Background: Roux en Y gastric bypass (RYGB) has been highly effective in weight loss and it has been the procedure of choice for patients suffering from diabetes. There is a high attrition rate in long-term follow-up. Hence, limited long-term data are available. Methodology: We collected retrospectively data from a prospectively maintained institutional database. To increase the long-term follow-up rate, a telephonic interview was conducted with patients who had not come for long-term follow-up. Standard definitions were used for weight loss, weight regain, comorbidities, comorbidity resolution, and nutritional parameters. Results: Of 142 patients who underwent laparoscopic RYGB between 2008 and 2018, 125 patients (M: 33, F: 92; Age: 42.4 ± 5.2 years) were included in the study. The mean % weight loss at 1, 3, 5, and 7 years was 28.9, 31.8, 31.3, and 31.7, respectively. Mean % excess body mass index loss (% EBMIL) at 1, 3, 5, and 7 years was 67.6 ± 18, 73.7 ± 17.9, 71.7 ± 20.7, and 69.5 ± 24.6, respectively. Median weight regain at 3, 5, and 7 years was 8.4%, 12.7%, and 24% of weight lost. Significant weight regain was seen in 1 patient at 3 years and 3 patients at 5 and 7 years of follow-up. Among patients suffering from diabetes, 50.9% had remission and 45.3% had improvement at 1 year. At 5 years, this was 56% and 40%, respectively. Among patients suffering from hypertension, at 5 years, remission was seen in 11 (64.7%) out of 17. Significant improvements were seen in hypothyroidism, OSA, gastroesophageal reflux disease, and lipid profile. There was a statistically significant decrease in mean levels of fasting blood sugar, glycated hemoglobin (HbA1c), hemoglobin, serum calcium, insulin, c-peptide, serum albumin, and total protein and there was an increase in mean Vitamin D levels at 1 year follow-up. There was a decrease in mean levels of folate, total iron-binding capacity, parathyroid hormone, and alkaline phosphatase and an increase in mean Vitamin B12, iron, and ferritin postsurgery. However, this was statistically not significant. Nutritional deficiencies were noted. Seven complications were noted out of 142 procedures and no surgery-related mortality. Three patients had significant weight regain beyond 5 years. Conclusion: RYGB is a safe and effective bariatric procedure with well-sustained results in long run. Nutritional supplementation is required to correct deficiencies.


Stroke is a major cause of serious, long-term disability for those living in the United States. Treatment of issues related to stroke requires a multidisciplinary rehabilitation approach. Recreation therapy services, which include physical activities, contribute to positive rehabilitation outcomes experienced by those post stroke. This report identifies the impact of a repetitive adapted golf program on the (1) functional fitness skills and (2) balance of adults recovering from stroke as well as any community resources used by participants. Eleven men and women (M  age = 61.5) were referred to the program. Each participated in a group-oriented, collaborative community adapted golf program. Pre- and posttest assessments of functional fitness and balance were measured using components of the Functional Fitness Battery and the Berg Balance Test. Participants experienced statistically significant increases in their levels of coordination, "standing on one foot," and strength. Differences in scores for agility and "sit to stand" were not statistically significant. Although several limitations are noted, it seems that regular involvement in moderately or mildly active physical activities can help improve selected functional skills in persons having stroke. Most did report a positive response to use of community resources. The results of this project support the use of adapted golf as a therapeutic recreation modality for poststroke intervention.


Abstract This study examined systemic testosterone concentrations in rams that were classified according to their sexual behavior and partner preference as either female-oriented (FOR), male-oriented (MOR), or asexual (NOR). For this purpose, we measured testosterone concentrations under three separate conditions: in conscious rams during the nonbreeding season (June) and breeding season (November), and in anesthetized rams during the breeding season. Basal testosterone concentrations in conscious rams were not different among the three groups (P > 0.05) in either season. However, when rams were anesthetized, mean systemic concentrations of testosterone in FORs (mean ± SEM, 13.9 ± 7.4 ng/ml serum) were greater (P < 0.05) than in NORs (0.9 ± 0.1 ng/ml), but not in MORs (2.2 ± 6.2 ng/ml), whereas testosterone concentrations were not different between MORs and NORs (P > 0.05). Concentrations of testosterone in the spermatic vein of FORs (127 ± 66 ng/ml) were greater (P < 0.05) than in MORs (41 ± 10 ng/ml) and NORs (19 ± 7 ng/ml). Serum LH concentrations were not different. Cortisol was higher (P < 0.05) in anesthetized MORs (25.1 ± 4.2 ng/ml) and NORs (27.2 ± 4.4 ng/ml) than in FORs (10.9 ± 1.8 ng/ml). These results demonstrate that circulating testosterone concentrations are related to sexual behavior only when rams are bled under anesthesia. Thus, differences in basal androgen concentrations in adulthood cannot be responsible for expression of male-oriented preferences or low libido in sheep. Instead, functional differences must exist between the brains of rams that differ in sexual preference expression.


We propose an efficient method for controlled generation of field squeezing with cold atomic clouds trapped close to a superconducting transmission line resonator. It is shown that, based on the coherent strong magnetic coupling between the collective atomic spins and microwave fields in the transmission line resonator, two-mode or single-mode field squeezed states can be generated through coherent control on the dynamics of the system. The degree of squeezing and preparing time can be directly controlled through tuning the external classical fields. This protocol may offer a promising platform for implementing scalable on-chip quantum information processing with continuous variables.


The energetic molecular crystal cyclotetramethylene-tetranitramine (HMX) is used in plastic bonded explosives, and reaction initiation and detonation are usually triggered by plastic deformation. However, the mechanism of plastic deformation in β-HMX, which is the HMX phase stable in ambient conditions, is still a matter of debate. A recent observation that pressure developing under shock conditions inhibits dislocation activity, leaves shear localization as the main deformation mechanism in this crystal at high pressures and strain rates. In this work, the steady state shear band viscosity is evaluated as a function of the applied pressure, temperature, and shear strain rate using atomistic models of the HMX crystal. The viscosity of a fully formed shear band decreases as a power function of the strain rate and decreases linearly with increasing temperature, demonstrating shear thinning and non-Arrhenius behavior. The viscosity increases with increasing pressure. The fully formed band behavior is independent of the crystallographic orientation. It is shown that viscosity can be expressed exclusively in terms of the density of the non-crystalline material in the band, and hence the results can be explained in terms of the excess free volume theory developed for shear bands in other material systems, e.g., metallic glasses. The stress required to nucleate a shear band from a straight pre-existing dislocation is reported as a function of the applied pressure, temperature, and strain rate.


Abstract Ameloblastoma is a histologically benign tumor that behaves aggressively because of its tendency to invade local structures, and it has a high probability of local recurrence. If neglected, ameloblastomas can grow substantially over the course of years, reaching the size of giant ameloblastomas. This large size can lead to deformities in facial appearance and impairments in speaking, swallowing, eating, and breathing. Surgical planning can be challenging because of the extension of the tumor and the consequent reconstructive issues. In this article, we present our experience with the reconstruction of 2 cases of giant ameloblastomas planned on the basis of occlusal casts and acrylic splints. In these patients, computerized planning was rendered complex and potentially inaccurate because of the dimensions of the tumor, the loss of anatomical landmarks, and the loss of occlusal landmarks. The cases were successfully reconstructed, but the technique can be flawed. A 3-dimensional virtual model of the mandible can be used as a template to develop cutting guides for reconstruction with free fibular flaps. This will allow us to overcome limitations, standardize the procedure, and achieve optimal functional and aesthetic results.


Dr. Abbott pushes on to the end of his gigantic task. These Indices will be very helpful to those who have the other volumes of Diatessariea, They were prepared by Dr. Abbott's daughter. The Specimen of Research is about the Sweetening of the Waters of Marah. It is amazing to see all the ramifications in Jewish literature that this subject undergoes. Dr. Abbott makes it all very interesting and luminous and you draw your conclusions out of it all. A. T. ROBERTSON.


We have studied one aspect of the effect of Coulomb interactions on the hopping conductivity of a band of localized electrons in a disordered system, that is correlations in successive hops due to the Coulomb gap. At low temperatures, the correlation holes around sites involved in the hop do not relax, and there is an enhanced probability for backward hops. We calculate both dc and ac conductivities by considering correlated random walks in the disordered medium.


The National Strategy defines the main directions and objectives of public policy in the interests of children and the key mechanisms for its implementation. The strategy is based on the universally recognized principles and norms of international law. Implementation of the National Strategy will be realized in the following areas: Family Child Welfare Policy, availability to quality education and training, cultural development, and information security of children, child-friendly health care, and healthy lifestyle; equal opportunities for children in need of special care of the State, the creation of protection and safeguarding the rights and interests of children and child-friendly justice, and children - members of the realization of National Strategy. School health care is intended to be actively involved in two directions: availability to quality education and training, cultural development, and information security of children, health care, child-friendly and healthy lifestyle. The main tasks in the part of hygiene and children's health are: state support for the construction of new preschool educational institutions and the development of all forms of safe preschool education, including non-state sector, providing for every upperclassman safe choice of training profile corresponding to his inclinations and life plans, as well as the functional possibilities and health state; providing quality psychological, correctional and pedagogical aid to children in educational institutions; renewal of forms and methods of control of child neglect, drug addiction, alcoholism, crime, prostitution; the development of effective mechanisms in prevention of deviant behavior in childhood; the creation and implementation of training programs for children and adolescents on rules of safety behavior in the World Wide Web, prevention of Internet addiction; the introduction of the system for monitoring of the educational environment; the creation of portals and sites accumulating the information about best resources for children and parents. Creation child-friendly health care is provided by: improvement of the regulatory and legal framework in the area of the healthcare of children, the development of technologies for complex diagnosis and early medical and social care for children with deviations in development and health, development of adolescent medicine, creation of the Youth Counselling Centres, centers for reproductive health care for adolescents and centers for medical and social care for adolescents; implementation of educational work on the prevention of early pregnancies and abortions in minors; support for successfully realized projects for creation friendly to children and young people clinics in the regions; restoring medical offices in educational institutions, the encouragement of responsibility of health staff in medical institutions in delivery of health care to children, available developed network of institutions, including telephone emergency services, counseling online, providing help to children and adolescents to will protect children in hardship. Availability of physical culture and sports, tourism infrastructure for all children with bearing in mind their individual needs, increasing the proportion of children and adolescents regularly engaged in physical culture and sport, will meet natural biological move requirements of children.


