Introduction Paederia foetida contains iridoid glycosides which has anti hyperglycemic effect. Purpose The purpose of this study was to know the effect of sembukan's leaves extract administration to blood glucose level decrement in diabetes mellitus animal model and compared it to glibenclamide. Method This research was a experimental laboratory which separated post test only group design. The subjects were 25 male mice (Mus musculus) aged 3 months with the average of 28.8±4.2 g in weight and were divided into 5 groups, control group K2,K3,K4,5 subsequently given 10 mg/kgBW glibenclamide, 125 mg/kgBW, 250 mg/kgBW and 500 mg/kgBW sembukan's leaves extract . Subjects were inducted with 40 mg/kgBW streptozotocin for 5 days. 2 hours after the treatment, oral glucose tolerance was done. Data were processed using One Way Annova and LSD testing with SPSS program 20. Result The result of the research showed that Paederia foetida 125 mg/kgBW gives the highest effect in decreasing the blood glucose level compared to the 250 mg/kgBW and 500 mg/kgBW and higher compared to glibenclamide (p=0.026). Conslusion In conclusion, sembukan's leaf extract could decrease blood glucose level in diabetes mellitus's animal with the best decrement potential on 125 mg/kgBW and still higher compared to the glibenclamide.


This paper presents a novel receiver design from signal processing viewpoint for direct-sequence code-division multiple access (DS-CDMA) systems under multipath fading channels. A robust adaptive decision-feedback equalizer (DFE) is developed by using optimal filtering technique via minimizing the mean-square error (MSE). The multipath fading channels are modeled as tapped-delay-line filters, and the tap coefficients are described as Rayleigh distributions in order to imitate the frequency-selective fading channel. Then, a robust Kalman filtering algorithm is used to estimate the channel responses for the adaptation of the proposed DFE receiver under the situation of partially known channel statistics. The feedforward and feedback filters are designed by using not only the estimated channel responses but the uncertainties and error covariance of channel estimation as well. As shown in the computer simulations, the proposed adaptive DFE receiver is robust against the estimation errors and modeling dynamics of the channels. Hence, it is very suitable for receiver design in data transmissions through multipath fading channels encountered in most wireless communication systems.


Background & Aims : Mediastinal masses can occur at any age, but prevalence of them differs according to age. Studies show that the prevalence of malignant masses has increased recently. The aim of this study was evaluation of frequency of mediastinal masses according to the location, pathologic findings, and ages of them. Materials & Methods: This retrospective and descriptive study was done with pathological review of 87 patients' documents that had undergone surgery for a mediastinal masses in Emam Khomeini Hospital of Urmia. Results: 53 patients were male and 34 of them were female. The frequency of tumor location were 52 cases (59.8%) in the anterior mediastinum, 13 (14.9%), more than one site, 11 cases (12.6%) posterior Mediastinum, 7 (8%) the upper mediastinum and 4 (4.6%) were in the middle mediastinum. The frequency of tumor pathology included 30 lymphomas (34.5%), Thymoma 8 (9.2%), germ cell tumor 6 (6.8%) and 2 (2.3%) neuroendocrine, the remained 29 (33.3%) patients hadother pathology. Differences between women and men in the type of tumors werestatistically significant. Neuroendocrine tumor in male and germ cell tumor in female was not reported. Conclusion: Anterior mediastinal tumors (47 cases) in order of frequency were included lymphoma (24 cases), Thymoma (7 cases), 5 cases of germ cell tumors and 11 patients with other pathology (benign lesions,metastasis,..). Middle mediastinal tumors (4 cases) were included lymphomas (1case), and 3 had otherpathgology. Posterior mediastinal tumors (9 cases) are included neuroendocrine tumors (2 cases) and 7 patients had other pathologies. Upper mediastinal tumors (5 cases) were included lymphoma (1case), and 4 had other pathology


The physics of instabilities in the precursor of relativistic collisionless shocks is of broad importance in high energy astrophysics, because these instabilities build up the shock, control the particle acceleration process and generate the magnetic fields in which the accelerated particles radiate. Two crucial parameters control the micro-physics of these shocks: the magnetization of the ambient medium and the Lorentz factor of the shock front; as of today, much of this parameter space remains to be explored. In the present paper, we report on a new instability upstream of electron-positron relativistic shocks and we argue that this instability shapes the micro-physics at moderate magnetization levels and/or large Lorentz factors. This instability is seeded by the electric current carried by the accelerated particles in the shock precursor as they gyrate around the background magnetic field. The compensation current induced in the background plasma leads to an unstable configuration, with the appearance of charge neutral filaments carrying a current of the same polarity, oriented along the perpendicular current. This ``current-driven filamentation'' instability grows faster than any other instability studied so far upstream of relativistic shocks, with a growth rate comparable to the plasma frequency. Furthermore, the compensation of the current is associated with a slow-down of the ambient plasma as it penetrates the shock precursor (as viewed in the shock rest frame). This slow-down of the plasma implies that the ``current driven filamentation'' instability can grow for any value of the shock Lorentz factor, provided the magnetization \sigma <~ 10^{-2}. We argue that this instability explains the results of recent particle-in-cell simulations in the mildly magnetized regime.


An approach to robotics called layered evolution and merging features from the subsumption architecture into evolutionary robotics is presented, and its advantages are discussed. This approach is used to construct a layered controller for a simulated robot that learns which light source to approach in an environment with obstacles. The evolvability and performance of layered evolution on this task is compared to (standard) monolithic evolution, incremental and modularised evolution. To corroborate the hypothesis that a layered controller performs at least as well as an integrated one, the evolved layers are merged back into a single network. On the grounds of the test results, it is argued that layered evolution provides a superior approach for many tasks, and it is suggested that this approach may be the key to scaling up evolutionary robotics.


Post-tensioned concrete bridge decks have been in service in Ontario for more than 30 years. Many of such bridge deck have been operating without any waterproofing/asphalt protection from their initial construction. Concerns currently exist as to the condition of the prestressing cables in the grouted ducts, particularly in the negative moment regions where the cables are closest to the deck surface. Deterioration of post-tensioned bridge decks due to prestress cable corrosion is matter of considerable concern since the repair or replacement is proved to be a costly process. As Ontario bridge infrastructure enters the era of maintenance, rehabilitation and replacement, there is an urgent need for investigating non-destructive inspection methodologies or procedure to assess the conditions of the grouted ducts and cables inside without invasive concrete work involving major concrete removal to expose the ducts for visual inspection. As such, the main objectives of this research were to (i) conduct state-of-the-art and state-of-practice review on the available non-destructive testing (NDT) techniques; (ii) conduct laboratory testing on simulated bridge deck segments with grout-encased prestressing cables to evaluate promising candidate method identified from the literature review that may be applicable to detect voids in the ducts, cable fracture or corrosion in post-tensioned decks; and (iii) propose a remedial procedure to fill the detected voids with grouting materials. Eight concrete specimens were caste to investigate the applicability of selected NDT methods on locating the reinforcing steel bars, ducts, corrosion in cables and voids. These methods were (i) Ground Penetration Radar ; (ii) Impact-Echo ; and (iii) Half-cell Potential. Also, Remedial procedure using vacuum grouting was experienced to fill the detected voids.


Engineering critical assessment (ECA) is an evaluation procedure for structures with flaws and has been widely applied for assessing pipeline integrity. The standards for structural integrity assessment, including BS 7910, involve stress-based ECA, and they are known to produce overly conservative results. Therefore, strain-based ECA has been recently developed as an alternative approach. One of the effective methods for improving the accuracy of strain-based ECA is the reference strain method. However, only a limited number of studies have applied this method to welded pipelines. Therefore, a numerical analysis based on strain-based ECA was performed for girth-welded joints with a circumferentially oriented internal surface crack. Particular attention was given to the strength mismatch effects. The equivalent stress–strain curve in BS7910 was used to reflect the strength mismatch effects in the reference strain. The results of the proposed method were validated with the results of a finite element analysis (FEA) in terms of the J-integral. Previous methods and the proposed method exhibit a reasonable correlation of the J-integral in the case of over-matching (OM). In the under-matching (UM) cases, while the previous procedures tended to underestimate or excessively overestimate the elastic-plastic energy release rate in comparison with the FEA, the proposed method evaluated the J-integral of pipelines with sufficient accuracy.


Abstract The use of incentives to encourage individuals to adopt 'healthier' behaviours is an increasingly popular instrument in health policy. Much of the literature has been critical of 'negative' incentives, often due to concerns about equality; 'positive' incentives, however, have largely been welcomed as an instrument for the improvement of population health and possibly the reduction of health inequalities. The aim of this paper is to provide a more systematic assessment of the use of incentives from the perspective of equality. The paper begins with an overview of existing and proposed incentive schemes. I then suggest that the distinction between 'positive' and 'negative' incentives – or 'carrots' and 'sticks' – is of limited use in distinguishing those incentive schemes that raise concerns of equality from those that do not. The paper assesses incentive schemes with respect to two important considerations of equality: equality of access and equality of outcomes. While our assessment of incentive schemes will, ultimately, depend on various empirical facts, the paper aims to advance the debate by identifying some of the empirical questions we need to ask. The paper concludes by considering a number of trade-offs and caveats relevant to the assessment of incentive schemes.


