a comprehensive framework of mutually supportive instruments for development. Framing of land fragmentation as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is believed to be a useful way to come to more specific policies in CEE countries and other regions of the world.


We present the theory, design, simulation, and experimental evaluations of a new laser transmissometer system for aerosol extinction rate measurement over long paths. The transmitter emits an ON/OFF modulated Gaussian beam that does not require strict collimation. The receiver uses multiple point detectors to sample the sub-aperture irradiance of the arriving beam. The sparse detector arrangement makes our transmissometer system immune to turbulence-induced beam distortion and beam wander caused by the atmospheric channel. Turbulence effects often cause spatial discrepancies in beam propagation and lead to miscalculation of true power loss when using the conventional approach of measuring the total beam power directly with a large-aperture optical concentrator. Our transmissometer system, on the other hand, combines the readouts from distributed detectors to rule out turbulence-induced temporal power fluctuations. As a result, we show through both simulation and field experiments that our transmissometer system works accurately with turbulence strength Cn2 up to 10-12  m-2/3 over a typical 1-km atmospheric channel. In application, our turbulence- and weather-resistant laser transmissometer system has significant advantages for the measurement and study of aerosol concentration, absorption, and scattering properties, which are crucial for directed energy systems, ground-level free-space optical communication systems, environmental monitoring, and weather forecasting.


This study was carried out to determine the Ichneumonidae (Hymenoptera) fauna of Gelincik Mountain Natural Park. Six stations were chosen with different altitude and floristic structure and were conducted between April 2010 and October 2012. Specimens were collected via sweeping net and malaise traps. A total of 145 samples were 47 species belonging to 43 genera were identified. Of these, 14 are new records for Ichneumonidae fauna for Turkey. These species are: Arotrephes perfusor (Gravenhorst, 1829) , Barichneumon peregrinator (Linnaeus, 1758), Charitopes gastricus (Holmgren, 1868), Dicaelotus pumilus (Gravenhorst, 1829), Diphyus trifasciatus (Gravenhorst, 1829), Gelis gallicator ( Aubert, 1971) , Herpestomus arridens (Gravenhorst, 1829), Ichneumon caloscelis Wesmael, 1845, Lissonota proxima Fonscolombe, 1854, Mesoleius melanoleucus (Gravenhorst, 1829), Odontocolon quercinus (Thomson, 1877), Olesicampe fulcrans (Thomson, 1887) , Symplecis invisitata Rossem, 1981 and Tropistes falcatus (Thomson, 1884). Also, three genera, Arotrephes , Charitopes and Tropistes are new records for Turkey.


Cusato and Bush raise concerns regarding the accuracy of diagnosis, bias introduced by knowledge of rheumatoid factor (RF) status during chart review, and inclusion of patients without joint complaints in our study of the RF's clinical utility. 1 The "gold standard" for diagnosis of rheumatoid arthritis (RA) (the American College of Rheumatology criteria) has always been a major obstacle in assessing the utility of tests in this illness because they may be unreliable (eg, morning stiffness is subjective; there may be significant interobserver variability in the assessment of arthritis) and, perhaps more important, because these criteria are not actually recommended for use in clinical practice; they were derived to facilitate studies of the disease. We did not rely solely on the College's criteria and accepted a rheumatologist's diagnosis of RA, recognizing that this would include patients who might not meet criteria; on the other hand, it provides a more realistic


: In order to establish radioimmunoassay (RIA) systems for the determination of TSH subunits were carried out. Standard TSH supplied from MRC and standard TSH subunits from Calbiochem were identified to be highly purified by gel filtrations through a Sephadex G-100 column. Antibodies of TSH subunits supplied from Calbiochem bound to standard TSH subunits but not to other pituitary hormones except for TSH. Cross reactivity of anti TSH-alpha antibody to standard TSH was 0.000082, and that of TSH-beta to standard TSH was 0.000011. As the standard curve of each subunit and the displacement curve by TSH were parallel in each assay system, serum levels of TSH subunits were computed by the subtraction of the amount of TSH subunits which was overestimated by the cross reaction with native TSH in this assay system. Cross reactivity of anti TSH-alpha antibody to TSH-beta was 0.001, and that of anti TSH-beta antibody to TSH-alpha was 0.002. But in clinical studies, one TSH subunit was not greatly affected by the determination of another TSH subunit. Utilizing these standard TSH subunits, antibodies of TSH subunits and 125I-labelled TSH subunits obtained by the chloramine-T method, the RIA systems for measurement of serum TSH subunits levels without an extraction procedure were developed. In each RIA system of TSH subunit, a good dose response curve was observed in the range from 0.2 to 50 ng/ml of TSH subunits. Recovery and reproducibility of each RIA system were satisfactory. The serum levels of TSH subunits in 13 normal subjects, 12 patients with primary hypothyroidism and 7 patients with hyperthyroidism were determined by the RIA of TSH subunits. In 13 normal subjects, serum levels of TSH-alpha varied from an undetectable level (U.D.: less than 0.2 ng/ml) to 0.3 ng/ml, and those of TSH-beta varied from an undetectable level (U.D.: less than 0.2 ng/ml) to 0.8 ng/ml. In 12 patients with primary hypothyroidism, serum levels of TSH-alpha varied from U.D. to 4.9 ng/ml, and those of TSH-beta varied from U.D. to 13.6 ng/ml. In 7 patients with hyperthyroidism, serum levels of TSH-alpha varied from U.D. to 4.3 ng/ml, and those of TSH-beta were ranged U.D. From the above data, it is suggested that the direct RIA of serum TSH subunits is a useful tool for studying the roles of TSH subunits in peripheral blood.


As part of a program to determine the physical possibility of expanding the number of types of base pairs in DNA, the pairing stabilities of the analog bases 6-thioguanine (GS) and 5-methyl-2-pyrimidinone (TH) in oligodeoxynucleotides were measured. Procedures were developed to synthesize oligodeoxynucleotides with the analog bases. The sequences of the synthesized oligomers were T-C-G-A-C-G-G-X-Y-C-C-G. An enzymatic procedure was developed to measure relative association constants of oligomer pairs with the self complementary reference oligomer, X = A and Y = T, K(T/A) = K. The results were K(C/G) = (5 +/- .5)K, K(TH/GS) = K/(1 +/- .5), K(T/G) = K/(9 +/- 3), K(TH/G) = K/(25 +/- 5), K(C/GS) less than K/30, K(TH/A) less than K/40, K(T/GS) less than K/40, K(C/A) less than K/40. The results with the standard bases are consistent with other methods of measurement. The stability of the base pair GS/TH is approximately the same as the standard base pair A/T.


