Purpose - Given age-related dwindling of competencies and eventual necessity of home-based nursing care in the home of elderly people, this study shows the spatial and social implications with reference to the person-environment fit. Design/methodology/approach - A qualitative approach has been chosen in order to conduct a penetrative single case analysis whose multiplicity permits a socially realistic description of the specific research context. Eleven members of staff from six different care organisations based in Austria were asked about these circumstances within the framework of expert interviews, supported by interview guidelines and recorded with an electronic device. The transcribed interviews were analysed using Qualitative Content Analysis according to Mayring (2008).Findings - The results emphasise the special significance of the person-environment fit for the context of home-based nursing care for the elderly and the particular demands made on their homes. Facing decreased personal competencies, especially missing barrier-free elements in the dwelling have been criticised. The recommendation of home adaption measures, improvisation and the refusal of the assignment of home-based care belong to the strategies the research group undergoes. Furthermore, the results show an enhancement of the person-environment fit. Besides proving room for living, the dwelling has to fulfil further functions because it is now the epicentre for the provision of home-based care. The results illustrate that attention should be directed on the private and individual context of the person.Originality/value - The study at hand, building on existing research results, adds the perspective of health care workers with regard to home-based care of the elderly.


Amantadine hydrochloride is one of the most commonly used drugs in the pharmacotherapeutic treatment of disorders of consciousness (DOCs) following traumatic brain injury (TBI). Indeed, its actions as a pro-dopaminergic drug and as an N-methyl-D-aspartate antagonist makes amantadine an interesting candidate to improve consciousness and responsiveness in individuals with DOC, including vegetative state and minimally conscious state. Giacino et al (N Engl J Med. 2012;366(9):819-826) recently reported that amantadine was able to accelerate the functional recovery course of subjects after TBI with DOC, during a 4-week treatment period. Some patients with DOC following severe TBI have been reported to have parkinsonian symptoms. Severe TBI and posttraumatic parkinsonism may share a common midbrain network dysfunction. In fact, both vegetative state and minimally conscious state following severe TBI can include features of akinetic mutism and parkinsonism. Responsiveness to pro-dopaminergic agents in some patients and to deep brain stimulation in others, might depend, respectively, on the integrity, or lack thereof, of the dopaminergic postsynaptic receptors. We are of the strong opinion that more attention should be given to parkinsonian findings in persons with DOC after severe TBI and would advocate for multicenter, randomized, controlled trials to assess risk factors for parkinsonism following severe TBI.


ABSTRACT Background: The Traditional Mediterranean Diet (TMD) is known to have beneficial effects on several chronic diseases. However, data concerning the whole transcriptome modulation of the TMD are scarce. Objective: We aimed to explore the effects of the TMD on the whole transcriptome of individuals at high cardiovascular risk. Methods: Thirty-four participants at high cardiovascular risk were randomly assigned to a TMD enriched with extra-virgin olive oil (TMD + VOO), mixed nuts (TMD + Nuts), or a control diet based on low-fat diet recommendations. A microarray analysis in circulating peripheral blood mononuclear cells of the participants was conducted before and after 3 months of the intervention. The association of changes in gene expression was modeled into canonical pathways by conducting an untargeted functional analysis with the Ingenuity Pathway Analysis® (IPA). Effects were considered significant when the absolute z-score values were ≥2.0 and the logarithm P (adjusted by the Benjamini–Hochberg procedure [BH]) values were ≥1.30. Results: According to IPA, interventions with TMD + Nuts, TMD + VOO, and control diet downregulated neuroinflammation, triggering receptor expressed on myeloid cells 1 , and cholecystokinin/gastrin-mediated signaling pathways, respectively. The gene expression among these pathways included cytokines, T-cell activation receptors, nuclear factor kappa β/inflammasome components, pro-inflammatory enzymes and cell cycle regulators. Conclusion: The current findings suggest that the TMD enriched with mixed nuts or VOO downregulate transcriptomic pathways, including those related to neuroinflammation, which could influence development of neurodegenerative diseases. Our data should be corroborated in other tissue cells, such as neurons and glial cells. The PREDIMED trial was registered at https://www.controlled-trials.com (ISRCTN35739639).


BACKGROUND
Nonalcoholic fatty liver disease (NAFLD) is a major risk factor for type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and liver failure. Treatment with n-3 long-chain polyunsaturated fatty acids (n-3 LCPUFAs) produced variable success in improving NAFLD. The purpose of this review is to determine if n-3 LCPUFA will decrease markers of NAFLD, compare the efficacies of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA), and identify factors that contribute to discrepancies in results.

METHODS
This study reviewed published clinical studies with n-3 LCPUFA and NAFLD/nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) by using PubMed and Web of Science.

RESULTS
Seventeen human studies ranging in DHA 250 mg/day to a mixture of EPA+DHA 50 mL/day for 8 weeks to 2 years were identified. Results obtained varied because of different dosages of n-3 LCPUFA, EPA and DHA ratios, duration, subject characteristics, diet, exercise, compliance, methods, and other factors. Despite inconsistencies in the results reported, 13 of 17 published studies reported that n-3 LCPUFA supplementation decreased liver fat, liver enzymes, or markers of inflammation; four reported decrease in ballooning and two in fibrosis. Results also indicated that DHA was more effective than EPA in the treatment of NAFLD. Caloric restriction and supplementation with n-3 LCPUFA were additive in decreasing hepatic steatosis.

CONCLUSIONS
n-3 PUFA decreased several markers of NAFLD; however, there was a lower observed efficacy in NASH treatment. Further long-term placebo-controlled studies with adequate power and supplementation duration and standardized and sensitive detection methods are needed to determine the efficacy of EPA and DHA individually and in a mixture to treat NAFLD and NASH.


Under-representation of women in the education, formal employment and administrative positions is very conspicuous. The gender disparities are prominently exhibited among communities adhering to traditional cultural values, beliefs, customs, practices and harbouring negative attitudes and perceptions among women and girls. These cultural attributes are likely to negatively influence the girls' career aspirations. This study therefore sought to determine the influence of social and cultural attributes on girls' educational and career aspirations in public secondary schools in Samburu County which is predominantly occupied by nomadic communities. Equal opportunities theory was adopted. A descriptive survey was employed. Data was collected from a sample of 132 girls using a questionnaire. Descriptive statistics in the form of frequencies and percentages were used to analyze and present the data. The following were the findings and conclusions: girls exhibited high educational and career aspirations; direct relationships existed between girls' higher educational and career aspirations and high socio-economic status, liberated attitudinal ideology, knowledge of role models, urban and rural-urban residence. Sex-role ideology, socio-economic status, role models, and residential location influenced the girls educational and career aspirations more than their religious affiliation. The following recommendations were made: researchers and educationists should investigate the subterranean factors that suppress girls' and career aspirations and recommend remedial measures to reduce or eradicate the negative influence of these factors; affirmative policies should be formulated aimed at creating a level playing ground for the disadvantaged groups of the society especially the girl child; and girls should emancipate themselves from the andro-centrically biased socio-cultural web and challenge themselves by pursuing high status professional careers since given favorable educational and training opportunities and conditions, they can achieve equally better as their male counterparts.


The first commercially viable high voltage (>600V) gallium nitride (GaN) Schottky barrier devices are reported. Though GaN does not have any "micropipe" defects, which commonly exists in SiC material, defects like dislocations due to lattice mismatch hamper the material development of GaN high power devices. Improvements in the nitride epitaxial film growth have led to significant reduction of conductive dislocations. Conductive Atomic Force Microscope (CAFM) analysis of conductive dislocations shows only on the order of 103 cm-2 density of conductive dislocations, which are believed to be responsible for the undesired leakage current. GaN diodes compare to SiC or Si devices demonstrate a significant advantage in the thermal resistance. The insulating properties of Sapphire substrates allow fabrication of the devices in TO220 packages with insulating frame and thermal resistance better than 1.8°C/W compare to 3°C/W of SiC or Si devices with insulating frame. Performance of GaN, SiC and Si devices in the switch mode power supplies is compared.


Abstract Objective The long-term risk of cardiovascular disease and diabetes have not been modeled for individuals with metabolic syndrome or other related cardiometabolic risk factors, nor have their long-term costs been estimated. Therefore, we used a Markov model to estimate these risks and costs over a decade. Methods A Markov model was used to predict the development of diabetes and cardiovascular events (myocardial infarction [MI], stroke) in cohorts according to their specific risk factor profiles. Six risk factors profiles were based on adults (18 years and older) in the NHANES 2001–2002 database. These profiles were combined with risk equations to estimate transition probabilities for the Markov model. Costs of both acute (MI, stroke) and chronic (MI, stroke, diabetes) management were estimated based on all-payer discharge data, insurance claims data, government sources, and the published literature. Results The model estimated that approximately 11% and 23% of individuals within the National Cholesterol Education Program Adult Treatment Panel III metabolic syndrome risk cohort would have new onset of diabetes within 3 years and 7 years, respectively. By year 10, the risk of developing diabetes was 31% for the metabolic syndrome risk cohort, and the risk of an incident acute MI or stroke event was approximately 3% to 4%. Cumulative costs as a result of new onset of diabetes within 10 years were estimated at $6200 per individual in the metabolic syndrome cohort and $20,000 per patient within the cohort who developed diabetes. The corresponding costs for incident acute MI and stroke were estimated at $2200 and $1300, respectively, per individual in the cohort, and $55,000 and $37,000, respectively, per patient in the cohort who had an event. Conclusion Based on the results of these analyses, individuals with cardiometabolic risk factors such as those comprising the metabolic syndrome are expected to have a substantial risk for cardiovascular events and conditions. In addition, these individuals can be expected to place a considerable economic burden on the health-care system even in the short term.


