This paper presents an efficient algorithm for buffered Steiner tree construction with wire sizing. Given a source and n sinks of a signal net, with given positions and a required arrival time associated with each sink, the algorithm finds a Steiner tree with buffer insertion and wire sizing so that the required arrival time (or timing slack) at the source is maximized. The unique contribution of our algorithm is that it performs Steiner tree construction buffer insertion, and wire sizing simultaneously with consideration of both critical delay and total capacitance minimization by combining the performance-driven A-tree construction and dynamic programming based buffer insertion and wire sizing, while tree construction and the other delay minimization techniques were carried out independently in the past. Experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach.


Purpose This study aimed to formulate an orally disintegrating tablet (ODT) containing both baclofen and meloxicam together for treating osteoarthritis. Methods Direct compression method was used to prepare ODTs using three types of co-processed excipients (Prosolv ODT G2®, F-melt®, and Pharmaburst®500). ODTs were evaluated according to weight variation, thickness, friability, hardness, drug content, wetting time, in-vitro disintegration time, in-vitro dissolution test, and palatability. To enhance the in-vitro dissolution of meloxicam and palatability of ODT, a six sigma methodology was used, and an improvement phase was established where ODTs were prepared using lyophilization and levigation techniques. Finally, a pharmacokinetic study of the improved ODT was accomplished in comparison to the conventional oral tablet. Results Pharmaburst-based formula (F4) showed the shortest wetting time and, consequently, the shortest disintegration time and the highest percentage of drug dissolved within 3 min compared to the other formulae. All the improved ODTs had a bitterness taste score vary from (0) palatable and (+1) tasteless. The current sigma level was 3.628 σ and 3.33 σ for palatability and solubility of ODT, respectively, which indicated the process was successfully improved compared with the previous sigma level of 2.342 σ of both processes. Pharmacokinetic study of the improved ODTs showed a significant decrease of Tmax to 120 and 30 min instead of 180 and 120 min for meloxicam and baclofen, respectively. Conclusion ODTs were successfully improved using the six sigma methodology, the pharmacokinetic parameters of both drugs were enhanced due to rapid absorption through the oral mucosa.


Whereas the treatment of fractures in birds has been a matter of multiple studies and reviews, comparatively little information is available for the treatment of luxations in birds. In this article, we review the current knowledge regarding the frequency, etiology, clinical presentation, diagnosis, and treatment of luxations in birds, aiming to guide the clinician in private practice as well as future research. The type, the localization, and the frequency of luxation do not follow a concrete pattern. In general, pet and aviary birds are more susceptible to leg and spinal luxations while in wild birds wing luxations are more frequently observed. Diagnosis is made on the basis of detailed orthopedic and radiographic examinations. Conservative management and coaptation has been successfully used in carpal, minor elbow, shoulder, coracoid, and metatarsophalangeal luxations. Surgical management is recommended in palatine bone, metacarpophalangeal, severe elbow, coxofemoral, stifle, and intertarsal joint luxations. The techniques, which have been applied, include arthrodesis, femoral head osteotomy, polymer rods, bone plates, and internal and external fixation in various combinations. Currently, there are no controlled studies, which underline the advantages and disadvantages of each technique.


Adolescence is a critical developmental period in the life course and a time when most young people enter into their first intimate relationships. The significance of a young person's early intimate relationships are two-fold: firstly they can impact upon a young person's development, depending upon the nature and quality of the relationship; secondly, they provide a framework for intimate relationships in adulthood. Exploration of behaviours young people think are acceptable and unacceptable within intimate relationships, including experiences and attitudes towards violence in these relationships, has been relatively limited within the UK.
Drawing upon feminist criminology and feminist qualitative psychology, this thesis explores young people's experiences and views of teenage intimate partner violence, with a focus on how young people understand, interpret and make sense of this violence. This research is a mixed methods study. A quantitative online survey was completed by 233 young people aged 16-19 and a series of eight predominantly single gender qualitative focus groups were held with young people aged 16-19.
The study addresses a significant gap in the research literature. Firstly, it provides insights into the nature and dynamics of different forms of violence in older adolescents' intimate relationships. Secondly, it provides a nuanced understanding of what intimate partner violence means to different groups of young people. Thirdly, it outlines what participants perceive young people could or should do if they are in a violent relationship in a five stage model which includes perceived barriers and enablers to recognising and doing something about experiences of partner violence. The perspectives and experiences of the young people in this research illuminate how best to respond to this problem.


Examination about sticking intensity security way of normal temperature metal spraying covering is required compulsorily accordingly with quantitative assessment about steel plate's surface roughness to secure adhesive power of steel materials and metal membrane stably at application of way method of construction by normal temperature metal spraying. In case of metal spraying, Sticking strength of metal spraying way finish is influenced greatly, and it is judged that is desirable that manages Sm/Rz by 6 lows to secure more than sticking intensity 20kgf/cm2 by Sm/Rz that evaluate that is rough of nature surface. The purpose of this study was to analyze an adhesion strength of metal spraying finish layer with the surface conditions of steel plate. For the purpose the experimental factors such as anticorrosive finish method and surface treatment method were selected.


Thermography is suggested as a tool to estimate myocardial and coronary epicardial flow in open-chest heart surgery. To test the feasibility and compare various methods for coronary flow estimation in open-chest surgery, thermographic imaging was applied to eight open-chest dogs which were injected with cold saline into the aortic root. Blood flow in the left arterial descending (LAD) coronary vessel was measured by a transit-time flowmeter. ECG gated images were acquired for 20-30 s, while the cold saline (20 ml) was injected into the aortic root. Several flow levels were achieved during repeated hyperaemic response to transient occlusions of the LAD. A temperature response curve for each flow level was obtained by averaging over an edge-detected arterial segment for each image frame. Several indices were calculated from the temperature curve and correlated with the measured coronary flow. These include: an index based on a corrective heat transfer model ( r = 0.69, p < 0.001), the slope of the descending part of the response curve ( r = 0.76, p < 0.001), the peak temperature difference ( r = 0.66, p < 0.001), and the area above the temperature response curve ( r = 0.61, p < 0.01). As shown, coronary flow can be estimated quantitatively by intraoperative epicardial thermography, and may therefore provide important on-line information regarding blood flow during open-chest surgical procedures. Further studies are required for optimal application of this technique so as to increase its potential as a valid clinical tool. Keywords: thermography, coronary arteries, blood flow


Traditional forming process of sheet metal is realized with Die and Mould, this technique lacks flexibility and used in the Volume production. The forming process of sheet metal based on laser shock waves is a novel and developing technique. Laser shock forming (LSF) and Laser peen forming (LPF) are two different forming process of sheet metal, both of them are based on a mechanical effect of shock waves induced by laser. In this paper, after introducing the mechanism of laser shock wave generating, these two forming process and technique feature are analyzed and compared, some research progresses are presented. It is indicated that forming technique based on laser shock waves are of high-flexible and great potential application in the fields of plastic forming of sheet metal.


In 2012, in a highly anticipated decision, the United States Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of a requirement that most Americans obtain health insurance or pay a monetary penalty.' The statute in question that contained this requirement, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Act or ACA), often labeled as "Obamacare," or the Affordable Care Act, was a monumental piece of legislation (over 900 pages) that was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Barack Obama in 2010. The Act represented a significant overhaul of the country's health care system and structure. The primary objectives of this legislation were to expand the number of individuals covered by health insurance and decrease the overall cost of health care in the country. In the 2012 elections, President Obama won re-election and Senate democrats strengthened their majority in the U.S. Senate. Consequently, many experts believed the Act was here to stay; however, questions remain regarding its implementation. Although the Supreme Court essentially ended two years of uncertainty on the legal status of the Act, it is now unclear whether the original goals of the Act and the individual mandate adding millions of new consumers to the health insurance market and increasing the number and share of Americans who are insured can still be met. This article explores the Court's taxing power decision with respect to the individual mandate and the direct implications of that decision to not only the Act's objectives for greater individual health insurance coverage, but also the possible impact in other health care areas. Two years after the Court's decision, the Act's overall implementation is still uncertain. As states work to implement the Act or choose to maintain their own healthcare models, the healthcare market is in a state of flux. Due partially to the Court's decision to restrict the Medicaid expansion, the Act's effectiveness is now more questionable than ever. Questions addressed by this Article include whether there really still is a legal individual mandate requiring the purchase of health insurance and whether further legislation could be possible under Congress's taxing power if the goals under the Act are not met. This article also reviews the question of whether there has been an expansion of Congress's taxing power, along with an analysis of current efforts at implementation and consideration of whether the Court's decision may ultimately have done more harm than good to the individual mandate.


Entity alignment aims to identify equivalent entity pairs between different knowledge graphs (KGs). Recently, the availability of temporal KGs (TKGs) that contain time information created the need for reasoning over time in such TKGs. Existing embedding-based entity alignment approaches disregard time information that commonly exists in many large-scale KGs, leaving much room for improvement. In this paper, we focus on the task of aligning entity pairs between TKGs and propose a novel Time-aware Entity Alignment approach based on Graph Neural Networks (TEA-GNN). We embed entities, relations and timestamps of different KGs into a vector space and use GNNs to learn entity representations. To incorporate both relation and time information into the GNN structure of our model, we use a self-attention mechanism which assigns different weights to different nodes with orthogonal transformation matrices computed from embeddings of the relevant relations and timestamps in a neighborhood. Experimental results on multiple real-world TKG datasets show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods due to the inclusion of time information.


