Brettanomyces/Dekkera yeasts grow in wine mainly during barrel aging. Their presence is often associated with formation of off-flavors. This potential spoilage generates a high demand for a fast, sensitive and reliable identification procedure in the food industry. Presently, these exigences are only fulfilled by the use of genetic techniques. In addition to yeasts from type culture collections Brettanomyces yeast strains isolated from Cabernet Sauvignon wines characterized by winemakers panels as having 'bretty' aromas were extensively analyzed in this regard. Brettanomyces/Dekkera reference strains from a type culture collection were included for comparison. Whereas karyotyping and chromosomal RFLP resulted in clear distinctions it did not allow for relatedness studies due to the lack of pattern conservation among species and strains. Conversely, i) ribosomal DNA restriction fragments length polymorphism, ii) comparative sequence analysis of the two internal transcribed spacer (ITS) regions located between the ribosomal RNA genes and iii) RAPD-PCR allowed for species discrimination within the genus Brettanomyces and strain discrimination within the species B. bruxellensis. All wine-isolated Brettanomyces/Dekkera yeasts belonged to the species B. bruxellensis. Cabernet Sauvignon wines were chosen from the seven vintages 1989 and from 1991 to 1996. Merlot, Chardonnay, and Sauvignon blanc were taken from vintage 1995. All wines originated from the same winery. Whereas populations of one single or two strains were found, one strain always dominated in the examined wines. Populations of two clone A and B were found in 1989 in the ratio of 90% to 10%. Clone B was not found in 1991 but clone A completely dominated. Populations derived from clone C were found in 1992 (100%), 1993 (90%), 1994 (100%), 1995 (90%), and 1996 (70%). Clone D started to evolve in 1995 (10%) and was present in the following year 1996 to 30%. Clone B which was present in 1989 (10%) was not found any more in the following vintages. Brettanomyces yeasts were found in Merlot, but no yeasts were found in the two white wines. This established procedure for the first time makes the determination of Brettanomyces yeast possible thus allowing to learn about their successions in wine.


Dynamic processes in biology are often controlled by multiple parameters that interact in a complex nonlinear fashion. Increasingly, evidence has accumulated that such behavior exhibits the property of sensitivity to initial conditions, a feature exhibited by chaotic systems. One such system is the vasculature. In this report, we present what we believe is the first experimental demonstration ever of imaging chaotic behavior of the vasculature in a large tissue structure (i.e., the human forearm). Supporting these findings are results from numerical simulation demonstrating our ability to image and correctly characterize complex dynamic behavior in dense scattering media that experience spatiotemporally coincident variations in hemodynamic states.


In the early 1900s John Quinn (1879–1924), Ohio-born son of Irish Catholic immigrants, was establishing a successful financial law career in Manhattan and had begun what became an all-consuming passion, collecting. At first he collected literature, especially Walter Pater, Thomas Hardy, William Morris and George Meredith, autograph manuscripts where possible, and then fine art, initially prints and drawings. Quinn himself was to be a key driver behind the 1913 Armory Show in New York and, in the years around the First World War, an increasingly prodigious collector of French modernism in particular, a process made all the easier by his own success that year in driving through anti-tariff legislation on the import to America of original works of art.

The later development of Quinn's art collecting has been widely discussed, most notably in 1978 by the art historian and museum curator Judith Zilczer, and his life as a whole very closely detailed a decade earlier in Benjamin L. Reid's 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winning The Man from New York.

My focus in this article is on the shifts and transformations of Quinn's earlier patterns of collecting from the turn of the century up to and including his interests in Vorticism, on his Irish collection in particular and on exploring Quinn's practices in relation to some recent studies of transnationalism, transculturation and the nature and operation of transatlantic networks in the market for art.


The main purpose of the study was to investigate the factors that are most influential in students' enrolment in Ghanaian languages programme in the University of Education, Winneba. The study employed the mixed sequential explanatory design. A total of 200 first year Ghanaian Language students of 2016/2017 Academic Year and staff members of the University of Education, Winneba-Ajumako Campus students were chosen through stratified proportional sampling technique to obtain the quantitative results. The Dean and admission officer of the Faculty of Ghanaian Languages and 12 students were purposely sampled and interviewed for the qualitative data. Frequencies, percentages and Independent sample t-test were used to analyze the quantitative data whilst the qualitative data was analysed thematically. The findings of the study revealed that institutional reputation, course entry requirement, fee affordability and subject enhancing employability were considered very important factors in choosing Ghanaian language programme in UEW. The study found significant difference between the direct and mature students on course entry requirement, affordable fees and teachers as factors that affect their enrolment. It was recommended university authorities, faculty and administrative staff should ensure the reputation of the university as an institution for excellence is maintained by offering all stakeholders timely information on programme benefits, course entry requirement and fees schedules, financial aids and fee-payment policies.


Between August 1966 and December 1989, 989 renal transplant recipients were followed up at the Renal Transplant Unit of Johannesburg Hospital. Seventy-five (7%) patients developed a total of 95 malignancies of which 5 (6%) were Kaposi's sarcoma. All patients received immunosuppressive agents; steroids, azathioprine and/or cyclosporin A. Clinical presentations included both limited skin involvement (1 patient) and disseminated forms of the disease: necrotic oral lesions (1 patient); disseminated skin involvement and lung metastases (1 patient); and widespread skin lesions with lymphadenopathy (2 patients). Four patients responded with complete tumour regression at all sites upon withdrawal of the immunosuppressive drugs. One patient suffered disease progression, and immunosuppression was continued, albeit at reduced dosages. These cases illustrate a relatively rare complication of immunosuppressive therapy. However, complete withdrawal of immunosuppressive drugs may result in sustained complete regression, despite the presence of advanced KS.


To gauge the speed capability of a MOSFET, the maximum saturation on-current is usually quoted as an important parameter. Although the effect of the linear characteristics has been known to be important, it is the purpose of this paper to provide an analytical and a quantitative answer, using a simple circuit analysis. The results show that the charging/discharging time in the linear region is not small, and consequently that the drain saturation voltage to reach the saturation current is a critical parameter. A new parameter "effective on-current" is proposed which captures the linear characteristics in addition to the saturation current, and should be more indicative of the large-signal speed capability in digital circuits. Finally, the impacts of series resistance are also examined.


Let a biorthogonal Reed-Muller code RM (1,m) of length n = 2m be used on a memoryless channel with an input alphabet plusmn1 and a real-valued output R. Given any nonzero received vector y in the Euclidean space Rn and some parameter epsiisin(0,1), our goal is to perform list decoding of the code RM (1, m) and retrieve all codewords located within the angle arccos e from y. For an arbitrarily small epsi, we design an algorithm that outputs this list of codewords with the linear complexity order of n [ln2 isin] bit operations. Without loss of generality, let vector y be also scaled to the Euclidean length radic(n) of the transmitted vectors. Then an equivalent task is to retrieve all coefficients of the Hadamard transform of vector y whose absolute values exceed nisin. Thus, this decoding algorithm retrieves all ne-significant coefficients of the Hadamard transform with the linear complexity n [ln2 isin] instead of the complexity n In2n of the full Hadamard transform.


Trichloramine is a disinfection by-product formed when chlorine reacts with nitrogen-containing contaminants in the pool water. Trichloramine can then evaporate from water to indoor air. Exposure to trichloramine can cause irritation in the airways, eyes, nose and throat of workers and swimmers. There is yet no Occupational Exposure Limit for trichloramine in Sweden. Air levels of trichloramine were measured in altogether 41 indoor swimming pools located in different parts of Sweden. All swimming pools used sodium hypochlorite for water disinfection. The majority of the swimming pools (N = 30) were traditional public swimming pools with a 25 m pool and often also an instruction pool for children. Measurements were also performed in 7 adventure swimming pools and 12 rehabilitation pools. Stationary air sampling was carried out next to the pool at about 1.3 m above the floor. Air was pumped (1 L/min) through a filter impregnated with sodium carbonate and arsenic trioxide, and the filters were analysed using ion chromatography. The sampling time was usually 2–3 hours, but varied from 1 up to 8 hours. The number of samples per swimming pool as well as the number of sampling days varied (from 1 up to 6 days), however in most of the pools sampling was performed on at least two different days. In total, about 400 air samples of trichloramine were collected. For the traditional public swimming pools, the geometric mean (GM) concentration of trichloramine was 0.13 mg/m3. In the swimming pool with the highest levels GM was 0.29 mg/m3, and in the pool with the lowest levels GM was 0.02 mg/m3. In the adventure swimming pools air levels of trichloramine were generally higher, GM 0.20 mg/m3, with a highest individual GM of 0.40 mg/m3. For the rehabilitation pools, the levels were considerably lower, with a GM of 0.03 mg/m3.


A range of formal models of human reasoning have been proposed in a number of fields such as philosophy, logic, artificial intelligence, computer science, psychology, cognitive science, etc.: various logics (epistemic logics; non-monotonic logics), probabilistic systems (most notably, but not exclusively, Bayesian probability theory), belief revision systems, neural networks, among others. Now, it seems reasonable to require that formal models of human reasoning be (minimally) empirically adequate if they are to be viewed as models of the phenomena in question. How are formal models of human reasoning typically put to empirical test? One way to do so is to isolate a number of key principles of the system, and design experiments to gauge the extent to which participants do or do not follow them in reasoning tasks. Another way is to take relevant existing results and check whether a particular formal model predicts these results. The present investigation provides an illustration of the second kind of empirical testing by comparing two formal models for reasoning – namely the non-monotonic logic known as preferential logic; and a particular version of belief revision theories, screened belief revision – against the reasoning phenomenon known as belief bias in the psychology of reasoning literature: human reasoners typically seek to maintain the beliefs they already hold, and conversely to reject contradicting incoming information. The conclusion of our analysis will be that screened belief revision is more empirically adequate with respect to belief bias than preferential logic and non-monotonic logics in general, as what participants seem to be doing is above all a form of belief management on the basis of background knowledge. The upshot is thus that, while it may offer valuable insights into the nature of human reasoning, preferential logic (and non-monotonic logics in general) is ultimately inadequate as a formal model of the phenomena in question.


