As analysts are expected to process a greater amount of information in a shorter amount of time, creators of big data software are challenged with the need for improved efficiency. Ray, our group's usable, scalable genome assembler, addresses big data problems by using optimal resources and producing one, correct and conservative, timely solution. Only by abstracting the size of the data from both the computers and the humans can the real scientific question, often complex in itself, eventually be solved. To draw a curtain over the specific computational machinery of big data, we developed RayPlatform, a programming framework that allows users to concentrate on their domain-specific problems. RayPlatform is a parallel message-passing software framework that runs on clouds, supercomputers, and desktops alike. Using established technologies such as C + + and MPI (message-passing interface), we handle the genomes of hundreds of species, from viruses to plants, using machines ranging from desktop computers to supercomputers. From this experience, we present insights on making computer time more useful—and user time much more valuable.


A series of 24 consecutive patients presenting with a fundus picture characterized by a predominance of cottonwool spots, or a single cotton-wool spot, is reported. Excluded were patients with known diabetes mellitus. Etiologic conditions found included previously undiagnosed diabetes mellitus in five patients, systemic hypertension in five patients, cardiac valvular disease in two patients, radiation retinopathy in two patients, and severe carotid artery obstruction in two patients. Dermatomyositis, systemic lupus erythematosus, polyarteritis nodosa, leukemia, AIDS, Purtscher's retinopathy, metastatic carcinoma, intravenous drug abuse, partial central retinal artery obstruction, and giant cell arteritis were each found in one patient. In only one patient did a systemic workup fail to reveal an underlying cause. The presence of even one cotton-wool spot in an otherwise normal fundus necessitates an investigation to ascertain systemic etiologic factors. RETINA 5:206-214, 1985


CALL Research Perspectives creates a foundation for the study and practice of computer-assisted language learning and provides an overview of ways to conceptualize and to conduct research in CALL. Its core assumptions are that all approaches to research have a place, and that researchers, teachers, and students all have a role to play in the study of computer-enhanced language learning.
This is not a how-to-do-research text. Written by top researchers in the field, it offers an open-ended view of what educators need to know and be able to do to answer questions that they have. It is intended to be easy to read, to provide resources for readers to explore the ideas further, and to be non-prescriptive in presenting suggestions for CALL research. The text explores problems with current CALL research and suggests ways that teachers and other researchers can avoid such problems; presents both commonly known and less explored theories that provide a foundation for CALL and language research; and addresses other issues and ideas that affect research outcomes.


Esterification considers the most important reaction in biodiesel production. In this study, oleic acid was used as a suggested feedstock in order to study and simulate production of biodiesel. The batch esterification reaction of oleic acid was carried out at various operating conditions; temperature from 40 to 70 °C, ethanol to oleic acid molar ratio from 3/1 and 6/1 and a reaction time up to 180 min.The catalyst used was prepared NaY zeolite, which is added to the reaction mixture as 2, 5 and 10 wt.% of oleic acid.The results show that the optimum conditions, gives 0.81 conversion of oleic acid, were 6/1 molar ratio of ethanol/oleic acid, 5 wt.% NaY relative to initial oleic acid, 70°C and 60 minutes. The activation energy of the suggested model was 42692 J/mole for forward reaction and 17218 J/mole for backward reaction.


Providing light during incubation has been shown to decrease bilateral physical asymmetry of broilers posthatch, which may indicate that early light stimulation reduces later stress susceptibility. This experiment evaluated the effects of lighting during embryogenesis on other measures of stress responsiveness in broilers. Cobb 500 eggs (n = 1,404) were incubated under 0L:24D, 1L:23D, 6L:18D, or 12L:12D; the light level was 550 lx. The broilers were then raised in floor pens under a 12L:12D lighting regimen, and various stress parameters were measured during wk 3 to 6 of age. There was an effect of incubation lighting regimen on posthatch stress responses. Following 1 h of crating, the change in corticosterone (CORT) concentration was less in the 12L:12D (-0.06 ng/mL, P < 0.05) treatment than all other treatments (pooled mean = 0.24 ng/mL); however, there were no treatment differences in CORT response to adrenocorticotropic hormone administration (pooled mean pre- vs. 1 h postadministration = 17.5 ng/mL, P > 0.05). Anti-keyhole limpet hemocyanin titers were higher in the 12L:12D birds (92,395 units/mL; P < 0.05) than all other treatments (pooled mean = 68,407 units/mL) on d 1 postcrating. Additionally, composite asymmetry scores were lower in the 12L:12D treatment (0.92 mm) than all other treatments (pooled mean = 1.14 mm, P < 0.05). These results demonstrate that providing 12 h of light per day during incubation can reduce the stress susceptibility of broilers posthatch.


Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has spread across the globe from 2019 affecting millions of people physically, mentally, and socio-economically. The purpose of the study was to map out the mental health consequences of the COVID-19 Pandemic and suggest recovery strategies.Methods: A qualitative inquiry into the mental health aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic using observations from working in busy health clinics, general practices, primary and community care setting, and dedicated COVID acute care wards during the pandemic in Australia, United Kingdom and Sri Lanka; discussions with colleagues worldwide; analyzing social and news media comments; literature survey and experience of dealing with past disasters were used to map out mental health consequences and put forward recovery strategies.Results: In covid sufferers, neuropsychiatric symptoms lasting months, unrelated to respiratory insufficiency suggested brain damage due to vascular endothelial injury and/or cerebral venous thrombosis (CVT). A third went onto develop or have a relapse of a psychological or neurological conditions. In the general population, common consequences included common mental health disorders; changing patterns of substance abuse including alcohol; increased domestic violence and child abuse. Family relationships, interactions and understanding improved in many but minority had strained dynamics. Vulnerable groups included the elderly, women, youth; children; disabled; frontline and health workers; minorities and severely mentally ill. At the community level, there were signs of collective (mass) hysteria from panic buying to conspiracy theories, public shaming, fake news and disinformation spreading on social media and mass protests. There were also positive effects such as better understanding of bio-knowledge; interventions (rapid vaccine production, contact tracing methods) and discoveries (mRNA Vaccines), health systems improvements (tele-health), online learning, gratitude toward heath care workers, increased social/community/family cohesion, closer international networking, reduction in suicide rates and drop in interstate and civil conflicts, road accidents, crime and communicable diseases with their resultant morbidity, mortality and mental health consequences. Conclusions: In view of the widespread mental health and psychosocial consequences from the COVID-19 pandemic, a community-based approach is suggested while treating more severe mental disorders at the primary care or specialist level.


In the present investigation, co-invasion of Lernaea parasite is reported in some fish species, collected from the Kor River Basin (Dorudzan Reservoir and Kor River), Southwest of Iran in 2010 and 2011. Lernaea cyprinacea parasites were isolated from the external surface of eye, lips, gills, nostrils, fins, operculum and body of Alburnus mossulensis, Capoeta aculeata, Capoeta saadii (all native cyprinids), Cyprinus carpio and Carassius auratus (exotic cyprinids). The highest infestation was found in endemic fish, C. aculeata with 61ectoparasites in a single specimen of 348 mm TL. The greatest prevalence was found in C. auratus (100%) followed by C. saadii (80%), C. aculeata (69.4%), C. carpio (30.1%) and A. mossulensis (27.3%). Lernaea parasites may have been translocated into Dorudzan Dam by exotic species (e.g., C. carpio and C. auratus) through the four processes of introduction (transport in alien host and acting as cointroduced species), establishment (survival and reproduction in alien host, acting as co-introduced species), spreading with its original host (dispersal) and switching to a native host species to become a co-invader.


Abrupt permanent ground displacement is a typical loading condition for pipelines crossing geotechnical hazard areas. An improved analytical method for calculating longitudinal strain of buried pipeline under tension combined with bending load induced by permanent ground displacement (PGD) was proposed, in which, the pipe steel was considered as a bilinear material and the soil constraint on pipe was considered as a series of elastic-plastic nonlinear soil springs. Effects of elastic deformation of axial soil springs on pipe strain was derived accurately. Effects of axial force in pipe on pipe's bending deformation was considered directly in the governing equation of pipe. Equilibrium between the section stresses in the large deformed pipe sections near fault trace and the section force and moment at the same position derived by the beam theory was used to obtain the nonlinear stress distributions in the pipe section and furtherly to obtain the equivalent modulus describing the locally decreased pipe stiffness. This method makes it possible to accurately derive the pipe longitudinal strain considering the effects of pipe material nonlinearity induced locally decreased pipe stiffness in large bending deformed pipe segments. A three dimensional nonlinear finite element model was also established by general software package ABAQUS to serve as a benchmark to validate the accuracy of proposed analytical method. Shell and pipe elements were employed to simulate pipes in large deformation and small deformation regions respectively. Distributed nonlinear soil spring elements were employed to simulate nonlinear soil constraints on pipe. Various loading conditions were performed to compare the efficiency and accuracy of the proposed analytical method comparing with the FE method. Results show the proposed analytical method can predict accurate longitudinal strain results even large plastic deformation appears in pipe. And comparing with FE method, analytical method has advantages in calculating efficiency, which is more suitable for application in engineering practice.