The P-well structure has been widely used in solid state image sensors to suppress blooming and smear. This structure, however, suffers from saturation level shading, flicker and saturation level fixed pattern noise. This work clarifies that the P-well potential sway, due to readout pulse feeding, brings about the shading and the flicker. and the impurity striation in silicon substrate causes the saturation fixed pattern noise. To eliminate the problems, a new structure and a new driving mode are proposed. As a result, the shading and the fixed pattern noise were reduced to a practically negligible level, and the flicker was completely suppressed.


Dispersions of small TiO2 nanoparticles in alcohol, stabilized by surface complexation with protonated triethanolamine ligands, are proposed as bio-encapsulation matrices. They were characterized by TEM and EXAFS spectroscopy, and DLS was used to investigate the nanoparticles stability over time in their pure form and after insertion into aqueous medium. This study reveals unusual structural features that explain the recently demonstrated facile formation of dense encapsulates on the surface of biological objects. In the view of the potentially broad application of this already industrially available material in agriculture as an encapsulation matrix for biocontrol organisms, its potential health and environmental effects were characterized by employing a number of model systems. The potential health effects of the produced stable aqueous dispersions were studied in vitro using A549 and U1810 lung carcinoma cell lines. The nanotitania in the environment is partly bio-digested with the formation of citrate and lactate complexes. The effects on the growth of tobacco pollen grains by the nanotitania and of the ammonium lactato-oxo-titanate (TiBALDH, a product already broadly used in biomineralization studies) were investigated to gain insight into the impact of these materials on the environment and specifically on plant reproduction. TiBALDH was used as a model product of the bio-digestion and its structure has been probed in this work by X-ray powder diffraction and EXAFS spectroscopy. No acute negative bio-effects could be observed for the studied materials at significantly high concentrations, such as 50 μg ml−1 for the viability of human lung cancer cells and up to about 120 μg ml−1 for the growth of pollen grains, corresponding to the conditions of proposed field applications. This observation was contrasted by the apparently high toxicity of the LaAlO3 based nanophosphor which was applied as a positive control.


The herbicides imazethapyr and imazapic used in the Clearfield rice system can persist in the soil and affect non-tolerant rice cultivars sown in rotation. The effect on rice plants can vary according to the cultivar and herbicide used in rotation. Thus, a field experiment was conducted to evaluate cultivar and herbicide options when growing non-tolerant rice after using Clearfield rice system. The experiment was installed in the 2006/07 growing season, in a lowland area located in Santa Maria, Rio Grande do Sul, Southern Brazil. The experiment was in a randomized block design with three replications in a factorial scheme. Factor A included two succession systems of Clearfield rice and non-Clearfield rice in the first three growing seasons (2003/04, 2004/05 and 2005/06): Succession 1 - two agricultural growing seasons using the Clearfield system with application of the herbicide mixture imazethapyr and imazapic (75 and 25 g a.i.. ha-1) and one growing season with non-tolerant rice, without application of imidazolinones; and Succession 2 - three growing seasons using Clearfield system and herbicide application at the same rate specified previously. Factor B included rice cultivars used in the fourth year (BR IRGA 409, IRGA 417, IRGA 422 CL and BRS 7 "TAIM"). Factor C included different herbicides used during the fourth growing season (2006/07), bispyribac-sodium, clomazone + propanyl, cyhalofop-butyl, quinclorac, penoxsulam. Rice production after using the Clearfield system requires at least one year without herbicide application (imazethapyr and imazapic) to avoid carryover to non-tolerant rice and yield reduction. A 30% grain yield reduction is caused by herbicide carryover to non-tolerant rice cultivated in areas where the Clearfield system had been used for three years. No difference was found in the non-tolerant rice cultivars used in this experiment, as all were susceptible to herbicide carryover. No increased injury was observed in rice plants due to herbicide application on the non-tolerant rice cultivars cultivated in rotation. However, it must be emphasized that it is necessary to choose a non-ALS inhibiting herbicide to reduce the pressure of selecting weeds resistant or tolerant to these herbicides.


This research was carried out to investigate the suitability of locally white sand and Dwaikhla clay (Kaolin) for manufacture of semi-silica refractory bricks as thermal insulators for lining the furnaces. Preliminary investigations had been done to determine the physical, chemical, thermal and mechanical properties with mineralogical constitution of raw materials by XRD analysis. Different amounts of kaolinite were added as binder to the white sand (raw materials) of semi-silica bricks. The specimens molded according to DIN standards by using semi-dry pressing method at pressure of (24.516MPa) according to the DIN1068 standards. After drying process at 110°C the specimens fired at firing temperatures (1000, 1100, 1200, 1300 and 1400) °C. The fired specimens have been investigated to determination the physical properties including bulk density, porosity, and the mechanical properties including compressive strength and thermal properties including thermal conductivity. It has been observed from the results that local white sand and kaolinite could be used as possible source raw materials for manufacture semi-silica refractories, mainly required for glass, ceramics factory in Rammadi.


Due to the small exciton diffusion length in organic materials, the donor-acceptor heterointerface in simple bilayer solar cells must be placed in close proximity to the bottom electrode. This makes great demands on the planarity of the base layer, since a non-uniform topography can cause adverse shorting through overlying layers. We fabricated indium tin oxide (ITO)/titanium oxide (TiOx)/fullerene (C60)/cyanine dye/molybdenum oxide (MoO3)/silver (Ag) solar cells with TiOx layers deposited via sputtering, coated from a nanoparticle suspension or prepared via a sol-gel process. A power conversion efficiency of 3.7% was measured when using a smooth sol-gel derived TiOx film.


Differences in micronaire of cotton fiber can affect grower returns, and influence textile quality. Therefore quantifying those effects that influence micronaire are important in developing management practices to optimise micronaire. This study proposes a method for predicting seasonal crop micronaire. The aim was to quantify the response of micronaire to temperature during boll filling and assess this information's ability to predict micronaire on an independent dataset. Utilising existing data from sowing time experiments in Australia that spanned three decades, linear responses of micronaire to both daily average and minimum temperatures were developed (r 2 =0.68 for both). These responses coupled with an estimate of temperature during the boll filling period when the majority of bolls were undergoing fiber thickening were able to successfully predict the micronaire on an independent dataset (r 2 =0.42) despite no adjustment for other climate and management factors that may influence crop micronaire. The ability to predict temperature effects on micronaire will be useful to assess reasons for seasonal and regional differences in micronaire and assess opportunities to modify micronaire with changes in management practices that influence the timing of boll development.


Construction industry in Malaysia is growing rapidly with high demand due to vast development and urbanization. Therefore, many commercial and residential buildings are being developed. The increasing number of construction projects in Malaysia will indirectly contribute to the increase of construction waste generation. Thus, waste minimization is an important area of concern in the implementation of the construction waste management in the construction industry of Malaysia. Data collection and observations was conducted at three construction sites which adopt different type of method with different type of building and size of project in Klang Valley. The calculation of the construction waste index generated at these sites is adopted from Poon et al., (2001). Result showed that construction method, size of projects (GFA), type of building, storage method system, human error and technical problem can affect the amount of waste index (debris) and amount of wastage level generated at construction sites. Therefore waste index and wastage level can be used as operational an indicator for waste minimization of the construction activities.


Master thesis is based on research pillars such as affective, social and cognitive sectors, which include several important learning factors like motivation, collaboration and computational thinking. These factors have been studied through the design of a conceptual framework that lies on a blended learning environment encompassing basic teaching programming principles and comprehension concepts that spring off Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) fields.
This blended learning environment was designed in the basis of a flipped classroom model in order to provide on-line distance learning activities through an integrated Learning Management System (LMS) such as Moodle, and face-to-face teaching activities, while making use of the benefits of the SCRATCH programming tool. The educational design was based on the ARCS motivation model (Keller, 1984), for each of its key components (Attention - Relevance - Confidence - Satisfaction), different strategies and techniques were incorporated. Master thesis based on these strategies has the main objective to investigate if there is a statistically significant effect on student motivation on programming using STE(A)M fields.
Since programming is definitely a means of cultivation of many important 21st century skills, such as computational thinking and collaboration, greater emphasis has been placed on designing cooperative problem-solving activities. For this reason, activities have been developed on the basis of the Collaborative Learning strategies such as Brainstorming & Think-Pair-Share and the cooperative teaching approach of Pair Programming, which have made it necessary to investigate the development of these skills.
The survey was conducted in three phases and carried on the sample of 12 elementary school students aged 9-11. It was based on quantitative data analysis through questionnaires that students filled in during the first and third phase of the research at the beginning and end of the experimental process and observation. The results revealed that the impact of the educational environment was statistically significant in motivating students as well as in developing cooperative and computational thinking skills.
The literature review has highlighted the need of creating a conceptual framework containing capabilities for the development of the abovementioned skills, but primarily to motivate young learners such as primary school students, to get familiar with programming principles and in future to get involved with the STEM fields. In Greece however, existing the question of incorporating programming at this educational level, research has showed off the need of framework implementation in students even younger than the ones foreseen in the curricula.
Master thesis importance lies in the emergence of this necessity, but also in students' interaction with asynchronous education forms such as electronic courses through which asynchronous collaboration problem solving skills are cultivated. Additionally, it proposes a methodology integrating innovative blended learning model, the flipped classroom in primary education, as a preliminary stage of the exclusive on-line and distance learning. Mainly it focuses on the design of a blended learning environment using various technological means, which orchestrated properly under ARCS motivation model and techniques of collaborative learning, by which teachers can stimulate their students and achieve teaching objectives in each subject.