Context: Planning in software projects is a difficult problem due to the uncertainty associated with it. There are many factors that cause difficulty in formulating a plan. Not many factors that influence the efficiency of planning are identified in the previous studies. The literature focuses only on technical aspects such as requirements selection and estimation in order to plan a release or iteration. Objectives. The objective of this study is to identify factors that affect planning efficiency. The context in which the objective is achieved is large scale complex projects that are distributed across multiple teams, in multiple global sites. The motivation for selecting large scale context is because most of the existing releases planning approaches discussed in the literature were investigated in small scale projects. Hence this context will allow studying the planning process in large scale industry. Methods. A case study was conducted at Siemens' Development Centre in Bangalore, India. A total of 15 interviews were conducted to investigate the planning process adopted by Siemens. To achieve triangulation, process documents such as release planning documents are studied and direct observation of the planning meeting is performed. Therefore multiple sources are used to collect evidences. Results. The identified challenges are grouped into technical and non-technical category. In total 9 technical factors and 11 non-technical factors are identified. The identified factors are also classified based on the context in which they affect the planning. In addition 6 effects of the factors are identified and improvements perceived by the participants are discussed in this study.


Acute gastroenteritis is one of the hygienic challenges of the 21 st century and one of the 6 major causes of death in children and adults in developed and developing countries. With respect to prevalence of this illness in Iran, the purpose of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of honey in treating diarrhea in Kashan, Iran. In this randomized clinical trial study, the participants were chosen from the children who were admitted to pediatric clinics. 150 children who met the criteria were divided into 3 groups. After a systematic treatment process and writing down the details, the first group received honey added to ORS (dissolved in ORS), the second group received honey separate from ORS and the control group received ORS with no honey. All the patients were under the close watch of the researchers until complete recovery. Then the data were analyzed with statistical tests and SPSS18 software. In general, among the 150 children who were studied there were 80 boys with the average age of 33.19 months and 70 girls with the average age of 29.84 months. The average diarrhea period from the beginning of treatment until complete recovery was 4.68 days for the first group, 3.725 for the second group and 5.60 for the control group. Thus there was a significant difference between the groups that received honey and the control group (p=0.001). The average number of bowel movements from the beginning of treatment until complete recovery was 4.22 for the first group, 3.50 for the second group and 4.90 for the control group. There was a significant difference in this respect (p<0.001). Generally, with regard to the findings of this study prescription of honey for diarrhea can reduce the number of bowel movements and diarrhea period. Similar studies could be done about other diseases to further investigate the effectiveness of honey in treating other health problems, not necessarily as a substitute treatment, but a supplementary treatment.


Aim. Studies related with the role of intensive and moderate training on reducing coronary heart disease (CHD) risks have revealed conflicting results. Thus, the aim of this study was to clarify the association between long-term physical training with competitive and recreational purposes and blood lipids and apolipoproteins in the middle-aged master athletes, recreational athletes and sedentary controls. Methods. The association between long-term physical training and serum concentrations of lipids, lipoproteins, and apolipoproteins in the middle-aged men was investigated. Twelve male master athletes (MA), 12 male recreational athletes (RA) (>10 y), and 12 male sedentary controls (CG) participated in the study. Serum concentrations of lipids and lipoproteins were measured by enzymatic methods; apolipoproteins (ApoAl and ApoB) and serum lipoprotein(a) [Lp(a)] were measured by immonoprecipitation assays. Results. TC, LDL-C, ApoAl, Lp(a) levels and LDL-C/HDL-C ratio of the 3 groups did not show any significant differences. MA and RA had significantly higher levels of 90 2maX , HDL-C,ApoAl/ApoB ratio; and lower values of percent body fat, resting heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressures, TG, ApoB and TC/HDL-C ratio than CG. We did not find any significant differences between MA and RA in any variables except for BMI and TC/HDL-C ratio. Conclusion. Habitual physical training favorably altered serum lipid and apolipoprotein profiles. Although there was no statistical significance (except for BMI and TC/HDL-C) between MA and RA, a tendency to reduce the CHD risks was observed almost in all variables in favor of MA.


This study is designed to evaluate the prevalence of waterpipe tobacco smoking and its related factors among Iranian adults. This is a cross-sectional study carried out during 2013/14 in Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran, among 1830 citizens aged over 15 years. Sampling was through Stratified multistage cluster sampling with proportional allocation within strata. Global Adult Tobacco Survey (GATS) questionnaire for waterpipe consumption was used for data gathering. Data were statistically analyzed by SPSS software. The prevalence of current waterpipe tobacco smoking was 17.6% .Waterpipe use prevalence in men was significantly more than women (24.2% vs. 11.3%). Multivariate analysis showed that age, sex, cigarette consumption, waterpipe consumption at home and ignorance of safety issues significantly influenced current waterpipe smoking (P = 0.001). Thus, prevalence of waterpipe smoking in Iranian adults is high and significant. Tackling waterpipe smoking should be considered in tobacco control programmes. However, further studies in this field are needed.


Objective. What factors shape public support for service refusals carried out in the name of the free exercise of religion? Existing analyses treat the businesses refusing to serve LGBT citizens as fungible. We hypothesize that the religious context does not matter and that reactions are consistent with the role of socialized disgust. Methods. We engage the same experimental design in two 2019 samples, one of 800 Colorado adult residents and one of 1,010 Protestants. The 1 × 2 × 2 design enables a contrast between a control, conditions that vary the business between a florist and photographer, and conditions that vary the religious nature of the event. Results. The results suggest that the religious nature of the context is immaterial and that reactions generally conform with the role of disgust, especially for those socialized to feel it—high attending evangelicals. Conclusion. We affirm the importance of the context of service delivery for religious freedom attitudes and discuss the role of religion.


The reflection upon human dignity taken up by the author was concentrated around three issues. The context of the first one is legal-ethical issues, with special emphasis put on the relations between understanding dignity and rights of a human being, both as an individual-person and as a citizen of a particular community. The second thread of deliberations was determined with a question about the essence of human dignity, with reference to biblical texts as well as the texts of modern philosophy (Kant, Hegel). The third aspect of dignity was framed by its understanding as a world view basis for contemporary human being. And this is subject to the pluralisation process which, according to the author, leads to erosion of essential understanding of this concept and risk of ceasing treating it as a basic and universal ethical norm protecting every human being.


Accurate and robust 3D head pose estimation is important for face related analysis. Though high accuracy has been achieved by previous works based on 3D morphable model (3DMM), their performance drops with extreme head poses because such models usually only represent the frontal face region. In this paper, we present a robust head pose estimation framework by complementing a 3DMM model with an online 3D reconstruction of the full head providing more support when handling extreme head poses. The approach includes a robust online 3DMM fitting step based on multi-view observation samples as well as smooth and face-neutral synthetic samples generated from the reconstructed 3D head model. Experiments show that our framework achieves state-of-the-art pose estimation accuracy on the BIWI dataset, and has robust performance for extreme head poses when tested on natural interaction sequences.


The effects of microwave radiation pretreatment on the leaching behavior of diaspore were investigated. The influence of sodium hydroxide addition, microwave irradiation temperature and microwave irradiation time were studied, the mechanism of microwave roasting pretreatment was also studied. The results show that microwave roasting pretreatment can greatly improve the leaching efficiency of Al2O3, and decrease the mole fraction of digestion liquor. The optimal microwave roasting condition is that the sodium hydroxide addition is 100kg/t, the microwave irradiation temperature is 535°C, and the microwave irradiation time is 5min the roasting mechanical is that the increase of effective affecting acreage and the formation of high active alumina.


OBJECTIVES
  We examined a nationwide population-based dataset of patients with bipolar disorder (BD) hospitalized in Taiwan, with our analyses focusing on one-year medical costs and relapse rates.

METHODS
  The data for this study, covering the years 2006 and 2007, were obtained from the Taiwan National Health Insurance (NHI) claims database. The study sample comprised BD patients who were discharged from hospitals between January 1 and December 31, 2006. Annual medical costs and relapse rates were described; the Kaplan-Meier method and the generalized linear models were carried out to examine the risk factors associated with cases of relapse.

RESULTS
  The annual medical costs associated with relapses among the study sample were found to be approximately 7.6 times the average per-capita NHI expenditure in Taiwan in 2006 (US$4,354 versus US$574), with a one-year relapse rate of 55%. Those patients between 20 and 60 years old with a medication possession ratio of <80 and with depressive episodes during the recruitment period were identified as being at risk of relapse.

CONCLUSION
  Bipolar disorder, which is a very costly disease, is associated with both poor medication adherence rates and frequent recurrences. Targeting drug adherence issues during maintenance treatment may well provide a valuable opportunity to reduce the risk of such recurrences.


In this paper, I measure the effect of forward guidance in a small and open economy using Israel as a case study. I suggest an alternative approach to the standard method of Gürkaynak et al. (2005) that relaxes the assumption of constant structure and estimates the effect of forward guidance (FG) separately for each shock and term to maturity. Namely, I relax the assumption that the relative effect is fixed across maturities for every FG shock, regardless of the information contained in each FG statement. This approach also controls for global shocks under the assessment that their impact may not be negligible in a small open economy. I find that while the estimates of the shocks from both methods are highly correlated, in cases where the FG shocks mainly affect specific terms to maturity the standard method leads to imprecise identifications. The results suggest that policymakers should take into consideration which term to maturity each FG statement impacts. In addition, I show that some of the main FG statements made by the Bank of Israel had a significant effect on yields.