This study believes that one of the most ignored areas in studies pertaining to issues involving university students is their satisfaction contact with hostel physical environment. Even, in Private Funding Initiative (PFI) concept, developers pay little concern on hostel built environment as compared to commercial properties. Therefore, the hostel occupants' satisfaction and their sensations interaction with indoor environment were not fully discovered. Thus, this study was designed to explore these areas with three primary objectives; identifying the dimension of facilities performance, examining the significant influence of facilities performance, and identifying the least and most significance dimension to hostel occupants' satisfaction. Data were obtained from questionnaire distributed randomly to a sample of 315 respondents from PFI's hostel blocks in UiTM Puncak Alam campus, Selangor. The data comprised four sections measure the Indoor Environment (IE), Surrounding Facilities (SF), satisfaction and demographic profiles. These were analysed using frequencies, exploratory factor analysis (EFA), and multiple regression analysis. Principal component analysis with VARIMAX rotation in EFA indicated variation in proposed-structural component where IE formed and extracted into six sub-dimensions, and SF factored 10 subdimensions. Later, the sub-dimensions were renamed in accordance to its characteristic that underlying the factor. Three items in IE and four items in SF were collapsed in structural dimensionality. EFA data were then performing the multiple regression analysis and resulted to medium-high correlation for both dimensions. ANOVA regression test indicated both models were fits for the analysis. The total variance explained 42% in IE and 60% in SF. Of six items in IE, only five items were identified significant to be included in the model, meanwhile, health and safety are the greatest influence and most importance on hostel occupants' satisfaction. Six items out of 10 were seen significant in SF and internet connection placed the greatest influence on hostel occupants' satisfaction. This study requires extension research that in other settings to generalize the result.


BACKGROUND
Results of previous studies have shown that piroxicam, a cyclooxygenase-1-2 inhibitor, improves the strength of healing ligaments, whereas celecoxib, a cyclooxygenase-2 inhibitor, impairs ligament healing.

HYPOTHESIS
The selective cyclooxygenase-1 inhibitor, SC-560, will improve the strength of ligament healing in an in vivo rat model.

STUDY DESIGN
Controlled laboratory study.

METHODS
Eighty male Sprague-Dawley rats underwent surgical transection of their medial collateral ligament. Postoperatively, 20 rats were given SC-560 at a low dose and 20 at a high dose for the first 6 days of recovery; the other 40 received a normal diet. The animals were sacrificed 14 days later, and both the injured and uninjured ligaments were mechanically tested to failure in tension.

RESULTS
No significant differences in the strength of injured ligaments were found between drug and placebo treatment. However, the contralateral uninjured ligaments in the SC-560-treated groups failed at 27% higher energy and 22% higher load.

CONCLUSIONS
This cyclooxygenase-1 inhibitor did not improve the strength of ligament healing but did significantly improve the strength of the contralateral uninjured ligament.

CLINICAL RELEVANCE
A pure cyclooxygenase-1 inhibitor is probably not indicated as a positive influence on ligament healing but might provide benefits in ligament injury prevention.


Abstract Using in-situ transmission electron microscopy (TEM) with ion irradiation, we investigated the microstructural changes in silicon carbide nanowhiskers (SiC NWs) which were used as a model system for nanoporous SiC. Irradiations were carried out using 6 keV He ions at temperatures between 500 and 1000°C and doses up to 20 dpa. These results are compared with the irradiation effects in SiC thin foils under the same conditions to establish differences in their response to radiation damage. The irradiation temperature played a significant role in the evolution of different microstructures; at 500°C, small defect clusters were observed in the NWs together with a segregation of carbon at the surface of the NWs mapped using energy-filtered TEM (EFTEM). At 800°C, small He bubbles (2–4 nm in diameter) were observed in the NW matrix while He platelets and bubble discs formed in the foils. At 1000°C, several changes were observed in the NWs including bubbles at twin boundaries, voids and oxygen-rich precipitates. The large surface area to volume ratio enhances defect recombination supressing the defect density in the SiC NWs compared to the foils indicating high radiation tolerance; however, elemental segregation and precipitation may limit its application in advanced nuclear reactors.


Women Activating Agency in Academia seeks to create and expand safe spaces for scholarly, professional and personal stories and assemblages of agency. It provides readers with the opportunity to connect with the strategies women are using to navigate academe and the core values, linked to trust, relationship, wellbeing and ethics of care, they live by. The collection offers the stories of women academics from around the globe and across disciplines and showcases their efforts to meaningfully listen and converse in order to resist self-audit and diminished identities. Reflections come from a range of responsive, personal and aesthetic techniques, including writing groups, guided autobiography, auto-ethnography, collective activism and slow scholarship. Chapters engage with themes and ideas such as agency, neoliberalism, ontological security, androcentricity, identity and collegial support, which manifest in unique ways for female academics. The focus in this volume is what really matters to women in the academy, as they share their efforts to 'be' themselves in their work, to 'care for themselves and others' and to 'count what isn't counted'. It aims to prove how collaborative storytelling and discussion can empower female academics to preserve and achieve these ambitions.


SUMMARY A three dimensional least-squares Kirchhoff migration (LSM) is developed in the prestack plane-wave domain to increase the quality of migration images and the computational efficiency. Due to the limitation of current 3D marine acquisition geometries, a cylindrical-wave encoding is adopted for the narrow azimuth streamer data. To account for the mispositioning of reflectors due to errors in the velocity model, a regularized LSM is devised so that each plane-wave or cylindrical-wave gather gives rise to an individual migration image, and a regularization term is included to encourage the similarities between the migration images of similar encoding schemes. Both synthetic and field results show that: 1) plane-wave or cylindrical-wave encoding LSM can achieve both computational and IO saving, compared to shot-domain LSM, however, plane-wave LSM is still about 5 times more expensive than plane-wave migration; 2) the regularized LSM is more robust compared to LSM with one reflectivity model common for all the plane-wave or cylindrical-wave gathers.


Some numeric results are presented from a distribution-free analysis of how many design patterns to sample from each of two classes, for stationary, discrete-measurement pattern classifiers. A table of design sample size partitions is presented, that maximizes the mean accuracy, given the total number of design patterns and the prior class probabilities. The maximization is also over the measurement complexity (total number of resolvable measurement values). It is shown that the optimal sample size partitions are biased, in that fewer patterns should be taken of the more probable class than is implied by the prior class probabilities. An insensitivity to nonoptimal partitions is exhibited, which appears to be similar to that seen in other Bayesian decision problems.


Kidney cancer accounts for approximately 2% of new cancers and conventional treatment with nephrectomy followed by IL-2 or IFN-alpha treatment does not provide long-term survival benefit in many patients. Increased understanding of the pathophysiology of renal cell carcinoma has prompted the development of targeted therapies for patients with this disease, including sunitinib. This paper reviews the most recent efficacy and safety data for sunitinib, as well as currently ongoing and planned studies for this receptor tyrosine kinase inhibitor. Results from a large-scale, long-term, Phase III trial have established sunitinib as the standard of care for first-line treatment of patients with advanced renal cell carcinoma, and it is now the reference standard against which other therapies for this cancer should be evaluated.


Annexation of local governments is a contentious topic. Litigation of annexation often addresses important constitutional provisions, such as property rights, federalism, limitations to police powers, equality and, more specifically, the Voting Rights Act. The United States Constitution is famously silent about local governments. In light of this omission and considering individual constitutional rights, would it make a difference to have local governments in the constitutional text? And to whom would it matter the most? This research developed an original dataset to answer those questions. This article focuses on annexation as proxy for local powers, and it compares the U.S. federalism scheme with the Brazilian unprecedented experience of leveling local governments alongside the states and the federal union in the Constitution of 1988. This research is unique in its comparison of the reasoning of the U.S. Supreme Court (U.S.S.C.) and its Brazilian counterpart, the Supremo Tribunal Federal (S.T.F.), with regard to annexation laws. The main contributions of this study to the literature are straightforward. First, it advances the literature on constitutional design by focusing on local governments, instead of states and the federal union. Second, and related to such an advancement, this paper departs from traditional federalism comparisons which were restricted to developed countries. Third, this research provides evidence contradicting previous claims that the U.S. constitutional omission of local governments was a failure of constitutional design relating to future matters. In addition, this study analyzes the consequences of the Brazilian constitutional design. This article concludes that there is no evidence supporting the proposition that the inclusion of municipalities as federal actors is necessarily superior to the current comparative trend that uses the dual spheres system of the U.S. federalism as a paradigm. Therefore, this research leads to unexpected results and provides evidence that contradicts the understanding of the U.S. constitutional omission of local governments as a failure of constitutional design.


A simple and effective statistical scheme for estimating river discharges on the River Niger has been derived using catchment rainfall data. Observed station annual average discharges at two locations were correlated with averaged annual rainfall data in recent years (1951–2000). A comparison of the estimated discharge and the observed discharge showed good agreement. The upstream station of Gaya on the border of Niger and Nigeria, with more extensive records, was used to validate the technique. A more limited discharge record at Lokoja, at the focal point of the Niger Delta, is used to reconstruct the discharge over 1951–2000. Despite the extensive dam construction on the Upper Niger during this period the main determinant of flow into the Delta has remained upstream rainfall. The relationship between the past rainfall data and river discharges at Lokoja are used to predict flows in the 2070s using rainfall values derived from various scenarios of a set of coupled climate model simulations. While there is uncertainty even over the sign of future change in west African rainfall, the river flow inferred from those models predicting increased rainfall over the coming century is at a level consistent with rapid change in channel position, as observed during the 1990s. This technique could be applied more widely to forecast future discharges from major river systems. Copyright © 2007 Royal Meteorological Society


In this talk, I will address the problem of grounding linguistic analysis in control applications, such as game playing and robot navigation. We assume access to natural language documents that describe the desired behavior of a control algorithm (e.g., game strategy guides). Our goal is to demonstrate that knowledge automatically extracted from such documents can dramatically improve performance of the target application. First, I will present a reinforcement learning algorithm for learning to map natural language instructions to executable actions. This technique has enabled automation of tasks that until now have required human participation --- for example, automatically configuring software by consulting how-to guides. Next, I will present a Monte-Carlo search algorithm for game playing that incorporates information from game strategy guides. In this framework, the task of text interpretation is formulated as a probabilistic model that is trained based on feedback from Monte-Carlo search. When applied to the Civilization strategy game, a language-empowered player outperforms its traditional counterpart by a significant margin.