We contribute to an improved understanding of Internet traffic characteristics by measuring and analyzing modern Internet backbone data. We start the thesis with an overview of several important considerations for passive Internet traffic collection on large-scale network links. The lessons learned from a successful measurement project on academic Internet backbone links can serve as guidelines to others setting up and performing similar measurements. The data from these measurements are the basis for the analyses made in this thesis. As a first result we present a detailed characterization of packet headers, which reveals protocol-specific features and provides a systematic survey of packet header anomalies. The packet-level analysis is followed by a characterization on the flow-level, where packets are correlated according to their communication endpoints. We propose a method and accompanying metrics to assess routing symmetry on a flow-level based on passive measurements. This method will help to improve traffic analysis techniques. We used the method on our data, and the results suggest that routing symmetry is uncommon on non- edge Internet links. We then confirm the predominance of TCP as the transport protocol in backbone traffic. However, we observe an increase of UDP traffic during the last few years, which we attribute to P2P signaling traffic. We also analyze further flow characteristics such as connection establishment and termination behavior, which reveals differences among traffic from various classes of applications. These results show that there is a need to make a more detailed analysis, i.e., classification of traffic according to network application. To accomplish this, we review state-of-the-art traffic classification approaches and subsequently propose two new methods. The first method provides a payload-independent classification of aggregated traffic based on connection patterns. This provides a rough traffic decomposition in a privacy sensitive way. Second, we present a classification method for fine-grained protocol identification by utilizing statistical packet and flow features. Preliminary results indicate that this method is capable of accurate classification in a simple and efficient way. We conclude the thesis by discussing limitations in current Internet measurement research. Considering the role of the Internet as a critical infrastructure of global importance, a detailed understanding of Internet traffic is essential. This thesis presents methods and results contributing additional perspectives on global Internet characteristics at different levels of granularity.


HES1 NOTCH RESPONSE ELEMENTS AND THEIR ROLES IN RBPJ-K BINDING by Michael Majid Khayat The Notch signaling pathway is a one of few fundamentally conserved signal transduction pathways critical for metazoan cellular development. Upon ligand activation, the Notch intracellular domain (NICD) translocates to the nucleus and forms a transcription complex with C-binding promoter factor-1 (RBPJ-k/CBF-1/Suppressor of Hairless) and Mastermind-like protein (MAM). The DNA-binding factor, RBPJ-k, binds to a response element containing a consensus sequence of RTGRGAR (where R is G or A). When RBPJ-k interacts with the NICD and MAM, Notch target genes are activated. The most well-characterized gene for Notch is Hes1. Hes1 contains four Notch response elements (NREs), labeled NRE 1-4. Of the four, NRE 2 and NRE 4 form what has been termed a sequence-paired site (SPS), identified as critical for transcription of Notchdependent genes. Not all NREs are formed into an SPS, and it is hypothesized that a different transcriptional cofactor is recruited to the NREs versus the SPS to stabilize protein-DNA complexes. Base pair mutations in the Hes1 promoter were tested for binding to nuclear extract and purified RBPJ-k using an electrophoretic mobility shift assay (EMSA). Results were insufficient to determine Notch complex binding; however, the internal guanines were determined critical for RBPJ-k binding to NRE 2 and NRE 4. Additionally, despite its context in Hes1, NRE 3 also showed binding to RBPJ-k. Taken together, these results confirm that the NREs in the SPS are required for RBPJ-k structure formation and raise questions about the roles of the other single NREs.


Changes in the extent of absolute, all‐time, daily temperature records across the contiguous United States were examined using observations and climate model simulations. Observations from station data and reanalysis from 1980 to 2013 show increased extent of absolute highest temperature records and decreased extent of absolute lowest temperature records. Conversely, station data from 1920 to 2013 showed decreased extent of absolute highest records with nearly half of such records occurring in the 1930s during exceptional widespread drought. Simulated changes in the extent of absolute temperature records from climate model experiments were in general agreement with observed changes for recent decades. However, fewer lowest temperature records and highest temperature records were observed since 2000 than simulated by most models. Climate models project a continued increase in the occurrence of highest temperature records and decline in lowest temperature records through the mid‐21st century.


This paper studies a modified photographic cell with symmetrical short gaps between a high-resistivity detector plate and two planar electrodes. The photographic system with a modified cell is designed to optimize the parameters for the enhancement of the resolution in such applications. The spatial stabilization of the current in the modified cell with a planar GaAs photodetector is studied in a wide range of gas pressure values at 101-342 Torr. Characteristics of the photographic system are obtained both without and with illumination of the detector plate with light of a particular wavelength range used to control the photoconductivity of the material. The current-voltage characteristic (CVC) and the photographic cell response are recorded.


The field of adversarial machine learning has experienced a near exponential growth in the amount of papers being produced since 2018. This massive information output has yet to be properly processed and categorized. In this paper, we seek to help alleviate this problem by systematizing the recent advances in adversarial machine learning black-box attacks since 2019. Our survey summarizes and categorizes 20 recent black-box attacks. We also present a new analysis for understanding the attack success rate with respect to the adversarial model used in each paper. Overall, our paper surveys a wide body of literature to highlight recent attack developments and organizes them into four attack categories: score based attacks, decision based attacks, transfer attacks and non-traditional attacks. Further, we provide a new mathematical framework to show exactly how attack results can fairly be compared.


This thesis explores the ways in which the body is positioned within consumer society. The development of body ideals in Western societies is examined in order to point out consumers' occupation with appearances and their bodies as signifiers of success. The three case studies (A&F, Calvin Klein Underwear and fitness magazines) will enable a close analysis of contemporary society and its engagement with the body. I argue that today the body acts as a signifier for people's narcissistic obsession with the surface, and that the body itself has come to exhibit characteristics of a commodity in consumer society.


The technique of DNA-RNA molecular hybridization was adopted for investigating the regulation of protein synthesis at the genome level in differentiated animal cells. In preliminary experiments, attempts were made to assay mammalian DNA-RNA complexes by means of methylated albumin-kieselguhr chromatography, Sephadex G-200 chromatography and by selective adsorption on nitrocellulose filters. The latter technique proved to be the most convenient for the present studies, especially when the DNA was immobilised to the nitrocellulose filter prior to hybridisation with RNA. Using this technique for the hybridization of in vivo labelled 14C- rat kidney RNA to homologous DNA it was found that under conditions of maximum hybridization only 7% of the DNA formed hybrids with the RNA. This result was taken as evidence for the restriction of DNA template activity in animal cells. In an attempt to detect tissue specific RNAs in various rat organs, comparisons were made of the rapidly 32P-labelled RNA factions of rat liver, kidney and pancreas by competitive hybridisation against unlabelled rat kidney RNA. Differneces were observed in the hybridization kinetics of the RNAs from each organ. As it was not possible to determine the real specific activity of rapidly labelled RNA from in vivo labelling experiments, it was concluded that the observed differences in competitive hybridization kinetics of these RNAs could be due either to absolute differences in RNA types or due to differences in the specific activities of the RNAs isolated from each organ. The difficulties associated with the use of in vivo labelled RNAs could be avoided by synthesising the RNAs in vitro from chromatin primers with the RNA polymerase of Micrococcus lysodeikticus. Experiments in which the RNA synthesised in vitro from calf thymus and rabbit thymus and bone marrow chromatins was hybridized to homologous DNA, showed that the template activity of the isolated chromatin was restricted to 5-10% of the total DNA. Competitive hybridization experiments showed that the RNA synthesised in vivo from calf thymus chromatin was qualitatively identical to that synthesised in the in vitro system. This was also confirmed with the RNAs synthesised in vivo and in vitro from rabbit bone marrow chromatin. It was concluded that the restriction of DNA template activity found in vivo in animal cells is also a property of the isolated chromatin. In further competitive hybridization experiments, the RNAs synthesised in vivo from rabbit thymus and bone marrow were compared separately with the RNAs synthesised in vitro from rabbit thymus and bone marrow chromatins. Evidence was provided for the existence of qualitative differences in the RNA populations of the two tissues. This suggests that the restriction of DNA template activity in differentiated cells is organ specific. Investigations into the nature of the specific restriction of template activity in calf thymus chromatin suggested that protein ionically bound to DNA is responsible for the restriction. Under specified conditions it was found possible to reconstitute chromatin from crude DNA, histone and non-histone fractions. The uncleohistone obtained by reconstituting DNA with the histone fraction alone, could not direct the in vitro synthesis of any RNA capable of hybridising to calf thymus DNA. On the other hand, nucleohistone reconstituted from DNA in the presence of both histone and non-histone fractions resulted in a specific part of the DNA being available for transcription. The magnitude of this unrestricted portion was found to be the same as that of whole chromatin. These results suggest that there exists in calf thymus chromatin a non-histone fraction responsible for conferring the specific restriction of DNA template activity.


Aim. To study clinical outcomes in hypertension patients after coronary stenting due to exertional angina. Material and methods. The study included 214 patients with class 3 stable angina and hypertension. All patients underwent coronary angiography followed by elective stenting. Clinical outcomes were assessed on average after 44 months of outpatient follow-up. Results. During the follow-up period, 43% of patients retained class III angina; the decrease in systolic (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP) was 18- and 14-mm Hg, respectively. There were 35 cases of myocardial infarction (MI) in this category of subjects. We revealed that 57% of patients had a progression of angina: from class III to class IV; the decrease in SBP and DBP was 10- and 18-mm Hg, respectively. There were 110 cases of MI and 10 cases of acute cerebrovascular accident in these patients. Conclusion. Inadequate control of SBP in patients after stenting due to stable exertional angina leads to a greater number of complications, mainly myocardial infarction.