"We live, as we dream--alone," Conrad revealed in "Heart of Darkness." This novel by Tadeusz Konwicki, a Pole writing in his own language, is an extension of the theme of dream and life and their interlocking realities, and man's attempt to come to meaningful and personal terms with an existential and absurd universe.The antihero (in the Camusian sense) is shown at the opening of the novel just coming out of a coma, having tried to commit suicide by poison. He is surrounded by provincial townsfolk, villagers who in their isolation and emotional impoverishment have turned their energies to creating a new religion--a private God, non-identifiable as either Christian or non-Christian.Called "one of the most terrifying novels in postwar Polish literature, ...greeted upon its appearance (in 1963) as a major literary sensation" (Czeslaw Milosz, "History of Polish Literature), " the novel moves through a series of flashbacks between present reality and recalled experiences. The language is that of a dream sequence with metaphors of nightmarish quality, both in intensity and "illogicality."The young Pole who narrates his experiences reveals himself to be caught up in a labyrinth leading nowhere, driven by an urge which ultimately is a need for punishment, and represents man's longing for a responsive and benevolent force over his destiny. Acutely feeling the lack, faced with a godless universe, he sees his choice to be between selfassertive survival at any price--moral, sensual, intellectual--or the selfpronouncement of worthlessness and the denouement of peace attained by suicide. The hero "escapes" death and is condemned to death-in-life.Konwicki's descriptions of the brutal mutual massacres of some of the war experiences of the narrator are unforgettable in their irony. The dialogue is witty and ironic, and retains the vernacular thrust of the Polish original. The author's experience as director and script writer earned him a Grand Prix (1958) at Venice for a film entitled "The Last Day of Summer." His vivid awareness of the passing values in an increasingly superficial world of interrelationships and goals makes this passionate work a powerful indictment of modern man's progress in guilt and war and his impotence in melding his idealistic dreams and his life.


This article addresses the relations between painting, photography and settler colonialism in the nineteenth century through the Māori portraits of Gottfried Lindauer. Lindauer paintings are partly notable for the role that photography, via the projective device of the episcope, played in their production. In the context of the European exoticising of non-western others, and a rapidly expanding market for their images, this intermedial device manifests a gap between painter and sitter, pre-modern and modern, the existing older county of Māori and the new county of New Zealand. The photographic operation of the exotic further includes national and international exhibitions in which Lindauer's portraits were shown, and the collectors, curators and commissioners of Lindauer's work, who I conceive as parasitical intermediaries or, in Kwame Anthony Appiah's phrase, culture brokers. Such figures situate Lindauer's paintings within a metropolitan regime of evaluation which is underpinned by distance and debt. However, the portraits are also vehicles for currency of another kind, which is the mana motuhake (independent authority) of Māori. Understood within Te Ao Māori (the Māori world) the portraits bridge the perceptual gap of the exotic, and make present, or felt, the historically continuous self-sovereignty of their subjects.


Addition of lysergic acid diethylamide to cultured human leukocytes resulted in a marked increase of chromosomal abnormalities. The distribution of chromosome breaks deviated significantly from random, with an accumulation of aberrations in chromosome No. 1. Cytogenetic investigation of a patient extensively treated with this drug over a 4-year period for paranoid schizophrenia showed a similar increase in chromosomal damage.


Ultraslow spreading ridges are poorly understood plate boundaries consisting of magmatic and amagmatic segments that expose mostly mantle peridotite and only traces of basalt and gabbro. The slowest part of the global spreading system is represented by the eastern Gakkel Ridge in the Central Arctic Ocean, where crustal accretion is characterized by extreme focusing of melt to discrete magmatic centers. Close to its eastern tip lies the unusual 5,310‐m‐deep Gakkel Ridge Deep (GRD) with limited sediment infill, which is in strong contrast to the broader sediment‐filled rift valleys to the east and west. Here, we report an 40Ar/39Ar age of 3.65 ± 0.01 Ma for a pillow basalt from a seamount located on the rim the GRD, confirming ultraslow spreading rates of ~7 mm/year close to the Laptev Sea as suggested from aeromagnetic data. Its geochemistry points to an alkaline lava, attributed to partial melting of a source that underwent prior geochemical enrichment. We note that the GRD extracts compositionally similar melts as the sparsely magmatic zone further west but at much slower spreading velocities of only ~6−7 mm/year, indicating the widespread occurrence of similarly fertile mantle in the High Arctic. This enriched source differs from subcontinental lithospheric mantle that influences magmatism along the Western Volcanic Zone (Goldstein et al., 2008, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature06919) and is similar to metasomatized mantle, shown to influence melt genesis along the Eastern Volcanic Zone.


Now an energy-rich sultanate, for centuries an important trading port in the South China Sea, Brunei has taken a different direction than its Persian Gulf peers. Immigration is restricted, and Brunei's hydrocarbon wealth is invested conservatively, mostly outside the country. Today home to some 393,000 inhabitants and comprising 5,765 square kilometers in area, Brunei first appears in the historical record at the end of the 10th century. After the Spanish attack of 1578, Brunei struggled to regain and expand its control on coastal West Borneo and to remain within the trading networks of the South China Sea. It later fell under British sway, and a residency was established in 1906, but it took the discovery of oil in Seria in 1929 before colonial power began to establish the bases of a modern state. Governed by an absolute monarchy, Bruneians today nevertheless enjoy a high level of social protection and rule of law. Ranking second (after Singapore) in Southeast Asia in terms of standards of living, the sultanate is implementing an Islamic penal code for the first time of its history. Focusing on Brunei's political economy, history and geography, this book aims to understand the forces behind Brunei's to-and-fro of tradition and modernisation.


We analyze the optimal debt structure of multinational corporations choosing between centralized or decentralized borrowing. We identify how this choice is affected by creditor rights and bankruptcy costs, taking into account managerial incentives and coinsurance considerations. We find that partially centralized borrowing structures are optimal with either weak or strong creditor rights. For intermediate levels of creditor rights fully decentralized (centralized) borrowing structures are optimal if managers have strong (weak) empire building tendencies. Decentralized borrowing is more attractive for companies focussing on short-term profitability. Credits are rather taken in countries with better creditor rights and more efficient insolvency systems. JEL classification: G32, F23


Background : Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) is a type of retrovirus that infects the human immune system that causes Acquired Immunodefiency Syndrome (AIDS). The presence of TB germs cause progression of cases of co-infection of TB-HIV getting worse so threatening sufferers. This study aims to reveal the one-year survival rate of patients co-infected TB-HIV based on time start of antiretroviral treatment.Methods : This study used a retrospective cohort design in RSPI Prof. Dr. Sulianti Saroso years 2013-2015. The data used comes from searches on the register of pre ARV and ARV form, TB Form, the book ARV monitoring, monitoring of pharmaceutical drugs, ARV overview and status tracking of medical records. The data collection involves the officer HIV / AIDS and the doctor (validation diagnosis and covariates) were in blind on the research hypothesis. Results : The cumulative probability of survival for one year patients co-infected TB-HIV get antiretroviral treatment early in RSPI Prof. Dr. Sulianti Saroso period January 2011-May 2014 was 81.5%. The probability of survival for patients of TB-HIV based on the initial time showed that one-year survival in patients receiving antiretroviral treatment in the intensive phase was 89.1% and in patients receiving antiretroviral treatment in advanced phases was 74.5%.Conclusion : Co-infected TB-HIV patients get antiretroviral drugs in the intensive phase tend to have a probability of survival is greater in the first year compared to co-infection TB-HIV patients get antiretroviral drugs in the advanced phase


The alliance of the Polish Catholic Church with the Law and Justice (PiS) government has been widely reported and resulted in significant benefits for the Church. However, beginning in mid-2016, the top church leadership, including the Episcopal Conference, has distanced itself from the government and condemned its use of National Catholicism as legitimation rhetoric for the government's malpractices in the fields of human rights and democracy. How to account for this behavior? The article proposes two explanations. The first is that the alliance of the PiS with the nationalist wing of the Church, while legitimating its illiberal refugee policy and attacks on democratic institutions of the government, further radicalized the National Catholic faction of the Polish Church and motivated a reaction of the liberal and mainstream conservative prelates. The leaders of the Episcopate, facing an empowered and radical National Catholic faction, pushed back with a doctrinal clarification of Catholic orthodoxy. The second explanatory path considers the transnational influence of Catholicism, in particular of Pope Francis' intervention in favor of refugee rights as prompting the mainstream bishops to reestablish the Catholic orthodoxy. The article starts by tracing the opposition of the Bishops Conference and liberal prelates to the government's refugee and autocratizing policies. Second, it describes the dynamics of the Church's internal polarization during the PiS government. Third, it traces and contextualizes the intervention of Pope Francis during the asylum political crisis (2015–2016). Fourth, it portrays their respective impact: while the Pope's intervention triggered the bishops' response, the deepening rifts between liberal and nationalist factions of Polish Catholicism are the ground cause for the reaction.