Colorectal cancer is a leading cause of cancer in Western countries. Surgery remains the only way to cure it. Recent trials led to the general acceptance of adjuvant chemotherapy in Dukes C cancer by identifying bolus 5FU and leucovin during 6 months (5 days monthly) as the current standard. The role of adjuvant chemotherapy remains questionable in Dukes B2 (stage II) colon cancer, in rectal cancer and after curative resection of liver metastases. The development of total mesorectum excision (TME) technique has dramatically resulted in improving local recurrence control and will be the standard in rectal cancer surgery; preoperative irradiation is widely used in Europe for stage II and III rectal cancer but its definite place and its optimal regimen await further assessment as well as the role of adjuvant chemotherapy in rectal cancer. New chemotherapeutic combinations based on new effective agents in colorectal cancer such as CPT-11 and oxaliplatine have been currently used for downstaging liver metastases initially unresectable. This new approach, combined with the development of local ablative therapies such as cryotherapy and radiofrequency allows curative strategies in a significant number of patients primarily unfit for surgical resection of liver mets. The present paper aims to review the different aspect of (neo)adjuvant therapies in the multimodal curative management of colorectal cancers.


Background and aims Despite significant improvements in targeted therapies for patients with advanced gastric cancer (GC), the prognosis of those patients remains poor. This study explores the expression and clinicopathological significance of human epidermal growth factor receptor 2, 3 and 4 (HER2, HER3, HER4) in GC, in order to find more prognostic biomarkers of GC and putative targets of therapy. Methods Immunohistochemistry was performed for HER2, HER3 and HER4 in 498 patients with GC using tissue microarray. Correlations between the receptor expression and clinicopathological features, as well as prognosis of the patients were statistically analysed. Results The high expression rates of HER2, HER3 and HER4 proteins in the patients were 8.6% (43/498), 20.7% (103/498) and 13.3% (66/498), respectively. High expression of HER2 and HER3 was correlated with proximal GC of the cardia (p<0.05). High expression of HER3 was associated with the tumour depth, tumour node metastasis (TNM) stage and lymph node metastasis (p<0.05). High expression of HER4 was associated with TNM stage (p<0.05) only. According to a regression model, high expression of HER3 was significantly associated with patients' poor survival (p=0.004). High expression rates of HER2, HER3 and HER4 were correlated with each other, but they were all associated merely with histologically intestinal-type adenocarcinoma of GC (p<0.05). Conclusions HER3 is correlated with the malignant biological behaviour of GC. Expression of HER3 is a significant predictor of poor survival in GC. Therefore, the development of HER3-targeted agents may provide new possibilities in the treatment of GC.


In this paper we provide a unified framework for consensus tracking of leader-follower multi-agent systems with measurement noises based on sampled data with a general sampling delay. First, a stochastic bounded consensus tracking protocol based on sampled data with a general sampling delay is presented by employing the delay decomposition technique. Then, necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for guaranteeing leader-follower multi-agent systems with measurement noises and a time-varying reference state to achieve mean square bounded consensus tracking. The obtained results cover no sampling delay, a small sampling delay and a large sampling delay as three special cases. Last, simulations are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.


Objective: The aim of this study is to develop an on-scene injury severity prediction (OSISP) algorithm for truck occupants using only accident characteristics that are feasible to assess at the scene of the accident. The purpose of developing this algorithm is to use it as a basis for a field triage tool used in traffic accidents involving trucks. In addition, the model can be valuable for recognizing important factors for improving triage protocols used in Sweden and possibly in other countries with similar traffic environments and prehospital procedures. Methods: The scope is adult truck occupants involved in traffic accidents on Swedish public roads registered in the Swedish Traffic Accident Data Acquisition (STRADA) database for calendar years 2003 to 2013. STRADA contains information reported by the police and medical data on injured road users treated at emergency hospitals. Using data from STRADA, 2 OSISP multivariate logistic regression models for deriving the probability of severe injury (defined here as having an Injury Severity Score [ISS] > 15) were implemented for light and heavy trucks; that is, trucks with weight up to 3,500 kg and ⩾ 16,500 kg, respectively. A 10-fold cross-validation procedure was used to estimate the performance of the OSISP algorithm in terms of the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). Results: The rate of belt use was low, especially for heavy truck occupants. The OSISP models developed for light and heavy trucks achieved cross-validation AUC of 0.81 and 0.74, respectively. The AUC values obtained when the models were evaluated on all data without cross-validation were 0.87 for both light and heavy trucks. The difference in the AUC values with and without use of cross-validation indicates overfitting of the model, which may be a consequence of relatively small data sets. Belt use stands out as the most valuable predictor in both types of trucks; accident type and age are important predictors for light trucks. Conclusions: The OSISP models achieve good discriminating capability for light truck occupants and a reasonable performance for heavy truck occupants. The prediction accuracy may be increased by acquiring more data. Belt use was the strongest predictor of severe injury for both light and heavy truck occupants. There is a need for behavior-based safety programs and/or other means to encourage truck occupants to always wear a seat belt.


Estimates of the benefits of environmental improvement, usually a nonmarket commodity, can be a valuable part of the information base for economically efficient environmental decision making. The objective of this paper is to review the literature of one class of nonmarket valuation methodologies based on observed consumption behavior subsumed under the term "travel cost demand models." Relative to travel cost demand models, we examine policy issues and underlying concepts focusing on choice theory and welfare evaluation. In addition, we identify major related empirical issues including demand specification, data problems, demand estimation, and welfare measurement. Unanswered questions may contribute to a research agenda.


You cannot know the contents of a memory until after you have actually retrieved it. This paper considers the implications of this straightforward observation upon the psychological process of preference construction. We show that this constraint renders observers with random access memory susceptible to tail risks. We show that this difficulty can be rectified by permitting observers to weight memory retrieval for such observations, that outcome utility cannot be used for this purpose, but information-theoretic surprise can serve as a useful proxy for it. Using two novel experiments, we present evidence in support of our account. With the first, we show that humans find surprising experiences easier to remember. With the second, we show that surprising experiences in the past have a greater influence on future decisions than is statistically warranted. This twofold demonstration substantiates a psychologically plausible account for the origin of subjective probability distortions.


Stripe-like compact assemblies of tin-doped indium oxide (ITO) colloidal nanocrystals (NCs) are fabricated by stop-and-go convective self-assembly (CSA). Systematic evaluation of the electron transport mechanisms in these systems is carried out by varying the length of carboxylate ligands protecting the NCs: butanoate (C4), octanoate (C8) and oleate (C18). The interparticle edge-to-edge distance L0, along with a number of carbon atoms in the alkyl chain of the coating ligand, are deduced from small-angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) measurements and exhibit a linear relationship with a slope of 0.11 nm per carbon pair unit. Temperature-dependent resistance characteristics are analyzed using several electron transport models: Efros–Shklovskii variable range hopping (ES-VRH), inelastic cotunneling (IC), regular island array and percolation. The analysis indicated that the first two models (ES-VRH and IC) fail to explain the observed behavior, and that only simple activated transport takes place in these systems under the experimental conditions studied (T = 300 K to 77 K). Related transport parameters were then extracted using the regular island array and percolation models. The effective tunneling decay constant βeff of the ligands and the Coulomb charging energy EC are found to be around 5.5 nm−1 and 25 meV, respectively, irrespective of ligand lengths. The theoretical tunneling decay constant β calculated using the percolation model is in the range 9 nm−1. Electromechanical tests on the ITO nanoparticle assemblies indicate that their sensitivities are as high as ∼30 and remain the same regardless of ligand lengths, which is in agreement with the constant effective βeff extracted from regular island array and percolation models.


This study assessed the energy budget for juvenile Atlantic Sea Scallop, Placopecten magellanicus, during a natural drop in temperature (15.6°C to 5.8°C) over an 8-week time period during the fall at three different enrichment levels of carbon dioxide (CO2). Every 2 weeks, individuals were sampled for ecophysiological measurements of feeding activity, respiration rate (RR) and excretion rate (ER) to enable the calculation of scope for growth (SFG) and atomic oxygen:nitrogen ratios (O:N). In addition, 36 individuals per treatment were removed for shell height, dry tissue weight (DTW) and dry shell weight (DSW). We found a significant decrease in feeding rates as CO2 increased. Those rates also were significantly affected by temperature, with highest feeding at 9.4°C. No significant CO2 effect was observed for catabolic energy processes (RR and ER); however, these rates did increase significantly with temperature. The O:N ratio was not significantly affected by CO2, but was significantly affected by temperature. There was a significant interaction between CO2 and temperature for ER and the O:N ratio, with low CO2 levels resulting in a U-shaped response that was not sustained as CO2 levels increased. This suggests that the independent effects of CO2 and temperature observed at low levels are different once a CO2 threshold is reached. Additionally, there were significant differences in growth estimators (shell height and DSW), with the best growth occurring at the lowest CO2 level. In contrast to temperature variations that induced a trade-off response in energy acquisition and expenditure, results from this research support the hypothesis that sea scallops have a limited ability to alter physiological processes to compensate for increasing CO2.


