Presuming that the standard of care reflected in the physician reimbursement scheme harms patients, German and US courts enforce their traditional legal standard of care in malpractice lawsuits. This paper summarizes the literature, evaluates the legal standard in microeconomic terms and determines the insurers' and courts' impact on patient welfare. The legal standard proves to be inefficiently high. By contrast, patient welfare is maximized when insurers apply a two-part reimbursement scheme that induces physicians not to comply with the legal standard. If this is infeasible, another reimbursement scheme is suggested.


Quantum correction model features the correction of the inversion layer charge on different classical transport models in semiconductor device simulation. This approach has successfully been of great interest in the recent years. Considering a metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) structure in this paper, the Hänsch, the modified local density approximation (MLDA), the density-gradient (DG), the effective potential (EP), and our models are investigated computationally and compared systematically with the result of the Schrödinger-Poisson (SP) model. In terms of the accuracy for (1) the position of the charge concentration peak, (2) the maximum of the charge concentration, (3)the total inversion charge sheet density, and (4) the average inversion charge depth, these well-established models are examined simultaneously. The DG model requires the solution of a boundary value problem, the EP model overestimates the position of the charge concentration peak and the maximum of the charge concentration, our explicit model demonstrates good accuracy among models.


Local development could be described as an attempt of global territorial development including economic, social, ultural, political aspects, encouraging the endogenous development -involving all human and financial means which contribute to it and assuring their convergence. It is a process based on the involvement of all interested actors (persons elected at local level, socio-professional groups, associative groups, initiators of projects on a certain territory) but also of the local population. Tourism is one of the most important branches in Romanian economy, having at its disposal a huge development potential. This field can represent a development chance for many areas. The diversity of tourism activities as well as the presence of some of them in the structure of other branches of economy offers tourism the character of an interference branch, having complex, ample connections with the other economic branches, connections that must be taken into account when local development strategies are drawn up. Local authorities are increasingly involved in the development and running of several aspects connected to tourism. This fact is based on the decentralizing tendency found in many countries, which refers to granting more responsibilities to local authorities. They know best what is important for the areas they manage and will do their best to achieve the local development objectives. At the same time, this reflects the stress laid on the involvement of communities in planning tourism and in the developing process of their areas. Tourism has many positive effects and contributes to the economic development of the areas that contain tourism sights directly and indirectly. The currency contribution of tourism, its contribution to forming the community's income, the generation of business and employment opportunities are only a few of the aspects that show the part played by tourism in the overall economic development of an area. Tourism contributes to the sustainable local development. Tourism development must take place both in rural and urban environments.


Many methods have been used such as UDDI and DWS to discovery requested web services. But they are just a kind of simple syntax match based on keywords and have a low ratio and precision. This paper proposes A Semantic Web Service Discovery Method Based on Ontology. It uses tree-form data structure to describe the web services and give all the nodes a weight value by certain strategy, then compute the semantic similarity between the web services requested and the services registered. To validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the algorithm, we construct a self-developed prototype system to show how well it works. The experiments prove that this algorithm has high recall and precision than other methods.


OBJECTIVE: To determine if the coadministration of methotrexate (MTX) and nonsteroidal antiinflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) results in a clinically significant drug interaction. DATA SOURCES: A case report of hematologic toxicity following the administration of MTX and flurbiprofen at our institution is presented. Six previously published case reports and five pharmacokinetic studies regarding MTX and NSAID interactions are available to assist in the evaluation of this potential interaction. DATA SYNTHESIS: Cases of various clinical manifestations during concomitant MTX and NSAID administration, including acute renal failure and pancytopenia, have been reported. The exact mechanism of the interaction has not been fully elucidated. Suggested theories to explain the mechanism of MTX toxicity include reduction in MTX clearance secondary to renal capillary constriction induced by NSAIDs, displacement of MTX or its metabolite from plasma proteins, competition between MTX and NSAIDs for renal tubular excretion, or impairment of hepatic metabolism of MTX by NSAIDs. Studies comparing MTX pharmacokinetics with or without concurrent NSAID therapy have not shown statistical differences in the parameters evaluated. However, one study did demonstrate differences in the pharmacokinetics of 7-hydroxymethotrexate, the active metabolite of MTX, when MTX was administered with aspirin. CONCLUSIONS: Although a clinically significant interaction does not occur in all patients, numerous case reports are available that demonstrate possible problems following the coadministration of MTX and NSAIDs. To date, the specific circumstances during which the reaction may occur have not been well defined.


