Apoptosis resulting from a high frequency of damage to the cell's genetic material and manifested at late time after exposure is regarded as an evidence of radiation-induced genomic instability. On the other hand, apoptosis disruption may lie behind preservation of cells with genetic anomalies, and become thereby one of the mechanisms of genomic instability. Techa riverside residents, have been chronically exposed to radiation since 1949 as a result of the Mayak PA activities. Maximum dose rates were 0.4-0.5 Gy/year during the early years. Two groups (168 exposed individuals and 118 unexposed controls) were studied with the aim to assess the intensity of peripheral blood lymphocyte apoptosis 55-58 years after the onset of radiation exposure. Apoptosis was assessed based on morphological criteria, using the TUNEL assay, by typing CD95 positive lymphocytes. To assess the apoptotic reserve of the peripheral blood lymphocytes, in-vitro additional irradiation at a dose of 1 Gy, and 24-hour incubation was used. Increase of apoptosis in exposed individual was revealed based on morphological criteria (‰) (12.3±0.6 in exposed vs 9.1±0.8 control subjects) and the findings of the TUNEL assay (‰) (2.4±0,3 in exposed vs 0.9±0.2 control subjects). No dependence of CD95 positive lymphocytes on radiation factor was registered (8.0±0.4 in exposed vs 7.4±0.6 control subjects). A modeling approach was used to estimate the fraction of cells with broken apoptosis from these two groups. In this approach dynamics of cell states after in vitro irradiation is modeled by the 4-compartment model with compartments of i) cell with deficient apoptosis, ii) normal cells, iii) damaged cells, and iv) cells identified as apoptotic. The estimation of model parameters resulted in identifying the fraction of cells with broken apoptosis from the initial blood sample. It can be concluded based on the study results that: (1) chronically exposed individuals manifest an increased rate of peripheral blood lymphocyte apoptosis decades after dose rates returned to the background level, (2) using the method of genotoxic exposure (standard in-vitro irradiation), it was possible to detect a higher frequency of apoptotic abnormalities in chronically exposed individuals vs that in the controls. Thus, the study has provided a convincing evidence of the important role played by apoptosis in the development of radiation-induced genomic instability in man.


Poly(acrylic acid) (PAA) has been grafted to chitosan at varying ratios in order to prepare the hydrogel adsorbent to remove Cr(VI), Pb, and methylene blue from the waste water solution. The reaction was performed in a homogeneous aqueous phase using N, N-methylenebisacrylamide (MBA) as a cross-linker, and ammonium persulfate as an initiator. Grafting (%) decreases with an increase in the quantity of chitosan in the hydrogel, but the degree of swelling increases slightly with an increase of chitosan due to the amphiphilic nature of the modified chitosan. The hydrogel was characterized by a variety of techniques, such as FT-IR, SEM and TGA analysis. Adsorption behaviors for Cr (VI), Pb, and methylene blue (MB) on the prepared adsorbent were studied with respect to the standard solution and the actual industrial effluent sample. Maximum removal efficiencies for Cr(VI) and Pb were obtained from 2:1 chitosan and acrylic acid (AA) in the hydrogel. On the other hand, hydrogels with higher PAA had a remarkably higher MB adsorption capacity than others. Increased removal of heavy metals and MB by the hydrogel than chitosan was due to carboxyl groups that are easy to form bidentate carboxylates with metal ions. The adsorption result of the hydrogel for real industrial effluent showed that approximately 35% of heavy metals (Cr (VI), Pb) and 53 % MB can be removed by a single adsorption cycle.


Global temperature (GT) changes over the 20th century and glacial-interglacial periods are commonly thought to be dominated by feedbacks, with relatively small direct effects from variation of solar insolation. Here is presented a novel empirical and physically-based auto-regressive AR(1) model, where temperature response is the integral of the magnitude of solar forcing over its duration, and amplification increases with depth in the atmospheric/ocean system. The model explains 76% of the variation in GT from the 1950s by solar heating at a rate of $0.06\pm 0.03K W^{-1}m^{-2}Yr^{-1}$ relative to the solar constant of $1366Wm^{-2}$. Miss-specification of long-equilibrium dynamics by empirical fitting methods (as shown by poor performance on simulated time series) and atmospheric forcing assumptions have likely resulted in underestimation of solar influence. The solar accumulation model is proposed as a credible mechanism for explaining both paleoclimatic temperature variability and present-day warming through high sensitivity to solar irradiance anomaly.


This study examined strategies adopted by relevant security agencies to curb sea robbery in Niger Delta Region of Nigeria. A multi-stage sampling technique was employed to select respondents'. A Sample of 400 was derived using Taro Yamane sample size determination technique. Questionnaires and oral interview were the methods used for data collection, while data collected were analysed using descriptive statistics. Results revealed that the joint task force (JTF) is selective in carrying out its constitutional mandate as their presence is felt only in critical facilities, which implies that security is porous and much is needed to guarantee safety of lives and properties on Nigeria territorial waters. Consequent upon this finding, crime-mapping as indicated on GIS map of sample states is recommended.


Higher rates of mental ill-health, particularly mood disorder, have been reported in women compared to men and this discrepancy has been attributed to underlying biological changes associated with the menstrual cycle. The literature relating to psychiatric ill-health and the premenstrual syndrome is, accordingly, critically evaluated and the evidence favouring a causal role for menstrual cycle changes in the genesis of such ill-health is briefly reviewed. A simple model of causation attributing psychiatric-ill-health to hormonal variation in the menstrual cycle is eschewed in favour of a multifactorial model which assumes an interaction between hormonal and hormonally-related changes in the premenstruum, basic personality and social dissatisfactions, adverse life circumstances, and interpersonal stresses.


Petri nets are a popular formalism for modeling and analyzing distributed systems. Tokens in Petri net models can represent the control flow state or resources produced/consumed by transition firings. We define a resource as a part (a submultiset) of Petri net markings and call two resources equivalent when replacing one of them with another in any marking does not change the observable Petri net behavior. We consider resource similarity and resource bisimilarity, two congruent restrictions of bisimulation equivalence on Petri net markings. Previously it was proved that resource similarity (the largest congruence included in bisimulation equivalence) is undecidable. Here we present an algorithm for checking resource bisimilarity, thereby proving that this relation (the largest congruence included in bisimulation equivalence that is a bisimulation) is decidable. We also give an example of two resources in a Petri net that are similar but not bisimilar.


OBJECTIVE--To measure the effect of parenteral antibiotics given before admission to hospital on mortality and on bacteriological investigations in meningococcal disease. DESIGN--Retrospective review of hospital notes and laboratory and public health medicine department records. SETTING--Three health districts in south west England. SUBJECTS--Patients with meningococcal disease in Gloucester district presenting between 1 January 1982 and 31 December 1991 (n = 190); patients with meningococcal disease in Plymouth (n = 118) and Bath (n = 73) districts presenting between 1 January 1988 and 31 December 1991 (total = 381). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE--Number of deaths from meningococcal disease. RESULTS--Parenteral antibiotic given by general practitioners was associated with a substantial reduction in mortality (from 9% to 5%; relative risk 0.6, 95% confidence interval 0.2 to 1.5); patients with a rash were more likely to be given parenteral antibiotics, and mortality was further reduced (from 12% to 5%; 0.5, 0.2 to 1.4). In a district where such treatment was regularly encouraged its use increased from 5% to 40% of cases over 10 years (p = 0.00001). Treatment with parenteral antibiotics before admission made isolation of meningococci from blood and cerebrospinal fluid less likely but did not affect nasopharyngeal cultures. CONCLUSIONS--General practitioners should carry benzylpenicillin in their emergency bags at all times and should administer it promptly, preferably intravenously, whenever meningococcal disease is suspected, unless the patient has had an anaphylactic reaction to penicillin. Specimens for culture should include a nasopharyngeal swab.


To determine whether staphylococci causing bovine mastitis are potential causes of human intoxications, 142 cultures identified as etiological agents of acute cases and 18 cultures causing chronic cases of staphylococcal mastitis were obtained from investigators in the United States and Canada, examined microscopically, and tested for carbohydrate utilization, terminal pH, catalase, coagulase, egg yolk hydrolysis, gelatin hydrolysis, cytochrome oxidase, urease production, nitrate reduction, micrococcal nuclease, phage type, and enterotoxin production. Three cultures were not confirmed as Staphylococcus aureus. Of the 157 S. aureus cultures, 23 produced staphylococcal enterotoxins. Although a direct relationship between staphylococcal mastitis and outbreaks of staphylococcal food poisoning was not proved, results indicated that staphylococcal infections of the bovine mammary gland represent a significant reservoir of enterotoxigenic strains of S. aureus.