In the context of current and any future climate change, methane (CH4) is an important greenhouse gas (GHG). However, current global trends of changes in atmospheric CH4 are unpredictable and the relative contributions of individual global sources and sinks are inadequately quantified. If net CH4 emissions are to be reduced, an improved understanding of key components, including natural wetlands, is required.
A study was conducted in order to construct an annual landscape estimate of CH4 flux for a typical UK blanket bog site near to Lake Vyrnwy, North Wales. Flux measurements were made following an established chamber method and sampling was maintained throughout a calendar year and was spatially stratified by vegetation to facilitate landscape extrapolation. In order to identify which environmental variables controlled CH4 fluxes from the blanket bog, regression analyses were performed using environmental variables measured at the time of flux measurement. In order to identify the longer term influence of environmental conditions, regression analyses were also conducted with running averages of measurements from periods prior to the day of flux measurement. A series of in situ experiments were undertaken to test hypotheses which examined the different controls on the observed variation in CH4 fluxes, related to temporal and spatial patterns of CH4 flux and to putative biases of sampling methods due to the limited footprint of chambers.
CH4 fluxes displayed a distinct seasonal pattern with low mean fluxes from January until June, when a dramatic increase in net methane emission occurred; higher CH4 fluxes continued until November and December. The site was a net source of CH4 and the best landscape estimate of CH4 flux (± standard error of the mean) was 9.8 (±3.8) g CH4 m-2 year 1. Errors associated with the extrapolation of measurements to a landscape-scale estimate resulted in estimates that ranged from 8.6 (±3.7) to 11.1 (±3.8) g CH4 m 2 year-1. Soil temperature and water table were the environmental variables which were most consistently associated with CH4 fluxes. However, the relationship between fluxes and water table did not always control CH4 fluxes in an expected manner. At some sites CH4 emissions were lower when the water table was closer to the surface, a result which contradicted the acrotelm-catotelm model of CH4 flux, but may be explained by the hysteresis of fluxes in response to changing water table. Strong hysteresis of CH4 fluxes was also apparent in response to temperature and radiation.
Hourly measurements of CH4 flux showed high variability but no significant difference between measurements during day and night. Similarly, a replicated landscape-scale experiment of water table manipulation was expected to cause changes in CH4 flux but, despite controlling for other aspects of spatial variation, the manipulation had no significant effect on CH4 fluxes. Flux estimates were made using chambers with footprints that varied by three orders of magnitude and there was no significant effect on mean CH4 fluxes. However, the variance of CH4 flux estimates strongly correlated with sample area with markedly smaller variance as chamber size increased.
Overall estimates of landscape CH4 flux were in the range of previous estimates made for UK peatland sites, but virtually all estimates displayed high variability. Such variability constrained the comparison of different estimates but it is possible to use methods, such as chambers with very large footprints, to improve the results of in situ studies.


Even though iterative solvers like the Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient method (PCG) have been studied for over fifty years, fault tolerance for such solvers has seen much attention in recent years. For iterative solvers, two major reliable strategies of recovery exist: checkpoint-restart for backward recovery, or some type of redundancy technique for forward recovery. Efficient low-overhead redundancy techniques like algorithm-based fault tolerance for sparse matrix-vector products (SpMxV) have recently been proposed. These techniques add resilience with a good, but limited scope; state-of-the-art techniques correct at most 1 fault within a SpMxV. In this work, we study a more powerful resilience concept, which is redundant multithreading. It offers more generic and stronger recovery guarantees, including any soft faults in PCG iterations (among others covering SpMxV), but also requires more resources. We carefully study this redundancy-efficiency conflict. We propose a fault-tolerant PCG method, called TwinPCG, which introduces very small wall-clock time overhead, and significant advantages in detection and correction strategies. Our method uses Dual Modular Redundancy instead of the more expensive Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR); still, it retains the TMR advantages of fault correction. We describe, implement, and benchmark our iterative solver, and compare it in terms of efficiency and fault tolerance capabilities to state-of-the-art techniques. We find that before multithreading in BLAS, TwinPCG introduces 5-6% runtime overhead compared to reference PCG implementations, and can exploit BLAS multithreading well. In the presence of faults, it reliably performs forward recovery for a range of problems, showing all the strengths of TMR techniques.


Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy is a powerful optical technique for the study of chiral materials and molecules. It gives access to an enantioselective signal based on the differential absorption of right and left circularly polarized light, usually obtained through polarization analysis of the light transmitted through a sample of interest. CD is routinely used to determine the secondary structure of proteins and their conformational state. However, CD signals are weak, limiting the use of this powerful technique to ensembles of many molecules. Here, we experimentally realize the concept of photothermal circular dichroism, a technique that combines the enantioselective signal from circular dichroism with the high sensitivity of photothermal microscopy, achieving a superior signal-to-noise ratio to detect chiral nano-objects. As a proof of principle, we studied the chiral response of single plasmonic nanostructures with CD in the visible range, demonstrating a signal-to-noise ratio better than 40 with only 30 ms integration time for these nanostructures. The high signal-to-noise ratio allows us to quantify the CD signal for individual nanoparticles. We show that we can distinguish relative absorption differences for right circularly and left circularly polarized light as small as gmin = 4 × 10–3 for a 30 ms integration time with our current experimental settings. The enhanced sensitivity of our technique extends CD studies to individual nano-objects and opens CD spectroscopy to numbers of molecules much lower than those in conventional experiments.


Introduction: Rhizopus typically results in acute, aggressive and angioinvasive infection, particularly in immunosuppressed individuals. Risk factors include immunosuppression in haematologic malignancy, uncontrolled hyperglycemia, iron overload states, and older chelator agents such as deferoxamine. Case Presentation: We describe a case of a 33-year-old female with transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia who was started on intravenous deferiprone therapy and subsequently presented with a retropharyngeal abscess. Despite intravenous broad spectrum antibiotics, she continued to deteriorate and developed aphasia. A CT scan of her head showed multiple hypodensities. Blood cultures grew Rhizopus species and a subsequent transesophageal echocardiogram showed a mass in the right atrium with a patent foramen ovale. Conclusion: Although deferiprone, a newer iron chelator agent, has antifungal properties in vivo, this case illustrates that angioinvasive Rhizopus infections can occur in patients treated with deferiprone.


The number of offers in higher education both in Ukraine and everywhere in the world is quite large, and accordingly the competition for new students is high. Higher education institutions (HEIs) in such conditions must know how to effectively present themselves to target audiences. New digital technologies and social media can help. Social media has become especially important during the quarantine restrictions associated with the COVID-19 pandemic.Universities have to use the Internet as their main source of communication, both for disseminating information and for recruiting new students. As a result, the use of social media in higher education is growing rapidly, and HEIs are making increasing efforts to establish their online presence. Higher education institutions try to establish contact with their potential students when they study in high school using various media platforms, including social networks and messengers.
This article is devoted to the theoretical analysis and practical research of using social media, in particular social networks, by higher education institutions in Ukraine to recruit students and maintain two-way communication with them.The study has shown that most freshmen actively used social networks to search for information about a HEI and some of them maintained a dialogue with the university through these social networks before the admission. An important regularity has been defined: the more widely and qualitatively a higher education institution is presented in social networks, the more often entrants and students turn to them in search of the necessary information. However, social networks still remain an auxiliary tool, as the majority of Ukrainian entrants first of all trust the official websites and feedback of graduates when choosing a higher education institution. In any case, the higher education marketing is becoming increasingly digital and this trend doesn't look to slow down anytime soon.


A tropospheric ozone Differential Absorption Lidar system, developed jointly by The University of Alabama in Huntsville and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is making regular observations of ozone vertical distributions between 1 and 8 km with two receivers under both daytime and nighttime conditions using lasers at 285 and 291 nm. This paper describes the lidar system and analysis technique with some measurement examples. An iterative aerosol correction procedure reduces the retrieval error arising from differential aerosol backscatter in the lower troposphere. Lidar observations with coincident ozonesonde flights demonstrate that the retrieval accuracy ranges from better than 10% below 4 km to better than 20% below 8 km with 750-m vertical resolution and 10-min temporal integration.


The paper describes the process of developing and the experience in teaching the practical component of a course in modern embedded systems at Institute Superior Tecnico, the engineering school of the Technical University of Lisbon (Portugal). The course mainly addresses electrical engineering students, covering both hardware and software aspects in a theoretical and practical integrated perspective. The results achieved in the last two years show that students significantly benefit from this new lab environment and projects, both in achieved skills and students' satisfaction.


The advantages of implementing and using 3D cone beam imaging technology in dental practice are undeniable, and these benefits have led to the technology's fast-paced advance into both everyday general dentistry as well as into specialty dental practice. This is despite the higher entry costs in terms of both financial and educational / training investments by a profession that is not known for investing in technologies that do not benefit patients and bring a significant return on investment.


