Peter Mair argued that increased demands for governments to work within constraints imposed from outside the formal chain of delegation, in conjunction with the declining strength of parties, were compromising the representative process. He recognised that the conditions of the economic crisis had increased these constraints and, in one of his last papers, he used the extreme case of Ireland between 2008 and early 2011 to explore this. More than three years on from his case study of Ireland, what has the unfolding crisis told us about Mair's observations and about the political face of that crisis? This chapter examines the politics of the economic crisis and, more precisely, the relationship between representative politics and responsible government in a number of 'extreme' cases of constrained governments: Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain.


Rapid-onset dystonia parkinsonism (RDP, DYT12, OMIM #128235) is a rare hereditary disorder characterized by the abrupt onset of involuntary muscle contractions (dystonia), poor balance and slowness of movement (parkinsonism). RDP is one of at least 15 known hereditary dystonias (Table 1), but is unique in its sudden onset of symptoms. RDP is autosomal dominant and a carrier of RDP can progress from asymptomatic to having permanent and debilitating dystonia in a matter of hours to days. The sudden onset of RDP can occur at any time throughout life, but often follows physical or emotional stress, such as fever, prolonged exercise, or childbirth. The symptoms are irreversible, but usually stabilize within 4 weeks without further progression. In addition to dystonia/ parkinsonism, the classic features of RDP include muscles involved in speech (dysarthria) and swallowing (dysphagia). Diagnosis is based on neurological examination only, because CT or MRI scans do not show any abnormalities in RDP patients. In 1999, significant evidence linked RDP to chromosome 19q13. In the present study, de Carvalho Aguiar and colleagues screened RDP patients for mutations in nine candidate genes in this region and present compelling evidence that mutations in the ion pump ATP1A3 cause RDP. ATP1A3 encodes a subunit of the Naþ/Kþ ATPase (a sodium pump) that hydrolyzes ATP to pump cations across the cell membrane and maintain ion gradients. ATP1A3 encodes one of the four isoforms of the catalytic subunit (A1-A4) of this sodium pump. Six different missense mutations in ATP1A3 were discovered in seven unrelated RDP families. The mutations segregated in all affected and obligate carriers and were not found in 500 European control chromosomes. Based on a multiple sequence alignment of ATP1A3 from 20 species, all six of the mutations were located in highly conserved regions of the protein. The authors use protein structure modelling in order to predict the impact of each of the six mutations on protein function. One mutation, T613M, lies at the edge of a phosphorylation domain and very likely interferes with the protein's ability to accept phosphates from ATP, disrupting its enzyme activity. The five other mutations (I274T, E277K, I758S, F780L and D801Y) fall into the highly conserved transmembrane domain of ATP1A3 and could affect the activity, folding and/or stability of the protein. Based on the model, the authors favour a haploinsufficiency hypothesis, due to loss of enzyme activity and/or irregular folding and stability, rather than the mutations resulting in dominant negative effects. Based on protein modelling, all six mutations detected in RDP families are predicted to reduce ATP1A3 function. In order to test this prediction, the authors examined the function of the ATP1A3 RDP mutations in transfected human embryonic kidney cells (HEK293T) grown in culture. Wild-type channels on an ouabainresistant background were able to increase survival of the HEK cells in the presence of ouabain, a toxin that inhibits endogenous Naþ/Kþ ATPases. Each of the mutations reduced or eliminated survival and therefore functioned less efficiently than wild-type ATP1A3. All but one of the mutations, however, also led to a decrease in the expression/stability of ATP1A3 that may, at least partially, explain the loss of activity. The functional studies nicely confirm the predictions made from the structural modelling and demonstrate that RDP mutations likely lead to a loss of ATP1A3 function. Interestingly, previous studies have implicated mutations in the ATP1A2 catalytic subunit with familial hemiplegic migraine type-2 (FHM2 OMIM #602481). One of the FHM2 mutations in A2 very closely resembles the I758S mutation Clin Genet 2004: 66: 393–398 Copyright # Blackwell Munksgaard 2004 Printed in Denmark. All rights reserved CLINICAL GENETICS doi: 10.1111/j.1399-0004.2004.00357.x


: Relations between mammary arterio-venous (AV) differences and arterial level were studied for glucose, acetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate on 172 samples and for blood essential amino acids on 20 samples, pooled by day and by cow. The data were obtained from 32 experiments on 5 cows eating various diets (Rulquin, 1981, 1983). AV differences in acetate and beta-hydroxybutyrate were highly related to the arterial levels (R=0.97 and 0.86) and averaged 74 and 41% of these levels (fig. 1). On the other hand, the AV difference in glucose was poorly (R=0.5) related to the arterial levels. Among the essential amino acids, only AV differences in phenylalanine, leucine, arginine, isoleucine and histidine were linearly related to the arterial levels (R=0.78, 0.73, 0.68, 0.63, 0.60) (fig. 2). AV differences in lysine, methionine, valine and threonine were more related to the AV differences of other amino acids than to the arterial levels (fig. 3). These results have been discussed in connection with different mammary metabolic transport systems and with the ability to modify mammary nutrient input by dietary manipulation.


Purpose – The purpose of the study is to analyze the user (as a customer of the library) requirements related to library services by using service-based quality function deployment (QFD) and employ QFD to identify visible marketing strategies in a service sector. Design/methodology/approach – In this study, QFD is applied to central library services of Dokuz Eylul University (DEU) in Izmir, Turkey. Basically, the methodology used in this study integrates the Kano model, AHP and planning matrix of house of quality. First, a focus group study is held to find out the requirements of university students for the university library that are then classified using the Kano model. The requirement categories are ranked with respect to their relative importance using analytical hierarchy process (AHP). In the last step, all findings are transferred to the planning matrix and strategies for DEU Central Library are developed. Findings – The paper reveals marketing strategies for a non-profit organization, a state university library, and helps the library find out its competitive position. Research limitations/implications – User requirements are determined through focus group studies held with undergraduate students. Other library users like academicians, external users, university staff and graduate students are ignored. Consideration of all possible user categories will give a whole picture of the requirements and their importance. In addition, a fair number of requirements limited the application of AHP only to the primary requirement categories. Practical implications – The strategic importance of requirements was identified more precisely and service elements were allocated more effectively. Originality/value – This study investigates the user requirements for library services in depth. It attempts to integrate AHP, Kano and QFD methods in library services for the first time to find out the most strategically important requirements. Therefore, it sheds light to library managers how to allocate their budget, arrange their services and develop their marketing strategies.


A newly developed space structure, the polyhedron space frame based on the bubble theory, is adopted in Chinese National Swimming Center-the Water Cube for 2008 Beijing 29 Olympic Games. Circular hollow sections, square hollow sections and rectangular hollow sections are employed as structural members, while welded hollow spherical joints are employed to connect the members. However, for welded hollow spherical joints connected with rectangular/square steel tubes, no previous study has been reported and no design criterion has been established. This paper investigates the structural behavior and load-carrying capacity of the joints subject to axial forces, bending moments and combined loading of the two. Based on the elastic-perfectly plastic model and the Von-Mises yield criterion, a finite element model for the analysis of the joints is established, in which the effect of geometric nonlinearity is taken into account. A major parametric study is then carried out employing this model. Experiments on ten typical full-scale joints are conducted to understand directly the structural behavior and the collapse mechanism of the joint, and also to validate the finite element model. A simplified theoretical solution is also derived for the loading-carrying capacity of the joint based on the punching shear failure model, and the basic form for the design equation is obtained. Finally, by utilizing the results from the simplified theoretical solution, finite element analysis and experimental study, the practical design method is established for the load-carrying capacity of the joints subject to axial forces, bending moments and the combined loading. The results from this study can be applied for direct design use, and also provide a reference for the revision of relevant design codes


In current photoacoustic tomography (PAT) systems, ultrasound transducer arrays and multi-channel data acquisition (DAQ) electronics are used to receive the PA signals. To achieve real-time PA imaging, massive 1D or even 2D transducer arrays and large number of DAQ channels are necessary. As a result, the ultrasound receiver becomes very complex, bulky and also costly. In this paper, we report the development of novel micromachined silicon acoustic delay line systems, which are expected to provide a new approach to address the above issue. First, fundamental building block structures of the acoustic delay line systems were designed and fabricated. Their acoustic properties were characterized with ultrasound and photoacoustic measurements. Second, two different acoustic delay line systems (parallel and serial) were designed and fabricated using advanced micromachining processes to ensure compact size, high accuracy, and good repeatability. The transmission of multiple acoustic signals in the acoustic delay line systems were studied with ultrasound experiment. Experimental results show that the silicon acoustic delay line systems can guide multiple channels of acoustic signals with low loss and distortion. With the addition of a set of suitable time delays, the time-delay acoustic signals arrived at a single-element transducer at different times and were unambiguously received and processed by the following DAQ electronics. Therefore, the micromachined silicon acoustic delay line systems could be used to combine multiple signal channels into a single one (without the involvement of electronic multiplexing), thereby reducing the complexity and cost of the ultrasound receiver for real-time PAT application.