In April 2009, a moment magnitude M w =6.3 earthquake struck the central region of Italy near the city of L'Aquila. While the earthquake was tragic — 305 people killed, 1500 injured, and thousands of buildings destroyed — its aftermath provides lessons for earthquake professionals. Within 10 km of the epicenter, the recorded horizontal peak ground acceleration exceeded 0.35g and the ground shaking had high-frequency content with relatively short duration. The damage indicated strong effects of site conditions, where heavy damage occurred to structures founded on young sediments. Old unreinforced masonry buildings made of mortar and multi-wythe rubble-stone or clay bricks were significantly damaged. These buildings were typically two or three stories tall and the damage ranged from wall cracking to severe damage and collapse. Some buildings with retrofitted cross-ties to reduce out-of-plane wall deformation performed reasonably well with limited cracking and no out-of-plane collapses. Reinforced concrete (RC) buildings ranged from two to eight stories tall. The majority of modern RC buildings were designed for horizontal acceleration of about 0.25g. In the epicentral region, little attention was paid to ductility requirements (e.g., smooth reinforcing bars, short lap splices, and insufficient column ties and transverse reinforcement in the beam-column joints were used). The designs appear to have ignored the effect of infill walls and some construction material was of poor quality. Although these deficiencies are serious, the widespread damage most likely resulted from the lack of ductility and the brittleness of exterior infill walls and interior partitions. There were also isolated cases of RC frame damage due to shear failures that led to soft-story mechanisms. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS


An optimization-based process synthesis framework is proposed for the thermochemical conversion of biomass to liquid fuels (BTL). Gasification of biomass is used to generate synthesis gas which can be converted to raw hydrocarbons either directly using Fischer–Tropsch synthesis or indirectly using catalytic conversion of methanol over ZSM-5. Multiple technologies are considered for generation of the raw hydrocarbons including (i) six types of Fischer–Tropsch units with different temperatures, catalyst types, and hydrocarbon effluent compositions, (ii) methanol conversion using methanol-to-gasoline, and (iii) methanol conversion using methanol-to-olefins. The hydrocarbons are upgraded into the final liquid fuel products (i.e., gasoline, diesel, and kerosene) using one or more technologies including ZSM-5 catalytic conversion, oligomerization, hydrocracking, isomerization, alkylation, and hydrotreating. A simultaneous heat, power, and water integration is included within the process synthesis framework to directly examine the costs associated with utility production and wastewater treatment with a particular topological design. A rigorous global optimization branch-and-bound strategy is implemented to mathematically guarantee the development of a BTL refinery that is economically and environmentally superior to all competing designs. Twenty-four case studies are investigated to determine the effect of refinery capacity, liquid fuel composition, and biomass feedstock on the overall system cost, the BTL refinery topological design, the process material/energy balances, and the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions.


In recent years, depression has gained increasing attention. As with other disorders, early detection of depression is an essential area of study, since severe depression can result in suicide. Thus, this study develops, implements, and analyzes a computational model based on natural language processing to identify the depression tendencies of Twitter users over time based on their tweets. Consequently, an F-measure of 83.58 % was achieved by analyzing both the textual content and the emotion of the papers. With these data, it is possible to determine whether constant fluctuation of emotions or the message in the text is a more accurate indicator of depression.


Abstract. Geospatial data are today more and more widespread. Many different institutions, such as Geographical Institutes, Public Administrations, collaborative communities (e.g., OSM) and web companies, make available nowadays a large number of maps. Besides this cartography, projects of digitizing, georeferencing and web publication of historical maps have increasingly spread in the recent years. In spite of these variety and availability of data, information overload makes difficult their discovery and management: without knowing the specific repository where the data are stored, it is difficult to find the information required and problems of interconnection between different data sources and their restricted interoperability limit a wide utilization of available geo-data. This paper aims to describe some actions performed to assure interoperability between data, in particular spatial and geographic data, gathered from different data providers, with different features and referring to different historical periods. The article summarizes and exemplifies how, starting from projects of historical map digitizing and Historical GIS implementation, respectively for the Lombardy and for the city of Parma, the interoperability is possible in the framework of the ENERGIC OD project. The European project ENERGIC OD, thanks to a specific component – the virtual hub – based on a brokering framework, copes with the previous listed problems and allows the interoperability between different data sources.


The A. shows the Finnish-Russian border changing from a political periphery into a focus for international ecopolitics, because of how landscapes either side have been treated under different geopolitically informed regimes of government. On the Finnish side landscape was transformed into industrially managed forests, whereas the Russian border zone was left largely unmanaged. Historical social links across the border were reactivated after the end of the Cold War, and young Finnish forest activists in particular have created social links here. Their activities challenge accepted ideas of sovereign territory and beg revisions of the analytical tools for addressing processes of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation such as those at play in ecopolitics


The brain mechanism regulating gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH)/luteinizing hormone (LH) release is sexually differentiated in rodents. Kisspeptin neurons in the anteroventral periventricular nucleus (AVPV) have been suggested to be sexually dimorphic and involved in the GnRH/LH surge generation. The present study aimed to determine the significance of neonatal testicular androgen to defeminize AVPV kisspeptin expression and the GnRH/LH surge-generating system. To this end, we tested whether neonatal castration feminizes AVPV kisspeptin neurons and the LH surge-generating system in male rats and whether neonatal estradiol benzoate (EB) treatment suppresses the kisspeptin expression and the LH surge in female rats. Immunohistochemistry, in situ hybridization, and quantitative real-time RT-PCR were performed to investigate kisspeptin and Kiss1 mRNA expressions. Male rats were castrated immediately after birth, and females were treated with EB on postnatal Day 5. Neonatal castration caused an increase in AVPV kisspeptin expression at peptide and mRNA levels in the genetically male rats, and the animals showed surge-like LH release in the presence of the preovulatory level of estradiol (E2) at adulthood. On the other hand, neonatal EB treatment decreased the number of AVPV kisspeptin neurons and caused an absence of E2-induced LH surge in female rats. Semiquantitative RT-PCR analysis showed that neonatal steroidal manipulation affects Kiss1 expression but does not significantly affect gene expressions of neuropeptides (neurotensin and galanin) and enzymes or transporter for neurotransmitters (gamma-aminobutyric acid, glutamate, and dopamine) in the AVPV, suggesting that the manipulation specifically affects Kiss1 expressions. Taken together, our present results provide physiological evidence that neonatal testicular androgen causes the reduction of AVPV kisspeptin expression and failure of LH surge in genetically male rats. Thus, it is plausible that perinatal testicular androgen causes defeminization of the AVPV kisspeptin system, resulting in the loss of the surge system in male rats.


We review radiometric techniques that take advantage of photon counting and stem from the quantum laws of nature. We present a brief history of metrological experiments and review the current state of experimental quantum radiometry.


The Renovation course 2012 subject in Helsinki is a brief survey of the Villa Annala, Hämeentie st., 154. The two-storey log and wooden-framed building is situated in a park area, and there forit has no plot or official registration number. For this reason, there have been no building permits or records of maintenance works in the building review office. The Parks department has served as the owner, and has organised together with the real estate department the upkeep of the building. The park itself is in excellent condition and the surrounding buildings are all in use. This main buildíng originally built by Konsul Wasenius in 1832 has been empty for over a year. The students have been asked to do a short survey of the building condition, offer alternatives for renovation, and finally give opinions concerning the future of the building. They are working in construction details and architecture team, ventilation and heating team and construction economics groups. The City of Helsinki is unable to give any information conerning the future of the building.


The continually increasing heat generation rates in high performance electronics, radar systems and data centers require development of efficient heat exchangers that can transfer large heat loads. In this paper, we present the design of a new high-performance heat exchanger capable of transferring 1000 W while consuming less than 33 W of input electrical power and having an overall thermal resistance of 0.05 K/W. The low thermal resistance is achieved by using a loop heat pipe with a single evaporator and multiple condenser plates that constitute the array of fins. Impellers between the fins are driven by a custom permanent magnet synchronous motor in a compact volume of 0.1 × 0.1 × 0.1 m to maximize the heat transfer area and reduce the required airflow rate and electrical power. The design of the heat exchanger is developed using analytical and numerical methods to determine the important parameters of each component. The results form the basis for the fabrication and experimental characterization that is currently under development.


Synapse loss precedes cell death in Alzheimer's disease, but the timing of axon degeneration relative to these events, and the causal relationships remain unclear. Axons become so severely dystrophic near amyloid plaques that their interruption, causing permanent loss of function, extensive synapse loss, and potentially cell death appears imminent. However, it remains unclear whether axons are truly interrupted at plaques and whether cell bodies fail to support their axons and dendrites. We traced TgCRND8 mouse axons longitudinally through, distal to, and proximal from dystrophic regions. The corresponding neurons not only survived but remained morphologically unaltered, indicating absence of axonal damage signalling or a failure to respond to it. Axons, no matter how dystrophic, remained continuous and initially morphologically normal outside the plaque region, reflecting support by metabolically active cell bodies and continued axonal transport. Immunochemical and ultrastructural studies showed dystrophic axons were tightly associated with disruption of presynaptic transmission machinery, suggesting local functional impairment. Thus, we rule out long-range degeneration axons or dendrites as major contributors to early synapse loss in this model, raising the prospect of a therapeutic window for functional rescue of individual neurons lasting months or even years after their axons become highly dystrophic. We propose that multi-focal pathology has an important role in the human disease in bringing about the switch from local, and potentially recoverable, synapse loss into permanent loss of neuronal processes and eventually their cell bodies.


This experimental study compared the effectiveness of three instructional strategies for upper basic eight classes in Creative Arts in Nigeria. 674 participants were involved. Virtual Arts instructional strategy group consisted of 212 students; 198 for demonstration and 264 for the cooperative instructional strategies. Male and female participants were 315 and 359 respectively; while public and private schools had 389 and 285 participants. Pretest was administered on each of the groups before instructions were carried out according to the identified instructional strategies. Drawing and painting was the content area of Creative Arts subject employed; then the posttest to assess the effectiveness of the instructional strategies. The study revealed that all students improved achievement with each of the three instructional strategies, but Virtual Arts group showed most improvement, while demonstration group did more than the cooperative group. There was significant gender difference in the achievement of upper basic male and female students when taught using Virtual Arts, Demonstration and Cooperative strategies respectively. Virtual Arts, Demonstration and Cooperative strategies had significant main effect on upper basic students' achievement in Creative Arts in both public and private schools.