Abstract Understanding a system's historical conditions is a key first step in mapping out restoration goals and strategies. We examined the age structure and stem density of a stand dominated by Garry oak (Quercus garryana) and Douglas-fir (Pseudotsuga menziesii), and related this structure to its environmental history. Our reconstruction was based on 139 increment cores and 197 stem cross-sections collected from trees in 21 plots. Individuals of both species were more than 200 years old, indicating that the stand had a mixed composition for centuries. The historical tree density was ca. one-tenth that present prior to restoration (oak release) activities. This open oak/Douglas-fir savanna was maintained for centuries by fires set by Native Americans. It began to infill with oak, and later Douglas-fir, in the 1800s, particularly following Euro-American settlement in the 1860s. Douglas-fir encroachment continued throughout the 1900s, with a very large cohort becoming established in the early 1970s. This recent wave of recruitment has occurred in many sites in the region, and may reflect interactions among climatic and environmental conditions, together with changes in land use, including the cessation of livestock grazing and logging. Oak release actions were undertaken to re-open the forest structure, and involved the removal of 55% of the trees, primarily small-diameter Douglas-fir. Comparisons with historical information suggest that the post-release stand is still much denser and biased towards Douglas-fir than the stand was historically.


The energy dependence of the European Union (EU) is a huge concern for the Member States. It`s mostly connected to the increasing dependence on imported energy resources. The ability of the EU to meet the energy needs is very limited. Dependency on imported resources is expected to reach 70% in 2020 and dependence on oil - 90%. Europe`s dependence on imported oil will increase drastically. Almost 100% is the Bulgarian dependence on imports of Russian natural gas and oil. The solar business has a great importance for the future of the entire energy sector. Its investigations will allow us to find the potential opportunities and possible threats of its development and will help us to develop its potential. There are many challenges in front of its development connected with legal frameworks, corporate interests and public pressure. Therefore, a successful adaptation is required to the high requirements of regulators and competitive alternative energy source.


It is well known that, all things being equal, the accuracy of mammalian timing and memory decays gradually with the passage of time. The gradual decay of temporal accuracy is also observed in single-unit neural recordings. Here we review recent modeling work describing a specific mechanism for timing and memory and relevant neural data. The model describes a neural mechanism that can give rise to a logarithmically compressed representation of the recent past. We examine the specific predictions of the model, in particular that the elapse of time is represented by sequentially activated cells which fire for a circumscribed period of time. Such cells, called time cells, have been observed in neural recordings from several brain regions in multiple species. As predicted by the model, the cells show accuracy that decreases with time.


A conventional processing workflow favors only the specular reflections, reducing or removing other wavefield interactions. These specular reflections are unsuitable for directly imaging sharp corners, such as those in fault zones and pinch outs; therefore, diffractions are used instead in a technique known as diffraction imaging. Plane-wave destruction (PWD) is a well-established method for removing reflections and imaging diffractions. However, this method assumes a gently variable slope; therefore, it fails to remove energy in areas that do not follow this assumption such as curved interfaces. To remove the remnant energy in these areas and thus enhance the overall interpretability of the diffraction images, we have adopted a simple spatial-variable filter in the frequency-wavenumber f-k domain based on the calculated dip field used for PWD, applied post PWD. To demonstrate the method, we have examined this on a range of synthetic data, complex synthetic data, and real data. The created diffraction images have then been interpreted to evidence the benefit of diffraction imaging in seismic interpretation, helping to delineate pinch outs, faults, and rugose surfaces.


Correspondence: Francisco José de Paula Júnior – QMSW 06 lote 03, Bloco B, Ap. 110, Sudoeste, Brasília-DF. CEP: 70680-600 E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.com Abstract Objective: to evaluate the Brazilian Laboratorial Environment Management System (GAL) as a data source for the Sentinel Surveillance of Influenza-like illness (SSILI). Methods: this is an evaluation study of GAL, through the analysis of its simplicity, flexibility, data quality, acceptability, representativeness, opportunity, stability and usefulness for SSILI, based on the guide for system evaluation in public health of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (Atlanta/GA, USA). Results: in 2011 and 2012, a total of 13,765 exams for respiratory viruses were registered. GAL presented simple structure, flexibility to changes, good data quality, acceptability and opportunity in the access to test results, being representative and stable in 23 Brazilian states. Conclusion: the system is useful in meeting the goals of SSILI; however, there are some recommendations for adjustments and for encouraging the adherence by the states that do not use the system yet.


We aimed to design and develop a comprehensive mammography database system (CMDB) to collect clinical datasets for outcome assessment and development of decision support tools. A Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) compliant CMDB was created to store multi-relational datasets of demographic risk factors and mammogram results using the Breast Imaging Reporting and Data System (BI-RADS) lexicon. The CMDB collected both biopsy pathology outcomes, in a breast pathology lexicon compiled by extending BI-RADS, and our institutional breast cancer registry. The audit results derived from the CMDB were in accordance with Mammography Quality Standards Act (MQSA) audits and national benchmarks. The CMDB has managed the challenges of multi-level organization demanded by the complexity of mammography practice and lexicon development in pathology. We foresee that the CMDB will be useful for efficient quality assurance audits and development of decision support tools to improve breast cancer diagnosis. Our procedure of developing the CMDB provides a framework to build a detailed data repository for breast imaging quality control and research, which has the potential to augment existing resources.


Various rhythm and connection disorders can be seen in the acute phase of acute rheumatic fever. First degree atrioventricular block, one of the minor signs of acute rheumatic fever, is the most common connection disturbance in this disease. Complete atrioventricular block, which seriously affects the conduction pathways, is rare in the literature. A 15-year-old boy was admitted because of syncope caused by complete atrioventricular block and a temporary pacemaker was employed because of symptomatic complete atrioventricular block. The transient pacemaker treatment was terminated due to recovery of complete atrioventricular block on the third day of antiinflammatory treatment. Acute rheumatic fever should be kept in mind as a possible cause of acquired complete atrioventricular block. Connection disturbances in acute rheumatic fever improve with antiinflammatory treatment. Transient pacemaker treatment is indicated for patients with symptomatic transient complete atrioventricular block.


The authors stress the importance of polysomnography--a new electrophysiologic method--in the prevention of SIDS (cot death). SIDS is the most important and frequent cause of infant mortality between 1 and 12 months of age in western countries (nowadays between 1-2/1000!). In Hungary the frequency is not so high. In the last few years the incidence declined after the "back to sleep" campaigns, but to reach further success, it is very important to seek the so called "risk" babies. The unique cause of cot death is not yet understood exactly, but some instability in respiration (mostly during the sleep) is one of the accepted principal basic factors. The mentioned new method helps in choosing the SIDS risk infants from the "normal" population, allows to examine their respiratory irregularity or even disorders during the sleep and gives possibility for the prevention of lethal apneas. The authors describe the details of the prevention in case of abnormal polysomnography in their other publications.


Ultrasound elevation beamwidth is the out of plane thickness causing image artefacts normally appearing around anechoic areas in the medium. These artefacts could also cause uncertainties in localizing objects (such as a surgical needle) in the ultrasound image slices. This thesis studies the clinical significance of elevation beamwidth artefacts in needle insertion procedures. A new measurement device was constructed to measure the transrectal ultrasound elevation beamwidth. The beam profiles of various lateral and axial distances to the transducer were generated. It is shown that the ultrasound elevation beamwidth converges to a point within its focal zone close to the transducer. This means that the transrectal ultrasound images have the best resolution within the focal zone of the ultrasound close to the transducer. It is also shown that the ultrasound device settings have a considerable impact on the amount of beamwidth artefacts. Needle tip localization error was examined for a curvilinear transrectal ultrasound transducer. Beveled prostate brachytherapy needles were inserted through all holes of a grid template orthogonal to the axial beam axis. The effects of device imaging parameters were also investigated on the amount of localization error. Based on the developed results, it was found that the imaging parameters of an ultrasound device have direct impact on the amount of object localization error from 0.5 mm to 4 mm. The smallest localization error occurs laterally close to the i center of the grid template, and axially within the beam's focal zone. Similarly, the largest localization error occurs laterally around both sides of the grid template, and axially within the beam's far field. Using the ultrasound device with appropriate imaging settings could minimize the effects of these artefacts. We suggest to reduce the gain setting of the ultrasound device. This will reduce the energies assigned to the off-axis beams and as a result, the elevation beamwidth artefacts are minimized.