Context Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is a non-invasive imaging technique that provides an indirect view into brain activity via the blood oxygen level dependent (BOLD) response. In particular, resting-state fMRI poses challenges to the recovery of brain activity without prior knowledge on the experimental paradigm, as it is the case for task fMRI. Conventional methods to infer brain activity from the fMRI signals, for example, the general linear model (GLM), require the knowledge of the experimental paradigm to define regressors and estimate the contribution of each voxel's time course to the task. To overcome this limitation, approaches to deconvolve the BOLD response and recover the underlying neural activations without a priori information on the task have been proposed. State-of-the-art techniques, and in particular the total activation (TA), formulate the deconvolution as an optimization problem with decoupled spatial and temporal regularization and an optimization strategy that alternates between the constraints. Approach In this work, we propose a paradigm-free regularization algorithm named Anisotropic 4D-fMRI (A4D-fMRI) that is applied on the 4D fMRI image, acting simultaneously in the 3D space and 1D time dimensions. Based on the idea that large image variations should be preserved as they occur during brain activations, whereas small variations considered as noise should be removed, the A4D-fMRI applies an anisotropic regularization, thus recovering the location and the duration of brain activations. Results Using the experimental paradigm as ground truth, the A4D-fMRI is validated on synthetic and real task-fMRI data from 51 subjects, and its performance is compared to the TA. Results show higher correlations of the recovered time courses with the ground truth compared to the TA and lower computational times. In addition, we show that the A4D-fMRI recovers activity that agrees with the GLM, without requiring or using any knowledge of the experimental paradigm.


Intrusion Detection System (IDS) plays an important role in computer network defence mechanism against malicious objects. The ability of IDS to detect new sophisticated attacks compared to traditional method such as firewall is important to secure the network. Machine Learning algorithm such as unsupervised learning and supervised learning is capable to solve the problem of classification in IDS. To achieve that, KDD Cup 99 dataset is used in experiments. This dataset contains 5 million instances with 5 different categories which are Normal, DOS, U2R, R2L and Probe. With such a large dataset, the learning process consumes a lot of processing times and resources. Clustering is unsupervised learning method that can be used for organizing data by grouping similar features into same group. In literature, many researchers used global clustering approach whereby all input will be combined and clustered to construct a codebook. However, there is an alternative technique namely local clustering approach whereby the input will be split into 5 different categories and clustered independently to construct 5 different codebooks. The main objective of this research is to compare the classification performance between the global and local clustering approaches. For this purpose, the soft assignment approach is used for indexing on KDD input and SVM for classification. In the soft assignment approach, the smallest distance values are used for attack description and RBF kernel for SVM to classify attack. The results show that the global clustering approach outperforms the local clustering approach for binary classification. It gives 83.0% of the KDD Cup 99 dataset.  However, the local clustering approach outperforms the global clustering approach on multi-class classification problem. It gives 60.6% of the KDD Cup 99 dataset.


Purpose: The purpose of this study was to provide understanding of the meaning of 'Yangsaeng' through lived experience of the elderly who practiced Kouk-Sun-Do. Methods: A hermeneutic phenomenological methodology developed by Max van Manen was adopted. The data were collected from the interviews and observations on the actual experience of 9 people who were over 65 years old and practiced Kouk-Sun-Do from August to December 2006. Results: The essential themes were discovered as 'body in comfort', 'spouting vigor', 'improving selfconfidence', 'developing one's mind', 'setting oneself in order', 'being aware of the value of Kouk-Sun-Do', 'recognizing importance of value of getting along' Conclusion: Therefore, practicing "Kouk-Sun-Do" is a suitable exercise for the elderly, as an effective nursing interventions for improving the quality of life of older people.


Toll-like receptors (TLR) are essential for Helicobacter pylori (Hp) recognition and subsequent innate and adaptive immunity responses. TLR2 appears to be the receptor responsible for most of the immunologic reaction against Hp infection. However, TLR4, TLR9 and eventually TLR5 may also have a synergic effect with TLR2 against Hp. It has been shown that gastric Hp infection increases TLR expression in the gastric mucosa. Moreover, recent studies have shown that human gastric carcinogenesis is associated not only with increased expression of TLR but also with decreased expression of their inhibitors such as Toll-Interacting Protein (TOLLIP) and peroxisome proliferator-activated receptor (PPAR)-g. Indeed, gastric dysplasia and adenocarcinoma are associated with high expression levels of TLR and low levels of TOLLIP and PPAR-g, suggesting increased activation of these receptors throughout human gastric carcinogenesis. In this article we discuss how these novels findings could be used not only for the diagnosis and prognosis of gastric lesions associated with Hp infection but also for their treatment. Specifically, we discuss the potential use of TLR agonists in addition to antibiotics to improve eradication rates of Hp and of TLR antagonists to slow the progression of gastric preneoplastic lesions. We also discuss the potential value of TLR signalling blockers and quantification of tumoral TLR expression, respectively, in the treatment and prognosis of gastric cancer. In conclusion, TLRs can be an important link between Hp and the sequence of gastric carcinogenesis and they can be used as biomarkers of gastric carcinogenesis. In this article, future lines of investigation related with these novel scientific findings are proposed and discussed.


By examining the relationship between the culture of internationalisation and the use of English in university classrooms, my paper demonstrates that the acquisition of one of the most important academic skills, i.e. writing in English, is efficiently achieved with the aid of process writing combined with peer reviewing. International students learn from one another under the guidance of the teacher as they adapt previous knowledge to the demands of the Swedish university classroom. As the lingua franca and the means by which students are most commonly assessed, English has a particularly important role to play in the international classroom. The conventions of academic writing must be learned and practised. With the aid of process writing and peer reviewing, students hone their writing skills at the same time as they improve their critical faculties. In this way, they are better able to demonstrate their knowledge and improve their results.


It is not clear yet why ADAM-alike adaptive gradient algorithms suffer from worse generalization performance than SGD despite their faster training speed. This work aims to provide understandings on this generalization gap by analyzing their local convergence behaviors. Specifically, we observe the heavy tails of gradient noise in these algorithms. This motivates us to analyze these algorithms through their Levy-driven stochastic differential equations (SDEs) because of the similar convergence behaviors of an algorithm and its SDE. Then we establish the escaping time of these SDEs from a local basin. The result shows that (1) the escaping time of both SGD and ADAM~depends on the Radon measure of the basin positively and the heaviness of gradient noise negatively; (2) for the same basin, SGD enjoys smaller escaping time than ADAM, mainly because (a) the geometry adaptation in ADAM~via adaptively scaling each gradient coordinate well diminishes the anisotropic structure in gradient noise and results in larger Radon measure of a basin; (b) the exponential gradient average in ADAM~smooths its gradient and leads to lighter gradient noise tails than SGD. So SGD is more locally unstable than ADAM~at sharp minima defined as the minima whose local basins have small Radon measure, and can better escape from them to flatter ones with larger Radon measure. As flat minima here which often refer to the minima at flat or asymmetric basins/valleys often generalize better than sharp ones~\cite{keskar2016large,he2019asymmetric}, our result explains the better generalization performance of SGD over ADAM. Finally, experimental results confirm our heavy-tailed gradient noise assumption and theoretical affirmation.


The characteristics of tapered inductors and standard inductors have been compared, and an improved compact model for tapered inductors is presented. The measured data of spiral inductors shows that the tapered inductor has higher quality factor (Q) than standard ones above 2.3GHz and higher frequency in which the maximum Q occurs. Because the parasitic capacitances, such as parallel capacitance and oxide capacitance, have lower values for tapered inductors, the real part of the input impedance is smaller, leading to higher Q value. For accurately modeling the behavior of tapered inductors, we propose an improved compact model, which adds a branch to model the frequency-dependent resistance. This model has the advantage of easily acquiring a relative equation because of the simple parallel structure of the skin effect model. The modeled and measured results have excellent agreement.


This paper explores the dynamics of government-to-government contracting at the local level in order to examine how governments' shared organizational characteristics, notably a governance structure based on political accountability, potentially make them more attractive vendors for services that risk contract failure. Relying on panel data from the 1992 and 1997 International City/County Manager Association's (ICMA) Alternative Service Delivery surveys along with data from the U. S. Census and other sources, this paper identifies service areas in which governments most frequently turn to government vendors. In particular, a comparison of public works and transportation services—a service area with low risks of opportunism leading to contract failure—and health and human services—a service area with high risks of opportunism leading to contract failure—shows that contracting governments are more likely to utilize governments over private firms and nonprofits for high-risk services. This is not the case for low-risk services, suggesting that governments view other governments as trusted contract vendors.


Concentrations of arsenic, cadmium, mercury, lead and selenium were determined in the muscles, brains, adrenal and thyroid glands, gonads, livers, kidneys and hair of pups and adult females of Baikal seals. Low concentrations of these five selected elements were found in Baikal seals in comparison with those published for other marine mammals, suggested low contamination of the selected elements in Lake Baikal. Results indicated that the main route of maternal transfer of Hg is via parturition, whereas that of Cd and Pb is via lactation. Further study is required on the investigation of element concentrations in plasma and milk. Due to the low concentrations of the elements in both adult females and pups, maternal transfer of the selected elements was found to constitute low potential risk for pups.


Interaction design research has rapidly evolved into a unique discipline embracing practicing professionals, design educators, and academic researchers. As with many evolving disciplines, attracting attention from a large number of people with different backgrounds, interests, and ways of seeing tends to cause 'disciplinary anxiety', which inevitably leads to the question of what constitutes 'good research'. What is rigorous and relevant interaction design research? How do we recognize and evaluate it? In this paper, we argue that most current attempts at dealing with issues of rigor and relevance in interaction design research tend to be on loan from other disciplines, and tend to overlook, conceal, or knowingly exclude some of what makes interaction design research such a unique field. Our primary contribution is that what may be perceived as three different design research activities--design practice, design exploration, and design studies--have their own purposes, intended outcomes, and internal logic. Each form of research must thus be examined in its own right and the notions of rigor and relevance for each of them have to be based on a firm understanding of the particular purpose of each approach. We would argue that this is not done consistently in the field today, which leads to misunderstandings, confusion, and mistakes when interaction design research is reviewed, discussed, and assessed.