ESD or not ESD? This question has probably come up in the minds of many advanced endoscopists in the Western world, when debating on how to approach resection of large non-pedunculated colorectal polyps. The benefit of endoscopic submucosal dissection (ESD) is twofold. First, it can achieve en bloc curative resection of low-risk colorectal cancers (CRC)1 that have only invaded the superficial (less than 1000 µm) submucosal layer (sm1 cancers), and that do not show lymphovascular invasion or poor differentiation.2 Second, the recurrence rate following ESD is only 1%–2%.3 But the procedure carries a greater risk of complications, it requires extensive training and special skill, and perhaps more importantly for Western endoscopists, it takes a long time, patience and a different mindset.3 4 The defenders of colorectal endoscopic mucosal resection (EMR) argue that it is safe and efficient and that recurrence can easily be addressed by experts, with over 90% eradication rates after a maximum of two sessions.5 The solution to the controversy therefore focuses on this question: Is colorectal ESD worthwhile to benefit the few patients with low-risk CRC?

The study by Fuccio et al 6 in Gut provides valuable insights to answer this question. The authors systematically reviewed all studies that examined the prevalence of cancer with sm1 invasion of colorectal lesions that were removed by ESD. They found an overall rate of sm invasion of 16%, of which 8% were limited …


Over the last years, studies have highlighted many features liable to be used for the characterization of sounds by several elicitation methods. These various experiments have resulted in the production of a long list of sound attributes. But, as their respective meaning and weight are not alike for assessors and listeners, the analysis of the results of a listening test based on sound criteria remains complex and difficult. The experiments reported in this paper were aimed at shortening the list of attributes by clustering them in sound families from the results of two semantic tests based on either a free categorization (i) or use of a multi-dimensional scaling method (ii).


Giardia infection was diagnosed in a 1.5-year-old, group-housed, female squirrel monkey with diarrhea. A retrospective study was undertaken to evaluate the incidence of Giardia in the 190-member colony. Records were analyzed to determine whether any one of the following conditions applied: the animal had clinical signs referable to the gastrointestinal system; a fecal examination for ova and parasites was performed; gastrointestinal parasitism was revealed by necropsy; or a culture of samples from the gastrointestinal tract was performed. Analysis revealed a total of 19 monkeys, 68% (13/19) of which had gastrointestinal clinical signs. Giardia cysts were recovered from 33% (4/12) of monkeys with gastrointestinal signs in which fecal examinations were done. The yearly incidence of diarrhea in the colony was low at 0.61%; however, 33% (2/6) of the monkeys with diarrhea were positive for Giardia. Six animals had blood in the feces or rectal prolapse, in the absence of diarrhea, and 30% (2/6) of these animals were positive for Giardia. Of six animals without gastrointestinal clinical signs, 50% (3/6) had giardiasis, which was listed as an incidental finding. In light of these findings, an additional 16 healthy animals were examined for Giardia. Giardia cysts were recovered from 50% (3/6) of males and 70% (7/10) of females from which samples were obtained. Additionally, clean water consumed by the animals was negative for Giardia cysts, and facility waste water was positive. To our knowledge, this is the first report of giardiasis in squirrel monkeys.


ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) are in-vehicle systems designed to enhance driving safety and efficiency as well as comfort for drivers in the driving process. Recent studies have noticed that when Human Machine Interface (HMI) is not designed properly, an ADAS can cause distraction which would affect its usage and even lead to safety issues. Current understanding of these issues is limited to the context-dependent nature of such systems. This paper reports the development of a holistic conceptualisation of how drivers interact with ADAS and how such interaction could lead to potential distraction. This is done taking an ontological approach to contextualise the potential distraction, driving tasks and user interactions centred on the use of ADAS. Example scenarios are also given to demonstrate how the developed ontology can be used to deduce rules for identifying distraction from ADAS and informing future designs.


We report a detailed characterization of an industry-like prepared Cu(In, Ga)Se2 (CIGS)/CdS heterojunction by scanning transmission electron microscopy and photoluminescence (PL). Energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy shows the presence of several regions in the CIGS layer that are Cu deprived and Cd enriched, suggesting the segregation of Cd–Se. Concurrently, the CdS layer shows Cd-deprived regions with the presence of Cu, suggesting a segregation of Cu–S. The two types of segregations are always found together, which, to the best of our knowledge, is observed for the first time. The results indicate that there is a diffusion process that replaces Cu with Cd in the CIGS layer and Cd with Cu in the CdS layer. Using a combinatorial approach, we identified that this effect is independent of focused-ion beam sample preparation and of the transmission electron microscopy grid. Furthermore, PL measurements before and after an HCl etch indicate a lower degree of defects in the postetch sample, compatible with the segregates removal. We hypothesize that Cu$_{2-x}$ Se nanodomains react during the chemical bath process to form these segregates since the chemical reaction that dominates this process is thermodynamically favorable. These results provide important additional information about the formation of the CIGS/CdS interface.


The connected dominating set (CDS) has been extensively used for routing and broadcast in wireless ad hoc networks. While existing CDS protocols are successful in constructing CDS of small size, they either require localized information beyond immediate neighbors, lack the mechanism to properly handle nodal mobility, or involve lengthy recovery procedure when CDS becomes corrupted. In this paper, we introduce the timer-based CDS protocols, which first elect a number of initiators distributively and then utilize timers to construct a CDS from initiators with the minimum localized information. We demonstrate that our CDS protocols are capable of maintaining CDS in the presence of changes of network topology. Depending on the number of initiators, there are two versions of our timer-based CDS protocols. The Single-Initiator (SI) generates the smallest CDS among protocols with mobility handling capability. Built on top of SI, the Multi-Initiator (MI) version removes the single point of failure at single-initiator and possesses most advantages of SI. We evaluate our protocols by both the ns-2 simulation and an analytical model. Compared with the other known CDS protocols, the simulation results demonstrate that both SI and MI produce and maintain CDS of very competitive size. The analytical model shows the expected convergence time and the number of messages required by SI and MI in the construction of CDS, which match closely to our simulation results. This helps to establish the validity of our simulation.


ABSTRACT Xu, C. and Dong, P., 2017. A dynamic model for coastal mud flocs with distributed fractal dimension. Suspended sediments entrained from muddy estuarine and coastal areas usually contain a large amount of mud flocs of various sizes and densities. The size and settling velocity of these mud flocs are unsteady and may vary over a large range. In most theoretical descriptions the mud flocs are treated as self-similar fractal entities with the fractal dimension being considered as either a constant or a simple function of the mean floc size. This deterministic description of fractal dimension has recently been found to be inadequate as for a given size class; fractal dimension of the mud flocs is not a single value but is distributed over a certain range. To address this problem this paper proposes a new flocculation model for the temporal evolution of floc size by considering the fractal dimensions for a given floc size class D to be normally distributed and validates the model with available experimental data. The proposed model is found to perform better in predicting the temporal evolution of floc size than that based on a single fixed floc-size-dependent fractal dimension, especially under high shear conditions and with large equilibrium floc size.


California is home to approximately 90,000 brownfields. Yet, certain areas of the state contain significantly higher concentrations of brownfield sites than others. Multiple explanations for this variation are possible and some have been explored in previous literature; however, one largely missing is the influence of policy entrepreneurs. Numerous researchers have recognized policy entrepreneurs as vital components of societal change. However, there is significant tension in the literature in terms of understanding the relationship between outcomes, local conditions and entrepreneurial activity. This project investigates the local conditions that encourage the emergence of successful political entrepreneurship and the importance of these conditions in relation to the individual qualities and skills of the entrepreneur.This research utilizes two, in-depth case studies to untangle the relationship among the conditions for entrepreneurial activity, the role of entrepreneurs and the remediation and redevelopment of brownfields. Relying on multiple methods, this project focuses on the influence of policy entrepreneurs on the brownfield programs in the urban areas of Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. Anticipated results will likely indicate that both conditions and entrepreneurial activity play important roles in active brownfield programs. However, this research aims to untangle the extent of the influence of the local conditions on the entrepreneur and the extent to which the entrepreneur(s), if they exist, influence the emergence of an active brownfield program.