Background Medication discrepancies can lead to adverse drug events and patient harm. Medication reconciliation is a process intended to reduce medication discrepancies. We developed a Secure Messaging for Medication Reconciliation Tool (SMMRT), integrated into a web-based patient portal, to identify and reconcile medication discrepancies during transitions from hospital to home. Objective We aimed to characterize patients' perceptions of the ease of use and effectiveness of SMMRT. Methods We recruited 20 participants for semistructured interviews from a sample of patients who had participated in a randomized controlled trial of SMMRT. Interview transcripts were transcribed and then qualitatively analyzed to identify emergent themes. Results Although most patients found SMMRT easy to view at home, many patients struggled to return SMMRT through secure messaging to clinicians due to technology-related barriers. Patients who did use SMMRT indicated that it was time-saving and liked that they could review it at their own pace and in the comfort of their own home. Patients reported SMMRT was effective at clarifying issues related to medication directions or dosages and that SMMRT helped remove medications erroneously listed as active in the patient's electronic health record. Conclusions Patients viewed SMMRT utilization as a positive experience and endorsed future use of the tool. Veterans reported SMMRT is an effective tool to aid patients with medication reconciliation. Adoption of SMMRT into regular clinical practice could reduce medication discrepancies while increasing accessibility for patients to help manage their medications. Trial Registration ClinicalTrials.gov NCT02482025; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02482025


Background: Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is associated with substance use disorders (SUD; alcohol and/or drug dependence) and nicotine dependence. This study aims to advance our knowledge about the association between SUD, nicotine dependence, and the course of ADHD (persistent versus remittent ADHD and lateonset ADHD). Methods: ADHD, SUD, and nicotine dependence were longitudinally assessed (mean age at study entry 11.3 years, mean age at follow-up 21.1 years) using structured psychiatric interviews and multi-informant questionnaires in a subsample of the Dutch part of the International Multicenter ADHD Genetics study. Individuals with persistent ADHD (n = 62), remittent ADHD (n = 12), late-onset ADHD (n = 18; age of onset after 12 years), unaffected siblings (n = 50), and healthy controls (n = 47) were assessed. Hazard ratios (HR) with 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were estimated by Cox regression and adjusted for clustered family data, gender, follow-up length, and current age. Results: Individuals with persistent ADHD were at significantly higher risk of development of SUD relative to healthy controls (HR = 4.56, CI 1.17–17.81). In contrast, levels of SUD in those with remittent ADHD were not different from healthy controls (HR = 1.00, CI .07–13.02). ADHD persisters had also higher prevalence rates of nicotine dependence (24.2%) than ADHD remitters (16.7%) and healthy controls (4.3%). A similar pattern was found in initially unaffected siblings who met ADHD criteria at follow-up ("late-onset" ADHD); they had also a higher prevalence of SUD (33%) compared to stable unaffected siblings (20%) and were at significantly increased risk of development of nicotine dependence compared to healthy controls (HR = 13.04, CI 2.08–81.83). Conclusions: SUD and nicotine dependence are associated with a negative ADHD outcome. Results further emphasize the need for clinicians to comprehensively assess substance use when diagnosing ADHD in adolescents and adults.


Context. KIC 6951642 has been reported as a candidate hybrid pulsator of type-γ Doradus – δ Scuti from observations of the first quarters of the Kepler mission. The regular patterns seen in the Fourier spectra of the Kepler and Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite TESS light curves and the sinusoidal modulation of its surface brightness suggest the additional presence of rotational modulation and stellar activity, respectively. Aims. We aim to investigate the pulsating nature of KIC 6951642 and to search for the signature of rotation and/or activity in the light curves. Methods. We performed an iterative frequency search of both Fourier spectra, and searched for regular patterns in them. We applied spectrum synthesis to determine the atmospheric stellar parameters. Since KIC 6951642 was reported to belong to a spectroscopic binary system, we fitted the time delays derived from the light curves with the radial velocities obtained from published as well as new spectra in an attempt to improve the quality of the first orbit. Results. Follow-up spectroscopy showed that KIC 6951642 is a fast-rotating F0-type star in a possible single-lined binary with a period of ∼4.8 yr. In the low-frequency regime, we identified the frequencies of 0.721 d−1 as well as of 0.0087 d−1. We attribute the first frequency to stellar rotation, and the second one to stellar activity with a cycle of length of 3.2 yr. We also detected g modes, with the strongest mode located at 2.238 d−1, as well as three asymmetric multiplets (with a mean spacing of 0.675±0.044 d−1). In the high-frequency regime, we detected frequencies of type-δ Scuti, with the strongest mode located at 13.96 d−1, as well as seven asymmetric multiplets (with a mean spacing of 0.665±0.084 d−1). We subsequently identified a few more frequencies that appear to be combinations of a g or p mode and one of the higher cited frequencies not due to pulsations. Conclusions. We propose that KIC 6951642 accomadates for a fast-rotating γ Dor – δ Sct hybrid star with various rotationally split multiplets of g and p modes and that it also displays a cycle lasting years of (possible) stellar activity.


How do institutions of the European Union change? Using an institutionalist approach, this article highlights the interplay between power, cognitive limits, and the normative order that underpins institutional settings and assesses their impact upon the process of institutional change. Empirical evidence from recent attempts to reinforce the protection of the free movement of goods in the EU suggests that, under conditions of uncertainty, actors with ambiguous preferences assess attempts at institutional change on the basis of the historically defined normative order which holds a given institutional structure together. Hence, path dependent and incremental change occurs even when more ambitious and functionally superior proposals are on offer.


Heat transfer improvement in microchannel heat sink (MCHS) has been a challenge, because it increases the power requirements for the fluid flow. In the present study, MCHS with different wall, geometric, and design configurations of cylindrical ribs and cavities are simulated to investigate their effect on thermal and hydrodynamic performance of MCHS using a laminar flow having Reynolds number in the range from 100 to 1000. The wall configurations include; base wall cylindrical ribs (BWCR), side wall cylindrical ribs (SWCR), and all wall cylindrical ribs (AWCR). Moreover, the geometric configurations involve different AWCR cases having rib spacings (Sfr) of 0.4 mm, 0.8 mm, 1.2 mm, and 0.4 mm staggered arrangement. Furthermore, the design configurations include; AWCR, all wall cylindrical cavities (AWCC), and all wall cylindrical ribs and cavities (AWCRC) with constant Sfr = 0.4 mm. The performance of various channels with flow disruptors is analyzed in terms of friction factor (f) and Nusselt number and then compared with smooth channel in terms of thermal enhancement factor (η). Based on the first law of thermodynamics, thermal resistance (Rth) is used to investigate the resistance of any configuration to flow of heat comparing at same pumping power. Moreover, the second law of thermodynamics is applied to quantify the rate of entropy generation (S˙gen) and transport efficiency (ηt) for MCHS. The results show that although the MCHS with all wall ribs has a lower value of η than the base wall and side wall ribs; however, it has the maximum value of  ηt and minimum value of Rth and S˙gen; thus, indicating that η is not the only performance criteria for the selection of MCHS.


AIM
To study the transcriptional regulation of human telomerase reverse transcriptase (hTERT) mRNA in normal human cholangiocytes (HBECs) after hepatitis B virus X (HBx) gene transfection and to elucidate the possible mechanism of HBV infection underlying cholangiocarcinoma.

METHODS
HBECs were cultured in vitro and co-transfected with a eukaryotic expression vector containing the HBx coding region and a cloning vector containing coding sequences of enhanced green fluorescent protein (EGFP) using lipid-mediated gene transfer. The transfection efficiency was determined by the expression of EGFP. The expressions of hTERT mRNA and HBx protein in HBECs were detected by RT-PCR and immunocytochemical stain, respectively.

RESULTS
The transfection efficiencies were about 15% for both HBx gene expression plasmid and empty vector. No hTERT mRNA was expressed in HBECs when transfected with OPTI-MEM medium and empty vector, but a dramatic increase was observed for hTERT mRNA expression in HBECs when transfected with HBx expression vector. HBx protein was only expressed in HBECs when transfected with HBx expression vector.

CONCLUSION
HBx transfection can activate the transcriptional expression of hTERT mRNA. Cis-activation of hTERT mRNA by HBx gene is the primary mechanism underlying the proliferation, differentiation and tumorigenesis of biliary epithelia.


Abstract With cancer incidence increasing over time, attention to the burden of related psychiatric and psychosocial consequences of the disease and treatment is a major topic for both cancer patients and their caregivers. Among cancer patients, psychiatric (e.g. adjustment, anxiety, depressive disorders) and neuropsychiatric disorders (e.g. cognitive disorders secondary to treatment, delirium) have been shown to affect an average of 30–35% patients, with differences according to stage and type of cancer. Also other psychosocial syndromes (e.g. demoralization, health anxiety, irritable mood) not taken into account in usual nosological systems should be considered for their impact on the patient's quality-of-life. Also, it has been repeatedly reported that psychological distress reverberates substantially throughout the nuclear family, and that a family approach is necessary in cancer care, with the caregiver–patient dyad as a unit to be the focus and direction of assessment and intervention. In this review the most significant psychosocial disorders causing burden for cancer patients and their caregivers are examined, and the main methods of assessment for more proper referral and treatment are summarized.


In most diseases related to pleural effusion, the fluid analysis yields important diagnostic information, and in certain cases, fluid analysis alone is enough for diagnosis. The many important characteristics of pleural fluid are described, as are other complementary investigations that can assist with the diagnosis of common and rare pleural effusions. For a systematic review of pleural effusion, a literature search for articles on the practical investigation and diagnosis of pleural effusion was done. Articles included guidelines, expert opinion, experimental and nonexperimental studies, literature reviews, and systematic reviews published from May 2003 through June 2009. The search yielded 1 guideline, 2 meta-analyses, 9 literature reviews, 1 randomized control trial, and 9 clinical studies. On the basis of class IIa or class I evidence from these articles, a step by step approach is recommended for investigating a pleural effusion, beginning with assessment of the medical history, clinical examination, radiology, pleural fluid evaluation, and finally, if no diagnosis is forthcoming, a pleural biopsy under image guidance or thoracoscopy.


Objectives– The aims of this study were to investigate myopathic changes in myasthenia gravis (MG) by using turns‐amplitude analysis (TAA) and quantitative motor unit potential duration analysis (MUPan), to correlate myopathic changes with severity and duration of the disease and the results of diagnostic tests including repetitive nerve stimulation test (RNS), single fiber electromyography (SFEMG), and anti‐acetylcholine receptor antibody (AChR‐ab), and to compare the sensitivities of these two methods in detecting myopathic changes in MG. Materials and methods– We studied both MUPan and TAA in 32 patients with MG. Results– The MUPan study showed myopathic changes in 12 patients (37.5%); TAA revealed a myopathic pattern in 4 (12.5%) and a neurogenic pattern in 4 cases (12.5%). Two of the 4 patients with a myopathic change by TAA also had short‐duration mean MUP on the MUPan. No statistically significant association was found between the myopathic changes either by MUPan or TAA, and the various clinical and laboratory features. Conclusion– We conclude that MUPan is a more sensitive method than TAA in showing myopathic changes in MG, and that TAA is of limited help in demonstrating them.


