The objective of the study was to evaluate the production of two strains of Ganoderma lucidum on agricultural waste and carry out bromatological analyses of the basidiomata obtained from the cultivation. The experiment was carried out at the Mushroom Module at the School of Agronomic Sciences of the Sao Paulo State University (FCA/UNESP - Botucatu, SP, Brazil) and two strains were used (GLM-09/01 and GLM-10/02) which were cultivated on waste, oat straw, bean straw, brachiaria grass straw, Tifton grass straw and eucalyptus sawdust under two situations: with (20%) and without (0%) supplementation with wheat bran. All the waste was taken from dumps of agricultural activities in Botucatu-SP. Both treatments were carried out in 10 repetitions, totaling 200 packages. The mushrooms cultivation took 90 days. Next, the biological efficiency of the treatments and the bromatological analysis of the basidiomata were evaluated.  The biological efficiency (BE) values (%) varied from 0.0 to 6.7%. In the mushroom bromatological analyses, the results ranged from 8.7 to 13.7%, from 2.0 to 6.7%, from 0.83 to 1.79% and from 38.8 to 54.5%, for total protein, ethereal extract, ash and crude fiber, respectively. Thus, we conclude that the substrates which presented the greater yield were the brachiaria straw, 20% in both strains tested (GLM-09/01 and GLM-10/02) and the bean straw, 20% in the strain GLM-10/02. The mushrooms showed high levels of ethereal extract, fibers and ashes and a low level of proteins. Key words:  Ganoderma lucidum , bromatological analyses, mushroom.


This paper presents the computational optimization of a spark ignition engine fueled with biomass derived syngas. KIVA 4 is used as simulation platform, where a three-dimensional model is implemented considering the valve system together with the intake and exhaust processes. For the optimization, a subroutine is developed that couples KIVA 4 to the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm II. Two optimization processes are performed, one at 2500 RPM and the other at 4500 RPM. In both cases, the aim is to optimize the equivalence ratio in the combustion chamber, with the objectives of maximizing the indicated thermal efficiency and minimizing the nitrogen monoxide emission. From the results, it can be deduced that the performance of the engine presents its optimum values for mixtures close to stoichiometry, however, these individuals also exhibit the highest nitrogen monoxide emissions. At both 2500 RPM and 4500 RPM, it was possible to find equivalence ratios that allow obtaining efficiencies greater than those achieved in the conventional operation of the engine, that is, when it is fueled with gasoline.


The ecological settings in the Himalayan hills provide a unique opportunity for resource poor farmers to sell their organically produced Nepali coffee as specialty coffee to the global market. This study attempts to examine the impact of coffee production on Nepali smallholders' livelihoods taking their integration into value chain into account. Descriptive analysis, logit and linear regression models were used to gauge the impact of coffee production on the livelihood strategies of Nepali smallholders in the value chain. Finding of the study shows that smallholders have little bargaining power and trust in trade due to asymmetric market information and inadequate support in farm level upgrading activities. Group organic certification of coffee seems as a catalyst to entry international market and cost effective with 6-10 per cent premium price to the smallholders. The results from the logit model reveal that level of education, record keeping about coffee activities, training received for quality enhancing practices, access to credit and trust in trade have a positive and significant effect on farmers' decision to adopt process upgrading at farm. Some suggestions are mentioned.


Work previously reported by this laboratory indicated that prenatal chlordane exposure affected macrophage function in young adult mice. Because these macrophage effects were due to exposure during the development of the immune system, the possibility of a persistent effect on the development of myeloid stem and progenitor cells was considered. Female mice were treated with either 0 or 8 mg of chlordane per kilogram body weight daily for 18 days during pregnancy. Myeloid hemopoietic activity of bone marrow cells from 6-week-old offspring was evaluated for in vitro colony-forming units-in-culture in response to exogeneously added recombinant forms of the cytokines granulocyte/macrophage-colony stimulating factor, macrophage-CSF, and interleukin 3 (IL-3). There was a significant depression of the numbers of bone marrow colony forming units-granulocyte/macrophage (CFU-GM), CFU-IL-3, and CFU-macrophage (CFU-M) in only the female offspring. Male offspring consistently demonstrated no difference in the CFU-GM, CFU-IL-3, or CFU-M. Prenatal treatment with chlordane did not significantly affect the number of recoverable viable bone marrow cells in either male or female mice.


Materials Science![Figure][1]

CREDIT: NAMIKO YAMAMOTO

A simple thermostat exploits the difference in the thermal expansion of two metal films to sense temperature changes and trigger the heating or cooling system on or off as needed. In some cases, though, the change in dimension with temperature is a problem; for example, a satellite built on Earth has to be engineered to allow for the shrinking of the parts that will occur when it reaches the low temperatures found in outer space. A few materials exist that show either limited or negative thermal expansion, including complex metal oxides, silica glasses, and an iron-nickel alloy, but these materials may be brittle or operate only over a narrow temperature range. One route to creating a material with a tailorable coefficient of thermal expansion (CTE) is to create an engineered structure. Yamamoto et al. created a periodic lattice composed of hexagonal plates of aluminum combined with a frame of titanium, which has a lower CTE, to make a thin-film material. When heated, the expansion of the aluminum is accommodated by stretching and bending of the titanium, in such a way that the connection points stay stationary. The samples were tested from room temperature to 185°C and showed a very low and slightly negative CTE. The authors envision using this architecture for making an array of mirrors, and demonstrate this capability by showing that the reflected image quality remained constant over the test temperature range.

Adv. Mater. 10.1002/adma.201304997 (2014).

 [1]: pending:yes


Microalgae can synthesise the ozone depleting pollutant and greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O). Consequently, significant N2O emissions have been recorded during real wastewater treatment in high rate algal ponds (HRAPs). While data scarcity and variability prevent meaningful assessment, the magnitude reported (0.13-0.57% of the influent nitrogen load) is within the range reported by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for direct N2O emissions during centralised aerobic wastewater treatment (0.016-4.5% of the influent nitrogen load). Critically, the ability of microalgae to synthesise N2O challenges the IPCC's broad view that bacterial denitrification and nitrification are the only major cause of N2O emissions from wastewater plants and aquatic environments receiving nitrogen from wastewater effluents. Significant N2O emissions have indeed been repeatedly detected from eutrophic water bodies and wastewater discharge contributes to eutrophication via the release of nitrogen and phosphorus. Considering the complex interplays between nitrogen and phosphorus supply, microalgal growth, and microalgal N2O synthesis, further research must urgently seek to better quantify N2O emissions from microalgae-based wastewater systems and eutrophic ecosystems receiving wastewater. This future research will ultimately improve the prediction of N2O emissions from wastewater treatment in national inventories and may therefore affect the prioritisation of mitigation strategies.


The impact of sea state on air–sea momentum flux (or wind stress) is a poorly understood component of wind–wave interactions, particularly in high wind conditions. The wind stress and mean wind profile over the ocean are influenced by the characteristics of boundary layer turbulence over surface waves, which are strongly modulated by transient airflow separation events; however, the features controlling their occurrence and intensity are not well known. A large-eddy simulation (LES) for wind over a sinusoidal wave train is employed to reproduce laboratory observations of phase-averaged airflow over waves in strongly forced conditions. The LES and observation both use a wave-following coordinate system with a decomposition of wind velocity into mean, wave-coherent, and turbulent fluctuation components. The LES results of the mean wind profile and structure of wave-induced and turbulent stress components agree reasonably well with observations. Both LES and observation show enhanced turbulent stress and mean wind shear at the height of the wave crest, signifying the impact of intermittent airflow separation events. Disparities exist particularly near the crest, suggesting that airflow separation and sheltering are affected by the nonlinearity and unsteadiness of laboratory waves. Our results also suggest that the intensity of airflow separation is most sensitive to wave steepness and the surface roughness parameterization near the crest. These results clarify how the characteristics of finite-amplitude waves can control the airflow dynamics, which may substantially influence the mean wind profile, equivalent surface roughness, and drag coefficient.


Detecting all local extrema or the global extremum of a polynomial on the torus, the sphere, or the rotation group is a tough yet often requested numerical problem. We present a heuristic approach that applies common descent methods like nonlinear conjugated gradients or Newtons methods simultaneously to a large number of starting points. The cornerstone of our approach is FFT-like algorithms, i.e., algorithms that scale almost linearly with respect to the sum of the dimension of the polynomial space and the number of evaluation points. These FFT-like algorithms allow us to compute one step of a descent method simultaneously for all starting points at almost the same cost as for one single starting point. The effectiveness of the proposed algorithms is demonstrated in various applications. In particular, we apply it to the Radon transform of a spherical function which allows us to detect lines in spherical patterns.


Introduction. Continuing professional education (CPE) is a strategic resource of cardinal transformations, which are currently taking place in education. The essence of such transformations generally consists in necessary rejection of a subject-information learning model and transition to designing the model of vocational self-development and self-determination.The aim of this research was to reveal the essence of teachers' professional development as the process of positional self-determination and formation of managerial position. The hypothesis of the study consists in the assumption that the technology of self-determined learning is the institutional form of mastering and implementing the practice of CPE for teachers as a practice of human potential development in the professional and anthropological self-determination of an adult learner.Methodology and research methods. The methodological basis of the study was the comparative educational strategy of CPE, which is embodied in the model of self-determined adult education, focused on the formation of the human ability to manage their own development in an unstable world through the development of new types of cultural thinking and behaviour. The methods of research of teachers' management position included the system of the following initiatives: interviews, results of group reflections, content-analysis, methods of included observation using video recording of training sessions and educational products.Results and scientific novelty. The complex of diagnostic technologies allowed the authors to establish management positions of teachers (implementer, leader or strategist) and their ability to design the paths of own development and to organise the system of managerial challenges. As the most adequate technological scheme of self-determined learning, the authors tested the mechanism of projectresource management, which regulates the learner's movement in the educational space from actions carried out in a particular situation in accordance with the circumstances to an activity determined by a local goal, then to the reflection of own activity elevating to the status of a new norm, and, finally, to the reflection of changes in their own position. It was established that the developmental trajectory of human potential in professiogenesis starts from mastering the subject and means of activity (implementer) and passes through building up funds in transforming a special subject of activity (leader) towards designing new standards of means and subject of activity (strategist).The authors introduce the concept of "anthropological self-determination of an adult in the educational process" as the process and the result of formation of own managerial position and development of a new identity in changing life circumstances.Practical significance of the present research is determined by the possibility of designing educational programmes, which ensure co-organisation of adult students in a single event-activity space based on the mechanisms of project-resource management through the system of managerial challenges.