This study is a comparative evaluation of the nutrient profile of four selected browse plants often recommended for use as non-conventional feeding materials. Fresh leaves of Myrianthus arboreus, Gmelina arborea, Terminalia catappa and Dacroydes edulis were collected from farmlands in Asaba, Delta State, Nigeria. Proximate analysis was carried out on the dried leaves to determine the levels of crude protein, crude fiber, metabolisable energy, total ash and ether extract. The presence of the following mineral elements: calcium, magnesium, iron and zinc was determined. The presence of eight amino acids was also determined. Data collected were subjected to a one-way analysis of variance procedure. Significantly different means were separated using Duncan's multiple range procedure. Significance was reported at 5% level of probability. Significant differences between the test materials were observed for all the parameters measured. Results obtained were within the ranges of reported values. Key words : Comparative evaluation, browse plants, non-conventional feeding materials.


Background Patients experience atrial fibrillation (AF) as a complex disease given its adversity, chronicity, and necessity for long-term treatments. Few studies have examined the experience of rural individuals with AF. We conducted qualitative assessments of patients with AF residing in rural, western Pennsylvania to identify barriers and facilitators to care. Methods and Results We conducted 8 semistructured virtual focus groups with 42 individuals living in rural western Pennsylvania using contextually tailored questions to assess participant perspectives. We inductively analyzed focus group transcripts using paragraph-by-paragraph and focused coding to identify themes with the qualitative description approach. We used Krippendorff α scoring to determine interreviewer reliability. We harnessed investigator triangulation to augment the reliability of our findings. We reached thematic saturation after coding 8 focus groups. Participants were 52.4% women, with a median age of 70.9 years (range, 54.5-82.0 years), and most were White race (92.9%). Participants identified medication costliness, invisibility of AF to others, and lack of emergent transportation as barriers to care. Participants described interpersonal support and use of technology as important for AF self-care, and expressed ambivalence about how relationships with health care providers affected AF care. Conclusions Focus group participants described multiple social and structural barriers to care for AF. Our findings highlight the complexity of the experience of individuals with AF residing in rural western Pennsylvania. Registration URL: https://www.clinicaltrials.gov; Unique identifier: NCT04076020.


Patterns are a well-known and often used concept in the domain of computer science. They document proven solutions to recurring problems in a specific context and in a generic way. So patterns are applicable in a multiplicity of specific use cases. However, since the concept of patterns aims at generalization and abstraction of solution knowledge, it is difficult to apply solutions provided by patterns to specific use cases, as the required knowledge about refinement and the manual effort that has to be spent is immense. Therefore, we introduce the concept of Solution Implementations, which are directly associated to patterns to efficiently support elaboration of concrete pattern implementations. We show how Solution Implementations can be aggregated to solve problems that require the application of multiple patterns at once. We validate the presented approach in the domain of cloud application architecture and cloud application management and show the feasibility of our approach with a prototype. Keywords-pattern; pattern languages; pattern-based solution; pattern application; cloud computing patterns


For many years, South Africa had represented a typical example of a hydrocracy. Following the democratic transition in South Africa, however, new policy paradigms emerged, supported by new political elites from the ANC. A reform of the water policy was one of the priorities of the new Government, but with little experience in water management, they largely relied on 'international best practices' in the water sector, although some of these international principles did not perfectly fit the South African water sector landscape. In parallel, a reform called 'transformation' took place across all public organisations with the aim of allowing public administrations to better reflect the racial components in South African society. As a result, civil engineers lost most of their power within the Department of Water Affairs and Sanitation (DWS). However, despite these changes, demand-side management has had difficulties in materializing on the ground. The paper aims at discussing the resilience of supply-side management within the Ministry, despite its new policy orientation. Using a policy network concept, the paper shows that the supply-side approach still prevails today, due to the outsourcing of most DWS tasks to consulting firms with whom DWS engineers have nourished a privileged relationship since the 1980s. The article uses the decision-making process around the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP) Phase 2 as an emblematic case study to illustrate such developments. This policy network, which has enjoyed so much influence over DWS policies and daily activities, is now being contested. As a consequence, we argue that the fate of the LHWP Phase 2 is ultimately linked to a competition between this policy network and a political one. (Resume d'auteur)


Knowledge is the only way organizations gain sustainable competitive advantage in such a hyper-competitive era. Given its importance, the study examines the antecedents to tacit and explicit knowledge and the mediating role of psychological ownership. We have collected a sample of 157 using online Google forms and physically visiting the banks in certain cases. The study used Smart PLS for statistical analysis. Structural equation modeling was performed on Smart PLS for data analysis as the constructs are reflective. The study found that perceived organizational-support positively influences both dimensions of knowledge-sharing behavior – tacit and explicit knowledge. Psychological ownership positively "mediates perceived organizational support and explicit knowledge sharing." However, we did not find support for the mediating role of psychological ownership between perceived organizational-support and tacit knowledge sharing. The study recommends the HR department must create awareness of the support it provides to employees. HR professionals must build an all-inclusive workplace culture that embodies organizational support. Furthermore, customized incentives such as extrinsic and intrinsic benefits can encourage employees to share knowledge.


The rapid growth in the foreign-born population in many high- and middle-income countries in recent decades has prompted much research on the socio-economic determinants and impacts of immigration. This paper investigates the relationship between the stock of foreign population by nationality living in the UK and the bilateral stock of foreign direct investment (FDI), both inward FDI into the UK and outward FDI from the UK. This study contributes to the literature on the above-mentioned association between migration and FDI, by using the UK annual data from 2001 to 2007 for 22 countries on the inward volume of FDI and for 27 countries on the outward volume of FDI. Our study finds a significant and positive relationship between migration and outward FDI. This result also holds, if we correct for endogeneity by using an instrumental variable approach. If we then include the education level of migrants living in the UK, our results indicate that the more educated migrants from a certain country are, the stronger positive effect they have on FDI in both directions (inward and outward).


This paper describes the duchamp source finder, a piece of software designed to find and describe sources in three-dimensional, spectral-line data cubes. duchamp has been developed with H i (neutral hydrogen) observations in mind, but is widely applicable to many types of astronomical images. It features efficient source detection and handling methods, noise suppression via smoothing or multi-resolution wavelet reconstruction, and a range of graphical and text-based outputs to allow the user to understand the detections. This paper details some of the key algorithms used and illustrates the effectiveness of the finder on different data sets.


Abstract. Strength assessment of earth dams is mainly conducted using a plane design scheme, which does not always lead to adequate results. In this paper, it is proposed to assess the stress state of earth dams in a three-dimensional statement. Consequently, to assess the stress-strain state and dynamic characteristics of earth dams, appropriate mathematical models, methods and algorithms are built. The basis of the developed methods for solving specific problems for a spatial structure is a finite element method, the Gauss method (or the square root method) and the Muller method. Reliability of results is proved by solving a series of test problems. With the developed methods, the stress-strain state and dynamic characteristics of the Gissarak and Sokh earth dams were investigated. Based on the results of the study, it has been shown that for some types of earth dams, at preliminary assessment of the stress state and dynamic characteristics of structures, it is possible to use a plane-deformable model of calculation. Studies have shown that to ensure the required accuracy in assessing the stress state and dynamic characteristics of complex inhomogeneous spatial systems (such as earth dams), it is necessary to make calculations using a three-dimensional model. The data obtained as a result of research allowed to reveal some features of the stress state in a spatial case, indicating dangerous areas with the greatest stresses, as well as to study the pattern of natural oscillations that cannot be described using a plane model.


As a cohort of people, 'children in work' have become critical to the everyday functioning of diverse supply chain systems. This Working Paper considers diverse commodity chains (leather, waste, recycling and sex) to explore the business realities that generate child labour in its worst forms. A review of the literature finds that occurrence of the worst forms of child labour (WFCL) in supply chain systems is contingent on the organising logics and strategies adopted by actors in both the formal and informal economies. Piecing together the available evidence, the paper hypothesises that a supply chain system is sensitive to the use of WFCL when downward pressure to take on business risk cannot be matched by the economic resilience to absorb that risk. Emergencies and persistent stressors may increase risk and reduce resilience, shifting norms and behaviour. There is a need for further work to learn from business owners and workers in the informal economy.


This study assessed the socio-demographic characteristics and the characteristics of therapeutic adhesion of 27 bearers of arterial hypertension undergoing ambulatorial treatment who had hypertensive urgencies crises or emergencies in the city of Fortaleza in the period between October of 2002 and May of 2003. The majority were women, between 50 and 60-years old, with little formal education, treatment time shorter than 5 years and time of diagnosis varying from 5 to 10 years. The use of medicine was the treatment that was most mentioned, followed by the reduction of the consumption of salt and attendance to medical appointments. However, attending the appointments and receiving orientation did not seem to change their behavior, since most of the patients that were interviewed practiced no physical exercises and demonstrated little knowledge of the illness, for they attributed the rise of the arterial pressure to emotional factors.


A series of four self-assembled Pt(II) molecular squares with 4,4'-dipyridyl or pyrazine bridges, including the previously reported Pt(II) squares [Pt(en)(4,4'-dipyridyl)](4)(NO(3))(8) (1), were investigated for their abilities to act as selective and effective human telomeric (htelo) G-quadruplex binders. FRET and SPR studies demonstrated that Pt(II) squares could discriminate against duplex DNA, and show promising selectivity between intramolecular G-quadruplexes. PCR-stop assays and CD studies showed that Pt(II) squares strongly induced the formation of parallel G-quadruplexes. ITC experiments indicated that Pt(II) squares could bind to the G-quadruplex with high binding constants (K(b) values ranging from 10(4)-10(8) M(-1)). All four Pt(II) squares were effective inhibitors of human telomerase, and showed anticancer efficacy. This was particularly the case for [Pt(NH(3))(2)(4,4'-dipyridyl)](4)(NO(3))(8) (2), which exhibited a 15-fold higher antiproliferative effect on A549/cisR cells than cisplatin.