Abstract Hypoxemia is anticipated during wildlife anesthesia and thus should be prevented. We evaluated the efficacy of low flow rates of supplemental oxygen for improvement of arterial oxygenation in anesthetized brown bears (Ursus arctos). The study included 32 free-ranging brown bears (yearlings, subadults, and adults; body mass 12–250 kg) that were darted with medetomidine-zolazepam-tiletamine (MZT) from a helicopter in Sweden. During anesthesia, oxygen was administered intranasally from portable oxygen cylinders at different flow rates (0.5–3 L/min). Arterial blood samples were collected before (pre-O2), during, and after oxygen therapy and immediately processed with a portable analyzer. Rectal temperature, respiratory rate, heart rate, and pulse oximetry-derived hemoglobin oxygen saturation were recorded. Intranasal oxygen supplementation at the evaluated flow rates significantly increased the partial pressure of arterial oxygen (PaO2) from pre-O2 values of 9.1±1.3 (6.3–10.9) kPa to 20.4±6.8 (11.1–38.7) kPa during oxygen therapy. When oxygen therapy was discontinued, the PaO2 decreased to values not significantly different from the pre-O2 values. In relation to the body mass of the bears, the following oxygen flow rates are recommended: 0.5 L/min to bears <51 kg, 1 L/min to bears 51–100 kg, 2 L/min to bears 101–200 kg, and 3 L/min to bears 201–250 kg. In conclusion, low flow rates of intranasal oxygen were sufficient to improve arterial oxygenation in brown bears anesthetized with MZT. Because hypoxemia quickly recurred when oxygen was discontinued, oxygen supplementation should be provided continuously throughout anesthesia.


Here we study the effects of inducible oncogenic K-Ras (G12V) expression on the polarized morphogenesis of colonic epithelial cells. We provide evidence that the autocrine production of heregulins, ligands for the ErbB3 receptor tyrosine kinase, is responsible for the hyperproliferation and aberrant 3D morphogenesis upon oncogenic K-Ras expression. This is in line with results obtained in primary intestinal organoid cultures, in which exogenous heregulin is shown to interfere with normal tissue architecture. Importantly, ErbB3 inhibition and heregulin gene silencing rescued K-RasG12V-induced features of cell transformation. Together with the increased ErbB3 positivity detected in human high-grade primary colorectal cancers, our findings provide support for an autocrine signaling loop engaged by oncogenic K-Ras involving ErbB3 that contributes to the dedifferentiation of the intestinal epithelium during tumor initiation and progression.


Over the last few decades, transport has played an important role in causing various problems including environmental destruction, resource depletion, global warming, social segregation, congestion and inequality in cities around the world. The situation could be even serious in urban China. As a country in transition from a centrally planned economy to a market economy, China has been experiencing unprecedentedly fast motorisation, which has resulted in a decline in non-motorised and public transport, increasing traffic congestions, air pollution and fatal casualties. Unfortunately, the trend is more than likely to continue in the future. Therefore, knowledge of changing travel behaviour in China is urgently needed. This is especially so considering that existing literature draws disproportionally on data from North American, North-western Europe, Australia and Japan and little is knew about travel behaviour outside the western world, including China. Given that the context of urban China is different in several respects-socio-cultural norms, institutional setting, built environment, and special development stage-from western countries, an empirical study into travel behaviour in China could thus have important practical relevance in helping to adjust transport-planning practices to the Chinese context as well as significant scientific relevance to understand the importance of urban China's different contexts for transport behaviour and get a deeper, more complete understanding of travel behaviour and its determinants in general. In this research, an empirical analysis is carried out to demonstrate the situations of travel behaviour of Nanjing residents and its determinants. Using the dataset of Nanjing Resident Travel Survey (NRTS), the research examines travel behaviour in Nanjing Metropolitan Area by employing various regression models including OLS model, logistic model, ordered probit model and changing parameter model. This research finds that the characteristics of travel behaviour and its determinants in Nanjing display a number of similarities with travel behaviour in western cities but at the same time, there are some important differences. More importantly, the empirical analyses in the dissertation show that the specific Chinese context-socio-cultural norms, institutional setting, built environment, and special development stage-matters. The research also delivers some implications for transport policies. The results in this dissertation confirm that that land use can influence travel behaviour significantly. This proved link between land use and travel behaviour gives the premise for implementing land use policy initiatives to reduce private car use. However, the analysis also shows that compactness alone serves as a necessary but not as a sufficient condition for diminished car use. To reduce car use, Chinese governments should also provide alternatives to private cars. Based on the research results of the dissertation, for short distances, it is highly recommended that urban China should preserve as much as possible the configurations of compact land use to stimulate walking and cycling as the main transport modes to limit car use. In the meanwhile, to replace car use for long distances, the governments should heavily invest in fast public transport to promote public transport as the major mode.


Reticuloendotheliosis in captive greater (Tympanuchus cupido pinnatus) and Attwater's (T. cupido attwateri) prairie chickens is reported for the first time. Between September 1993 and August 1994, two adult female wild-caught greater prairie chickens housed at Texas A&M University (College Station, Texas, USA) were observed with multiple subcutaneous nodules. Both birds were euthanatized. Complete necropsy examinations revealed lesions limited to the skin of each bird. Histopathologic examination of lesions revealed pleomorphic lymphoreticular cells suggestive of reticuloendotheliosis and reticuloendotheliosis virus (REV) was demonstrated in tumor tissue by polymerase chain reaction and virus isolation. Between September 1994 and June 1995, five additional greater prairie chickens and two Attwater's prairie chickens were euthanatized or found dead with evidence of lymphoreticular neoplasia in multiple organ systems. Initial testing of the captive flock in December 1994 for evidence of viremia and antibody to reticuloendotheliosis virus revealed over 50% of the tested birds were viremic, but none developed antibodies. Subsequent testing between January 1995 and January 1996 indicated that once infected with reticuloendotheliosis virus, Attwater's prairie chickens tended to remain outwardly healthy despite persistent viremia compared to infected greater prairie chickens which had higher morbidity and mortality rates within 60 to 90 days after initial detection of viremia and did not usually develop persistent viremia. Antibodies to REV were detected in only three captive greater prairie chickens and only in 1995. Six of the nine birds that were euthanatized or found dead due to reticuloendotheliosis developed viremia prior to death; three birds were not tested prior to death. Testing of free-ranging greater and Attwater's prairie chickens for reticuloendotheliosis is recommended prior to translocation or release.


Y zeolite was synthesized form silica gel microsphere by in- situ hydrothermal method, with appropriate amount of other constituents, such as sodium silicate, water, without adding any organic additives. The as-synthesized samples were characterized using powder X-ray diffraction (XRD), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and N2 sorption. The results show that the synthesized sample not only has a composite structure with zeolite Y and silica gel, but also retains the shape of silica gel microsphere. The pore distribution of the composite materials indicated that the composite material contains two types of pore that are micropores and large pores.


Semantic word embeddings have become increasingly important in natural language processing tasks over the last few years. This popularity is due to their ability to easily capture rich semantic information through a distributed representation and the availability of fast and scalable algorithms for learning them from large text corpora. State-of-the-art neural network language models (NNLMs) used in automatic speech recognition (ASR) and natural language processing also learn word embeddings optimized to model local N-gram dependencies given training text but are not optimized to capture semantic information. We hypothesize that semantic word embeddings provide diverse information compared to the word embeddings learned by NNLMs. We propose novel feedforward NNLM architectures that incorporate semantic word embeddings. We apply the resulting NNLMs to ASR on broadcast news and show improvements in both perplexity and word error rate.


Many SMEs suffer from financing problems that hinder their growth. To overcome these difficulties, some list on the stock market and make a public offering. Does this favor the SMEs' growth? And what types of growth do SMEs prefer in this context? The empirical study shows an overall positive development of turnover, especially internationally. SMEs seem to focus on external growth at the expense of internal growth and short-term investment in R&D.


Deposits of methane and their associated seeps are found worldwide along continental margins. These seeps are of importance and increasing interest because their potential as an energy source, their contribution to greenhouse gases, and the unique community of chemosynthetic microorganisms and fauna that they host. One of the best-studied methane seep sites is Southern Hydrate Ridge, located ~90 km west of Newport, Oregon at a water depth of ~780 m. Despite extensive geophysical and biological research completed here, no studies have quantified the relationship of seep sites and seafloor geology to the spatial distribution and abundances of microbial and macrofaunal communities. High resolution, georeferenced photomosaics of the individual seeps and the associated biological communities at this site were collected in 2011, using the remotely operated vehicle ROPOS. Detailed analyses of these images has allowed for the quantification and characterization of the diversity and structure of the faunal community coregistered with seafloor substrate. Results show that both the distribution and abundances of seep organisms are highly variable.