What is it about the process of diagnosis that eludes critical evaluation? Clinicians make millions of diagnoses every day, and making the right one is central to effective treatment and accurate prognosis. Great diagnosticians tend to be forgiven their other human failings, if the television portrayal of rude but brilliant Dr Gregory House is anything to go by (BMJ 2005;330:1090, doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7499.1090), which suggests that much of the prestige of medicine is bound up with the ability to diagnose. Yet we know surprisingly little about the thought processes behind successful diagnosis. A new series launched this week aims to encourage clearer thinking about diagnosis. Carl Heneghan and colleagues have used their own experience in primary care to articulate a range of diagnostic strategies used by general practitioners in routine consultations (doi:10.1136/bmj.b946). In a linked article, MatthewThompson and colleagues explore the use of "restricted rule-out" as a strategy for excluding serious illness in a feverish child (doi:10.1136/bmj.b1187). Future articles will use cases of chronic cough and acute diarrhoea to illustrate diagnostic strategies including "test of treatment" and "test of time." This week's journal also includes two intriguing warnings against uncritical thinking. In his Observations column, Christopher Martyn explains that the Bradford Hill "criteria" for judging cause and effect were in fact quite the reverse (doi:10.1136/bmj.b1621). Austin Bradford Hill listed the "viewpoints" in a lecture at the Royal Society of Medicine in 1964. But he did so in order to conclude that there is no foolproof way of establishing causality. "None of my nine viewpoints can bring indisputable evidence for or against the cause and effect hypothesis and none can be required as a sine qua non," he said. Martyn shows that Bradford Hill took a pragmatic approach to interpreting observational evidence, weighing up the various features of individual associations in order to make a decision about whether action was needed. He concludes that authors who grind through the criteria trying to show that the association they've observed ticks enough boxes to be considered causal have missed the point entirely. A second call to pull our thinking socks up comes from Robin Nunn (doi:10.1136/bmj.b1568). His target is the concept of placebo. The lack of a clear definition, despite centuries of discussion and decades of research, brings him to conclude that it's time to stop thinking in terms of placebo; "Rebranding is not enough to rescue this tired product." For those who use placebo as treatment, he suggests we ask what exactly is going on between doctor and patient. And in a post-placebo era, clinical research would simply compare something with something else. His proposal includes the provision that all methodologically acceptable research reports would fully describe the two sets of conditions being compared so that a reader could replicate them. This will be music to the ears of Paul Glasziou, one of the architects of our diagnosis series mentioned above, who is on an important mission to improve the way journals describe interventions (BMJ 2008;336:1472-4, doi:10.1136/bmj.39590.732037.47).


The polar organic compound integrative sampler (POCIS) is a tool that has been effectively used to passively sample organic pollutants over long periods in aquatic environments. In this study, POCIS were used to investigate the spatial and temporal occurrence of 21 antibiotics in irrigation return flows and upstream sites of an intensively managed agricultural watershed in south-central Idaho. The antibiotic metabolite, erythromycin-HO, and the antibiotics monensin, oxytetracycline, sulfadimethoxine, sulfamethazine, sulfamethoxazole, trimethoprim, and tylosin were detected at frequencies ranging from 3.1 to 62.5%, with monensin having the highest rate of detection. The fact that monensin was the most frequently detected compound indicates that it is entering return flows in runoff from fields that had received livestock manure or wastewater. Antibiotics (except oxytetracycline, sulfamethazine, and tylosin) were also detected at an upstream site that consisted of diverted Snake River water and is the source of irrigation water for the watershed. Therefore, even cropped soils that are not treated with manure are still receiving low-level antibiotics during irrigation events. This study provides the first set of evidence that surface waters within this agricultural watershed contain antibiotic residues associated with veterinary and human uses.


There is a significant flaw in today's painting software: the colors do not mix like actual paints. E.g., blue and yellow make gray instead of green. This is because the software is built around the RGB representation, which models the mixing of colored lights. Paints, however, get their color from pigments, whose mixing behavior is predicted by the Kubelka-Munk model (K-M). Although it was introduced to computer graphics almost 30 years ago, the K-M model has never been adopted by painting software in practice as it would require giving up the RGB representation, growing the number of per-pixel channels substantially, and depriving the users of painting with arbitrary RGB colors. In this paper, we introduce a practical approach that enables mixing colors with K-M while keeping everything in RGB. We achieve this by establishing a latent color space, where RGB colors are represented as mixtures ofprimary pigments together with additive residuals. The latents can be manipulated with linear operations, leading to expected, plausible results. We describe the conversion between RGB and our latent representation, and show how to implement it efficiently.


This paper presents a study on transmission opportunity (TXOP) mechanism of the new MAC protocol described in the IEEE 802.11e supplement to the standard. A simple algorithm for dynamic configuration of TXOP limit is proposed for the contention channel access mode, called enhanced distributed channel access (EDCA). The proposed scheme aims to define dynamic rules for TXOP duration adjustment in multimode IEEE 802.11e networks in order to improve system efficiency and provide better QoS provision


PURPOSE
The impact of clinical decision support (CDS) on initial doses and intervals and pharmacokinetic outcomes of amikacin and tobramycin therapy was evaluated.

METHODS
A complex CDS advisor to provide guidance on initial dosing and monitoring of aminoglycoside orders, using both traditional-dosing and extended-interval-dosing strategies, was integrated into a computerized prescriber-order-entry (CPOE) system and compared with a control group whose aminoglycoside orders were closely monitored by pharmacists. The primary outcome measured was an initial dose within 10% of a dose calculated to be adherent to published dose guidelines. Secondary outcomes included a guideline-adherent interval, trough and peak concentrations in goal range, and rate of nephrotoxicity.

RESULTS
Of 216 patients studied, 97 were prescribed amikacin and 119 were prescribed tobramycin. The number of orders with initial doses consistent with reference standards increased from 40% in the preadvisor group to 80% in the postadvisor group (p < 0.001). Selection of the correct initial interval based on renal function increased from 63% to 87% (p < 0.001). The changes in the initial dosing and interval resulted in an increase of trough concentrations at goal (59% in the preadvisor group versus 89% in the postadvisor group, p = 0.0004). There was no significant difference in peak concentrations in the goal range or rate of nephrotoxicity.

CONCLUSION
An advisor for aminoglycoside dosing and monitoring integrated into a CPOE system significantly improved selection of initial doses and intervals and resulted in an improvement in the rate of trough serum drug concentrations at goal compared with standard provider dosing.


This chapter explores if alternative participatory co-creation approaches have the potential for deploying an emancipatory urbanism that is able to contest the urban dynamics of (digital) capitalism. It does so by focusing on the Barcelona case. Barcelona fully embraced a "smart citizen" approach in 2011 to become a European referent in smart urban strategies. However, in 2015, with the arrival of a new municipal government, Barcelona has situated itself contesting the "smart city" and at the forefront of alternative possibilities with its "technological sovereignty" strategy. This shift aims to remake the smart city agenda for citizens through the advancement of the right to information and guarantees to open, transparent, and participatory decision-making through new digital and platform technologies. The chapter argues, first, that "technological sovereignty" has been instrumental in re-politicizing the notions of (smart) citizenship and technology, deploying initiatives aimed at regaining public control on data and citizens participating in policy-making. Second, Barcelona's technological sovereignty strategy, though framed as locally and bottom-up, is based on a global comprehension and diagnosis of the global dynamics of digital capitalism. However, sometimes, there still remains an over-optimistic stance concerning digital technology. Thus, for any alternative to the neoliberal smart city, it is necessary to decenter the debate from the technologies themselves or the local, and recognize that any emancipatory strategy is also about acknowledging that technology-led solutions are not autonomous of broader relations of production and complex political economy geographies.


A large offspring-number diploid biparental multilocus population model of Moran type is our object of study. At each time step, a pair of diploid individuals drawn uniformly at random contributes offspring to the population. The number of offspring can be large relative to the total population size. Similar "heavily skewed" reproduction mechanisms have been recently considered by various authors (cf. e.g., Eldon and Wakeley 2006, 2008) and reviewed by Hedgecock and Pudovkin (2011). Each diploid parental individual contributes exactly one chromosome to each diploid offspring, and hence ancestral lineages can coalesce only when in distinct individuals. A separation-of-timescales phenomenon is thus observed. A result of Möhle (1998) is extended to obtain convergence of the ancestral process to an ancestral recombination graph necessarily admitting simultaneous multiple mergers of ancestral lineages. The usual ancestral recombination graph is obtained as a special case of our model when the parents contribute only one offspring to the population each time. Due to diploidy and large offspring numbers, novel effects appear. For example, the marginal genealogy at each locus admits simultaneous multiple mergers in up to four groups, and different loci remain substantially correlated even as the recombination rate grows large. Thus, genealogies for loci far apart on the same chromosome remain correlated. Correlation in coalescence times for two loci is derived and shown to be a function of the coalescence parameters of our model. Extending the observations by Eldon and Wakeley (2008), predictions of linkage disequilibrium are shown to be functions of the reproduction parameters of our model, in addition to the recombination rate. Correlations in ratios of coalescence times between loci can be high, even when the recombination rate is high and sample size is large, in large offspring-number populations, as suggested by simulations, hinting at how to distinguish between different population models.


Thermal ground planes (TGPs) are flat, thin (external thickness of 2 mm) heat pipes which utilize two-phase cooling. The goal is to utilize TGPs as thermal spreaders in a variety of microelectronic cooling applications. TGPs are novel high-performance, integrated systems able to operate at a high power density with a reduced weight and temperature gradient. In addition to being able to dissipate large amounts of heat, they have very high effective axial thermal conductivities and (because of nano-porous wicks) can operate in high adverse gravitational fields.A three-dimensional (3D) finite element model is used to predict the thermal performance of the TGP. The 3D thermal model predicts the temperature field in the TGP, the effective axial thermal conductivity, and the evaporation and the condensation rates. A key feature of this model is that it relies on empirical interfacial heat transfer coefficient data to very accurately model the interfacial energy balance at the vapor-liquid saturated wick interface. Wick samples for a TGP are tested in an experimental setup to measure the interfacial heat transfer coefficient. Then the experimental heat transfer coefficient data are used for the interfacial energy balance. Another key feature of this model is that it demonstrates that for the Jakob numbers of interest, the thermal and flow fields can be decoupled except at the vapor-liquid saturated wick interface. This model can be used to predict the performance of a TGP for different geometries and implementation structures. This paper will describe the model and how it incorporates empirical interfacial heat transfer coefficient data. It will then show theoretical predictions for the thermal performance of TGP's, and compare with experimental results.Copyright © 2012 by ASME


This study originates from ongoing action research that aims to develop institutional opportunities to reflect on and take decisions about inclusion in the School of Accounts and Administration of Rio de Janeiro's State Accounts Office. The research was organized in three phases. The first phase was an in-service course to sensitize professionals about inclusion. The second stage comprised the reformulation of the curriculum of the courses delivered by those professionals to other public servants; the third phase involved the creation and supervision of a discussion group that sought to develop cultures, policies and practices of inclusion. This study presents and analyses the first phase of the research from an omnilectical perspective. The question that guided this first phase was: what meanings of inclusion can be collectively derived from a course that aimed to sensitize a group to inclusion? The data was organized using Bardin content analysis technique, and discussed on the basis of the omnilectical perspective, developed by Santos. The results show the ways in which the participants "built" the concept of inclusion and their need to set up institutional practices based on participative citizenship, and to implement continuous evaluation of the teaching-learning processes.