As the world becomes increasingly computationally enabled, so our view of human-computer interaction (HCI) needs to evolve. The proliferation of wireless connectivity and mobile devices in all their various forms moves people from being outside a computer and interacting with it to being inside an information space and moving through it. Sensors on the body, wearable computers, wireless sensor networks, increasingly believable virtual characters and speech-based systems are all contributing to new interactive environments. New forms of interaction such as gesture and touch are rapidly emerging and interactions involving emotion and a real sense of presence are beginning. These are the new spaces of interaction we need to understand, design and engineer. Most importantly these new forms of interaction are fundamentally embodied. Older views of a disembodied cognition need to be replaced with an understanding of how people with bodies live in and move through spaces of interaction.


Discussed here are problems with the use of cowlings with radial air cooled engines. An XF7C-1 airplane, equipped with service cowling and with narrow ring, wide ring, and exhaust collector ring cowlings over the service cowling, was used. For these four cowling conditions, the rate of climb and high speed performance were determined, the cylinder conditions were measured, and pictures to show visibility were taken. The level flight performance obtained with an engine speed of 1900 r.p.m. for the service type, the narrow ring, the wide ring, and the exhaust collector ring was 144.4, 146.6, 152.8, and 155 mph, respectively. The rate of climb was practically the same for each type tested. The visibility was not materially impaired by the use of the wide or the narrow cowlings. With the narrow ring and exhaust collector ring cowlings there was an increase in cylinder temperature. However, this increase was not enough to affect the performance of the engine. The use of an exhaust collector ring incorporated into the cowling is practical where the problem of visibility does not enter.


A sampling program was conducted in a residential community in Cairo, Egypt in order to determine the presence of chlorine disinfection by-products (DBPs) in treated water and to observe the impact of the distribution system on DBP levels. Five campaigns were conducted over a 15-month period during 2005–2006. Trihalomethanes (THMs) and haloacetic acids (HAAs) exceeded local and international limits depending upon the season. Tap water concentrations of THMs were considerably higher in summer than during the rest of the year. In the Summer 2005 event, the average for the 20 tap water locations was 158 μg/l Total-THMs, well in excess of the U.S. EPA limit of 80 μg/L and the current Egyptian standard of 100 μg/l; all 20 locations exceeded the 100 μg/l limit. For the following event in late Fall 2005, the average dropped to 84 μg/l with 11 and 6 sites exceeding the U.S. EPA and Egyptian limits, respectively. HAA levels tended to be complementary to Total-THM values in that they were lower in summer but higher during fall and spring. The U.S. EPA limit on a select set of 5 HAAs (HAA5) is 60 μg/l (Egypt does not currently regulate HAAs). The average for HAA5 in the Summer 2005 event was 52 μg/l with 8 of the 20 tap samples equalling or exceeding the 60 μg/l standard. By contrast, in Fall 2005, the HAA5 average increased to 89 μg/l, with 15 of 20 sites exceeding the limit. THM and HAA concentrations generally increased with distance from the WTP along a targeted distribution main, while chlorine and natural organic matter tended to decrease.


Abstract There has been increasing interest in algae‐based bioassessment, particularly, trait‐based approaches are increasingly suggested. However, the main drivers, especially the contribution of hydrological variables, of species composition, trait composition, and beta diversity of algae communities are less studied. To link species and trait composition to multiple factors (i.e., hydrological variables, local environmental variables, and spatial factors) that potentially control species occurrence/abundance and to determine their relative roles in shaping species composition, trait composition, and beta diversities of pelagic algae communities, samples were collected from a German lowland catchment, where a well‐proven ecohydrological modeling enabled to predict long‐term discharges at each sampling site. Both trait and species composition showed significant correlations with hydrological, environmental, and spatial variables, and variation partitioning revealed that the hydrological and local environmental variables outperformed spatial variables. A higher variation of trait composition (57.0%) than species composition (37.5%) could be explained by abiotic factors. Mantel tests showed that both species and trait‐based beta diversities were mostly related to hydrological and environmental heterogeneity with hydrological contributing more than environmental variables, while purely spatial impact was less important. Our findings revealed the relative importance of hydrological variables in shaping pelagic algae community and their spatial patterns of beta diversities, emphasizing the need to include hydrological variables in long‐term biomonitoring campaigns and biodiversity conservation or restoration. A key implication for biodiversity conservation was that maintaining the instream flow regime and keeping various habitats among rivers are of vital importance. However, further investigations at multispatial and temporal scales are greatly needed.


Bacteriophagy taking place in the presence of M/8 Na2SO4 has the following pronounced characteristics: A. Time of lysis is considerably prolonged. B. The bacteria take up less than the normal amount of phage. C. Phage production occurs at one-third the customary rate. D. It takes four times as much phage to lyse a Na2SO4-treated bacterium than a normal one. E. Bacterial growth is not affected by Na2SO4. The lag phase and the lowered rate of phage production can be attributed to the Na2SO4 effect on the cell surface. Less phage is taken up by the cells and contact of phage with the bacterium's precursor-producing mechanism is impeded.


School disciplinary practices for students with disabilities and their peers without disabilities have long been questioned. Moreover, the school discipline of both dominant culture and ethnic minority children and youth has raised concerns. In that regard school discipline has in general become a hotbed for litigation and debate. While suspect discipline practices have been used with students across ethnic backgrounds, they are disproportionately meted out to African American students, particularly males (Harry & Anderson, 1995). This article examines exclusionary discipline practices and their impact on African American students. Culturally responsive instructional and management strategies are identified that can mitigate school suspensions and expulsions of African American children and youth.


While deep learning has shown a great potential in various domains, the lack of transparency has limited its application in security or safety-critical areas. Existing research has attempted to develop explanation techniques to provide interpretable explanations for each classification decision. Unfortunately, current methods are optimized for non-security tasks ( e.g., image analysis). Their key assumptions are often violated in security applications, leading to a poor explanation fidelity. In this paper, we propose LEMNA, a high-fidelity explanation method dedicated for security applications. Given an input data sample, LEMNA generates a small set of interpretable features to explain how the input sample is classified. The core idea is to approximate a local area of the complex deep learning decision boundary using a simple interpretable model. The local interpretable model is specially designed to (1) handle feature dependency to better work with security applications ( e.g., binary code analysis); and (2) handle nonlinear local boundaries to boost explanation fidelity. We evaluate our system using two popular deep learning applications in security (a malware classifier, and a function start detector for binary reverse-engineering). Extensive evaluations show that LEMNA's explanation has a much higher fidelity level compared to existing methods. In addition, we demonstrate practical use cases of LEMNA to help machine learning developers to validate model behavior, troubleshoot classification errors, and automatically patch the errors of the target models.


Contemporary, architecture calls for a wide range of surface textures and treatments. A surface compatible with the architecture's design may vary from a glass-smooth finish to one requiring special sculptured ornamentation. These surfaces require many different types of from sheathing and lining. The purpose of study development new design from and made elaborateness shape. Easy to used in field that architecture finish material not used expect effective reduce of working hours, personnel expenses, architecture finish material, cost. Through this study, we have figured out the best mix proportion for durability and glossability of glossing exposure concrete.