The superconducting gap symmetry of the Fe-based superconductors was studied by measurements and analysis of London penetration depth and super uid density. Tunnel diode resonator technique for these measurements was implemented in a dilution refrigerator allowing for the temperatures down to 50 mK. For the analysis of the super uid density, we used both experimental studies of Al-coated samples and original thermodynamic approach based on Rutgers relation. In three systems studied, we found that the superconducting gap at the optimal doping is best described in multi-gap full gap scenario. By performing experiments on samples with arti cially introduced disorder with heavy ion irradiation, we show that evolution of the superconducting transition temperature and of the super uid density are consistent with full-gap sign changing s superconducting state. The superconducting gap develops strong modulation both in the under-doped and the over-doped regimes. In the terminal hole-doped KFe{sub 2}As{sub 2}, both temperature dependence of the super uid density and its evolution with increase of the scattering rate are consistent with symmetry imposed vertical line nodes in the superconducting gap. By comparative studies of hole-doped (Ba,K)Fe{sub 2}As{sub 2} and electron-doped Ca10-3-8, we show that the superconducting gap modulation in the under-doped regime ismore » intrinsic and is not induced by the coexisting static magnetic order.« less


The human skin surface is covered with a lipid film that forms the interface between the viable epidermal layers and outer environment, and influences the colonisation of bacteria. Hydrolysis of the epidermal lipid ceramide via ceramidase yields sphingosine, an antimicrobial lipid that is able to kill staphylococci rapidly. Studies of patients with atopic dermatitis have indicated a correlation between levels of sphingosine and S. aureus colonisation of human skin, yet the contribution of sphingosine to the composition of the human skin microbiome and microbiota colonisation is unclear. This study investigates the effect of the host epidermal antimicrobial lipid D-sphingosine on S. aureus and S. epidermidis, with a focus on discovering components that contribute to survival of the former. The methods RNA-Seq and qPCR were used to dissect the transcriptional responses of S. aureus Newman and S. epidermidis Tu3298 after challenge with D-sphingosine. S. aureus displayed a large set of differentially expressed genes (1331), which contrasted with a smaller set for S. epidermidis (340). There was a clearly defined stimulon that was common between the species that included pathways for energy maintenance, amino acid and ion transport and metabolism, and protein repair. Previously reported transcriptomic responses to multiple cell wall and membrane-targeting antimicrobials shared commonalities with the response to sphingosine that supports its reported mode of action at the cell surface with membrane damage. The VraSR cell wall stress stimulon was upregulated in both species. Each species displayed pronounced upregulation of a putative phosphate-specific ABC transporter system encoded by the pstS-pstCAB operons. Experiments identified a contribution of this transport system to sphingosine survival and phosphate supplementation was shown to markedly increase sphingosine survival. Previous studies by the Horsburgh group identified experimentally evolved S. aureus strains with high levels of D-sphingosine resistance after serial passage with increasing concentrations of the lipid. SNPs associated with increased resistance were determined by genome resequencing and some of these were localised to the farER genes encoding a FarR-regulated FarE (mmpL) lipid efflux transporter. An isogenic farR SNP mutant of S. aureus was generated using molecular genetics approaches and showed a 10-fold higher MIC for D-sphingosine compared with the wild type Newman strain, indicating that the purported FarER fatty acid efflux system may have the capacity to mediate transport of sphingosine. The study findings of a link between sphingosine challenge and phosphate metabolism indicates future research potential to study host spingosine-1-phosphate in staphylococcal lifecycles, during health and disease.


A cohort of one hundred 8-9 year old school children in Northeastern Peninsular Malaysia underwent stool examination, weight and height measurements. Seventy-three children were infected with Ascaris lumbricoides and/or Trichuris trichiura. All infected children were treated with albendazole at baseline, 6 months and 9 months. Measurements were repeated on all but 2 children at 1 year. Repeat stool examination (n = 94) at 1 year revealed a marked reduction in the level of Ascaris infection and a modest reduction in Trichuris infection. There was no difference in net growth between treated children and uninfected controls. Post-hoc analysis by gender however revealed that infected girls (n = 33) experienced significantly higher increments in weight, height and weight for age. Furthermore, children found to be infected at baseline level but worm free at follow-up, were observed to have experienced greater increments in height and height for age. The evidence suggests that periodic antihelminthic treatment may have a positive effect on the growth of subsets of pre-adolescent children but it is emphasised that further work is required to validate these findings.


The purpose of this study was to provide an evidence base for colorectal cancer research activity that might influence policy, mainly at the national level. Improvements in healthcare delivery have lengthened life expectancy, but within a situation of increased cancer incidence. The disease burden of CRC has risen significantly, particularly in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Research is key to its control and reduction, but few studies have delineated the volume and funding of global research on CRC. We identified research papers in the Web of Science (WoS) from 2007 to 2021, and determined the contributions of the leading countries, the research domains studied, and their sources of funding. We identified 62 716 papers, representing 5.7% of all cancer papers. This percentage was somewhat disproportionate to the disease burden (7.7% in 2015), especially in Eastern Europe. International collaboration increased over the time period in almost all countries except in China. Genetics, surgery and prognosis were the leading research domains. However, research on palliative care and quality‐of‐life in CRC was lacking. In Western Europe, the main funding source was the charity sector, particularly in the UK, but in most other countries government played the leading role, especially in China and the USA. There was little support from industry. Several Asian countries provided minimal contestable funding, which may have reduced the impact of their CRC research. Certain countries must perform more CRC research overall, especially in domains such as screening, palliative care and quality‐of‐life. The private‐non‐profit sector should be an alternative source of support.


Why do large neural network generalize so well on complex tasks such as image classification or speech recognition? What exactly is the role regularization for them? These are arguably among the most important open questions in machine learning today. In a recent and thought provoking paper [C. Zhang et al.] several authors performed a number of numerical experiments that hint at the need for novel theoretical concepts to account for this phenomenon. The paper stirred quit a lot of excitement among the machine learning community but at the same time it created some confusion as discussions on this http URL testifies. The aim of this pedagogical paper is to make this debate accessible to a wider audience of data scientists without advanced theoretical knowledge in statistical learning. The focus here is on explicit mathematical definitions and on a discussion of relevant concepts, not on proofs for which we provide references.


This article consists of two parts. First, I provide a systematic refutation of Phyllis Trible's and Mieke Bal's contention that "the human" created in Gen. ii 7 is a neuter "earth creature" rather than a man. Next, in anticipation of likely objections, I raise certain epistemological questions regarding the nature of interpretation, proposing in the end the position of philosophical realism as a preferable alternative to the "reader-oriented" stance of most current feminist studies (and other so-called ideological approaches). The goal is not to settle this controversy, but to reintroduce a neglected philosophical position into the current debate.


Background Return to work (RTW) with or after a chronic disease is not a well understood process, influenced by a variety of personal, work, societal and medical factors. The aim of this study was to identify predictors for RTW at 12 months after transplantation in kidney-transplanted patients applying a bio-psycho-social model. Methods All kidney patients followed in the Swiss National Transplant Cohort from May 2008 to December 2012, aged 18 to 65 at registration were included in this study. By linking medical data and a psycho-social questionnaire before, 6 and 12 months after transplantation, we analysed the potential influencing factors on being employed 12 months after transplantation of these three dimensions. Results Overall of the 689 participating patients, 387 (56.2%) worked 12 months after kidney transplantation compared to 58.9% who worked before transplantation. Age, education, self-perceived health (at 6 months post transplantation), a short waiting time for surgery, pre-transplant employment and an organ from a living donor are significant predictors of RTW. Moreover, while self-perceived heath increased after transplantation and time since transplantation in all groups, the depression score decreased only among those employed at 12 months. The main determinant for RTW (OR = 18.6), pre-transplant employment status was associated with sex, age, education, depression and with duration of dialysis. An organ from a living donor (42.1%) was more frequent in younger age-classes, higher education, non-diabetics and was associated with shorter waiting time till surgery. Conclusion First employment in chronically ill persons should be helped being maintained as being unemployed pre-transplant is by far the single most important determinant of RTW. Second using organs from living donors should be encouraged and planned also for the promotion of RTW. Finally mental and physical health support and shortening of waiting times are other possible action to promote RTW in kidney patients.


BACKGROUND
Means to prevent and control intra- or postoperative bleeding remain a topic of utmost importance in thyroidectomy. In this randomised clinical trial, we used adrenaline spraying to see if it helps bleeding control and reduces drainage and hematoma formation after thyroidectomy.

METHODS
After total thyroidectomy, 1 mg/ml adrenaline solution in 10 ml saline was sprayed all over the operation area by a syringe in 40 patients of "Adrenaline (+) Group". In the other 40 patients in "Adrenaline (-) Group", only standart total thyroidectomy was performed. Drainage amounts of 24 hours were recorded.

RESULTS
Among 80 patients, 66 (82.5%) were female and 14 (17.5%) were male. The daily drainage amounts of the Adrenaline (+) Group were found statistically significantly lower than the Adrenaline (-) Group (p<0.05). In both of the groups, thyroid volumes were significantly correlated with the drainage amounts. "p" values were 0.008 and <0.001 in Adrenaline (+) and Adrenaline (-) Groups, respectively.

CONCLUSIONS
Preliminary experience using adrenaline has been encouraging and it is useful as an adjunct to thyroid surgery in order to prevent hemorrhagia and give up drain placement. But prospective randomized trials using adequate patient numbers are still needed to validate efficacy and safety.


A national, random sample of 1000 graduating pediatric residents was surveyed in 2014 on receipt of training in medical home activities and preparedness to engage in same in practice. Of 602 survey respondents (60% response), 71.8% reported being very/fairly knowledgeable about medical homes. Most residents (70.0% to 91.3%) reported they received training in 6 medical home activities; more than one fourth wished for more training in 4 of 6 activities. The majority (62.5% to 77.3%) reported very good/excellent perceived preparedness. Residents with continuity clinic experiences at 2 or more sites and with continuity clinic experience at a community health center were more likely to report very good/excellent preparedness in multiple medical home activities. Overall, residents feel knowledgeable, trained, and prepared to engage in medical home activities as they are leaving residency. Opportunities exist to further explore the influence of additional training in specific activities and the number and type of training site experiences on perceived preparedness.


Our understanding of Titan, Saturn's largest satellite, has recently been consid- erably enhanced, thanks to the Cassini-Huygens mission. Since the Saturn Orbit Injection in July 2004, the probe has been harvesting new insights of the Kronian system. In par- ticular, this mission orchestrated a climax on January 14, 2005 with the descent of the Huygens probe into Titan's thick atmosphere. The orbiter and the lander have providedus with picturesqueviews of extraterrestrial landscapes, new in compositionbut reassuringly Earth-like in shape. Thus, Saturn's largest satellite displays chains of mountains, fields of dark and damp dunes, lakes and possibly geologic activity. As on Earth, landscapes on Titan are eroded and modeled by some alien hydrology: dendritic systems, hydrocarbon lakes, and methane clouds imply periods of heavy rainfalls, even though rain was never observed directly. Titan's surface also proved to be geologically active - today or in the recent past - given the small number of impact craters listed to date, as well as a few possible cryovolcanic features. We attempt hereafter a synthesis of the most significant results of the Cassini-Huygens endeavor, with emphasis on the surface.