Whooping cough (pertussis) dynamics provide an interesting disease ecology case study. Unlike other childhood diseases, the observed patterns of pertussis dynamics are found very diverse and are not easily captured by simple deterministic models. This has led to the current understanding that the disease dynamics can only be explained by adding stochasticity into the models. In this work, we demonstrate that an appropriate deterministic model can explain pertussis dynamics. The consequences of using the model in making public health decisions are also discussed. Whooping cough dynamics also exhibits strong seasonality, which is thought to result from variation in contact rates. In this research, seasonal change in disease incidence and the timing of outbreaks are also analyzed using case report data from several UK cities. We show that birth rates in prior years have a positive correlation with current outbreak sizes and a negative correlation with current outbreak peak time. A modeling approach is also used to understand and explain the patterns found in the data. Index words: Whooping Cough, Modeling, Seasonality, Gamma Distribution


Background: Catheter-related bloodstream infections (CRBSI) are associated with a high burden of morbidity and mortality, but the impact of infecting organism on clinical outcomes has been poorly studied. Methods: This retrospective analysis of a prospective vascular access database from a large academic dialysis center investigated whether the organism type affected the clinical presentation or complications of CRBSI. Results: Among 339 patients with suspected CRBSI, an alternate source of infection was identified in 50 (15%). Of 289 patients with CRBSI, 249 grew a single organism and 40 were polymicrobial. Fever and/or rigors were presenting signs in ≥90% of patients with Staphylococcus aureus or Gram-negative CRBSI, but only 61% of Staphylococcus epidermidis infections (p < 0.001). Hospitalization occurred in 67% of patients with S. aureus CRBSI versus 34% of those with S. epidermidis and 40% of those with a Gram-negative bacteria (p < 0.001). Admission to the intensive care unit was required in 14, 9, and 2% (p = 0.06); metastatic infection occurred in 10, 4, and 4% (p = 0.42); and median length of stay among patients admitted to the hospital was 4, 4, and 5.5 days (p = 0.60), respectively. Death due to CRBSI occurred in only 1% of patients with CRBSI. Conclusion: CRBSI is confirmed in 85% of catheter-dependent hemodialysis patients in whom it is suspected. S. epidermidis CRBSI tends to present with atypical symptoms. S. aureus CRBSI is more likely to require hospitalization or intensive care admission. Metastatic infection is relatively uncommon, and death due to CRBSI is rare.


The purpose of this study is to reinforce the defense and security system by recognizing the behaviors of suspicious person both inside and outside the military using deep learning. Surveillance cameras help detect criminals and people who are acting unusual. However, it is inefficient in that the administrator must monitor all the images transmitted from the camera. It incurs a large cost and is vulnerable to human error. Therefore, in this study, we propose a method to find a person who should be watched carefully only with surveillance camera images. For this purpose, the video data of doubtful behaviors were collected. In addition, after applying a algorithm that generalizes different heights and motions for each person in the input images, we trained through a model combining CNN, bidirectional LSTM, and DNN. As a result, the accuracy of the behavior recognition of suspicious behaviors was improved. Therefore, if deep learning is applied to existing surveillance cameras, it is expected that it will be possible to find the dubious person efficiently.


Paul Starr's The Creation of the Media presents modern policymakers with an important opportunity to consider the historical lessons of the telecommunications industry. This Book Review underscores how Starr's book richly explains some key components of U.S. information policy - such as relying on an integrated strategy of intellectual property, antitrust law, and telecommunications policy - and that some historical lessons are misplaced as to today's environment - such as a categorical skepticism of vertical integration. Moreover, Starr's account of telecommunications history explains that the U.S.'s success in promoting innovation in the information industries reflects our reluctance to manage key industry segments through government bureaucracies and our ability to develop an appropriate regulatory model for an era of monopolies. As we move into a new technological environment, however, we need to move away from the classic regulatory prescriptions of cradle-to-grave common carriage regulation and regulating what programs broadcasters must provide to their viewers. Rather, as the Book Review highlights, policymakers need to develop a next generation regulatory regime that learns the correct lessons from history and economic learning to meet the challenges of the Internet age.


Abstract Biofilms occurring in seepage groundwater contaminated with petroleum in an urban subway drainage system were characterized. The development of biofilms was observed only in the sites where petroleum-contaminated groundwater had seeped or was seeping. Moreover, the conditions of the biofilms such as color and development extent were influenced by the amount of spilled petroleum: By increasing the amount of spilled petroleum, the amount of biofilms increased and its color whitened. It deteriorated and became dark-brown if the contaminated groundwater did not seep any more. These facts indicate that the biofilms can be used as a preliminary indicator to identify the locations of fuel contaminated sumps and seeps without a more detailed assessment such as instrumental analysis. The biofilms were capable of degrading petroleum at 15°C, which is similar to the average temperature of the seepage groundwater. Filamentous bacteria, Sphaerotilus spp., were isolated from the biofilms. It is considered that these bacteria are responsible for the development of biofilms in the seepage groundwater contaminated with petroleum because they can secrete extracellular polymeric substances.


OBJECTIVES
To examine Achilles and patellar tendon morphology in dancers with and without tendon pain.

METHODS
Fifty-three dancers with and without Achilles and/or patellar tendon pain participated. Eleven age-matched non-dancers served as controls. Longitudinal ultrasound images of the middle and distal Achilles and proximal and distal patellar tendons were acquired. To assess macromorphology, the thickness of the middle and distal Achilles and proximal and distal patellar tendons were measured. Micromorphology was analyzed by selecting 2 x 2-mm2 regions of interest in the tendons; spectral analysis using the fast Fourier transform was run for several kernels (2 x 2-mm2 subimages) within each image, and the peak spatial frequency (PSF) was extracted. A one-way ANOVA compared asymptomatic, symptomatic, and control tendon thickness and PSF.

RESULTS
Macromorphology: There was no significant difference between asymptomatic and symptomatic dancers in middle or distal Achilles tendon thickness and distal patellar tendon thickness. Proximal patellar tendons in control subjects were thinner than those in asymptomatic (p=0.036) and symptomatic (p=0.003) dancers. Micromorphology: There was no significant difference in PSF between asymptomatic and symptomatic dancers and controls in the Achilles or patellar tendon.

CONCLUSION
Increased proximal patellar tendon thickness without changes in tendon micromorphology suggests that tendon adaptations are more likely activity-related and less likely influenced by degeneration.


Bacteria from several groups of marine organisms were isolated and, using direct antibiograms, identified those that produce antibacterial substances, using a human pathogenic strain of Staphylococcus aureus ATCC6538 as revealing microorganism. Bacteria which produce substances that inhibited S. aureus growth were identified through morphological, physiological and biochemical tests. Out of 290 bacteria, 54 (18.6%) inhibited the growth of S. aureus, but only 27 survived for identification. Bivalves, sponges and corals were the most represented from which 41.2, 33.3 and 29.7%, respectively, produced antibacterial substances of the isolated bacteria in each group. The marine species with highest proportions of these bacteria were the hard coral Madracis decactis (62.5%), the sponges Cliona sp. (57.1%) and the octocoral Plexaura flexuosa (50.0%). Out of the 27 strains that produced antibacterial substances, 51.8% were Aeromonas spp. and 14.8% Vibrio spp. Marine bacteria that produce antibacterial substances are abundant, most belong in the Vibrionacea group and were isolated mainly from corals and bivalve mollusks.


The article analyzes certain early Byzantine hagiographic texts concerning various forms of brigandage (both maritime and land-based). Two such accounts are studied in detail, one by Gerontius of Jerusalem and another by Theodoret of Cyrus. The instances described unveil the weakness of Roman state structures at the borders of the state as well as in lands harassed by barbarian raids, including piracy. Despite certain flaws (mostly the lack of precision), the accounts under discussion constitute valuable and reliable sources of historical knowledge.


An idea of designing oscillation-less and high-resolution hybrid schemes is proposed and several types of hybrid schemes based on this idea are presented on block-structured grids. The general framework, for designing various types of hybrid schemes, is established using a Multi-dimensional Optimal Order Detection (MOOD) method proposed by Clain, Diot and Loubere [1]. The methodology utilizes low dissipation or dispersion but less robust schemes to update the solution and then implements robust and high resolution schemes to deal with problematic situations. A wide range of computational methods including central scheme, MUSCL scheme, linear upwind scheme and Weighted Essentially Non Oscillatory (WENO) scheme have been applied in the current hybrid schemes framework. Detailed numerical studies on classical test cases for the Euler system are performed, addressing the issues of the resolution and non-oscillatory property around the discontinuities.