This thesis presents a framework for simulating the fluid dynamical behavior of complex moving boundary problems in a high-performance computing environment. The framework is implemented in the pELAFINT3D software package. Moving boundaries are evolved in a seamless fashion through the use of distributed narrow band level set methods and the effect of moving boundaries is incorporated into the flow solution by a novel Cartesian grid method. The proposed Cartesian grid approach builds on the concept of a ghost fluid method where boundary conditions are applied through least-squares polynomial extrapolations. The method is hybridized such that computational cells adjacent to moving boundaries change discretization schemes smoothly in time to avoid the introduction of strong oscillations in the pressure field. The hybridization is shown to have minimal effect on accuracy while significantly suppressing pressure oscillations.
The computational capability of the Cartesian grid approach is enhanced with a massively parallel adaptive meshing algorithm. Local mesh enrichment is effected through the use of octree refinement, and a scalable mesh pruning algorithm is used to reduce the memory footprint of the Cartesian grid for geometries which are not well bounded by a rectangular cuboid. The computational work is kept in a well-balanced state through the use of an adaptive repartitioning strategy. The numerical scheme is validated against many benchmark problems and the composite approach is demonstrated to work well on tens of thousands of computational cores. A simulation of the closure phase of a mechanical heart valve was carried out to demonstrate the ability of the pELAFINT3D package to compute high Reynolds number flows with complex moving boundaries and a wide disparity in length scales. Finally, a novel image-to-computation algorithm was implemented to demonstrate the flexibility the current method allows in designing new applications.


Poor spelling can stifle creativity and limit the range of vocabulary that young children may attempt to use, which will in turn limit the quality of their writing. Many schools look to utilise spelling tests as a strategy designed to improve spelling despite valid criticism from educational psychologists and linguists for being anachronistic and incompatible with the way that pupils actually learn to spell (see the work of Charles Read who describes spelling as a creative skill). Yet could spelling tests aid pupils learning with English as an Additional Language considering their potential lack of exposure to written English morphology? This study observed notable improvement in target language spelling in both experimental and naturalistic conditions even 4 weeks after initial testing. However, the impact on promoting a broader range of spelling strategies and in particular morphological awareness appears more limited.


Magnetic sector ICP-MS was used to measure the first row transition metals Sc, V, Cr, Mn, Fe, Co, Ni, Cu and Zn in certified reference materials, viz., NIST SRM 1643d Water, NIST SRM 1573a Tomato Leaves, NIST SRM 1566a Oyster Tissue, Bio-Rad Level 1 Urine, and in geological standard rocks BHVO-1, BCR-1 and AGV-1. Solid samples were prepared for ICP-MS analysis via high temperature and pressure digestion, followed by simple dilution (1 + 99 or 1 + 999). The water sample was analysed without further treatment, while the urine sample was diluted 1 + 9. With the exception of Zn in the urine matrix, indium was found to be a suitable internal standard for most of the isotopes of interest in the samples considered. All samples were analysed using both low (300) and medium (3000) resolutions (m/Δm at 10% peak height). The transition metals are well known often to suffer major interference from polyatomic species, and the extent of this interference was clearly evident when using spectral resolution 300. Depending on the sample type and matrix, accurate results could not be guaranteed for all isotopes when using low resolution. Without mathematical correction, extra sample preparation measures, or modified instrument operation, the same problems would be encountered in quadrupole ICP-MS studies. However, magnetic sector ICP-MS using medium resolution mode was found to overcome adequately polyatomic interferences associated with the transition metal isotopes considered, for all sample types. To a general approximation, measured elemental concentrations agreed to within ±5–10%, or better, of certified values when a spectral resolution of 3000 was employed [the accuracy found for individual elements varies depending on sample type, analyte concentration, isotope considered, and the relative success of the sample digestion procedure (if required)]. Results are presented taking into consideration both instrumental and method detection limits.


Protein Structure Comparison (PSC) is at the core of many important structural biology problems. PSC is used to infer the evolutionary history of distantly related proteins; it can also help in the identification of the biological function of a new protein by comparing it with other proteins whose function has already been annotated; PSC is also a key step in protein structure prediction, because one needs to reliably and efficiently compare tens or hundreds of thousands of decoys (predicted structures) in evaluation of 'native-like' candidates (e.g. Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP) experiment). Each of these applications, as well as many others where molecular comparison plays an important role, requires a different notion of similarity, which naturally lead to the Multi-Criteria Protein Structure Comparison (MC-PSC) problem. ProCKSI (www.procksi.org), was the first publicly available server to provide algorithmic solutions for the MC-PSC problem by means of an enhanced structural comparison that relies on the principled application of information fusion to similarity assessments derived from multiple comparison methods (e.g. USM, FAST, MaxCMO, DaliLite, CE and TMAlign). Current MC-PSC works well for moderately sized data sets and it is time consuming as it provides public service to multiple users. Many of the structural bioinformatics applications mentioned above would benefit from the ability to perform, for a dedicated user, thousands or tens of thousands of comparisons through multiple methods in real-time, a capacity beyond our current technology.

This research is aimed at the investigation of Grid-styled distributed computing strategies for the solution of the enormous computational challenge inherent in MC-PSC. To this aim a novel distributed algorithm has been designed, implemented and evaluated with different load balancing strategies and selection and configuration of a variety of software tools, services and technologies on different levels of infrastructures ranging from local testbeds to production level eScience infrastructures such as the National Grid Service (NGS). Empirical results of different experiments reporting on the scalability, speedup and efficiency of the overall system are presented and discussed along with the software engineering aspects behind the implementation of a distributed solution to the MC-PSC problem based on a local computer cluster as well as with a GRID implementation. The results lead us to conclude that the combination of better and faster parallel and distributed algorithms with more similarity comparison methods provides an unprecedented advance on protein structure comparison and analysis technology. These advances might facilitate both directed and fortuitous discovery of protein similarities, families, super-families, domains, etc, and also help pave the way to faster and better protein function inference, annotation and protein structure prediction and assessment thus empowering the structural biologist to do a science that he/she would not have done otherwise.


At the core of most three-dimensional alignment and tracking tasks resides the critical problem of point correspondence. In this context, the design of descriptors that efficiently and uniquely identifies keypoints, to be matched, is of central importance. Numerous descriptors have been developed for dealing with affine/perspective warps, but few can also handle non-rigid deformations. In this paper, we introduce a novel binary RGB-D descriptor invariant to isometric deformations. Our method uses geodesic isocurves on smooth textured manifolds. It combines appearance and geometric information from RGB-D images to tackle non-rigid transformations. We used our descriptor to track multiple textured depth maps and demonstrate that it produces reliable feature descriptors even in the presence of strong non-rigid deformations and depth noise. The experiments show that our descriptor outperforms different state-of-the-art descriptors in both precision-recall and recognition rate metrics. We also provide to the community a new dataset composed of annotated RGB-D images of different objects (shirts, cloths, paintings, bags), subjected to strong non-rigid deformations, to evaluate point correspondence algorithms.


Rising food prices hurt poor the most. The real burden of inflation is always higher than what the WPI figures suggest. Right through 2007, consumer inflation was running much higher for all categories. During the last month of 2007, inflation as measured by the consumer price index was above 5 per cent for the three categories of workers that are tracked by the official statistics, even as wholesale price inflation was just 3.5 per cent. Even as the government pulls out all stops to douse the fires of inflation, one should not forget that it is the outcome of years of neglect of agriculture. It has been observed that prices were highly volatile during the first half of 2008. UPA government took office in may, 2004. Leaving the first year of office as it is with period lagged effect of earlier government, an analysis of period between April, 2005 to May 2008 (leaving highly volatile period from April, 2004 to March, 2005 and June, 2008 to July 2008, by the time this paper is written) needs to be carried out to see trends in prices.


Stormwater biofilters (designed primarily for nutrient and metal removal) are gaining popularity globally for the treatment of urban stormwater runoff. However, their reported faecal indicator removal efficiency varies from several log to net leaching, and the effluent concentrations rarely meet the requirements for stormwater harvesting. In order to improve the stormwater biofilter design for reliable pathogen treatment, research in three Stages is therefore conducted systematically: identification of key design factors and operational conditions in existing biofilters, development of novel antimicrobial filter media, and new biofilter design incorporated with the antimicrobial media. In Stage 1, best practice stormwater biofilters using sandy loam as filter media were found to remove E. coli by 2 log during typical dosing events (i.e. twice weekly dosing). The absence of vegetation, reduced filter media depth, addition of filter media additives, presence of saturated zone and carbon source (SZ) were of no significance effect on E. coli removal. However, intermittent drying periods reduced E. coli removal in vegetated biofilters, and the presence of a SZ mitigated the negative effect. This led to the conclusion that filter medium, SZ, and intermittent drying periods were the main factors influencing the processes that govern faecal microbial behaviour within stormwater biofilters and thus affecting overall removal. In Stage 2, novel antimicrobial filter media were developed and evaluated by considering the key factors for stormwater treatment identified in Stage 1. Firstly, antimicrobial agents (including copper, zinc, iron, titanium and quaternary ammonium salts)-modified zeolite/granular activated carbon were prepared. It was found that, only the copper-modified media exhibited robust antimicrobial efficiency during five months natural stormwater treatment. Secondly, the copper-modified media were further optimised through heat treatment (calcination) or Cu(OH)2 coating to prepare stable yet more efficient antimicrobial media copper-zeolite. In Stage 3, copper-zeolite biofilters at large-scale were designed and constructed using the optimised antimicrobial media developed in Stage 2. The impact of design factors (vegetation, filter media type and filter media layout) and operational conditions (intermittent drying periods, inflow volume, inflow concentrations and experimental duration) on removal of faecal indicators, reference pathogens, copper and nutrients from synthetic stormwater was examined over 16 months. It was found that the copper-zeolite biofilters (1) exhibited longevity in faecal indicators removal despite operational conditions; (2) effectively removed reference pathogens (81% of effluent concentrations were below limit of detections) and (3) showed effective removal of copper and nutrients. In summary, newly developed copper-zeolite media are able to remove faecal indicators and reference pathogens while not sacrificing the removal of other pollutants subjected to various operational conditions. The main recommendation is that stormwater biofilters could integrate layers of low-cost and stable antimicrobial filter media for improved removal of faecal microbes from urban stormwater. Further research can be recommended in the following two aspects: (1) examine the impact of seasonality on the performance of the copper-zeolite biofilters; and (2) maintain the performance of the antimicrobial media which may lie below clogged surfaces; this creates unfavourable conditions for the functioning of media (unsaturated flow, limited contact time, and reduced oxygen levels).