Synucleinopathies are a broad class of neurodegenerative disorders characterized by the presence of intracellular protein aggregates containing α-synuclein protein. The aggregated α-synuclein protein is hyperphosphorylated on serine 129 (S129) compared to the unaggregated form of the protein. While the precise functional consequences of S129 hyperphosphorylation are still being clarified, numerous in vitro and in vivo studies suggest that S129 phosphorylation is an early event in α-synuclein dysfunction and aggregation. Identifying the kinases and phosphatases that regulate this critical phosphorylation event may ultimately prove beneficial by allowing pharmacological mitigation of synuclein dysfunction and toxicity in Parkinson's disease and other synucleinopathies. We report here the development of a high-content, fluorescence-based assay to quantitate levels of total and S129 phosphorylated α-synuclein protein. We have applied this assay to conduct high-throughput loss-of-function screens with siRNA libraries targeting 711 known and predicted human kinases and 206 phosphatases. Specifically, knockdown of the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase related kinase SMG1 resulted in significant increases in the expression of pS129 phosphorylated α-synuclein (p-syn). Moreover, SMG1 protein levels were significantly reduced in brain regions with high p-syn levels in both dementia with Lewy bodies (DLB) and Parkinson's disease with dementia (PDD). These findings suggest that SMG1 may play an important role in increased α-synuclein pathology during the course of PDD, DLB, and possibly other synucleinopathies.


The widespread use of Computer Graphics and Computer Vision applications has led to a plethora of hardware implementations that are usually expressed using linear algebraic methods. There are two drawbacks with this approach that are posing fundamental challenges to engineers developing hardware and software applications in this area. The first is the complexity and size of the hardware blocks required to practically realize such applications – particularly multiplication, addition and accumulation operations. Whether the platform is Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) or Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), in both cases there are significant issues in efficiently implementing complex geometric functions using standard mathematical techniques, particularly in floating point arithmetic. The second major issue is the complexity required for the effective solution of complex multi-dimensional problems either for scientific computation or for advanced graphical applications. Conventional algebraic techniques do not scale well in hardware terms to more than 3 dimensional problems, so a new approach is desirable to handle these situations. Geometric Algebra (GA) promises to unify the different approaches used in vector algebra, trigonometry, homogeneous coordinates and quaternion algebra into a single framework. Geometric Algebra provides a rich set of geometric primitives to describe points, lines, planes, circles and spheres along with simple algebraic operations instead of points and lines alone as in a conventional algebra. This ability to carry out direct operations on this rich set of primitives enables GA to be a powerful tool for solving a wide variety of problems in computer vision, graphics and robotics. In all these areas, performance is a key issue, therefore hardware architecture of GA is considered essential to meet the stringent performance requirements for these applications. In this thesis, a detailed review of the influential research in the development of GA along with the necessary fundamentals of GA is given. Subsequently a review of background relating different implementation strategies provides an important element in understanding the specific requirements and thereby developing the hardware architecture. Based on this study, an architecture was developed that is modular and scalable to higher dimensions for geometric algebra processing. In this architecture, the designer can easily specify the floating point resolution, the order of the computation and also configure the trade-offs between the hardware area and speed. The modularity and the flexibility of the interface of the architecture also provides a platform where the designer can quantify the clock cycles to the number of resources that they may have in hand for any GA based application. This architecture has been designed not only to be a stand alone core, but can also be configured and used as a coprocessor to a larger system. To demonstrate the performance and flexibility of the GA architecture presented in this thesis, the hardware has been tested extensively using a standard image processing application. The performance results obtained from these experiments are comparable to the results obtained using existing methods. It is also shown through derivations and also from the experiments that the convolution operation in the image processing application with the GA based rotor masks, belong to a class of linear vector filters. This linear vector filter can be applied to image or speech signals where vector filtering is of fundamental interest. This opens up a range of research opportunities to the growing field of color image processing. This work has explored the totally new area of GA hardware with novel aspects including the grade tracking, configurability and linearity of the hardware. From a software point of view and application development, this work has explored the development of a platform with compiler support and easier programming methods specific to the GA hardware in an FPGA based platform. This has further enabled and increased the practical significance of the work by verifying the GA techniques in a variety of real world designs. Therefore, from both points of view it has advanced the state-of-art and has opened up opportunities for further research in GA hardware.


Recently generating natural language explanations has shown very promising results in not only offering interpretable explanations but also providing additional information and supervision for prediction. However, existing approaches usually require a large set of human annotated explanations for training while collecting a large set of explanations is not only time consuming but also expensive. In this paper, we develop a general framework for interpretable natural language understanding that requires only a small set of human annotated explanations for training. Our framework treats natural language explanations as latent variables that model the underlying reasoning process of a neural model. We develop a variational EM framework for optimization where an explanation generation module and an explanation-augmented prediction module are alternatively optimized and mutually enhance each other. Moreover, we further propose an explanation-based self-training method under this framework for semi-supervised learning. It alternates between assigning pseudo-labels to unlabeled data and generating new explanations to iteratively improve each other. Experiments on two natural language understanding tasks demonstrate that our framework can not only make effective predictions in both supervised and semi-supervised settings, but also generate good natural language explanation.


Recently different studies of green transport have become interesting for policy makers, car manufacturers, customers and energy suppliers. Many stakeholders from the public and private sectors are investing a lot of effort to identify consumer behaviour for future improvements in development of green products and effective strategies, which could accelerate the transition to sustainable future. This paper presents the effects of electric vehicle promotional policies and customer preferences about alternative fuel vehicles. This study has shown that the electric vehicle promotional policies adopted in Slovenia have been unsuccessful, as the share of first-time registered electric vehicles in 2013 was below 1%. For different segments of people whose opinions about low emission vehicles differ, different measures must be adopted. When designing promotional policies focus must be on the most relevant factors such as the total vehicle price and fuel economy.