In my thesis I address two questions regarding the aluminum market in China. The first question analyzes the degree to which the Chinese aluminum market is integrated into the world market. I use the Johansen test for cointegration of time series data in SAS statistical software to compare the volatility of daily aluminum spot prices quoted at the Chinese aluminum Commodity Exchange market in Shanghai (SHFE) relative to its counterparts in London (LME), and New York (COMEX) in order to determine the degree to which prices at SHFE follow the same pattern as prices at LME and COMEX. I also perform a series of cointegration tests to determine whether the results derived for Commodity Exchanges also apply to the physical aluminum markets. The results indicate that the three Commodity Exchange markets are not integrated together as one market system. SHFE displays a certain degree of economic integration with the LME but cannot be regarded as economically integrated with COMEX. Nevertheless, LME and COMEX exhibit a relatively high degree of economic integration between themselves. The results can be extended to the physical aluminum market in the Shanghai region but not to China as a whole, most likely because of insufficient number of data observations. The second question concerns the efficiency of aluminum trading at SHFE, relative to COMEX and LME. The precision, with which termed aluminum futures contract prices on their maturity are able to predict spot prices, serves as a standard measure of Commodity Exchange efficiency. Using the same testing procedure as for the first question I compare relative volatility of spot and futures prices at each Commodity Exchange, and rank their relative performance. The results show that SHFE displays somewhat better efficiency results than LME but worse than COMEX. In level terms, the efficiency of LME cannot be confirmed, SHFE comes close to being efficient and COMEX can be regarded as highly efficient.


A tax assessment made by the Commissioner of Taxation may be argued to be invalid for any of a number of reasons, for example, because it is said to be tentative, provisional or made in bad faith or as a result of conscious maladministration. Whether, in proceedings under Pt IVC of the Taxation Administration Act 1953 (Cth), a court or tribunal has jurisdiction to determine the validity of an assessment is a question that has elicited seemingly divergent views among judges. In particular, there appears to be an inconsistency between the proposition stated by the Full Court of the Federal Court in the 2013 Gashi decision and Taylor J's statement in the High Court decision in McAndrew in 1956 on whether invalidity may be raised in proceedings under Pt IVC. In this article, however, it is argued that there is no inconsistency when one has regard to the particular species of invalidity that is asserted.


This paper analyzes the effects of new technologies oriented to automation in the Chilean labor market. A general equilibrium model is used, in which the investment in robotic capital and the investment in traditional capital are considered separately, allowing the study of the effects of complementarity and substitution that are verified in relation to the labor factor. In particular, the model treats robotic capital as a direct substitute for labor, while incorporating traditional capital as complementary to it. By subjecting the economy to shocks in robotic capital prices, the effects on consumption, employment, wages and GDP can be studied. The results indicate that a fall in the international purchase price of robotic capital has a negative impact on employment as well as on the product. The exercises carried out in this study indicate that a decrease in the international price of robotic capital by 1%, under conditions of high replacement rates between employment and robots, produces a drop in employment and wages of 0.05% if the change is transitory and of 0.25% if it is permanent due to an increase in imports of robotic capital.


develop AIDS). Excellent reviews of homosexual mores in the US have appeared recently,].4 tracing among other things the development of the bath-house system among male homosexuals, where there appears to be an increasing incidence of multiple anal contacts (up to 1000/year/person). It is well known that male homosexuals suffer from a much higher incidence of various enteric parasitic infections, CMV infection, syphilis, and gonorrhoea, than is encountered in the heterosexual male population.':" Thus, with the anal canal being used as a surrogate vagina and trauma being inflicted as a result, it is not difficult to seehow immunosuppression may occur in susceptible individuals, eg, passive, receptor male homosexuals with ano-rectal trauma.' Another interestingproposition is the suggestion that seminal fluid has an immunosuppressive action."This couldwellexplain the few reports of women with AIDS who have in fact been subjected to anal penetration and subsequentimmunosuppression. Clearly, not all male homosexuals are at risk, but a susceptible subgroup seems to be. Limitation or elimination of multiple anal contacts among malehomosexuals may well be the most effective means of reducing or treating the AIDS problem.


This note argues that the solutions to the euro-area crisis proposed by the EU governing institutions in cooperation with the IMF, based on further austerity and wage cuts, will worsen the crisis. They are unlikely to reduce both sovereign and external debt ratios of countries experiencing these problems. Quite in contrary, they are likely to further reduce the real GDP growth of these countries.


The second generation of gynogenetic diploid common carp of majalaya, sinyonya and mirror strains have been produced in 1992. Some of them were sex-reversed by oral administration of 17 α-methyltestoteronne. The females and sex-reversed males were matured on early 1994 and mated to produce progenies of pure strains. This research aimed to measure certain quantitative characters since the early stage of development to the market size. Three different conditions of rearing (i.e. rice field, ponds and concrete tanks) were applied during the nursery phase, while the earthen pond and running water system with intensive feeding were used for the grow-out stage. The results showed that average fecundity of sinyonya carp was higher than mirror and majalaya strains, but its performances of the early development (i.e. fertilization rate, hatching  rate and survival rate at 14 days old) was lowest. At the nursery phase, the survival and growth rates of majalaya carp was relatively better than the other two strains, but the mirror carp had highest feed efficiency and lowest protein retention. During culture period, the growth rates of these three common carp strains were relatively similar (1%), but sinyonya carp, among strains had the highest percentage of fillet (38.5%) with the  lowest total number of muscular bones (69), the highest level of protein content (77.5%) and the lowest level  of lipid content (16.6%) among the three strains.  Keywords: Cyprinus carpio L, gynogenesis, growth rate, product quality.


In eDiscovery, it is critical to ensure that each page produced in legal proceedings conforms with the requirements of court or government agency production requests. Errors in productions could have severe consequences in a case, putting a party in an adverse position. The volume of pages produced continues to increase, and tremendous time and effort has been taken to ensure quality control of document productions. This has historically been a manual and laborious process. This paper demonstrates a novel automated production quality control application which leverages deep learning-based image recognition technology to extract Bates Number and Confidentiality Stamping from legal case production images and validate their correctness. Effectiveness of the method is verified with an experiment using a real-world production data.


In typical signal combining scenarios, the combining weights are estimated using the criterion of maximum average signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or maximum combined output power (COP). Eigen-based algorithms are very important and popular in signal combining. The conventional SNR EIGEN or COP EIGEN may not necessarily be effective in terms of performance or system complexity. The main contribution of this study is the introduction of the combined signal autocorrelation coefficient as a newer objective function to signal combining. The corresponding eigen-based combining algorithm AC EIGEN and its modified algorithm MAC EIGEN are also derived. Proposed algorithms have the same simple system structure as the COP EIGEN, which can successfully avoid estimating the noise correlation matrix. Simulation results indicate that the AC EIGEN and the MAC EIGEN have good combining performance for signals with white Gaussian noise when the SNR of the signals is low. Considering the system complexity of the SNR EIGEN, and the COP EIGEN being biased for non-uniform noise variance signals, the proposed algorithms are attractive.


Diabetes mellitus is one of the most important chronic disease and has become a major public health challenge in the recent world. Currently Machine Learning approaches have been used to analyze and predict the probability of people getting affected by diabetes. Diabetes can be effectively identified using the proposed Machine Learning technique. Many techniques and algorithms were used before for the prediction of type 2 diabetes prediction ,one such model was Multinomial Logistic Regression .Moving a step ahead to improve the diagnostic efficiency, this paper proposes the use of Weighted K –Nearest neighbor for detecting the type-2 Diabetes. This new approach proves higher effectiveness when compared to Multinomial Logistic Regression. Using Pima Indian Dataset the experiments were performed and it shows that efficiency is higher for weighted KNN when compared to Multinomial Logistic Regression.


1. Iron absorption from maize (Zea mays) and sorghum (Sorghum vulgore) beer was more than twelvefold greater than from a gruel made from the constituents used to prepare the beer. 2. The effect of changes occurring during brewing were investigated. These changes include a decrease in the solid content, and the formation of 30 ml ethanol/l and 5 ml lactic acid/]. 3. The presence of solid material was found to inhibit Fe absorption markedly, especially when the solid content was 100 g/l or more. 4. The presence of ethanol potentiated Fe absorption but the effect was only modest in gruels with a high solid content. 5 Fe absorption from a 2 ml lactic acid/] solution was four-fold greater than from a hydrochloric acid solution of the same pH. When lactic acid was added to a gruel containing 200 8 solids/l the mean absorbtion rose from 0.4 to 1.2%. 6. In a direct comparison, Fe absorption from beer was significantly better than from a gruel of similar pH containing lactic acid. 7. The results suggest that at least three factors are responsible for the enhanced Fe absorption from maize and sorghum beer. These include the removal of solids during fermentation and the presence of ethanol and of lactic acid in the final brew. 8. In order to reproduce the way in which beer is brewed domestically in Fe containers, a study was done in which beer was prepared in the presence of Fe wire. Under such circumstances Fe was rapidly dissolved and the final Fe concentration of the brew was 89 mg/l. However, the nature of the Fecontaining compound or compounds was not elucidated.