This work revisits the theory of the mixed Rossby–gravity (MRG) wave on a sphere. Three analytic methods are employed in this study: (a) derivation of a simple ad hoc solution corresponding to the MRG wave that reproduces the solutions of Longuet‐Higgins and Matsuno in the limits of zero and infinite Lamb's parameter, respectively, while remaining accurate for moderate values of Lamb's parameter, (b) demonstration that westward‐propagating waves with phase speed equalling the negative of the gravity‐wave speed exist, unlike the equatorial β‐plane, where the zonal velocity associated with such waves is infinite, and (c) approximation of the governing second‐order system by Schrödinger eigenvalue equations, which show that the MRG wave corresponds to the branch of the ground‐state solutions that connects Rossby waves with zonally symmetric waves. The analytic conclusions are confirmed by comparing them with numerical solutions of the associated second‐order equation for zonally propagating waves of the shallow‐water equations. We find that the asymptotic solutions obtained by Longuet‐Higgins in the limit of infinite Lamb's parameter are not suitable for describing the MRG wave even when Lamb's parameter equals 104. On the other hand, the dispersion relation obtained by Matsuno for the MRG wave on the equatorial β‐plane is accurate for values of Lamb's parameter as small as 16, even though the equatorial β‐plane formally provides an asymptotic limit of the equations on the sphere only in the limit of infinite Lamb's parameter.


The article is dedicated to the introduction of mapping methodology of the use of agricultural lands based on GIS and Earth remote sensing from space. In the article, the theoretical and methodical positions and features of complex agricultural mapping are formulated, the method of geo-information mapping of agricultural land holdings and land uses with the use of data of Earth remote sensing from space is developed. It is proved that the technological scheme of creation of electronic agricultural maps represents a complete cycle of creating maps and includes the following stages: the preparatory stage, the stage of fieldwork, the stage of map creation. Particular attention is paid to the stage of map formation, in which the content and database of created maps are developed. It is established that work on map layout may be performed after the steps of forming layers, processing of map symbols libraries, development, and filling of databases, and also the formation of layers of thematic elements. The content of agricultural maps is a collection of agricultural complexes, objects associated with them for agricultural development of the territory of the agricultural business, and thematic elements, used to create a complex agricultural map. An approximate content of thematic elements of the agricultural complex map, consisting of agricultural complexes and agricultural infrastructure is defined on the basis of the development of theoretical foundations. A complete list of the semantics of layers of a complex agricultural map is presented.


Background : Point spread function (PSF) is akey point for the field of imaging. This include the concept of image quality which would be reflected in to many applications such that in medical imaging and astrophysics applications. In this work, PSF was derived for an array of elliptically synthetic aperture. Materials and methods : A Gaussian filter with different width value (0.5, 0.8, and 1) was used to investigate the possibility of improving the PSF under two conditions: for differenced limit system and focus error system. MathCAD program was used later to calculate the value of PSF for above condition. Results : The results demonstrate that increasing the number of elliptically synthetic apertures would improve the value of PSF together with reducing the secondary peak (Apodization). Accordingly, the contribution of Gaussian filter was limited. Conclusions: According to the results, an enhancement was observed in the elliptically synthetic apertures based optical system.


Classroom discourse analysis has contributed to understandings of the nature of student-teacher interactions, and how learning takes place in the classroom; however, much of this work has been undertaken in teacher-directed learning contexts. Student-centred classrooms such as problem-based learning (PBL) approaches are increasingly common in professional disciplines such as the health sciences and medicine. With the globalisation of education, health science and medical education, PBL classrooms are often sites of considerable linguistic and cultural diversity, yet little is known from a classroom discourse perspective about the language demands of PBL. This paper examines the ways in which the students and tutor negotiate and construct meanings through language in one first year physiotherapy PBL tutorial at an Australian university, with a particular focus on the ways in which the discourse is regulated in a student-centred learning environment. The analysis of the classroom discourse is underpinned by Halliday's systemic functional linguistics. The findings provide a description of the linguistic resources students draw on to co-construct and negotiate knowledge, as well as show how the tutor, with minimal strategic interventions, scaffolds the students' learning. The findings also suggest that the PBL environment can be a challenging one for students whose cultural and language backgrounds are different from that of the classroom.


Congressional plenary power has been a powerful force in federal law for over a century, forming the legal foundation of Congress's extraordinarily wide range of legislation over indigenous Americans, their lands, and their governments. The Supreme Court's corollary Plenary Power Doctrine has bolstered this power over time by requiring highly deferential judicial review of the many statutes related to "Indian affairs." Despite the lack of a strong Constitutional foundation, Congress has consistently used the mantle of Plenary Power to legislate in a wide range of indigenous matters and the Supreme Court has declined to place meaningful constraints upon its exercise. In the area of environmental law in particular, Congress exercised its plenary power to delegate environmental regulatory authority through various statutes, including the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, and others. These delegations have been widely lauded for the opportunities they created in the area of tribal environmental law. Yet, despite the excitement that these amendments initially brought, their value remains open for debate. For instance, less than .1% of federally recognized tribes have obtained primacy from EPA under one or more of the Tribes as States (TAS) provisions in the environmental statutes. The faulty legal foundation and arguably low level of success of the TAS provisions (particularly when viewed across the entirety of tribal and indigenous lands in the United States) call into question the continuing role and value of the Congressional Plenary Power Doctrine itself. For, while the short-term goal of improving air or water quality might be achieved by the tribes that can manage to satisfy the numerous criteria to obtain primacy in one or more areas, the legal reality is that the federal government still controls the regulatory playing field for the vast majority of tribes, and even for tribes that have obtained TAS status in one area, but not others. This Article examines critically the role of Congressional plenary power, in the past and in the modern era, to illustrate how the Constitutional basis for Congress's asserted power in this area is inherently flawed. It also explores the pragmatic limitations of Congressional plenary power over tribal environmental quality.

Finally, the Article explains how continued recognition of Congressional plenary power over indigenous environmental regulation and environmental quality causes serious and troubling concerns for tribal sovereignty and tribal environmental quality in the long term.


This paper considers the problem of approximating a digitized surface in R3 with a hierarchical bicubic B-spline to produce a manipulatable surface for further modeling or animation. The 3D data''s original mapping from R3 (multiple rows of cylindrical scans) is mapped into the parametric domain of the B-splice (also in R3) using a modified chord-length parameterization. This mapping is used to produce a gridded sampling of the surface, and a modified full multi-grid (FMG) technique is employed to obtain a high-resolution B-spline approximation. The intermediate results of the FMG calculations generate the component overlays of a hierarchical spline surface reconstruction. Storage requirements of the hierarchical representation are reduced by eliminating offsets wherever their removal will not increase the error in the approximation by more than a given amount. The resulting hierarchical spline surface is interactively modifiable (modulo the size of the dataset and computing power) using the editing capabilities of the hierarchical surface representation allowing either local or global changes to surface shape while retaining details of the scanned data.


Blockchain technology has the potential to resolve trust concerns in cross-organizational workflows and to reduce reliance on paper-based documents as trust anchors. Although these prospects are real, so is regulatory uncertainty. In particular, the reconciliation of blockchain with Europe's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is proving to be a significant challenge. We tackled this challenge with the German Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. Here, we explain how we used Action Research to guide the Federal Office in creating a GDPR-compliant blockchain solution for the German asylum procedure. Moreover, we explain the architecture of the Federal Office's solution and present two design principles for developing GDPRcompliant blockchain solutions for crossorganizational workflow management.


This thesis proposes that contemporary printmaking, at its most significant, marks the present through reconstructing pasts and anticipating futures. It argues this through examples in the field, occurring in contexts beyond the Euramerican (Europe and North America). The arguments revolve around how the practice of a number of significant artists in Japan, Australia and Thailand has generated conceptual and formal innovations in printmaking that transcend local histories and conventions, whilst paradoxically, also building upon them and creating new meanings. The arguments do not portray the relations between contemporary and traditional art as necessarily antagonistic but rather, as productively dialectical.

Furthermore, the case studies demonstrate that, in the 1980s and 1990s particularly, the studio practice of these printmakers was informed by other visual arts disciplines and reflected postmodern concerns. Departures from convention witnessed in these countries within the Asia-Pacific region shifted the field of the print into a heterogeneous and hybrid realm. The practitioners concerned (especially in Thailand) produced work that was more readily equated with performance and installation art than with printmaking per se. In Japan, the incursion of photography interrupted the decorative cast of printmaking and delivered it from a straightforward, craft-based aesthetic. In Australia, fixed notions of national identity were challenged by print practitioners through deliberate cultural rapprochements and technical contradictions (speaking across old and new languages).However time-honoured print methods were not jettisoned by any case study artists. Their re-alignment of the fundamental attributes of printmaking, in line with materialist formalism, is a core consideration of my arguments.