The Architecture of Radio is an iOS and Android app visualizing the data infrastructures that enable contemporary practices of observation, communication, and navigation. In this paper, we take the app as a starting point for exploring the broader issue of how notions of data as evidence wield their influence in visualization practice — even in the context of projects that their makers explicitly position as artistic or speculative endeavors. In the process, we consider the app's interface and its functionalities, along with the discourse around it, including reviews. The latter in particular are highly revealing of how, despite disclaimers in promotional and other related materials, the apps and their makers are held to precisely the sort of evidentiary standards that they are seeking to break away from. In looking for explanations, we relate those reactions to conventions for the selection and representation of data that producers of (all) visualizations rely on.


Background Medication incident reporting systems play a vital role in improving medication safety through the identification of medication incidents/near misses and learning from them. FMEA is an excellent tool to review a system as it systematically identifies potential problems in a system and makes them transparent on a priority basis before they occur. Purpose To use failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) to improve the medication incident reporting system in a hospital. Materials and methods The prospective risk analysis tool, FMEA, was used by a multidisciplinary team to identify key failures in the original medication incident reporting system. The likelihood of the failure occurring, the severity and detectability of the failure if it occurred were agreed by the team and used to calculate the risk priority number (RPN) of each failure mechanism. Potential failures with an RPN of greater than 45 were targeted in an FMEA action plan which was produced and implemented with the aim of reducing these priority risks. This action plan included the introduction of a new medication incident report form, a new database to record and analyse incidents for trends, a new medication safety newsletter for staff and the production of a key performance indicator to feedback information to management. Results By implementing the key measures identified in the FMEA process, an overall reduction of 75% was achieved in total risk priority number of the medication incident reporting system. Conclusions Prospective risk analysis provides a great opportunity for system improvement. The inclusion of a multidisciplinary team at all stages in this analysis ensures a balanced approach to reviewing a system and identifying potential risks. Implementation of the FMEA action plan has lead to a significant risk reduction in the process and resulted in a robust medication incident reporting system in the hospital.


Teleworking is a new way of working based upon information and communication technologies which is rapidly replacing the old method of working in the cities. In most developed countries including the United States, United Kingdom and Canada, this new way of working has managed to help reduce the problem of traffic congestion and air pollution due to work related trip generated from private vehicles entering the cities. The rapid growth of residential landuse in urban fringe has caused the CBD area to continue to function as the employment center of the population forcing office workers to generate trips to their offices in the cities. The large movement of private vehicles entering the city centre area contributes to the rapid increase of CO, NOx, HC emissions thus affecting the general health condition of the urban population. In addition, it also increases the traffic congestion in already congested city. In addition, office workers' need to bear travel related cost such as car park, fuel and maintenance costs. The purposes of this study are firstly to determine that influence trip generation among the workers and secondly to assess the impacts of teleworking in reducing air pollution. Two hypotheses were generated in this study. First, the location of residences in urban fringe will influence the number of trips generated and their tendency to telework. Secondly, their willingness to adopt teleworking will help reduce air pollution through the decrease in work trip. A questionnaire survey was undertaken among 200 private sector offices worker in Johor Bahru CBD area. Informations obtained are divided into two parts which are the characteristics of the respondents and the factors that contribute to trip generation. Data collected from respondents were analyzed using standard statistical techniques such as frequency distribution, cross tabulation and the Chisquare. The study has shown that 75% (150) of the respondents has some knowledge about the practice of teleworking and are willing to adopt it. The home location of the respondents at the urban fringe with more than 10 km distance and the time taken to travel to work act as the main reasons for the respondents to choose teleworking. In addition, traffic congestion, air pollution and the cost related to travel to work are other reasons. It can be concluded that the acceptance of teleworking will help reduce trip generation and hence the level of pollution in the city.


A newborn with situs solitus, normally related great arteries and intact atrial septum, underwent surgical repair at our institution for anomalous drainage of the right superior vena cava in the left atrium at the level of the right superior pulmonary veins. This rare cyanotic congenital cardiac malformation is herein described with special regard to its anatomical and diagnostic features. A novel surgical approach for achieving correction is also described.


ABSTRACT Mormon religiosity is deeply marked both by a culture of secrecy and also by a culture that obliquely indexes secret religious material as a means of communication. This secrecy, though, can at times be an engine of disbelief, a process which has been exacerbated by the internet. Because of high levels of social integration in the community, Mormon disbelief can have high social costs. Some Mormons, however, have retained a 'testimony' by using the concept of transhumanism as a way to re-negotiate what 'belief' in Mormonism means. However, in part due to the very culture of secrecy that can fuel doubt, and also in part due to the technical codes that transhumanism as a community often relies on, this very shift can itself be difficult for Mormon non-transhumanists to discern.


Skeletal maturity is a critical consideration for pediatric orthopedic surgeons, general pediatricians, endocrinologists, metabolic bone disease specialists, rheumatologists, and physiatrists in the development and modification of treatment plans for growing children. Arguably the most widely utilized method of determining skeletal age, the Greulich and Pyle method (GPM), unfortunately has many shortcomings. Between the method reflecting limited population metrics and its reliance on a voluminous hard-copy radiographic atlas, the GPM may not lend itself to widespread use or optimized learning in the modern era of orthopedics. In 2013, the Shorthand Bone Age (SBA) method suggested a simpler approach by demonstrating reliability when just a single feature for each skeletal age, depending on patient sex, was sufficient in providing an accurate bone age estimate reflective of the full GPM. In addition to the SBA, an expanding body of research has emerged over the past two decades, attempting to provide the orthopedic community with simpler yet effective tools to determine skeletal age. In this review, we compare and present the spectrum of current concepts encompassing validated bone age determination methods for each of six commonly imaged anatomic locations: hand/wrist, elbow, shoulder/proximal humerus, hip/pelvis, knee, foot/ankle. All methods are presented visually in table format, with detailed graphic design, quantitative approximations to generate relative consistency between systems, and age-based color-coding for ease of memorization and use. All images are derived from patients presenting to the study institution within the past three months, so as to harness modern image quality and populations while also adhering to the principles and age-based features inherent to each system's different categories. The purpose of this review is multifaceted: to enable better incorporation of skeletal age considerations into daily practice by caregivers in many disciplines; to enhance awareness regarding the full array of tools that may spare young patients additional and unnecessary radiation; and to serve as a springboard for a mobile application to be utilized in any clinical setting by anyone with a mobile device.


English Language is a compulsory subject at all levels of education and a prerequisite for admission into higher institutions in Nigeria. However, students' achievement in the subject is poor. This underachievement has been attributed to some teacher factors, (attitude towards English teaching, teaching experience, teacher's content knowledge and text utilization). Previous studies focused largely on univariate influence of these factors without consideration of their composite and relative contribution to students' achievement. This study adopted a descriptive research survey design. Four research questions were raised and ten randomly selected public senior secondary school two students in Ibadan Southwest Local Government Area and two instruments were used to collect data. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and multiple regression at 0.05 level of significance. Findings revealed a significant relationship between teacher factors and students' achievement in English Language (R2 = 0.616, F (4, 19) =0.431, p0.037). There were relative effects of the factors on students' achievement- teacher attitude (R2 = 0.808, F (4, 19) =0.242, p0.002), teaching experience (R2=0.536, F (4, 19) = 1.492, p0.031), teacher's content knowledge (R2 = 0.801, F (4, 19) = 1.335, p 0.041) and text utilization (R2 = 0.594, F (4, 19) = 0.209, p0.023) Teacher attitude was considered the factor that predicts students' achievement in English most. It is recommended that instructional materials should be provided for English Language teachers, they should be sponsored to workshops, seminars and conferences and their salaries should be paid promptly in order to improve on their attitude, content knowledge and text utilization.


Huanglongbing (HLB) is one of the most devastating diseases of citrus worldwide. 'Candidatus Liberibacter asiaticus' is the prevalent species of three HLB-associated Liberibacter spp., which is vectored by the psyllid Diaphorina citri. The vector and the bacteria have host plants outside the genus Citrus, and these plants have the potential to affect disease epidemiology within citrus groves. Murraya paniculata could be especially problematic because it is a popular ornamental plant and a host of both psyllid and bacteria. We conducted a year-long survey of eight urban plantings of M. paniculata in east-central Florida to characterize 'Ca. L. asiaticus' infection rates in plants and associated psyllids. Using sensitive quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) primers targeting two prophage genes of 'Ca. L. asiaticus', we found infection to be extremely low: less than 1% of psyllids and 1.8% of plants. With qPCR primers targeting 'Ca. L. asiaticus' 16S rDNA, none of the plants and only one psyllid were 'Ca. L. asiaticus'-positive. Therefore, the titer of 'Ca. L. asiaticus' is low in M. paniculata and associated psyllids. These results suggest that urban plantings of M. paniculata may serve as a minor source of 'Ca. L. asiaticus' inoculum.


We present efficient new randomized and deterministic methods for transforming optimal solutions for a type of relaxed integer linear program into provably good solutions for the corresponding NP-hard discrete optimization problem. Without any constraint violation, the epsilon-approximation problem for many problems of this type is itself NP-hard. Our methods provide polynomial-time epsilon-approximations while attempting to minimize the packing constraint violation. Our methods lead to the first known approximation algorithms with provable performance guarantees for the s-median problem, the tree pruning problem, and the generalized assignment problem. These important problems have numerous applications to data compression, vector quantization, memory-based learning, computer graphics, image processing, clustering, regression, network location, scheduling, protocol testing, and communication. We provide evidence via reductions that our approximation algorithms are nearly optimal in terms of the packing constraint violation. We also discuss some recent applications of our techniques to scheduling problems.