Background: Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a mental health condition characterized by an inability to regulate emotions or accurately process the emotional states of others. Previous neuroimaging studies using classical univariate analyses have tied such emotion dysregulation to aberrant activity levels in the amygdala of patients with BPD. However, multivariate analyses have not yet been used to investigate how representational spaces of emotion information may be systematically altered in patients with BPD. Methods: Patients with BPD performed an emotional face matching task while undergoing MRI before and after a 10-week inpatient program of dialectical behavioural therapy. Representational similarity analysis (RSA) was applied to activity patterns (evoked by angry, fearful, neutral and surprised faces) in the amygdala and temporo-occipital fusiform gyrus of patients with BPD and in the amygdala of healthy controls. Results: We recruited 15 patients with BPD (8 females, 6 males, 1 transgender male) to participate in the study, and we obtained a neuroimaging data set for 25 healthy controls for a comparative analysis. The RSA of the amygdala revealed a negative bias in the underlying affective space (in that activity patterns evoked by angry, fearful and neutral faces were more similar to each other than to patterns evoked by surprised faces), which normalized after therapy. This bias-to-normalization effect was present neither in activity patterns of the temporo-occipital fusiform gyrus of patients nor in amygdalar activity patterns of healthy controls. Limitations: Larger samples and additional questionnaires would help to better characterize the association between specific aspects of therapy and changes in the neural representational space. Conclusion: Our findings suggest a more refined role for the amygdala in the pathological processing of perceived emotions and may provide new diagnostic and prognostic imaging-based markers of emotion dysregulation and personality disorders. Clinical trial registration: DRKS00019821, German Clinical Trials Register (Deutsches Register Klinischer Studien).


There are many similarities in the succession problems of chief executive officers, whether their businesses are large or small, whether private or publicly-held. However, the chief executive of a family business has additional problems which arise simply because it is a family business. For example, the problem of finding a successor is not limited to the person with the most suitable track record and abilities, but has the added complications of family membership and expectations. Much of the literature covers the reasons why founders and chief executives should plan for their succession. The benefits of planning are well explored and clearly support the idea that most founders who do not sell the business when they retire wish their businesses to continue and probably wish it to stay in the family. The literature (Daft 1992; Francis 1993; Morgan 1986) provides reasons to plan for succession, including minimizing taxation, continuation of the lousiness, development of expertise, employee relations, and strategic goals. In many cases, small firms are negligent in succession planning. The literature (Leach 1991; Lynn 1974; Kets de Vries 1988; Scase and Goffee 1987) provides a number of reasons why succession planning does not happen, even when the owner/manager knows that it should. These include feelings of immortality, lack of a suitable successor, a surfeit of suitable successors, and fear of retirement. The aims of this article were to answer the following questions regarding succession issues in family businesses: (1) Do the owner/managers of local family-owned businesses have a succession plan, however informal? (2) Does the formulation of a succession plan depend upon the age of the owner/manager? (3) Does the formulation of a succession plan depend upon which generation of the family is currently manger of the business? (4) Does the gender of the owner/manager have any influence on the formulation of a succession plan? (5) Does succession planning vary according to the business sector in which the company operates? (6) Does succession planning depend on the extent to which the manager owns the business? (7) Does succession planning depend upon the size of the business? (8) What factors do existing managers consider to be important in preparing their successor for office? and (9) If owner/managers do have a succession plan, what is it? Research Design The sample consists of small firms in East Anglia, U.K. The area is rural and, until relatively recently, has not had the benefit of convenient access to England's highway system. Major highways have recently been constructed, and the development of adjoining port cities has given the area an important economic boost; unemployment has been at least two percent below the national average since 1981. People in the area are relatively close-knit, which required that attention be paid to anonymity and privacy issues in the research design. Table 1 Comparison of Planners and Non-Planners (n = 21; rounded to the nearest percent) Planning for Not planning for succession succession Breakdown of total respondents 38 62 Intending to retire not in foreseeable future 38 77 within 2 years 12 8 within 5 years 12 - within 10 years 38 15 By age of owner/manager under 44 - 31 45-54 50 38 55-65 50 31 By generation of current incumbent founders of business 38 39 2nd generation 62 22 3rd generation - 39 By business sector manufacturing 38 23 retail 25 31 wholesale 25 8 service 12 38 By ownership owners/majority shareholders 62 53 minority shareholders 38 47 A questionnaire was designed, pilot-tested, and sent out with a covering letter. …