The sucrose binding protein (SBP) has been implicated as an important component of the sucrose uptake system in plants. SBP-mediated sucrose transport displays unique kinetic features and the protein is not similar to other transport proteins. Here, we report the characterization of a member of the SBP family from soybean [Glycine max (L) Merrill] designated S64 or SBP2. Subcellular fractionation and precipitation by GTP-agarose demonstrated that S64/SBP2 is a membrane-associated protein that exhibits GTP binding activity. Purified recombinant S64/SBP2 protein, expressed as a histidine-tagged protein in Escherichia coli, exhibited nucleotide-binding specificity to guanine nucleotides. The GTP binding site was mapped to an imperfect Walker A type-sequence, Ala279-Leu-Ala-Pro-Thr-Lys-Lys-Ser286, by site-directed mutagenesis. Escherichia coli-produced wild-type protein and a truncated version of the protein containing the putative binding-sequence-bound GTP, although not with the same efficiency. In contrast, replacement of Thr283 and Lys284 residues to Leu and Glu residues prevented GTP binding. The site directed mutant failed to bind GTP but retained the ability to undergo oligomerization andto promote growth of the susy7 yeast strain, deficient inutilizing extracellular sucrose, on medium containing sucrose as the sole carbon source. Our results indicate that GTP binding and sucrose transport by SBP are separable and function independently. The implications of our findings with respect to the function and membrane topology of SBP are discussed.


The purpose of this study is to examine the effect of the item weighting method developed by researchers on the construct validity of the test. For this purpose, a Monte Carlo simulation study was carried out. Test length, average factor loadings, and sample size were considered as simulation conditions. Item weighting method was defined as follows: If average score of the individuals (calculated as individual's test score/the number of items) plus item difficulty index is 1 and over then item reliability index added to individual's item score (1 or 0); if not, then the item score of the individual (1 if 1, 0 if 0) is preserved. As a result of the research, it was observed that the weighting method contributes to the construct validity. According to the results of confirmatory factor analysis, the comparative fit index (CFI) and the root mean square error of approximation (RMSEA) values were improved. According to the research findings, the weighting method used in this research can be recommended.


In the last decade, there has been an increasing interest in the link between new product launch strategy and market performance. So far, new product launch research has focused on this performance relationship without giving much attention to background factors that can facilitate or inhibit successful launch strategies. However, investigating such antecedents that set the framework in which different strategic launch decisions enable or prevent the market performance of new products is useful for enhancing the current state of knowledge. Drawing on the concept of a firm's orientation, the present study discusses the influence of the corporate mind-set on new product launch strategy and market performance. It is hypothesized that the capability to successfully launch new products is based on the interplay between a firm's mind-set (i.e., an analytical, risk-taking, and aggressive posture) and its strategic launch decisions on setting launch objectives, selecting target markets, and positioning the new product. A research model with mediating effects is proposed, where the corporate mind-set determines the launch strategy decisions, which in turn impact market performance. The model is tested with data on 113 industrial new products launched in business-to-business markets in Germany using a multiple informant approach. The results support the mediated model as the dimensions of the corporate mind-set have a significant impact on most strategic launch decisions, which in turn significantly contribute to market performance. It is found that while an analytical posture relates to all three strategic launch decisions, risk taking and an aggressive posture have a significant impact on two, respectively one, launch strategy elements. These findings confirm the importance of investigating antecedents for a successful new product launch, as the corporate mind-set serves as a background resource that sets the framework for successful new product launch decisions. In the final section implications for research and managerial practice as well as limitations of this research are provided.


OBJECTIVE
The authors sought to determine if greater seafood consumption, a measure of omega-3 fatty acid intake, is associated with lower prevalence rates of bipolar disorder in community samples.

METHOD
Lifetime prevalence rates in various countries for bipolar I disorder, bipolar II disorder, bipolar spectrum disorder, and schizophrenia were identified from population-based epidemiological studies that used similar methods. These epidemiological studies used structured diagnostic interviews with similar diagnostic criteria and were population based with large sample sizes. Simple linear and nonlinear regression analyses were used to compare these prevalence data to differences in apparent seafood consumption, an economic measure of disappearance of seafood from the economy.

RESULTS
Simple exponential decay regressions showed that greater seafood consumption predicted lower lifetime prevalence rates of bipolar I disorder, bipolar II disorder, and bipolar spectrum disorder. Bipolar II disorder and bipolar spectrum disorder had an apparent vulnerability threshold below 50 lb of seafood/person/year. The absence of a correlation between lifetime prevalence rates of schizophrenia and seafood consumption suggests a specificity to affective disorders.

CONCLUSIONS
These data describe a robust correlational relationship between greater seafood consumption and lower prevalence rates of bipolar disorders. These data provide a cross-national context for understanding ongoing clinical intervention trials of omega-3 fatty acids in bipolar disorders.


We introduce a fixed-point algorithm, the complex QAM (C-QAM) algorithm, for separation of quadrature amplitude modulated (QAM) sources through independent component analysis. The algorithm matches the input QAM distribution through a mixture of Gaussian kernels and uses fixed-point updates that fully take advantage of complex domain processing. We demonstrate the performance of the C-QAM algorithm through simulations and note that it provides improved performance over a wide range of operating conditions such as low signal-to-noise ratio, small sample sizes, and large number of sources.


The dietary supplement industry has long been concerned about international activities that could have a potential impact on supplement trade. As originally proposed, FDA reform legislation contained provisions on mutual agreements and global harmonization that would have applied to most products under FDA jurisdiction. However, Congress explicitly exempted supplements from the final provisions of the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997 (P.L. 105-115), which means that these products are not part of on-going trade discussions.


Hepatitis C virus (HCV) is a major cause of chronic liver disease worldwide. Only 1%–30% of patients in need of treatment may get it. In recent years, the availability of direct-acting antiviral agents (DAA) has been an important advancement in treating HCV infection. However, due to cost, it is not possible to receive these drugs in many countries where infection is endemic. In these low- and middle-income countries, the main barriers to controlling HCV infection are lack of knowledge about the infection, constraints on diagnostic testing and treatment, and lack of experts. Both national and international support are essential to overcoming these barriers. In low- and middle-income countries, interferon and ribavirin-based therapies still are the first choices due to their availability and to government payment support. In addition, in developed countries, efforts to provide lower-cost DAA drugs continue. Pharmaceutical companies continue to research manufacture of bioequivalent drugs to reduce treatment costs. Considering the fake drug market, all developments need to be monitored closely by the institutions involved. This review focuses on barriers to hepatitis C treatment and ways to overcome those barriers.


The objective of this work is to develop a systematic method of implementing theWavelet-Galerkin method for approximating solutions of differential equations. The beginning of this project included understanding what a wavelet is, and then becoming familiar with some of the applications. The Wavelet-Galerkin method, as applied in this paper, does not use a wavelet at all. In actuality, it uses the wavelet's scaling function. The distinction between the two will be given in the following sections of this paper. The sections of this thesis will include defining wavelets and their scaling functions. This will give the reader valued insight to wavelets and Discrete Wavelet Transforms (DWT). Following this will be a section defining the Galerkin method. The purpose of this section will be to give the reader an understanding of how weighted residual methods work, in particular, the Galerkin Method. Next will be a section on how Scaling functions will be implemented in the Galerkin method, forming the Wavelet-Galerkin Method. The focus of this investigation will deal with solutions to a basic homogeneous differential equation. The solution of this basic equation will be analyzed using three separate, distinct methods, and then the results will be compared. These methods include the Wavelet-Galerkin Method, the Galerkin Method using quadratic shape functions, and standard analytical means. Factors to be studied include computational time, effort, accuracy, and ease of implementing the method of solution. After a thorough comparison has been made, there will be a section to talk about possible applications of theWavelet-Galerkin method and recommendations for future work. Predictions of what avenues to pursue in refining theWavelet-Galerkin method will also be stated. And suggestions on how to make the method more accurate will be given.


Relation classification aims to extract semantic relations between entity pairs from the sentences. However, most existing methods can only identify seen relation classes that occurred during training. To recognize unseen relations at test time, we explore the problem of zero-shot relation classification. Previous work regards the problem as reading comprehension or textual entailment, which have to rely on artificial descriptive information to improve the understandability of relation types. Thus, rich semantic knowledge of the relation labels is ignored. In this paper, we propose a novel logic-guided semantic representation learning model for zero-shot relation classification. Our approach builds connections between seen and unseen relations via implicit and explicit semantic representations with knowledge graph embeddings and logic rules. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our method can generalize to unseen relation types and achieve promising improvements.


Molecular structure determination of chemical reactions or processes has been one of the grand challenges in physics, chemistry, and biology. To image these processes, it typically requires sub-Angstrom spatial and femtosecond temporal resolutions. One of the standard imaging techniques, X-ray diffraction, however, currently suffers from temporal jitters and is available only at large facilities. Furthermore, it also suffers from very low elastic scattering cross sections, which make it difficult to apply to gas phase molecules. Another technique, ultrafast electron diffraction (UED), overcomes this low cross section problem, but the temporal resolution is still limited to hundreds of femtoseconds, mainly due to Coulomb repulsion in electron beam and velocity mismatch between laser-pump pulse and electron probe pulse in a typical pump-probe scheme. The recently proposed laser-induced electron diffraction (LIED) is based on two basic ideas. First, an electron wave packet can be generated from a target itself by an intense laser pulse and driven back within the subsequent half-cycle of the laser to rescatter from the parent ion, thus realizing a self-imaging process. Laser-free elastic differential cross sections (DCS) can then be extracted from high-energy electron spectra, as demonstrated by the Quantitative Rescattering theory (QRS). Second, the target structure information can be retrieved from the DCS. This retrieval is further simplified by using back-scattered electrons with collision energy of about 100 eV, for which the independent-atom model (IAM) can be employed to quite accurately simulate the DCS. Demonstration of ultrafast imaging with the LIED has been reported so far on simple diatomic molecules. Here we discuss recent progress in LIED with polyatomic molecules in two examples. The first one is aligned acetylene (C2H2) and the second one is benzene (C6H6). In both cases, two bond lengths, C-C and C-H have been successfully retrieved. For even more complex polyatomic molecules with many bond lengths and bond angles, the method using simple fitting to DCS would not work, while the 1D Fourier transform method cannot resolve bonds of similar lengths. We show that these difficulties can be overcome by using the 2D Fourier transform method which allows retrieving 2D information from laser aligned polyatomic molecules.