Today, almost all desktop and laptop computers are shared-memory multicores, but the code they run is overwhelmingly serial. High level language extensions and libraries (e.g., Open MP, Cilk++, TBB) make it much easier for programmers to write parallel code than previous approaches (e.g., MPI), in large part thanks to the efficient {\em work-stealing} scheduler that allows the programmer to expose more parallelism than the actual hardware parallelism. But when the parallel tasks are too short or too many, the scheduling overheads become significant and hurt performance. Because this happens frequently (e.g, data-parallelism, PRAM algorithms), programmers need to manually coarsen tasks for performance by combining many of them into longer tasks. But manual coarsening typically causes over fitting of the code to the input data, platform and context used to do the coarsening, and harms performance-portability. We propose distinguishing between two types of coarsening and using different techniques for them. Then improve on our previous work on Lazy Binary Splitting (LBS), a scheduler that performs the second type of coarsening dynamically, but fails to scale on large commercial multicores. Our improved scheduler, Breadth-First Lazy Scheduling (BF-LS) overcomes the scalability issue of LBS and performs much better on large machines.


The Soil Moisture and Ocean Salinity (SMOS) Mission is the second of the European Space Agency's Living Planet Program Earth Explorer Opportunity Missions, and it is scheduled for launch in July 2009. Its objective is to provide global and frequent soil-moisture and sea-surface-salinity (SSS) maps. SMOS' single payload is the Microwave Imaging Radiometer by Aperture Synthesis (MIRAS) sensor, an L-band 2-D aperture-synthesis interferometric radiometer. For the SSS, the output products of SMOS, at Level 3, will have global coverage and an accuracy of 0.1-0.4 psu (practical salinity units) over 100 times 100-200 times 200 km2 in 10-30 days. During the last few years, several studies have pointed out the necessity of combining auxiliary data with the MIRAS-measured brightness temperature to provide the required accuracy. In this paper, we propose and test two techniques to include auxiliary data in the SMOS SSS retrieval algorithm. Aiming at this, pseudo-SMOS Level-3 products have been generated according to the following steps: 1) A North Atlantic configuration of the NEMO-OPA ocean model has been run to provide consistent geophysical parameters; 2) the SMOS end-to-end processor simulator has been used to compute the brightness temperatures as measured by the MIRAS; 3) the SMOS Level-2 processor simulator has been applied to retrieve SSS values for each point and overpass; and 4) Level-2 data have been temporally and spatially averaged to synthesize Level-3 products. In order to assess the impact of the proximity to the coast at Level 3, and the effect of these techniques on it, two different zones have been simulated: the first one in open ocean and the second one in a coastal region, near the Canary Islands (Spain) where SMOS and Aquarius CAL/VAL activities are foreseen. Performance exhibits a clear improvement at Level 2 using the techniques proposed; at Level 3, a smaller effect has been recorded. Coastal proximity has been found to affect the retrieval of up to 150 and 300 km from the coast, at Levels 2 and 3, respectively. Results for both scenarios are presented and discussed.


The conversion of glycerol to epichlorohydrin (GTE) is of great interest because the product is widely used in plastics, rubbers and adhesives, and also contributes to the disposal of the reactant glycerol, a major by-product in biodiesel production. Here we find effective catalysis by small gold clusters for the GTE reaction in water with an enhanced selectivity towards the desired product. Along with natural bond orbital (NBO) analysis rationalizing the donor-acceptor charge-transfer interactions, we illustrate the mechanism for bond activation in the reactants and intermediates over gold cluster catalysts, and present thermodynamically and kinetically favoured reaction pathways for dehydrochlorination in GTE processes.


: The polyacrylic cements were first introduced to dentistry in the middle 1960's when Smith showed the value of the polyacids, in developing adhesion to enamel and dentine. Within 10 years, Wilson had advanced the concept by changing the powder from a zinc oxide to glass and at the same time varying the poly-acid used. Both cements depend on the development of complex polyacrylate chains which can be linked with metal ions and in turn can form dynamic linkages with both enamel and dentine. The original polycarboxylate cement has many desirable characteristics and is still a useful cement for luting crowns and bridges and for lining cavities. However it is no longer widely used because it has been somewhat overshadowed by the glass ionomer cements which are even more versatile and have superior physical properties. By varying the type of glass, the fluoride content of the glass and the powder/liquid ratio as well as adding inclusions of other metals such as silver they can fulfil a variety of roles in restorative dentistry. However, as with any restorative material, it is essential that the operator fully understand the requirements for successful placement. The basic rules are reviewed for each of the types currently available and the steps for clinical success are detailed.


As there is increasing recognition of the link between schools and the carceral state, Carla Shedd brings much needed voices into the conversation in Unequal City: Race, Schools, and Perceptions of Injustice. Her account of schools in Chicago is largely drawn from the voices of young people who provide insight into their perceptions of injustice. What emerges is an account that does more than simply document young people's experiences and perceptions of injustice in schools and neighborhoods. She is interested in a more nuanced analysis that incorporates student voice, examines the agentic role of place, and forces us to consider how studying the social world through discrete units (e.g., a neighborhood) can often times be incomplete. Shedd draws from both quantitative and qualitative data to understand young people's sense of injustice, or their awareness of how opportunities are distributed unequally based on race, ethnicity, gender, or class. Situated in four urban high schools varying from highly segregated to integrated, Shedd uses both survey and interview data to tap into young people's perceptions and experiences. The survey from the Chicago Consortium on School Research provides a broad overview on Chicago high school students' experiences with police, perceptions of safety and injustice, and background information on neighborhood and individual characteristics. Complementing the survey results were interviews conducted with ten students from each school, for a total of forty interview participants. These young people provided in-depth accounts of their experiences at school, in their neighborhoods, and the passage between the two. The interviews with students who come from vastly different high school and neighborhood contexts reveal the boundary crossing, or lack thereof, that characterizes the journey from home to school each day. While the opportunity to attend school outside of a disadvantaged and segregated neighborhood is often viewed as an opportunity for upward mobility, the students in Shedd's study demonstrate that this journey from neighborhood to school is wrought with perceptions of injustice. Students who crossed boundaries to attend more integrated schools were more likely to see the differential distribution of injustice in contrast to students who remained in segregated schooling contexts (similar to their neighborhoods) and were less aware of discrimination.


BACKGROUND
Camphor is a toxic hydrocarbon, found in numerous over-the-counter medicinal products and chemist-shop items. The consequences of camphor poisoning depend on the dose, and severe poisoning can result in death. Ingestion of camphor can cause seizures, apnoea, renal insufficiency, raised hepatic enzyme levels, and vomiting resulting in chemical pneumonitis due to aspiration.

CASE DESCRIPTION
We present the case of a 34-year-old female patient from the Dominican Republic who was brought into our accident and emergency department following the ingestion of camphor mothballs for persisting headaches. She was unconscious (Glasgow coma score: 3) and had severe acidosis (pH 6.59), respiratory insufficiency, electrolyte imbalance and raised hepatic enzyme and amylase levels. She was admitted to the intensive care unit and recovered quickly. Five days later, she was transferred to a general ward, where it became apparent that she was suffering from severe memory loss. After eight days she was discharged in good clinical condition, although she still suffered some memory loss.

CONCLUSION
Many every-day products contain camphor. Poisoning can lead to an acute clinical picture, and immediate intensive care department treatment is obligatory. As there is no antidote available, supportive care is the only available option when poisoning occurs.


Staphylococcus aureus is a major etiological agent of bovine mastitis worldwide. In this study, 37 strains of S. Aureus resistant to penicillin were isolated from bovine mastitis cases in Gansu Province for investigating blaZ and virulence-related genes, including tst, eta, etb, lukPV, lukED, lukM, hla, hlb, hld, and edin. Antibiotic resistance was based on disk diffusion method and blaZ and virulence-associated genes were studied by polymerase chain reaction. Penicillin resistance gene blaZ was detected in 35/37 (94.6%) of penicillin-resistant S. Aureus isolates. tst, lukPV, lukED, hla, hlb, and hld were observed in 5.4%, 2.7%, 89.2%, 70.3%, 73.0%, and 70.3% of the penicillin-resistant isolates, respectively, while eta, etb, lukM, and edin were not detected in any isolates. blaZ carried by penicillin-resistant S. Aureus isolates may be the main reason for phenotypic penicillin resistance. Virulence determinants encoded by lukED, hla, hlb, and hld genes may play important roles in bovine mastitis pathogenesis of penicillin-resistant S. Aureus in Gansu Province.


Each node in a neural network is trained to activate for a specific region in the input domain. Any training samples that fall within this domain are therefore implicitly clustered together. Recent work has highlighted the importance of these clusters during the training process but has not yet investigated their evolution during training. Towards this goal, we train several ReLU-activated MLPs on a simple classification task (MNIST) and show that a consistent training process emerges: (1) sample clusters initially increase in size and then decrease as training progresses, (2) the size of sample clusters in the first layer decreases more rapidly than in deeper layers, (3) binary node activations, especially of nodes in deeper layers, become more sensitive to class membership as training progresses, (4) individual nodes remain poor predictors of class membership, even if accurate when applied as a group. We report on the detail of these findings and interpret them from the perspective of a high-dimensional clustering process.