This case study explores issues of interoperability and shared collection management between two libraries – one community and one academic – located within the American Jewish University (AJU). AJU's choice to use two separate classification systems, Library of Congress and Elazar, respectively, provides a necessary separation of academic and religious context, but limits record access between the two collections. Specifically, this study aims to answer the following core research question: is consolidation into one classification scheme both a realistic and helpful solution for increased interoperability? Examining the history, patron needs, and principles of arrangement in both systems provided further insights regarding shared or coexisting collections between libraries that fulfill more than one role. Suggestions for further research are considered, as they relate to theological collections as well as other context-dependent classification systems.


Oral anticoagulation with vitamin K antagonists (VKA) was the cornerstone of stroke prevention in atrial fibrillation (AF). This review article presents the state of the art, with regard to the treatment options developed over the past few years, the new oral anticoagulants (NOAC). A search in PubMed for relevant published studies has been performed. Dabigatran and apixaban were superior to warfarin to reduce stroke risk or systemic embolism ; dabigatran, rivaroxaban and edoxaban were non-inferior. All NOAC are globally non-inferior to warfarin for stroke prevention in non-valvular AF and they have a superior safety profile, with a reduced intracranial bleeding risk. They are now the first choice for treatment.


Abstract A 100 m water resource well penetrating shaly dolostone in East Fishkill, NY was tested to identify fracturing and to relate in situ hydraulic conductivity to acoustic properties derived from sonic waveform logs. The vertical fracture distribution was determined by borehole televiewer imaging. Sonic full waveforms were also recorded in the well and were analysed for compressional and Stoneley amplitudes, and differential energy logs were calculated. Hydraulic pulse tests were conducted in 1.5 m intervals isolated using a re-inflatable borehole packer system, and the measured conductivity in unfractured zones ranged from 10−9 to 10−5 cm s−1. Our preliminary comparison of results show that hydraulic conductivity is not related to Stoneley amplitude and weakly related to compressional amplitude and Stoneley differential energy. However, hydraulic conductivity may be reduced by partially closed or clay-filled fractures and volumetric differences in the packed interval which simultaneously increase attenuation. Further analysis by hydraulic flow tests in highly permeable zones are expected to improve the correlation. In principle, independent estimation of hydraulic conductivity from sonic attenuation measurements alone could be extended to untested intervals in nearby wells.


The behavior of temperatures in the region of Castilla-Leon in Spain was explored in a study of trend analyzes of the regional thermal anomalies in the zone. The work was developed in two steps: in the first, the working data series were refined, completed and homogenized. The variables addressed in these series were the maximum, minimum and mean temperatures corresponding to 38 weather observatories representative of the whole regional area and their length spanned the 1931-1996 period. Homogenization was carried out by applying the methodology established by Alexandersson and Moberg (1997). Once the homogeneous series had been constructed, in a second phase we analyzed their temporal behavior from regional anomaly series. To do so, the values of the anomalies were calculated at each of the selected stations −for the 1945-1996 period− from the mean monthly, seasonal and annual values of the 1961-1990 period. Then, following the methodology described by Jones et al. (1982) and Jones and Hulme (1996), the representative values for the whole region were determined. The results obtained for the whole period analyzed (1945-1996) indicated that, for a confidence interval of 95%, increasing trends are only seen for the maximum and mean winter values. Outside this threshold, the trend found was of the same sign in summer, whereas trends were decreasing for all the variables for their equinoctial seasons. By contrast, the behavior of temperatures in the 1972-1996 subperiod was striking; the annual maximum, minimum and mean temperatures displayed a certain increasing trend for that confidence interval. This was confirmed with the seasonal values, above all for spring and summer, and also (secondarily) those of winter and autumn. Thus, over the past 25 years analyzed there has been an increasing trend of about 0.05oC/year in the values of the maximum, minimum and mean temperature anomalies, both annual and seasonal.


OBJECT
A systematic investigation on cortical reorganization in patients with hemiparesis of a subcortical origin, with special emphasis on functional correlates, was conducted using functional magnetic resonance (fMR) imaging performed on a 3-tesla system specifically optimized for fMR imaging investigation.

METHODS
The study group included 46 patients with hemiparesis (25 with right and 21 with left hemiparesis) and 30 age-matched healthy volunteers as controls. All study participants were originally right handed. The characteristics of the lesion were putaminal hemorrhage in 19 patients, thalamic hemorrhage in 10 patients, and striatocapsular bland infarction in 17 patients. Functional recovery in subcortical hemiparesis showed two distinct phases of the recovery process involving entirely different neural mechanisms. Phase I is characterized by the process of recovery and/or reorganization of the primary system. Successful recovery of this system is typically reached within 1 month after stroke onset. Its clinical correlate is a rapid recovery course and significant recovery of function within 1 month of stroke onset. Failure of recovery of the primary system shifts the recovery process to Phase II, during which reorganization involving the ipsilateral pathway takes place. The clinical correlate of Phase II is a slow recovery course with variable functional outcome.

CONCLUSIONS
Effective functional organization of the ipsilateral pathway, as identified by linked activation of the ipsilateral primary sensorimotor cortex and contralateral anterior lobe of the cerebellum, is correlated with a good prognostic outcome for patients in the slow recovery group. A high degree of connectivity between supplementary motor areas, bilaterally, appears to influence functional recovery adversely.


"Lies, damn lies and statistics." The old adage is emblematic of people's distrust of statistics, yet in recent years advanced statistics have proven useful over traditional approaches in areas as varied as Nate Silver's work in political polling and advanced statistics in sports. In November 2013, new cholesterol guidelines, initially developed by an expert National Institutes of Health panel and then endorsed and published jointly by the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association (ACC/AHA), took a few steps toward applying more advanced statistical techniques to medical practice.1

The fundamental change is that the ACC/AHA cholesterol guidelines base their recommendations on the best available information on an individual patient's chance of benefitting from treatment. To achieve this, they noted that we need to stop focusing so much on low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol levels and focus more on our patient's overall risk of having a heart attack or stroke. For primary prevention, the new guidelines propose that a statin be recommended once a person's 10-year risk of having a heart attack or stroke is >7.5%, using a cardiovascular risk calculator developed by the original National Institutes of Health expert panel. Noting that multiple clinical trials have failed to find a significant benefit from adding a second lipid-lowering medicine to a statin, the ACC/AHA cholesterol guidelines generally recommend no additional cholesterol medications for those who tolerate a statin, even if LDL remains elevated.

These guidelines have triggered a cacophony of controversy, with some cholesterol specialists suggesting that the new guidelines will lead to serious undertreatment of high cholesterol and lost lives, and others suggesting that they will lead to overtreatment of millions of Americans.2,3 The net result—utter confusion.

Controversies in medicine have become a dime a dozen, but this medical controversy has a unique aspect to …


Parkinson disease (PD) is well known that a neurodegenerative disorder characterized by selective loss of dopaminergic neurons in the substantia nigra pars compact (SN). Although the exact mechanism remains unclear, oxidative stress plays critical roles in the pathogenesis of PD. DJ-1 is a multifunctional protein, a potent antioxidant and chaperone, linked to autosomal recessive early onset of PD by loss-of-function. Therefore, we investigated the protective effects of transduced Tat-DJ-1 protein against SH-SY5Y cells and PD mouse model. Tat-DJ-1 protein rapidly transduced into the cells and shows protective effect on 6-hydroxydopamine (6-OHDA)-induced neuronal cell death by reduced the reactive oxygen species (ROS). In addition, we found that Tat-DJ-1 protein protects against dopaminergic neuronal cell death in the 1-methyl-4-phenyl-1,2,3,6,-tetrahydropyridine (MPTP)-induced PD mouse models. These results suggest that Tat-DJ-1 protein provides a potential strategy for therapeutic delivery in various human diseases including PD.


In the facultative methylotroph Arthrobacter P1 the enzyme transaldolase plays an important role in both the pentose phosphate pathway and in the ribulose monophosphate cycle of formaldehyde fixation. Among gluconate-negative mutants of Arthrobacter P1 strains occurred which also were unable to grow on xylose because they had lost the ability to synthesize transaldolase. Furthermore, this loss of transaldolase activity resulted in decreased growth rates on a number of other "heterotrophic" substrates. Contrary to expectation, these mutants still grew on methylamine and were even able to use gluconate as a carbon source at normal rates provided methylamine was supplied as a nitrogen source. Under these conditions high levels of transaldolase were observed. Partial purification of the transaldolases synthesized by gluconate-grown cells of wild type Arthrobacter PI and methylamine-grown cells of one of these mutants, strain Art 98, revealed the presence of transaldolase isoenzymes. These enzymes displayed similar kinetics but were very different in heat sensitivity. Functionally these isoenzymes are apparently very similar but their synthesis is regulated differently. One of the enzymes is synthesized constitutively whereas the other is specifically induced during growth on C1 compounds. Strain Art98 has lost the ability to synthesize the constitutive transaldolase. It is postulated that the Cl-induced transaldolase serves to ensure a sufficiently high rate of regeneration of ribulose-5-phosphate during growth on C1 compounds.