Our study explores the impact of selection criteria on the costs and benefits of early child care for mothers' employment, child development, and municipalities' revenues by exploiting the selection criteria of different Italian municipalities in assigning child care slots. In Italy, only around 13% of the demand for public child care coverage is met, and the number of applications exceeds the number of places in child care services in all regions. In conditions of excess demand, municipalities introduce selection criteria to give priority to families for whom access to public child care appears to be more valuable. We analyse through simulations the consequences of introducing different selection criteria, using a representative Italian sample of households with children under three years of age (EU-SILC), and the selection criteria employed by six representative Italian municipalities. Our results have interesting policy implications. The benefits for child outcomes and mothers' employment are stronger in municipalities where the selection criteria give priority to more disadvantaged households. However, in these contexts selected households are less able to contribute to the financial sustainability of the service.


Biological symptoms of D.I.C. were investigated in 43 patients with acute leukemia. Ten of them were found to be positive either at the onset or at the relapse of the disease and in some cases D.I.C. was triggered by chemotherapy. Among the ten positive cases 3 patients had an acute promyelocytic leukemia, 4 had an acute lymphoblastic leukemia, 2 a myeloblastic and 1 a monoblastic leukemia. D.I.C. was found either in patients with an hypercellular form of the disease or in patients with a normal or low white cell count. Symptoms of D.I.C. in acute leukemia must be systematically sought at the onset and during treatment by chemotherapy and treated with heparin and platelet transfusions as it is now admitted for acute promyelocytic leukemia.


The prevalence of both obesity and disability is increasing globally and there is now growing evidence to suggest that these two health priorities may be linked. This paper explores the evidence linking obesity to muscular‐skeletal conditions, mental health disorders and learning disabilities in both adult and child populations. The impact of obesity on the four most prevalent disabling conditions in the UK (arthritis, mental health disorders, learning disabilities and back ailments) has been examined through novel data analysis of the 2001 Health Survey for England and UK Back Exercise And Manipulation trial data. Together these analyses strongly suggest that whether the cause or result of disability, obesity is undeniably implicated, thus presenting a serious public health priority. Future research efforts are required to strengthen the evidence base examining obesity in back disorders, mental health and learning disabilities, in order to improve current clinical management.


In manned agricultural vehicles, the automated systems assist the driver by reducing the workload. This is achieved e.g. by using an automatic guidance system to steer the tractor along the desired path. However, increasing automation tends to cause a reduction of awareness, so risks to collide obstacles in the field are higher. In this study, an autonomous tractor was equipped with front side laserscanner (LIDAR) to sense the environment in front. The laserscanner scans the environment at 50 Hz rate. The theoretical maximum range of the sensor is 25 m, but it was found in the tests, that in agricultural field conditions, the feasible range is not more than 7 m, due to the sunlight disturbance. Agricultural vehicles weigh tons, so the deceleration is limited and the limited range causes challenges to detect the obstacle and decelerate without colliding it. The developed algorithm is able to detect solid objects, like electricity poles in the trajectory. The deceleration algorithm is based on the known dynamics and actuator delays of the tractor locomotion system, by taking into account the maximum deceleration rate. In field tests, the system was evaluated in grass fields. In the first test, the system was tested with real electricity poles with no implement. In the second test, the system was tested with a mower and by using artificial obstacles placed into the grass. The system was able to detect the obstacles with high accuracy and stop precisely, but in the corners of the field the system caused false positives when the sensor was sensing beyond the edges of the field plot.


The cellular physiology and biology of human cardiac c‐kit+ progenitor cells has not been extensively characterized and remains an area of active research. This study investigates the functional expression of transient receptor potential vanilloid (TRPV) and possible roles for this ion channel in regulating proliferation and migration of human cardiac c‐kit+ progenitor cells. We found that genes coding for TRPV2 and TRPV4 channels and their proteins are significantly expressed in human c‐kit+ cardiac stem cells. Probenecid, an activator of TRPV2, induced an increase in intracellular Ca2+ (Ca2+i), an effect that may be attenuated or abolished by the TRPV2 blocker ruthenium red. The TRPV4 channel activator 4α‐phorbol 12‐13‐dicaprinate induced Ca2+i oscillations, which can be inhibited by the TRPV4 blocker RN‐1734. The alteration of Ca2+i by probenecid or 4α‐phorbol 12‐13‐dicprinate was dramatically inhibited in cells infected with TRPV2 short hairpin RNA (shRNA) or TRPV4 shRNA. Silencing TRPV2, but not TRPV4, significantly reduced cell proliferation by arresting cells at the G0/G1 boundary of the cell cycle. Cell migration was reduced by silencing TRPV2 or TRPV4. Western blot revealed that silencing TRPV2 decreased expression of cyclin D1, cyclin E, pERK1/2 and pAkt, whereas silencing TRPV4 only reduced pAkt expression. Our results demonstrate for the first time that functional TRPV2 and TRPV4 channels are abundantly expressed in human cardiac c‐kit+ progenitor cells. TRPV2 channels, but not TRPV4 channels, participate in regulating cell cycle progression; moreover, both TRPV2 and TRPV4 are involved in migration of human cardiac c‐kit+ progenitor cells.


Minkowski sums of simplices in ${\mathbb{R}}^n$ form an interesting class of polytopes that seem to emerge in various situations. In this paper we discuss the Minkowski sum of the simplices $\Delta_{k-1}$ in ${\mathbb{R}}^n$ where $k$ and $n$ are fixed, their flags and some of their face lattice structure. In particular, we derive a closed formula for their exponential generating flag function . These polytopes are simple, include both the simplex $\Delta_{n-1}$ and the permutahedron $\Pi_{n-1}$, and form a Minkowski basis for more general permutahedra.


Our mobility is an important daily requirement so much so that any disruption to it severely degrades our perceived quality of life. Studies in gait and human movement sciences, therefore, play a significant role in maintaining the well-being of our mobility. Current gait analysis involves numerous interdependent gait parameters that are difficult to adequately interpret due to the large volume of recorded data and lengthy assessment times in gait laboratories. A proposed solution to these problems is computational intelligence (CI), which is an emerging paradigm in biomedical engineering most notably in pathology detection and prosthesis design. The integration of CI technology in gait systems facilitates studies in disorders caused by lower limb defects, cerebral disorders, and aging effects by learning data relationships through a combination of signal processing and machine learning techniques. Learning paradigms, such as supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and fuzzy and evolutionary algorithms, provide advanced modeling capabilities for biomechanical systems that in the past have relied heavily on statistical analysis. CI offers the ability to investigate nonlinear data relationships, enhance data interpretation, design more efficient diagnostic methods, and extrapolate model functionality. These are envisioned to result in more cost-effective, efficient, and easy-to-use systems, which would address global shortages in medical personnel and rising medical costs. This paper surveys current signal processing and CI methodologies followed by gait applications ranging from normal gait studies and disorder detection to artificial gait simulation. We review recent systems focusing on the existing challenges and issues involved in making them successful. We also examine new research in sensor technologies for gait that could be combined with these intelligent systems to develop more effective healthcare solutions.


The new concept of reprogrammable digital circuit implementation for auto-guiding system is shown in this paper. It is dedicated to astrophotography and operates with popular CCD webcam and ST4 compatible equatorial mounts. This idea was verified by MATLAB model, which was used to test all procedures and data conversions. Next the circuit prototype was implemented at Altera MAX II CPLD device and tested. The project was design also for amateur-astronomy so costs, user-friendly configuration and maintenance are very important factors which were taken into consideration.


Intermediate band solar cells (IBSCs) are emerging, potentially high efficiency, solar cells. In this work, IBSCs based on zinc-sulfide with a high chromium doping density (Cr:ZnS), are fabricated, characterized and gradually improved. The first devices showed an efficiency of (0.008 ± 0.001) %. Improvements in the cell design led to a record efficiency of (2.05 ± 0.12) %. Thin undoped and Cr-doped ZnS films, on a silicon substrate, were processed into complete devices and characterized with current-voltage and open circuit voltage versus light intensity measurements. Solar cell simulations were made with a numerical simulation program (SCAPS), to get a better understanding of our solar cells. Different solar cell parameters, absorption coefficients, and ZnS film thicknesses were varied and investigated in the simulations. Addition of the chromium doping in the zinc-sulfide films resulted in large improvements in the cell efficiencies, compared to the undoped cells, due to below band gap absorption and a higher conductivity in this layer. This was seen in both the experimental and simulated cells. Aging effects were observed for some of the solar cells, when the zinc-sulfide layer is exposed to air. However, when a thin top layer of aluminum doped zinc-oxide was used, the aging effect was strongly reduced or removed. This work is a contribution to the realization of high performance IBSCs, based on abundant, non-toxic, and inexpensive materials. The total efficiencies achieved are still low, in comparison to established solar cell technologies, but the trend is going the right direction. Hopefully, these solar cells will approach their theoretical limits in near future and contribute to a revolution in the worldwide electricity production.


Objective: Assessment of distribution of pulpitis in primary dentition on an individual and community scale.