Malaria is a life-threatening infectious disease caused by a parasitic protozoan belonging to the genus Plasmodium. Resistance has started to emerge for the currently recommended artemisinin combination therapies used to treat malaria. There is a great need for new anti-malarial drugs, but traditional drug discovery timelines take approximately 10-17 years. Drug repositioning offers a very effective alternative to de novo drug design and could minimise the long timescales involved in the process of bringing a drug to the market. Work at the University of Salford identified the previously widely-used anti-amoebic drug emetine dihydrochloride as a potent inhibitor of Plasmodium falciparum K1 strain parasites (IC50: 47 + 2.17 nM). Emetine is not currently in use due to its emetic and cardiotoxic effects.

The cryo-EM structure (3J7A) depicting the emetine binding site on the 40S subunit of the 80S P. falciparum ribosome has recently been published as a potential target binding site for emetine, enabling rational design of safer synthetic analogues. This study focuses on using molecular modelling tools to predict activities of the two isomers of dehydroemetine, a synthetic analogue of emetine developed in the 1960s by Roche. Studies conducted in the mid-20th century found dehydroemetine to be less toxic than emetine; however, its use as an anti-amoebic was replaced due to the introduction of the safer drug metronidazole, although dehydroemetine still remains as a WHO recommended drug for use in amoebiasis in metronidazole treatment failure. Using MOE and Autodock vina docking software, the activities of two isomers of dehydroemetine; (-)-R,S-dehydroemetine and (-)-S,S-dehydroisoemetine were predicted. Docking studies predicted a better binding conformation for (-)-R,S-dehydroemetine compared to (-)-S,S-dehydroisoemetine. The two diastereomers of dehydroemetine were synthesised and tested against the multi-drug resistant K1 strain of Plasmodium falciparum. It was found that of the two diastereomers, (-)-R,S-dehydroemetine (IC50: 69.58 + 2.62 nM) shared almost similar potency with emetine (47 + 2.17 nM), whereas (-)-S,S-dehydroisoemetine (IC50: 1.85 + 0.2 µM) was much less active as predicted through modelling studies. Stage specificity studies of both compounds showed more activity against the trophozoite erythrocytic stages of the parasite. The IC50 speed assays carried out to verify onset of antimalarial activity in emetine and the dehydroemetine diastereomers, found that although the compounds started activity within 24 hours, the IC50 values were achieved only at 48 hours. Cell cytotoxicity assays showed both compounds to be potent against HepG2 hepatic cancer cell lines seeded at 5000 cells/well with low selectivity indices (SI = ~3 and ~1 for (-)-R,S-dehydroemetine and (-)-S,S-dehydroisoemetine). To achieve further dose reduction to minimise toxicity, CalcuSyn-based drug interactivity assays were optimised and validated on known synergistic antimalarial drug combinations (atovaquone/proguanil). Drug interaction analysis performed using the validated CalcuSyn method found the antimalarial drug atovaquone to be synergistic with (-)-R,S-dehydroemetine at IC50, IC75 and IC90 values (Combination indices (CI): 0.88-0.89). Proguanil displayed moderate synergy (CI: 0.67), additivity (CI: 1.04) and antagonism (CI: 1.6) with (-)-R,S-dehydroemetine at IC50, IC75 and IC90 combinatory doses, respectively. Combination studies with artemether (CI: 1.6) and doxycycline (CI: 1.5) were found to be antagonistic. Emetine and (-)-R,S-dehydroemetine were found to display gametocidal activity against both male and female gametes with no cross-resistance observed on 3D7A, Dd2 and W2 strains.

Further experiments were conducted to investigate the possibility of a multimodal mechanism of action for emetine and its analogues. ATP proliferation experiments on parasite-infected erythrocytes showed emetine and (-)-R,S-dehydroemetine caused a reduction in cellular ATP concentrations. Emetine and (-)-R,S-dehydroemetine also resulted in the disruption of the parasite mitochondrial membrane potential in infected erythrocytes in a manner similar to the slow-acting antimalarial atovaquone. The results support multimodal mechanisms of action in addition to inhibition of protein translation.

Experiments were also conducted to determine the cellular basis of cardiotoxicity previously reported in emetine and dehydroemetine therapy for amoebiasis. hERG K+ channel blocking assays showed that emetine and (-)-R,S-dehydroemetine did not result in inhibition (Selectivity indices > 285), indicating a differential mechanism of action for cardiotoxicity. To explore this further, experiments were done to evaluate the effect of emetine and (-)-R,S-dehydroemetine on calcium regulatory mechanisms on sheep ventricular myocytes. Both emetine and (-)-R,S-dehydroemetine displayed potentiation of ryanodine receptors, lowering the threshold for generation of calcium waves with consequent increased susceptibility for arrhythmias. (-)-R,S-dehydroemetine however, also displayed negative inotropic effects in comparison to emetine, thus making the compound potentially less arrhythmogenic and supporting early clinical observations reported in the 1960s during anti-amoebic therapy.


In 1991, the Directorate of Kirklareli Museum in Turkish Thrace identified and registered as an "archaeological conservation area" the remains of an Ottoman iron foundry measuring around 10,000 sqm and situated approximately 4 kilometers east of the town of Demirkoy in the middle of a heavily forested region of the Istranca massifs. Referred as Samakocuk in the Ottoman archival documents, the town lies about 25 km east of the Turkish - Bulgarian border and about 20 km south of the Black Sea shore. In May 2002, a project has been initiated to conduct research on the iron mining and iron works in the area. Starting from summer 2003, surface surveys, excavations and archival investigations have been carried out. During the summer season of 2005, in addition to the continuing the excavation at the upper terrace of the Ottoman foundry which is believed to go back to the time of Sultan Mehmed II, the Conquerer (Fatih, r.1451-81), the industrial archaeology team and the geodesic survey team carried out a sounding excavation at the location of two furnaces, the chimney mouths of which were located during the surface surveys of 2003. These furnaces were located about 250 meters west of the original foundry site known as Kabakci's field, and the purpose of the expedition was to investigate the type of furnace technology prior to start working on the lower terrace of the Ottoman Foundry. The three weeks of excavation revealed a second smaller foundry site. As the work progressed, a rectangular workshop measuring 20 meters by 50 meters and divided into two sections with a central entrance hall was unearthed. It also became clear that the same system of dikes and water canals serviced both foundries for the operation of the water wheels supplying energy for the bellows and the trip hammers for wrought iron production. One of the furnaces excavated within the eastern workshop of this new foundry turned out to be a shaft (or bloom) furnace for iron production illustrating an advanced 17th century technology. In the middle of the west wing of this new foundry was identified a copper smelting furnace. Archival documents related to the Ottoman financial records dated to the 19th century indicate that copper was the second major metal produced at DemirkoySamakocuk foundries besides iron, and that the raw copper was used for making copper alloy molds for casting cannon balls for the Ottoman artillery forces.


Background: The project controller is a function witch evolved due to the strong gaining ground of project operation. Why the area of the project controller is interesting to study is explained by the fact that increasing knowledge of this function is important in order to make project operation work well. The fact that opinions in this field disagree, further increases the interest of the field. In order to study the function of the project controller three companies have been singled out. They are IFS, Intentia and Saab Bofors Dynamics. The selection is based upon them being knowledge based companies with project intense operation. Aim: The aim with this study is to compare and analyse the function of the project controller in three project intense knowledge based companies. Method: This study is based upon three methodological bases being qualitative study, case study and interview. As a complement to the interviews, document analysis have been used. Result: The field of responsibility of accounting controllers is still of great importance, but can be seen as a smaller part of the collected project controller functions. A new area for the function of the project controller stresses constitutes of interaction, which both directly and indirectly supports project control. In the interactive function, both offensive and defensive functions are included, which can be conceived paradoxically. Furthermore the function of the project controller is rather influenced by how companies organise and structure the management control than the importance of the project operation.


Hindsight tells us that COVID-19, thought by Trump and others to have come out of nowhere, is more aptly labelled a "gray rhino" event, one that was highly probable and one that we had the power to prevent. Indeed, despite considerable evidence of the impending threats of pandemics, for the most part, pandemic preparation was ignored, resulting in wide-scale social and economic losses.

The lessons from COVID-19 however should remind us of the perils of ignoring gray rhino risks. Nowhere is this more apparent than with climate change, a highly probable, high impact threat that has largely been ignored to date. Despite those who deny climate change, there remains ample evidence of the increasing temperature of the earth, which like COVID-19, has the potential not only to create public health emergencies but also to create wide scale, enormous adverse impacts on the economy.

Indeed, the risks posed by climate change to the economy have the potential to be so far-reaching that it should, as this article argues, be termed a systemic risk. As such, the economic implications of climate change need to be mitigated in order to preserve economic stability. This is necessary not only for prudential and economic reasons, but also to protect citizens' health and safety, and to ensure that business does not exceed the limits of the planet.

While there has been some attention to addressing the economic implications of climate change at the global level, progress in the US has been minimal. This is surprising, not only because climate change has already caused unprecedented damage in certain parts of the country, but also because, to some extent, existing legislation and models may offer the tools to address the systemic risks of climate change. Drawing inspiration from the Dodd-Frank Act, SEC rules, and the FDIC model, among others, this article proposes regulatory approaches for mitigating climate change systemic risks in hopes that COVID-19 does not foreshadow our fate for climate change.