Background Rheumatoid arthritis (RA), psoriatic arthritis (PsA) and ankylsosing spondylitis (SA) are associated with an increased cardiovascular (CV) mortality. Quantitative abnormalities in lipid profiles are insufficient to explain this excess of CV risk and a qualitative approach of HDL composition is required to identify loss of atheroprotective functions and to correctly identify patients at risk. Atheroprotective functions of HDL are directly linked to the structure of HDL mainly composed of phospholipids (PL). Objectives The main objective of this study is to analyze the PL composition of HDL in patients with chronic inflammatory rheumatic diseases and to compare to matched healthy controls. Methods HDL structure was assessed in patients with active RA (ACR criteria), PsA (CASPAR criteria) and SA (ASAS criteria) patients before initiating first biologic and in healthy controls matched for age, sex and body mass index. Dyslipidemia treatment or pathology which could interfere with lipid profile were excluded. Demographics data, disease activity, cardiometabolic profile and plasma samples were collected. HDL particle were isolated from plasma after two step ultracentrifugation using gradient of density. Lipidomics analysis were performed using liquid chromatography coupled with mass spectrometry. Phospholipid composition between patients and controls was compared using multivariate analyses to take into account possible confounding variables determined according to univariate results and clinical relevance (age, tobacco consumption, steroids use). Multidimensional analyses as factorial mixed data analysis (FMDA) were performed to complete these analyses. Results 19 RA, 19 PsA and 12 SA were analyzed (table 1). 220 phospholipids species were identified among which 2 major classes were modified in rheumatic diseases. Phosphatidylcholine (PC) decreased in RA and PsA (p<0.01 and <0.05 respectively) while lysophosphatidylcholine (LPC) increased significantly (p<0.01, and <0.05 respectively). Some phospholipids species as PC 40: 8 (p<0.001), LPC 16:0 (p<0.001), LPC 18:0 (p<0.001) were identified as discriminant marker of HDL composition in rheumatic disease as compared to controls. Conclusions Phospholipids composition of HDL is altered in RA and PsA. These alterations could explain a loss of atheroprotective functions and the excess of CV risk observed in RA and PsA patients. Chronic inflammation, through the activation of phospholipase A2 type II which hydrolyze PC into LPC, could modify the structure of HDL phospholipids and thus could impact HDL functionality such as cholesterol efflux, LDL oxidation modulation, anti-inflammatory and vasculoprotective properties. These preliminary data suggest the major role of inflammation in these alterations. References Tselepis AD et al. Atheroscler Suppl. 2002;3(4):57–68. Kontush A, et al. J Lipid Res. 2013;54(11):2950–63. Disclosure of Interest None declared


Ray-tracing techniques have proven to be very useful for the analysis and design of wireless systems both in urban microcells and in indoor picocells. At present, the optimization of these techniques enables not only the signal mean level but also the local statistics to be estimated accurately, which is of great practical importance. A wide range of comparisons between measurements and simulations confirming this have been carried out by the authors, and some examples are presented. The most interesting contribution of this paper is that starting from the signal information at one single point, obtained using ray-tracing techniques, it is possible to estimate the signal statistics in a local area of that point. This possibility substantially reduces the local statistics calculation time, confirming the idea that an efficient site specific channel model might be feasible. Finally, it is also shown that ray-tracing techniques are able to accurately estimate the first- and second-order statistics in those environments where the Clarke (1968) or isotropic scattering model is not applicable.


Two studies were conducted to evaluate the effects of irradiation of spray-dried animal plasma and Termin-8 treatment to spray-dried animal plasma, base mix (specialty protein products, milk products, ground oat groats, soy flour, flow agent, vitamins, and minerals), or whole diet on nursery pig performance. Overall (d 0 to 14) in Exp. 1, pigs fed diets containing irradiated plasma had increased ADG and pigs fed Termin-8® treated plasma had increased ADG and ADFI compared to pigs fed diets with regular plasma or whole diets (containing either regular or irradiated plasma) treated with Termin-8. No differences in F/G were observed among treatments. In Exp. 2, pigs fed diets that contained either animal plasma or base mix treated with Termin-8 in the SEW diet had increased ADG and F/G from d 0 to 13 compared to no Termin-8 treatment, but no differences were observed overall (d 0 to 40). Therefore, the use of irradiated spray-dried animal plasma and Termin-8 treated spray-dried animal plasma and base mix improves growth performance in nursery pigs during the initial period after weaning.


Aim of this paper is to describe the simultaneous switching noise (SSN) mitigation by means of a novel electromagnetic band gap (EBG) structure with triangle patches and hexagonal array. The proposed EBG structure allows achieving -40 dB stop band within the frequency range 6.5-9 GHz. Parametric analysis including the radius effect of the metal plated vias, the via length and the distance between the patches is performed by means of full wave simulations, based on the Finite Integration Technique. The impact of the proposed design on the signal integrity is also investigated both in time domain (eye-diagrams and TDR) and frequency domain (S-parameters). Finally dispersion diagrams of the singular unit EBG cell are analyzed by means of eigenmode solver and periodic boundary conditions.


Regulation 1024/2013 has established the Single Supervisory Mechanism (SSM) as a milestone towards
the establishment of a full-fledged European Banking Union (EBU). This mechanism represents an
unprecedented centralization in the area of financial market supervision in the internal market by shifting
powers from national supervisory authorities to the European Central Bank (ECB), to be exercised
primarily by its newly established Supervisory Board. In principle, the ECB is in charge of direct supervision
of significant credit institutions, whereas the competent national supervisors remain in charge of all other
credit institutions. Yet it can be observed as a rather peculiar feature of the SSM model that the ECB has the
duty to carry out its tasks under EU law by directly applying national legislation. More specifically, Article
4(3) of the SSM Regulation compels the ECB to apply both national legislation implementing relevant EU
directives and national rules exercising options granted by EU regulations.
This paper examines the application by the ECB of national rules in fulfilling its tasks under the SSM
Regulation by focusing on a number of salient legal challenges posed by these novel regulatory arrangements
in the EU. For this purpose, the application of different national implementing rules by the ECB is
scrutinized. Here the analysis focuses on the difficulties that a supranational authority such as the ECB
may face in interpreting, applying, and enforcing the national rules of different member states, as well as
the implications these difficulties may have for the coherence of the European financial regulatory and
supervisory system that was one of the main goals of the establishment of the EBU. Next, the challenges
arising in terms of legal review and protection against ECB measures that are based on the application
of national law are analyzed. In particular, issues pertaining to access to justice as regards the competent
court(s) and the law applicable to disputes involving the application of national legislation by the ECB are
investigated.


OBJECTIVE A common means of subtyping schizophrenia is to use family history. Familial schizophrenia is defined by a family history of psychotic disorders, and sporadic schizophrenia is defined by the absence of such a history. Some writers have proposed that familial cases are mostly genetic, while the causes of sporadic schizophrenia are primarily environmental. The object of this report is to consider the theoretical and empirical support for the validity of this classification. METHOD A review of studies examining the familial-sporadic distinction in schizophrenia was based on papers located through a MEDLINE search and published bibliographies. Because of the great variation in the methodological rigor of the studies, the authors rated them on a scale assessing 10 methodological features. Studies achieving at least 50% of the maximum possible score were selected for review. RESULTS Only 29 of 69 studies located met the selection criteria, and even among the studies selected, important methodological shortcomings were noted. Despite an impressive number of comparisons between groups of subjects with familial and sporadic schizophrenia, few differences were found. In addition, few differences were replicated and supported by studies using designs other than the familial-sporadic distinction. CONCLUSIONS The scarcity of studies with adequate methodology precludes any definitive judgment about the validity of the familial-sporadic distinction in schizophrenia. The delineation of predominantly genetic and predominantly environmental subtypes of schizophrenia will likely require large sample sizes, valid methods for the diagnosis of relatives, and stringent definitions of familiarity and sporadicity. Moreover, research strategies other than the familial-sporadic distinction may be better suited to identify such subtypes.


Cell colonies of bacteria, tumor cells, and fungi, under nutrient limited growth conditions, exhibit complex branched growth patterns. In order to investigate this phenomenon we present a simple hybrid cellular automaton model of cell colony growth. In the model the growth of the colony is limited by a nutrient that is consumed by the cells and which inhibits cell division if it falls below a certain threshold. Using this model we have investigated how the nutrient consumption rate of the cells affects the growth dynamics of the colony. We found that for low consumption rates the colony takes on an Eden-like morphology, while for higher consumption rates the morphology of the colony is branched with a fractal geometry. These findings are in agreement with previous results, but the simplicity of the model presented here allows for a linear stability analysis of the system. By observing that the local growth of the colony is proportional to the flux of the nutrient we derive an approximate dispersion relation for the growth of the colony interface. This dispersion relation shows that the stability of the growth depends on how far the nutrient penetrates into the colony. For low nutrient consumption rates the penetration distance is large, which stabilizes the growth, while for high consumption rates the penetration distance is small, which leads to unstable branched growth. When the penetration distance vanishes the dispersion relation is reduced to the one describing Laplacian growth without ultra-violet regularization. The dispersion relation was verified by measuring how the average branch width depends on the consumption rate of the cells and shows good agreement between theory and simulations.