Material and Methods: Subject of the study are 67 children with primary dentition and performed minimum one endodontic treatment of a deciduous tooth. Totally 37 girls and 30 boys are included into this research. Child's minimal age equals to four and maximum age of participants is six. The research has been carried out at the Faculty of Dental Medicine, Medical University "Prof. Dr. Paraskev Stoyanov"-Varna, in the period 2015-2017. The researchers are specialists at Pediatric Dentistry. Irreversible caries lesions with pulp involvement, categorized as D4, have been investigated through this retrospective study based on medical records of participants. Actual survey data processing package for mathematical and statistical analysis SPSS 20.0 was applied.

Results: Approximately half of all the children who have taken part in the research, namely 46, 30 %, are characterized with two endodontic treatment procedures performed. One clinical situation of endodontic therapy concerns 22, 40 % of all the participants. Maximum five teeth affected by pulpitis have been recorded per individual primary dentition.

Conclusion: Pulpitis is widely distributed in deciduous teeth.


Memristors are a promising building block to the next generation of computing systems. Since 2008, when the physical implementation of a memristor was first postulated, the scientific community has shown a growing interest in this emerging technology. Thus, many other memristive devices have been studied, exploring a large variety of materials and properties. Furthermore, in order to support the design of practical applications, models in different abstract levels have been developed. In fact, a substantial effort has been devoted to the development of memristive based applications, which includes high-density nonvolatile memories, digital and analog circuits, as well as bio-inspired computing. In this context, this paper presents a survey, in hopes of summarizing the highlights of the literature in the last decade.


Gender quotas traditionally focus on the underrepresentation of women. Conceiving of quotas in this way perpetuates the status of men as the norm and women as the "other." Women are subject to heavy scrutiny of their qualifications and competence, whereas men's credentials go unchallenged. This article calls for a normative shift in the problem of overrepresentation, arguing that the quality of representation is negatively affected by having too large a group drawn from too narrow a talent pool. Curbing overrepresentation through ceiling quotas for men offers three core benefits. First, it promotes meritocracy by ensuring the proper scrutiny of politicians of both sexes. Second, it provides an impetus for improving the criteria used to select and evaluate politicians. Third, neutralizing the overly masculinized environment within parliaments might facilitate better substantive and symbolic representation of both men and women. All citizens would benefit from these measures to increase the quality of representation.


OBJECTIVE
To describe the efficacy and safety of an initiation algorithm for 4 mg of warfarin in ambulatory patients with atrial fibrillation.

DESIGN
Prospectively planned retrospective chart review.

SETTING
Centre for Family Medicine Family Health Team in Kitchener, Ont.

PARTICIPANTS
Ambulatory patients requiring anticoagulation for atrial fibrillation.

INTERVENTIONS
Patients were prescribed 4 mg of warfarin to be taken once daily for 3 days. An international normalized ratio (INR) measured on the morning of the fourth day was used to predict the maintenance dose of warfarin. Subsequent INR measurements were obtained biweekly until patients reached their actual maintenance dose.

MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES
Number of INR values greater than or equal to 4.0 before the warfarin maintenance dose was achieved. Secondary outcome measures included thromboembolic and bleeding events, number of days required to reach therapeutic INR, and correlation between predicted and actual warfarin maintenance dose.

RESULTS
Twenty-five patients were included in the study. The average age was 76.0 years (range 56.0 to 89.0), and 17 patients were women. The average CHADS2 (congestive heart failure, hypertension, age ≥ 75 years,diabetes mellitus, and stroke or transient ischemic attack) score was 2.0.Only 1 patient had an INR greater than 4.0 during the study period. The mean time to achieve a therapeutic INR was 11.0 days. The day 4 INR was moderately predictive of the maintenance dose (r2 = 0.47). There were no adverse events that required medical attention during the study period.

CONCLUSION
In this pilot study, an initiation algorithm for 4 mg of warfarin was safe and achieved a therapeutic INR within a reasonable time frame in outpatients with atrial fibrillation.


Since the seminal work of Akaike in the early seventies, optimizing some penalized empirical criterion such as the penalized log-likelihood has become a classical solution to the problem of choosing a proper statistical model from the data. For many model selection problems such as multiple change-point detection and variable selection for instance, it is desirable to let the dimension or the number of models of a given dimension grow with the sample size. A non asymptotic theory for model selection has therefore emerged during these last ten years in order to take this type of situations into account. The main issue both from a practical and ∗ Laboratoire de Mathématiques, UMR 8628 et équipe-projet SELECT, Université de Paris-Sud, Centre Scientifique d'Orsay, 91405 Orsay Cedex. E-mail : firstname.lastname@example.com Journal de la Société Française de Statistique, tome 149, n◦ 4, 2008 ©0000 (copyright holder) SÉLECTION DE MODÈLE : DE LA THÉORIE À LA PRATIQUE a theoretical view point is to understand how to penalize an empirical criterion such as the log-likelihood in order to get some optimal selection procedure. Asymptotic theory provides some useful indications on the shape of the penalty but it often leaves to the user the choice of numerical constants. The optimal value for these constants is generally unknown. In some situations theory is indeed not sharp enough to lead to explicit values. In some other cases, the problem is more of a statistical nature since according to the theory, the optimal value should depend on the unknown distribution of the observations. Our purpose here is to promote some data-driven method to calibrate the penalty. This method is partly based on preliminary theoretical results that we shall recall and partly founded on some heuristics that we intend to explain.


In a worldwide collaboration, information was sought and centrally checked on mortality and recurrence for each woman in any randomised trial that began before 1985 of any aspect of systemic adjuvant therapy for early breast cancer. Checked data were available for 75 000 women (about 90% of those ever randomised), of whom 32% had died and another 10% had experienced recurrence. The parts now reviewed include 30 000 women in tamoxifen trials, 3000 in ovarian ablation trials, 11 000 in polychemotherapy trials, 15 000 in other chemotherapy comparisons, and 6000 in immunotherapy trials. Highly significant reductions in the annual rates both of recurrence and of death are produced by tamoxifen (25% SD 2 recurrence and 17% SD 2 mortality: 2p < 0.00001 ), by ablation below age 50 (26% SD 6 recurrence and 25% SD 7 mortality: 2p = 0.0004),and by polychemotherapy (28% SD 3 recurrence and 16% SD 3 mortality: 2p < 0.00001), but not by ablation at older ages or by immunotherapy. (Tamoxifen also reduced the risk of development of contralateral breast cancer by 39% SD 9: lp < 0-00001.) For tamoxifen and for polychemotherapy the avoidance of recurrence is chiefly during years 0-4 (this difference being maintained but not increased afterwards), but the avoidance of mortality is highly significant both during and after years 0-4, so the cumulative differences in survival produced by these relatively brief treatments (median: 2 years tamoxifen, 1 year polychemotherapy) are larger at 10 than at 5 years. There is little information beyond year 10 (except for ovarian ablation, which produces separately significant mortality reductions both during and after years 0-9). Both direct and indirect randomised comparisons show long-term polychemotherapy (eg, 12 months) to be no better than shorter (eg, 6 months) regimens, but do show polychemotherapy to be significantly better than single-agent chemotherapy. Indirect randomised comparisons do not reveal significant differences between different forms of polychemotherapy, or differences between different tamoxifen doses, but do show that long-term tamoxifen (eg, 2 years, Gr even 5 years) is significantly more effective than shorter tamoxifen regimens. In old age (70+) tamoxifen is of demonstrated efficacy, but chemotherapy has not been evaluated. Between ages 50 and 69 direct comparisons show that chemotherapy plus tamoxifen is better (1 p < 0.00001) than chemotherapy alone both for recurrence and for mortality, and better (1 p < 0.00001) than tamoxifen alone for recurrence. in women aged under 50 chemotherapy and ovarian ablation appear, by an indirect comparison, to be of comparable efficacy, and the combination may be still better. The 30-40% proportional risk reductions that can be produced by combined chemo-endocrine therapy in middle age are similar for node-positive and for node-negative patients, but the absolute improvement in 10-year survival is about twice as great for the former (at least 12 deaths avoided per 100 women treated) as for the latter.


The resource management of Multihoming in nested mobile network raises new issues in the host mobility of ipv6 network. Multihoming facilitates the possibility of switching over to the network path offering better performance. However the key factor in attaining the benefit of multihoming is to ensure that the handoff switches over from one network interface to the other interface with minimal interruption. The aim of mobility support is to make mobile nodes keep connectivity without modification when roaming. The contribution of this paper is to simulate a policy based routing protocol framework that focuses on session preservation by redundancy and Load balancing by selecting the best available interface or enabling multiple interfaces simultaneously, since their management is critical for mobile communication. To manage these two critical resources, we identify the mobility characteristics and hardware configurations of in vehicle networks. The study then proposed a policy based routing protocol using two adaptive session preservation schemes in multihoming, which is refer to as best-connected MR selections based on location and path based type to support nested network of MIPV6 which was simulated using network simulator (NS2).


This study attempts to ascertain whether particular structural arrangements and demographic features of a community were responsible for especially severe disturbances during the 1960s. Preliminary to addressing this question, consideration is given to the manner of measuring severity and to the volatile components of this phenomenon. With respect to the latter, it is found that (1) disorder severity declined as a function of the number of prior outbreaks in a city and (2) there is evidence for a temporal effect, with the post-Martin Luther King-assassination disturbances having been unusually destructive. Regarding the more stable (community) determinants of disorder severity, only Negro population size and a dummy term for South were found to be related to severity. Net of these variables, various indicators of Negro disadvantage in a community failed to reveal significant associations with severity. This result is interpreted as further evidence for the distinctly national character of the disturbances in the 1960s.