Suppose that a sequence of unknown parameters is observed sub ject to independent Gaussian noise. The EbayesThresh package in the S language implements a class of Empirical Bayes thresholding methods that can take advantage of possible sparsity in the sequence, to improve the quality of estimation. The prior for each parameter in the sequence is a mixture of an atom of probability at zero and a heavy-tailed density. Within the package, this can be either a Laplace (double exponential) density or else a mixture of normal distributions with tail behavior similar to the Cauchy distribution. The mixing weight, or sparsity parameter, is chosen automatically by marginal maximum likelihood. If estimation is carried out using the posterior median, this is a random thresholding procedure; the estimation can also be carried out using other thresholding rules with the same threshold, and the package provides the posterior mean, and hard and soft thresholding, as additional options. This paper reviews the method, and gives details (far beyond those previously published) of the calculations needed for implementing the procedures. It explains and motivates both the general methodology, and the use of the EbayesThresh package, through simulated and real data examples. When estimating the wavelet transform of an unknown function, it is appropriate to apply the method level by level to the transform of the observed data. The package can carry out these calculations for wavelet transforms obtained using various packages in R and S-PLUS. Details, including a motivating example, are presented, and the application of the method to image estimation is also explored. The final topic considered is the estimation of a single sequence that may become progressively sparser along the sequence. An iterated least squares isotone regression method allows for the choice of a threshold that depends monotonically on the order in which the observations are made. An alternative possibility, also discussed in detail, is a particular parametric dependence of the sparsity parameter on the position in the sequence.


Protons that produce significant direct ionization in a sensitive volume also slow down, so the LET is not constant in large sensitive volumes. A single-event cross section for energy deposition within the volume that takes this into account is calculated analytically. It is up to the user to select a critical energy and a sensitive volume that gives the best representation of the charge-collection physics for the purpose of calculating SEU rates from protons by direct ionization for the device of interest. A complete set of equations is given only for an ellipsoidal sensitive volume, but other geometries could be treated once the required analytical functions have been provided. An example that utilizes the ellipsoidal sensitive volume is considered and is compared to measured cross sections.


A field experiment was conducted during rainy Kharif season 2015 at Rice Research Station, Kaul (Kaithal) of CCS Haryana Agricultural University, Hisar, Haryana to find out the effect of different dates of transplanting on four non scented different duration rice (Oryza sativa) varieties. Results of experiments revealed that early transplanting dates (June 15 and July 05) increase the grain yield (70.60q/ha and 69.49q/ha) and yield contributing traits of non scented rice varieties as compared to late transplanting on July 25 (49.03q/ha). However, the quality characters viz. hulling, milling and head rice recovery were improved in delayed transplanting. Medium duration varieties HKR-128 and HKR-127, being statistically at par, recorded significantly higher yield as compared to mid-early variety HKR-47 and early duration variety HKR-48. The interaction between dates of transplanting and non scented varieties of rice was found significant and reveals that the reduction in grain yield about 30 per cent when delay in transplanting from June 15 to July 25. The extent of reduction in grain yield was less (23%) in early duration variety HKR-48 than mid early duration variety HKR-47 (30%) and medium duration varieties HKR-128 (31%) and HKR-127 (32%) when delayed in transplanting.


Abstract Motivation Single-cell sequencing brings about a revolutionarily high resolution for finding differentially expressed genes (DEGs) by disentangling highly heterogeneous cell tissues. Yet, such analysis is so far mostly focused on comparing between different cell types from the same individual. As single-cell sequencing becomes cheaper and easier to use, an increasing number of datasets from case–control studies are becoming available, which call for new methods for identifying differential expressions between case and control individuals. Results To bridge this gap, we propose barycenter single-cell differential expression (BSDE), a nonparametric method for finding DEGs for case–control studies. Through the use of optimal transportation for aggregating distributions and computing their distances, our method overcomes the restrictive parametric assumptions imposed by standard mixed-effect-modeling approaches. Through simulations, we show that BSDE can accurately detect a variety of differential expressions while maintaining the type-I error at a prescribed level. Further, 1345 and 1568 cell type-specific DEGs are identified by BSDE from datasets on pulmonary fibrosis and multiple sclerosis, among which the top findings are supported by previous results from the literature. Availability and implementation R package BSDE is freely available from doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6332254. For real data analysis with the R package, see doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6332566. These can also be accessed thorough GitHub at github.com/mqzhanglab/BSDE and github.com/mqzhanglab/BSDE_pipeline. The two single-cell sequencing datasets can be download with UCSC cell browser from cells.ucsc.edu/?ds=ms and cells.ucsc.edu/?ds=lung-pf-control. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


I explore the points of contention between Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas that account for their divergent claims about self-preservation, and maintain that Adorno has the more defensible view. Although both thinkers agree that the task of material self-preservation has largely been assumed by the welfare state and the capitalist economy, Adorno views this development as destructive and self-destructive while Habermas thinks it has benefited the lifeworld by relieving it of the burden of materially reproducing itself. Unlike Habermas, who rejects the idea of a collective subject, Adorno believes that only such a subject, conscious of its instinctual impulses and directing them toward the preservation of humanity and the environing world on which it depends for its survival, would make self-preservation rational.


This book explores how democracy has developed in Chile since the end of the military dictatorship in 1990. It brings together an examination of international influences on the country's political development with empirically based analyses of Chilean political institutions and change. Chapters one and two examine international aspects of the 1973 coup and how these influenced the development of politics inside Chile. Chapters three, four, and five provide empirical analyses of the 1989, 1993, and 1999/2000 presidential elections, respectively. Chapter six investigates how the Pinochet factor influenced developments after 1990 and the Chilean reaction to Pinochet's arrest in London in 1998. Chapter seven assesses changes in the Chilean party system and links these to similar processes elsewhere. The final chapter examines the paradox that despite economic and social advances, opinion polls report a low level of attachment to democracy and very low levels of confidence in political institutions.


Inpatient flow management plays a critical role in efficient care delivery, patient outcomes, and hospital operational and financial costs. Modeling and performance analysis of inpatient flow present unique features and challenges that differ from operations in other service industries. In this paper, we review recent modeling and analytical advances in the setting of inpatient flow management, with a particular focus on service time models motivated from the observations of inpatient discharges. We first compare two new service time models developed to capture the time-of-day inpatient flow dynamics and reveal interesting connections between the two models. We then review analytical methods developed to analyze systems with the new service time models. Based on one method, which is amenable to a one-dimensional exact analysis under certain conditions, we further introduce its approximations that have explicit analytical forms and enable efficient computations in large systems. In particular, we showcase how to leverage a powerful tool, the Stein's method framework, in the hospital setting for steady-state approximations and characterizing error bounds. We conclude the paper by a literature review on other important aspects in inpatient flow management and propose future research directions, from both the modeling and analytical perspectives.


Abstract Cardiac rehabilitation has evolved into a composite therapy of exercise training, psychosocial support, and education with major goals of returning patients to normalcy after an acute coronary event such as myocardial infarction or coronary bypass surgery. This process seems especially important in patients with significant levels of deconditioning before entering therapy. Survival is improved with a decrease in cardiovascular mortality after myocardial infarction of as much as 20% to 30%. Cardiac rehabilitation for the surgical patient today is additionally important with shortening length of stay, and with regard to the prevention of recurrent disease. Modification of risk factors in patients with known coronary disease has especially meaningful implications for the bypass patient. The percentage of patients returning for second, and even third coronary bypass operations continues to increase. Recent studies suggest the possibility of slowing, and in some cases actual arrest or regression of coronary atherosclerosis, in addition to the reduction of subsequent acute coronary events and the need for future revascularization. Other issues of potential importance include quality of life, return to work after bypass surgery, and noncardiac complications of surgery.


Fibromyalgia (FM) or Fibromyalgia Syndrome (FMS) is a neurodegenerative disorder causing musculoskeletal pain, tenderness, stiffness, fatigue, and sleep disorder in the body. It is one of the most common chronic pain conditions, affecting about 6% of the world population. Being refractory, till date, no specific treatment of this disease is available. Accumulating evidences over the last few decades indicate that proinflammatory macrophages, cytokines, & chemokines as the key players in this disease. Recent findings suggest activation of Microglial cells and associated pro-inflammatory signals as one of the major causes of chronic pain in patients suffering from fibromyalgia. Increased density of iNOs/CD68+ M1 effector macrophages has been associated with neuropathic pain models. In light of this, depletion of these pro-inflammatory macrophages has been shown to reduce sensitivity to neuropathic pain. On the other hand, modulating pattern of AGEs (Advanced Glycation End-Products) can also contribute to inactivation of macrophages. These findings strongly suggest that macrophages are critical in both inflammatory and neuropathic pain. Therefore, this chapter highlights the impact of macrophage plasticity in various immunopathological aspects of fibromyalgia.