An efficient non-linear pre-filtering technique based on Tomlinson-Harashima pre-coding (THP) has recently been proposed by Liu and Krzymien in the context of multiple-antenna multi-user systems. The algorithm is based on the zero-forcing (ZF) criterion and is derived under the assumption that the number of users is equal to the number of transmit antennas. In contrast to other existing methods, it ensures the same signal-to-noise-ratio (SNR) at each mobile terminal so as to guarantee a fair treatment of all active users. In multimedia applications, however, several types of information with different quality-of-service (QoS) requirements must be sent simultaneously on different subchannels. Motivated by the above problem, in the present work we design a THP-based pre-filtering algorithm for multiple-antenna multi-user systems in which the base station allocates the transmit power according to the QoS requirement of each active user. Compared to existing alternatives, the proposed scheme is simpler to implement and suited for practical situations where the number of active users may be less than the number of transmit antennas


The growing interest in open-domain question answering is limited by the lack of evaluation and training resources. To overcome this resource bottleneck for German, we propose a novel methodology to acquire new question-answer pairs for system evaluation that relies on volunteer collaboration over the Internet. Utilizing Wikipedia, a popular free online encyclopedia available in several languages, we show that the data acquisition problem can be cast as a Web experiment. We present a Web-based annotation tool and carry out a distributed data collection experiment. The data gathered from the mostly anonymous contributors is compared to a similar dataset produced in-house by domain experts on the one hand, and the German questions from the from the CLEF QA 2004 effort on the other hand. Our analysis of the datasets suggests that using our novel method a medium-scale evaluation resource can be built at very small cost in a short period of time. The technique and software developed here is readily applicable to other languages where free online encyclopedias are available, and our resulting corpus is likewise freely available.


"Hoosier Faiths" surveys the history of more than fifty denominations and religious groups in Indiana from pioneer days to the present. In addition to profiles of internationally known religious centers, such as Notre Dame and Saint Meinrad, and mainline congregations of Catholics, Methodists, Baptists, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and Episcopalians, among others, "Hoosier Faiths" includes sections on Jews, Muslims, Shakers, Rappites, Mennonites, Pentecostals, Mormons, Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Christian Scientists, who contributed significantly to Indiana's diverse and flourishing religious heritage. L. C. Rudolph describes the founding and development of each religious group, highlights major personalities and issues, and summarizes the group's present status. An appendix of statistics on church membership and Kim Charles Ferrill's thirty-two handsome photographs of religious institutions around the state further enhance this major reference work.


This article aims at an analysis of agreements as to succession from the perspective of private international law. All forms of succession agreements are considered, including mutual wills. The study also contains references to comparative law in the field. The relevant provisions of Regulation (EU) No 650/2012 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 4 July 2012 on jurisdiction, applicable law, recognition and enforcement of decisions and acceptance and enforcement of authentic instruments in matters of succession and on the creation of a European Certificate of Succession – are analyzed. 650/2012, distinguishing between unilateral and bi- or multilateral pacts, as well as between the admissibility of pacts and issues related to their validity, including binding force and provisions on termination. The article concludes with a functional analysis dedicated to adapting the effects of agreements as to succession, wich are valid according to the hypothetical succession law, given that the lex successionis is hostile to them. More specifically, there is the issue of protecting the interests of force heirs by reference to the law applicable to the succession.


Speaker adaptation by means of adjustment of speaker characteristic properties, such as vocal tract length, has the important advantage compared to conventional adaptation techniques that the adapted models are guaranteed to be realistic if the description of the properties are. One problem with this approach is that the search procedure to estimate them is computationally heavy. We address the problem by using a multi-dimensional, hierarchical tree of acoustic model sets. The leaf sets are created by transforming a conventionally trained model set using leaf-specific speaker profile vectors. The model sets of non-leaf nodes are formed by merging the models of their child nodes, using a computationally efficient algorithm. During recognition, a maximum likelihood criterion is followed to traverse the tree. Studies of one- (VTLN) and four-dimensional speaker profile vectors (VTLN, two spectral slope parameters and model variance scaling) exhibit a reduction of the computational load to a fraction compared to that of an exhaustive grid search. In recognition experiments on children's connected digits using adult and male models, the one-dimensional tree search performed as well as the exhaustive search. Further reduction was achieved with four dimensions. The best recognition results are 0.93% and 10.2% WER in TIDIGITS and PF-Star-Sw, respectively, using adult models.


This paper provides a comprehensive study of the harmonics generated by a frequency shifted backscatter communication system. The suppression and the manipulability of different harmonics are of importance to avoid detrimental inter-user interference when a number of backscattering nodes (and perhaps also other active wireless users) operate simultaneously in a network. In this paper the harmonics generated by a widely adopted open-short backscatter tag architecture is firstly presented. Then the ideal backscatter system which generates no unwanted harmonics is discussed, which inspires various harmonic suppression strategies. In particular, practical constraints of the backscatter tag hardware capabilities are applied, e.g., the number of discrete reflection coefficients that can be synthesized, and the dimension of the reflection coefficients (real-valued or complex-valued). Furthermore, the dual-transistor based IQ backscatter modulator is found useful to suppress all mirror harmonics and any specified higher order harmonics. The applicability of these proposed harmonic suppression approaches are demonstrated by an exemplar backscatter network consisting of multiple nodes performing binary frequency shifted keying (2FSK) modulated backscatter communications simultaneously.


Abstract Recalling several profound disagreements about business ethics as it is currently discussed in Western societies, I emphasize the need for business ethics as an academic discipline that constitutes the "backbone" for both teaching business ethics and improving business practice (section 1). Then I outline a conceptual framework of business ethics that promotes a "bottom-up" approach (section 2). This "problem-and action-oriented" conception appears to be fruitful in terms of both practical relevance and theoretical understanding. Finally, I argue for (section 3) the relevance of discussing goals at all levels of human action (i.e., individuals, organizations, systems) as well as the indispensability of human rights, and propose Amartya Sen's "goal-rights-system" approach as a normative-ethical framework for business ethics that integrates these two fundamental aspects.


In this paper I present an approach to teaching about and defining bribery that starts with the presumption that a payment, once defined as a "bribe," is prima facie unethical. That is, I make no distinction between "good bribes" and "bad bribes." In short, bribery cannot be justified. In this context, how could you determine precisely when a particular payment constitutes a bribe and when it does not? I present a framework for defining bribery in such a way that it (1) retains the presumption that bribery is unethical, (2) reflects our intuitive understanding of bribery, and (3) is flexible enough to effectively discriminate between bribe and non-bribe payments. This definition is based on the principal-agent relationship in that bribes are payments to agents to induce them to act against the interests of their principals. I begin the paper by describing a classroom exercise designed to force students to think about what a good definition of bribery ought to be. First, I give students a sheet of paper describing 11 brief scenarios in which a payment is to be made from one person to another. These scenarios are reproduced in the paper. Second, I ask them to identify which scenarios constitute the payment of a bribe, according to their understanding of bribery. Third, I challenge students to formulate a general definition of bribery that justifies their assessments of the specific cases they have identified as bribery. That is, they must develop one definition of bribery to account for each of the cases of bribery they identified. Fourth, I invite students to offer to the class whether or not a particular scenario is an example of bribery, what their definition of bribery is, and why their definition supports their conclusions. Finally, I apply their definitions to other scenarios to determine whether the definitions force the students to agree with their original assessments of what cases involved bribery. Examples of definitions typically offered are provided, along with my responses as to why they are inferior. I then offer a definition of bribery based on the principal-agent framework. A principal-agent relationship exists when a principal delegates some task or assignment to an agent, who is then made responsible for acting in the principal's interest. The important idea here is that the agent, by agreeing to enter into a principal-agent relationship, accepts the obligation to act in the interest of the principal. The concept of a principal-agent relationship provides a straightforward means of defining bribery. A bribe is a payment, made by a third party to an agent of a principal, in which the agent explicitly or implicitly agrees to take an action that is contrary to his duty as an agent of the principal and is thus not in the interest of the principal. A bribe cannot be, by definition, a payment made to a principal (although a payment made to a principal may be unethical for other reasons); only agents can be bribed, not principals. Effectively, this means that in assessing whether business payments are bribes, one should determine whether the person receiving the payment is an agent of a principal, and if the payment is going to be retained by the agent.


We compared median runoff (R) and precipitation (P) relationships over 25 years from 20 mesoscale (50 to 5,000 km2) catchments on the Boreal Plains, Alberta, Canada, to understand controls on water sink and source dynamics in water‐limited, low‐relief northern environments. Long‐term catchment R and runoff efficiency (RP−1) were low and varied spatially by over an order of magnitude (3 to 119 mm/year, 1 to 27%). Intercatchment differences were not associated with small variations in climate. The partitioning of P into evapotranspiration (ET) and R instead reflected the interplay between underlying glacial deposit texture, overlying soil‐vegetation land cover, and regional slope. Correlation and principal component analyses results show that peatland‐swamp wetlands were the major source areas of water. The lowest estimates of median annual catchment ET (321 to 395 mm) and greatest R (60 to 119 mm, 13 to 27% of P) were observed in low‐relief, peatland‐swamp dominated catchments, within both fine‐textured clay‐plain and coarse‐textured glacial deposits. In contrast, open‐water wetlands and deciduous‐mixedwood forest land covers acted as water sinks, and less catchment R was observed with increases in proportional coverage of these land covers. In catchments dominated by hummocky moraines, long‐term runoff was restricted to 10 mm/year, or 2% of P. This reflects the poor surface‐drainage networks and slightly greater regional slope of the fine‐textured glacial deposit, coupled with the large soil‐water and depression storage and higher actual ET of associated shallow open‐water marsh wetland and deciduous‐forest land covers. This intercatchment study enhances current conceptual frameworks for predicting water yield in the Boreal Plains based on the sink and source functions of glacial landforms and soil‐vegetation land covers. It offers the capability within this hydro‐geoclimatic region to design reclaimed catchments with desired hydrological functionality and associated tolerances to climate or land‐use changes and inform land management decisions based on effective catchment‐scale conceptual understanding.