"The Text in the Community" brings together essays by a diverse group of medievalists to consider the multiple ways in which readers approach texts and manuscripts as part of various "communities" of readers, authors, scribes, and scholars. The central premise of this volume is that texts do not exist in isolation. Each written work is embedded in a wide variety of contexts - literary, historical, geographical, social, political, and religious - and derives its meaning in part from the intersection of those contexts in the reader's experience of the text. This collection is distinguished by a variety of approaches to the study of medieval texts and manuscripts and by the capacious time frame in which they are located, extending from the Anglo-Saxon period to the fifteenth century. Contributors demonstrate ways in which the insights gained from careful attention to the multiple dimensions, material as well as verbal, of medieval texts can extend and complicate our notions of the literary tradition, medieval reading practices and audiences, and modes of composition.


Charles Simic is one of the leading American poets now writing. His first collection, Dismantling the Silence, was published in 1971, and in the three decades that have followed he has received numerous awards and honours for his work. This selection, made by the author himself from forty years' work, is an outstanding overview of an astonishing poet.


Lecithin cholesterol acyltransferase is an enzyme that esterifies free cholesterol. A complete deficiency of this enzyme results in a diffusely cloudy cornea. This deficiency is thought to be transmitted as an autosomal recessive trait. We studied a family in which four members were homozygote recessive. In the homozygote recessive condition, a central corneal haze caused by deposition of numerous minute gray dots was consistently present. In the heterozygote condition, arcuslike changes were present in some of the patients studied. We found the corneal change in the recessive state to be sensitive and specific as a marker of this condition. Heterozygotes appear to have a higher incidence of arcuslike corneal changes.


Retinoic acid-inducible gene-I (RIG-I) is a putative RNA helicase and recently identified as a cytosolic RNA receptor in mammalian cells. The role of RIG-I in the regulation of vascular function under physiological and pathological conditions is unknown. The present study tested whether RIG-I activation triggers inflammasome formation, turning on inflammation in mouse endothelial cells (EOMA cell line). By real time RT-PCR and Western blot analysis, transfection of mouse ECs with RIG-I specific agonist, 5'-triphosphate double-stranded RNA (3pRNA, 0.5 mg/L) increased RIG-I mRNA level by 106% and protein level by 81% compared to those in control double-stranded RNA (dsRNA) transfected ECs. ELISA analyses showed that 3pRNA significantly increased release of type I IFN alpha by 31 folds and IL-1 beta (a prototype cytokine from inflammasome activation) by 8 folds in these ECs. Proatherogenic stimulation of mouse ECs with cholesterol crystals or 7-ketocholesterol also markedly increased protein expression of RIG-I, but had no effect on RIG-I mRNA levels. Measurements of active caspase-1, an inflammasome activation marker using FLICA fluorescent probe that specifically binds to cleaved caspase-1, demonstrated that 3pRNA doubled FLICA positive cells compared to that in control dsRNA transfected ECs. Interestingly, cholesterol crystals significantly increased FLICA positive cells by 3 folds. This activation of caspase-1 in ECs by cholesterol crystals was further confirmed by increase in cleaved caspase-1 (p10) using Western blot analysis and by enhanced IL-1 beta release as detected by ELISA. In the presence of 3pRNA, cholesterol crystal-induced inflammasome activation was not further augmented. These data indicate that increased expression and activity of RIG-I activate IL-1 beta producing inflammasomes in ECs, which may represent an early molecular mechanism mediating vascular inflammation or injury upon atherogenic stimulations.


Previous studies have reported that the Conservative Government of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher failed to promote competition in its privatisation of large monopolistic publicly owned enterprises in the United Kingdom during the 1980s. In consequence, it failed to maximise the welfare gains which were potentially available. This perceived failure in policymaking has been attributed to flaws in government decision making. The interests of public sector managers have also been identified as impediments to welfare maximisation. However, neither the flaws in government decision making, nor the role of enterprise management in the process of privatisation, have been systematically and thoroughly investigated. The normative perspective adopted in most previous studies did not facilitate investigation of why a government would implement privatisation policy which was not socially optimal.

An alternative - public choice - explanation of the process of privatisation of large monopolistic publicly owned enterprises in the United Kingdom is advanced in this study. A public choice explanation facilitates investigation of the inherently political process of enterprise privatisation, and permits explicit consideration of the influence of enterprise management in that process.

Specific predictions are made about the changes in the relationship between an enterprise and the state, and about the changes in market structures, that occurred during implementation of the Thatcher Government's privatisation decisions. They are predictions about removal of the constraints of public ownership, restrictions on the entry of competitors into markets served by the privatised enterprises, retention of their horizontally and vertically integrated structures, restrictions on future price increases, maintaining service quality, the continuation of cross-subsidies, commitment of the Government and its successors to the redistribution of wealth effected, and the role of the regulator. Evidence supporting these predictions, and supporting the public choice explanation of this study, is presented.

Privatisation created new profit opportunities for the enterprises by removing the constraints of public ownership, and by restructuring the markets they served. It also made possible the provision of incentives, through the introduction of performance-related compensation, for senior management response to those opportunities. The study examines, and provides evidence in support of, expected changes in the level and form of senior management compensation occurring at the time of privatisation of the large monopolistic publicly owned enterprises in the United Kingdom, and immediately afterwards. Senior management could be expected to respond to new profit opportunities through redefining the scope of enterprise activities, and through changing the way in which resource use was coordinated and controlled. Predictions are made concerning the changes expected in the horizontal scope of the activities of the privatised enterprises, and in the extent to which their activities were vertically integrated. Evidence is presented supporting these predictions.

Not only does the evidence presented support the public choice explanation of this study. It also indicates that the public choice perspective which has been advanced is superior to the alternative, normative, perspective in terms of predictions made about the outcomes of the process through which large monopolistic publicly owned enterprises in the United Kingdom were privatised. The public choice perspective explains aspects of enterprise privatisation which are not easily explained from the normative perspective.


With the sea-ice diminishing steadily in the polar regions, there has been growing interest in new transit routes through polar waters using cost-effective transportation. Among the international regulators over polar shipping, the International Maritime Organization (IMO) is the leading body concerned with drafting marine safety and environmental protection rules. The mandatory Polar Code (International Code for Ships Operating in Polar Waters) adopted by the IMO signals the consensus among maritime states to apply compulsory rules to vessels operating in Arctic and Antarctic waters. As the standing member of the IMO and a major global shipping power, China is preparing to adopt national regulatory standards to develop an adequate vessel infrastructure and crew training system. Proceeding in parallel with the developing polar shipping industry, China will also move ahead in comprehensive collaboration with the Nordic states regarding polar issues. Citation: Li W F, Huang Y. International code for ships operating in polar waters: challenges to polar shipping safety rules in China. Adv Polar Sci, 2016, 27: 146-153, doi: 10.13679/j.advps.2016.3.00146


It is relatively easy to document direct agonistic interactions among or within species that lead to exclusion of subordinate animals from preferred habitats. It is more difficult to measure the competitive effects of that exclusion on the ''loser.'' Thus, much behavioral research assumes that the intensity of agonistic interactions is correlated with their cost to performance, but does not directly measure such a cost. We examined fitness- associated traits of pregnant viviparous scincid lizards ( Eulamprus heatwolei) in outdoor enclosures under three conditions: alone, with a conspecific, or with a larger and more aggressive heterospecific (Egernia saxatilis, a sympatric scincid species). As in previous laboratory studies, Egernia saxatilisattacked Eulamprus heatwoleiand excluded individuals of the smaller species from warmer shelter sites. However, Eulamprus heatwoleiwere able to maintain ''normal'' schedules of body temperatures and food intake, apparently by modifying their behavior to minimize encounters with their aggressive cage mates. Ac- cordingly, the subordinate animals showed no overt ill effects in spite of strong agonistic interactions: the body condition, locomotor performance, and corticosterone levels of sub- ordinate Eulamprus housed with Egernia were indistinguishable from those of lizards kept in solitary cages or with conspecifics only. Similarly, the offspring of these pregnant females were born at the same time, and with similar phenotypic traits, as the offspring of control females. Thus, even in situations of intense interspecific aggression and consequent habitat exclusion, behavioral flexibility of the subordinate animals may decrease or eliminate the inferred ecological consequences of that interaction.


General stress conditions in bacterial cells cause a global cellular response called the stringent response. The first event in this control is production of large amounts of a regulatory nucleotide, guanosine-3′,5′-(bis)pyrophospahte (ppGpp). It was proposed recently that ppGpp acts by decreasing stability of open complexes at promoters that make short-lived open complexes,e.g. the rRNA promoters. However, here we report that the bacteriophage λp R promoter, which forms long-lived open complexes, is inhibited by ppGpp in vitroas observed in vivo. We performed a systematic investigation of the ppGpp-specific inhibition of transcription initiation at λp R and found that ppGpp does decrease stability of open complexes at λp R, but only slightly. Likewise the equilbrium binding constant and rate of open complex formation by RNA polymerase at λp R are only slightly affected by ppGpp. The major effect of ppGpp-mediated inhibition is to decrease the rate of promoter escape. We conclude that ppGpp-mediated inhibition of transcription initiation is not restricted to promoters that make short-lived open complexes. Rather we conclude that the initial catalytic step of transcript formation is affected by ppGpp, specifically formation of the first phosphodiester bond is inhibited by ppGpp at λp R.