Hermansky-Pudlak syndrome (HPS) is a rare heterogeneously inherited autosomal recessive group of disorders presenting with oculocutaneous albinism, bleeding diathesis and pulmonary disease. HPS is thought to occur as a consequence of disturbed formation of intracellular vesicles, most importantly, melanosomes, platelet dense granules and lysosomes. These abnormalities contribute to the morbidity associated with the disease, as ceroid lipofuscin deposits in lysosomes affect many organ systems. This is especially evident in the lungs where it is often associated with severe pulmonary fibrosis and premature death. Clinical recognition of HPS is critical as it facilitates genetic counseling, aids in prognostication and directs medical management as in our patient who presented with end stage fibrosis and severe hypoxia. J Med Cases. 2014;5(10):522-524 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14740/jmc1920w


In this paper, we study intermittency for the parabolic Anderson equation ∂u/∂t = κ u + ξu, where u : Zd × [0,∞) → R, κ is the diffusion constant, is the discrete Laplacian and ξ : Zd × [0,∞) → R is a space-time random medium. We focus on the case where ξ is γ times the random medium that is obtained by running independent simple random walks with diffusion constant ρ starting from a Poisson random field with intensity ν. Throughout the paper, we assume that κ, γ,ρ, ν ∈ (0,∞). The solution of the equation describes the evolution of a "reactant" u under the influence of a "catalyst" ξ . We consider the annealed Lyapunov exponents, that is, the exponential growth rates of the successive moments of u, and show that they display an interesting dependence on the dimension d and on the parameters κ, γ,ρ, ν, with qualitatively different intermittency behavior in d = 1,2, in d = 3 and in d ≥ 4. Special attention is given to the asymptotics of these Lyapunov exponents for κ ↓ 0 and κ →∞.


Background: Hepatitis C virus (HCV) diagnosis either in isolation or in HIV co-infection has often been laden with misdiagnosis, false positives and negatives being reported frequently. The use of strip tests has been replaced with the more sensitive fourth generatiom enzyme linked immunosorbent assay (EIA) HCV antibody test. However, a definitive HCV diagnosis is best achieved by determination of presence of HCV viral RNA.
Objective: The study is to compare two HCV serological and molecular diagnosis techniques, in a cohort of HIV-1/HCV co-infected patients commencing antiretroviral therapy.
Methods: Samples which tested positive for hepatitis C antibody (HCVAb) using the ELISA technique from 100 HIV-1/HCV patients (58 male, 42 female), aged between 18 and 65 years, with (Dia.Pro Diagnostic BioProbes s.r.l) where retrospectively retrieved. PCR based HCV RNA qualitative (COBAS Amplicor, Roche Diagnostics, Branchburg, USA) and HCV RNA quantitative (COBAS Ampliprep/COBAS TaqMan, Roche Diagnostics, Branchburg, USA) assays were simultaneously carried out on the aliquots of these samples.
Results: Out of the 100 HIV/HCV positive patients, only 64 (64%) were positive on the qualitative and 64 (64%) also with viral titer on quantitative assays (limit of detection 15 IU/ml). The remaining 36 (36%) had negative HCV RNA and 'Not Detected'for the qualitative and quantitative assays respectively. These results tend to indicate an absence of active HCV infection for a significant portion of the HIV-HCV co-infected population.
Conclusion: HCVAb testing should not be the only assay used to determine HCV dignosis in Nigeria. Although expensive, requiring instrumentation and longer time factor, HCV RNA (both qualitative and quantitative) is highly recommended, especially for immuno-compromised persons.


Titanium alloys are commonly used in biomedical application in hard tissues replacement especially for knee and hip implants but facing huge wear debris due to continuous cyclic contact within the joints of the implants. Diamond coating is a potential solution for improving the tribological and wear properties of the implants made from this alloy. Diamond is known for having high wear resistance property and chemical vapour deposition (CVD) is one of the most promising methods for diamond coating. However, the major concern for CVD process is the poor adhesion of the diamond to the substrate material due to the large mismatch of coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) properties between the two. A suitable interlayer material can be introduced to reduce the gap of CTE differences by oxidation process. In this study, the effect of pickling temperature and mechanical surface treatment methods on the adhesion strength of Ti oxide interlayer prior to diamond coating were investigated. Besides, the thickness of oxide layer and surface morphology were also evaluated. Experiments were carried out on Ti6Al4V substrate by varying the surface treatment pickling temperature from 25°C to 50°C. In mechanical surface treatment, all samples were ground using #220 to #1200 grits and followed with polishing using alumina paste. After the surface treatment process, all the substrates underwent thermal oxidation for 25 hours at 900°C. The results showed that the adhesion strength of oxide layer increases with the increasing of pickling temperature. Mechanical surface pretreatment provides better adhesion of oxide layer than chemical pretreatment (pickling process). However, the adhesion strength decreases with the increases of oxide layer thickness.


In this study, we aimed to analyze the effects of low‐level laser therapy (LLLT; 660 nm) on levels of protein expression of inflammatory mediators after cutting Achilles tendon of rats. Thirty Wistar male rats underwent partial incisions of the left Achilles tendon, and were divided into three groups of 10 animals according to the time of euthanasia after injury: 6, 24 and 72 h. Each group was then divided into control group and LLLT group (treated with 100 mW, 3.57 W cm−2, 0.028 cm2, 214 J cm−2, 6 J, 60 s, single point). In LLLT group, animals were treated once time per day until the time of euthanasia established for each group. The group treated with LLLT showed a significant reduction of IL‐1β compared with control groups at three time points (6 h: P = 0.0401; 24 h: P = 0.0015; 72 h: P = 0.0463). The analysis of IL‐6 showed significant reduction only in the LLLT group at 72 h compared with control group (P = 0.0179), whereas IL‐10 showed a significant increase in the treated group compared with control group at three experimental times (6 h: P = 0.0007; 24 h: P = 0.0256; 72 h: P < 0.0001). We conclude that LLLT is an important modulator of inflammatory cytokines release after injury in Achilles tendon.


In 2009 Children's Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) had been recognized as the best children's hospital in the country for six years in a row; but leadership saw CHOP as more than the large main campus in Western Philadelphia. Beginning in the 1990s, CHOP had created a large network of Primary Care Providers, Specialty Care Centers, Ambulatory Surgery Centers, and community hospital affiliations. CHOP leadership wanted to ensure that the quality they had demonstrated at CHOP would translate out to these facilities, and more, that the combination of many parts could actually work together to provide even better care than the main hospital could do on its own.


Imprinted genes form a special subset of the genome, exhibiting monoallelic expression in a parent-of-origin-dependent fashion. This monoallelic expression is controlled by parental-specific epigenetic marks, which are established in gametogenesis and early embryonic development and are persistent in all somatic cells throughout life. We define this specific set of cis-acting epigenetic regulatory elements as the imprintome, a distinct and specially tasked subset of the epigenome. Imprintome elements contain DNA methylation and histone modifications that regulate monoallelic expression by affecting promoter accessibility, chromatin structure, and chromatin configuration. Understanding their regulation is critical because a significant proportion of human imprinted genes are implicated in complex diseases. Significant species variation in the repertoire of imprinted genes and their epigenetic regulation, however, will not allow model organisms solely to be used for this crucial purpose. Ultimately, only the human will suffice to accurately define the human imprintome.


We present optical integral field unit (IFU) observations (VLT/VIMOS-IFU and WIYN/SparsePak), and associated archival deep Hα imaging (MPG/ESO 2.2 m WFI), of the nearby starburst galaxy NGC 253. With VIMOS we observed the nuclear region and southern superwind outflow in detail with five pointings, and with the WIYN/SparsePak IFU we observed two partially overlapping regions covering the central disc and northern halo. The high signal-to-noise ratio of the data and spectral resolution (80-90 km s ―1 ) enable us to accurately decompose the emission line profiles into multiple components. The combination of these data sets, together with the wealth of information on NGC 253 available in the literature, allows us to study the starburst-driven superwind in great detail. We investigate the known minor axis outflow cone, which is well-defined in the Hα imaging and kinematics between radii of 280 and 660 pc from the nucleus. Kinematic modelling indicates a wide opening angle (~60°), an inclination consistent with that of the disc and deprojected outflow speeds of a few 100 km s ―1 that increase with distance above the plane. The [N II]/Hα and [S II]/Hα line ratio maps imply that a significant fraction of the wind optical emission lines arise from shocked gas, with localized pockets/filaments of strongly shocked gas. From the kinematics, the cone appears partially closed in at least one place, and very broad Hα linewidths (>400 km s ―1 full width at half maximum) suggest there is material filling the cone in some regions. Extrapolation of the cone to its apex shows it is not centred on the starburst nucleus, suggesting the wind is deflected and collimated by the dense circumnuclear material. We discuss the implications of these findings on our understanding of the origins and evolution of the superwind. No evidence for an outflow is found on the north-western side of the disc out to >2 kpc in our optical data, due to obscuration by the foreground disc. The lack of an obvious connection between the inner (r < 1 kpc) Hα and X-ray bright outflow cone and the large-scale (r ≲ 10 kpc) X-ray 'horns' is also discussed.


: The progress in the diagnostic and the therapeutic possibilities of medicine, the amendment of articles 218 foll. StGB (= Penal Code), and a fundamental change in the attitude towards sexuality and abortion, on the background of the demand for free self-determination of the woman, have fundamentally changed the fields of medical activities and tasks, especially those of psychiatry, in ascertaining the indication for the legal termination of pregnancy and in giving advice in cases of pregnancy conflicts. By far the most terminations of pregnancy today are carried out on the basis of a social or a social predicament indication, for whose assessment the psychiatrist, as a rule, ist not competent. This functions should be stronger orientated towards giving advice and providing therapy in cases of pregnancy conflicts. Particular attention has to be payed to special aspects of contraception and negative psychic after-effects of an abortion. Psychiatric indications should only be accepted, in cases in which they can be substantiated clearly. All advisory and therapeutic measures have to serve the aim of furthering the freedom and autonomy of decision of the pregnant woman, of facilitating the solution of intrapsychic and ethical conflicts, thus making genuine responsibility realizable.