 Key words: Public administration, omnilectical perspective, inclusion in education.


Four approaches have been examined to predict the endurance of circumferentially notched, uniaxially loaded test pieces subjected to fully reversed strain-controlled cyclic loading at elevated temperatures. Results are compared with uniaxial data derived from smooth test pieces. The strain-time waveforms include both trapezoidal and triangular shapes to distinguish between fatigue and fatigue-creep damage. The four materials investigated are HP-45 (1144 K), Incoloy 800H (1144 K), Incoloy 800 (922 K), and 1 1/4Cr-½Mo (811 K). The analysis has reflected the various degrees of cyclic hardening and creep deformation exhibited by these materials. The predictive approaches include Neuber notch strain analysis and finite element analyses to identify the maximum plastic strain range, the equivalent plastic strain range, and the total plastic work per cycle. The study provides a simple, pragmatic approach to predicting whether cyclic plant operation is lifetime limiting. The primary conclusion is that the total plastic work-per-cycle approach is the preferred method for evaluation of fatigue-limited plant lifetimes.


The aims of the study were to investigate to what extent the essence of waiver of costumary land in Merauke Regency and to investigate to what extent the release of customary land can provide legal certainty for investors. The research was conducted in Merauke, West Papua Privince. The techniques of obtaining the data were interview and field observations. The data consisted of primary and secondary data. They were analyzed using qualitative analysis.The results of the research indicate that the waiver of customary land is the claim of the existence of indigenous people as a condition of the transfer of land rights in Papua Province especially in Merauke Regancy. The release of customary land for investors benefit in Merauke Regency does not provide legal certainty for investors, so it causes the conflict of land affair. The conflict occurs due to the overlapping of tenure or claim by some tribes over the land rights and land boundaries which are not clear because they are natural boundaries.


Portraying urban functional zones provides useful insights into understanding complex urban systems and establishing rational urban planning. Although several studies have confirmed the efficacy of remote sensing imagery in urban studies, coupling remote sensing and new human sensing data like mobile phone positioning data to identify urban functional zones has still not been investigated. In this study, a new framework integrating remote sensing imagery and mobile phone positioning data was developed to analyze urban functional zones with landscape and human activity metrics. Landscapes metrics were calculated based on land cover from remote sensing images. Human activities were extracted from massive mobile phone positioning data. By integrating them, urban functional zones (urban center, sub-center, suburbs, urban buffer, transit region and ecological area) were identified by a hierarchical clustering. Finally, gradient analysis in three typical transects was conducted to investigate the pattern of landscapes and human activities. Taking Shenzhen, China, as an example, the conducted experiment shows that the pattern of landscapes and human activities in the urban functional zones in Shenzhen does not totally conform to the classical urban theories. It demonstrates that the fusion of remote sensing imagery and human sensing data can characterize the complex urban spatial structure in Shenzhen well. Urban functional zones have the potential to act as bridges between the urban structure, human activity and urban planning policy, providing scientific support for rational urban planning and sustainable urban development policymaking.


The MRCPCH MasterCourse was published in April 2007 following a prolonged gestation, which involved a unique collaboration between the UK Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) and publishing giant Elsevier. It is aimed both at paediatric trainees preparing for all parts of the College Membership (MRCPCH) exam, and primary care trainees preparing for the Diploma in Child Health (DCH). Purchase of the package provides two substantial paper volumes, an accompanying DVD and 3 years of free access to a linked website. The volumes can be purchased separately.

This multi-author review considers the package from a number of different perspectives.

### Professor Sir David Hall

The eminent consultants who taught my generation of medical students commanded enormous respect (and affection), but one of them, with unusual insight, observed, "we make the same mistake a thousand times and call it experience". The culture of evidence based medicine has reduced scope for the idiosyncratic style of yesterday's consultants. There is more likely to be a right and a wrong answer as to how one should investigate and treat any given clinical situation, but understanding the research that produces and evaluates today's treatments has become much more challenging. No-one can now keep up with immunology, neuroscience, statistics and the myriad of other disciplines that support clinical medicine and there have been equally important developments in public health and the social sciences. For example, we now know far more about the complex relationships between social and economic circumstances, child rearing practices and child health and we appreciate more clearly how stress and distress can both mimic and interact with organic disease; these interactions go some way to explaining why so many of the children who present in primary care, and a good proportion of those seen by paediatricians, do not have a readily defined condition for which there …


ABSTRACT It has been 10 years since the publication of the relative risk model (RRM) for regional scale ecological risk assessment. The approach has since been used successfully for a variety of freshwater, marine, and terrestrial environments in North America, South America, and Australia. During this period the types of stressors have been expanded to include more than contaminants. Invasive species, habitat loss, stream alteration and blockage, temperature, change in land use, and climate have been incorporated into the assessments. Major developments in the RRM have included the extensive use of geographical information systems, uncertainty analysis using Monte Carlo techniques, and its application to retrospective assessments to determine causation. The future uses of the RRM include assessments for forestry and conservation management, an increasing use in invasive species evaluation, and in sustainability. Developments in risk communication, the use of Bayesian approaches, and in uncertainty analyses are on the horizon.


We have proposed novel techniques using region based segmentation for resolving complex occlusions of objects as they are tracked by a single, static video camera. The data is low resolution and noisy. The method improves the segmentation of moving objects obtained from any background subtraction method and then tracks objects continuously before, during and after occlusions. The method has been tested with real time complex occlusions of multiple people using a novel testing criterion that we have developed after critically analyzing all the possible scenarios of occlusions. The method has been proved to be successful with most of the testing criteria.


The Underground Railroad, an often misunderstood antebellum institution, has been viewed as a simple combination of mainly white "conductors" and black "passengers." Keith P. Griffler takes a new, battlefield-level view of the war against American slavery as he reevaluates one of its front lines: the Ohio River, the longest commercial dividing line between slavery and freedom. In shifting the focus from the much discussed white-led "stations" to the primarily black-led frontline struggle along the Ohio, Griffler reveals for the first time the crucial importance of the freedom movement in the river's port cities and towns. Front Line of Freedom fully examines America's first successful interracial freedom movement, which proved to be as much a struggle to transform the states north of the Ohio as those to its south. In a climate of racial proscription, mob violence, and white hostility, the efforts of Ohio Valley African Americans to establish and maintain communities became inextricably linked to the steady stream of fugitives crossing the region. As Griffler traces the efforts of African Americans to free themselves, Griffler provides a window into the process by which this clandestine network took shape and grew into a powerful force in antebellum America.


The WRF model is applied to simulate the low-level wind field for a wind farm located in a typical arid region in northwest China for February 2008. The selected region has complex terrain with sparse vegetation. Overall, the WRF model reproduced the variation features of wind speeds and wind directions. However, the model overestimated the observed low-level wind speeds, and there were large discrepancies for the low wind velocity (i.e. the errors of simulated winds increase with height and will be larger when the observed wind speeds are lower than 2.5 m/s). The features of the simulated errors and the possible causes in the model were analysed. The simulated low-level wind in the afternoon is more accurate than that in early morning, which is usually unstable. Copyright (C) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


Objective: Biases affect how certain we are about the available evidence, however no standard tool for assessing the risk of bias (RoB) in prevalence studies exists. For the purposes of a living systematic review on prevalence of mental health disorders during the COVID-19 pandemic, we developed a RoB tool to evaluate prevalence studies in mental health (RoB-PrevMH) and tested interrater reliability. Methods: We reviewed existing RoB tools for prevalence studies until September 2020, to develop a tool for prevalence studies in mental health. We tested the reliability of assessments by different users of RoB-PrevMH in 83 studies stemming from two systematic reviews of prevalence studies in mental health. We assessed the interrater agreement by calculating the proportion of agreement and Kappa statistic for each item. Results: RoB-PrevMH consists of three items that address selection bias and information bias. Introductory and signaling questions guide the application of the tool to the review question. The interrater agreement for the three items was 83%, 90% and 93%. The weighted kappa was 0.63 (95% CI 0.54 to 0.73), 0.71 (95% CI 0.67 to 0.85) and 0.32 (95% CI -0.04 to -0.63), respectively. Conclusions: We developed a brief, user friendly, and adaptable tool for assessing RoB in studies on prevalence of mental health disorders. Initial results for interrater agreement were fair to substantial. The tool's validity, reliability, and applicability should be assessed in future projects.