ABSTRACT HeLa cells were stably transfected with a cDNA clone encoding the B1 isoform of the mouse FcγRII receptor (hereafter referred to as HeLa-FcRII cells). The receptor was expressed at high level at the plasma membrane in about 90% of the cells. These cells bound and internalized mouse monoclonal virus-neutralizing antibodies 8F5 and 3B10 of the subtype immunoglobulin G2a (IgG2a) and IgG1, respectively. Binding of the minor-group human rhinovirus type 2 (HRV2) to its natural receptors, members of the low-density lipoprotein receptor family, is dependent on the presence of Ca2+ ions. Thus, chelating Ca2+ ions with EDTA prevented HRV2 binding, entry, and infection. However, upon complex formation of 35S-labeled HRV2 with 8F5 or 3B10, virus was bound, internalized, and degraded in HeLa-FcRII cells. Furthermore, challenge of these cells with HRV2-8F5 or HRV2-3B10 complexes resulted in de novo synthesis of viral proteins, as shown by indirect immunofluorescence microscopy. These data demonstrate that minor-group receptors can be replaced by surrogate receptors to mediate HRV2 cell entry, delivery into endosomal compartments, and productive uncoating. Consequently, the conformational change and uncoating of HRV2 appears to be solely triggered by the low-pH (pH ≤ 5.6) environment in these compartments.


Special reason and common reason bring on the process disturbance. Statistical process control (SPC) is commonly used to monitor the process disturbance which arises from assignable reason. Engineering process control (EPC) compensates the deviation of output for common reason based on the feedback adjustment principle. Therefore, integrated SPC/EPC approach has better performance than that merely using SPC or EPC. However, in practice, it is very hard to search the appropriate method to apply for integration of SPC/EPC. The main reason is that EPC's compensation has depressed probability which assignable reason is monitored by control chart. In this paper, a joint-monitoring method is designed to account for the above problems through detecting process output as well as monitoring process input. An example is given to prove that joint-monitoring can detect the process disturbance more quickly and more accurately.


The relations between the verbal component, the visual component, and the translational aspect of a given text have been discussed and described by translation scholars and semioticians in a diversity of manners. A significant graphic element may be introduced during the translation production, usually in dialogue with the verbal one, thus creating a new intersemiotic text. Medieval manuscripts are known for offering their readers illustrations, miniatures, rubrics, decorated initials, colored and gilded details, and other visual ingredients. As a result, the codex functions as an essential interpretive agent rather than a passive container for verbal texts. This model of the intricate illuminated manuscript was imported into modern culture systems through transfer. However, in reality, most manuscripts exhibit simple decorative schemes or are plain and unadorned, which means that ornaments in their current versions most likely derive from the model mentioned above. The paper looks at the productivity of this medieval model by examining various visual components inserted into the printed modern French translations based on the unmistakably plain manuscript of the thirteenth-century work Aucassin et Nicolette. The analysis will focus on the illustrated translations, addressing the added elements and their characteristics, their relation to the model, the increased determinacy they create, and the resulting reading they seem to encourage. We will suggest that even the narration levels and the performative aspect of the text may be affected by the new, intersemiotic nature bestowed upon this ancient text through the integration of other modalities into its translations.


Ever since the invention of computer, a curiosity exists to see if it can be made to learn. If humans could understand how to program them and learn to improve automatically with experience, the impact would be dramatic. A successful understanding of how to make computers learn would open up many new uses of computers and new levels of competence and customization. In this paper, two applications of Machine Learning are explored. In the first one, linear regression to understand the correlation of the feature columns with the output and make predictions based on the "line of best fit" is given. In the second one, discriminative classifiers for analyzing and segregating text-based data is proposed. On applying regression analysis on advertising data, it is observed that TV advertising has the strongest linear correlation with sales. In the later section, text-based machine learning is employed using the scikit-learn library of Python. Multiple contemporary classifiers are applied on a set of SMS's to perform spam detection. The performance of the classifiers is evaluated using suitable accuracy metrics. The results show that the Naive Bayes algorithm is much faster than other algorithms such as Logistic Regression. Using a Bayesian probabilistic approach, a spam ratio is attached to all the tokens in the input set. The proposed work proves to be helpful in the field of advertising and spam detection systems


Purpose: This study aims to discuss impacts of human resource management practice in efforts to achieve competitive strengths by means of employees' mediation within the context of five-stars hotels in Jakarta. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study used a quantitative approach by examining the hypothesis and applying SEM structural equation modelings. The data is collected from 191 employees by way of questionnaires distributed to respondents from Tourism Sector, particularly, those five-stars hotels located in Jakarta. Finding: This study revealed a significant influence on competitive strength brought about by human resources practices. Yet, human resources management practice unlikely led to significant influence on employees' job satisfaction. Whereas, satisfaction on work performance produced significant positive impacts on competitive strength. Furthermore, it was clear that human resource management practice unlikely mediated impacts of human resources practice on competitive strengths of the employees of five-stars hotels in Jakarta. Practical Implications: The results are interesting from the practical aspect to be applied for the improvement of the enterprise job satisfaction in the tourism sector. Originality/value: This paper examines job satisfaction when human resource practices increase competitive advantage.


: Basic otosclerosis pathogenetic factors are reviewed with a special emphasis on heredity. The inheritance in otosclerosis is autosomal dominant with incomplete gene expression. The involvement of HLA antigens is detailed. Autoimmune origin of the disease is confirmed morphologically and immunologically in perilymph and serum tests. There are infiltrates with lymphocytes, plasmatic and mast cells in basis stapedial mucoperiostal tissue. Perilymph contained significantly elevated levels of IgG and IgM, of antibodies to native DNA and type II collagen, especially in patients with active otosclerotic foci. Validation of relevant etiopathogenetic mechanism is provided basing on first-hand experience and literature data.


The reciprocal interaction between pain and negative affect is acknowledged but pain‐related alterations in brain circuits involved in this interaction, such as the mediodorsal thalamus (MDThal), still require a better understanding. We sought to investigate the relationship between MDThal circuitry, negative affect and pain severity in chronic musculoskeletal pain. For these analyses, participants with chronic knee pain (CKP, n = 74) and without (n = 36) completed magnetic resonance imaging scans and questionnaires. Seed‐based MDThal functional connectivity (FC) was compared between groups. Within CKP group, we assessed the interdependence of MDThal FC with negative affect. Finally, post hoc moderation analysis explored whether burden of pain influences affect‐related MDThal FC. The CKP group showed altered MDThal FC to hippocampus, ventromedial prefrontal cortex and subgenual anterior cingulate. Furthermore, in CKP group, MDThal connectivity correlated significantly with negative affect in several brain regions, most notably the medial prefrontal cortex, and this association was stronger with increasing pain burden and absent in pain‐free controls. In conclusion, we demonstrate mediodorsal thalamo‐cortical dysconnectivity in chronic pain with areas linked to mood disorders and associations of MDThal FC with negative affect. Moreover, burden of pain seems to enhance affect sensitivity of MDThal FC. These findings suggest mediodorsal thalamic network changes as possible drivers of the detrimental interplay between chronic pain and negative affect.


Published: 21 Aug. 2017 Interests in increasing the trains' speed of travel, generated higher degrees of wariness about the possible sever accidents. Since, the passenger wagon car body needs to be a safe compartment for its occupants therefore; great attention should be paid on its design. In this study, a passenger car body that is originally made in Eastern Germany and its chassis are modeled to simulate the crash analysis according to EN 15227 standard. The results are then used in order to optimize the wagon chassis design. This investigation is performed in two steps. In the first step, which consists of simulation of the original wagon model, it is found that due to the lack of efficiency in crash force absorbent, some modifications in the design are needed. In the second step, the original chassis is modified and by implementing honeycomb cores as energy absorbing devices, higher energy absorption is achieved. Furthermore, impact stresses in mid-section of the chassis considerably decreased. The proposed energy absorbing device can be implemented in the front end of the chassis to provide a crashworthy structure. The results show that by modifying the under-frame the amount of energy absorption is increased by 46%, and also, the amount of maximum stress in the center of the under-frame isreduced by 66%.