Author(s): Parvin, Darius Euge | Advisor(s): Ivry, Richard B | Abstract: Motor control is an essential part of what makes us human. It's important for learning how to walk and talk, for professional athletes and performers, and for recovery after injury, such as being able to function independently after a stroke. Indeed, one can even argue that the ultimate function of the brain is to dynamically select and execute movements. Without being able to move, we wouldn't be able to express ourselves or affect the world around us. By improving our understanding the motor system, we may not only be able to optimize rehabilitation schedules or brain machine interfaces, but also discover general principles about how the brain is structured. Our lack of understanding of the motor system is made apparent by the current state of robotics. Humans have a number of mechanical disadvantages compared to robots: The forces generated by our muscles are variable and subject to fatigue, and there is considerable noise and delays in the motor signals sent to our muscles as well as in the processing of sensory feedback from our movements. Despite these challenges, we can perform complex and dexterous tasks, controlling our legs and body to walk along highly variable surfaces or our hands to crack an egg, tasks we do far more gracefully than the most sophisticated robots. Computers can easily outperform humans in games like chess where there are well defined rules and objectives, however, when it comes to learning new movements, it's unclear what to optimize for. What makes humans great at learning and performing movements is likely not to do with our muscles or processing power, but the learning rules instantiated in our brains. Human motor learning is thought to be comprised of multiple learning processes. Consider a child learning to tie her shoes: The initial step involves declaratively learning a specific sequence of steps. Through trial and error, reinforcement learning would help favor certain actions over other possible actions. And sensorimotor adaptation can fine-tune the movements, allowing the child to accomplish the task for laces of different thickness or when wearing gloves on a wintry day. These different processes are thought to rely on different brain regions, and the extent to which they are independent processes or interact with each other is an open question. In order to move accurately throughout life, the motor system must compensate for changes in the body and environment. Sensorimotor adaptation refers to the automatic and implicit process, one this is dependent on the integrity of the cerebellum, essential for keeping the sensorimotor system calibrated. For this form of supervised learning, the actual sensory feedback is compared to the predicted sensory consequences of a movement, with the difference constituting a sensory prediction error. The sensory prediction error is used to make rapid adjustments in an on-going movement and as a learning signal to alter the next movement in order to reduce the movement error.A key insight concerning sensorimotor adaptation is that this process appears to be impervious to task goals. In a seminal study, Mazzoni and Krakauer (2006) perturbed the visual feedback while participants performed a reaching task. By providing instructions about the perturbation, the participants were able to immediately adjust their behavior such that the cursor hit the target. However, the adaptation system continued to respond to the mismatch between the predicted and observed limb position, even though in this context, the consequences of adaptation were actually detrimental to task performance. This conclusion has been reinforced with a number of different tasks over the past decade, underscoring the automatic nature of adaptation and, computationally, that this learning process is concerned with ensuring that a selected movement is executed properly, rather than that the selected movement is appropriate. This body of work raises the question of the constraints on adaptation: If not task performance, what sources of feedback influence adaptation? The central purpose of this thesis is to characterize the features of sensory feedback that influence sensorimotor adaptation. By understanding the relevant features or inputs that constrain adaptation, we may be able to better understand the information that is communicated to this learning process. From these we could hypothesize how brain regions involved in adaptation interact with other brain regions that contribute to motor control. This should also lead to new insights and testable predictions about how the motor system will respond in various situations, meaning we could design more effective learning environments where these features are pronounced. In this thesis, I study the inputs to sensorimotor adaptation by testing cases with multiple or ambiguous sources of feedback, exploring how these signals affect performance.In Chapter 1, I investigate the potential interaction between sensory prediction errors and reward prediction errors. To study this, I use a task in which participants reach towards targets in order to earn points. I manipulate both the task feedback (reward or no reward) and movement feedback, asking how these different feedback signals interact with each other. Contrary to previous hypotheses, we find that sensorimotor adaptation and reinforcement learning operate in parallel. Furthermore, I show that a key feature determining choice behavior is a sense of agency: Does the participant believe they have control over the outcome. If so, they are more likely to seek higher payoffs (riskier behavior) compared to when they believe that they do not control the outcome. In Chapter 2, I present multiple feedback signals linked to a single movement. By varying which sources of feedback are task relevant and which are task-irrelevant, I ask if adaptation is sensitive to task relevance (even if insensitive to task outcome). The alternative hypothesis is that all feedback information is treated in a similar manner by the adaptation system. The results show that the adaptation system is sensitive to task relevance. However, overall adaptation is attenuated in the presence of irrelevant feedback signals. These results highlight a novel role of task relevance for sensorimotor adaptation, particularly in situations with multiple or redundant sources of feedback.In Chapter 3, I explore the interaction of vision and proprioception in sensorimotor adaptation. Previous experiments have shown that adaptation in response to visual errors has a limited capacity; the system can be recalibrated up a certain point, beyond which accurate performance requires some sort of change in the movement plan. The basis for this limited capacity is unclear. One hypothesis is that the upper bound on adaptation reflects an equilibrium point between signals concerning visual and proprioceptive sensory prediction errors. This hypothesis predicts that, as proprioceptive information becomes less reliable, the sensitivity to visual errors should be relatively greater, and thus produce a larger upper bound on adaptation. I test hypothesis by asking if variation across individuals in terms of their sensitivity to proprioception is predictive of their response to a visual perturbation. The results show a negative correlation between proprioceptive acuity and the magnitude of adaptation to a visual error, consistent with the idea that adaptation entails the integration of different sensory prediction error signals.In summary, by studying the response of adaptation of multiple sources of feedback, we have furthered our understanding of the constraints on sensorimotor adaptation. We find that sensorimotor adaptation not only integrates feedback from vision and proprioception, but that under situations it is also sensitive to the task relevance. Although we did not find evidence for a direct interaction between adaptation and decision making, our finding of adaptation's sensitivity to task relevance suggests an exciting possibility for the interaction with other goal directed systems.


Abstract The reform movement in statistics education has led to a revitalization of the undergraduate introductory statistics course. However, many students satisfy their degree requirements by taking statistics courses in "client departments" such as business, the social sciences, and the lab sciences, typically taught by non-statisticians. This article presents the findings of a metasynthesis of the existing literature on teaching statistics in these client disciplines to learn (1) what is currently being taught and how, and (2) the most important challenges for statistics teachers in other departments. Articles were reviewed using qualitative axial coding and quantitative text analysis to identify common research themes and ideas in the literature for each discipline. Research themes, attitudes toward statistics instruction, and pedagogical techniques were found to vary from discipline to discipline. Collaboration with instructors in other disciplines may be a welcome step toward improving statistics instruction across the university.


New anti-cancer drugs that specifically target oncogenes involved in signalling show great clinical promise. However, the effectiveness of such targeted treatments is often hampered by innate or acquired resistance due to feedbacks, crosstalks or network adaptations in response to drug treatment. Addressing this problem requires an understanding of these networks and how they differ between cells with different oncogenic mutations or between sensitive and resistant cells. Here, we present Comparative Network Reconstruction (CNR), a computational method to reconstruct signaling networks based on incomplete perturbation data, and to identify which edges differ quantitatively between two or more signalling networks. Prior knowledge about network topology is not required but can straightforwardly be incorporated. We extensively tested our approach using simulated data and applied it to perturbation data from a BRAF mutant cell line that developed resistance to BRAF inhibition. Comparing the reconstructed networks of sensitive and resistant cells suggests that the resistance mechanism involves re-establishing wildtype MAPK signaling, possibly through an alternative RAF-isoform.


In this paper we consider adiabatic disturbances of the form h(r)exp [i(ω2t-mθ -bZ] that occur in an inviscid compressible fluid rotating as an unbounded Rankine vortex, for m = 0,1 and 2. Here (r, θ, Z) are cylindrical polar coordinates with the Z-axis along the axis of symmetry of the problem. When the Mach number M at the periphery of the core of the vortex tends to zero the problem reduces to the incompressible fluid model that was considered by Kelvin, who showed that for a given m and a non-zero b there is an infinite spectrum of finite eigenfrequencies. It is shown that when b is small, for m = 2, as M increases the eigenfrequencies, starting from the largest one, come successively to a limiting stage with the following consequences: for waves rotating faster than the vortex core the limiting stage frequency represents a cutoff frequency. For waves rotating slower than the vortex core the limiting stage represents the boundary of stability. At higher M these waves become unstable. When b is sufficiently large there is no limiting stage for the eigenfrequencies and the perturbation is stable. The ' critical ' values of b given by another author for m≽2 relate to only one frequency and are not critical for all frequencies. The behaviour of the eigenfrequencies for m═1 is qualitatively similar to that for m═2. The frequencies associated with m═ 0 are real for all M. For m═0 there is also a solution representing an acoustic wave, which in the absence of the vortex would be plane and propagating in the axial direction. We also report a set of solutions for b═ 0 m≽1, which appears to have gone unnoticed, and give some details for the case where the vortex is confined in a cylinder.


Weak memory models provide a complex, system-centric semantics for concurrent programs, while transactional memory (TM) provides a simpler, programmer-centric semantics. Both have been studied in detail, but their combined semantics is not well understood. This is problematic because such widely-used architectures and languages as x86, Power, and C++ all support TM, and all have weak memory models. Our work aims to clarify the interplay between weak memory and TM by extending existing axiomatic weak memory models (x86, Power, ARMv8, and C++) with new rules for TM. Our formal models are backed by automated tooling that enables (1) the synthesis of tests for validating our models against existing implementations and (2) the model-checking of TM-related transformations, such as lock elision and compiling C++ transactions to hardware. A key finding is that a proposed TM extension to ARMv8 currently being considered within ARM Research is incompatible with lock elision without sacrificing portability or performance.


We derive optimal characteristics of contribution rates into defined-contribution pension plans based on consumption-savings theory. Contribution rates should be age-dependent and adjust to the balance-to-income ratio. Using detailed registry data on household savings behavior in Sweden, we show that individuals adjust savings rates according to these principles. We apply these principles in a quantitative model to design an optimal rule for contribution rates in a mandatory defined-contribution pension plan. Compared to typical rigid designs of contribution rates, our proposed design leads to the same average replacement rate and provides liquidity benefits and insurance against income shocks. The design implies a welfare gain of 1.8 percent in consumption equivalent and reduces the dispersion of replacement rates by more than 40 percent. Our design is robust to time-inconsistent investors. JEL classification: D91, E21, G11, H55.


The first global recession of the twenty-first century has been widely characterised as a
crisis rooted in secured credit default. But in the UK, a different, less visible, but
increasingly common tale of credit default exists, which not only predates the economic
downturn, but continues to compound its effects: that of unsecured, consumer credit
default. This is the object of this thesis: it focuses on tracing the changing calculative
landscapes that heavily indebted and defaulting consumer credit borrowers in the UK
move through, from periods of borrowing, to managing debts, to being confronted by debt
collectors. It draws together the perspectives of borrowers, defaulters, collectors, industry
analysts and spokespersons, as well as insights from visits to three major debt collection
agencies, shedding light on a domain of socio-economic life which has been subject to little
detailed empirical research. At the centre of the thesis is the concept of 'market
attachment', drawing on work within the 'economization' programme within economic
sociology. In so doing, the thesis argues that in existing accounts of market attachment
there has been a lack of attention (a) to the variable modes through which markets seek to
enact attachments between consumer and producer and (b) to those constraining market
attachments from which 'detachment' is difficult. In particular, the thesis explores the
relationship between 'affective' modes of social action and economic calculation. Drawing
attention to how emergent, corporeal relations can become central to markets, the thesis
contributes towards enriching the vocabulary and expanding the potential empirical focus
of economic sociology. In so doing, the thesis explores the distributed politics of consumer
credit, centring on the separation enacted between 'lender' and 'collector'. This separation,
the thesis argues, is not only useful for the collections industry, it is strategically put to
work and routinely re-enacted as a generative market device.