Following the studies of technology trajectories, Christiansen (1997) coined the concept of disruptive innovation to shed more light on the pattern of discontinuous innovations which were introducing new performance values to the market and mostly led to create a new market. Following his studies there have been a huge amount of scholars who have tried to elucidate the concept of disruptive innovations from different points of views. Among all of these studies, there are few researches about the dynamic of disruptive innovations diffusion in the market while most of the studies have focused on the concept itself. According to Porter (2008) the dynamic of market competition has been totally changed over the past decade and survivance of incumbents in the market mostly depends on their capability to innovate disruptively and keep their dominancy by radical or incremental improvements. Considering the desire of incumbents to set a dominant position in today?s fast growing markets, getting the ultimate benefits of disruptive innovations has become a disputable issue. Therefore, focusing on the dynamic of disruptive innovations, this research tries to elucidate the way that market leaders take an unknown potential disruptive innovation out of its dark corner during its infancy time, raise it and disrupt the mainstream market relying on it to establish a new market. Focusing on the dynamic of innovation diffusion, this research has chosen the high-tech medical market of Iran as the main target of empirical field work. Novelty of this concept in medical markets and also appropriateness of invasive cardiovascular devices business in terms of great amount of disruptive innovation, make this case study appropriate for the purpose of this research. Therefore conducting a longitude case study of Iranian invasive cardiovascular market during the past 10 years, this research conducts 30 semi-structured interviews with the key decision makers of the four main incumbents of Iranian invasive cardiovascular market about launching new innovations including: Johnson and Johnson (Cordis), Abbott Laboratories, Boston Scientific and Medtronic. The findings of these interviews are supported by the results of archival researches for more validity and reliability. Finally these findings will get compared with the conceptual framework of research in the discussion chapter to modify the existing literatures and in some cases add some new theoretical notions to them. The main contribution of this research is to identify the accelerating factors of disruptive innovation diffusion from, strategic, technological and cultural points of views. These findings can help practitioners to accelerate the diffusion rate of their disruptive innovations to disrupt the market earlier than the others and set their dominant position in the market as a market leader. Also it will provide an opportunity for the other scholars to build on more about the concept of disruptive innovation diffusion.


Abstract Intergovernmental Economic Organizations usually leverage the scientific capacity of their member countries to ensure economic prosperity through consensual science policies. The D-8 Organization for Economic Cooperation is an intergovernmental economic forum constituting eight developing Muslim-majority countries with a host of recent initiatives toward encouraging interstate scientific and technological collaborations. This study presents an overview of the forum's overarching science policies and the research performance in the member countries in the past two decades. The individual D-8 countries' performance over a set of STI indicators is analyzed to examine the driving forces of the STI system in the member countries. The findings revealed marked disparities among the countries in economic prosperity, R&D expenditure, and the stock of researchers in their STI systems. Although the aggregate research volume of the D-8 countries almost quadrupled over the 2010s compared with the previous decade, there are salient differences in the research capacity and scientific impact among these countries. GDP, R&D expenditure, human development index, GNI per capita, and the number of researchers (FTE per million inhabitants) contribute to explain the growth of publications in some of the D-8 countries. Knowledge sharing, transfer of technology, research collaboration, and investment in R&D infrastructure among the member countries underline the recent overarching scientific policy initiatives of the D-8 organization.


Long-distance RNA movement is important for plant growth and environmental responses; 18 however, the extent to which RNAs move between distant tissues, their relative magnitude 19 and functional significance remain to be elucidated on a genomic scale. Using a soybean 20 ( Glycine max )/common bean ( Phaseolus vulgaris ) grafting system, we identified 100 shoot- 21 root mobile miRNAs and 32 shoot-root mobile phasiRNAs, which were predominantly 22 produced in shoots but transported to roots, some of which enabled cleavage of their mRNA 23 targets or their precursors. In contrast, most of the mobile mRNAs were transcribed in both 24 shoots and roots and were truncated fragments, with the transported copies accounting for 25 only a tiny portion of all copies accumulated in the recipient (shoots or roots) tissues. These 26 findings suggest that the regulatory mechanisms for sRNAs movement are different from 27 those for mRNA movement, and that the earlier is more strictly regulated, and likely, more 28 functionally significant than the latter.


This guide will provide with you with suggested resources, research tools, and writing tutorials that are available from the AUM Library, the Learning Center, and other AUM departments. Additionally, this guide provides you with assistance in utilizing an


Non-regular, non-cohabiting relationships and condom neglect are known to fuel the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Africa. Reproductive health needs of the men, the major decision-makers in this community, have been grossly neglected in this regard. This exploratory, community-based study assessed condom use among married men when with commercial sex workers (CSWs) and abstinent behaviour when their wives were unavailable for sex. (A CSW is one known to receive payment for sex.) Out of the 3,178 married respondents, 1,755 (55.2%) had ever used condoms. Of this number, 1,296 (73.8%) resided in urban locations while 459 (26.2%) resided in rural areas. Of these men, 137 had used CSWs in the six months prior to the study. Only 63 (46%) of these had used a condom at the last visit. Young age (<30 years) was the only predictor of condom use when with CSWs (p=0.03). Predictors of abstinence behaviour when the wife was unavailable for sex included: primary and secondary education, young age of the wife, low occupational status and monogamy. National HIV/AIDS control programmes should address men's risk-taking behaviour, empowering women to negotiate condom use and reduce long abstinence periods. Continued efforts should be made to reach sex workers and to make condoms much more widely available, acceptable and affordable, especially in rural areas.


This article is aimed at relating a certain substantial body of established material concerning wave loading on offshore structures to fundamental principles of mechanics of solids and of fluids and to important results by G. I. Taylor (1928a, b). The object is to make some key parts within a rather specialised field accessible to the general fluid-mechanics reader. The article is concerned primarily to develop the ideas which validate a separation of hydrodynamic loadings into vortex-flow forces and potential-flow forces; and to clarify, as Taylor (1928b) first did, the major role played by components of the potential-flow forces which are of the second order in the amplitude of ambient velocity fluctuations. Recent methods for calculating these forces have proved increasingly important for modes of motion of structures (such as tension-leg platforms) of very low natural frequency.


This research intends to quantitatively evaluate the seismic parameters of special steel resisting moment frames designed via the prescribed values in the Iran standard No. 2800. Sixteen designed frames having 4, 6, 8, and 12 stories and grouped into four types are dynamically non-linearly analyzed by means of OPENSEES software incorporating the element stiffness degradation. The general far-fault 22 record pairs presented by FEMA_P695 is used in the process of preparing the frame's fragility curves where are localized with multiplying their medians by corresponding predicted spectral shape factors (SSF). The frame's seismic parameters (R factor and over-strength factor) are calculated using two methods; FEMA_P695 criteria, developed on the basis of epsilon as the spectral shape parameter, and the proposed approach, developed on the actual definition of spectral shape parameter. The results of this study showed that use of FEMA_P695's rules end up with acceptable groups' seismic parameters, opposed to those groups where have been associated with rock and soft soil conditions and judged by the other approach. It is expected that the whole seismic parameters presented in the standard No. 2800 will be evaluated based on the currently used analytical methods in the near future. Review History: Received: 9 August 2016 Revised: 7 November 2016 Accepted: 15 January 2017 Available Online: 20 February 2017


The purpose of hardening is the increase the hardness of the steel by creating an imbalanced structure. High hardness can be achieved by the formation of a martensitic structure. In some specific cases, we try to obtain a bainitic structure when hardening. In real hardening processes, a martensitic structure is usually achieved on the surface of the body, producing a mixture of martensite, bainite and other types of microstructures in the core of the body. The contribution deals with the influence of anisothermal hardening on selected mechanical properties of EN ISO S235JR (G2) steel. The observed values are the HBW hardness, Rm strength and hardness A. At the hardness measurement locations, the structural steel compositions are metallographically evaluated in the surface of hardened and non-hardened samples that are mutually compared. Subsequently, the influence of hardening on the examined mechanical properties and dependencies descibing the correlation of the structure and hardness of the hardened steels is deduced.


Purpose : – This paper seeks to examine the adoption of an environmental management system (EMS) in government departments involved in one Australian state and identify the key factors that contribute to successful adoption. Design/methodology/approach : – Data were collected through semi-structured interviews conducted with environmental coordinators involved in the EMS adoption. The external consultant appointed by the Environmental Protection Authority who provided the training on behalf of the government departments was also interviewed. Findings : – The results from the analysis shows that environmental coordinators valued the training as it enhanced their knowledge and skills. They experienced a combination of both tangible and intangible benefits. The lack of contribution and support from top management; difficulty in accessing resources; and resistance from employees were the main challenges experienced during EMS implementation. Recommendations made by the interviewees included: providing training to top management to increase their understanding of the EMS process and its benefits; selection of the right champion; provision of adequate resources; and, training of employees. Research limitations/implications : – The findings are based on interviews conducted in only one Australian state and no follow up interviews could be undertaken to track the progress made by various departments. Originality/value : – The findings of this paper are original as no other similar study has been undertaken in this Australian state documenting the experiences of environmental coordinators when implementing an EMS. Our findings have practical implications for public sector organisations and government departments implementing EMS.