Treatment by injection or infusion is widespread in China. Using the common cold as a tracer condition, we explored the reasons for over-prescription of injections and infusions in Guizhou, China. Interviews with prescribers, patients and key informants were supplemented by focus groups. These revealed how historical ideas encourage unnecessary use of percutaneous treatment: faith in the healing power of needles is locally attributed to association with acupuncture. Many patients and some staff believe that injections per se are therapeutic. However, the structure of health service financing and remuneration now reinforces this irrational faith. Market-based reforms have attempted to control costs and increase productivity with an incentive scheme which rewards prescribers financially for over-prescription in general and for use of injections and infusions in particular. Aggressive marketing has displaced oral treatment from health facilities into independent pharmacies, leaving doctors functioning mainly as injection providers. There is a need for a multi-faceted response encompassing education and reform of financial incentives to reduce the use of unnecessary treatment.


BACKGROUND
The optimal treatment for hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is surgical resection. However, only a small percentage of patients are operative candidates. Percutaneous radiofrequency interstitial thermal ablation proved to be effective in the treatment of unresectable HCC. Recent advances in laparoscopic ultrasound have improved the accuracy in detecting small intrahepatic HCC nodules missed by preoperative imaging techniques. Our objective was to evaluate a novel operative combination of laparoscopic ultrasound with laparoscopic radiofrequency (LRF) in the treatment of HCC not amenable to liver resection. The aim of our review was to evaluate the advantages and limits of the laparoscopic approach according the criteria of the evidence-based medicine.

CONCLUSIONS
LRF of HCC proved to be a safe and effective technique at least in the short and mid-term. This technique may be indicated in selected cases when the percutaneous approach to the lesion is very difficult or contraindicated.


Electromagnetic transient program (EMTP) simulators are being widely used in power system dynamics studies. However, their capability in real-time simulation of power systems is compromised due to the small time step used and relatively slow simulation speed. The shifted frequency analysis (SFA) is then proposed to accelerate the EMTP simulations for power system dynamics. The objective of this paper is to extend the SFA method to model the induction machines in EMTP. By analyzing the relationship between rotor and stator physical variables, a phase-coordinate model with lower number of equations is first derived. Based on this, an SFA model is proposed as a general purpose model capable of simulating both fast transients and slow dynamics. Case study results have confirmed the SFA induction machine model is a valuable component for real-time EMTP simulations. It is observed that the SFA model is in excess of 70 times faster than the standard EMTP model when simulating dynamics with frequency spectra close to the fundamental power frequency.


This study explores explanations for the approval of euthanasia by assessing differences among individuals and countries, using four main arguments used by opponents and proponents in the public debate over euthanasia. We performed multilevel analysis on data from thirty-three countries, obtained from the European Values Study 1999/2000 and the World Values Survey 2000; we enriched these data with country-specific information. First, our results supported the hypothesis based on the religion argument: religious people and people living in a religious context are more strongly opposed to euthanasia. In addition, Protestants and people living in Protestant countries have more favorable attitudes toward euthanasia than do Catholics and people living in Catholic countries. Second, we found support for the hypothesis derived from the slippery slope argument: fear that euthanasia will be abused resulted in people from vulnerable groups and people living in countries with low-responsive health care systems being more opposed to euthanasia. Third, as the autonomy-hypothesis predicted, highly educated people and people who highly value autonomy as well as people living in a country with a stronger than average attachment to autonomy show a more favorable attitude toward euthanasia. Fourth, while the death with dignity argument predicts that people who witness unbearable suffering in their personal or national environment are more favorable toward euthanasia, our results show only weak support. Furthermore, cross-level interaction tests showed that national contexts are, to some extent, able to decrease the differences between groups in society in terms of their response to euthanasia.


his study is the result of an investigation of the influence of physical work environment toward stress at work place, particularly the color composition used. The research subjects were thirty students of ASMI (Secretary and Management Academy) who were divided into three groups, namely the Harmonious group, The Disharmonious group, and the Controlled group. The Work Stress Scale was used in the measurement process. The measurement was done three times: before the experiment, in the middle of the experiment (first 2 hours), and after the experiment (last 2 hours). The result was analysed using the Analysis of Variance (ANAVA) A-Mix-B model of SPS-2000 software application. The result of this study illustrated that there was a significant difference on work stress level impacted by color composition applied at work space (F = 4.149, p = 0.026). The graphic of work stress average of the Harmonious group showed that Harmonious color composition did not affect the work stress significantly (t = 0.520, p = 0.306). The dominantly white color composition that played a role as the Controlled group was in fact able to reduce the work stress. The graphic showed that the Controlled group tended to decrease significantly with these values t = 1.825, p = 0.035, and the initial work stress average was (0.000) higher than the final one (- 22.800). The Disharmonious group showed that the color composition increased the work stress level (t = 3.177, p = 0.001). It was concluded that Harmonious color composition at work space did not influence the work stress level, dominantly white color composition could reduce the work stress level, and inharmonious (Disharmonious) color composition application had chances to elevate the work stress level. keywords: color composition, work space, work stresKeywords


Patient no-shows and cancellations are a significant problem to healthcare clinics, as they compromise a clinic's efficiency. Therefore, it is important to account for both no-shows and cancellations into the design of appointment systems. To provide additional empirical evidence on no-show and cancellation behaviour, we assess outpatient clinic data from two healthcare providers in the USA and EU: no-show and cancellation rates increase with the scheduling interval, which is the number of days from the appointment creation to the date the appointment is scheduled for. We show the temporal cancellation behaviour for multiple scheduling intervals is bimodally distributed. To improve the efficiency of clinics at a tactical level of control, we determine the optimal booking horizon such that the impact of no-shows and cancellations through high scheduling intervals is minimised, against a cost of rejecting patients. Where the majority of the literature only includes a fixed no-show rate, we include both a cancellation rate and a time-dependent no-show rate. We propose an analytical queuing model with balking and reneging, to determine the optimal booking horizon. Simulation experiments show that the assumptions of this model are viable. Computational results demonstrate general applicability of our model by case studies of two hospitals.


Predicting the implications of ongoing ocean climate warming demands a better understanding of how short-term thermal variability impacts marine ectotherms, particularly at beyond-optimal average conditions during summer heatwaves. Using a globally important model species, the blue mussel Mytilus, in a 5-week-long experiment, we (a) assessed growth performance traits under 12 scenarios, consisting of four thermal averages (18.5, 21, 23.5 and 26℃) imposed as constant or daily fluctuating regimes with amplitudes of 2 or 4℃. Additionally, we conducted a short-term assay using different mussel individuals to (b) test for the species capacity for suppression and recovery of metabolic performance traits (feeding and aerobic respiration) when exposed to a 1-day thermal fluctuation regime (16.8–30.5℃). Using this high-resolution data, we (c) generated short-term thermal metabolic performance curves to predict and explain growth responses observed in the long-term experiment. We found that daily high-amplitude thermal cycles (4℃) improved mussel growth when fluctuations were imposed around an extreme average temperature of 26℃, representing end-of-century heatwaves. In contrast, thermal cycles negatively affected mussel growth at a less extreme average temperature of 23.5℃, resembling current peak summer temperature scenarios. These results suggest that fluctuations ameliorate heat stress impacts only at critically high average temperatures. The short-term assay demonstrated that during the warming phase, animals stopped feeding between 24 and 30℃ while gradually suppressing respiration. In the subsequent cooling phase, feeding and respiration partially and fully recovered to pre-heating rates respectively. Furthermore, nonlinear averaging of short-term feeding responses (upscaling) well-predicted longer term growth responses to fluctuations. Our findings suggest that fluctuations can be beneficial to or detrimental for the long-term performance of ectothermic animals, depending on the fluctuations' average and amplitude. Furthermore, the observed effects can be linked to fluctuation-mediated metabolic suppression and recovery. In a general framework, we propose various hypothetical scenarios of fluctuation impacts on ectotherm performance considering inter- or intra-species variability in heat sensitivity. Our research highlights the need for studying metabolic performance in relation to cyclic abiotic fluctuations to advance the understanding of climate change impacts on aquatic systems. A free Plain Language Summary can be found within the Supporting Information of this article


Using data from the first eleven waves of the BHPS, this paper measures the extent of the selection bias induced by adulthood and coresidence conditions - bias that is expected to be severe in short panels - on measures of intergenerational mobility in occupational prestige. We try to limit the impact of other selection biases, such as those induced by labour market restrictions that are typically imposed in intergenerational mobility studies, by using different measures of socioeconomic status that account for missing labour market information. We stress four main results. First, there is evidence of an underestimation of the true intergenerational elasticity, the extent of which ranges between 10 and 25 percent. Second, the proposed methods used to correct for the selection bias seem to be unable to attenuate it, except for the propensity score weighting procedure, which performs well in most circumstances. This result is confirmed both under the assumption of missing-at-random data as well as under the assumption of not-missing-at-random data. Third, the two previous sets of results (direction and extent of the bias, and differential abilities to correct for it) are also robust when we account for measurement error. Fourth, restricting the sample to a period shorter than the eleven waves under analysis leads to a severe sample selection bias. In the cases when the analysis is limited to four waves, this bias may range from 27 to 80 percent.