There are many types of adaptive methods that have been developed with different algorithm schemes and definitions for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDE). Adaptive methods have been developed in mesh-based methods, and in recent years, they have been extended by using meshfree methods, such as the Radial Basis Function (RBF) collocation method and the Method of Fundamental Solutions (MFS). The purpose of this dissertation is to introduce an adaptive algorithm with a residual type of error estimator which has not been found in the literature for the adaptive MFS. Some modifications have been made in developing the algorithm schemes depending on the governing equations, the domains, and the boundary conditions. The MFS is used as the main meshfree method to solve the Laplace equation in this dissertation, and we propose adaptive algorithms in different versions based on the residual type of an error estimator in 2D and 3D domains. Popular techniques for handling parameters and different approaches are considered in each example to obtain satisfactory results. Dirichlet boundary conditions are carefully chosen to validate the efficiency of the adaptive method. The RBF collocation method and the Method of Approximate Particular Solutions (MAPS) are used for solving the Poisson equation. Due to the type of the PDE, different strategies for constructing the adaptive method had to be followed, and proper error estimators are considered for this part. This results in having a new point of view when observing the numerical results. Methodologies of meshfree methods that are employed in this dissertation are introduced, and numerical examples are presented with various boundary conditions to show how the adaptive method performs. We can observe the benefit of using the adaptive method and the improved error estimators provide better results in the experiments.


Methane is an important greenhouse gas (GHG) and a source of energy for heating, lighting, generation of electricity and growth of methanotrophs. In addition to balancing CH4 levels in the environment, methanotrophs can be used to produce platform chemicals like lactate; biopolymers such as poly-3-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) and animal feed in the form of single cell proteins. To harness their industrial and environmental potential, this study was carried out to understand their physiology, biochemistry and to develop the much needed forward and reverse genetic tools in methane fixing bacteria. Nine methanotrophs were isolated using dilution to extinction methods and streaking on dilute Nitrate Mineral Salt (dNMS) agar plates. They include Isolate 01 (Methylocystis species) isolated from Wollaton late; Isolate 03 (Methylocystis species) also isolated from Wollaton lake; Isolate 3* (Methylocystis species) isolated from a bog in Moseley; Isolate 6 (Methylocystis species) isolated from University Of Nottingham lake, Isolate 7 (Methylomonas species) isolated from Nottingham landfill; Isolate 9 (Methylococcus capsulatus) isolated from a landfill in Nigeria; Isolate 10 (Methylocaldum species) isolated from cow manure; Isolate 12 (Methylocystis species) also isolated from a bog in Moseley; and Isolate 14 (Methylococcus capsulatus) isolate from Roman baths in Bath. Isolate 6 and Isolate 10 are type I; Isolate 9 and 14 are type X; while Isolate 01, 03, 3*, 6 and 12 are type II methanotrophs. All the isolates were able to grow both on CH4 and biogas. Only the type II methanotrophs were capable of accumulating PHB under nitrogen limiting conditions with Isolate 12 accumulating approximately 10 times more PHB (25.05% of dry cell weight) when grown with biogas compared to CH4. The important characteristics, availability of PacBio genome sequence and good conjugation efficiency of Isolate 12 qualified it as the best candidate for the development of transposon random mutagenesis in methanotrophs. A Tn5 plasmid derivative (miniTn5Kan_R6K) was used to deliver the transposon, and Inverse PCR identified 36 different insertion locations of transposon suggesting unbiased transposition insertions. A suicide plasmid replicon (R6K) was used for the plasmid and its non-replicative nature was demonstrated in Isolate 12. It was the first time random transposon mutagenesis was reported in type II methanotrophs. To enable more efficient genome editing, CRISPR-Cas9 gene knockout system was attempted on four methanotrophs (Isolate 3*, 10, 12 and M. parvus OBBP). Gene knockout was achieved in Isolate 12 and M. parvus (OBBP) when DNA ligase IV gene (ligD) was targeted using a plasmid with guide RNA under the transcriptional control of a promoter with moderate strength and Streptococcus pyogenes Cas9 under the transcriptional control of a weak promoter. Up to 80% editing efficiency was achieved in Isolate 12. This is the first demonstration of CRISPR genome editing in methanotrophs.


The aim was to explore the agreement over 24 h between observed and participant self-reported energy intake in adolescent netball players (habitual exercisers). Thirteen girls; age 16±1 years; stature 1.68±0.06 m; mass 61.1±8.0 kg; body mass index 21.6±2.5 kg/m2; body fat 21.5±6.9%; dietary restraint 2.13±0.63 (average category for high school females)1 and maturity offset 2.7±0.5 years from peak height velocity (positive maturity offset). The participants spent 12 h at Northumbria University, from 08:00 in the morning to 20:00 in the evening. They were provided with breakfast, lunch and dinner, along with ad libitum snacks throughout the day and for the period between 20:00 and 08:00 the following morning. All items were pre weighed or measured by the observer to determine the energy intake (MJ) content. These were then numerically coded and the participants could collect food and drink items at their discretion throughout the day. The participants were instructed to inform a member of the research team of the numerical code of each item collected to later calculate observed energy intake (MJ), taking into account all leftover food or drink items. Participant recorded energy intake (MJ) was calculated using a combined self-reported, weighed food record, where all food and drink items were manually weighed or measured and recorded in a food diary by the participants and confirmed during a 24-h recall interview with the observer the following morning. Agreement between observer and participant self-reported energy intake was calculated. Energy intake mean bias±random error equated to 0.46±1.5 MJ (1.96 SD of the mean difference), therefore the 95% limits of agreement was large, ranging from −1.04 to 1.96 MJ/days. The 95% CI for bias, however, ranged from 0.00 to 0.92 MJ/days. Overall, the combined self-reported, weighed food diary and 24-h recall interview technique indicated good agreement at the group level, therefore providing a means for assessing self-reported energy intake in habitual exercisers.


This paper presents QoSOnt: an ontology for Quality of Service (QoS). Particular focus is given to
its application in the field of service-centric systems. QoSOnt aims to promote consensus on QoS
concepts, by providing a model which is generic enough for reuse across domains. This shared
conceptualisation facilitates intercommunication regarding QoS in a heterogeneous environment.
Its realisation as an ontology allows automated reasoning about the concepts modelled. SQRM
(Service QoS Requirements Matcher), an application making use of QoSOnt, is also discussed to
demonstrate these advantages.


Oxalic acid is widely reported in the literature as one of the major components of organic aerosol. It has been reported as both a product of primary emissions from combustion processes and as a secondary product of atmospheric chemistry. Concentrations of particulate oxalate have been measured at a UK urban site (500 daily samples) and for a more limited period simultaneously at a rural site (100 samples) in the fine (less than 2.5 mu m) and coarse (2.5-10 mu m) size fractions. Full size distributions have also been measured by sampling with a MOUDI cascade impactor. Average concentrations of oxalate sampled over different intervals in PM10 are 0.04 +/- 0.03 mu g m(-3) at the rural site and 0.06 +/- 0.05 mu g m(-3) at the urban background site, broadly comparable with measurements from other European locations. During the period of simultaneous sampling at the urban and rural site, concentrations were very similar and the inter-site correlation in the PM2.5 fraction for oxalate (r = 0.45; p < 0.001) was appreciably weaker than that for sulphate and nitrate (r = 0.82 and 0.84, respectively). Nonetheless, the data clearly point to a predominantly secondary source of oxalate at these sites. Possible contributions from road traffic and woodsmoke appear to be very small. In the larger urban dataset, oxalate in PM2.5 was correlated significantly (p < 0.01) with sulphate (r = 0.60), nitrate (r = 0.48) and secondary organic carbon (r = 0.25). Clustering of air mass back trajectories demonstrates the importance of advection from mainland Europe. The size distribution of oxalate at the urban site showed a major mode at around 0.55 mu m and a minor mode at around 1.5 mu m in the mass distribution. The former mode is similar to that for sulphate suggesting either a similar in-cloud formation mechanism, or cloud processing of oxalate and sulphate after formation in homogeneous reaction processes. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.


This thesis examines data on the retention, progression and attainment of actual Kingston University undergraduate students. The thesis attempts to identify the extent to which the "attainment gaps" between Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) and white students and between mature and "regular" students, identified as existing in higher education across the United Kingdom also occur at Kingston University. This thesis analysed data within the Faculty of Science, Engineering and Computing Undergraduate student cohorts at Kingston University for patterns and trends in attainment and how they can be explained by differences in ethnicities, age and UCAS points. After an initial investigation of the data using descriptive statistics, statistical modelling techniques are applied to the students' data. Firstly, multiple linear regression models are fitted to each department or subject area within the Faculty to analyse the factors affecting students' mean marks at all levels (1st year, 2nd year and final year undergraduate). Secondly, multiple logistic regression models will be fitted to each department within the Faculty to calculate the odds ratios with respect to each of the categorical variables. Finally, two types of 2- level multilevel data analysis, namely a hierarchical model and a growth model are employed. In the hierarchical model, the data is analysed with individual students being level one and the different faculty departments being level two and in the growth model with time in years at level one and the students at level two. All things being equal, this should be able to account for the variation between students and subjects.