The paper addresses the problem of topological mapping of intellectual properties (IPs) on the tiles of a mesh- based network on chip (NoC) architecture. The aim is to ob- tain the Pareto mappings that maximize performance and min- imize the amount of power consumption. As the problem is an NP-hard one, we propose a heuristic technique based on evolu- tionary computing to obtain an optimal approximation of the Pareto-optimal front in an efficient and accurate way. At the same time, two of the most widely-known approaches to map- ping in mesh-based NoC architectures are extended in order to explore the mapping space in a multi-criteria mode. The ap- proaches are then evaluated and compared, in terms of both accuracy and efficiency, on a platform based on an event-driven trace-based simulator which makes it possible to take account of important dynamic effects that have a great impact on mapping. The evaluation performed on real applications (an MPEG-4 codec and a cellular phone application) confirms the efficiency, accuracy and scalability of the proposed approach.


Preparation of titanium diboride reinforced copper matrix composites with high conductivity and mechanical strength was developed based on in situ produced powders. The effect of the titanium diboride content on the mechanical properties of the bulk material produced from the powders by Spark Plasma Sintering technique was studied. Increasing titanium diboride content from 2.5 up to 7.5 wt.% resulted in a 1.5-fold increase in yield strength, tensile strength and hardness and 5-fold increase in wear resistance with only 10% decrease in conductivity.


This study was conducted to determine the prevalence of Anaplasmosis and efficacy of different antiprotozoal drugs in goats around the Mirpurkhas. A total of 300 goats were examined for the occurrence of Anaplasmosis. Anaplasma marginale was the only species identified from all positive goats and the highest prevalence of Anaplasmosis was recorded in Samaro (30%) and the lowest (8%) in Sindhri, district Mirpurkhas. The overall prevalence of anaplasmosis was recorded at 13.33%. The rate of infection was higher in females (17%) compared to males (9%). The age wise prevalence was recorded 14% in two years of age and 12% in 2 years and above of age. The most prominent clinical features in positive cases of anaplasmosis were recorded increased body temperature, respiration and pulse rate, with loss of condition and icterus. The disease positive animals were divided into four groups; A, B, C and D in order to determine the efficacy of different antiprotozoal drugs. The Imidocarb, Diminazine and Oxytetracycline drugs were administered to A, B and C groups respectively, on the standard dose by the recommendations of manufacturers. While the D group was kept as an untreated positive control. It was observed that maximum efficacy against Anaplasma marginale was achieved by the administration of Imidocarb (80%), followed by Diminazine (60%) and Oxytetracycline (30%). All animals of the infected control group (D) were remained positive and shown the increasing intensity of the infection and one goat was died in control group D due to the severity of the infection.


OBJECTIVE
To determine the relative efficacies of alternative antipneumocystis agents in human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)-infected patients with Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia unresponsive to primary drug treatment with a combination product of trimethoprim and sulfamethoxazole or parenteral pentamidine.

METHODS
Meta-analysis of 27 published clinical drug trials, case series, and case reports involving P carinii pneumonia. Data extracted included underlying disease, primary antipneumocystis treatment, days of failed primary treatment, salvage regimen, use of systemic corticosteroids and antiretroviral drugs, and clinical outcome.

RESULTS
In 497 patients with microbiologically confirmed P carinii pneumonia (456 with HIV or acquired immunodeficiency syndrome), initial antipneumocystis treatment failed and they therefore required alternative drug therapy. Failed regimens included trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (160 patients), intravenous pentamidine (63 patients), trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole and/or pentamidine (258 patients), aerosolized pentamidine (6 patients), atovaquone (3 patients), dapsone (3 patients), a combination product of trimethoprim and dapsone (2 patients), and trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole followed by a combination of clindamycin and primaquine phosphate (2 patients). Efficacies of salvage regimens were as follows: clindamycin-primaquine (42 to 44 [88%-92%] of 48 patients; P<10(-8)), atovaquone (4 [80%] of 5), eflornithine hydrochloride (40 [57%] of 70; P<.01), trimethoprim-sulfamethoxazole (27 [53%] of 51; P<.08), pentamidine (64 [39%] of 164), and trimetrexate (47 [30%] of 159).

CONCLUSION
The combination of clindamycin plus primaquine appears to be the most effective alternative treatment for patients with P carinii pneumonia who are unresponsive to conventional antipneumocystis agents.


Much of the literature on informal carers of cancer patients is quantitative and psycho-oncology based. This literature has established that cancer carers experience higher rates of stress, depression and anxiety than their non-caregiving counterparts, with younger female carers reporting higher rates of burden and unmet needs. The reasons behind this variation and variations in support preferences are poorly understood: some carers prefer support groups and others prefer practical support. This study takes a sociological approach to exploring carers' varied experiences. Longitudinal interviews were conducted with 32 carers of a spouse with cancers of varying stages and diagnoses in the Australian Capital Territory. Analysis, informed by the discretionary time literature, shows time-sovereignty illuminates much of the variation in carers' emotional experiences and support preferences. Carers with few competing commitments and less onerous caregiving responsibilities had time to experience and unpack the range of emotions associated with cancer, and reconnect with their spouse. These carers preferred emotion-focused support. In contrast, carers with multiple commitments had little time to themselves and viewed emotions as an indulgence. These carers preferred practical support. A time-sovereignty framework offers health and support professionals a means of understanding carers' varying needs and tailoring support services.


This paper discusses the evidence for the role of CREB in neural stem/progenitor cell (NSPC) function and oncogenesis and how these functions may be important for the development and growth of brain tumours. The cyclic‐AMP response element binding (CREB) protein has many roles in neurons, ranging from neuronal survival to higher order brain functions such as memory and drug addiction behaviours. Recent studies have revealed that CREB also has a role in NSPC survival, differentiation and proliferation. Recent work has shown that over‐expression of CREB in transgenic animals can impart oncogenic properties on cells in various tissues and that aberrant CREB expression is associated with tumours in patients. It is the central position of CREB, downstream of key developmental and growth signalling pathways, which give CREB the ability to influence a spectrum of cell activities, such as cell survival, growth and differentiation in both normal and cancer cells.


The theory of fixing the origin of the coordinate system in a polar space group by use of restraints (soft constraints or pseudo-observations) is developed for any space group in any setting. The 0108-7673/88/040499-08503.00 coefficients of the optimal restraint equation are on the average proportional to the square of the atomic numbers. They are determined directly from the unrestrained singular normal-equations matrix. Application of the restraint results in a positive-definite matrix which is as nearly diagonal as possible for the atomic O 1988 International Union of Crystallography 500 ORIGIN FIXING IN POLAR SPACE GROUPS positional coordinates along the origin-free axes. Correlations between these coordinates are therefore minimized. A very compact completely general and easily implemented algorithm results which functions without user intervention.


RORγ2 (retinoid-related orphan receptor γ2) plays a critical role in the regulation of thymopoiesis. Microarray analysis was performed in order to uncover differences in gene expression between thymocytes of wild-type and RORγ−/− mice. This analysis identified a novel gene encoding a 22 kDa protein, referred to as NABP1 (nucleic-acid-binding protein 1). This subsequently led to the identification of an additional protein, closely related to NABP1, designated NABP2. Both proteins contain an OB (oligonucleotide/oligosaccharide binding) motif at their N-terminus. This motif is highly conserved between the two proteins. NABP1 is highly expressed in the thymus of wild-type mice and is greatly suppressed in RORγ−/− mice. During thymopoiesis, NABP1 mRNA expression is restricted to CD4+CD8+ thymocytes, an expression pattern similar to that observed for RORγ2. These observations appear to suggest that NABP1 expression is regulated either directly or indirectly by RORγ2. Confocal microscopic analysis showed that the NABP1 protein localizes to the nucleus. Analysis of nuclear proteins by size-exclusion chromatography indicated that NABP1 is part of a high molecular-mass protein complex. Since the OB-fold is frequently involved in the recognition of nucleic acids, the interaction of NABP1 with various nucleic acids was examined. Our results demonstrate that NABP1 binds single-stranded nucleic acids, but not double-stranded DNA, suggesting that it functions as a single-stranded nucleic acid binding protein.


This paper studies the dynamics of the lineal-located time-harmonic moving-with-constant-velocity load which acts on the hydro-elastic system consisting of the elastic plate, compressible viscous fluid - strip and rigid wall. The plane-strain state in the plate is considered and its motion is described by employing the exact equations of elastodynamics but the plane-parallel flow of the fluid is described by the linearized Navier-Stokes equations. It is assumed that the velocity and force vectors of the constituents are continuous on the contact plane between the plate and fluid, and impermeability conditions on the rigid wall are satisfied. Numerical results on the velocity and stress distributions on the interface plane are presented and discussed and the focus is on the influence of the effect caused by the interaction between oscillation and moving of the external load. During these discussions, the corresponding earlier results by the authors are used which were obtained in the cases where, on the system under consideration, only the oscillating or moving load acts. In particular, it is established that the magnitude of the aforementioned interaction depends significantly on the vibration phase of the system.


Perhydroderivatives of polyene antibiotics have a much lower activity against eukaryotic cells than the polyene antibioitics itself. Bacterial cells are normally resistant against most polyene antibiotics and their perhydroderivatives. In earlier experiments with wall less L-form cells of Escherichia coli we have shown that the bacterial cell wall may be responsible for the resistance of the intact bacterial cells against polyene antibiotics and their perhydroderivatives by masking internal target sites.