The automotive industry plays a determinant role in the economy of developed countries. Sheet metal forming is one of the most important processes in car manufacturing. Recent trends in car production may be characterized by the application of lightweight principles. Its main priority is to fulfill both the customers' demands and the increased legal requirements. The application of high strength steels may be regarded as one of the potential possibilities. Applying high strength steels has a positive response for many of the requirements: increasing the strength may lead to the application of thinner sheets resulting in significant mass reduction. Mass reduction is leading to lower consumption with increased environment protection. However, increasing the strength can often lead to the decrease of formability, which is very unfavorable for the forming processes. In this chapter, an overview of recent material developments in the automotive industry concerning the use of new-generation high strength steels will be given. In this paper, the material developments are emphasized from the point of view sheet metal forming; therefore, our focus is on the body-in-white manufacturing in the automotive industry.


We develop a new, mathematically precise framework for treating the effects of nonlinear phenomena occurring on small scales in general relativity. Our approach is an adaptation of Burnett's formulation of the shortwave approximation, which we generalize to analyze the effects of matter inhomogeneities as well as gravitational radiation. Our framework requires the metric to be close to a background metric, but allows arbitrarily large stress-energy fluctuations on small scales. We prove that, within our framework, if the matter stress-energy tensor satisfies the weak energy condition (i.e., positivity of energy density in all frames), then the only effect that small-scale inhomogeneities can have on the dynamics of the background metric is to provide an effective stress-energy tensor that is traceless and has positive energy density-corresponding to the presence of gravitational radiation. In particular, nonlinear effects produced by small-scale inhomogeneities cannot mimic the effects of dark energy. We also develop perturbation theory off of the background metric. We derive an equation for the long-wavelength part of the leading order deviation of the metric from the background metric, which contains the usual terms occurring in linearized perturbation theory plus additional contributions from the small-scale inhomogeneities. Under various assumptions concerning the absence of gravitationalmore » radiation and the nonrelativistic behavior of the matter, we argue that the short-wavelength deviations of the metric from the background metric near a point x should be accurately described by Newtonian gravity, taking into account only the matter lying within a homogeneity length scale of x. Finally, we argue that our framework should provide an accurate description of the actual universe.« less


Background: The research goal of the Dental segment of the Centre of Biomedical Informatics is focused on the electronic health record (EHR) development for dentistry. Objectives: At the beginning there has been constructed an electronic dental cross "DentCross", which was representing patients dental data in the graphical form. It has been completed with the system of the automatic speech recognition (ASR) and voice synthesis module (TTS).
Methods: The main goal of this work was to reach the high entirety of the system and its automatization. For this reason it has been completed with the special record medium for the temporomandibular disorders (TMD).
Results: Concerning the experience with the old version the knowledge database (KB) for TMD has been structured differently. A classification diagnostic schema by the American Academy of Orofacial Pain (AAOP) has been used. The KB has been created in the MUDR KB Editor application. On this basis a relational database has been constructed and a user interface for data collection based on MUDR and MUDRLite EHR systems was developed.
Conclusions: The main advantage of this system is determination of probable diagnosis of the disease (AAOP) by the system ("custom" component). It is based on the characteristic data, which have been recorded in the electronic form after the investigation. For the creation of the component of its alone MS Visual Studio.NET 2003 development tool has been used. The whole component is programmed in C] language.


We propose a new approach to represent and manipulate a mesh-based character animation preserving its time-varying details. Our method first decomposes the input mesh animation into coarse and fine deformation components. A model for the coarse deformations is constructed by an underlying kinematic skeleton structure and blending skinning weights. Thereafter, a non-linear probabilistic model is used to encode the fine time-varying details of the input animation. The user can manipulate the corresponding skeleton-based component of the input, which can be done by any standard animation package, and the final result is generated including its important time-varying details. By converting an input sample animation into our new hybrid representation, we are able to maintain the flexibility of mesh-based methods during animation creation while allowing for practical manipulations using the standard skeleton-based paradigm. We demonstrate the performance of our method by converting and editing several mesh animations generated by different performance capture approaches.


Summary

1. A reduction in forest area should result in a reduction of its number of species and, moreover, do so in a characteristic way according to the familiar species-area relationship. Brooks, Pimm & Collar (1997) applied this formula to the losses in forest area in the Philippines and Indonesia. Independently derived totals of the number of endemic bird species that are threatened with extinction broadly agree with these predicted losses. In some cases, however, predicted losses overestimate or underestimate the actual numbers of threatened species.

2. Within an island, the proportionate deforestation to date might be most extensive where there are many endemic species, or where there are few. To test this possibility, we obtained recent forest cover data for the region. We separated lowland (  1000 m a.s.l.) forest cover by overlaying topographic maps. From these data, we predict separately the numbers of montane and lowland endemic bird species likely to become extinct as a result of deforestation. We then compared these totals with the numbers considered threatened in the latest Red List.

3. Our predictions based on deforestation closely match the numbers of threatened endemic birds in the lowlands, but underestimate them in montane regions.

4. Our predictions based on deforestation underestimate the number of threatened montane mammal species even more seriously.

5. Lowland faunas of insular South-east Asia are under extreme threat because of massive deforestation. The region's montane faunas appear seriously threatened even by low levels of deforestation.


Despite the frequency of tax changes and their potential importance to investors, almost all of the analysis of tax-based investment incentives assumes investors never anticipate any tax changes. We depart from this approach by analyzing the historical pattern of U.S. corporate investment incentives over the period 1953-86, incorporating the feature of investor awareness that the tax code may change. Our analysis incorporates a predictive equation for future tax variables into a model of optimal investment subject to adjustment costs and uncertainty. We find that expectations of future tax changes significantly affect the incentive to invest only if adjustment costs are low. In this case, the incentive to invest in 1986 was strong, as investors are estimated to have anticipated the coming reduction in investment incentives.


The proliferation of smart devices and the advancement of data-intensive services has led to explosion of data, which uncovers massive opportunities as well as challenges related to real-time analysis of big data streams. The edge computing frameworks implemented over manycore systems can be considered as a promising solution to address these challenges. However, in spite of the availability of modern computing systems with a large number of processing cores and high memory capacity, the performance and scalability of manycore systems can be limited by the software and operating system (OS) level bottlenecks. In this work, we focus on these challenges, and discuss how accelerated communication, efficient caching, and high performance computation can be provisioned over manycore systems. The proposed Fast, ExteNsible, and ConsolidatEd (FENCE) framework leverages the availability of a large number of computing cores and overcomes the OS level bottlenecks to provide high performance and scalability for intelligent big data processing. We implemented a prototype of FENCE and the experiment results demonstrate that FENCE provides improved data reception throughput, read/write throughput, and application processing performance as compared to the baseline Linux system.


Most mineralogists are familiar with differential thermal analysis and thermogravimetry, and possibly with differential scanning calorimetry and evolved gas analysis, but what about thermomagnetometry, emanation thermal analysis and thermosonimetry? All is revealed in this fluently written book. Following a prominent definition of thermal analysis (the measurement of changes in physical properties of a substance as a function of temperature whilst the substance is subjected to a controlled temperature programme) and two introductory chapters, these techniques and many others are described systematically, starting with theory and principles, through relevant equipment, ending with well chosen examples of applications (a good number of these from the Earth Sciences). There are also chapters on the use of microcomputers in thermal analysis, derivation of reaction kinetics from thermal analysis data, and purity determinations of compounds from measurement of melting points, and guides are given to the literature of thermal analysis and to the main manufactures of thermal analysis equipment. Appendices list introductory experiments in thermal analysis and computer programs for data capture and processing. This book is an excellent introduction to thermal analysis both at the undergraduate level and for established workers in other disciplines who might wish to apply these techniques in their research. It is also priced realistically!


The author revisits the issue of market timing and concludes that it may prove to be an exercise that does more harm than good to long-term investment performance. Though it may seem easy to understand market returns with the benefit of hindsight, this short articles argues that market timing done in hindsight provides investors with little help in making solid long-term investment decisions. Trachtenberg suggests that, in any given year, there will be both perfectly good as well as perfectly bad reasons for not investing. In the same way, in any given year, one witnesses ups and downs in the market and in one's own portfolio return. Thus, using the data from 1985 onwards, Trachtenberg shows that the critical decision is not when to invest, but how much to invest.


As a usual model for a variety of practical applications, the maximum diversity problem (MDP) is computational challenging. In this paper, we present an opposition-based memetic algorithm (OBMA) for solving MDP, which integrates the concept of opposition-based learning (OBL) into the well-known memetic search framework. OBMA explores both candidate solutions and their opposite solutions during its initialization and evolution processes. Combined with a powerful local optimization procedure and a rank-based quality-and-distance pool updating strategy, OBMA establishes a suitable balance between exploration and exploitation of its search process. Computational results on 80 popular MDP benchmark instances show that the proposed algorithm matches the best-known solutions for most of instances, and finds improved best solutions (new lower bounds) for 22 instances. We provide experimental evidences to highlight the beneficial effect of OBL for solving MDP.


The growing need for performing large-scale and low-cost biomedical studies has led organizations to promote the reuse of patient data. For instance, the National Institutes of Health in the U.S. requires patient-specific data collected and analyzed in the context of Genome-wide Association Studies (GWAS) to be deposited into a biorepository and broadly disseminated. While essential to comply with regulations, disseminating such data risks privacy breaches because patients' genomic sequences can be linked to their identities through diagnosis codes. This paper proposes a novel approach that prevents this type of data linkage by modifying diagnosis codes to limit the probability of associating a patient's identity to their genomic sequence. Our approach employs an effective algorithm that uses generalization and suppression of diagnosis codes to preserve privacy and takes into account the intended uses of the disseminated data to guarantee utility. We also present extensive experiments using several datasets derived from the electronic medical record (EMR) system of the Vanderbilt University Medical Center, as well as a large-scale case study using the EMRs of 79K patients, which are linked to DNA contained in the Vanderbilt University biobank. Our results verify that our approach generates anonymized data that permit accurate biomedical analysis in tasks including case count studies and GWAS.