Introduction: Dyspepsia is a common reason for seeking Medicare in the primary health care setting and beyond. However, a major challenge in evaluating patients with dyspepsia is distinguishing between peptic ulcer disease, functional dyspepsia and gastric malignancy. In most cases, the underlying cause of dyspepsia will not be obvious based on clinical history and physical examination alone. This study was carried out to characterize dyspepsia symptoms and determine predictors of organic disease among dyspepsia patients at the Jos University Teaching Hospital, Jos, Nigeria. Materials and Methods: A prospective cross-sectional study of consecutive adult patients with dyspepsia referred for gastroscopy at the Jos University Teaching Hospital (JUTH, North-Central Nigeria was carried out. After an overnight fast, a detailed clinical history and physical examination was carried on each subject before undergoing upper gastrointestinal endoscopy using Olympus fibreoptic gastroscope. Two pairs each of gastric antral and corpus biopsies were taken from each subject and examined for the presence of Helicobacter pylori using rapid urease test. The data obtained were analyzed using the SPSS Version 15.0 Statistical soft-ware package. P values of 0.05). Anorexia, weight loss and epigastric tenderness were significantly more in those with organic dyspepsia compared to non-ulcer dyspepsia (P value 0.05). Conclusion: Dyspepsia is a common condition among patients although symptoms, physical examination and the presence or otherwise of H. pylori infection have poor predictive values for organic disease at endoscopy, the presence of anorexia, weight loss and epigastric tenderness may be pointers to the presence of an underlying organic pathology at endoscopy. Keywords: Endoscopic findings, Dyspepsia, predictors, Organic Disease, Jos, Nigeria


: Clinical efficacies of ointments containing alpha- and gamma-interferon and characterized by antiviral activity (2.0 x 10(4) IU) were studied. Antiviral effect of these ointments used in the treatment of 168 children suffering from herpetic stomatitis was assessed from the clinical and immunologic viewpoints. Measurements of secretory IgG carried out over the course of therapy evidenced positive changes in local immunity.


Objectives Laughter has a positive and quantifiable effect on certain aspects of health, and previous studies have suggested that income influences the emotion. However, it is unknown whether social relationship-related factors modify the association between equivalised income and laughter among older people. In the present study, we examined the relationship between equivalised income and the frequency of laughter. In addition, we examined the impact of social relationship-related factors on the association between equivalised income and frequency of laughter using a cross-sectional study design. Design Cross-sectional study and binomial regression analysis. Setting We sampled from 30 municipalities in Japan. Participants We examined 20 752 non-disabled Japanese individuals aged ≥65 years using data from the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study. Primary outcome Frequency of laughter. Results Laughter increased significantly with an increase in equivalent income (p for trend <0.0001). Prevalence ratios (PR) for laughing almost every day were calculated according to quartile equivalised income after adjusting for age, instrumental activities of daily living, depression, frequency of meeting friends, number of social groups and family structure. The results revealed that PRs in Q4 (men; ≥€24 420, women; ≥€21 154) were 1.21 (95% CI 1.13 to 1.30) among men and 1.14 (95% CI 1.08 to 1.20) among women, as compared with Q1 (men; <€12 041, women; <€9518), respectively. After excluding participants with depression, the association remained significant. In addition, we found inadequate social relationships and living alone were associated with a lower frequency of laughter. In comparison with the lowest equivalent income with meeting friends less frequently and living alone, the PRs of the highest equivalent income with meeting friends frequently and living with someone were higher, respectively. Conclusions The results revealed a significant relationship between equivalent income and the frequency of laughter. Social relationships and family structure were also associated with the frequency of laughter.


Homophilic interactions of the cell adhesion molecule L1 mediate not only mechanical adhesion among cells, but also, importantly, propagate intracellular signals due to connections with the major signalling networks that control most cellular responses. The ability of the cell adhesion molecule L1 to modulate cellular responses has been traditionally viewed as a direct consequence of its adhesive functions. However, after L1-specific stimulation with antibody 557, shedding of L1 occurs and dispossesses this recognition molecule of its adhesiveness as a static cell surface molecule. In fact, under these conditions stimulation of signalling cascades becomes a manifestation of emerging soluble L1 proteolytic fragments, which act as triggers of gene expression. The present work provides novel insights into the proteolytic processing of L1 upon L1-antibody stimulation: triggering of signalling with L1-antibody leads to serine protease-dependent cleavage of full-length L1 at the plasma membrane and generation of a sumoylated transmembrane 70 kDa fragment comprising the intracellular and transmembrane domains and part of the extracellular domain of L1. This fragment travels from the plasma membrane to the late endosomal compartment, where it is released from endosomal membranes into the cytoplasm, and then transported into the nucleus by a pathway that depends on importin and chromatin-modifying protein 1. The 70 kDa L1 fragment is not only transported to the endosomal compartment, but also shortly after generation cleaved by cathepsin E at the plasma membrane. Cathepsin E cleaves the 70 kDa L1 fragment at Glu1167 generating a smaller 30 kDa fragment. This 30 kDa L1 fragment is rapidly released into the cytoplasma after generation at the plasma membrane and is then translocated into the nucleus in an importin-dependent manner. Addition of the serine protease inhibitor aprotinin or mutation of the sumoylation site at Lys1172 abolishes L1-stimulated generation and nuclear import of both fragments. Their nuclear import is also impaired after alteration of the nuclear localization signal at Lys1147 of L1. Mutation of the putative cleavage site at Glu1167 as well as addition of the aspartyl protease inhibitor pepstatin abolishes generation of the 30 kDa L1 fragment. Furthermore, pepstatin inhibits L1-dependent migration of cerebellar neurons from explants, but not neurite outgrowth, indicating that the cathepsin E-mediated cleavage and/or possibly nuclear import of the 30 kDa fragment are necessary for L1-induced neuronal migration. Since aprotinin inhibits L1-stimulated neurite outgrowth, it is very likely that the 70 kDa fragment is involved in regulation of neuritogenesis. Nuclear import of the 70 kDa fragment might activate cellular responses in parallel or in association with phosphorylation-dependent signalling pathways. Alterations in the levels of the 70 kDa fragment during development and in the adult after spinal cord injury or in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease suggest that this fragment is functionally implicated in development, regeneration, neurodegeneration, and possibly sysnaptic plasticity in the mature nervous system.


Take data driven method as theoretical basis, study multi-source information fusion technology. Using online and off-line data of the fusion system, does not rely on system's mathematical model, has avoided question about system modeling by mechanism. Uses principal component analysis method, rough set theory, Support Vector Machine(SVM) and so on, three method fusions and supplementary, through information processing and feature extraction to system's data-in, catches the most important information to lower dimensional space, realizes knowledge reduction. From data level, characteristic level, decision-making three levels realize information fusion. The example indicated that reduced computational complexity, reduced information loss in the fusion process, and enhanced the fusion accuracy.


Despite extensive research on malware and Trojan horses, covert channels are still among the top computer security threats. These attacks, which are launched using specially-crafted content or by manipulating timing characteristics, transmit sensitive information to adversaries while remaining undetected. Current detection approaches typically analyze deviations from legitimate network traffic statistics. These approaches, however, are not applicable to highly dynamic, noisy environments, such as cloud computing environments, because they rely heavily on historical traffic and tedious model training. To address these challenges, we present a real-time, wavelet-based approach for detecting covert timing channels. The novelty of the approach comes from leveraging a secure virtual machine to mimic a vulnerable virtual machine. A key advantage is that the detection approach does not require historical traffic data. Experimental results demonstrate that the approach exhibits good overall performance, including a high detection rate and a low false positive rate.


Novel tetraaza macrocyclic ligand has been synthesized from condensation of ethylene diamine and ethyl acetoacetate and its Ni (II) complex is prepared by non-template condensation reaction. The bonding and stereochemistry of the complex has been characterized by elemental analysis, magnetic susceptibility, IR, UV-visible, 1H NMR and mass spectral studies. The magnetic and spectral data indicate octahedral geometry of the complex.


Sign Languages (SL) are necessary for the intellectual development of Deaf children. They are complete linguistic system used by the Deaf Culture for education, communication, creation and dissemination of knowledge. Arbitrarily forbidden for more than 100 years, the lack of SL artifacts is now a major problem the Deaf: there are few loci where they can interact in their own language (i.e. there are few media in SL). The recent growth in social media (virtual applications that allow the user to create and share their own content) has provided a new vector for the use of SL (whether in real time, or separated in space and time) and value SL as a Language of culture, identity and inclusion. The research surveyed Deaf students of a Bachelors program in Linguistics and shows that social media has become a new Agora for the Deaf Culture.


Cellulose acetate powder which is extracted from the cigarette (insulator part as a filler) has been used with polymer to produce PVC Cement/cellulose acetate composite. The dielectric behavior of this composite is analyzed as a function of weight fractions (0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4, and 0.5 wt%), temperature range (30 110) ◦C and frequency (120Hz -2MHz). Impedance and σac. conductivity of the composites behaviors as function of frequency and temperature have also studied. The results show that, the real permittivity, dielectric loss and loss tangent for all composites increase with increasing cellulose acetate filler content.


This paper discusses an evaluation of changes in the Licensing Act 2003 (LA03) on crime and disorder in five English case study areas. The LA03 paved the way for pubs, clubs, supermarkets and other outlets to sell alcohol for up to 24 hours and came into effect in November 2005. This Home Office-funded evaluation was undertaken between October 2005 and March 2007.
The methodology included site visits, participant observation, interviews with bar and door staff and the use of Geographical Information Systems to identify pub clusters and areas of concentrated drinking. Levels of violence against the person, criminal damage, sexual offences and disorder were identified prior to and following the implementation of the LA03. Changes in these were measured for town centres as a whole, in streets with a high density of drinking establishments and within individual pubs and clubs. Ambulance data and Hospital Accident and Emergency admissions were also scrutinized.
Particular attention was paid to changes in the geographical distribution and timing of offences and incidents following implementation of LA03. The extent to which changes in the LA03 were accompanied by both temporal and geographical displacement of crime and disorder was examined. The paper concludes with an assessment of how far the LA03 actually resulted in changes in pub hours and how far it is possible to link these to changing patterns of crime and disorder in town centres.


endotracheal tube obstruction secondary to inferior turbinate impaction. American Association of Nurse Anesthetists 1991; 59: 538–40. 3 Szekely SM, Webb RK, Williamson JA. The Australian Incident Monitoring Study. Problems related to endotracheal tube: an analysis of 2000 incident reports. Anaesthesia and Intensive Care 1993; 21: 611–6. 4 The Royal College of Anaesthetists. Guidelines for the Provision of Anaesthetic Services. London: The Royal College of Anaesthetists, 2004. 5 American Society of Anesthesiologists. Standards for Basic Anesthetic Monitoring, 2005, [WWW document]. http:// www.asahq.org [accessed 25 November 2005]. 6 Kannan S, Manji M. Survey of use of end-tidal carbon dioxide for confirming tracheal tube placement in intensive care units in the UK. Anaesthesia 2003; 58: 476–9.