The present study investigated the contribution of epistemological beliefs about learning and Asian values on pre-service teachers' value for education. The relationship of epistemological beliefs and valuing education is based on Schwartz and Bilsky's (1987; 1990) theory of human values. The participants were 362 pre-service teachers from different universities in Manila, Philippines. It was found in a standard regression analysis that both complexity and structured belief about learning significantly predicted valuing one's education. Higher expectation for achievement, filial piety, and emotional restraint were also significant. A hierarchical multiple regression was used to test the order of contribution of Asian values (filial piety, hierarchical family structure, collectivism, emotional restraint, perseverance and hard work, higher expectation for achievement, respect for authority, and respect for education) on valuing education. The results showed that the order of Asian values based on the theory of Schwartz and Bardi (2001) significantly explained the variation on valuing education (Adjusted R 2 =.35). The contribution of each Asian value increased the variation on valuing education but it remained stable with the inclusion of respect for education and respect for authority.


The decisions made by the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE) give rise to two questions: how is cost-effectiveness evidence used to make judgements about the 'value for money' of health technologies? And how are factors other than cost-effectiveness taken into account? The aim of this paper is to explore NICE's cost-effectiveness threshold(s) and the tradeoffs between cost effectiveness and other factors apparent in its decisions. Binary choice analysis is used to reveal the preferences of NICE and to consider the consistency of its decisions. For each decision to accept or reject a technology, explanatory variables include: the cost per life year or per QALY gained; uncertainty regarding cost effectiveness; the net cost to the NHS; the burden of disease; the availability (or not) of alternative treatments; and specific factors indicated by NICE. Results support the broad notion of a threshold, where the probability of rejection increases as the cost per QALY increases. Cost effectiveness, together with uncertainty and the burden of disease, explain NICE decisions better than cost effectiveness alone. The results suggest a threshold somewhat higher than NICEs stated 'range of acceptable cost effectiveness' of pound 20,000-30,000 British pounds per QALY--although the exact meaning of a 'range' in this context remains unclear.


This article explores the circumstances in which a judicial officer may be required to recuse himself or herself on the basis of an opinion provided in the course of practice as a legal practitioner, prior to appointment to judicial officer, particularly where that opinion was on a matter of law only (including the constitutional validity of legislation). We suggest that questions concerning disqualification of judicial officers in such circumstances might be better approached by considering broader concepts of fairness, in addition to asking whether the provision of the pre-judicial opinion gives rise to considerations of apprehended bias. We also explore possible developments of the law to avoid the undesirable situation where the disqualification of a particular judicial officer may depend upon whether one party to the litigation chooses to disclose the existence or the content of advice that it has received.


We present a robust and real-time monocular six degree of freedom relocalization system. Our system trains a convolutional neural network to regress the 6-DOF camera pose from a single RGB image in an end-to-end manner with no need of additional engineering or graph optimisation. The algorithm can operate indoors and outdoors in real time, taking 5ms per frame to compute. It obtains approximately 2m and 3 degree accuracy for large scale outdoor scenes and 0.5m and 5 degree accuracy indoors. This is achieved using an efficient 23 layer deep convnet, demonstrating that convnets can be used to solve complicated out of image plane regression problems. This was made possible by leveraging transfer learning from large scale classification data. We show the convnet localizes from high level features and is robust to difficult lighting, motion blur and different camera intrinsics where point based SIFT registration fails. Furthermore we show how the pose feature that is produced generalizes to other scenes allowing us to regress pose with only a few dozen training examples.


Many signal processing systems, particularly in the multimedia and telecommunication domains, are synthesized to execute data-dominated applications. Their behavior is described in a high-level programming language, where the code is typically organized in sequences of loop nests and the main data structures are multidimensional arrays. This paper proposes a memory management algorithm for mapping multidimensional signals (arrays) to physical memory blocs. The advantages of this novel technique are the following: (a) it can be applied to multilayer memory hierarchies, which makes it particularly useful in embedded systems design, (b) it provides metrics of quality for the overall memory allocation solution: the minimum data storage of each multidimensional signal in the behavioral specification (therefore, the optimal memory sharing between the elements of same arrays), as well as the minimum data storage for the entire specification (therefore, the optimal memory sharing between all the array elements and scalars in the code), (c) it is well-suited to a dynamic multithreading implementation, which makes it computationally efficient.


This paper presents a novel Cellular Automata (CA) approach for image segmentation. We treat the image segmentation problem as cell merging in a cellular space constructed in the image plane. A cell is defined to be a pixel or a group of pixels with close RGB values. In each iteration, a cell checks the similarities between itself and its neighboring cells. Cells with similar properties are merged into large cells, which will eventually lead to high quality superpixels. The segmentation process is a trade-off between accuracy and computation cost. We have proved that the proposed approach is able to obtain satisfactory results efficiently while keeping image details.


Two hypotheses concerning adenosine triphosphate (ATP) degradation are examined: The metabolic basis of specific disorders involves ATP degradation, and uric acid and its precursors are measurable body fluid markers of ATP degradation. These hypotheses are examined by discussing human models of ATP degradation, methods for measurement of ATP degradation, and disorders of ATP degradation.


Cloud computing has become increasingly popular by obviating the need for users to own and maintain complex computing infrastructure. However, due to their inherent complexity and large scale, production cloud computing systems are prone to various runtime problems caused by hardware and software failures. Dependability assurance is crucial for building sustainable cloud computing services. Although many techniques have been proposed to analyze and enhance reliability of distributed systems, there is little work on understanding the dependability of cloud computing environments. As virtualization has been an enabling technology for the cloud, it is imperative to investigate the impact of virtualization on the cloud dependability, which is the focus of this work. In this paper, we present a cloud dependability analysis (CDA) framework with mechanisms to characterize failure behavior in cloud computing infrastructures. We design the failure-metric DAGs (directed a cyclic graph) to analyze the correlation of various performance metrics with failure events in virtualized and non-virtualized systems. We study multiple types of failures. By comparing the generated DAGs in the two environments, we gain insight into the impact of virtualization on the cloud dependability. This paper is the first attempt to study this crucial issue. In addition, we exploit the identified metrics for failure detection. Experimental results from an on-campus cloud computing test bed show that our approach can achieve high detection accuracy while using a small number of performance metrics.


textabstractIn Western societies there has been a change in reproductive behaviour with a tendency towards more couples postponing childbearing. As a consequence the number of couples experiencing impaired fertility in the Netherlands is rising. Female age in this respect is the commonly studied individual risk factor for subfertility. Subfertility is clinically defined as 12 months of unprotected intercourse during the fertile period of the menstrual cycle without a resulting pregnancy. Several modifiable factors exist that also affect fertility and the chance of having a healthy child. Many studies underline the detrimental role of adverse lifestyles and dietary intake of both women and men on reproductive outcome. During the periconceptional period – defined as the time span before and surrounding conception – these factors can detrimentally influence reproductive processes such as gametogenesis, fertilisation and implantation, through the induction of oxidative stress, chromosomal defects, interact with polymorphisms in detoxification enzymes and/or possible interfere with epigenetic mechanisms.
Worldwide, there is a high prevalence of unhealthy lifestyle factors in women and men during their reproductive period. In the Netherlands 25% of the women and 35% of the men smoke, 80-90% of women and men use social alcohol , defined as the use of <14 units/week, and 40% of the women and 52% of the men have overweight or are obese.
Therefore, research into potential modifiable risk factors may ultimately contribute to preventive and curative treatments. In the following paragraph the implication of adverse lifestyles on reproductive performance are outlined.


Network anomaly detection has become the promising aspect of intrusion detection. The existing anomaly detection models depict the detection profiles with a static way, which lack good adaptability and interoperability. Furthermore, the detection rate is low, so they are difficult to be deployed the realtime detection under the high-speed network environment. In this paper, the excellent mechanisms of self-learning and adaptability in the human immune system are referred and a dynamic anomaly detection algorithm with immune negative selection, named as DADAI, is proposed. The concepts and formal definitions of antigen, antibody, and memory cells in the network security domain are given; the dynamic clonal principle of antibody is integrated; the mechanism of immune vaccination is discussed, and the dynamic evolvement formulations of detection profiles are established (including the detection profiles' dynamic generation and extinction, dynamic learning, dynamic transformation, and dynamic self-organization), which will accomplish that the detection profiles dynamically synchronize with the real network environment. Both our theoretical analysis and experimental results show that DADAI is a good solution to network anomaly detection, which increase the veracity and timeliness on anomaly detection problem.


Iberia, a natural cul-de-sac peninsula, plays a major role in the study of the Neanderthals demise and its eventual relationship with the spread of Anatomically Modern Humans (AMH) in Europe. The site of Cova Eirós (Galicia, Spain), located in NW Iberia, contains Middle and Upper Palaeolithic levels, based on the cultural remains recovered at the site. No human remains directly associated with those levels were discovered yet. The available radiocarbon dates from the levels 2 (c. 35 ka cal BP, Early Upper Paleolithic) and 3 (c. 41 ka cal BP, Late Middle Paleolithic), point to a late survival of Neanderthal groups in North Iberia and to a relative quick arrival of the AMH, c. 35-36 ka cal BP, with respect to other territories of the Iberian Peninsula. The archaeological record shows clear differences between the Middle and the Upper Palaeolithic occupations, regarding raw-material acquisition, lithic technology and subsistence strategies. The location of Cova Eirós in the westernmost margin of the Cantabrian Rim and in the Atlantic Façade, makes this site a key place to understand the spread of the first AMH and the progressive demise of Neanderthal populations.


Parliamentary systems are characterised by strong links between the executive and the legislature. While the importance of executive–legislative relationships is well-known, the extent to which executive dominance affects parliamentary behaviour is hard to grasp. This study uses the recent institutional crises in Belgium to study parliamentary behaviour in the absence of a government with full powers. Cabinet formation in Belgium has proved to be protracted in recent years, leading to long periods of government formation in both 2007–2008 and 2010–2011. Such circumstances provide a unique comparison between normal situations of parliament in the presence of government, and exceptional situations of prolonged periods of caretaker government. In particular the article looks at three aspects of parliamentary behaviour that are usually linked to executive–legislative relations: legislative initiatives, voting behaviour and party unity. The general hypothesis is that prolonged periods of government formation gave parliamentarians more opportunities to influence the legislative process and more (ideological) freedom. The results show a nuanced picture: parliament became more pro-active, the salience of the government–opposition divide declined, while party unity remained as strong as ever. It is concluded that government formation processes did not lead to drastic changes in the legislative–executive relationship, but rather permitted a modest correction to the extremely weak position of parliament.