Many beginning generalist teachers are responsible for the delivery of integrated arts education as part of their curriculum. This responsibility is dependent on their own beliefs about their competence, school context, pressures of the curriculum and benefits of the arts for students. These beliefs operate as a key factor in a generative system of human competence (Bandura, 1997), leading to the assumption that they are powerful influences on the overall teachers' effectiveness with students. Little is known about the impact of personal experiences on pre-service teacher beliefs and confidence levels for arts education. Greater recognition of confirming and disconfirming experiences that shape teacher engagement with the arts is necessary. This paper provides insights into a research project that attempts to contribute towards filling this void, in order to improve teacher effectiveness within the arts domain in the middle years. It is part of a bigger study exploring beliefs of beginning generalist teachers. This study explores the life stages of 15 generalist pre-service teachers undertaking a graduate diploma in education. Each participant's life stage was analysed before being compared to their level's of teacher self-efficacy for arts education. Results indicated that negative arts experiences at school and little engagement with the arts during each life stage informed teachers' beliefs for their future teaching practice. The study reveals important information that informs teacher training and induction programmes about pre-service teachers experiences within the arts domain.


Ure2p is the protein determinant of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae prion state [URE3]. Constitutive overexpression of the HSP70 family member SSA1 cures cells of [URE3]. Here, we show that Ssa1p increases the lag time of Ure2p fibril formation in vitro in the presence or absence of nucleotide. The presence of the HSP40 co-chaperone Ydj1p has an additive effect on the inhibition of Ure2p fibril formation, whereas the Ydj1p H34Q mutant shows reduced inhibition alone and in combination with Ssa1p. In order to investigate the structural basis of these effects, we constructed and tested an Ssa1p mutant lacking the ATPase domain, as well as a series of C-terminal truncation mutants. The results indicate that Ssa1p can bind to Ure2p and delay fibril formation even in the absence of the ATPase domain, but interaction of Ure2p with the substrate-binding domain is strongly influenced by the C-terminal lid region. Dynamic light scattering, quartz crystal microbalance assays, pull-down assays and kinetic analysis indicate that Ssa1p interacts with both native Ure2p and fibril seeds, and reduces the rate of Ure2p fibril elongation in a concentration-dependent manner. These results provide new insights into the structural and mechanistic basis for inhibition of Ure2p fibril formation by Ssa1p and Ydj1p.


The effect of hot carrier injection on the FET's junction properties has been investigated for CMOS NFET devices. Junction profiles and carrier concentration of stressed and unstressed devices are measured and compared by dual lens electron holography and scanning capacitance microscopy, respectively. The measurements reveal that the width of the junction on the drain side of the device that undergoes hot carrier stressing decreases, indicating a reduction in active carrier concentration. These results are consistent with the hypothesis of phosphorous dopant passivation by the hot carrier induced release of hydrogen into the drain side extension region.


We present the design and analysis of a fault-tolerant and bandwidth-efficient Peer-to-Peer (P2P) scheme (called as WARP). WARP employs a simple and natural fault-tolerant mechanism to manage the dynamic nature of node arrivals and departures by allowing multiple physical nodes to service data mapped to a single node in the overlay. WARP's overlay network is asymmetric (built using an underlying tree topology) which naturally allows search queries of two different types — centralized and distributed — to be handled in an uniform way. Centralized queries go to specific chosen nodes in the network and are useful in the context of popular data while distributed queries can be directed to any node in the network. We prove via a stochastic analysis that any query, regardless of type, will be successfully serviced with high probability (w.h.p). Specifically, we show that for a network with N nodes on the average, the hop complexity of any search is O(log N) w.h.p., while the degree of each node is bounded by O(log N) w.h.p. When many search queries happen at the same time, it is important to avoid congestion at any one node. WARP achieves this by introducing small-world edges to the overlay which reduces the bandwidth complexity (the worst case expected number of queries that go through any node). We prove that this complexity is bounded by O(log N) w.h.p. We also generalize our results when the P2P network is built using other underlying topologies such as hypercubes or rings. Thus our scheme can be used to "convert" any static topology into a dynamic fault-tolerant network.


Cytotoxic T cells recognize tumor Ags and destroy cancer cells in vitro. Adoptive transfer studies with transgenic T cells specific for tumor Ags have demonstrated that CTL are effective only in mice with small tumor burdens and thus appear to have limited potential in cancer immunotherapy. Here we used transgenic mice that express the TCR specific for an unmutated tumor Ag P1A and multiple lineages of P1A-expressing tumors to address this critical issue. We found that local costimulation, either by expression of B7-1 on the tumor cells or by local administration of anti-CD28 mAb 37N, reinvigorated the function of CTL specific for the tumor Ag, as it substantially increased the efficacy of CTL therapy for mice with large tumor burdens. Our study suggests that CTL-based immunotherapy can be manipulated to deal with large tumors.


Dangers of Caudal Analgesia SIR,-Dr. FitzGerald and Dr. Galley (May 12, pp. 677-8) are apparently enthusiastic advocates of continuous caudal analgesia in childbirth. The former, after attending the course in continuous caudal analgesia by Drs. Hingson and Edwards in Philadelphia, regrets that with one exceptiom he can find no evidence of active interest in the method in any British hospital. Dr. Galley charges British obstetricians with prejudice, apathy, and conservatism in their attitude towards, and ill-informed criticism of, " newer methods of securing analgesia," by which, judging from the context, he apparently also means continuous caudal analgesia. Dr. FitzGerald admits that the method " does somewhat alter the normal course of labour." This is putting it mildly, for the patient, besides being unable to empty her bladder, has no urge to bear down or use her abdominal muscles in the second stage of labour, and in consequence normal flexion of the head and rotation of the occiput are seriously interfered with, so that the second stage is prolonged and persistent occipitoposteriors and deep transverse arrests are common. FitzGerald, Thomson, and Brown found that the incidence of forceps delivery was increased to 70% compared with 12% in 1939 (before caudal). Siever from experience of 1,200 cases found that persistent occipito-posterior cases occurred in*121% compared with 4%° before caudal. Hingson and Edwards report a similar experience. Infection at the site of injection is another risk. Hingson and Edwards have reported one death from this cause. Siever has had two such cases. One of the women got arachnoiditis; a laminectomy was done. The patient is " gradually recovering bladder function and the use of her legs, but the prognosis is guarded." As for the effect on the baby, in one of Siever's cases the foetus died in utero 5 minutes after the third injection. Within 2 minutes the foetal heart sounds became slow and gradually got weaker and stopped. In Siever's opinion this death and the deaths of three other babies in his series were due to the drug injected (metycaine). The subject of continuous caudal analgesia in obstetrics was discussed very fully at a meeting of the Chicago Gynecological Society in October, 1943 (reported in the July, 1944, number of the Amnierican Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology). In that discussion Huber mentioned 2 cases of his in which metycaine was given for Caesarean section. After 30 c.cm. of a 1.5°o solution had been injected vasomotor collapse occurred. The blood pressure fell to 60/40 and so remained for 3/4 hour. The foetal heart sounds fell to 60. The baby after delivery proved to be not normal. At the time of the discussion it was 7 months old and very definitely abnormal. In another case of Caesarean section the patient also collapsed. The foetal heart sounds fell to 50 or 60 and remained so for 1/4 hour. After delivery it made one or two respirations and then could not be resuscitated. Baptisti-whose paper, by the way, every enthusiast for, or would-be user of, caudal analgesia should read-considered that though the risks of continuous caudal analgesia could be minimized by caution they could not be entirely eliminated. Among the risks he emphasized was intradural injection :with respiratory failure and sudden death. This might happen in the most experienced hands. Sudden death might occur apart from intraspinal injection. "A press campaign in the United States represents caudal anaesthesia as safe and painless childbirth. . . The movement has to some extent stunned the medical profession to the point of clouding its judgment." Now "physicians are beginning to awake to actual facts . . . caudal anaesthesia is no safer to-day than it ever was. . The use of such a hazardous procedure electively to relieve the usually innocuous pains of labour is unjustifiable. Since the recent advent of continuous caudal analgesia four women have lost their lives because of the procedure per se. There have been other 'close calls' reported. . Never before has the human nervous system been subjected to the' action of such prolonged concentrated anaesthesia. The absence of residuals and sequelae remains to be proved." Because of the death of the one-hundredth obstetric patient receiving caudal analgesia two minutes after injection the method was abandoned in Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, in 1940. " It seems strange," says Baptisti, " that the tragic accidents are so frequently delayed but apparently they eventually do occur." An ideal analgesic in childbirth should be safe for mother and child. Judging from these reports continuous caudal analgesia is safe for neither. That is why it has never become popular among British obstetricians, not because its use calls for "increased time and skill from the obstetrician and anaesthetist" nor because of apathy, conservatism, and prejudice, as Dr. FitzGerald and Dr. Galley respectively assert.1 am, etc., Obstetrical Unit, U.C.H. Medical School, W.C.I. F. J. BROWNE.


ABSTRACT The "Our planet reviewed" expedition allowed to investigate the fish fauna from the Mitaraka Mountain Range (French Guiana). We sampled fishes at 14 sites using complementary sampling methods including rotenone, underwater observation, seine, cast nets, traps and hooks. We present the first detailed fish inventories from this region. Thirty eight species belonging to 16 families were observed, and at least one unknown species belonging to the genus Jupiaba Zanata, 1997 was collected. At two torrential sites we recorded an unusual fish assemblage made of a single Trichomycteridae species, Ituglanis nebulosus de Pinna & Keith, 2003. A few rare species were also recorded such as Pimelodella procera Mees, 1983 hereby extending its known distribution 100 km Southward. Anablepsoides gaucheri (Keith, Nandrin & Le Bail, 2006) was collected for the first time since its description in 2006. This species was collected in a stream located 15 km eastern from its type location, revealing its distribution might span over the entire Mitaraka range. Overall, the species turnover between sites was high even between sites with similar environmental conditions, suggesting that dispersal limitation is playing a significant role in fish assemblage composition. This indicates that complementary inventories in nearby areas may still provide new species and original information on the fish fauna inhabiting small streams of Southern French Guiana.