Abstract: GABA and glutamate play a major role in central integration of hypothalamo‐pituitary‐adrenocortical (HPA) stress responses. Recent work in our group has focused on mechanisms whereby GABAergic and glutamatergic circuits interact with parvocellular paraventricular nucleus (PVN) neurons controlling the HPA axis. GABAergic neurons in the bed nucleus of the stria terminalis, preoptic area, and hypothalamus can directly inhibit PVN outflow and thereby reduce ACTH secretion. In contrast, glutamate activates the HPA axis, presumably by way of hypothalamic and brainstem projections to the PVN. These inhibitory and excitatory PVN‐projecting neurons are controlled by descending information from limbic forebrain structures, including glutamatergic neurons of the ventral subiculum, prefrontal cortex, and GABAergic cells from the amygdala and perhaps septum. Lesion studies indicate that the ventral subiculum and prefrontal cortex are involved in inhibition of HPA axis responses to psychogenic stimuli, whereas the amygdala is positioned to enhance hormone secretion by way of GABA‐GABA disinhibitory connections. Thus, it seems the psychogenic responses to stress are gated by discrete sets of GABAergic neurons in the basal forebrain and hypothalamus. As such, these neurons are positioned to summate limbic inputs into net inhibitory tone on the PVN and may thus play a major role in HPA dysfunction seen in affective disease states and aging.


The midland water snake, Nerodia sipedon, is very abundant in portions of the southeastern U.S.A., where it may play an important role as a predator in freshwater communities. I examined whether foraging mode in naive neonatal snakes was phenotypically plastic or canalized and I compared handling times and capture efficiencies for different prey types (juvenile fishes and frogs) between neonatal and adult snakes. I also tested for kin recognition by mother snakes by comparing their consumption of unrelated (non-kin) and related (kin) neonates according to time and the availability of alternative prey (fish). In addition, the response of prey in the presence and in the absence of snakes was tested by comparing the amount of time that juvenile fishes utilized areas containing different microhabitat complexities and by comparing the amount of time that fishes were actively moving. Overall, foraging mode was phenotypically plastic, handling times and capture efficiencies differed by prey type and snake size class, kin recognition was confirmed, and fishes did not alter their habitat selection or activity patterns in the presence of snakes.


The new WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA) is a significant step forward for the international trading regime, representing new hope for the relevance of the WTO.The TFA is the first multilateral agreement since the creation of the WTO in 1995 and includes novel measures to help developing countries build capacity, while also taking into consideration regulatory concerns of WTO members through the application of the general GATT exceptions to the new agreement. While the TFA may appear narrow in scope, with regards to goods it is arguably the broadest WTO Agreement besides the GATT, since all goods that cross national borders find themselves subject to trade facilitation measures. If the TFA is properly interpreted, the combination of capacity-building measures, a focus on technological improvements and the judicious invocation of Article XX could result in a win-win situation wherein routine positive trade is streamlined, reducing time required to cross borders, while negative trade is more easily controlled and regulated at the border.Despite regulatory questions concerning implementation, it is likely that the TFA will reduce the cost of trading across borders, while improving trade for developing countries and allowing WTO members to better control trade flows, through a combination of procedural streamlining and regulatory discretion.


Toxic language is difficult to define, as it is not monolithic and has many variations in perceptions of toxicity. This challenge of detecting toxic language is increased by the highly contextual and subjectivity of its interpretation, which can degrade the reliability of datasets and negatively affect detection model performance. To fill this void, this paper introduces a toxicity inspector framework that incorporates a human-in-the-loop pipeline with the aim of enhancing the reliability of toxicity benchmark datasets by centering the evaluator's values through an iterative feedback cycle. The centerpiece of this framework is the iterative feedback process, which is guided by two metric types (hard and soft) that provide evaluators and dataset creators with insightful examination to balance the tradeoff between performance gains and toxicity avoidance.


This conference was held at University College, Cardiff, 22–23 September 1987, in memory of Dr Sven Føyn, former Director of Norges Geologiske Undersøkelse, who with Professor J. G. C. Anderson in 1962 established the Norwegian Caledonides research group in the Department of Geology at University College, Cardiff. The group is now celebrating its 25th anniversary. The conference consisted of 35 talks and 10 poster presentations with c. 75 delegates attending, mainly from British and Scandinavian institutions. The conference was introduced by M. Brooks, welcoming delegates to Cardiff, and was followed by a short session on basement geology. T. Emmett (CCAT Cambridge) described a series of dolerite dykes in the Jotun Nappe of S. Norway the geochemistry of which suggested that there had been a late Precambrian, pre-Caledonian extension of the Balto-Scandian continental margin. I. Bryhni (Oslo) followed with a description of the supracrustal rocks of the gneiss region of south Norway and the equivocal relationship of these rocks to the high pressure eclogitized rocks of the basement. The second session concentrated on the geology of Finnmark in northernmost Norway. B. Robins (Bergen) discussed the relationship between deformation and emplacement of the Seiland Igneous Province and concluded that deformation had occurred prior to the youngest intrusion dated at 531 ± 3 Ma. S. Daly et al. (UC Dublin, Leeds and Cardiff) presented Rb-Sr and U-Pb (zircon) ages of c. 800Ma for granite bodies which cross-cut folds in the Kalak Nappe Complex, suggesting that the Klubben Group metasediments and the deformation


This is a review of the mass balance of planet Earth, intended also for scientists not usually working with space physics or geophysics. The discussion includes both outflow of ions and neutrals from the ionosphere and upper atmosphere, and the inflow of meteoroids and larger objects. The focus is on ions with energies less than tens of eV originating from the ionosphere. Positive low-energy ions are complicated to detect onboard sunlit spacecraft at higher altitudes, which often become positively charged to several tens of volts. We have invented a technique to observe low-energy ions based on the detection of the wake behind a charged spacecraft in a supersonic ion flow. We find that low-energy ions usually dominate the ion density and the outward flux in large volumes in the magnetosphere. The global outflow is of the order of 1026 ions s–1. This is a significant fraction of the total number outflow of particles from Earth, and changes plasma processes in near-Earth space. We compare order of magnitude estimates of the mass outflow and inflow for planet Earth and find that they are similar, at around 1 kg s−1 (30 000 ton yr−1). We briefly discuss atmospheric and ionospheric outflow from other planets and the connection to evolution of extraterrestrial life.


Some of the most important inland fisheries in the World are found in semi-arid regions. Production systems and livelihoods in arid and semi-arid areas are at risk from future climate variability and change; their fisheries are no exception. This paper reviews the importance of fisheries to livelihoods in 'wetlands in drylands', with a focus on case-studies in Africa. We examine the threats posed by climate change to the traditional 'trieconomy' of fishing, farming and livestock herding. Although both livelihood strategies and local institutions are highly adapted to cope with, and benefit from, climate-induced variability, weaknesses in the wider governance and macro-economic environment mean that the overall adaptive capacity of these regions is low and the farmer-herder-fishers are vulnerable to projected climate change. In order to maintain the important nutritional, economic, cultural and social benefits of fisheries in the face of climate change, planned adaptation at scales from the local to the regional (trans-national) is required. We use the concept of resilience in linked social-ecological systems to examine how such responses may be developed and promoted. Key strategies include facilitating people's geographical and occupational mobility, improving intersectoral water and land-use planning, and promoting forms of aquaculture that help build resilience of farming systems to seasonal and episodic water deficits.


Based on conceptualizations and assessment instruments of adult attachment research, the development of the adult attachment scale is outlined. The AAS scale is a self report instrument reflecting attachment-related attitudes. The dimensional scales of the AAS assess to what extent a person feels close to his partner, to what extent he is able to rely on others, and how much someone is afraid of losing an intimate partner. The German version of the AAS was normed in a representative study and its psychometric properties were investigated. The reliability of all scales was satisfactory (alpha = 0.72 - 0.79), however, the scale structure only acceptable. Thus, the current version might be integrated in studies to analyze the convergence of adult attachment measures. Findings on the convergent and discriminant validity of the scales (sociodemographic data, the SOC-S, the HADS-D, the SOMS and the Whiteley-Index were included) suggest a high prognostic relevance of the scales in the fields of health psychology and psychosomatics.


High-temperature sorption of CO2 via calcium looping has wide applications in postcombustion carbon capture, sorption-enhanced hydrogen production, and inherent energy storage. However, fast deactivations of CaO sorbents and low CO2 uptake in the fast carbonation stage are major drawbacks of this technology. For the first time, we developed a green approach through the reuse of nanosilica derived from coal fly ash (CFA) to enhance both the cyclic CO2 uptakes and the sorption kinetics of CaO sorbents. The as-synthesized nanosilica-supported CaO sorbent showed superior cyclic stability even under realistic carbonation/calcination conditions, and maintained a final CO2 uptake of 0.20 g(CO2) g(sorbent)-1 within short carbonation time, markedly increased by 155% over conventional CaO sorbent. Significantly, it also exhibited very fast sorption rate and could achieve almost 90% of the total CO2 uptake within ∼20 s after the second cycle, which is critical for practical applications. These positive effects were attributed to the formation of larnite (Ca2SiO4) and the physical nanostructure of silica, which could yield and keep abundant reactive small pores directly exposed to CO2 throughout multiple cycles. The proposed strategy, integrating the on-site recycling of CFA, appears to be promising for CO2 abatement from coal-fired power plants.