The artists selected for in-depth analysis from these three countries are all innovators whose geographical circumstances and creative praxis drew on local traditions whilst absorbing international trends. In their radical revisionism, they acknowledged the specificity of history and place, conditions of contingency and forces of globalisation. The transformational nature of their work during the late twentieth century connects it to the postmodern ethos and to a broader artistic and cultural nexus than has hitherto been recognised in literature on the print. Emerging from former guild-based practices, they ambitiously conceived their work to be part of a continually evolving visual arts vocabulary.

I argue in this thesis that artists from the Asia-Pacific region have historically broken with the hermetic and Euramerican focus that has generally characterised the field. Inadequate documentation and access to print activity outside the dominant centres of critical discourse imply that readings of postmodernism have been too limited in their scope of inquiry. Other locations offer complexities of artistic practice where re-alignments of customary boundaries are often the norm. By addressing innovative activity in Japan, Australia and Thailand, this thesis exposes the need for a more inclusive theoretical framework and wider global reach than currently exists for 'printmaking'.


A review of the original French edition of this book in the "American Journal of Sociology" hailed it as "the most finished product yet to emerge from the new (Marxist) school of French urban sociology... The aim of the book is nothing less than to reconceptualize the field of urban sociology. It is carried out in two stages: a critique of the literature of urban sociology (and urbanization) and an attempt to lay the Marxist bases for a reconstructed urban sociology."The problems facing the world's cities, whether problems of development or of decay, cannot be solved until they have been diagnosed. The race riots in Detroit, the shantytowns of Paris, the financial crisis of New York must not be seen in isolation. The mushrooming cities of the third world, demolition and urban sprawl at home are located in a network of economics, social welfare and power politics, and the decisions we are called upon to make elude us in a fog of ideology.This brilliant exposition of the function of the city in social, economic and symbolic terms illuminates the creation and structuring of space by action--administrative, productive and more immediately human. The interaction of environment and life-style, the complex of market forces and state policy against a background of traditional social practice is scrutinized with the aim of establishing concepts and research methods that will enable us to come to grips with the cities themselves and the way in which we view them.Castells draws on urban renewal in Paris, the English New Towns, the American megalopolis for concrete data in his empirical and theoretical investigation. In this English edition, a new Part V has been added on urban development in America. The chapters on the "pobladores" in Chile and the struggle of the FRAP in Quebec have been greatly extended and an Afterword traces the development of research in the past five years.


Nutch is an open source search engine that is gaining increasing popularity in the commercial world. The Nutch architecture leads itself to a wide range of parallelization techniques. Multiple backend servers can be used to both partition the corpus of search data, thus increasing the rate of queries serviced, and to increase the size of the search data while preserving the service rate. Alternatively, multiple search engines can operate in parallel, further increasing the query rate. In this paper, we analyze the performance and scalability of various configurations of Nutch. The configurations were implemented as part of the Commercial Scale Out project at IBM Research, and were used to investigate the applicability of scale-out architectures in commercial environments. We conclude that Nutch is highly scalable, with the different configurations behaving differently from a performance perspective.


To characterize summation-discrimination properties of the visual analyzer on rabbits under the conditions of photopic and scotopic adaptation, bioelectrical responses of the retina, optic tract, external geniculated body and visual cortex were recorded in response to intermittent photostimulation within the frequency range from 0.1 to 50 Hz and to pair flashes with intervals between them from 15 to 200 ms. The structures under study were demonstrated to be heterogenous as regards the capacities for temporary resolution of signals regardless of the fact that the differences revealed were relatively negligible. It was found that under photopic conditions, temporary discrimination was appreciably higher, the physiological intensity of stimulation being similar. Analysis of experimental material shows that the capacity for temporary resolution is determined not as much by temporary summation as by excitability dynamics.


Thousands of Nepalese girls are trafficked to India and other neighbouring countries every year, primarily for sex work and the majority return to Nepal after spending a years in sex trade. The sub-group of Nepalese girls who become involved in sex work via trafficking are the focus of this paper. The aim of this study was to increase understanding regarding the context of sex trafficking, the methods and means of trafficking, living conditions in brothels and survival strategies among trafficked girls.

We conducted 33 in-depth interviews in early 2013 with returned trafficking survivors (n=14) and policy-makers, people working in trafficking related NGOs/INGOs (n=19) in Nepal. All 14 trafficking survivors were recruited in Nepal through the NGO working on trafficking field.

The young girls trafficked from Nepal to India in this study were typically unmarried, illiterate and very young (8 to 14 years at the time of trafficking). The key methods of trafficking were false marriage, fake job offer, and abduction. Among the 14 respondents, some had spent one month and others nearly 5 years in Indian brothels. Respondents were either rescued, escaped or released by brothel owners. Four out of 14 were HIV positive. Most policy makers mentioned that poverty, unemployment and illiteracy are the causes behind the trafficking of young girls. The anti-trafficking interventions need to be considered at a) community level before movement has begun; b) urban centres which are both source and transitory centres for trafficking; c) trafficking level when girls are highly mobile and when they are in brothels; and d) return from trafficking as girls to move back into the community


Cu,Zn-superoxide dismutase (SOD1) is a protein involved in the antioxidant defense system of the body responsible for the dismutation of the superoxide anion. It contains two Cu and two Zn ions per molecule. As this protein is also involved in several diseases it is used in clinical diagnostics as a biomarker, which requires the accurate and reliable determination of SOD1. Therefore, a candidate reference measurement procedure for the quantification of this protein in human erythrocytes was developed using species-specific isotope dilution mass spectrometry (IDMS), a method giving results traceable to the International System of Units (SI). The measurement procedure was validated with regard to a metrological point of view. Commercially available SOD1 was thoroughly characterized to be used as a pure protein calibration standard in IDMS approaches. Furthermore, Cu and Zn labeled SOD1 was produced to be used as a spike material required for species-specific IDMS. Finally, SOD1 was quantified in human erythrocytes using both double and triple IDMS and a complete uncertainty budget for both approaches was estimated according to the Guide to the Expression of Uncertainty in Measurement (GUM). A calculated mass fraction of SOD1 with its associated expanded uncertainty of (63.94 0.93) mg g 1 (n 1⁄4 30) for double and (64.02 0.96) mg g 1 (n 1⁄4 30) for triple IDMS was obtained.


As big data capabilities have increased, so too has the potential for price discrimination. Price discrimination occurs when sellers offer goods and services at different prices to different consumers. Profiles of consumers can be created based on a variety of factors, such as their location, past purchases or behaviors online, or, more frequently, a large number offactors that, when combined, enables sellers to serve tailored prices based on differences between consumer profiles. In addition to these algorithmic forms of price discrimination, simpler methods are also in use, such as basing prices solely on the basis of a consumer's IP address.
This article aims to provide a comprehensive mapping of the boundaries of online price discrimination in Europe. While few legal provisions speak directly to online price discrimination or personalized pricing, a number of areas of law likely have a bearing on the extent to which price discrimination is legally permitted. As such, this article will examine competition law, consumer protection law, data protection law, and non-discrimination law in order to determine where online price discrimination may constitute noncompliance with one of the relevant provisions, as well as to denote where it appears that the framework is ill-equipped to adequately address the practice. Practical and sociological aspects relating to both online price discrimination and the application of the legal frameworks in these areas are also incorporated.


Speech-recognition thresholds (SRTs) were obtained in nine sensorineural hearing-impaired subjects wearing an adaptive-filter hearing aid under four separate listening conditions. The SRT was obtained with the filter in and out of the circuit in order to relate the effects of noise reduction to speech recognition performance. The noise level was held constant while the speech level varied (transformed up-down method). For the majority of the subjects tested, the activation of the noise-suppression circuit in the aid resulted in performance equivalent to or worse than that obtained without the circuit activated. For the group, a significant improvement (less than 0.05) in recognition was observed only in low-frequency noise competition.