Aim: Because mutations of splicing factor 3B subunit-1 (SF3B1) have been identified in 4% of pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) patients, we investigated the activity of new potential inhibitors of SF3B1 in combination with gemcitabine, one of the standard drugs, in PDAC cell lines. Methods: One imidazo[2,1-b][1,3,4]thiadiazole derivative (IS1) and three indole derivatives (IS2, IS3 and IS4), selected by virtual screening from an in-house library, were evaluated by the sulforhodamine-B and wound healing assay for their cytotoxic and antimigratory activity in the PDAC cells SUIT-2, Hs766t and Panc05.04, the latter harbouring the SF3B1 mutations. The effects on the splicing pattern of proto-oncogene recepteur d'origine nantais (RON) and the gemcitabine transporter human equilibrative nucleoside transporter-1 (hENT1) were assessed by PCR, while the ability to reduce tumour volume was tested in spheroids of primary PDAC cells. Results: The potential SF3B1 modulators inhibited PDAC cell proliferation and prompted induction of cell death. All compounds showed an interesting anti-migratory ability, associated with splicing RON/ΔRON shift in SUIT-2 cells after 24 h exposure. Moreover, IS1 and IS4 potentiated the sensitivity to gemcitabine in both conventional 2D monolayer and 3D spheroid cultures, and these results might be explained by the statistically significant increase in hENT1 expression (P < 0.05 vs. untreated control cells), potentially reversing PDAC chemoresistance. Conclusion: These results support further studies on new SF3B1 inhibitors and the role of RON/hENT1 modulation to develop effective drug combinations against PDAC.


OBJECTIVE
A retrospective study to evaluate the efficacy and side effects of linear accelerator radiosurgery in the treatment of cavernous sinus meningiomas.

METHODS
Between 1993 and 2001, 42 patients with meningiomas involving the cavernous sinus underwent linear accelerator radiosurgery at our institution. A mean radiation dose of 14 Gy was delivered to the tumor margin. The median tumor volume was 8.2 cm3 (mean, 8.4 cm3). Median follow-up was 36 months (mean, 38 mo).

RESULTS
Control of tumor growth was achieved in 97.5% of the patients. There was no mortality or permanent extraocular motor or pituitary dysfunction. Treatment-related complications included new trigeminal neuropathy in 4.7% and a new visual field defect in 2.8%. Two patients required shunt placement after developing hydrocephalus. One patient with symptomatic temporal lobe edema underwent partial excision of the tumor. Improvement of existing cranial neuropathies was noted in 29% of affected trigeminal nerves, in 22% of oculomotor nerves, and in 13% of Cranial Nerves IV and VI.

CONCLUSION
This study indicates that linear accelerator radiosurgery can achieve a high control rate of meningiomas involving the cavernous sinus with no mortality and a low incidence of morbidity.


An equation is derived from first principles for describing the change in concentration with time of a beta-lactam antibiotic in the presence of intact Gram-negative bacteria possessing a beta-lactamase located in the periplasmic space. The equation predicts a first-order decline in beta-lactam concentration of the form [S] = [Si]e lambda t, where [S] is the exogenous concentration of beta-lactam, [Si] is the value of [S] at time zero, t is the time from mixing of cells and antibiotic and lambda (less than 0) is the decay constant. The value of lambda is exactly described by the theory in terms of experimentally measurable quantities. Quantitative data concerning cephaloridine hydrolysis by intact cells of Haemophilus influenzae agreed well with the theory, as did data concerning the uptake of 2-nitrophenyl galactoside by intact cells of Escherichia coli. Cephalosporin C hydrolysis by intact cells of Pseudomonas aeruginosa did not progress as predicted by the theory. The theory is applicable to any substrate which is acted on by an enzyme that is located solely in the periplasmic space and that obeys the Michaelis-Menten equation of enzyme kinetics.


Public health recommendations for lifestyle modification, including diet and physical activity, have been widely disseminated for the prevention and treatment of disease. These guidelines are intended for the overall population without significant consideration for the individual with respect to one's genes and environment. Personalized lifestyle medicine is a newly developed term that refers to an approach to medicine in which an individual's health metrics from point-of-care diagnostics are used to develop lifestyle medicine-oriented therapeutic strategies for improving individual health outcomes in managing chronic disease. Examples of the application of personalized lifestyle medicine to patient care include the identification of genetic variants through laboratory tests and/or functional biomarkers for the purpose of designing patient-specific prescriptions for diet, exercise, stress, and environment. Personalized lifestyle medicine can provide solutions to chronic health problems by harnessing innovative and evolving technologies based on recent discoveries in genomics, epigenetics, systems biology, life and behavioral sciences, and diagnostics and clinical medicine. A comprehensive, personalized approach to medicine is required to promote the safety of therapeutics and reduce the cost of chronic disease. Personalized lifestyle medicine may provide a novel means of addressing a patient's health by empowering them with information they need to regain control of their health.


Abstract We present here the first report based on phylogenetic analyses of small subunit (SSU/18S) and large subunit (LSU/28S) ribosomal DNA (rDNA) sequences from a wider-than-token sample of rhynchonellide articulate brachiopods, with data from 11 of ∼20 extant genera (12 species) belonging to all four extant superfamilies. Data exploration by network and saturation analyses shows that the molecular sequence data are free from major aberrations and are suitable for phylogenetic reconstruction despite the presence of large deletions in four SSU rDNA sequences. Although molecular sequence analyses cannot directly illuminate the systematics of fossils, the independent, genealogical evidence and phylogenetic inferences about extant forms that they make possible are highly relevant to paleontological systematics because they highlight the limitations of evolutionary inference from morphology. Parsimony, distance, maximum likelihood (no clock) and Bayesian (relaxed-clock) analyses all find a tree topology that disagrees strongly with the existing superfamily classification. All tested phylogenetic reconstructions agree that the taxa analyzed fall into three clades designated A1, A2, and B that reflect two major divergence events. The relaxed-clock analysis indicates that clades A and B diverged in the Paleozoic, while clades A1 and A2 reflect Permo-Triassic (and later) events. Morphological homoplasy and possible gene co-option are suggested as the main sources for the discord between the morpho-classification, the results of cladistic analyses of morphology, and the relationships reconstructed from molecular sequences. The origin, function and evolutionary implications of the deletion-bearing rhynchonellide SSU rDNA sequences are briefly discussed in relation to pseudogenes and concerted evolution in the rDNA genomic region.


Background Although miRNA-183-5p plays a critical role in many cancer types, including gastric cancer, hepatocellular carcinoma, prostate cancer, renal cell cancer and breast cancer, its role in osteosarcoma remains unclear. Methods Expression levels of miR-183-5p were detected in osteosarcoma tissues and cell lines using qRT-PCR. The effect of miR-183-5p on the survival and recurrence of osteosarcoma patients was analyzed in a cohort of 80 patients using Kaplan–Meier curves and Cox regression analysis. Effects of miR-183-5p on cell proliferation, migration and invasion abilities were evaluated using CCK-8, crystal violet and transwell assays. Results The expression of miR-183-5p was found to be upregulated in human osteosarcoma tissues and cell lines. Moreover, miR-183-5p expression was observed to be closely associated with tumor size, TNM stage and lung metastasis. Notably, high expression of miR-183-5p was shown to be able to predict unfavorable clinical prognosis in osteosarcoma patients. Additionally, whilst overexpression of miR-183-5p was observed to significantly promote the proliferation, migration and invasion of osteosarcoma cells; an inhibitory effect was observed with knockdown of miR-183-5p. Conclusion This study demonstrated that miR-183-5p acts as an oncogene and plays a critical role in the regulation of osteosarcoma tumor progression, and our results suggest a novel potential prognostic and therapeutic value of miR-183-5p in osteosarcoma.


We have constructed a general purpose optical tomographic imaging device capable of evaluating a variety of body appendages. A novel functional feature of the instrument is its use of a geometrically adaptive scanning head, in the form of a mechanical iris, about which are attached optical fibers positioned in a circular array. By adjusting the pass-through diameter of the iris, optical fibers can be brought into gentle contact with a tissue target. This serves to improve optical coupling while simultaneously stabilizing the tissue against motion artifacts. In addition, in many instances it also permits gentle deformation of the tissue to a simple circular geometry which is favorable for data analysis. The instrument also employs a rotating filter array that serves to extend the dynamic range of measurement to >1012 while retaining excellent precision (CV = 0.2–0.3%). Reconstruction results of laboratory phantoms and physiological imaging studies of the human forearm are presented.


We consider wait-free synchronization for the single-writer/multiple-reader problem in small-memory embedded real-time systems. We present an analytical solution to the problem of determining the minimum, optimal space cost required for this problem, considering a priori knowledge of interferences $the first such result. We also show that the space costs required by previous algorithms can be obtained by our analytical solution, which subsumes them as special cases. We also present a wait-free protocol that utilizes the minimum space cost determined by our analytical solution. Our evaluation studies and implementation measurements using the SHaRK RTOS kernel validate our analytical results


We present a method for deriving the normalizing constant for the state space probabilities in a closed Markovian queueing network with constant service rates. Our method produces a much simpler expression than any obtained previously. This expression takes the form of a sum of only M terms (if the visitation rate to service rate ratios are distinct), and is easily generalized to the degenerate case. The expression also yields a closed form solution for time delay distributions in cyclic networks of any length and with any number of customers.


Five years ago, we marveled at the incredible advances in both medical and surgical dermatology. These included systemic retinoids for acne and keratinizing disorders, superpotent topical corticosteroids for even steroid-unresponsive dermatoses, photochemotherapy and narrow-band UVB phototherapy for psoriasis, and mycosis fungoides. They also included other difficult-to-treat skin problems, and sophisticated surgical modalities to improve photo-damaged skin and to help turn back the clock on skin aging in general. Five years ago, we celebrated, in these pages, 20 years of change in dermatology as reflected on the subjects that Dermatology Times covered for its readers.