We studied the bonding between two flat Si substrates with thin metal films. The bonding was accomplished during thin film sputter deposition on contamination free surfaces of metal films. In this work we used Ti and Pt. Successful bonding of these metal films (each having a thickness of 10–20 nm) occurred at room temperature over the entire bonded area (12 mm × 12 mm). Self-diffusion, particularly at grain boundaries and film surface, was the mechanism for bonding. Suitable metal bonding only occurred if the film surface roughness is sufficiently smaller than the self-diffusion length of metals. Particularly in the bonding of Ti to Ti films, transmission electron microscope observation revealed that complete crystalline grains had been formed across the former interface between the single thin Ti films. The interfaceless bonding can be explained by recrystallization of the Ti lattice due to the high self-diffusion coefficient of Ti. This technique would be applied to bonding of wafers to fabricate thin film devices or microsystems. Moreover, this bonding technology can be used with many different thin film materials and various semiconductor substrates.


Aminopropyl-functionalized silica (NH2-SiO2) was obtained via a sol-gel process using tetraethoxylsilicate (TEOS) and aminopropyltriethoxysilane (APTES). Aminopropyl group contained silica was further modified with formaldehyde to achieve a novel organic group modified silica, denoted as CH2O-SiO2. Using CH2O-SiO2 as support to prepare surported Pd catalyst (denoted as Pd/M-SiO2), small Pd nanoparticles (1-2 nm) were fabricated on CH2O-SiO2 surport. Hydrogenation of acetylene is used as probe reaction to evaluate the catalytic performance of Pd/M-SiO2. The results indicate that Pd/M-SiO2 exhibits unique catalytic property, which the selectivity of ethylene increases with the increase of acetylene conversion. In-situ DRIFTS spectra of CO adsorption show that the organic groups presented on the silica affect the electronic property of the very small Pd nanoparticles, which causes the change of reaction paths of hydrogenation of acetylene over Pd/M-SiO2 compared with traditional supported Pd catalyst.


ABSTRACT The sediments covering the bottom of Devils Lake below the depth of about six meters are fine muds. Above six meters they increase in coarseness with decrease in depth to become sands or courser materials on the shores. The immediate bottom of the lake at short distances from the shores is covered with a black soupy liquid that is termed sludge. This has a maximum thickness estimated as about one meter. The sediments beneath the sludge are black and have an average water content of 82.5 per cent. Silicon dioxide is the chief constituent of the inorganic part of the sediments and ranges in percentage between 50 to more than 60 per cent. There is little or no calcium or magnesium carbonate, The organic content of the sediments is estimated to be between 15 and 20 per cent. Bacteria are ot particularly abundant in the muds beneath the sludge, but aerobic and facultative bacteria average over a million per gram of dry sludge.


Over the past decade and a half, a series of demonstrations prior to the National Long-Term Care Channeling Demonstration have been fielded to test some form of case managed, community-based long-term care. Fourteen community care demonstrations funded through Federal Government waivers and similar to Channeling were indetified. This report presents a series of tables to facilitate comparisons of the interventions, evaluation designs and estimated effects of these 14 demonstrations with one another and with the two models of community care tested under Channeling.


This paper examines the pressures on family farms from globalisation and the adaptation strategies that have been adopted. Employing a relational approach to understanding the emergent "global countryside", the paper describes the impact of globalisation in terms of the stretching, substitution and severing of the social and economic relations that constitute the entity of the "family farm", requiring adaptions in the strategies of family farmers. It proceeds to outline some of the strategies adopted, including entrepreneurial engagement with global networks, international mobility and resistance. These are then illustrated through short case studies drawing on qualitative and ethnographic research with "globally engaged farmers".


Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs such as sulindac inhibit Wnt signaling, which is critical to maintain cancer stem cell–like cells (CSC), but they also suppress the activity of 5-lipoxygenase (5-LO) at clinically feasible concentrations. Recently, 5-LO was shown to be critical to maintain CSC in amodel of chronic myeloid leukemia. For these reasons, we hypothesized that 5-LO may offer a therapeutic target to improve the management of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), an aggressive disease driven by CSCs. Pharmacologic and genetic approaches were used to evaluate the effects of 5-LO blockade in a PML/RARa-positive model of AML. As CSC models, we used Sca-1þ/lin murine hematopoietic stem and progenitor cells (HSPC), which were retrovirally transduced with PML/RARa. We found that pharmacologic inhibition of 5-LO interfered strongly with the aberrant stem cell capacity of PML/RARa-expressing HSPCs. Through small-molecule inhibitor studies and genetic disruption of 5-LO, we also found that Wnt and CSC inhibition is mediated by the enzymatically inactive form of 5-LO, which hinders nuclear translocation of b-catenin. Overall, our findings revealed that 5-LO inhibitors also inhibit Wnt signaling, not due to the interruption of 5-LO–mediated lipid signaling but rather due to the generation of a catalytically inactive form of 5-LO, which assumes a new function. Given the evidence that CSCs mediate AML relapse after remission, eradication of CSCs in this setting by 5-LO inhibition may offer a new clinical approach for immediate evaluation in patients with AML. Cancer Res; 74(18); 5244–55. 2014 AACR.


While evolution is generally thought of as a slow process, acting at long time scales, selection can also cause rapid evolutionary changes in a population in just a few generations. This is especially true for the immune system, which is under constant selection by parasites and pathogens. In this thesis I use experimental selection to study a fast selection response in parasitoid immunity in Drosophila fruit flies. By taking selection processes into the laboratory, it becomes possible to study the action of selection in a controlled environment and to replicate the process over multiple populations that share the same genetic background. By allowing only those individuals that are able to survive parasitation to reproduce we caused replicated populations to adapt to parasitoid infection. First I analyzed the changes that selection had caused in the immune response itself. The evolved lines had a higher resistance and a higher density of insect blood cells (hemocytes), especially for specific hemocyte types. However, this was only the case in unparasitized individuals, while the larvae of selected and control lines had a similar hemocyte density after an immune reponse was induced . Secondly I analyzed the genomic changes caused by selection. I found that the effects of selection on the genome were pervasive, yet very localized. This may be a consequence of the large population size and genetically variable source population of our lines. We used these regions where selection had an effect to identify candidate genes that can increase parasitoid resistance.


J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), widely known as perhaps the most eminent landscape painter of the romantic era, considered himself particularly a painter of historical landscapes. His distinctive landscapes were often enriched with symbolism and allegory that set them apart from those of his artist contemporaries and mystified his audiences. "Angel in the Sun" is an unconventional study of the richness and complexity of Turner's vision of history as revealed through his drawings and paintings. Turner was deeply affected by the world in which he lived, the sciences that explained it, and the conflicts and accomplishments of his society. He wove these strands into the dense fabric of the historical pictures he created, pictures that were extremely varied, complex, original, and controversial. In "Angel in the Sun", Gerald Finley untangles the various thematic strands running through Turner's art, including the intersection of private and public histories, classical and biblical history and contemporary events, and science and religion, and shows how Turner's use of light and colour played an important role in conveying these ideas. "Angel in the Sun" includes over 130 illustrations in colour, and black and white, that reveal Turner's remarkable achievement as a painter of historical subjects. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, the book will appeal not only to art historians and landscape theorists but also to historians of science and literature. Gerald Finley, a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada, is professor emeritus of art history, Queen's University. His other books include "Landscapes of Memory: Turner as Illustrator to Scott" and "George Heriot: Postmaster Painter of the Canadas".


LAI, YU-KUEN. Packet Processing on Stream Architecture. (U nder the direction of Dr. Gregory T. Byrd). Stream processing architectures have been proposed as effic ient and flexible platforms for network packet processing. This is because packet processi ng hares many of the same characteristics of media and image processing that motivate stream ar chitectures: little global data reuse, abundant data parallelism, and high computational complex ity. This dissertation explores the SIMD (Single Instruction, M ultiple Data) stream architecture for network packet processing with several security-r elated applications. The implementations are based on the stream programming model on the Imagine medi a processor, which consists of three tiers of memory hierarchy and eight VLIW clusters oper ating in SIMD mode. The applications explored are listed as follows: the Advanc ed Encryption Standard (AES) in parallel operation modes with key agility, the Multiline ar Modular Hash (MMH) message authentication code, Bloom-filter-based content inspection engi ne for signature-based intrusion detection, and the sketch update for Internet traffic analysis. Some nov l methodologies are also presented as applications being transformed and implemented on the stre am architecture. The thesis characterizes the processing throughput of thes e applications and explores the tradeoffs on different configurations of stream architectu re. Moreover, the sketch update application is also implemented on the Intel IXP network processor, in or der to explore the difference between Imagine and a traditional architecture. The SIMD operation simplifies the access to shared data structure without explicit synchronization and arbitrati on overhead. As a result, the system achieves efficient utilization of maximum memory bandwidth. The architecture demonstrates the flexibility to support co mputation-intensive packet processing tasks at high performance. Applications such as hash and st tistical based tasks are best fit into the stream programming model with an abundance of producer a nd consumer locality: portions of values computed and stored in the stream register file (SRF) a re used for calculating a new set of values recursively. With a 500-MHz clock, the stream proces sor is capable of processing packets up to multi-gigabit-per-second throughput with outstanding power efficiency. Although packet processing over the SIMD stream architectu r exhibits control flow and load balancing issues due to packet size variation, the anal ysis indicates that the multi-core, multiSIMD architecture improves the performance and efficiency. Further explorations are proposed as promising directions for future research.