Creating a mobile application often requires the developers to create one for Android och one for iOS, the two leading operating systems for mobile devices. The two applications may have the same layout and logic but several components of the user interface (UI) will differ and the applications themselves need to be developed in two different languages. This process is gruesome since it is time consuming to create two applications and it requires two different sets of knowledge. There have been attempts to create techniques, services or frameworks in order to solve this problem but these hybrids have not been able to provide a native feeling of the resulting applications. This thesis has evaluated the newly released framework React Native that can create both iOS and Android applications by compiling the code written in React. The resulting applications can share code and consists of the UI components which are unique for each platform. The thesis focused on Android and tried to replicate an existing Android application in order to measure user experience and performance. The result was surprisingly positive for React Native as some user could not tell the two applications apart and nearly all users did not mind using a React Native application. The performance evaluation measured GPU frequency, CPU load, memory usage and power consumption. Nearly all measurements displayed a performance advantage for the Android application but the differences were not protruding. The overall experience is that React Native a very interesting framework that can simplify the development process for mobile applications to a high degree. As long as the application itself is not too complex, the development is uncomplicated and one is able to create an application in very short time and be compiled to both Android and iOS. First of all I would like to express my deepest gratitude for Valtech who aided me throughout the whole thesis with books, tools and knowledge. They supplied me with two very competent consultants Alexander Lindholm and Tomas Tunström which made it possible for me to bounce off ideas and in the end having a great thesis. Furthermore, a big thanks to the other students at Talangprogrammet who have supported each other and me during this period of time and made it fun even when it was as most tiresome. Furthermore I would like to thank my examiner Erik Berglund at Linköpings university who has guided me these last months and provided with insightful comments regarding the paper. Ultimately I would like to thank my family who have always been there to support me and especially my little brother who is my main motivation in life.


Granisetron transdermal system (GTS; Sancuso®), a patch delivering a 5-HT3 receptor antagonist, has been shown to improve nausea and vomiting in gastroparesis. Recent FDA guidance on gastroparesis suggests daily scoring of symptoms to show efficacy. Aim: Determine the efficacy and onset of therapeutic response of GTS in improving specific symptoms and overall symptoms of gastroparesis in patients with gastroparesis using a daily symptom diary for gastroparesis. Methods: Symptomatic patients with diabetic or idiopathic gastroparesis with nausea and/or vomiting were enrolled. Gastroparesis Cardinal Symptom Index Daily Diary (GCSI-DD) captured severity of symptoms at baseline for one week and during two weeks of treatment with GTS. Key results: 14 patients (age 41.5 ± 17 years; 13 females) with refractory gastroparesis (5 idiopathic, 9 diabetic) participated in this open label study. Nausea, early satiety, postprandial fullness, abdominal pain, GCSI-DD composite score, and overall symptom severity significantly improved (p<0.05) during treatment when compared to the baseline week. Nausea significantly decreased on day 5 (p<0.01) of treatment. Episodes of vomiting did not significantly change. Side effects included pruritus (2 patients) and redness (1) at the patch site, headache (1), constipation (1), and poor patch adherence (5). Conclusions and Inferences: GTS significantly reduced nausea severity in patients with gastroparesis. There were also significant improvements in early satiety, postprandial fullness, and abdominal pain. Nausea improvement occurred on the fifth day of treatment. Thus, GTS has therapeutic effect on nausea, as well as other gastroparesis symptoms, in patients with gastroparesis as captured using a daily diary for gastroparesis. Key Points: Granisetron transdermal system (GTS; Sancuso®), a patch delivering a 5-HT3 receptor antagonist, has been shown to improve nausea and vomiting in gastroparesis. Daily symptom scoring, using a patient reported outcome, may help document efficacy for agents to treat gastroparesis: determining which symptoms improve and when. GTS has therapeutic effect on nausea, as well as other gastroparesis symptoms, in patients with gastroparesis as Research Article


Lung cancer is the top cause for deaths by cancers whose 5-year survival rate is less than 20%. To improve the survival rate of patients with lung cancers, the early detection and early diagnosis is significant. Furthermore, early detection of pulmonary nodules is essential for the detection and diagnosis of lung cancer in early stage. The National Lung Screening Trial (NLST) showed annual screening by low-dose computed tomography (LDCT) could help to reduce the deaths caused by lung cancer of high-risk subjects by 20% comparing with screening by chest radiography. In past decade, there has been lots of works on computer-aided detection (CADe) and computer-aided diagnosis (CADx) for pulmonary nodules in computed tomography (CT) scans, whose target is to detect, segment the nodules and further classify them into benign and malignant efficiently and precisely. This survey reviews some recent works on detection, segmentation and classification for pulmonary nodule in CT scans with deep learning techniques.


Abstract It is well known that one may study Hardy spaces with the domain a finite bordered Riemann surface rather than the unit disk. However, for domains with more than one boundary component it is natural to consider, besides the usual positive definite inner product on H 2 , indefinite inner products obtained by picking up different signs (or in the vector-valued case, different signature matrices) when integrating over different components. In this paper we obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for such an indefinite inner product to be nondegenerate and show that when this condition is satisfied we actually get a Krein space. Furthermore, each holomorphic mapping of the finite bordered Riemann surface onto the unit disk (which maps boundary to boundary) determines an explicit isometric isomorphism between this space and a usual vector-valued Hardy space on the unit disk with an indefinite inner product defined by an appropriate hermitian matrix. As is usual when studying Hardy spaces on a multiply connected domain, the elements of the space are sections of a vector bundle rather than functions. The main point is to construct an appropriate extension of this bundle to the double of the finite bordered Riemann surface and to use Cauchy kernels for certain vector bundles on a compact Riemann surface.


Despite the fact that human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and HPV-related cancers are on the rise in men, male HPV vaccine series completion is less than 10% in many areas. This study examined parental knowledge of the HPV vaccine and intent to vaccinate their sons. A cross-sectional study of 341 parents of boys was conducted in school settings in rural southeastern Georgia. Mothers were 2.07 times more likely than fathers to vaccinate their sons. Future research directions should include strategies to increase HPV vaccination in both genders and focus on parents' perceived severity and vulnerability of their sons to HPV infection.


Testing the often-made assumption that ice particle aggregates (snowflakes) are well represented by oblate spheroids, ellipsoid fits are applied to aggregate images. An algorithm to retrieve both the ellipsoidal parameters and the orientations of the fitted ellipsoids is applied to Multi-Angle Snowflake Camera measurements of ice particle aggregates observed in Alaska. The resulting ellipsoids have shapes closer to prolate spheroids than the oft-assumed oblate spheroids. A robust linear relationship exists between the two characteristic aspect ratios of the ellipsoids. The most probable orientation of the maximum dimension of the retrieved ellipsoids is not in the horizontal plane, and the rotational angles of the maximum dimensions in the horizontal plane are not uniform, but instead display some correlation with the wind direction at the times of the measurements. The retrieval results can be used to improve the representation of aggregates in microphysics and/or electromagnetic radiation scattering models applicable to radar and satellite measurements.


High morbidity and mortality among pregnant women are characteristic identifiers of waterborne epidemic outbreaks of hepatitis E. In the absence of effective treatment, vaccination offers a potential means to reduce the morbidity and mortality associated with pregnancy. However, clinical studies are hampered by safety concerns, because vaccination during pregnancy is generally contraindicated. A review of the records of a recent phase 3 clinical trial of the recombinant hepatitis E vaccine identified 37 of 31,791 women in the vaccine group and 31 of 31,735 women in the placebo group who were pregnant at the time of enrollment or became pregnant during the course of the study and were inadvertently given one (n 1⁄4 41 [22 vaccine, 19 placebo]), two (n 1⁄4 23 [14 vaccine, 9 placebo]), or three (n 1⁄4 4 [1 vaccine, 3 placebo]) doses of the HEV 239 vaccine or the control HBV vaccine. A total of 53 doses were received by the 37 pregnant women in the vaccine group, and 46 doses were received by the 31 pregnant women in the placebo group. Table 1 compares the adverse reactions observed in each of these subjects with that of two matched nonpregnant women. Only one subject in the vaccine group reported grade 1 pain at the site of inoculation. No serious adverse events were reported. The rates of adverse reactions to either vaccine were similar to those observed for the matched nonpregnant women. Nineteen (51.3%) of the women in the vaccine group and 14 (45.2%) in the placebo group underwent elective abortion. All the other women went on to give normal full-term birth by vaginal delivery (seven in the vaccine group versus seven in the placebo group) or by cesarean section (11 in the vaccine group versus 10 in the placebo group). No spontaneous abortion occurred, and the babies were born without congenital anomalies. The weights (3,573.5 6 356.7 g versus 3,565.6 6 531.6 g), lengths (50.7 6 1.3 cm versus 50.8 6 1.5 cm), and gestational ages (276.2 6 7.6 days versus 276.6 6 7.1 days) of the babies born to the mothers in the vaccine group and the placebo group, respectively, were comparable (P > 0.05). Blood samples from both month 0 and month 7 were available for one woman who received the third dose of HEV 239 vaccine during month 4 of her pregnancy. Her antibody level increased from undetectable to 34.7 Wu/mL, which is higher than that of 80% of subjects who received three doses of HEV 239 vaccine. None of the 68 pregnant women acquired hepatitis E. These preliminary observations suggest that the HEV 239 vaccine is safe for both mother and fetus and partially allay concerns regarding the safety of further clinical trials to substantiate this finding.


The paper compares different auction formats for sale of a single patented innovation for budget constrained bidders. This unit decreases the marginal cost of production in the aftermarket for its owner by an amount which depends on the money invested on the development of this technology. As the bidders have a fixed budget that must be used to pay the final auction price and also to develop the new technology, the winner has incentives to pay a low amount for his unit to increase the amount available to invest in cost reduction. Conversely the loser has incentives to induce induce a higher price to be paid by the winner in order to increase aftermarket profits. This conflict of interest generates the willingness to pay (WTP) for the patent through an endogenous process, which may end up by stablishing a higher WTP for the lowest financed firm. Given this background, the case in which the players have different initial budgets may generate multiple equilibria for all studied auction mechanisms. These equilibria produce di¤erent consumer surplus and, thus, a central government with an unti-trust behavior is able to choose the auction that generates the re�ned equilibrium leading to the highest consumer surplus.