Searching techniques in most of existing neural architecture search (NAS) algorithms are mainly dominated by differentiable methods for the efficiency reason. In contrast, we develop an efficient continuous evolutionary approach for searching neural networks. Architectures in the population that share parameters within one SuperNet in the latest generation will be tuned over the training dataset with a few epochs. The searching in the next evolution generation will directly inherit both the SuperNet and the population, which accelerates the optimal network generation. The non-dominated sorting strategy is further applied to preserve only results on the Pareto front for accurately updating the SuperNet. Several neural networks with different model sizes and performances will be produced after the continuous search with only 0.4 GPU days. As a result, our framework provides a series of networks with the number of parameters ranging from 3.7M to 5.1M under mobile settings. These networks surpass those produced by the state-of-the-art methods on the benchmark ImageNet dataset.


Traditionally, flood management has concentrated on providing protection against floods using technical measures, but there is currently an international shift towards a more integrated system of flood risk management, whereby flood risk is defined as the probability of flooding multiplied by the potential consequences. Climate change is a great challenge to sustainable development and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) in Thailand. The main purpose of this paper is to highlight the challenges associated with the current situation and projected impacts of climate change on the disasters and the human environment in Thailand, to review and explore the potential of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), and to propose SEA in making informed decisions relevant to the implementation of the new adaptation framework in a flood management plan. Thus, current measures on how Thailand is responding to the recent impacts of climate change in river basin planning are presented. It is imperative that an appropriate environmental assessment tool, such as SEA be employed in making rational decisions regarding adaptation frameworks. SEA offers a structured and proactive environmental tool for integrating of climate change adaption into formulating Policies, Plans, and Programs (PPPs) among relevant sectors.


The Sordariomycetes is one of the largest classes in the Ascomycota, and the majority of its species are characterized by perithecial ascomata and inoperculate unitunicate asci. It includes more than 600 genera with over 3000 species and represents a wide range of ecologies including pathogens and endophytes of plants, animal pathogens and mycoparasites. To test and refine the classification of the Sordariomycetes sensu Eriksson (2006), the phylogenetic relationship among 106 taxa from 12 orders out of 16 in the Sordariomycetes was investigated based on four nuclear loci (nSSU and nLSU rDNA, TEF and RPB2), using three species of the Leotiomycetes as outgroups. Three subclasses (i.e. Hypocreomycetidae, Sordariomycetidae and Xylariomycetidae) currently recognized in the classification are well supported with the placement of the Lulworthiales in either a basal group of the Sordariomycetes or a sister group of the Hypocreomycetidae. Except for the Microascales, our results recognize most of the orders as monophyletic groups. Melanospora species form a clade outside of the Hypocreales and are recognized as a distinct order in the Hypocreomycetidae. Glomerellaceae is excluded from the Phyllachorales and placed in Hypocreomycetidae incertae sedis. In the Sordariomycetidae, the Sordariales is a strongly supported clade and occurs within a well supported clade containing the Boliniales and Chaetosphaeriales. Aspects of morphology, ecology and evolution are discussed.


Anti-mesothelin Pseudomonas exotoxin A-based recombinant immunotoxins (RITs) present a potential treatment modality for pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC). To study mechanisms of resistance, the sensitive PDAC cell line KLM-1 was intermittently exposed to the anti-mesothelin SS1-LR-GGS RIT. Surviving cells were resistant to various anti-mesothelin RITs (IC50s >1 μg/ml), including the novel de-immunized RG7787. These resistant KLM-1-R cells were equally sensitive to the anti-CD71 HB21(Fv)-PE40 RIT as KLM-1, indicating resistance was specific to anti-mesothelin RITs. Mesothelin gene expression was partially down-regulated in KLM-1-R, resulting in 5-fold lower surface protein levels and decreased cellular uptake of RG7787 compared to KLM-1. Bisulfite sequencing analysis found that the mesothelin promoter region was significantly more methylated in KLM-1-R (59 ± 3.6%) compared to KLM-1 (41 ± 4.8%), indicating hypermethylation as a mechanism of mesothelin downregulation. The DNA methyltransferase inhibitor 5-azacytidine restored original mesothelin surface expression to more than half in KLM-1-R and increased sensitivity to RG7787 (IC50 = 722.4 ± 232.6 ng/ml), although cells remained significantly less sensitive compared to parental KLM-1 cells (IC50 = 4.41 ± 0.38 ng/ml). Mesothelin cDNA introduction in KLM-1-R led to 5-fold higher surface protein levels and significantly higher RG7887 uptake compared to KLM-1. As a result, the original sensitivity to RG7787 was fully restored (IC50 = 4.49 ± 1.11 ng/ml). A significantly higher RG7787 uptake was thus required to reach the original cytotoxicity in resistant cells, hinting that intracellular RIT trafficking is also a limiting factor. RNA deep sequencing analysis of KLM-1 and KLM-1-R cells supported our experimental findings; compared to KLM-1, resistant cells displayed differential expression of genes linked to intracellular transport and an expression pattern that matched a more general hypermethylation status. In conclusion, resistance to anti-mesothelin RITs in KLM-1 is linked to a methylation-associated down-regulation of mesothelin, while aberrations in RIT trafficking could also play a role.


Fracture tests at low temperature (-47°C~-43°C) of 20 notched bars fabricated from E43 solder were conducted. The effect of notch radius, r, and notch depth, d/D, on fracture mode of E43 solder was studied. The experimental results demonstrate that cracks initiate at the center of notch section and the notched bars fracture at the notch section at low temperature. The fracture mode is cleavage fracture and the fracture sections are coarse. Specimens with a sharper notch radius (a smaller r) and a larger notch depth (a smaller d/D ratio) show poor ductility. The stress-strain curve of E43 solder tested on standard specimen at low temperature (-47°C~-43°C) exhibits the character of yielding, hardening and necking. The ratio of ultimate strength to yield strength, σu/σy, and the ductility, δ5, at low temperature meet to the requirement in plastic design for structural steel.