Tendinopathy is a degenerative disease in which inflammatory mediators have been found to be sometimes present. The interaction between inflammation and matrix remodeling in human tendon cells (TCs) is supported by the secretion of cytokines such as IL-1β, IL-6 and IL-33. In this context, it has been demonstrated that pulsed electromagnetic fields (PEMFs) were able to reduce inflammation and promote tendon marker synthesis. The aim of this study was to evaluate the anabolic and anti-inflammatory PEMF-mediated response on TCs in an in vitro model of inflammation. Moreover, since PEMFs enhance the anti-inflammatory efficacy of adenosine through the adenosine receptors (ARs), the study also focused on the role of A2AARs. Human TCs were exposed to PEMFs for 48 hours. After stimulation, A2AAR saturation binding experiments were performed. Along with 48 hours PEMF stimulation, TCs were treated with IL-1β and A2AAR agonist CGS-21680. IL-1Ra, IL-6, IL-8, IL-10, IL-33, VEGF, TGF-β1, PGE2 release and SCX, COL1A1, COL3A1, ADORA2A expression were quantified. PEMFs exerted A2AAR modulation on TCs and promoted COL3A1 upregulation and IL-33 secretion. In presence of IL-1β, TCs showed an upregulation of ADORA2A, SCX and COL3A1 expression and an increase of IL-6, IL-8, PGE2 and VEGF secretion. After PEMF and IL-1β exposure, IL-33 was upregulated, whereas IL-6, PGE2 and ADORA2A were downregulated. These findings demonstrated that A2AARs have a role in the promotion of the TC anabolic/reparative response to PEMFs and to IL-1β.


The thesis of this paper is that human beings are remarkably distinct from other living beings (animals, birds, insects, etc.) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) machines (computers, robots, etc.) by what we would like to call cultural symbols. The latter refers to such cultural components as language, science, knowledge, religious beliefs, thought, myths, cultural norms and values. The Concept of The Culturo-Symbolic Soul Cultural symbols are seen in this paper as being intrinsically imbued with transcendental/metaphysical qualities whose impact and role in shaping the behavior of human individuals and societies are viewed as crucial. The centrality of cultural symbols both in the making of the most human distinct identity and its social action justifies the priority which must be given to their analysis and comprehension. This epistemological outlook on the nature of human cultural symbols should be the privileged frame of analysis for the social scientist who aspires to establish a more credible intellectual paradigm, that could help disclose the nature of the latent yet powerful moving forces which trigger the behavior of individuals and the dynamics of societies. In other words, the cultural symbols that the human species possesses must be the main source that psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and political scientists ought to consult and refer to in any ambitious scientific endeavor which seriously aims at improving the levels of understanding and explaining the behavior of the individuals as well as that of human Mahmoud Dhaouadi is professor of sociology at the University of Tunis, Tunisia. collectivities. In short, being central to the very identity-making as well as to the behavior of social actors in any society and any culture, human cultural symbols could legitimately be called the Culturo-Symbolic Soul of human social actors. Giving cultural symbols a prominent role in the study of the social actor's and his/her society's behavior restores the essential humanistic touch to the mainstream work of behavioral social sciences. That humanistic dimension has been lost considerably under the impact of both Behaviorism and Structuro-Functionalism. The former often studies human behavior according to S-R contingency or the rules that govern animal behavior. Modern Structuro-Functionalism, on its part, examines social action as shaped and determined by no more than the constraining social facts (faits sociaux) and the social structures. The major thesis to be developed throughout the pages of this study aims essentially to accomplish two goals: to establish a theoretical framework on the nature and the role of cultural symbols as key forces to the determination of single or collective human behavior. Viewed in this way, the insights of human cultural symbols are expected to enhance the social scientist's scientific credibility. In other words, at this level, we aspire to make a social science contribution to basic research in the field of human cultural symbols, and try to apply our theoretical perspective in an empirical manner on a sample of behavior drawn from different societies, cultures, and civilizations. The full and conclusive success in combining the theoretical and the applied levels in the behavioral social sciences remains, however, an ideal. The measure of one's theory's highest credibility is nothing more than coming closer to the realization of a genuine synthesis between the applied and the theoretical in the world of the behavioral social sciences. To articulate our developing theory on the universe of cultural symbols, we need first to present a transparent analysis of the essence of cultural symbols' transcendental nature. Their transcendental hidden dimensions have manifested themselves in a rather tangible way as we have increasingly distanced ourselves from approaching them through positivist lenses. Our Ever Smaller World Alvin Toffler, the well-known American thinker, has stated that humankind has gone through two major revolutions: the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. Today, humanity embarks on its third and most important rev2 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 19:1


This project focuses on the competitive pressure, or the threat of competitive pressure, generated by charter school policy. This paper uses longitudinal district-level data and multiple quasi-experimental designs to examine the relationship between two Ohio charter school policies and changes in public school district instructional resource allocation. Some believe that the competitive pressure created by charter schools will improve efficiency in district-run public schools; however, the findings from this study do not reliably demonstrate that charter school policy will induce a public school district to increase the level of instructional resource allocation. The findings do provide evidence that some charter policies are linked to changes in resource allocation at certain school districts. This study suggests that additional, multiple method investigations are needed to study how public school districts respond to competition and policies designed to change the levels of competition in the public school system.


Despite numerous RNA-seq samples available at large databases, most RNA-seq analysis tools are evaluated on a limited number of RNA-seq samples. This drives a need for methods to select a representative subset from all available RNA-seq samples to facilitate comprehensive, unbiased evaluation of bioinformatics tools. In sequence-based approaches for representative set selection (e.g. a k-mer counting approach that selects a subset based on k-mer similarities between RNA-seq samples), because of the huge number of available RNA-seq samples and the large number of k-mers/sequences in each sample, computing the full similarity matrix between all samples using k-mers/sequences for the entire set of RNA-seq samples in a large database (e.g. the SRA) has memory and runtime challenges, making direct representative set selection infeasible with limited computing resources. Therefore, we developed a novel computational method called "hierarchical representative set selection" to handle this challenge. Hierarchical representative set selection is a divide-and-conquer-like algorithm that breaks the representative set selection into sub-selections and hierarchically selects representative samples through multiple levels. We demonstrate that hierarchical representative set selection can achieve performance close to that of direct representative set selection, while largely reducing the runtime and memory requirements of computing the full similarity matrix (up to 8.4X runtime reduction and 4.7X memory reduction for 10000 samples that could be practically run with direct subset selection). We show that hierarchical representative set selection substantially outperforms random sampling on the entire SRA set of RNA-seq samples, making it a practical solution to representative set selection on large databases such as the SRA.


We define two categories of Dirac manifolds, i.e., manifolds with complex Dirac structures (real Dirac structures give subcategories). The first notion of maps I call Dirac maps, and the category of Dirac manifolds is seen to contain the categories of Poisson and complex manifolds as full subcategories. The second notion, dual-Dirac maps, defines a dual-Dirac category which contains presymplectic and complex manifolds as full subcategories. The dual-Dirac maps are stable under B-transformations. As an example, we consider the case of a Lie group with a complex Dirac structure and establish conditions for which multiplication is a Dirac map. In particular we get two structures of a category on Hitchin's generalized complex manifolds, i.e., two reasonable notions of generalized complex maps.


Controversy concerning the appropriate surgical management of intussusception in the adult prompted review of the Mayo Clinic's experience with this uncommon entity. During the last 23 years, 48 patients had documented intussusception: 24 instances of intussusception originating in the small intestine and 24 instances of intussusception originating in the colon. Two-thirds of the colonic intussusceptions were associated with primary carcinoma of the colon. Only one-third of the intussusceptions of the small intestine were harbingers of malignancy, and 70% of these lesions were metastatic. Because of these findings, we advocate resection of intussusceptions of the colon without initial surgical reduction, in order to minimize the operative manipulation of a potential malignancy. In the patient with intussusception of the small intestine, an associated primary malignancy is uncommon. Initial reduction, followed by limited surgical resection, is the preferred treatment. Surgical resection without reduction is favored only when an underlying primary malignancy is clinically suspected.


Weakly supervised semantic segmentation is a challenging task as it only takes image-level information as supervision for training but produces pixel-level predictions for testing. To address such a challenging task, most recent state-of-the-art approaches propose to adopt two-step solutions, i.e. 1) learn to generate pseudo pixel-level masks, and 2) engage FCNs to train the semantic segmentation networks with the pseudo masks. However, the two-step solutions usually employ many bells and whistles in producing high-quality pseudo masks, making this kind of methods complicated and inelegant. In this work, we harness the image-level labels to produce reliable pixel-level annotations and design a fully end-to-end network to learn to predict segmentation maps. Concretely, we firstly leverage an image classification branch to generate class activation maps for the annotated categories, which are further pruned into confident yet tiny object/background regions. Such reliable regions are then directly served as ground-truth labels for the parallel segmentation branch, where a newly designed dense energy loss function is adopted for optimization. Despite its apparent simplicity, our one-step solution achieves competitive mIoU scores (val: 62.6, test: 62.9) on Pascal VOC compared with those two-step state-of-the-arts. By extending our one-step method to two-step, we get a new state-of-the-art performance on the Pascal VOC (val: 66.3, test: 66.5).