This research considered whether or not the frequency of Bible teaching relates to attachment relationships between teens and their youth-workers. Bible study and attachment were also considered relative to their relationships to adolescent psychosocial adjustment. Teaching teenagers from the Bible coincides with youth-workers cultivating more successful attachment relationships with young people. Those taught most frequently, demonstrated higher levels of attachment relationships. Bible teaching and adolescent attachment to a youth-worker also related to a teenager feeling less lonely.


This article examines the subject and visual representation of the gay fantasy figure, with specific reference to the male sexual outlaw character and its embodiment in the archetypes of the sailor and male hustler, and their fantasmatic performance in fashion editorials and advertising campaigns. It will focus on themes of homoeroticism, narratives of sexual danger, duality and adornment (with specific reference to tattooed bodies), and will provide an overview of the fascination with the rough trade type that gay artists and audiences share, and the dichotomy of 'good and evil' and 'tragic and comic' in these artists' subversive rendition of homo-hetero desire. The starting points for this article are two seminal works on the Male Sexual Outlaw as a central focal point for their audiences' desire: Jean Genet's novel Querelle de Brest (1947, illustrated by Jean Cocteau) and Philip-Lorca diCorcia's series of photographs titled Hustlers (1990–1992). By focusing on the figures of the professional mariner and the male prostitute, and incorporating underlying references to the male-dominated shady underworlds they supposedly inhabit and a life lived on the margins of society, the work investigates the representation and desire for a sexually dominant man from within the canon of western white gay male art.


In longitudinal studies with missingness, shared parameter models (SPM) provide appropriate framework for the joint modeling of the measurements and missingness process. These models use a set of random effects to account for the interdependence between two processes. Sometimes the longitudinal responses may not be fitted well by using a linear model and some non-parametric methods have to be used. Also, parametric assumptions are typically made for the random effects distribution, and violation of those may affect the parameter estimates and standard errors. To overcome these problems, we propose a semi-parametric model for the joint modelling of longitudinal markers and a missing not at random mechanism. In this model, because of the flexibility in nonparametric regression models, the relationship between the response variables and the covariates has been modeled by semi-parametric mixed effect model. Also, we do not assume any parametric assumption for the random effects distribution and we allow it to be unspecified. The parameter estimations are made using a vertex exchange method. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed model, we compare SPM using regression spline (Spline-SPM) and semi-parametric SPM (SpSPM) models. We also conduct a simulation study with different parametric assumptions for the random effects distribution. A real example from a recent HIV study is analyzed for illustration of the proposed approach.


Author(s): Reti, Irene H. | Abstract: In 1971, Robert Michael Tanner [R. Michael Tanner] arrived at the University of California, Santa Cruz as a young assistant professor, joining what was then a fledgling computer and information sciences board [department]. Attracted to UCSC by its focus on undergraduate education and interdisciplinary study, and by the beauty of the campus's natural landscape, Tanner was hired by the legendary provost of Cowell College, Jasper Rose. Tanner remained at UC Santa Cruz until 2002; in his more than thirty years on the campus he served in a myriad of leadership roles. His first administrative position was as chair of the Committee on Admissions, Financial Aid, and Relations with Schools, working with Dean of Admissions Richard Moll during UCSC's enrollment crisis of the 1970s and early 1980s. He later chaired the Computer and Information Sciences (1981-1988) board and the Academic Senate Committee on Educational Policy (1985-1987), where he focused on reviewing UCSC's Narrative Evaluation System and the campus's general education requirements. This oral history, conducted as part of the Regional History Project's University History Series, provides Tanner's unique perspective on thirty years of UCSC's history from the vantage point of these diverse administrative positions, as well as a member of the computer and information science faculty and of Cowell College, where he served as a residential preceptor in the 1970s. After many years of dedicated teaching, in 1988-89 Tanner entered UCSC's senior administration, serving first as acting dean of natural sciences from 1988-19, and then as academic vice chancellor from 1989-1992 and executive vice chancellor (a position which he was the first to occupy) from 1992-1998. In the early 1990s, Tanner played a key role in helping UCSC cope with a major budget crisis. During those years he worked with three chancellors: Chancellor Robert Stevens, Chancellor Karl Pister, and finally Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood. In this oral history, he offers his firsthand impressions of these three very different campus leaders.One of the most substantial contributions of this oral history is Tanner's incisive thoughts on UC Santa Cruz as an experimental and unique institution of higher education. He shares insightful reflections on how Dean McHenry's centralized decision making structure during the early years of the campus impacted the campus as it began to grow; on UCSC's innovative college system; and on the campus's Narrative Evaluation System. Another valuable contribution of this narrative is Tanner's on-the-ground perspectives on the development of Silicon Valley and UC Santa Cruz's relationship with the technology industry.


AIMS
Blood D-dimer testing has been proposed as diagnostic marker with high sensitivity for exclusion of acute aortic dissection (AAD). We performed a systematic review and validated the findings in a prospective patient cohort.

METHODS AND RESULTS
We searched MEDLINE, EMBASE, CINAHL, and BIOSIS from inception until January 2007 using a combination of search terms for aortic dissection and D-dimer. Study type, type of assay used, predefined cut-off level, result of D-dimer testing, sensitivity, and specificity were abstracted. In 16 identified studies (437 patients), the reported cut-off values ranged from 0.1 to 0.9 microg/mL. D-dimer testing provided high sensitivity (0.97 95% CI 0.94-0.98) and negative likelihood ratio (0.06 95% CI 0.02-0.13). In our cohort of 65 patients (36 male, 55%; median age 59 years, IQR 49-67) with proven AAD, D-dimer levels scattered from 0.24 to 137.88 microg/mL (median 3.47; IQR 1.55-14.49). Mean NPV for the different cut-off levels ranged from 92 % for a cut-off level of 0.9 microg/mL to 100% for a cut-off level of 0.1 microg/mL in our study population.

CONCLUSION
Current evidence supports a routine measurement of D-dimer in excluding AAD. A D-dimer <0.1 microg/mL will exclude AAD in all cases.


Background: Opioid maintenance treatment (OMT) is regarded as a crime control measure. Yet, some individuals are charged with violent criminal offenses while enrolled in OMT. This article aims to generate nuanced knowledge about violent crime among a group of imprisoned, OMT-enrolled individuals by exploring their understandings of the role of substances in violent crime prior to and during OMT, moral values related to violent crime, and post-crime processing of their moral transgressions. Methods: Twenty-eight semi-structured interviews were undertaken among 12 OMT-enrolled prisoners. The interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. An exploratory, thematic analysis was carried out with a reflexive and interactive approach. Findings: Prior to OMT, substances and, in particular, high-dose benzodiazepines were deliberately used to induce 'antisocial selves' capable of transgressing individual moral codes and performing non-violent and violent criminal acts, mainly to support costly heroin use. During OMT, impulsive and uncontrolled substance use just prior to the violent acts that the participants were imprisoned for was reported. Yet, to conduct a (violent) criminal act does not necessarily imply that one is without moral principles. The study participants maintain moral standards, engage in complex moral negotiations, and struggle to reconcile their moral transgressions. Benzodiazepines were also used to reduce memories of and alleviate the guilt associated with having committed violent crimes. Conclusions: Substances are used to transgress moral codes prior to committing and to neutralize the shame and guilt experienced after having committed violent crimes. Being simultaneously enrolled in OMT and imprisoned for a (violent) crime might evoke feelings of 'double' shame and guilt for both the criminal behavior prior to treatment and the actual case(s) one is imprisoned for while in OMT. Treatment providers should identify individuals with histories of violent behavior and, together with them, explore concrete episodes of violence and their emotional reactions. Particular attention should be given to potential relationships between substance use and violence and treatment approaches tailored accordingly. What appears as severe antisocial personality disorder may be partly explained by substance use.


Sheet metal stamping processes design is not a trivial task due to the complex issues to be taken into account. Therefore, proper design methodologies to reduce times and costs have to be developed mostly based on computer aided procedures. This paper presents a methodology to effectively determine the optimal process parameters using finite element analysis (FEA) and design of experiments (DOE) based on Metamodels. The idea is to establish an approximation function relationship between quality objectives and process parameters to alleviate the expensive computational expense in the optimization iterations for the sheet metal forming process. This paper investigated the Kriging metamodel approach. In order to prove accuracy and efficiency of Kriging method, a nonlinear function as test functions is implemented. At the same time, the practical nonlinear engineering problems such as square drawing are also optimized successfully by proposed method.


Indian power systems are designed to operate at a nominal frequency of 50 Hz. They face hourly demands that exceed their generation capacity during certain hours of a day and operate at a lower frequency in those hours. In general, each state (province) has an electric utility with a generation capacity that comprises: (i) state (provincial) government owned generation plants, (ii) independent power producers (IPPs) and (iii) assigned portion of outputs of central (federal) government owned generation plants. The state government and central government plants and IPPs offer to sell energy to a State's utility through offer bids. A State's utility may draw additional power from a central generator in excess of its assigned portion of output and it is termed as an un-scheduled interchange (UI). The utility will pay for this UI to the central generator using an hourly tariff rate known as availability-based tariff (ABT). ABT is a function of the operating frequency. This study captures this operational model, ABT structure and proposes a mixed integer linear-programming formulation to optimally commit and schedule units in the utility for 24 h. The proposed model and results on actual data are reported. The system includes a pumped-hydro unit.