In This applicable research, investigating absorption of process of Erythrosine dye on Copper oxide Nanoparticles Adsorbent was studied. First, prepared dye concentrations of 6, 8 and 12 mg L-1. and the effects of parameters such as concentrations of initial dye, time and pH on dye absorption efficiency were investigated. The dye concentrations in different samples weremeasured via spectrophotometer (505.6 nmfor dye Erythrosine wavelength). The results of absorption studies showed that Erythrosine absorption or removal rates would increase with decreasing the primary dye concentration, increasing reaction time, and decreasing pHon the basis of the results, copper oxide Nanoparticles can the absorb Erythrosine dye appropriately and efficiency of the process is higher in acidic pHfor dye Erythrosine. Themaximumdye removal of 93.68%could be achieved at initial pH 2 using adsorbent dosage of 0.233gr in 50 ml (12 mg L-1 dye concentration) and agitation rate of 180 rpm. Effect of different parameters as kinetic parameters, were calculated pseudo-First and secondorder kinetic, the Langmuir and Freundlichmodels Isothermfor absorb of this dye on adsorbent. this results showed that second-order kinetic adherence possessing regression coefficient of R2 i'³ 0.999, absorption or removal of Erythrosine on Copper oxide nanoparticles and different parameters for investigating of process rate of absorption in to be this experience. Equilibrium data fitted well with the Langmuir model for dye with adsorbent.


Modern wind turbines have grown significantly in nacelle heights and rotor diameters over the last three decades and will probably do so in the future. Additionally, more and more turbines are mounted in shallow waters on offshore monopiles and also on floating platforms in the deep sea. These technological developments implicate that the complex structural composition of the turbines becomes more flexible and simultaneously more and competing control objectives appear above the horizon. In this context, advanced state-feedback based control schemes have emerged in the wind sector in order to tackle these new challenges effectively though requiring the mostly hidden and immeasurable information about the dynamic state of the wind turbine.

In order to obtain this valuable information without additional measurements and sensors, the present thesis bridges the scientific gap between the nonlinear estimation theory on the one hand and the practical application to wind turbine control systems on the other hand.
This approach includes the investigation of the nonlinear filter algorithms, the control-oriented physical models and the design methodology needed to make nonlinear state estimation techniques ready for wind turbine application. The results of this approach are so-called virtual (model-based) sensors that are employed for multiple estimation tasks, such as the observation of unknown disturbances and the online reconstruction of mechanical component loads. These sensors are applicable whenever it is impossible or too expensive to measure the desired quantities directly.

The thesis explores first the suitable nonlinear algorithms to solve the estimation problems. The focus is here laid upon the sigma-point Kalman filters (SPKF) where classical and adaptive versions are presented. As widely known, the free design parameters of these filters have a significant influence on the expected estimation accuracy. An unfortunate filter parameter design leads to weak filter performance or (even worse) filter divergence. This is very critical in closed-loop systems where the state estimates are essential for the feedback controller.
For this reason, the dissertation investigates two approaches to address this problem.
The first step is the optimal design of the filter parameters based on numerical optimization. Therewith, all the relevant information about the wind turbine are exploited prior to application in order to find the best initial design parameters. The second step is the selective noise adaptation of certain filter parameters. This approach improves on the filter performance when the previous knowledge is insufficient for a proper initial design or some critical filter parameters are unknown and time-varying.

Moreover, a comprehensive engineering suite is developed in order to integrate the necessary functionality to perform an automated filter performance assessment. Finally, the strengths of these techniques are demonstrated illustratively for a variety of test scenarios, with extensive simulation results, for different estimation problems and different filter types in order to investigate all relevant practical aspects.

In a nutshell, this thesis provides the theoretical foundations, the practical application and also the simulative proof of concept in order to realize the wind turbine state estimation effectively and to bring it successfully into practice. Thereby, these virtual sensors shall level the ground not only for advanced state-feedback control, but also provide further insight into the system's internal behavior which can be exploited in future, for instance, for remaining useful life-time assessment based on reconstructed, experienced loads.


Because of the breadth of the subject it is impossible to cover all the contemporary trends in philosophy of the twentieth century in this essay. Indeed, there has been a voluminous output of books and-ideas in the last seventy years. This essay, however, focuses attention on the philosophical trends of the second half of the twentieth century, or the last twenty years, four of which may be cited here: 1.) The Death of Godl which is mainly philosophical, despite its theological undertones; 2.) Herbert Marcuse's socio-political theory; 3.) Structuralism, the direct antithesis of Existentialism; and 4.) Jacques Monod's theory of chance and necessity.


Detecting anomalous trajectory has become an important and fundamental concern in many real-world applications. However, most of the existing studies 1) cannot handle the complexity and variety of trajectory data and 2) do not support efficient anomaly detection in an online manner. To this end, we propose a novel model, namely Gaussian Mixture Variational Sequence AutoEncoder (GM-VSAE), to tackle these challenges. Our GM-VSAE model is able to (1) capture complex sequential information enclosed in trajectories, (2) discover different types of normal routes from trajectories and represent them in a continuous latent space, and (3) support efficient online detection via trajectory generation. Our experiments on two real-world datasets demonstrate that GM-VSAE is more effective than the state-of-the-art baselines and is efficient for online anomalous trajectory detection.


This article discusses the female immigrant of the 21st century in Spain from a cinematographic and literary point of view. After explaining what immigration is and which are the factors that influence this growing phenomena, several films cinema and literaty works dealing with immigration are presented: the movies A mi madre le gustan las mujeres (2001) by Daniela Féjerman, Canciones de amor en Lolita's Club (2007) by Vicente Aranda, Evelyn (2012) by Isabel de Ocampo, and the novels La patera (2000) by Mahi Binebine, Las voces del Estrecho (2016) by Andrés Sorel, Deshojando alcachofas (2005) by Esther Bendahan. On one hand the selected films and books give an overview of the immigrant women focusing on stereotypes and prejudices shared by Western societies. On the other hand, they give a realistic and objective representation, showing the inferior position and the exploitation that the immigrant women have to endure.


The interaction between coherent polaritons and incoherent excitons plays an important role in polariton physics. Using resonant pump-probe spectroscopy with selective excitation of single polariton branches, we investigate the different dephasing mechanisms responsible for generating a long-lived exciton reservoir. As expected, pumping the upper polariton results in a strong dephasing process that leads to the generation of a long lived reservoir. Unexpectedly, we observe an efficient reservoir creation while exciting only the lower polariton branch when the detuning is increased towards positive detuning. We propose a simple theoretical model, the polaritonic Bloch equations, to describe the dynamics of the system.


The following communication has been delayed in being brought before the Geological Society in the expectation of receiving further facts from Dr. Oldham, or that he would publish a substantive account of his own results after his examination of the earthquake-region. The latest communications received, however,by the writer from Dr. Oldham render it doubtful whether he will be able, consistently with the pressure of his official duties, to pursue the subject further; and as the facts which he has collected and well explained, of the production of enormous earth-fissures as effects of this earthquake, are of great importance, the writer has deemed it best to place them on record now, and to add to Dr. Oldham's account some remarks of his own as to the very striking secondary effects of this earthquake. Cachar, the site of the earthquake of the 10th January, 1869, is a British Province of Eastern India, about 110 miles in length from north to south, by 60 or 70 miles in width. Its boundaries on the north and south are Assam and Tipperah (an independent state), and on the east and west Munnepoor and Silhet respectively. It is hill-surrounded, except on the south and west, and consists chiefly of extensive plains, through which many large and small rivers wind and wander through ever changing courses in deep muddy beds, in which they rise from 25 to 35 feet in the rains. The chief river is the Barak, which is navigable for great distances, the Juroo and


Anthropogenic CO2 is progressively acidifying the ocean, but the responses of harmful algal bloom species that produce toxins that can bioaccumulate remain virtually unknown. The neurotoxin domoic acid is produced by the globally-distributed diatom genus Pseudo-nitzschia. This toxin is responsible for amnesic shellfish poisoning, which can result in illness or death in humans and regularly causes mass mortalities of marine mammals and birds. Domoic acid production by Pseudo-nitzschia cells is known to be regulated by nutrient availability, but potential interactions with increasing seawater CO2 concentrations are poorly understood. Here we present experiments measuring domoic acid production by acclimatized cultures of Pseudo-nitzschia fraudulenta that demonstrate a strong synergism between projected future CO2 levels (765 ppm) and silicate-limited growth, which greatly increases cellular toxicity relative to growth under modern atmospheric (360 ppm) or pre-industrial (200 ppm) CO2 conditions. Cellular Si∶C ratios decrease with increasing CO2, in a trend opposite to that seen for domoic acid production. The coastal California upwelling system where this species was isolated currently exhibits rapidly increasing levels of anthropogenic acidification, as well as widespread episodic silicate limitation of diatom growth. Our results suggest that the current ecosystem and human health impacts of toxic Pseudo-nitzschia blooms could be greatly exacerbated by future ocean acidification and 'carbon fertilization' of the coastal ocean.