The principal argument used by the U.S. Supreme Court to justify the right of free speech derives from the assumption that deliberation over a diversity of perspectives is more likely than their paucity to help the audience discover some provisional truth. I call this the justification from truth and its advocates are plentiful and prominent, including justices Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. and Louis Brandeis as well as the philosophers John Stuart Mill and John Milton. Puzzlingly, the Court has generally avoided applying this justification to religious expression and neither the Court nor any scholar has offered a sufficiently developed account of what an application of the justification from truth to religious expression might look like. I attempt to do so in this article. The justification from truth is one of the most discussed topics for law since the European Enlightenment and the topic of religion has obviously provoked voluminous discussion. I hope to offer in my article a novel and engaging conceptual bridge between these two categories that will be of interest to scholars who study constitutional law as well as to those who study church-state relations and the many readers who find intriguing questions about the search for religious truth. I employ a series of case suites in the latter part of the article manuscript to illustrate how the justification from truth can be applied to religious expression, and it is my hope that such case suites will serve as a useful practical guide to judges.


This article investigates the evolving concept of fiduciary duty and its role in Canadian public sector pension funds' environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing practices. It contributes to the literature in the distinct but related fields of environmental gentrification and urban climate finance by bringing fiduciary debates into sharper focus. Engagement with issues surrounding investors' legal and ethical duties to invest responsibly can contribute to an enhanced understanding of the global and local mechanisms of production and reproduction of environmental and spatial inequalities, as well as strategies for creating more than just urban futures. ESG, a calculative and modelling technique used to manage investment risks, overwhelmingly focuses on physical and financial climate risks (e.g., infrastructure assets and risks associated with regulatory change). This privileges the instrumental, Cartesian view of the environment as severed from its social, historical, and relational character, a perspective that has been thoroughly critiqued in the environmental/ecological gentrification literature. However, ESG investing has also introduced a potentially productive uncertainty in the realm of financial expertise; it forces questions about what it means to invest deferred compensation in the "best interests" of workers and retirees. This article has three interrelated aims. First, it reviews recent trends in environmental gentrification and urban climate finance literature to highlight an emerging but underdeveloped engagement with ESG and fiduciary duty. Second, it shows how the rise of ESG has revealed a vulnerability in the hegemonic profit maximization interpretation of fiduciary duty and invited further, open-ended, critical-theoretical engagements with the concept of the fiduciary and their responsibilities. Finally, it offers the concept of "fiduciary activism from below" to explore how grassroots agency increasingly stages a direct confrontation with corporations, institutional investors, and shareholders in the struggles over urban space and resistance to environmental and infrastructural violence.


In this paper we present a compositional and-or graph grammar model for human pose estimation. Our model has three distinguishing features: (i) large appearance differences between people are handled compositionally by allowing parts or collections of parts to be substituted with alternative variants, (ii) each variant is a sub-model that can define its own articulated geometry and context-sensitive compatibility with neighboring part variants, and (iii) background region segmentation is incorporated into the part appearance models to better estimate the contrast of a part region from its surroundings, and improve resilience to background clutter. The resulting integrated framework is trained discriminatively in a max-margin framework using an efficient and exact inference algorithm. We present experimental evaluation of our model on two popular datasets, and show performance improvements over the state-of-art on both benchmarks.


In somatic cells phosphoinositide 3-kinase (PI 3-kinase) is activated upon interaction with both receptor tyrosine kinases (RTK) and G-proteins resulting in the production of moieties involved in the inositol phospholipid signalling pathway. As G proteins, RTK and the inositol phospholipids have all been implicated in the human sperm acrosome reaction, experiments were carried out to determine whether PI 3-kinase was also involved in this phenomenon. Wortmannin is a selective inhibitor of PI 3-kinase and was shown to significantly inhibit the acrosome reaction induced by both mannose-bovine serum albumin (mannose-BSA) (10, 50 and 100 nM) and a polyclonal antibody raised against an extracellular region of the sperm zona receptor kinase (ZRK, at 100 nM only). Wortmannin did not inhibit the A23187- or progesterone-induced acrosome reaction. These results suggest that PI 3-kinase is involved in the human sperm acrosome reaction. The levels of tyrosine phosphorylation of sperm proteins as detected by Western blotting using antiphosphotyrosine antibodies was not affected by wortmannin in agonist (A23187 and mannose-BSA)-stimulated spermatozoa. This indicated that PI 3-kinase operates downstream of tyrosine phosphorylation in the signal transduction cascade which leads to the human sperm acrosome reaction.


The paper investigates the common dynamic properties of business cycle fluctuations across countries, regions and the world. We employ a Bayesian dynamic latent factor model to estimate common components in main macroeconomic aggregates (output, consumption and investment) in a sixty-country sample covering seven regions of the world. In particular, we simultaneously estimate (i) a dynamic factor common to all aggregates/regions/countries (the world factor); (ii) a set of 7 regional dynamic factors common across aggregates within a region; (iii) 60 country factors to capture dynamic comovement across aggregates within each country; (iv) and a component for each aggregate that captures idiosyncratic dynamics. We decompose the volatility in each aggregate into the fraction due to the world, region, country, and idiosyncratic components. The results indicate that the world factor is an important source of volatility for aggregates in most countries, providing evidence for a world business cycle. We find that the region-specific factor plays only a minor role in explaining fluctuations in economic activity. While the world and regional factors together account for a larger share of fluctuations in output than in consumption, the country factor along with the idiosyncratic factor play a much larger role in explaining investment dynamics. We also compare and contrast how the three aggregates in each country relate to the world, region and country factors, and document similarities and differences across regions, countries and aggregates. We link the empirical results to the economic structure of the countries in the sample.


Using density functional theory with van der Waals dispersion correction, the adsorption behavior of common gaseous pollutants (CO, NO, NO2, and NH3) on monolayer C3N is investigated. The adsorption sites and energies, binding distances, charge transfers, and electronic band structures are calculated to understand the influence of the adsorbed molecules on the transport properties of monolayer C3N. The current–voltage characteristics are calculated using the nonequilibrium Green's function formalism. It turns out that all investigated molecules are physisorbed on monolayer C3N and that NO and NO2 gases can be sensed with high sensitivity. The recovery time of the sensor is found to be outstanding in the case of NO sensing (2.4 μs at room temperature) and competitive to other materials in the case of NO2 sensing.


We introduce a modified topological model for the evolution of two-dimensional soap froth. The topological rearrangement associated with a T2 process is deterministic; the final topology depends on the areas of the neighbouring cells. The new model gives agreement with experiments in the transient regime, where the previous models failed qualitatively, and also improves agreement in the scaling state.


Purpose: To present a new technique to plan and deliver spatially‐fractionated radiotherapy (GRID) utilizing helical TomoTherapy IGRT system. Methods: In a single large dose (20 Gy), GRID offers an effective radiation therapy for bulky malignant tumors. The conventional GRID irradiation is delivered through a dedicated grid block or field intensity modulation using a multileaf collimator(MLC). However, the dose to nearby organs‐at‐risk (OAR) becomes a concern when treating deep seated bulky lesions in GRID technique. So With its capability of delivering highly conformal and multifocal dose distributions, TomoTherapy emerges as a promising radiotherapy modality for GRID therapy that delivers high single dose to deep seated tumors with excellent normal tissue sparing. It is called TOMO GRID. Planning CTimages and contours are exported from a Pinnacle3 planning workstation via DICOM connection to the in‐house developed software system, DICOMan, where Boolean operations are applied to GTV contours to create multiple parallel GRID targets. An avoidance (GTV ‐ GRID targets) structure is also created to help the inverse planning process to achieve the desired peak‐valley ratio. Those CTimages and contours will be repackaged in DICOMan and sent to TomoTherapy planning workstation.Results: TOMO GRID delivers highly non‐uniform dose distributions that resemble more or less those of breachytherapy. The TOMO GRID targets (virtual implants) can be configured in various patterns (templates), sectional shapes and sizes. At each "insert" position, the implant can be in either "needle" or "seed‐spacer" train. Tested in both phantom and real patient datasets, our results show that it is feasible to deliver GRID therapy on TomoTherapy unit for deep seated lesions Conclusions: TomoTherapy has a great potential to deliver GRID therapy with a superior quality than conventional GRID therapy. More studies need to be conducted to justify the applicability of this technology in clinics.


Autism is a highly heritable neurodevelopmental disorder, which greatly reduces reproductive success. The combination of high heritability and low reproductive success raises an evolutionary question: why was autism not eliminated by natural selection? We review different perspectives on the evolution of autism and propose an integration which emphasizes epistatic interactions between the effects of genes during development. It is well-established that autism is a polygenic disorder, and that the genes contributing to autism interact. If a disorder is polygenic, it is likely that the genes underlying the disorder are also involved in traits that are beneficial for the individual. For example, it is possible that genes involved in the development of autism are also involved in the development of intelligence. As intelligence is positively correlated with reproductive success, genes involved in autism can possibly spread in the population. We propose that in most individuals, the interactions between genes result in normal or high intelligence and the absence of autism. However, in some unlucky situations, often in combination with spontaneous negative mutations, the interactions between genes can lead to the development of autism (or other pathologies). Thus, the combination of high heritability and low reproductive success in autism can be explained from an evolutionary developmental perspective that emphasizes the role of epistatic interactions in polygenic disorders.


In proton machines, potential-well distortion leads to small amount of bunch lengthening with minimal head-tail asymmetry. Longitudinal modemixing instability occurs at higher azimuthal modes. When the driving resonance is of broad-band, the threshold corresponds to Keil-Schnell criterion for microwave instability. [l] When the driving resonance is narrower than the bunch spectrum, the threshold corresponds to a similar criterion derived before. [2]