This study advances research at the intersection of environmental degradation, social stratification, and population health in the United States. Expanding the theoretical principles of power, proximity, and physiology, we hypothesize that the harmful effect of fine particulate matter on life expectancy is greater in states with higher levels of income inequality and larger black populations. To test our hypothesis, we use two-way fixed effects regression analysis to estimate the effect of a three-way interaction between fine particulate matter, income share of the top ten percent, and the percent of the population that is black on state-level average life expectancy for all US states and the District of Columbia (2000–2014). The findings support our hypothesis: the estimated effect of the three-way interaction on average life expectancy is negative and statistically significant, net of various socioeconomic and demographic controls. Using post-estimation techniques, we visually illustrate that the harmful effect of fine particulate matter on life expectancy is especially pronounced in states with both very high levels of income inequality and very large black populations. We conclude by summarizing the theoretical and substantive implications of our findings, the limitations of the study, and potential next steps in this evolving area of interdisciplinary research.


Abstract : This monograph is a part of the report of a research project on the problems of the east Asiatic monsoon carried out by the Institute of Geophysics and Meteorology, Academia Sinica during the past several years. It consists of three parts. The first part presents a critical survey of the past views and research approaches of meteorologists in different countries to the monsoon problem and includes a summary of the author's (Kao's) views. The second part discusses in greater detail the formation factors of the east Asiatic monsoon climate and some of its characteristic features in China. It proposes a division of China into different monsoon regions. The third part studies the development in summer and decay in winter of the monsoon in relation firstly to the seasonal variation of the general circulation, and secondly to the beginning and end of the rainy season in China. Based on the studies outlined above, tentative conclusions on the problems are given. This reference monograph is intended for those working in the fields of meteorology, climatology and geography. (Translator)


Introduction Social contextual factors are often not taken into account when examining STI transmission. Understanding relationship types is central to targeting sexual health services, such as partner notification. This study examines the public's understandings of the language used to describe different types of partners and sexual relationships. Methods A qualitative study, involving six focus groups was conducted in Scotland and England. Purposive sampling recruited 38 participants, including young heterosexuals (n=22) and gay men and other men who have sex with men (n=16). A semi-structured topic guide was used to facilitate the discussion, which included interactive tasks. An integrative thematic analytic approach was adopted by synthesising both textual data and the data derived from the interactive tasks. Results Findings highlighted the diverse ways that relationships are understood and the fluid nature of partner types. Themes illustrated the importance of a range of contextual factors such as the variable nature of sexual relationships and key differences in their affective elements, the importance of peer context, social identities and developmental trajectories and the role of online communication in developing and shaping sexual networks and partnership formation. Discussion Social identities and people's historical and geographic context 'shape' the way people talk about relationships. Fluidity and contextualisation are two key elements to be taken into consideration in understanding the language and terms used to describe relationships. From a public health perspective, understanding relationship types can unveil pathways to understand transmission patterns of STIs and provide more effective sexual health services.


A careful look at the UK population reflects the elevated position, growing population of some diaspora groups. Existing research shows the complex nature of diaspora groups and underlines the difficulties for sociologists in understanding the various cultural aspects of these varied groups. Hence, it became crucial to study these groups in order update the existing literatures as most of the existing literatures does not fulfil the required the attention towards diaspora groups. Although scholars started comprehending 'diaspora' in their studies since 1970s, majority of the works remained focused to the classical Jewish diaspora and their characteristics of forceful removals, exile, nostalgia and hope of final return to homeland. Again some of the studies were carried out on African diaspora, but the result remained limited as these studies were more focused with the issues around identity. Following the trend of classical diaspora, a new version of 'diaspora' has arrived, which included new groups of people e.g.: businessmen, politicians, scholars and journalists. The emergence of new diaspora group has challenged the classical form of diaspora through its positive meaning of life opposing the classical theme of survival in agony. So this research will explore the cultural aspects of a relatively new diaspora group with particular reference to the Bangladeshi communities in the UK. Along with that the study will explore the food consumption patterns of this given community. By doing so, it will also identify the relationship between food and identity. As the study will focus on the interest, beliefs and cultural practices of the Bangladeshi diaspora in the UK, a qualitative research approach is used. In conclusion, the study is expected to uncover the underlying significance of culture and identity on food consumption of diaspora.


Bias in news reporting can lead to tribalism and division on important issues. Scalable and reliable measurement of such biases is an important first step in addressing them. In this work, based on the intuition that media bias is captured by the tone and word choices in articles, we propose a framework for modeling the relative bias of media outlets through masked token prediction via large-scale pretrained masked language models fine-tuned on articles form news outlets. Through experiments on five diverse and politically polarized topics we show that our framework can capture media bias towards these topics with high reliability. Additionally, our experiments show that our framework is general, in that language models fine-tuned on one topic can be applied to other topics with little drop in performance.


The purpose of this project was to create a method for designing a scholarly journal by managing all design and print aspects of a Volume II, student produced, journal. The journal, Paideia, included student research papers and alumni successes in the workplace from California Polytechnic State University's Political Science Department. Responsibilities included inserting text and photos from the Political Science committee, and making a cohesive layout and design with all elements given. Since a new volume of the journal will be assembled each year, a style guide was also produced alongside the journal, for future students to refer to when producing a new volume. The style guide ensures a cohesive brand for Paideia in the future years, as there will be new designers assigned to the journal each year. In addition, finding the best printing solution for Paideia, and obtaining price estimates for various quantities was important in terms of budget.


Shortened military avionics life cycles, growing real time processing performance requirements, and commercial product technology adaptation to military operational environments makes the move to COTS challenging. Avionics systems integrators must focus on procuring avionics box enclosures that support military operational environments. Aircraft wiring modification processes have to be developed to provide upgrades that support high speed computing systems using greater data bandwidths. Software engineering processes have to be tailored to incorporate new computing system standards and methodologies. Avionics Systems Engineering processes must evolve and adapt to dynamically changing COTS NDI product lines that incorporate emerging standards. COTS-OSEP embraces the combination of art and science that includes insight, intuition, and technology projection necessary to upgrade avionics suites with the latest capabilities. With the convergence of telecommunication, high definition television, multimedia, and super computing desktop technologies, traditional military ECBS architecting paradigms have to significantly evolve in order to reap 'value engineering' benefits from the commercial marketplace.


The development of a phasic system for the enzymic resoln. of racemic phenylalanine (I) up to benchtop pilot plant scale is described. The principle is based upon the hydrolysis of racemic Pr ester of I with immobilized a-chymotrypsin (II) in which only the L-isomer reacts to give enantiomerically pure L-I. By employing Me2CHCH2COMe and H2O as solvents, several problems inherent to the monophasic system (such as substrate autohydrolysis, dimerization, or pptn. at high pH or severe pH decreases at the activity optimum of the enzyme (5.5-6.5) due to low buffer capacity) are overcome, since the immiscible org. phase partially exts. the neutral form of the ester, thus shifting the buffer capacity to optimal reaction values. 100% Conversions are thereby obtained without the necessity of external pH control. Various data are presented for monophasic, biphasic, and triphasic (ie. with immobilized II) systems, including conversions, substrate partitions between the 2 solvents, and reaction kinetics. Although batch expts. with the 3-phase system were successful in a continuously stirred tank reactor, in continuous operation in a plug flow reactor conversion did not exceed 80%, probably a result of mass transfer limitation between both liq. phases. [on SciFinder (R)]


2nd SIMPI (Sustainability Initiatives: Case Studies in Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia) and International Conference on Urban Studies, Far Eastern University, Manila Philippines. (2016, May 4-5).


Temporal continuity of object identity is a natural feature of visual input statistics, and it is potentially exploited -in an unsupervised manner -by the ventral visual stream to build and re-shape the neural representation in inferior temporal (IT) cortex and ITdependent core object recognition behavior. Prior psychophysical studies in humans and electrophysiological studies in monkey IT are individually supportive of this hypothesis. However, due to differences in tasks and experience manipulations, it is not yet known if the reported plasticity of individual IT neurons and the reported human behavioral changes are quantitatively consistent. Here we tested that consistency by building an unsupervised plasticity model that captures the previously-reported IT neural plasticity and combined that model with a previously established IT-to-recognition-behavior linking model. We compared the predictions of the overall model with the results of three new human behavioral experiments: in each we delivered a different type of unsupervised temporal contiguity experience and longitudinally measured its effect on performance of targeted object discrimination tasks. We found that, without any parameter tuning, the overall model accurately predicted the mean direction, magnitude and time course of performance changes in all three of these experiments. We also found a previously unreported dependency of the observed human performance change on the initial difficulty of the targeted object discrimination task, which was also largely predicted by the overall model. This result demonstrates the interlocking consistency of a range of prior neural and behavioral work, and thus adds support to the hypothesis that tolerant core object recognition in human and non-human primates is instructed -at least in part -by naturally occurring unsupervised temporal contiguity experience.


ABSTRACT This article reports on the findings from a literature review of research on data use in education published in English, German and Scandinavian languages. The review is inspired by methods for systematic mapping. The analysis illustrates how the characteristics of the total corpus of 129 articles on data use in education vary across different contexts, countries and regions. In all contexts, the studies primarily investigate structures and systems around data use. While the Anglophone studies are mainly empirical and often concerned with implementation and effectiveness in terms of data use, the studies published in German and Scandinavian languages focus more heavily on discussions and analytical reflections upon the developments of data use in education. Six investigative modes of studies on data use that can contribute to creating a more nuanced understanding of research on data use in education are identified, presented and discussed.