PURPOSE: The main purpose of this qualitative study was to explore tech start-up failures in Sri Lanka to emerge themes that explain the critical factors that are impacting failures of Sri Lankan tech start-ups and also to identify recommendations that could help evade those factors. The paper also presents the finding to enrich tech entrepreneurs to build their strategies with an understanding of factors that leads to failure and to make well-educated decisions. METHODOLOGY: The study is based on a qualitative research approach that helps to present findings in a theoretical way. A phenomenological analysis has been used to identify, understand, and analyze the phenomena of tech start-up failures. Twelve start-up leaders participated in this study and shared their lived experiences of tech start-up failures in Sri Lanka. Interviews were conducted with them based on twelve interview questions and twelve core themes emerged based on the participants' lived experiences. In analyzing data, the modified Van Kaam approach was used, utilizing a seven-step framework that considers the structural and textual aspects of experiences, as well as the perceptual characteristics of the phenomenon. FINDINGS: The themes answered the key research question of the study: What are the critical factors that are impacting on failures of tech start-ups in Sri Lanka? The cause of tech start-up failures according to the current study varied including, financial uncertainty, no market research, no product–market fit, paranoid behaviors of innovators, lack of timely response to changing conditions, and location of the venture. IMPLICATIONS: The paper concisely presents twelve critical reasons for tech start-up failures. The results of the research will enable Sri Lankan tech start-ups to identify key factors of failure for the growth of their surviving strategies. Identifying secret obstacles in the industry helps entrepreneurs prepare for pitfalls and provides guidelines for policymakers to make informed choices when implementing national policies. More importantly, it has been discovered that the major areas that require more attention are leadership, funding, marketing, and innovation. Finally, four groups of recommendations have been discussed under financing, market research, leadership, and inventors. ORIGINALITY AND VALUE: The comparison of the current study themes with the findings of related studies is inconclusive because the literature on tech start-up failures in other countries and in Sri Lanka is minimal. Some of the themes align with the findings of research conducted in other countries, although there were some themes that were explored uniquely.


This case note examines Tatar c. Roumanie, App. No. 6702 1/01, European Court of Human Rights, January 27, 2009. In Tatar c. Roumanie, the applicants claimed that the Romanian authorities' failure to halt the practice of using sodium cyanide constituted a breach of Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. On these facts, the European Court reiterated earlier holdings that pollution can interfere with a person's private and family life by harming his or her well-being. Accordingly, the Court held that the operating conditions laid down by the Romanian authorities had been inadequate to preclude the possibility of serious harm.The present case illustrates that the Court has increasingly relied on international environmental law as a basis for determining the adequacy of measures taken by the government. It is likely that the Court has done so on the basis of its consistently stated principle that the Convention's guarantees must be made "real and effective." However, despite the findings of violations in this case, the Court awarded no pecuniary or nonpecuniary damages. The court's decision is reflective of a larger pattern in which the Court, facing a constantly rising caseload, is increasingly restrictive in awarding compensation.


A mathematical formulation is developed to model the dynamics of sand dunes. The physical processes display strong non-linearity that has been taken into account in the model. When assessing the success of such a model in capturing physical features we monitor morphology, dune growth, dune migration and spatial patterns within a dune field. Following recent advances, the proposed model is based on a discrete lattice dynamics approach with new features taken into account which reflect physically observed mechanisms.


OBJECTIVE
To investigate the clinical efficacy and toxicities for the NAPD regimen (vinorelbine, cytarabine, cisplatin, and dexamethasone) in the treatment of recurrent refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.
 Methods: A total of 30 patients identified with recurrent refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma were enrolled in this retrospective study. The curative efficacy of NAPD regimen was evaluated after 2 consecutive cycles. The toxicities and adverse reaction were evaluated after 1 cycle. The objective response rate (ORR), overall survival (OS), progress free survival (PFS), and the rates of 1, 2, and 4-year OS and PFS were analyzed. The prognosis was evaluated with univariate analysis.
 Results: The ORR was 56.7% and clinical benefit rate (CBR) was 83.3% after 2 cycles. Five patients achieved complete remission, 12 achieved partial remission, and 8 achieved stable disease. The median OS was 22 (1.5-140) months. The 1, 2, and 4-year OS rates were 59.1%, 48.2%, and 40.2%, respectively. The median PFS was 14 (1.5-140) months. The 1, 2 and 4-year PFS rates were 56.3%, 42.2%, and 31.7%, respectively. The main adverse reaction was myelosuppression. Three patients suffered from grade III-IV leukopenia and 1 thrombocytopenia. Grade I-II gastrointestinal toxicity was 20%. No heart, liver, and kidney damages at grade III-IV were observed.
 Conclusion: The NAPD regimen is effective and its toxicity is well tolerated for the treatment of recurrent refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. It is a salvage chemotherapy regimen worth to be verified.


Abstract In this article, we explore a beautiful idea of Skinner and Wiles in the context of GSp(4) over a totally real field. The main result provides congruences between automorphic forms which are Iwahori-spherical at a certain place ω, and forms with a tamely ramified principal series at ω, Thus, after base change to a finite solvable totally real extension, one can often lower the level at ω. For the proof, we first establish an analogue of the Jacquet–Langlands correspondence, using the stable trace formula. The congruences are then obtained on inner forms, which are compact at infinity modulo the centre, and split at all the finite places. The crucial ingredient allowing us to do so, is an important result of Roche on types for principal series representations of split reductive groups.


3-Alkoxycarbonylaminomethylcarbonylamino-4-(arylcarbonyl)pyr idines--in which the chlorophenyl ring of dipeptidylaminobenzophenones is replaced by a pyridyl ring--were synthesized and evaluated as anticonvulsants using subcutaneous pentylenetetrazole (scPTZ) and maximal electroshock (MES) induced seizure screening tests. The substituent on the aryl ring of the 4-arylcarbonyl moiety was a determinant of activity in both tests, the potency order of substituents being generally 2-F greater than 2-H greater than 2-Cl. Compounds possessing a 3-benzyloxycarbonylaminomethylcarbonylamino substituent exhibited moderate activity in the scPTZ test, whereas all 3-tert-butoxycarbonylaminomethylcarbonylamino derivatives were inactive. The test results in the scPTZ screen suggest that the 3-benzyloxycarbonylaminomethylcarbonyl(N-methyl)amino compounds may undergo biotransformation, at least in part, to pyrido[3,4-e]-1,4-diazepin-2-ones. 3-Alkoxycarbonylaminomethylcarbonyl(N-methyl)amino-substituted compounds were always more potent than analogous 3-alkoxycarbonylaminomethylcarbonylamino-substituted compounds in the scPTZ test, whereas they were equipotent in the MES screen. Following oral administration, 3-benzyloxycarbonylaminomethylcarbonyl(N-methyl)amino-4-(2-chlorob enzoyl) pyridine exhibited a potency greater than that of valproic acid but less than that of clonazepam in the rat scPTZ screening test. 3-Benzyloxycarbonylaminomethylcarbonylamino-4-(2-fluorobenzoyl)pyr idine was the most potent compound in the rat oral MES screening test, exhibiting an activity greater than that of clonazepam but less than that of phenytoin. The 3-alkoxycarbonylaminomethylcarbonylamino-4-(arylcarbonylpyridin es had moderate affinity for the benzodiazepine receptor site(s); the IC50s in displacing 10 nM [3H]flunitazepam were in the 0.37-15.11 microM range (clonazepam = 0.003 microM).