Blacklists and whitelists are often employed to filter outgoing and incoming traffic on computer networks. One central function of these lists is to mitigate the security risks posed by malware threats by associating a reputation (for instance benign or malicious) to end-point hosts. The creation and maintenance of these lists is a complex and time-consuming process for security experts. As a consequence, blacklists and whitelists are prone to various errors, inconsistencies and omissions, as only a tiny fraction of end-point hosts are effectively covered by the reputation lists. In this paper, we present a machine learning model that is able to automatically detect whether domain names and IP addresses are benign, malicious or sinkholes. The model relies on a deep neural architecture and is trained on a large passive DNS database. Evaluation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the approach, as the model is able to detect malicious DNS records with a F1 score of 0.96. In other words, the model is able to detect 95 % of the malicious hosts with a false positive rate of 1:1000.


The Revolution of 1905 had an enormous impact on many nations in the Russian Empire. In order to study the society of the Russian Empire during the Revolution of 1905, many aspects need to be considered. Besides political and social changes, it is also important to study how and why violence occurred during the Revolution.
Violence had many sources in the Revolution of 1905 in the Russian Empire. One such source was the revolutionary political parties, whichsaw acts of violence as a means for realising their political agenda. Revolutionary parties formed armed groups, which attacked the authorities and other people. Bombs exploded in many places. Revolutionaries also gave speeches and printed various texts calling upon the masses to engage in violence against the authorities. The authorities also used violence in situations where it was unnecessary for defending themselves or protecting the lives of others. On many occasions, soldiers opened fire on political demonstrations or crowds of strikers. Although the authorities finally managed to supress the Revolution using violence, it is also evident that during the Revolution, the use of violence by the authorities played a role in the radicalisation of the revolutionary movement. It is well known that the shooting of demonstrators in St Petersburg on 9 January 1905 became a catalyst for the Revolution. Later, similar events took place in many parts of the Russian Empire.
In many areas of the Empire (Poland, Latvia, etc.), large numbers of people were killed by the authorities and by the people participating in the revolutionary movement. This study reveals that almost all of the people who were killed during the Revolution of 1905 in Estonia died at the hands of the authorities. There were 102 known victims of the Revolution in Estonian towns, and all of them were killed by the authorities. Most of them died on 16 October when soldiers opened fire on a peaceful workers' demonstration in Tallinn. There was a total of five revolutionary events in Estonian towns where people were killed. Three of them took place in Tallinn, one in Tartu and one in Narva. All five events took place during workers' strikes. Events in the countryside need to be investigated more thoroughly, but as far as is known, it seems to have been extremely rare for revolutionaries or participants in uprisings to kill anyone in the countryside as well. We know with certainty that only one German landlord (Arthur von Baranoff) was killed in Estonia in 1905. The punitive squads that were sent to Estonia by the authorities in December of 1905 killed hundreds of people. So although the events in the countryside need further research in order to obtain more reliable data, it is clear that most of the victims of the Revolution of 1905 in the countryside were killed by the authorities.
It is exceedingly difficult to point out exactly why the revolutionary movement in Estonia was less violent than in many other areas of the Russian Empire. Estonia and Latvia were in a relatively similar political situation, but the Revolution became much more violent in Latvia. This may be due to the fact that the socialist movement was not as widespread in Estonia as it was in Latvia. Socialist organisations in Estonia were also weaker than in Latvia. An event already occurred on 13 January in Riga in which soldiers opened fire on a crowd of people. It is possible that this contributed to the early radicalisation of the revolutionary movement in Latvia. Tallinn's City Council may also have played an important role in keeping the peace. Estonians had won election to the City Council of Tallinn for the first time in 1904. It is likely that Estonian workers found it easier to communicate with the Tallinn's municipal government than Riga workers with their local city government that was still dominated by Germans. Tallinn's municipal government did not position itself against the workers' movement and in some cases tried to work together with the representatives of the workers. It is possible that this also played an important role in revolutionary events in Tallinn.


In this paper a novel self-adaptive remnant vibration suppression method using interior inlay viscous fluid unit (IVFUM) has been investigated. The IVFU is imbedded in the flexible structure, that can self-adaptively reduce the flexible structure remnant vibration efficiently. In order to evaluate the effect of the IVFUM, the self-adaptive vibration suppression experiment for the IVFU Euler beam in the fixed frequency excitation and the rotating excitation were carried out.. We proposed the SDOF damping system model combined with the nonlinear least square fitting method to process the rotating remnant vibration attenuation signal and identify the rotating IVFU Euler beam modal parameters. Finally, it is demonstrated that the IVFUM for the remnant vibration suppression effect of the flexible Euler beam is efficient under certain conditions after experimental and numerical analysis.


We study the problem of the optimal mixing of a passive scalar under the action of an incompressible flow in two space dimensions. The scalar solves the continuity equation with a divergence-free velocity field, which satisfies a bound in the Sobolev space $W^{s,p}$, where $s \geq 0$ and $1\leq p\leq \infty$. The mixing properties are given in terms of a characteristic length scale, called the mixing scale. We consider two notions of mixing scale, one functional, expressed in terms of the homogeneous Sobolev norm $\dot H^{-1}$, the other geometric, related to rearrangements of sets. We study rates of decay in time of both scales under self-similar mixing. For the case $s=1$ and $1 \leq p \leq \infty$ (including the case of Lipschitz continuous velocities, and the case of physical interest of enstrophy-constrained flows), we present examples of velocity fields and initial configurations for the scalar that saturate the exponential lower bound, established in previous works, on the time decay of both scales. We also present several consequences for the geometry of regular Lagrangian flows associated to Sobolev velocity fields.


The purpose of the study was to comparison of selected physical fitness among university level hockey and football players. Only male players were selected randomly from the hockey and football, who had participated in university championship held at Banaras Hindu University Varanasi. The age of players ranged between 18-24 years. Speed and Agility were selected as a variable for investigation of present study. The data for the purpose of this study was collected at the field of Banaras Hindu University Varanasi by administering the speed and agility. Hockey and football players were not found statically different with regard to speed. There was significant different was found in agility of hockey and football players. The football players were more Agile. No significant different has been found between speed variable of hockey and football player. Significant different has been found between agility variable of hockey and football player.


The formal [2+2] cycloaddition of ketenes and imines, also known as Staudinger synthesis, is a facile method for the synthesis of biologically important β-lactam derivatives. In this paper two previously reported stereoselective reactions were investigated with computational methods. Our computations support experimental data that a chiral imine, derived from d-glyceraldehyde reacting with ketenes, yields almost exclusively one out of the possible four diastereomers. The reaction proceeds stepwise, first addition of the imine to the ketene yields an intermediate, then the product is formed in a conrotatory electrocyclization. Results indicate that the electrostatic repulsion of the chiral auxiliary group is the main factor of the stereoselectivity, but solvent and substituent effects are not negligible. Calculations were performed at M06-2X/6-31+G** level of theory combined with IEF-PCM solvation, in common solvents such as toluene, THF, dichloromethane, acetonitrile and water. These results provide useful insight for the development of new chiral auxiliaries and optimizing reaction parameters.


The Barents Sea is a key region for water mass modification in the Arctic. Interaction with atmosphere and ice, and mixing in the Barents Sea, significantly modify the water masses before they enter the Arctic Basin. In the eastern Barents Sea mixing of water masses generates dense Barents Sea Water (BSW) which inflows the Arctic Ocean to form the Arctic Intermediate Waters. BSW plays an important role in the maintenance of the Arctic halocline. To study the interannual variability and evolution of water masses passing through the Barents Sea could be useful for better understanding of the climate change in the Northern Hemisphere.
Neodymium is one of number tracers which have been used to trace the distribution and circulation of water masses within the Barents Sea. Neodymium isotopic composition (expressed as ɛNd) has been successfully applied for water mass tracing due to the residence time of Nd in the oceans being shorter than the ocean overturning time and due to independence of Nd from biological fractionation and physical processes.
This work examines the major water masses within the Barents Sea, using temperature, salinity, REE concentrations and ɛNd isotopic composition data of seawater.
Water within the Barents Sea are a mixture of the saline, warm and unradiogenic Atlantic water; fresh, warm, unradiogenic, and REE-enriched Coastal water from the Kola Peninsula; fresh, cold, and relatively radiogenic Arctic surface water; and fresh, most radiogenic in this area and depleted in LREE Ob/Yenisei River Current water in different proportion. Particle scavenging is very important processes for modification of chemical content of water masses. As a result of water mass transformation, waters in southwestern part of the sea have ɛNd=-12.9±0.2 with relatively low HREE/LREE ratio=3.20±0.30. In the central part of the sea, where the Arctic waters have a stronger influence, ɛNd is -10.6±0.2 in the surface layer, but near the bottom the Nd isotopic signature indicates presence of Atlantic water (ɛNd=-12.0±0.2). The Nd isotopic composition in the northern parts of Barents Sea is more radiogenic (ɛNd=-9.1±0.3) and a maximum of the HREE/LREE ratio is reached due to particle scavenging. In the northeastern part of the study area the most radiogenic signature (ɛNd=-8.5±0.3) was determined reflecting admixture of radiogenic Ob/Yenisei River water.


The seismotectonic setting of the Aegean Sea, based on information from seismicity, neotectonics and global positioning system studies, is characterized by a sharp transition from a compressional outer arc to a complex back-arc, with an approximate north–south extension along the volcanic arc. Seismicity and 3-D tomography studies reveal the geometry of the subducting slab and image the low-velocity/high-attenuation mantle wedge at depths of 50–80 km beneath the volcanic arc where magma is generated. The 1956 Amorgos M7.5 earthquake and the impact from its seismic shaking and landslide-triggered tsunamis are discussed in the context of the regional seismotectonic setting.