Since the reports elucidating the sequence of four subtypes of muscarinic cholinergic receptors appeared, it has been clear that pharmacological approaches to the study of subtypes of these receptors are inadequate to selectively detect one subtype in the presence of the others. One methodology that can provide more selective reagents with which to study these subtypes is immunology. Thus, using the information on the primary sequence of these receptors available in the literature, rabbits were injected with an oligopeptide, CRKIPKRPGSVHRTPSRQ, conjugated to keyhole limpet hemocyanin. This oligopeptide (m1 C-terminal peptide) corresponds to the 17-amino acid sequence of the carboxyl terminus of a rat m1 muscarinic receptor. This portion of the amino acid sequence of the muscarinic receptor protein has been shown to be unique to the m1 receptor and has not been found in the other subtypes of the receptor thus far sequenced. The antisera (anti-m1 antisera) had high titer against the m1 C-terminal peptide in a solid phase radioimmunoassay. The anti-m1 antisera were shown to immunoprecipitate [3H] quinuclidinyl benzilate ([ 3H]QNB) binding activity solubilized from rat forebrain. [3H]Pirenzepine ([ 3H]PZ) has been shown to interact with a subset of [3H]QNB binding sites in forebrain and heart. The anti-m1 antisera were shown to immunoprecipitate [3H]PZ binding sites in cerebral cortex, hippocampus, and corpus striatum, areas believed to be rich in the m1 subtype of the muscarinic receptor. Although [3H]PZ binding activity was present in receptor preparations solubilized from heart, neither [3H]PZ- nor [3H]QNB-binding activities could be immunoprecipitated from this tissue using the anti-m1 antisera. A monoclonal antibody raised against the porcine atrial muscarinic receptor was shown to immunoprecipitate both [3H]PZ- and [3H]QNB-binding activities solubilized from rat heart, but only [3H]QNB-binding activity could be immunoprecipitated from forebrain using this antibody. Immunoprecipitation of [3H]PZ- and [3H]QNB-binding activity by anti-m1 antisera could be inhibited by the m1 C-terminal peptide. Peptides corresponding to the C-terminal portions of the rat m3 and m4 muscarinic receptor were not inhibitory in the immunoprecipitation assay. This study provides further evidence for subtypes of muscarinic receptors in rat tissues and supports the hypothesis that receptor subtypes defined using PZ can be further subclassified on the basis of differences in primary structure.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 400 WORDS)


In this paper, a linear dual-polarized two-element microstrip antenna array is experimentally presented for broadband diversity applications within the IMT-2000 band. Using a /spl plusmn/45/spl deg/ polarization scheme, each patch is fed by two orthogonal microstrip lines, above which an additional square patch is concentrically stacked in order to increase the operating bandwidth. The impedance and radiation characteristics of the optimized configuration are measured. In order to investigate the diversity performance of the array, the far-field coupling, output power correlation as well as the diversity gain are measured at the center frequency in a non-fading channel.


This study was conducted to evaluate antimicrobial activity of orthodontic elastomeric chains (OECs) coated with chlorhexidine (CHX) hexametaphosphate (HMP) nanoparticles and its effect on force decay. OECs were coated with CHX-HMP-5 (5 mM CHX and HMP), CHX-HMP-1 (1 mM CHX and HMP) nanoparticle colloidal solutions, CHX-5 (5 mM CHX) and CHX-1 (1 mM CHX) solutions. Release of CHX from coated OECs was evaluated over 28 days. Antimicrobial activity of the eluate collected on day 1 was tested against Streptococcus mutans and Lactobacillus rhamnosus by measuring the zone of inhibition after 4 days. OECs were observed by scanning electron microscope (SEM) to observe surface characteristics comparing: (1) uncoated and coated OECs and (2) before and after release of CHX. Force decay of OECs were measured over 28 days. SEM analysis showed that OECs were coated with nanoparticles. OECs coated with CHX-HMP-5 and CHX-HMP-1 released CHX over 28 days. The eluate from the coated OECs produced zones of inhibition after day 4 towards S. mutans and L. rhamnosus. Both CHX-HMP nanoparticle coated OEC released CHX over a period of 28 days that was capable of inhibiting the growth of S. mutans and L. rhamnosus. For all groups, the largest mean loss of force occurred over the first 24 h, followed by a relative plateau. All groups maintained >50% of the initial mean force over entire experiment of 28 days. This study showed that OECs can be coated with CXH-HMP nanoparticles that continuously elute the antimicrobial for extended periods. The coatings did not alter the force decay of OECs. Use of such coating on OECs can provide antibacterial activity to aid in the reduction of biofilm buildup and prevention of white spot lesions. This approach offers promising clinical applications.


In order to solve the problem of mis-operation of transformer differential relay owing to the inrush current, internal faults and inrush current must be discriminate effectively. In this paper, a novel approach of identification between inrush current and internal faults based on hyperbolic S-transform (HST) which is a very powerful tool for nonstationary signal analysis giving the information of transient currents both in time and in frequency domains is presented. The signal is transformed to phase space by using HST and the features are detected. It is found that the time-frequency contours in case of inrush current are different from that in case of internal faults. The results obtained by using HST and discrete wavelet transform (DWT) were compared. Comparison results indicate that the time-frequency localization characteristics are more distinct in ST domain, and HST has strong capability in noise reduction. The spectral energy and standard deviation from the HST of signal are computed, classification of inrush current and internal faults is done by BP neural networks. Simulation results indicate that this technique is effective and feasible.


This thesis explores the relationship between what investors say on online social media and price movements in financial markets. Recent studies have applied techniques from the natural language processing literature to distil the content of blogs, micro-blogs and user generated content sites to a 'sentiment' measure, pertaining to whether the content is good or bad for a given stock. Sentiment is then measured over a time series and compared to stock price returns. There is general agreement in the literature that a relationship between online sentiment and returns exists, but the strength, sign and timing of this relationship vary across studies. In this thesis I argue that this type of sign-strength-timing variability is an inherent part of the sentiment-price relationship. My rationale for this is that existing sentiment metrics miss important contextual information that can significantly alter the interpretation of a piece of text. The fact that sentiment measures lack this type of contextual awareness means that the relationship between sentiment and price will vary based on factors that are latent from the sentiment measure. Based on this argument I make three key contributions in this thesis: firstly, I document significant evidence that sign, strength and timing variability are a characteristic feature of the online textual sentiment-price relationship. Secondly, I develop a novel time series analysis methodology, signal diffusion mapping (SDM), that is capable of modelling and forecasting effectively based on relationships that are characterised by this type of variability. Third, I show that when appropriately modelled using SDM, it is possible to use the sentiment signal to forecast prices. Using this methodology I document that the sentiment-price relationship is much stronger than has previously been assumed in the literature. I go on to show it is possible to develop trading strategies based on SDM that generate excess returns once reasonable costs have been accounted for. I conclude that there is economically meaningful financial information in online social media, and that a characteristic of this information with respect to prices is variability. Modelling variability more accurately using SDM opens the possibility for using online information directly in asset pricing models or trading strategies.


Lymphocyte trafficking is orchestrated by chemokine and sphingosine 1-phosphate (S1P) receptors that enable homing and egress from secondary lymphoid organs (SLO). These receptors undergo rapid internalization and plasma membrane recycling to calibrate cellular responses to local chemoattractants. Circulating chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) cells display an abnormal increase in the surface levels of the homing receptors CCR7 and CXCR4 concomitant with low S1P receptor 1 (S1P1) expression. In this study, we investigated the role of receptor recycling on CXCR4/CCR7 surface levels in CLL cells and addressed the impact of quantitative alterations of these receptors and S1P1 on the ability of leukemic cells to accumulate in SLOs. We show that recycling accounts, to a major extent, for the high levels of surface CXCR4/CCR7 on CLL cells. In addition, increased expression of these receptors, together with S1P1 deficiency, is detectable not only in circulating leukemic cells, but also in SLOs of CLL patients with lymphoadenopathy. We further provide evidence that ibrutinib, a Btk inhibitor that promotes mobilization of leukemic cells from SLOs, normalizes the imbalance between CXCR4/CCR7 and S1P1. Taken together, our results highlight the relevance of chemokine and S1P receptor recycling in CLL pathogenesis and clinical outcome.


Abstract Purpose: In the framework of RENEB, several biodosimetry exercises were conducted analyzing different endpoints. Among them, the analysis of translocations is considered the most useful method for retrospective biodosimetry due to the relative stability of their frequency with post irradiation time. The aim of this study was to harmonize the accuracy of translocation-based biodosimetry within the RENEB consortium. Materials and methods: An initial telescoring exercise analyzing FISH metaphase images was done to harmonize chromosome aberration descriptions. Then two blind intercomparison exercises (IE) were performed, by sending irradiated blood samples to each partner. Samples were cultured and stained by each partner using their standard protocol and translocation frequency was used to produce dose estimates. Results: The coefficient of variation in the 1st IE (CV = 0.34) was higher than in the 2nd IE (CV = 0.16 and 0.23 in the two samples analyzed), for the genomic frequency of total translocations. Z-score analysis revealed that eight out of 10 and 17 out of 20 dose estimates were satisfactory in the 1st and 2nd IE, respectively. Conclusions: The results obtained indicate that, despite the problems identified in few partners, which can be corrected, the RENEB consortium is able to carry out retrospective biodosimetry analyzing the frequency of translocations by FISH.


This paper addresses the narrative of a Muslim woman who struggles to negotiate her rights, identity and sense of belonging in an American diaspora space. Despite the
difficulties and obstacles of being regarded as an "other" in her adopted homeland, Khadra Shamy, the protagonist in Mohja Kahf's The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, chooses to
maintain her Islamic identity with a new interpretation of her faith while attempting to build a hybrid identity as an American Muslim. The narrative implies that not all Muslims
interpret their religion in the same way and that Muslims identify themselves with Islam to differing degrees. Hence, the media and critics of Islam clearly distort social reality when they depict all Muslims as extremists and all Muslim women as abject individuals. In addition, the employment of Islamic feminism in the analysis of the novel is an approach that can help enhance our knowledge concerning problems connected to the patriarchy that
are pertinent in many Muslim communities, including ones in the West. The diaspora space in America has become a platform for Muslim women to gain more freedom, particularly the freedom to negotiate their rights and identities and to reinterpret religious teachings
in a new light, a freedom that they may not be able to achieve in some Muslim-majority countries.


A large number of simulations have been performed to reveal how the occurrence of freak waves on deep water depends on the group and crest lengths for fixed steepness. It is found that there is a sharp qualitative transition between short- and long-crested sea, for a crest length of approximately ten wavelengths. For short crest lengths the statistics of freak waves deviates little from Gaussian and their occurrence is independent of group length (or Benjamin–Feir index, BFI). For long crest lengths the statistics of freak waves is strongly non-Gaussian and the group length (or BFI) is a good indicator of increased freak wave activity.