SINCE THE 1990S, when prostate-specific antigen (PSA)-based prostate cancer testing was introduced, the majority of guidelines have counselled against PSA testing; however, major changes have occurred that have changed the benefit– harm balance firmly in favour of benefit. Randomised controlled trials, such as the European Randomized study of Screening for Prostate Cancer (ERSPC) and its Göteborg arm, have demonstrated significant benefits in favour of screening. The Göteborg trial, with 22 years of follow up, demonstrated a 41% relative risk reduction of dying from prostate cancer.1 Having demonstrated that there is a benefit to survival from screening men of the correct age group, namely those with a greater than sevento 10-year life expectancy, the challenge now was to reduce the harms of screening and treatment. Multiparametric magnetic resonance imaging (mpMRI) of the prostate has profoundly changed how prostate cancer is diagnosed as it is now used and funded as a triage test to determine if a patient requires a biopsy or can be safely reassured. A standardised reporting system, the prostate imaging – reporting and data system (PI-RADS), is now routinely used, with scores between 1 and 5 demonstrating increasing risk of prostate cancer being present (a positive predictive value of PI-RADS 3 = 13%, PI-RADS 4 = 40% and PI-RADS 5 = 69%). The European Association of Urology recommends biopsy in patients with PI-RADS ≥3, and suggests omitting biopsy in those with less suspicious magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) features.2 Several randomised controlled trials, such as PROMIS and PRECISION, have demonstrated the role of MRI in the diagnostic pathway, with improved sensitivity compared with transrectal ultrasound (TRUS)-guided biopsies (87% versus 60%) for the detection of clinically significant disease and 27% avoided the biopsy altogether.3,4 In addition, prostate-specific membrane antigen (PSMA) positron emission tomography/ computed tomography (PET/CT) can also improve the detection of higher grade disease with evidence that the standardised uptake value in the primary lesion correlates with tumour grade. This, in combination with mpMRI of the prostate, improves sensitivity and the negative predictive value of detection of clinically significant disease,5 which is also strongly supported by the results of the PRIMARY trial.6 Having now ensured that only men at risk of clinically significant cancers are biopsied, the challenge was to make that process safer. The major advantage of transperineal biopsies (TPB) has been the significant reduction in biopsyrelated sepsis that is associated with the TRUS-guided approach (0–0.7% with TPB compared with 0.5–6.9% with TRUS).7 Once diagnosed, staging of high-risk cancers is also vastly improved using PSMA PET/CT with a landmark Australian trial (proPSMA) clearly demonstrating the improved accuracy of PET/CT compared with standard care, namely CT of the abdomen and pelvis and a nuclear bone scan (92% versus 65%), with the results changing the management in 27% of men.8 Last, there has been a massive shift away from definitive treatment to active surveillance for low-risk prostate cancer and even some small lower-risk, intermediate-risk disease. The risk of prostate cancer death is very low (1%) in trials regardless of whether patients were treated with surgery, radiotherapy or observation,9,10 with significant improvements in quality of life associated with avoiding the potentially debilitating side effects of surgery or radiotherapy. An experimental but emerging treatment option is focal therapy for patients with unifocal prostate cancer proven on MRI, PSMA PET/CT and biopsy, whereby the tumour is ablated by an energy source (eg irreversible electroporation, high-intensity focused ultrasound, brachytherapy seeds, interstitial laser or cryotherapy) with early results showing promising cancer ablation rates in the treatment zones with a reduced risk of side effects.11 While experimental, this does demonstrate that urologists around the world are determined to reduce morbidity where possible for all prostate cancer patients. The tide has turned in prostate cancer diagnosis and treatment with the advent of these new technologies. The 2016 National Health and Medical Research Council-endorsed guidelines are currently being reviewed, and we all eagerly await the outcome of this review and the revised recommendations.


This contribution examines the role of religion as source of social trust. Going beyond the scope of the existing literature, we jointly evaluate the effect of individual religiosity and regional religious context by means of multilevel analysis of 97 small-scale German regions. The results based on the German Socio-Economic Panel suggest that there is a double positive effect of Protestantism: Not only do Protestants tend to be more trusting, but a Protestant context also increases one's trust—regardless of individual religious beliefs. Conversely, social trust is less developed in Catholic-dominated regions. In addition, although Catholic individuals are more trusting than the non-religious individuals, they do not differ from members of smaller Christian groups or Muslims. At same time, the notion that certain religious groups and especially religious minorities are distrustful of the wider society is not substantiated by empirical evidence. Furthermore, while church attendance is a powerful predictor for social trust, a context effect for regional levels of devoutness could not be detected. Finally, religious diversity decreases social trust for Muslims only, but not to a degree as to pose a threat to social integration.


Prosocial behavior during adolescence is consistently associated with a myriad of positive outcomes including fewer risk-taking behaviors and greater positive affect. Although limited, there is some literature that suggests prosocial behavior is an important protective factor in attenuating the effects of stressful life events such as exposure to community violence. Unfortunately work examining prosocial behaviors in African American adolescents is very sparse. The present study examined the moderating role of altruism, a specific form of prosocial behavior, on relationships between exposure to violence and negative mental health outcomes in a sample of 207 African American adolescents (136 females, 71 males). Participant's age ranged from 13 to 18 (M = 15.78, SD = 1.19). Results indicated that boys and girls engaged in similar levels of altruistic behaviors, but these behaviors were especially important in moderating the impact of community violence on antisocial behaviors for boys. The findings suggest that encouraging altruistic behaviors in boys may be critical in improving outcomes for adolescent males developing in violent ecologies.


Physiologically-based pharmacokinetic (PBPK) modeling is a useful approach to investigate the absorption, distribution, metabolism and elimination (ADME) of a compound in animals as well as humans. In this dissertation, a PBPK model was constructed to describe dose and time dependent pharmacokinetics of dichloroacetic acid (DCA) in humans. DCA is used clinically to treat metabolic acidosis and is also a potential carcinogenic contaminate in drinking water. DCA inactivates its own metabolic enzyme, glutathione transferase zeta (GSTzeta) which leads to an increased half-life after repeated dosing. GSTzeta is also a major enzyme in tyrosine catabolism and deficiency in this metabolic pathway resulting in the accumulation of intermediate metabolites is proposed as the mechanism behind DCA carcinogenicity. Therefore, quantitative evaluation of DCA pharmacokinetics and compromised GSTzeta activity following repeated dosing is critical in understanding the pharmacological and toxicological effects arising from human exposure. Nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors (NRTIs) are the primary antiretroviral drugs used in highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART), which is successful in reducing mother-tochild transmission (MTCT) of HIV. However, limited in vivo pharmacokinetic data are available for NRTI disposition in pregnant women as well as their fetuses. PBPK models are advantageous in that assessment of special physiological situations, such as pregnancy and the compounds pharmacokinetics behavior, in animal, tissues that otherwise can never been assessed in human, such as placenta and fetus. The first PBPK models describing perinatal exposure to NRTIs and the potential drug-drug interactions are reported in this dissertation. Based on the model simulations, NRTIs cross placenta through active transport, not only passive diffusion. Consequently, when co-administered, NRTI clearance from maternal tissues may be altered. Drug-drug interactions on transplacental transfer suggest a complex mechanism including upregulated/down-regulated transport, which may be the result of multiple NRTIs transporters located on both the maternal and fetal side of the placenta. Because of the similarity between human and rat placenta, including similar transporter compositions, the interactions identified in present study may have clinical significance and thus, require careful monitoring during administration to pregnant women to protect against mother-to-child transmission (MTCT) of HIV. INDEX WORDS: physiologically-based pharmacokinetic model, dichloroacetic acid, nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors, pregnancy, drug-drug interaction, suicide inhibition PHYSIOLOGICALLY-BASED PHARMACOKINETIC MODELING APPROACH FOR DRUG DISPOSITION IN HUMAN AND PREGNANT RAT


The mechanical properties of endothelial cells were measured using the micropipette technique. The cells employed were collected from bovine aortic endothelium and cultured in our laboratory. Endothelial cells from confluent monolayers under no-flow conditions were detached from their substrate by trypsin or by a mechanical method and suspended in modified Dulbecco medium (MDM). In the micropipette technique, a part of the cell is aspirated into the tip of the micropipette under a microscope, and the deformation measured from a photograph. In this study, the data obtained were analyzed using a model where the cytoskeletal elements, which are considered to be the primary stress bearing components, are assumed to reside in a submembranous, cortical layer. Detached cells were found to have almost homogeneous mechanical properties based on measurements from different regions of the surface of a single cell. However, a hysteresis loop was observed in the relation between pressure and cell deformation during the loading and unloading processes. The calculated elastic shear moduli obtained for the trypsin-detached cells were as much as 10-20 times larger than those of a red blood cell. Mechanically-detached cells had moduli approximately twice that of the trypsin detached cells. Passage time, i.e., cell culture age, had no influence on the mechanical properties of the trypsin-detached cells, but did have an effect on the mechanically-detached cells, with both the younger and older cells being somewhat stiffer.


Topological data analysis is becoming a popular way to study high dimensional feature spaces without any contextual clues or assumptions. This paper concerns itself with one popular topological feature, which is the number of d–dimensional holes in the dataset, also known as the Betti–d number. The persistence of the Betti numbers over various scales is encoded into a persistence diagram (PD), which indicates the birth and death times of these holes as scale varies. A common way to compare PDs is by a pointto-point matching, which is given by the n-Wasserstein metric. However, a big drawback of this approach is the need to solve correspondence between points before computing the distance, for n points, the complexity grows according to O(n3). Instead, we propose to use an entirely new framework built on Riemannian geometry, that models PDs as 2D probability density functions that are represented in the square-root framework on a Hilbert Sphere. The resulting space is much more intuitive with closed form expressions for common operations. The distance metric is 1) correspondence-free and also 2) independent of the number of points in the dataset. The complexity of computing distance between PDs now grows according to O(K2), for a K K discretization of [0, 1]2. This also enables the use of existing machinery in differential geometry towards statistical analysis of PDs such as computing the mean, geodesics, classification etc. We report competitive results with the Wasserstein metric, at a much lower computational load, indicating the favorable properties of the proposed approach.