Due to the superiority of using geometric information, 3D Face Recognition (FR) has achieved great successes. Existing methods focus on high-quality 3D FR which is unpractical in real scenarios. Low-quality 3D FR is a more realistic scenario but the low-quality data are born with heavy noises. Therefore, exploring noise-robust low-quality 3D FR methods becomes an urgent and challenging problem. To solve this issue, in this paper, we propose to learn flexibly distributional representation for low-quality 3D FR. Firstly, we introduce the distributional representation for low-quality 3D faces due to that it can weaken the impact of noises. Generally, the distributional representation of a given 3D face is restricted to a specific distribution such as Gaussian distribution. However, the specific distribution may be not up to describing the complex low-quality face. Therefore, we propose to transform this specific distribution to a flexible one via Continuous Normalizing Flow (CNF), which can get rid of the form limitation. This kind of flexible distribution can approximate the latent distribution of the given noisy face more accurately, which further improves accuracy of low-quality 3D FR. Comprehensive experiments show that our proposed method improves both low-quality and cross-quality 3D FR performances on low-quality benchmarks. Furthermore, the improvements are more remarkable on low-quality 3D faces when the intensity of noise increases which indicate the robustness


Title of thesis: IMPACT OF HARDWARE OBSOLESCENCE ON SYSTEM SOFTWARE FOR SUSTAINMENTDOMINATED ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS Degree Candidate: Arindam Goswami Degree and Year: Master of Science, 2004 Thesis directed by: Associate Professor Peter A. Sandborn The last two decades have witnessed manufacturers of sustainmentdominated long field life electronic systems incorporate Commercial Off the Shelf (COTS) technology products into their systems on a large scale. Many of these products, however, have lifetimes of significantly shorter duration than the systems they are incorporated into and as a result become obsolete long before the system's intended duration of useful life is over. This problem is especially prevalent in avionics and military systems, where systems may encounter obsolescence problems even before they are fielded and always during their support life. Manufacturing that takes place over long periods of time exacerbates this problem. Many part obsolescence mitigation strategies exist including: lifetime buy, last-time buy, part replacement, aftermarket source, uprating, emulation, reengineering, salvage, and ultimately redesign of the system. Design refresh (or redesign) has the advantage of treating multiple existing and anticipated obsolescence problems concurrently and additionally allows for functional upgrades. Hitherto, there have been studies concentrated on determining the optimum combination of different obsolescence strategies by using life cycle cost as the deciding criterion. However, these studies take into account only hardware life cycle costs. In many systems, such as avionics systems, software life cycle costs (redesign, rehosting and requalification) have a significant bearing on total life cycle cost. Thus software redesign due to part obsolescence triggered hardware redesign should also be addressed during life cycle management planning. This thesis describes a methodology and it's implementation for determining the hardware part obsolescence impact on life cycle sustainment costs for system software based on future production projections, maintenance requirements and part obsolescence forecasts. The methodology extends the MOCA (Mitigation of Obsolescence Cost Analysis) methodology/tool that determines the optimum design refresh plan during the field-support-life of the product in order to minimize life cycle cost. The design refresh plan consists of a set of design refresh activities and their respective calendar dates. The methodology incorporates the use of two software commercial cost analysis models: PRICE S and COCOMO. The methodology developed in this thesis has been validated using a Navy test case (VH-60N Digital Cockpit Upgrade Program). It has also been applied to Honeywell International, Inc.'s AS900 engine controller. The results obtained demonstrate the necessity of taking software redesign analysis into account during life cycle management planning. IMPACT OF HARDWARE OBSOLESCENCE ON SYSTEM SOFTWARE FOR SUSTAINMENT-DOMINATED ELECTRONIC SYSTEMS


Background The holistic needs of patients with symptomatic heart failure are often neglected. This may be partly attributable to a reliance on secondary care management. It is proposed that collaboration and communication between Primary Care, Cardiology and Palliative Care Services may be key in meeting the multidimensional needs of patients. This qualitative study assesses the adequacy of current services within Northern Ireland, to meet the needs of patients with heart failure, as perceived by General Practitioners (GPs). Method Semi-structured interviews were conducted with GPs recruited via the University Department of General Practice and Northern Ireland Medical and Dental Agency. Interviews were transcribed, independently coded using NVivo 9TM and analysed using a six-step thematic analysis approach. Key themes were identified inductively. Results Twenty semi-structured interviews with participants from each of the five Trust areas were conducted. GPs reported prioritising acute medical problems with less emphasis on the assessment of underlying needs. Discussions around end of life care were frequently neglected, related to poor awareness of the need to initiate these discussions, difficulties identifying palliative requirements and fear of causing unnecessary distress. Care provided by the heart failure team was highly regarded, although difficulties included inequity of access and inadequate handover to GPs. Specialist Palliative Care (SPC) services were deemed important, yet GPs often reported poor awareness of their role. The common perceptions that SPC services were overstretched; cancer focused and lacked expertise in heart failure lead to its limited utilisation. The need for these services to be community based was evident. Conclusions GPs identified a number of barriers that currently limit the delivery of holistic care for community based heart failure patients. Expansion of the community heart failure service, more frequent conversations with patients, along with greater interdisciplinary collaboration and education may help bridge the current gaps in care provision.


An analytic cross-sectional study of married Orang Asli was carried out in the district of Hulu Langat, Selangor D.E., to examine the practice of family planning and the, factors influencing it. The collection of data completed within 4 weeks that is from 20.12.93- 2.1.94 and 16.5.94 - 29.5.94. The study used the universal sampling method. Home visit were made to all the 10 Orang Asli villages in order to interview the respondents through the used of guided questionnaires prepared in Bahasa Malaysia. The finding showed that 98.33% of respondents have knowledge of at least one type of effective method of family planning with the pill being the most well known method. The study also showed that 86.67% knew of in effective method. Theused of plant roots was the method known by the majority of the respondents. The study found that 51.64% practised family planning while 25.41% did not practised it. The remaining of 22.95% were pregnant at the time of data collection. The finding also showed that only 16.390; of respondents practised in effective method in comparison to 34.43% who practised the effective method. One respondent ( 0.82% ) practised both method simultaneously. Statistical tests were carried out to discover whether relationship exist between the two (2) dependent variables of knowledge and practise with independent variables of socioeconomic status, age, gravida and number of living children. However X2 and t-test did not show any sjgnificant relationship between the two (2) dependent variables and the independent variables. The main factor that influenced the respondents to plan their families was to space the pregnancy. Other important factor was the encouragement from the husband. The main factor that obstructed the used of family planning was they felt that they were still young. Other important factors were their desire for a big family and a lack of accurate knowledge of the importance of birth spacing on maternal and child health.


The rate of implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) implantation has gone up as primary and secondary prevention trials have relatively consistently shown significant improvement in mortality and morbidity. Most patients with ICDs are followed routinely at intervals ranging from 3 to 6 months. Many patients require additional non-scheduled visits to investigate symptoms that may or may not relate to their cardiac disease or device. Appropriate and inappropriate therapies of implantable cardioverter defibrillators have a major impact on morbidity and quality of life in ICD recipients. Remote monitoring systems can substitute for routine follow-up visits and/ or deliver continuous diagnostic and device status information. Remote monitoring of ICDs can decrease the need for many patient visits and, thereby, probably reduce expense.


Highly active antiretroviral therapy in HIV-1 infected patients is associated with a lipodystrophy syndrome, characterized by wasting of peripheral fat, central adiposity, hyperlipidaemia and insulin resistance. The CT findings are presented and the differential diagnosis is discussed.