Error-rate performance of a digital FM with differential detection in the presence of both thermal Gaussian noise and cochannel interference is theoretically analyzed in the fast Rayleigh fading environment encountered in the typical UHF or microwave land mobile radio channels. The temporal correlation of the fades is included in the performance analysis. The error probability is presented by a simple closed form for the important situations where both effects of Gaussian noise and cochannel interference predominate in causing errors. Finally, a comparison with the other detection schemes, e.g., discriminator and coherent detections, is given.


Prior research reports a remarkable homogeneity of hedge fund performance rankings produced by common risk-adjusted performance ratios. The paper at hand contributes to the discussion by studying the behavior of, and the relationship between these performance ratios over the time period from 1994 to 2010, and by validating the robustness of the findings for shorter sub-periods characterized by specific economic conditions. The results suggest that although the general result that most of the ratios considered provide very similar performance rankings is supported, the degree of their congruency varies over time.


Recently, neural style transfer has drawn many attentions and significant progresses have been made, especially for image style transfer. However, flexible and consistent style transfer for videos remains a challenging problem. Existing training strategies, either using a significant amount of video data with optical flows or introducing single-frame regularizers, have limited performance on real videos. In this paper, we propose a novel interpretation of temporal consistency, based on which we analyze the drawbacks of existing training strategies; and then derive a new compound regularization. Experimental results show that the proposed regularization can better balance the spatial and temporal performance, which supports our modeling. Combining with the new cost formula, we design a zero-shot video style transfer framework. Moreover, for better feature migration, we introduce a new module to dynamically adjust inter-channel distributions. Quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate the superiority of our method over other state-of-the-art style transfer methods. Our project is publicly available at: https://daooshee.github.io/CompoundVST/.


The management of sickle cell disease is a major challenge at the international level. In many African countries, sickle cell anemia is one of the major causes of mortality and is a critical public health problem in Niger. In this part of the continent, the estimated prevalence is around 18 to 22%, which is amongst the highest in Africa. Nowadays, despite the existence of some ways to improve the prognosis of sickle cell anemia as allograft, it turns out that these resources are expensive and out of reach of underdeveloped countries. The purpose of this study was to identify the preliminary anti-sickle cell plants in Niger's traditional pharmacopoeia. To do this, an ethnobotanical survey was conducted among the patients consulting the National Reference Center for Sickle Cell Disease (CNRD) and the traditional healers in the city of Niamey. At the end of this survey, 29 plant species were identified. The phytochemical study of 12 plants showed the presence of large chemical groups known for important biological properties (polyphenols, alkaloids, gallic tannins, sterols and polyterpenes).

 Key words: Phytochemical study, sickle cell disease, Niger, medicinal plants, ethnobotanical survey.


Person re-identification concerns the matching of pedestrians across disjoint camera views. Due to the changes of viewpoints, lighting conditions and camera features, images of the same person from different views always appear differently, and thus feature representations across disjoint camera views of the same person follow different distributions. In this work, we propose an effective, low cost and easy-to-apply schema called the Mirror Representation, which embeds the view-specific feature transformation and enables alignment of the feature distributions across disjoint views for the same person. The proposed Mirror Representation is also designed to explicitly model the relation between different view-specific transformations and meanwhile control their discrepancy. With our Mirror Representation, we can enhance existing subspace/ metric learning models significantly, and we particularly show that kernel marginal fisher analysis significantly outperforms the current state-of-the-art methods through extensive experiments on VIPeR, PRID450S and CUHK01.


Objective measures of intelligibility, speech transmission index (STI) and speech transmission index for public address systems (STIPA), often form the basis for sound system verification. The reported work challenges the accuracy of both measures when encountering high level, discrete reflections. Tests were carried out in an anechoic environment with artificial reflections added between 0 and 500ms. Discrepancies were found to occur above 80ms due to synchronisation between modulation frequencies and reflection arrival times. Differences between STI and STIPA of up to 0.1 were found to occur for the same delay condition. Results suggest STIPA should be avoided in acoustic environments where high level, discrete reflections occur after 80ms and STI should only be used alongside other verification methods.


We propose a workshop on the theme of ubiquitous text entry research. Our aim is to address the methodological challenges arising from several decades of experience in this research community. We hope to solicit views, experiences and ideas from researchers across a range of backgrounds, with a view to formulate concrete action plans to move community practices into a strengthened position by 2030.


Every surgeon occasionally finds it necessary to operate because of a diseased gallbladder when in his judgment something less than classic cholecystectomy is indicated. There are two types of patients in whose cases the decision to perform a less severe operation is important. These are: (1) persons whose general condition make the risk of cholecystectomy too great and (2) persons for whom removal of the gallbladder is hazardous because of the local lesion. In many clinics cholecystostomy is the operation performed in this group of patients; in others some form of partial cholecystectomy or cauterization is resorted to. Thorek 1 advised excision of most of the free portion of the wall of the gallbladder and electrocoagulation of the part attached to the liver. During the years 1935 to 1940 we have used cauterization of the mucosa of the gallbladder with solutions of phenol and alcohol, the procedure often called chemical


The noise sensitivities of nine different QRS detection algorithms were measured for a normal, single-channel, lead-II, synthesized ECG corrupted with five different types of synthesized noise: electromyographic interference, 60-Hz power line interference, baseline drift due to respiration, abrupt baseline shift, and a composite noise constructed from all of the other noise types. The percentage of QRS complexes detected, the number of false positives, and the detection delay were measured. None of the algorithms were able to detect all QRS complexes without any false positives for all of the noise types at the highest noise level. Algorithms based on amplitude and slope had the highest performance for EMG-corrupted ECG. An algorithm using a digital filter had the best performance for the composite-noise-corrupted data.<<ETX>>


Gender issues were very much in evidence at the 1998 Rome Diplomatic Conference during the drafting and adoption of the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). For example, difficult discussions surrounded the inclusion of provisions on the selection of a "fair representation of female and male judges", on the crime against humanity and war crime of forced pregnancy; and on the term 'gender' itself. Negotiations also took place on provisions related to other crimes against humanity and war crimes of sexual and gender-based violence, as well as on gender-sensitive participation of victims in the proceedings of the Court, victim protection, and composition of the staff of the Registry and the Office of the Prosecutor. Given the number of gender-related provisions, it is not surprising that the Rome Statute has been hailed for its attention to issues of gender. This attention to gender was not as evident at the Review Conference of the Rome Statute in June 2010 in Kampala, Uganda. While nearly all of the issues discussed in Kampala had gendered aspects, gender issues only really came to the fore in the stocktaking exercise, particularly under the theme of "the impact of the Rome Statute system on victims and affected communities". This chapter outlines and examines the discussion of gender issues within the context of the official stocktaking exercise on victims, as well as in related side-events. It looks at gender issues related to the International Criminal Court's outreach program and the Trust Fund for Victims. It concludes by making recommendations on U.S. engagement with respect to ICC victims issues.


A radial distribution electrical network at a certain distance will have a large voltage loss due to conductive losses, especially at the end point. The tip voltage is determined by the distance of the distribution and the amount of load. The form of configuration also affects the amount of power loss and voltage loss. So that a good configuration is needed in order to obtain good efficiency. Reconfiguration of the distribution network is used to reset the network configuration form by opening and closing switches on the distribution network. Reconfiguration is expected to reduce power losses and improve distribution system reliability. Many feeders and buses on the network if calculated manually will be difficult and require a very long time. So it is necessary to solve problems using program assistance. In this case, use Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm based on the behavior of a herd of insects, such as ants, termites, bees or birds. BPSO is a development of the PSO algorithm designed to solve the optimization problem in a discrete combination, where the particle takes the value of binary vectors with length n and speed which is defined as the probability of xn bits to reach value 1. The results show a significant reduction in losses.


Interferon gamma (IFNγ) supports effector responses of CD8+ cytotoxic T lymphocytes (CTLs) and is a surrogate marker for detection of antigen-specific T cells. Here, we show that tumor-specific CTL clones have impaired IFNγ expression and production upon activation. Assessment of the relationship between IFNγ production and the 5′methylcytosine-guanine (CpG) dinucleotide methylation of the IFNγ promoter using bisulfite treatment has shown that IFNγ− CTL clones accumulates CpG hypermethylation within the promoter at key transcription factor binding sites (−186 and −54), known to be vital for transcription. We confirmed these findings using ex vivo isolated and short-term expanded bulk tumor-specific CTL lines from four cancer patients and demonstrated that IFNγ methylation inversely correlates with transcription, protein level, and cytotoxicity. Altogether, we propose that a sizeable portion of human tumor-specific CTLs are deficient in IFNγ response, contributed by CpG hypermethylation of the IFNγ promoter. Our findings have important implications for immunotherapy strategies and for methods to detect human antigen-specific T cells.


Objectives: The purpose of this study was to report the result and the satisfaction of Korean medicine treatment for patients with dysmenorrhea who participated in support program of Jeollabuk-do. Methods: The subjects of this study were 33 volunteers, suffering from primary dysmenorrhea. As the 'Dysmenorrhea Treatment Project', we conducted a dysmenorrhea program at 22 Korean medicine clinic and 1 Korean medicine hospital in Jeollabuk-do. From May to December 2018, we conducted the program and assessed the effect and satisfaction twice after first two menstrual cycles after Korean medicine treatment through questionnaire. They were treated by Korean medicine treatment such as herbal medicine, acupuncture, moxibustion, heat therapy, physical therapy and others in 2017. The results were measured by the visual analogue scale (VAS) and multidimensional verbal rating scale (MVRS) of overall pain. The disturbance in school activity for menstrual period and satisfaction of Korean medicine treatment were investigated by continuous rating scales. Results: The VAS score of overall pain was decreased significantly. Also the amount of the analgesic taken for menstrual period and the degree of disturbance in school activity were decreased significantly. Besides, the satisfaction of Korean medicine treatment was increased. Conclusions: This study might suggest that the Korean medicine treatment on dysmenorrhea is effective.