This paper presents the design and implementation of a wireless sensor node for a Motion Capture system with Accelerometers (WiMoCA). It is composed by a tri-axial integrated accelerometer a microcontroller and a wireless transceiver WiMoCA nodes have been exploited to build a Wireless Body Area Sensor Network (WBASN) that allows to implement a wireless/wearable distributed gesture recognition system where nodes are mounted on many parts of the human body. We describe the hardware architecture and all the software layers supporting the recognition system. We also show characterization experiments on WiMoCA nodes that highlight how their performance and power consumption levels make them suitable to HCI applications.


Cultural heritage institutions and archival repositories are increasing their presence online with social media and are working to make a bigger impact online while making the best use of staff time. One of the ways that these institutions have been successful in reaching communities on social media has been through the adoption of internet communication and language. Significantly, more institutions are using frame animation to create GIFs (Graphic Interchange Format). GIFs created from movies, TV shows, artwork, etc. are ubiquitous on the internet. By taking physical and digital materials from their collections and manipulated them to create looping videos, animated artwork, and 3D models, institutions have found a way to adapt this internet currency to promote their archival holdings. This workshop will instruct participants on how to use image editing tools to create 3 types of GIFs used by cultural heritage institutions and archival repositories on the web. The instructor will lay out the underlying techniques that go into creating these GIFs step by step. The first part of the workshop will facilitate the use of several still images of an object to create a 3D like model. The second part of the workshop will help participants work with digitized video to create a looping video. The third part of the workshop will train participants to animate a piece of artwork. The workshop will conclude with a discussion on the issues surrounding the use of these techniques and how they can be addressed. The workshop will last 2 hours. Participants in the workshop will need to bring their own laptop along with a version of either Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. Both are available as a trial version for 30 days. To better facilitate hands on instruction, the number of participants will need to be capped at 25


This book explores the changes that have occurred as regards the production structure, trade and society in Central America and the Dominican Republic, and how these have influenced the countries' growth trajectories. One of the conclusions it reaches is that the subregion overall has enjoyed faster economic growth than the rest of Latin America over the two decades examined, which has helped to raise people's incomes and living standards. Yet this progress falls far short of what is needed, given the high levels of poverty and indigence and the glaring inequalities suffered by much of the population in Central America and the Dominican Republic. If the subregion is to attain higher levels of development with equality, one of the challenges it must tackle urgently is to adopt a strategy for changing its production structures and forging ahead with subregional integration, in order to correct productivity lags and income gaps. Another piece of unfinished business is to broaden the scope of action of fiscal and monetary policy, with a view to raising public investment, deploying countercyclical policies and developing greater resilience to external shocks.


This paper re-examines the optimal tax design problem (income and commodities) in the presence of externalities. The nature of the second-best, and the choice of the tax instruments, are motivated by the informational structure in the economy. The main results are: (i) environmental levies (linear or nonlinear) differ in formula from Pigouvian taxes by the expressions for the optimal tax on private goods; (ii) externalities do not affect commodity tax formulas (linear and nonlinear) for private goods; (iii) externalities do not affect the income tax structure if commodity taxes are nonlinear and affect it if commodity taxes are linear; and (iv) a general income tax plus strictly Pigouvian taxes are sufficient for efficient taxation if individuals of different types have identical marginal rates of substitution (at any given consumption bundle).


Carbon-fibre reinforced carbon-silicon carbide composites (Cf/C-SiC) has increasingly drawn the attention of designers and engineers of transport vehicles and friction components due to the outstanding combination of low density and high tolerance to mechanical/thermal damage across a wide range of temperatures. However, the lack of enough understanding of tribology and hands-on experience in application could create pitfalls for composites design, and be disappointed in engineering application. Through the study of the friction surface using post-mortem microstructural analysis, we have demonstrated that the friction surface development varies largely from one constituent to another. Friction debris could form a strong bond on the surface of silicon, but unlikely on that of carbon fibre and silicon carbide. Silicon carbide regions could undergo an excessive ductile deformation that led to the development of kinks or microcracks on the friction surface.


he thrust of this paper is an argument that by embracing new paradigms in educational
technology, Kenya can effectively enhance access to learning in higher education. The
demand for higher education worldwide is growing at a tremendous rate and many public
universities which peg their admissions on bed space are unable to meet these demands.
In addition, there is a huge population of people who cannot access education through the
conventional modes; these include the working class in society who would like to further
their education without leaving their places of work, and the various groups of people who
cannot directly register under the regular conventional education due to the demands of their
professional engagements or orientations. The current attempts by universities in Kenya to
meet this demand have largely taken the form of the establishment of satellite campuses
in different parts of the country. However this has created many challenges: the inability
to improve facilities available, but more especially it has stretched the human resource in
these institutions. Furthermore, it does not fully address the needs of the special groups of
people. Such a scenario is due to the fact that the provision of learning is still based on the
traditional forms of educational technologies under the conventional education mode. It
is our argument in this paper that there is a need for a paradigm shift which calls for the
utilisation of new forms of educational technologies to give diversified and better quality
education in institutions of higher learning. A shift in the types of educational technologies
used would cater for the needs of this special group of people. Some of these technologies which
we discuss in this paper include: the Internet, e-mail, video teleconferencing, virtual learning
and computer-assisted learning, among others forms of technology that have found a home
in open and distance education. This is done against the background of the philosophies that
inform the integration of these technologies into the instructional process.


: Seasonal changes in the population structure of anophelines were studied in Kheda district, Gujarat. Mosquito collections were made from the villages of Nadiad taluka, representing 3 different physiographic zones. Maximum number of anopheline species (13) were recorded from canal irrigated area followed by 11 species from non-canal irrigated and 8 species from riverine areas. Four anophelines namely An. subpictus, An. culicifacies, An. annularis and An. stephensi were predominant. High densities of An. culicifacies and An. subpictus were recorded in March and August. Results of a four year study (1985 to 1988) on the population of anophelines from 3 different physiographic entities showed marked differences in the seasonal abundance of different species.


Given the limited opportunities for consensual, sexual relationships in prisons, inmates must often seek to fulfill their sexual needs through other avenues, including use of sexually explicit materials. The current study explores the policies of correctional agencies regarding allowing inmates' access to sexually explicit materials. Drawing on Department of Corrections (DOC) policies, this study indicates important variations across systems. Current research, as it relates to the effects of viewing sexually explicit materials on prison inmates, is scarce. Although more data are available from the general population, it is not entirely clear whether these results translate to prison inmates. Nonetheless, prison administrators may still have a legitimate penological interest in restricting these materials. Examining both the current state of correctional policies on access to sexually explicit materials and the current research, potential implications for policy development are discussed.


With the convergence of information technology and communication, the Internet has changed the way organizations communicate internally and externally, the way organizations are configured and the way organizations build partnerships. As a result, e-partnerships and virtual organizations become increasingly popular in today's corporate world. This chapter aims to address issues of change and innovation associated with e-partnerships and virtual organizations. The chapter (i) discusses the advantages of e-partnerships and virtual organizations and the driving forces behind them; (ii) identifies issues and problems relating to the emergence of e-partnerships and virtual organizations; (iii) explores key factors for achieving the best performance and best results of e-partnerships and virtual organizations; and (iv) speculates future trends of the development of e-commerce and e-business which affects directly the viability of e-partnerships and virtual organizations. This author maintains that a total quality partnership approach holds the key to success. The present study draws upon the current leading literature in the field and a case study of Amazon.com, one of the world largest on-line dealers and virtual enterprise with the most extensive e-networks and e-partnerships.


Among college survivors of unwanted pursuit behaviors (UPBs; 40.1%, n = 189) or intimate partner stalking (IPS, i.e., UPBs causing emotional distress; 32.1%, n = 151), the present study examined effects of social reactions to disclosures on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomatology, academic outcomes, and personal empowerment. Compared to UPB survivors, IPS survivors were more likely to disclose and reported higher positive and negative reactions to disclosure as well as greater frequency of UPBs/IPS, IPV, and PTSD symptoms. Among both groups, only negative social reactions were positively associated with PTSD symptoms. However, among IPS (but not UPB) survivors, only positive social reactions were related to academic outcomes and empowerment when controlling for PTSD and IPS frequency. Implications for research and practice are discussed.


Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Bronte (1857) is a pioneering biography of one great Victorian woman novelist by another. Gaskell was a friend of Charlotte Bronte, and, having been invited to write the official life, determined both to tell the truth and to honour her friend. She contacted those who had known Charlotte and travelled extensively in England and Belgium to gather material. She wrote from a vivid accumulation of letters, interviews, and observation, establishing the details of Charlotte's life and recreating her background. Through an often difficult and demanding process, Gaskell created a vital sense of a life hidden from the world. This edition, based on the revised Third Edition of 1857, collated with the manuscript and the First Edition, and taking account of the Second Edition, offers fuller information about the process of writing and fuller elucidation of the text than any previous edition. For the first time, all the French passages are translated, and detailed annotation covers biographical and historical material, references, and allusions.