The World Bank (the Bank) has supported legal reform in countries in all the major regions of the World--in countries with civil law, common law and Islamic law traditions, and in countries as disparate as China, the Comoros and the Czech Republic. The Bank has been in the business of supporting legal reform for nearly a decade, so it could be assumed that we have learned a great deal about the strategy and implementation of reform programs in that time. It is interesting to reflect on the change that has resulted in the importance attached today to law and legal reform in the development process. In the early years of the Bank's existence, lawyers and legal change were seen as rather remote from the Bank's development objectives. In a 1962 letter written on the role of lawyers in the appraisal of Bank-financed projects, the Bank's Office of Information said: We have never had a lawyer included on a mission because of his legal knowledge. You have probably noticed from the reports [of the various missions] that the effort of a mission is generally directed towards broad economic planning and programming and that consequently its depth is extremely limited in the more specialized and highly technical areas such as the development of the legal system of the country or the legal problems incident to economic development. This is not to say that men with legal backgrounds are never mission members, but rather that, if they have such background, it is only incidental to their other abilities. Fortunately, things have changed. Today, it is widely acknowledged that governments must provide the institutional infrastructure that makes competitive markets work, and that the legal system is a key element of that institutional infrastructure. For example, in a recent report by the African Governors of the Bank, the Governors recognized that capacity inadequacies in the legal system as a whole pose major constraints to the development of capacity in the private sector. They proposed that: A high priority should be given to a thorough reform of the legal system, including enhancing the local capacity to draft laws, providing support for the redrafting of legal codes, improving the judiciary, the capacity of State attorneys and private lawyers, and the capacity of legal and judicial training institutions. They went on to say that: It is clear that "piecemeal" reform of the legal system often does not yield the desired result. When an entire legal system has broken down, it is not enough to reform only a limited area of the law, such as banking laws, for example, without confronting the weaknesses in law enforcement in general. Modern banking laws are of little use when the lawyers, courts, and other legal institutions responsible for implementing them lack the capacity to do so effectively. What is required is a broader strategy of reform which addresses the legal system as a whole. The African Governors' report is typical as a recognition that there are linkages between economic development and the legal system, even though the precise nature of that linkage is still debated. As an institution with the mandate of promoting economic development, the Bank has been willing to make loans directly to finance comprehensive legal change. In some instances, the legal reform program is a component of a much larger operation, typically covering a range of private or public sector development activities. With increasing frequency, legal and judicial reform loans are being developed as free-standing operations without a project linkage to other reforms. Such free-standing legal and judicial reform loans have been approved and are now under implementation in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Asia and Latin America--at last count, 12 loans totaling $260 million. A similar number of new operations are in various stages of preparation. …


One of the most pressing questions with regard to climate feedback processes in a warming Arctic is the regional-scale methane release from Arctic permafrost areas. The Airborne Measurements of Methane Fluxes (AIRMETH) campaign is designed to quantitatively and spatially explicitly address this question. Ground-based eddy covariance (EC) measurements provide continuous in-situ observations of the surface-atmosphere exchange of methane. However, these observations are rare in the Arctic permafrost zone and site selection is bound by logistical constraints among others. Consequently, these observations cover only small areas that are not necessarily representative of the region of interest. Airborne measurements can overcome this limitation by covering distances of hundreds of kilometers over time periods of a few hours. Here, we present the potential of environmental response functions (ERFs) for quantitatively linking methane flux observations in the atmospheric surface layer to meteorological and biophysical drivers in the flux footprints. For this purpose thousands of kilometers of AIRMETH data across the Alaskan North Slope are utilized, with the aim to extrapolate the airborne EC methane flux observations to the entire North Slope. The data were collected aboard the research aircraft POLAR 5, using its turbulence nose boom and fast response methane and meteorological sensors. After thorough data pre-processing, Reynolds averaging is used to derive spatially integrated fluxes. To increase spatial resolution and to derive ERFs, we then use wavelet transforms of the original high-frequency data. This enables much improved spatial discretization of the flux observations, and the quantification of continuous and biophysically relevant land cover properties in the flux footprint of each observation. A machine learning technique is then employed to extract and quantify the functional relationships between the methane flux observations and the meteorological and biophysical drivers in the flux footprints. Lastly, the resulting ERFs are used to extrapolate the methane release over spatio-temporally explicit grids of the Alaskan North Slope. Metzger et al. (2013) have demonstrated the efficacy of this technique for regionalizing airborne EC heat flux observations to within an accuracy of ≤18% and a precision of ≤5%. Here, we show for the first time results from applying the ERF procedure to airborne methane EC measurements, and report its potential for spatio-temporally explicit inventories of the regional-scale methane exchange. References: Metzger, S., Junkermann, W., Mauder, M., Butterbach-Bahl, K., Trancon y Widemann, B., Neidl, F., Schafer, K., Wieneke, S., Zheng, X. H., Schmid, H. P., and Foken, T.: Spatially explicit regionalization of airborne flux measurements using environmental response functions, Biogeosciences, 10, 2193-2217, doi:10.5194/bg-10-2193-2013, 2013.

Cite as: Author(s) (2013), Title, Abstract B43G-07 presented at 2013 Fall Meeting, AGU, San Francisco, Calif., 9-13 Dec.


The title inorganic±organic hybrid complex, [CdBr2(C10H8N2)]n, features two-dimensional [CdBr2(4,4 0-bipy)]n (4,40-bipy is 4,40-bipyridine) neutral networks, based on the octahedral Cd atom coordinated by four 2-Br and two 24,40-bipy at trans positions, yielding a CdBr4N2 octahedron. It crystallizes in the orthorhombic system (Cmmm). All the crystallographically independent atoms are on special positions, namely Cd on mmm, Br on mm, N on mm2, and C on sites of symmetry m or mm2. Optical absorption spectroscopy reveals the presence of an optical gap of 3.76 eV, indicating that the complex is a wide-gap semiconductor. Photoluminescence investigation reveals that the complex displays strong colour-tunable emissions, which might originate from a ligandto-ligand charge-transfer (LLCT) transition. Thermogravimetric differential thermal analysis shows that the complex is thermally stable up to 493 K.


Automatic diabetic retinopathy (DR) lesions segmentation makes great sense of assisting ophthalmologists in diagnosis. Although many researches have been conducted on this task, most prior works paid too much attention to the designs of networks instead of considering the pathological association for lesions. Through investigating the pathogenic causes of DR lesions in advance, we found that certain lesions are closed to specific vessels and present relative patterns to each other. Motivated by the observation, we propose a relation transformer block (RTB) to incorporate attention mechanisms at two main levels: a self-attention transformer exploits global dependencies among lesion features, while a cross-attention transformer allows interactions between lesion and vessel features by integrating valuable vascular information to alleviate ambiguity in lesion detection caused by complex fundus structures. In addition, to capture the small lesion patterns first, we propose a global transformer block (GTB) which preserves detailed information in deep network. By integrating the above blocks of dual-branches, our network segments the four kinds of lesions simultaneously. Comprehensive experiments on IDRiD and DDR datasets well demonstrate the superiority of our approach, which achieves competitive performance compared to state-of-the-arts.


A high temperature superconducting power cable requires forced flow cooling. Liquid nitrogen is circulated by a pump and cooled down by a subcooling system. Typical operating temperature range is expected to be between 65 K and 80 K. The circulating liquid nitrogen is subcooled by liquid nitrogen boiling on the shell side of a subcooler heat exchanger, and then it cools the HTS cable. The HTS power cable needs sufficient cooling to overcome its low temperature heat loading. This loading typically comes in two forms. One is heat leak from the surroundings and the other is internal heat generation, i.e., AC loss. This paper describes performance tests of the cooling system. Heat exchanging performance of the subcooler, pressure drop between supply and return lines, and heat transfer coefficient of a former are examined for the performance test.