The modernization of agriculture has a well-established theoretical basis from Capitalist, Marxist and Keynesian approaches. These approaches have different bases of departure: market mechanisms and state planning. But these different approaches require an identical exogenous path of development for rural areas based on 'modern' processes of specialization, concentration and integration.
Instead, the endogenous approach to rural development did not initially have a solid theoretical basis. It was created by the action of different actors in marginal areas. Lowe (2006) identified four endogenous sources of resistance to exogenous processes which we have integrated by adding two exogenous sources.
The first theoretical background of the phenomena of endogenous development of rural areas was due to the school of rural sociology of Wageningen which produced the so-called paradigm of endogenous rural development. The paradigm essentially study traditional typologies of agriculture excluded from the modernization processes. Ploeg (2006) has studied endogenous rural development at the light of the concept of 'local styles of farming'. According to the paradigm, the exogenous resources have to be 'deconstructed' and 'reconstructed' in conformity of 'local styles'. Processes of deconstruction and reconstruction will be discussed in our work critically showing two examples.
Finally, following the definition of "strong" and "weak" sustainable development , we shall create a new definition of rural endogenous development.


Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a short-range wireless communication technology aiming at low-cost and low-power communication. The performance evaluation of classical Bluetooth device discovery have been intensively studied using analytical modeling and simulative methods, but these techniques are not applicable to BLE, since BLE has a fundamental change in the design of the discovery mechanism, including the usage of three advertising channels. Recently, there several works have analyzed the topic of BLE device discovery, but these studies are still far from thorough. It is thus necessary to develop a new, accurate model for the BLE discovery process. In particular, the wide range settings of the parameters introduce lots of potential for BLE devices to customize their discovery performance. This motivates our study of modeling the BLE discovery process and performing intensive simulation. This paper is focused on building an analytical model to investigate the discovery probability, as well as the expected discovery latency, which are then validated via extensive experiments. Our analysis considers both continuous and discontinuous scanning modes. We analyze the sensitivity of these performance metrics to parameter settings to quantitatively examine to what extent parameters influence the performance metric of the discovery processes.


Rainwater harvesting is a strategy for reducing a building's reliance on municipal water. New residential buildings as well as large commercial buildings are increasingly equipped with rainwater collection systems. It is uncertain, however, how significant a role rainwater harvesting plays in achieving a building's water self-sufficiency. How effective is rainwater harvesting in various climatic zones? Is water self-sufficiency an achievable goal? This paper examines the water selfsufficiency of residential buildings that utilize rainwater harvesting. The test building is a two story single-family house with a population of four residents. The water consumption and rainwater harvesting potential of this standard house were analysed in a range of climatic zones across the US. The continental US is a microcosm of the world's climates spanning from the arid desert to the humid savanna, from the sub-tropical south to the frigid north. Based on the data published by the United States Geological Surveys (USGS), water consumption of the standard house in 13 test cities was analyzed. Next, the volume of rainwater harvested from the roof of this standard home was estimated. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) 30-year average precipitation data were used in estimating the volume of harvested rainwater. From this study, it was found that rooftop rainwater harvesting can provide at most 25% water selfsufficiency only in subtropical climates. In arid climates, the self-sufficiency was approximately 5% or less, even in rainy months. Drastically conserving water through change in occupant consumption patterns, supplemented with rainwater harvesting, is essential in achieving a building's water self-sufficiency.


Many behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) share similarities in executive functioning and communication deficits with those described in several neuropsychiatric disorders, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), epilepsy, schizophrenia (SCH), and autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Numerous studies over the last four decades have documented altered neuroinflammation among individuals diagnosed with ASD. The purpose of this revie\w is to examine the hypothesis that\ central histamine (HA) plays a significant role in the regulation of neuroinflammatory processes of microglia functions in numerous neuropsychiatric diseases, i.e., ASD, AD, SCH, and BPSD. In addition, this review summarizes the latest preclinical and clinical results that support the relevance of histamine H1-, H2-, and H3-receptor antagonists for the potential clinical use in ASD, SCH, AD, epilepsy, and BPSD, based on the substantial symptomatic overlap between these disorders with regards to cognitive dysfunction. The review focuses on the histaminergic neurotransmission as relevant in these brain disorders, as well as the effects of a variety of H3R antagonists in animal models and in clinical studies.


Sulfur mustard was employed as a chemical warfare agent by the Iraqi forces in the borderline regions of Iran during the Iraq-Iran war (1980–1988). The short- and long-term biological effects of sulfur mustard agent have been studied in both basic and clinical aspects. One organ that was primarily affected was the respiratory system. Among the adults, regular physical activity positively affects the respiratory system as well as the individual's ability to perform important daily tasks. We investigated the self reported physical activity in chemical victims 20 years after sulfur mustard exposure, compared the data with those of the matched counterparts, and explored any potential association with BMI. The exposed group was 357 and the control group was 125 individuals. Physical activity was measured using the global physical activity questionnaire (GPAQ) that evaluates work, recreational, transport and sitting activities. A significant difference was found between the control and exposed groups in terms of total physical activity MET (metabolic equivalent), total physical activity min/week and total transport-related physical activity min/week in BMI >30 kg/m2. In addition, total work-related physical activity showed a significant difference between the control and exposed groups with BMI <25 kg/m2. The results show that a significant correlation was present between the increase of body weight and the reduction of total physical activity and MET in exposed group 20 years after sulfur mustard exposure.


Haploid breeding is an effective method of shortening the breeding period of plants. In this study, to develop a haploid breeding technique, optimum conditions of the culture medium were investigated for anther-derived callus induction in the strawberry cultivar Seolhyang. The effects of the culture medium type, myo-inositol, auxin and cytokinin combination treatment, silver nitrate (AgNO3), and ferric ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid (Fe-EDTA) on anther-derived callus induction were analyzed. Anthers were incubated in Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium, Gamborg B5 medium (B5), and Lichter medium (NLN) for 8 weeks. Each culture medium had 0.4 mg∙L–1 of 6-benzyladenine (BA), 0.1 mg∙L−1 of indole-3 acetic acid (IAA), and 2.0 mg∙L−1 of 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid (2,4-D) added to it. Results showed that MS medium was most effective in callus induction. When 100 mg∙L−1 of myo-inositol was added to each medium, the callus induction rate increased. Auxin and cytokinin combination treatment was more effective with the addition of 0.4 mg∙L−1 of BA, 0.1 mg∙L−1 of IAA, and 2.0 mg∙L−1 of 2,4-D to MS medium compared to the addition of 0.1 mg∙L−1 of BA, 2.0 mg∙L−1 of IAA, and 0.4 mg∙L−1 of 2,4-D. With AgNO3 treatment, the highest callus induction rate was found at a concentration of 25 mg∙L−1. The callus induction rate increased as the AgNO3 concentration increased; however, a significant decrease was seen at 30 mg∙L−1. In the case of Fe-EDTA, the most effective concentration for callus induction was 25 mg∙L−1. Therefore, supplementing myo-inositol, AgNO3 and Fe-EDTA can help in anther-derived callus induction in Seolhyang strawberries.

 Key words: Anther culture, auxin, B5 medium, callus induction, cytokinin, haploid breeding, NLN medium.


Cellular DNA is constantly challenged by various endogenous and exogenous genotoxic factors that inevitably lead to DNA damage: structural and chemical modifications of primary DNA sequence. These DNA lesions are either cytotoxic, because they block DNA replication and transcription, or mutagenic due to the miscoding nature of the DNA modifications, or both, and are believed to contribute to cell lethality and mutagenesis. Studies on DNA repair in Escherichia coli spearheaded formulation of principal strategies to counteract DNA damage and mutagenesis, such as: direct lesion reversal, DNA excision repair, mismatch and recombinational repair and genotoxic stress signalling pathways. These DNA repair pathways are universal among cellular organisms. Mechanistic principles used for each repair strategies are fundamentally different. Direct lesion reversal removes DNA damage without need for excision and de novo DNA synthesis, whereas DNA excision repair that includes pathways such as base excision, nucleotide excision, alternative excision and mismatch repair, proceeds through phosphodiester bond breakage, de novo DNA synthesis and ligation. Cell signalling systems, such as adaptive and oxidative stress responses, although not DNA repair pathways per se, are nevertheless essential to counteract DNA damage and mutagenesis. The present review focuses on the nature of DNA damage, direct lesion reversal, DNA excision repair pathways and adaptive and oxidative stress responses in E. coli.


Introduction: 'Macrocytosis' is the term used to describe large erythrocytes with increased mean corpuscular volume (MCV) seen in peripheral blood smears. Various pathological disorders with differentiating clinical, biochemical, hematological and bone marrow findings can attribute to macrocytosis. Aims and Objectives: We conducted a one year study, from Sep 2016 to Sep 2017 with the aim to identify the number and causes of macrocytosis and also to assess the haematological features associated with macrocytosis in peripheral blood smear and routine haemogram. We also evaluated the clinical, biochemical (Vitamin B12 and folate assay) and bone marrow studies to differentiate megaloblastic from nonmegaloblastic causes of macrocytosis. Results: Among 56 cases of macrocytosis received in a year, Megaloblastic anemia was the commonest etiological factor, followed by alcoholism and drug intake. Isolated macrocytosis without anaemia was noted in 4 cases. Presence of hypersegmented neutrophils and macroovalocytes was the most frequent observation in peripheral smear examination in all megaloblastic conditions. Conclusions: A meticulous interpretation of routine haemogram along with peripheral blood smear and biochemical analysis helps in identifying the underlying cause and treatment for macrocytosis.


In this work the superplastic behaviour of a hot rolled AZ31 magnesium alloy sheet under a biaxial tension test with the blow forming technique is presented and reported. The specimen dome height and its thickness distribution, during and after the test, have been used as characterizing parameters. A numerical FE model of the test has been developed in order to easily characterize the material and to directly analyze experimental results. The influence of the rolling cycle on the microstructure and consequently on the material behaviour has been also analyzed. A synergic use of experimental results and of the numerical model has been done for finding material constants in different situations. The material flow parameters have been found and results are presented.