An explicit Wiener-Hopf solution is derived to describe the scattering of duct modes at a hard-soft wall impedance transition in a circular duct with uniform mean flow. Specifically, we have a circular duct r = 1,-8 0 and a hard wall along x 0. A minimum edge condition at x = 0 requires a continuous wall streamline r = 1 + h(x, t ), no more singular than h = O(x1/2) for x ? 0. A mode, incident from x <0, scatters at x = 0 into a series of reflected modes and a series of transmitted modes. Of particular interest is the role of a possible instability along the lined wall in combination with the edge singularity. If one of the "upstream" running modes is to be interpreted as a downstream-running instability, we have an extra degree of freedom in the Wiener-Hopf analysis that can be resolved by application of some form of Kutta condition at x = 0, for example a more stringent edge condition where h = O(x3/2) at the downstream side. The question of the instability requires an investigation of the modes in the complex frequency plane and therefore depends on the chosen impedance model, since Z = Z(?) is essentially frequency dependent. The usual causality condition by Briggs and Bers appears to be not applicable here because it requires a temporal growth rate bounded for all real axial wave numbers. The alternative Crighton-Leppington criterion, however, is applicable and confirms that the suspected mode is usually unstable. In general, the effect of this Kutta condition is significant, but it is particularly large for the plane wave at low frequencies and should therefore be easily measurable. For ? ? 0, the modulus tends to |R001| ? (1 + M)/(1 - M) without and to 1 with Kutta condition, while the end correction tends to8without and to a finite value with Kutta condition. This is exactly the same behaviour as found for reflection at a pipe exit with flow, irrespective if this is uniform or jet flow.


Sustainable transport system should be able to provide physical access to places of employment, health, education, recreation, and other places associated with human life. In addition, sustainable transport must also support the economic growth and poverty reduction. The purpose of this study is to identify the forms of community participation and develop indicators of community participation in a transportation. A comparison of transport systems in two cities in Indonesia, namely Semarang and Surabaya, is selected as a case study. The results indicate that the forms of community participation in sustainable transportation system include payments of fuel tax, vehicle tax, parking charges, public transport tickets, and road pricing.In addition, there are many indicators that can be used to assess the sustainability of an urban transport system. The results also show that the transport system in Surabaya is better than that found in Semarang.


Due to environmental issues caused by pollution of water resources with organic pollutants, researches to provide effective methods for removing these pollutants has got a lot of attentions. In the present work, the application of Metal Organic Frameworks for the photocatalytic treatment of wastewater containing organic pollutants was studied. Due to the high porosity, suitable band gap, good thermal and chemical stability, ZIF-67 was selected for photocatalytic removal of organic pollutants from wastewater. The ZIF-67 photocatalyst was synthesized and characterized by XRD, FTIR, BET, ICP and UV-DRS techniques. To study the photocatalytic activity of ZIF-67, degradation of methylene blue as an organic model compound has been performed and the effects of catalyst loading, dye concentration and pH on MB removal were studied. Also, the effect of zinc addition to ZIF-67 strucure on the performance of photocatalytic activity was studied. According to the BET results, the specific surface area of catalyst was measured about 1750 m2/g which indicates the high porous structure of ZIF-67. A catalyst loading of 0.5 g/L resulted in 68% removal of MB with initial concentration of 15 ppm after 2 hours of exposure. By addition of zinc to the structure, Zn/Co-ZIF was synthesized and not only showed better crystallization, but also photocatalytic activity increased to 79%. Also, increasing pH and catalyst loading resulted in higher removal efficiency. Both ZIF-67 and Zn/Co-ZIF structures exhibited higher activity in the basic environment (pH 8-12). Although increasing catalyst loading increases removal efficiency but it entails the increase of turbidity which could affect the removal efficiency inversely for higher values. Band gap measurements by UV-DRS analysis indicated that both ZIF-67 and Zn/ZIF-67 can be active under visible light irradiation, and hence may be applicable for degradation of organic pollutant in wastewater.


The aim of this study was to determine the prevalence of psychiatric symptoms among nondemented individuals with memory changes and whether such symptoms predict progression of functional decline or diagnosis of Alzheimer disease (AD). A semi-structured interview was administered at baseline to controls (n = 32) and to nondemented subjects with memory changes (n = 112) and to each subject's collateral source. The interview assessed the impact of cognition on functional abilities in daily life and a variety of psychiatric symptoms, including symptoms of psychosis, depression, and personality change. Participants were followed annually for 3 years to determine who had progressive functional decline and who progressed to meet clinical criteria for AD. Those diagnosed with AD on follow-up had more symptoms of personality change, such as agitation and passivity, at baseline than those who did not progress to meet clinical criteria for AD. Mild depressive symptoms were also more common among individuals at baseline who subsequently `converted' to AD. Symptoms of personality change were associated with a more rapid increase in functional difficulty over time, whereas depressive symptoms were not. Changes in personality are more common among subjects with memory changes who go on to develop AD. Particular types of personality change, such as agitation and passivity, are related to progression of functional difficulty over time. Depressive symptoms, although common in prodromal AD, are not associated with a more rapid functional decline.


This article discusses obstacles to overcoming dangerous climate change. It employs an account of dangerous climate change that takes climate change and climate change policy as dangerous if it imposes avoidable costs of poverty prolongation. It then examines plausible accounts of the collective action problems that seem to explain the lack of ambition to mitigate. After criticizing the merits of two proposals to overcome these problems, it discusses the pledge and review process. It argues that pledge and review possesses the virtues of encouraging broad participation and of providing a procedural safeguard for the right of sustainable development. However, given the perceptions of the marginal short term costs of mitigation, pledge and review is unlikely, at least initially, to issue in an agreement to make deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Because there is no rival approach that seems likely to better instantiate the two virtues, pledge and review may be the best available policy for mitigation. Moreover, recent economic research suggests that the co-benefits of mitigation may be greater than previously assumed and that the costs of renewable energy may be less than previously calculated. This would radically undermine claims that the short term mitigation costs necessarily render mitigation irrational and produce collective action problems. Given the circumstances, pledge and review might be our best hope to avoid dangerous climate change.


Comparative studies are rare in the study of online communication campaigning. The authors chose two cases, Poland and France, to describe the two campaigns for the Parliamentary elections. Content analysis allowed the authors to detect online communication strategies and parties' attempt to reach different audiences. Web-cartography illustrates the parties' network connections. The authors find strong cross-country and resource-based differences for the more interactive and engaging features (Web 2.0), which are not that powerful for explaining audience-targeting strategies. Overall a sales strategy and a focus on marketing dominated over e-representation (exhibiting the parties' political record). In both countries social media platforms are well incorporated into online strategies. Facebook dominates in Poland, Twitter in France. Web cartography gives a counterintuitive picture of the Polish parties' network being much more personalized but also of more ghettoing within the supporting environment.


: We report the first experience of the use of GM-CSF as prophylaxis of ganciclovir induced severe bone marrow suppression in a CMV seropositive patient with acute myeloid leukemia who underwent a complete remission after an allogeneic bone marrow transplantation from an identical HLA sibling who also was CMV seropositive. A successful bone marrow engraftment was documented by day 14. Once peripheral blood counts stabilized, the patient received ganciclovir 5 mg/kg TIW. By day 73 severe neutropenia was documented but a spontaneous improvement occurred with discontinuation of ganciclovir. From day 100 to day. 110 he received daily ganciclovir at a dose of 5 mg/kg and the same dose of GM-CSF without signs of toxicity. There was no evidence of either acute graft versus host disease or of CMV infection. One year after transplantation he relapsed and died of complications of acute leukemia.


In prostate tumors, both the epithelial and stromal mesenchyme compartments show gene expression changes from their respective normal counterpart. In fact, there are more such changes in the stroma than the epithelium. These include down-regulated expression of genes involved in smooth muscle cell differentiation and those differentially expressed between prostate and bladder, i.e., organ-restricted. In development, the stromal cell type mediates tissue formation from differentiation of stem or progenitor cells. Diseases like cancer may arise as a result of defective stromal signaling. Stromal signaling can be demonstrated by co-culture of stromal cells and embryonal carcinoma NCCIT cells used as a stem cell substitute. In co-culture, stromal cells induce NCCIT cells through diffusible molecules to lose stem cell gene expression, gain expression of prostate genes, alter cytomorphology, and lower proliferation. This NCCIT response is varied as co-cultured bladder stromal cells induce a different gene expression. At the same time, NCCIT factors also affect gene expression of co-cultured stromal cells. NCCIT induces normal prostate tissue (NP) stromal cells to become more like cancer-associated (CP) stromal cells in both mRNA and microRNA expression. In contrast, NCCIT shows minimal effect on CP stromal cells. CP stromal cells may represent a less differentiated state in the prostate stromal cell lineage.


The aim of this study is to develop a multidimensional measure for assessing children's personal agency to handle parental conflict through their coping self-efficacy beliefs (Bandura, 1997). Coping self-efficacy beliefs are individuals' perceived ability to motivate themselves, access cognitive resources, and perform the actions required to take control of stressful situations. This study examines the psychometric properties and validation of the newly created Parental Conflict Coping Self-Efficacy Scale (PCC-SES). The study was based on 663 children, in grades 5 and 7 and their mothers. An exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis through structural equation modeling supported the structure of the PCC-SES. The PCC-SES's structure was facilitated by three global strategies, namely Proactive Behavior (problem solving and seeking social support), Avoiding Maladaptive Cognitions (avoiding preoccupation, avoiding self-blame and distancing) and Avoiding Maladaptive Behavior (avoiding aggression and avoiding overinvolvement).