Specific issues investigated in this project were: Identifying the most effective substrate for optimum biofilm formation, and the range of operating conditions for optimum removals to be achieved; Developing a standard suite of laboratory tests, both simulated filtration tests and genetic tests, to identify the potential of an existing filter to remove cyanobacterial metabolites; Better understanding of the lag period prior to the onset of degradation of several metabolites; The feasibility of artificially inoculating or "seeding" filters to enhance removal of the cyanobacterial metabolites.

This book is co-published with Water Research Australia.

This title belongs to WaterRA

ISBN: 9781780407548 (eBook)

ISBN: 9781780407531 (Print)


OBJECTIVE: To determine the prevalence of hepatitis B virus (HBV) infection in heterosexual patients attending two genitourinary medicine (GUM) clinics in the West Midlands and to examine whether heterosexual activity is a risk factor for acquiring HBV infection with the view to extend HBV vaccination policies to cover this group. DESIGN: HBV markers were determined in the GUM study group and compared with that of the control groups. Responses to a questionnaire were used to examine sexual behaviour patterns that may be related to heterosexual acquisition of HBV infection. SETTING: The West Midlands, UK April 1992-January 1993. SUBJECTS: 788 male patients and 688 female patients attending GUM clinics were compared with 498 male blood donors and 563 females attending antenatal clinics for the seroprevalence of HBV markers. Potential risk factors related to heterosexual activity were assessed in 1436 patients in the study group. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Prevalence of HBV markers in the GUM study group and the controls. The possible use of the risk factors examined as predictors for acquiring HBV infection. RESULTS: The seroprevalence of hepatitis B core antibody (anti-HBc) in GUM patients was 1.9% and 0.5% in the control group. In the study groups the prevalence of anti-HBc from Birmingham was 3.2% while that from Coventry was 0.8%. The low seroprevalence of HBV prevented a multiple logistic analysis. A limited regression analysis showed that being non-white (p < 0.001) and duration of sexual activity (p = 0.013) were risk factors for HBV infection. However, these two factors were poor predictors of the risk to exposure to HBV infection. CONCLUSION: The prevalence of HBV infection in heterosexual patients in the West Midlands is very low and does not provide any indications to broaden HBV vaccination into heterosexual patients attending GUM clinics. Risk factors were poor predictors of the exposure to HBV infection. This is partially due to the low prevalence of HBV infection in this study. Further studies are required before definitive conclusions are made regarding the potential predictive value of risk factors.


Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to focus on the practical knowing that is central in police education. Drawing on perspectives about tacit knowledge and embodied learning (e.g. Merleau-Ponty, 1945/1997; Polanyi, 1966; Argyris and Schön, 1974) as well as empirical examples, this paper discusses the design of and what can be expected from computer simulation training for the development of police students' professional knowing.

Design/methodology/approach
The discussion is based on lessons learned from working with two different computer simulation training situations designed to prepare the students for an upcoming practical training by facilitating the understanding of complex situations as they should be handled in the physical training situation.

Findings
The experiences from the training sessions showed that the different characteristics of the simulations mediate how the training session was performed, e.g., unplanned trial and error vs focused and attentive, but also group discussions about how to act and appropriate actions in relation to the situation to be solved in the simulation.

Originality/value
Based on the lessons learned from working with the two different computer simulations, it is posited that the use of computer simulations for practical scenario training is a complex endeavor that needs, in various degrees, to be supported by pedagogical steering. The design of computer simulation training (both the simulation and how the training is designed and performed) need to consider the specific aspects that surround tacit knowledge and embodied learning in the "real sense" (anchored to the practical training) to be of relevance for police students development of professional knowing.


Introduction Teaching medication history taking or medication reconciliation to students requires practice for students to achieve competency. Practice makes students more confident with the process, but multiple practice opportunities require multiple cases, and creating these new cases can be a tedious and time-consuming process. Methods The Medication Mysteries Infinite Case Tool was designed to produce random patient cases using game-like features to allow students to practice medication history taking and medication reconciliation without the need to use and train standardized patients. The tool was created using a random draw card-based system to determine patient personality attributes, drugs they are taking, and confusions they have about their drug-taking behavior. This tool is used in a lab dedicated for the purpose of practicing medication history taking with students being assessed via simulation with standardized patients. This tool is currently used at the University of Florida College of Pharmacy as part of a training program for first-year pharmacy students. Results Since 2011, seven classes of first- and second-year pharmacy students have participated in this lab. Each year's class contained an average of 280 students divided into lab groups of 18–24 students. In our initial offering of the lab and assessment, 200 students on three campuses completed the individual assessments following the laboratory session. Fifty-eight percent achieved excellence, and 39% achieved competence on the individual assessment. Only 3% were assessed as being deficient on their performance and were required to repeat the assessment. Overall, 86.8% agreed or strongly agreed that the MMICT was an excellent way to experience how to reconcile medication. Discussion Students enjoy the practice and become proficient with the skills they learn through this process as evidenced by increased self-efficacy and achieved competence on a standardized assessment. The tool and the research associated with the outcome were awarded with the 2012 American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy Innovations in Teaching Award.


403 "Christmass rabbits" slaughtered in a public slaughter-house were inspected. The average age of the rabbits was eleven months, the average weight being 4.3 kg. (Rabbits raised for commercial purposes are slaughtered when they are approximately three months and weigh 2.5 kg.). Pathological changes were observed in 34 per cent of the animals after slaughter; these changes were mainly due to parasites. Of all rabbits which were inspected, 77 per cent were passed for food; 13 per cent were only passed after some parts of the animals had been removed (mainly livers showing coccidiosis); 8 per cent were conditionally admitted and 2 per cent were condemned. Moreover, 120 traditionally raised rabbits and 120 rabbits raised for commercial purposes were examined for the presence of Salmonella in the faeces and the wall of the rectum. No Salmonella organisms were detected.


Context: Dutasteride and finasteride are 5-reductase inhibitors (5ARIs) that dramatically reduce serum levels of dihydrotestosterone (DHT). Objective: Because androgens are essential for fertility, we sought to determine the impact of 5ARI administration on serum testosterone (T), DHT, and spermatogenesis. Design, Setting, Subjects, and Intervention: We conducted a randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled trial in 99 healthy men randomly assigned to receive dutasteride (D; 0.5 mg) (n 33), finasteride (F; 5 mg) (n 34), or placebo (n 32) once daily for 1 yr. Main Outcome Measures: Blood and semen samples were collected at baseline and 26 and 52 wk of treatment and 24 wk after treatment and were assessed for T, DHT, and semen parameters. Results: D and F significantly (P 0.001) suppressed serum DHT, compared with placebo (D, 94%; F, 73%) and transiently increased serum T. In both treatment groups, total sperm count, compared with baseline,wassignificantlydecreasedat26wk(D,28.6%;F,34.3%) but not at 52 wk (D, 24.9%; F, 16.2%) or the 24-wk follow-up (D, 23.3%; F, 6.2%). At 52 wk, semen volume was decreased (D, 29.7%; F, 14.5%, significantly for D) as was sperm concentration (D, 13.2%; F, 7.4%, neither significant). There was a significant reduction of 6 to 12% in sperm motility during treatment with both D and F and at follow-up. Neither treatment had any effect on sperm morphology. Conclusions: This study demonstrates that the decrease in DHT induced by 5ARIs is associated with mild decreases in semen parameters that appear reversible after discontinuation. (J Clin Endocrinol Metab 92: 1659–1665, 2007)


Optimization of atomic structures presents a challenging problem, due to their highly rough and non-convex energy landscape, with wide applications in the fields of drug design, materials discovery, and mechanics. Here, we present a graph reinforcement learning approach, StriderNET, that learns a policy to displace the atoms towards low energy configurations. We evaluate the performance of StriderNET on three complex atomic systems, namely, binary Lennard-Jones particles, calcium silicate hydrates gel, and disordered silicon. We show that StriderNET outperforms all classical optimization algorithms and enables the discovery of a lower energy minimum. In addition, StriderNET exhibits a higher rate of reaching minima with energies, as confirmed by the average over multiple realizations. Finally, we show that StriderNET exhibits inductivity to unseen system sizes that are an order of magnitude different from the training system.


This paper presents the results of atmospheric Sulfur dioxide (SO_2) column densities obtained from satellite observation over Pakistan during the time period of 2004-2012. The level-2 data product of the Scanning Imaging Absorption Spectrometer for Atmospheric Chartography (SCIAMACHY) instrument on-board ENVISAT-l is used. S02 column densities are retrieved by applying differential optical absorption spectroscopy (DOAS) technique. The spatio-temporal distribution of SO_2 column densities along with the seasonal variation over main cities and regions of Pakistan are discussed. The Nabro volcano eruption in the year 2011 caused high SO_2 levels over East Africa, the Middle East and South and Southeast Asia. Satellite images exhibited several episodes of volcanic SO_2 column densities transported to Pakistan. The temporal trend in SO_2 column densities was calculated, and the significance of the data set was tested with statistical analysis. An overall increase of about 70% (8.7% per year) in SO_2 column densitiies over Pakistan during the time period of 2004-2012 has been calculated. This study presents the first spatial and temporal analyses of SO_2 column densities over Pakistan by using satellite observation.