In the present paper we studied the effect of polyene antibiotics and their perhydroderivatives on intact cells and protoplasts of Candida guilliermondii. Our experiments have shown that most of the perhydroderivatives studied had a lower a against intact cells as well as protoplasts than the corresponding polyene antibiotics. This means that in the case of eukaryotic cells the cell wall as a penetration barrier cannot mainly be responsible for the low activity of perhydroderivatives. The results are compared with those obtained previously with intact cells and protoplast type L-form cells of E. coli.


The use of operable shading devices impacts building loads significantly. The need exists for an explicit treatment of window shading devices in the design of energy efficient buildings through simulation. A general framework for modeling complex fenestration systems has recently been implemented in ESP-r. The underlying models have been developed with emphasis on computational efficiency and straightforward input requirements. The capabilities, which currently include modeling of slat-type blinds in any arrangement between glazing layers, are summarized and an overview of the solar optical and thermal models is given. An analysis of slat-type blind models was carried out comparing the complex fenestration facility in ESP-r to slat-type blind models in EnergyPlus. Simulations were conducted for a test cell with a south facing window. The results show good agreement between the two simulation programs. Considering the complicated nature of shading layer modeling, the new complex fenestration facility in ESP-r yielded encouraging results in this preliminary study.


This review aimed to determine the overall sensitivity and specificity of indocyanine green (ICG) near‐infrared (NIR) fluorescence in sentinel lymph node (SLN) detection in Colorectal cancer (CRC). A systematic search in electronic databases was conducted. Twelve studies including 248 patients were reviewed. The median sensitivity, specificity, and accuracy rates were 73.7, 100, and 75.7. The pooled sensitivity and specificity rates were 71% and 84.6%. In conclusion, ICG‐NIR fluorescence is a promising technique for detecting SLNs in CRC.


Solar radiation is energy, a natural and inexhaustible source of heat and light, and as such a major factor to be considered for enhancing urban environmental sustainability. Solar availability on buildings determines to a large degree their active and passive solar potential; whereas, the insolation of open spaces affects their microclimate and in turn, their use and liveability. Solar objectives are thus multiple and may also be conflicting in time and space, especially in temperate climates, where thermal comfort needs vary in seasons.
The subject of the thesis is the relationship between urban geometry and environmental performance of urban forms, explored at the neighbourhood scale and in real urban areas. Specifically, the research investigates statistically casual relationships of urban geometry with environmental phenomena related, directly or indirectly, to the availability of solar radiation. Full consideration is given to the varying solar geometry as a major parameter affecting the interaction between urban geometry and solar radiation, lending it a temporal and geographical -related to latitude- character. The research subject is explored through three distinct studies, which share the same methodology investigating particular topics under the same thematic umbrella. The first and the third study, in the order of these being presented, investigate phenomena occurring in open spaces, namely insolation and thermal diversity; whereas, the second study examines solar availability in open spaces and on building facades.
In the methodology, urban geometry is distinguished into built density, which is associated negatively with solar availability but positively with sustainability at the city-scale, and urban layout. The former expresses total built volume in a site, and the latter is represented by a set of quantified geometric parameters which characterise the way in which the built volume is allocated and distributed within the site. This distinction aims to provide evidence for the significance of urban layout in modifying the solar urban environment as well as addressing conflicting solar design objectives. The performance of the urban forms is examined through a series of performance indicators, namely sky view factor, insolation, solar irradiance and thermal diversity values. Both urban geometry variables and performance indicators are calculated on average in each urban form. The great size of the sample analysed allows their relationships to be investigated in statistical means.
The research belongs to the new era of urban environmental studies which make use of digital 3D models of cities to study spatially expressed phenomena in the built environment. It is based entirely on the analysis of existing urban forms, of 500x500m area, found in two European cities, London and Paris. London constitutes the main case study city, whereas Paris is examined for comparison purposes. The two cities are located at similar geographical latitudes and within the same climatic context, but their urban fabrics exemplify very different geometries. The geometric and environmental analysis of the urban forms as well as the elaboration and processing of the output data are performed using computer-based tools and methods, such as MATLAB software and image processing techniques applied in urban digital elevation models (DEMs) and, SOLWEIG and the RADIANCE-based software, PPF, for SVF and solar simulations.
The research findings contribute to the field of urban environmental studies and design at multiple levels, presenting a significant theoretical, practical, and methodological value. First, they produce a critical insight about the factors affecting the relationship of urban geometry and sun-related phenomena occurring in the urban environment and lending it a dynamic character. In addition, they provide solid evidence about the enormous potential of urban geometry for promoting multiple -and sometimes conflicting- solar and urban design objectives, informing the relevant on-going discourse. Third, having as case studies real forms in London and Paris, a part of the findings is interpreted into urban design guidelines for enhancing the environmental performance of new and existing areas in the two cities. Last, as the research employs new methods and techniques to explore diverse topics, some of which are relatively new in the literature, it constitutes an important, methodological precedent for future research works.


A 'world view' perspective is deployed to show President Xi Jinping's dominance of China's policy-making environment and the ideas that he and his leadership group have tried to promote. We use this framework to explain China's relations with three major countries that are crucial to manage successfully in order for China to consolidate its global and regional ambitions – Japan, Russia and the United States. The article shows how the degree of alignment between China's and these great powers' world views influences their levels of resistance or acceptance of the policies that flow from Beijing's world view. We find that, while the United States and Russia lie at opposing ends of the resistance-acceptance spectrum, Japan represents an important middle ground along it. This finding encourages movement away from the overly simplistic dyadic depictions of global politics associated with 'new Cold War' or 'authoritarian versus liberal' labelling.


Human activity is one of the most important pieces of context affecting an individual's information needs. Understanding the relationship between activities, time, location, and other contextual features can improve the quality of various intelligent systems, including contextual search engines, task managers, digital personal assistants, chat bots, and recommender systems. In this work, we propose a method for extraction of an extensive set of open-vocabulary activities from social media. In particular, we derive tens of thousands of ongoing activities from Twitter, where people share information about their past, present, and future events and, using attached metadata, we establish spatiotemporal models of these activities at the time of posting. While public Twitter content is subject to self-censorship (not all activities are tweeted about), we compare extracted data with unbiased survey data (ATUS) and show evidence that for activities which are tweeted about, the underlying spatiotemporal profiles correctly capture their real distributions of activity conditioned on time and location. Next, to better understand the set of activities present in this dataset (and what role self-censorship may play), we perform a qualitative analysis to understand the activities, locations, and their temporal properties. Finally, we go on to solve predictive tasks centered on the relationship between activity and spatiotemporal context that are aimed at supporting an individual's information needs. Our predictive models, which incorporate text, personal history and temporal features, show a significant performance gain over a strong frequency-based baseline.


A four-stage model of decisionmaking was investigated in the context of low-impact practices among rock climbers in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana. Previous research has suggested that knowing what to do to minimize environmental and social impacts may not be the only factor limiting compliance with recommended visitor behaviors. Results from a sample of climbers at Kootenai Creek indicate that the way people are introduced to the sport has an important influence on attitudes toward low-impact practices. Significant differences were found between those who learned to rock climb indoors and those who learned to rock climb outdoors, as well as between those who were introduced to the sport of climbing with fixed anchors versus those introduced with removable climbing equipment. Summary recommendations for effective natural resource communications focus not just on what visitors are being asked to do, but also when, why, and how it is socially appropriate for them to do so.


The problem of multi-robot navigation of connectivity maintenance is challenging in multi-robot applications. This work investigates how to navigate a multi-robot team in unknown environments while maintaining connectivity. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to develop a decentralized policy, which is shared among multiple robots. Given range sensor measurements and the positions of other robots, the policy aims to generate control commands for navigation and preserve the global connectivity of the robot team. We incorporate connectivity concerns into the RL framework as constraints and introduce behavior cloning to reduce the exploration complexity of policy optimization. The policy is optimized with all transition data collected by multiple robots in random simulated scenarios. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by comparing different combinations of connectivity constraints and behavior cloning. We also show that our policy can generalize to unseen scenarios in both simulation and holonomic robots experiments.


Depression is one of the most common mental disorders in modern societies which also including student populations. Etiology of depression is naturally very complicated matter. Some of the effective parameters that have recently gained scholars' attention are personality traits including romantic relationships that can affect depression. The purpose of this study was to evaluate relationship between personality traits and romantic relationships with depression. Research population was students of Payam Noor University of Tehran that 50 married students and were selected by using random sampling method. Research instruments were Beck's depression Inventory II (BDIII), shortened revised NEO personality Inventory (NEO-FFI-60) and sternberg's triangular love scale. Data analysis showed that neuroticism component of personality traits as well as intimacy component of Sternberg's love theory has significant relationship with depression. Moreover, this research showed that neuroticism and intimacy could predict depression symptoms by 37 percent and 10 percent respectively. In order to prevent depression in students, interventional actions are needed to provide more clear relationships based on personality traits.


LEDGF/p75 is a transcriptional coactivator implicated in the pathogenesis of AIDS and leukemia. In these contexts, LEDGF/p75 acts as a cofactor by tethering protein cargo to transcriptionally active regions in the human genome. Our study--based on scanning force microscopy (SFM) imaging--is the first to provide structural information on the interaction of LEDGF/p75 with DNA. Two novel approaches that allow obtaining insights into the DNA conformation inside nucleoprotein complexes revealed (1) that LEDGF/p75 can bind at least in three different binding modes, (2) how DNA topology and protein dimerization affect these binding modes, and (3) geometrical and mechanical aspects of the nucleoprotein complexes. These structural and mechanical details will help us to better understand the cellular mechanisms of LEDGF/p75 as a transcriptional coactivator and as a cofactor in disease.