As a production factor today, knowledge constitutes the most important critical element that provides organizations with superiority in competition environment. Within this context, the generation of knowledge and its use in compliance with the relevant purposes by organizations may be realized through efficient and effective knowledge management. Obtaining the desired benefit from knowledge management may be realized by creating a knowledge leadership oriented structure in the organization. The Accounting Information System(AIS) as a mechanism that enables the measurement, evaluation, and development of the financial structures of organizations, also require the establishment of a structure based on knowledge leadership. The purpose of this study is to reveal the perceptions of accounting department managers towards knowledge leadership from a knowledge management perspective with a survey study in Turkey and to create a scientific basis for subsequent studies to be carried out in the future.


BACKGROUND
Subjects with aspirin-intolerant asthma (AIA) respond with bronchoconstriction and extrapulmonary adverse reactions to conventional nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) that inhibit the cyclooxygenase (COX) step in the biosynthesis of prostaglandins. Recently, 2 isotypes of COX have been identified, and COX-2-selective NSAIDs have been developed for treatment of inflammatory disorders.

OBJECTIVE
We investigated whether 33 subjects with a typical history of AIA tolerated the new COX-2-selective NSAID celecoxib.

METHODS
All subjects displayed current aspirin sensitivity in oral or inhalation challenge tests. The subjects first underwent a double-blind, randomized, cross-over, increasing-dose challenge with placebo or celecoxib (10, 30, or 100 mg in suspension) on 2 occasions 7 days apart. Thereafter, all subjects were exposed to 400 mg of celecoxib administered during an open challenge session as two 200-mg doses 2 hours apart. Lung function, clinical symptoms, and urinary excretion of leukotriene E(4) (LTE(4)) were monitored, with the latter being a sensitive biochemical marker of aspirin intolerance.

RESULTS
There were no changes in lung function or extrapulmonary symptoms during the double-blind sessions or in urinary excretion of LTE(4). Also, the highest recommended daily dose of celecoxib was well tolerated, with no symptoms, lung function changes, or alterations in urinary LTE(4) levels.

CONCLUSIONS
A group of subjects with clinically well-documented AIA tolerated acute challenge with the selective COX-2 inhibitor celecoxib. The findings indicate that the intolerance reaction in AIA is due to inhibition of COX-1. Large long-term studies of COX-2 inhibitors in AIA should be undertaken.


Introduction The precision of temperature control achieved in clinical practice during therapeutic hypothermia in neonates has not been described. Methods The hourly rectal temperature recordings from 17 infants treated with servo controlled and an equal number treated with manually adjusted cooling equipment were examined. The target rectal temperature for all infants is 33.5°C for 72 h. Results During 6 to 72 h after start of cooling, the mean (95% CI, variance) of the averaged rectal temperatures was 33.6°C (95% CI 33.4°C to 33.8°C, 0.1°C) in the manually adjusted group and 33.4°C (95% CI 33.3°C to 33.5°C, 0.04°C) in the servo controlled group (means, p=0.08; equality of variance, p=0.03). The variance was also significantly different between infant groups during 1 to 5 h after start of cooling, p=0.01, but not during rewarming. Conclusion The rectal temperature can be maintained close to the target temperature with either manually adjusted or servo controlled equipment, but there is less temperature variability with the servo controlled system in use in the UK.


Adaptive educational hypermedia allows lessons to be personalized according to the needs of the learner. However, to achieve this, content must be split into stand-alone fragments that can be processed by a course personalization engine. Authoring content for this process is still a difficult activity, and it is essential for the popularization of adaptive educational hypermedia that authoring is simplified, so that the various stakeholders in the educational process, students, teachers, administrators, etc. can easily work with such systems. Thus, real-world testing with these stakeholders is essential. In this paper we describe recent extensions and improvements we have implemented in the My Online Teacher MOT3.0 adaptation authoring tool set, based on an initial set of short-term evaluations, and then focus on describing a longterm usage and assessment of the system.


Epistemic Logic Programs (ELPs), that is, Answer Set Programming (ASP) extended with epistemic operators, have received renewed interest in recent years, which led to a flurry of new research, as well as efficient solvers. An important question is under which conditions a sub-program can be replaced by another one without changing the meaning, in any context. This problem is known as strong equivalence, and is well-studied for ASP. For ELPs, this question has been approached by embedding them into epistemic extensions of equilibrium logics. In this paper, we consider a simpler, more direct characterization that is directly applicable to the language used in state-of-the-art ELP solvers. This also allows us to give tight complexity bounds, showing that strong equivalence for ELPs remains coNP-complete, as for ASP. We further use our results to provide syntactic characterizations for tautological rules and rule subsumption for ELPs.


Objectives: To determine patient independency, health-related and disease-specific quality of life (QOL), gait pattern, and muscle strength in patients after salvage arthroplasty for failed internal fixation of a femoral neck fracture. Design: Secondary cohort study to a randomized controlled trial. Setting: Multicenter trial in the Netherlands, including 14 academic and nonacademic hospitals. Patients: Patients after salvage arthroplasty for failed internal fixation of a femoral neck fracture were studied. A comparison was made with patients who healed uneventfully after internal fixation. Intervention: None (observatory study). Main Outcome Measurements: Patient characteristics, SF-12, and Western Ontario McMaster osteoarthritis index scores were collected. Gait parameters were measured using plantar pressure measurement. Maximum isometric forces of the hip muscles were measured using a handheld dynamometer. Differences between the fractured and contralateral leg were calculated. Groups were compared using univariate analysis. Results: Of 248 internal fixation patients (median age, 72 years), salvage arthroplasty was performed in 68 patients (27%). Salvage arthroplasty patients had a significantly lower Western Ontario McMaster osteoarthritis index score (median, 73 vs. 90; P = 0.016) than patients who healed uneventfully after internal fixation. Health-related QOL (SF-12) and patient independency did not differ significantly between the groups. Gait analysis showed a significantly impaired progression of the center of pressure in the salvage surgery patients (median ratio, −8.9 vs. 0.4, P = 0.013) and a significant greater loss of abduction strength (median, −25.4 vs. −20.4 N, P = 0.025). Conclusions: Despite a similar level of dependency and QOL, salvage arthroplasty patients have inferior functional outcome than patients who heal after internal fixation of a femoral neck fracture. Level of Evidence: Therapeutic Level III. See Instructions for Authors for a complete description of levels of evidence.


Aims Acute heart failure (AHF) is associated with poor prognosis and requires recurrent hospitalizations. However, studies on AHF characteristics, treatment, and prognostic factors are few. Our aim was to investigate the characteristics, treatment, and 1-year prognosis of AHF and identify prognostic factors in different clinical groups. Methods and results We conducted a prospective multicentre study with 620 patients hospitalized due to AHF; mean age 75.1 (10.4) years, 50% male. Half of the patients had new-onset heart failure. Acute congestion (63.5%) and pulmonary oedema (26.3%) were the most common clinical presentations. Left ventricular ejection fraction (LVEF) was reported in two-thirds of patients. Half of these had preserved systolic function (LVEF 45%). At discharge, 86% of patients had beta-blockers and 76% either ACE-inhibitors or angiotensin receptor blockers in use. The 12-month all-cause mortality was 27.4%. We identified several clinical and biochemical prognostic risk factors in univariate analysis. Independent predictors of 1-year mortality were older age, male gender, lower systolic blood pressure (SBP) on admission, C-reactive protein, and serum creatinine .120 mmol/L. Conclusion We present the characteristics and prognosis of an unselected population of AHF patients. One-year mortality is high, and independent clinical risk factors include age, male gender, lower SBP on admission, C-reactive protein, and renal dysfunction.


In this work, the effect of uniaxial strain on electronic and thermoelectric properties of magnesium silicide using density functional theory (DFT) and Boltzmann transport equations has been studied. We have found that the value of band gap increases with tensile strain and decreases with compressive strain. The variations of electrical conductivity, Seebeck coefficient, electronic thermal conductivity, and power factor with temperatures have been calculated. The Seebeck coefficient and power factor are observed to be modified strongly with strain. The value of power factor is found to be higher in comparison with the unstrained structure at 2% tensile strain. We have also calculated phonon dispersion, phonon density of states, specific heat at constant volume, and lattice thermal conductivity of material under uniaxial strain. The phonon properties and lattice thermal conductivity of Mg2Si under uniaxial strain have been explored first time in this report.


Objective: The aim of this study was to assess the oral health related quality of life in patients with oral lichen planus, using a Chronic Oral Mucosal Diseases Questionnaire (COMDQ) during a course of standard medical treatment. Material and Methods: In this experimental study, fifteen patients with oral lichen planus   were entered the study and the COMDQ (a self reported questionnaire assessing different aspects of quality of life in individuals with chronic oral mucosal diseases), ), was used to assess the level of "Pain and functional limitation", "Medication and treatment", "Social emotional" and "Patient support" during the course of standard treatment. A data collection form including demographic information, type and location of the lesions, patients' symptoms and level of healing process was completed.  Patients were evaluated weekly during four weeks of treatment and COMDQ scores were documented. Data were analyzed, using ANOVA and Friedman statistical tests. Results: The mean score of the COMDQ questionnaire in lichen planus patients who completed the course of treatment, showed significant improvement (P < 0.001) after each week of therapy. Oral symptoms and the healing process of oral lesions showed improvement without any statistically significant changes among different weeks of therapy. "Pain and functional limitation", "Medication and treatment" and "Patient Support" improved significantly during the treatment period (P<001); however, the "Social and emotional" aspect did not show significant changes over the course of medical management. Conclusion: Oral health-related quality of life in patients with oral lichen planus improved significantly during the course of medical treatment.

Keywords
Oral Lichen Planus; COMDQ; Quality of Life; Oral Health.