The aim of the present study is to determine the duration of breast-feeding by mothers covered by the Mexican Social Security Institute and living in Tlaquepaque and Tonalá, outlying areas of the city of Guadalajara, Mexico; to identify possible maternal factors associated with early weaning; and to consider the social importance of this phenomenon. A sample of live-born infants and their mothers were selected from the study area. The children had reached at least one month of age between May 1990 and April 1991. Through multistage probabilistic sampling, random selection was made of primary health care units within the study areas, of family physicians' offices within those units, and finally, of all children meeting the study criteria in each of those offices. After visits to 166 dwellings, 141 mothers were interviewed, or 91% of the projected sample size (155). A 33-item questionnaire was prepared for the interviews. The interviewers were social workers trained to do this work, which they carried out between June and July 1991. Logistic regression models were used to estimate the relative risk (RR) associated with each variable and the probability that the infant was weaned early because of the presence or absence of certain variables. To ensure valid results, several regression models were developed with a view to selecting the one that best fit the data. The population attributable risk (PAR) was also calculated. The findings indicate that few mothers breast-feed their children in these areas, since 34.8% of the children were breast-fed for less than one month. Three maternal risk factors were statistically associated with early weaning (p < 0.05): maternal age under 20 years (RR = 3.75; CI 95%: 1.53-9.19); single marital status (RR = 2.88; CI 95%: 1.08-7.69); and social class, i.e., the mother's belonging to a "non-worker" social group (RR = 2.72; CI 95%: 1.17-6.28). The probability of an infant being breast-fed for less than one month was 0.84 when the three maternal risk factors were present, and 0.15 when they were absent. The high estimated PAR reflects the high proportion of mothers who were under the age of 20 or did not belong to the working class. The results underscore the importance of reducing the effect of these risk factors so that breast-feeding can become more widely practiced in the population studied.


Context-aware sensing is an integral part of the body sensor network (BSN) design and it allows the understanding of intrinsic characteristics of the sensed signal and determination of how BSNs should react to different events and adapt its monitoring behaviour. The purpose of this paper is to propose a novel spatio-temporal self-organising map that minimises the number of neurons involved whilst maintaining a high accuracy in class separation for both static and dynamic activities


The author proposes a portfolio selection method to manage market risk and credit risk in a corporate bond portfolio relative to its benchmark. He formulates an optimization problem that minimizes the variance of the loss distribution arising from credit risk with the constraints that the expected return of the portfolio not be below the benchmark and the market risk be identical to the benchmark. Such a problem formulation produces a portfolio that exhibits improved risk–adjusted return characteristics ex ante compared to the benchmark. A practical example illustrates the method.


In this paper, a nonlinear Bayesian filtering framework is proposed for the filtering of single channel noisy electrocardiogram (ECG) recordings. The necessary dynamic models of the ECG are based on a modified nonlinear dynamic model, previously suggested for the generation of a highly realistic synthetic ECG. A modified version of this model is used in several Bayesian filters, including the Extended Kalman Filter, Extended Kalman Smoother, and Unscented Kalman Filter. An automatic parameter selection method is also introduced, to facilitate the adaptation of the model parameters to a vast variety of ECGs. This approach is evaluated on several normal ECGs, by artificially adding white and colored Gaussian noises to visually inspected clean ECG recordings, and studying the SNR and morphology of the filter outputs. The results of the study demonstrate superior results compared with conventional ECG denoising approaches such as bandpass filtering, adaptive filtering, and wavelet denoising, over a wide range of ECG SNRs. The method is also successfully evaluated on real nonstationary muscle artifact. This method may therefore serve as an effective framework for the model-based filtering of noisy ECG recordings.


Covalent organic frameworks (COFs) represent a new class of crystalline porous organic materials with huge potential in gas storage and separation. Here we present three isoreticular COFs sharing identical two-dimensional layered structures but with different planarity of the building monomers, leading to various crystallinities, porosities and hydrocarbon uptake and separation performances. This study reveals the importance of monomer design in the long-range stacking of COFs, which can be used to tailor COFs with target functionalities for specific applications.


Three new species belonging to two different genera of South American mailed catfishes of the subfamily Loricariinae are described and figured. A discussion of and comparative notes on related species are added. Rineloricaria formosa n. sp. is described from the Rio Inirida/Rio Orinoco drainage in Colombia, from the Rio Atabapo (Rio Orinoco drainage) in Venezuela, and from the Rio Tiquie and Rio Uaupes (Rio Amazonas drainage) in Brazil. It is compared with Rineloricaria morrowi Fowler, 1940, with Rineloricaria melini (Schindler, 1959), and with Rineloricaria fallax (Steindachner, 1915). The lectotype of the latter species is herein designated, and a discussion on the misidentification of R. fallax with Loricariichthys brunneus (Hancock, 1828) is added. Rineloricaria hasemani n. sp. is based on three specimens, two of which are paralectotypes of Rineloricaria fallax from Maguarý. The specimens were collected from streams around Belem, Est. Para, Brazil. This new species seems more closely related to Rineloricaria stewarti (C. H. Eigenmann, 1909) than to R. fallax. Loricariichthys platymetopon n. sp. is based upon several specimens found in the Rio Parana/Rio Paraguay system and in the Rio Uruguay, and upon one specimen collected from near the Rio Solimoes. This species has hitherto erroneously been recorded as Loricaria maculata by Valenciennes (1840, 1847) and by Boulenger (1896), as Loricariichthys maculatus by Luling (1975), and as Loricaria typus (in subgenus Loricariichthys) by Regan (1904) and by A. de Miranda Ribeiro (1918). It seems likely that previous records of these nominal species (particularly from the Parana/Paraguay basin) actually concern, at least in part, L. platymetopon. This is confirmed for two specimens from the Rio Uruguay. L. platymetopon is compared with Loricariichthys maculatus (Bloch, 1794) — of which Parahemiodon typus Bleeker, 1862, provisionally is considered a junior synonym — and with Loricariichthys ucayalensis Regan, 1913, the lectotype of which is herein designated from the two syntypes.


Since Jaunuary 1989, cholangiojejunostomy was performed in 14 patients with obstructive icter. Obstruction was due to benign stricture in three patients and malign stricture in 11 patients. Central cholangiojejunostomy in eight patients, periferal cholangiojejunostomy in five patients, periferal and central cholangiojejunostomy in one pauent were performed. Stent was used in all patients. Four patients died in early period. Three patients with benign strictures are healty. In seven patients with strictures due to malignant diseases, comfortable survivals were provided until their deads. On conclusion, we believe cholangiojejunostomy is an effective procedure for the suitable patients who have obstructive icter.


With increasing public concern regarding sustainable forest management, forest land managers are obligated to ensure successful seedlings establishment and growth, particularly within the first few years. In order to achieve this goal there needs to be adequate seedling uptake of moisture and nutrients from the soil. Under conditions of adequate soil moisture, a reduction in early growth of planted white spruce and jack pine seedlings (two important commercial tree species in Saskatchewan) through interspecific competition with non-crop vegetation is primarily attributed to reductions in seedling uptake of soil nutrients, particularly N. Despite numerous reports on the competitive inhibition of young conifer seedlings by native understory vegetation, no attempts have been made to compare the relative N uptake ability of conifer planting stock with native boreal forest competitors. A depletion experiment was conducted to study the relationship between N concentration and subsequent ion absorption by roots of five competing boreal forest species. By monitoring the decrease in solution N concentration over time, the relative NH4 -N and NO3 -N uptake capacity of each species was quantitatively determined. Results from this study indicate that white spruce and jack pine seedlings have a lower measured NH4 -N and NO3 -N uptake capacity compared to native forest competitors, making these conifers relatively poor competitors for available N in soil. Calamagrostis exhibited a superior capacity for NH4 -N and NO3 -N uptake, suggesting that silvicultural practices that reduce the establishment of this grass species in the field will benefit the growth of planted conifer seedlings. A greater understanding of the relative N uptake capacity between conifer seedlings and native understory competitors may, therefore, lead to improved silviculture practices and subsequent plantation productivity.


Abstract The authors investigated the effect of residues from copper- and gold-mining on the Cree population of Oujé-Bougoumou, located 560 km north of Quebec City, Canada. Subjects (225) from Oujé-Bougoumou and a control population (100) completed a questionnaire on lifestyle and dietary habits and provided blood and urine samples for analysis. Geometric means of arsenic, lead, cadmium, and copper concentrations were not significantly different for subjects or controls 15 yr and older or children (8–14 yr old). However, blood zinc was higher and selenium was lower in Oujé-Bougoumou samples. Mean blood lead level was higher in children from Oujé-Bougoumou, but lower in adults aged 40 yr and older. For adults (15 yr and older) blood lead level increased with age and was higher in men, those who hunted, and consumed wild meat (R 2 = 0.43). Blood cadmium increased with age and smoking (R 2 = 0.61). No influence of mine residues was observed among residents of Oujé-Bougoumou, but lifestyle exposure associations were noted for both communities.