Abstract Metallic foams represent materials with low densities as well as good physical, mechanical, thermal, and electrical properties. Since they have pores, metal foams have a set of unusual properties compared with bulk structural materials, i. e. the can offer a unique combination of several properties that can not be obtained in one conventional material at the same time. Metal foams can be produced by different processing technologies and many of them are still under development. The lost foam technique is an alternative foundry process as compared to other conventional techniques. This paper reports about a new approach for the production of open-cell aluminium foam metal by such casting procedure. During the process, an expanded polystyrene cell has been used for pattern making and all critical steps for manufacturing open-cell metal foam by the new technique are described in detail.


In this paper the solutions to several variants of the so-called dividend-distribution problem in a multi-dimensional, diffusion setting are studied. In a nutshell, the manager of a firm must balance the retention of earnings (so as to ward off bankruptcy and earn interest) and the distribution of dividends (so as to please the shareholders). A dynamic-programming approach is used, where the state variables are the current levels of cash reserves and of the stochastic short-rate, as well as time. This results in a family of Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman variational inequalities whose solutions must be approximated numerically. To do so, a finite element approximation and a time-marching scheme are employed.


The re-use of products such as code, specifications, design decisions and documentation has been proposed as a method for increasing software productivity and reliability. A major problem that has still to be adequately solved is the storage and retrieval of re-usable 'components'. Current methods, such as keyword retrieval and catalogues, rely on the use of names to describe components or categories. This is inadequate for all but a few well established components and categories; in the majority of cases names do not convey sufficient information on which to base a decision to retrieve. One approach to this problem is to describe components using a formal specification. However this is impractical for two reasons; firstly, the limitations of theorem proving would severely restrict the complexity of components that could be retrieved and secondly the retrieval mechanism would need to have a method of retrieving components with 'similar' specifications. This thesis proposes the use of formal 'property' models to represent the key functionality of components. Retrieval of components can then take place on the basis of a property model produced by the library's users. These models only describe the key properties of a component, thereby making the task of comparing properties feasible. Views are introduced as a method of relating similar, non identical property models, and the use of these views facilitates the re-use of components with similar properties. The language Miramod has been developed for the purpose of describing components, and a Miramod compiler and property prover which allow Miramod models to be compared for similarity, have been designed and implemented. These tools have indicated that model based component library retrieval is feasible at relatively low levels of the programming process, and future work is suggested to extend the method to encompass earlier stages in the development of large systems.


Summary The status of chromium (Cr) is not a new question. Cr is clearly an essential nutrient; this is a position that has been held for over three decades by individual scientists, groups of scientists, and governmental committees. The most uniform response across species with regard to Cr deficiency symptoms that are responsive to Cr supplementation are alterations in glucose metabolism with special reference to peripheral tissue sensitivity to insulin. Because the body's ability to control blood glucose is critical to many life functions, and loss of ability to adequately control blood glucose can lead to many health debilitations, a consequence of Cr supplementation can be improved health and reproductive outcomes as well as improved survival rate or life span. Key words: chromium, mineral, mortality.


According to the phenomenon of pavement cracking in low temperature in Northeast China, AC-13I and AK-13I of the two gradations, SBS, Methyl Cellulose fiber and steel fiber are adopted to research the mechanics parameters of reinforced asphalt mixture by Indirect tension test at minus 10 degrees centigrade entering on pavement material. Improvement of the low-temperature indirect tensile strength, stiffness and deformation capacity of asphalt mixture is analyzed and mechanisms are revealed. The results indicate that low-temperature crack resistance of steel fiber-reinforced AC-13I asphalt mixture is improved significantly, it is better for the cold area in Northeast.


An analysis of the data on 145 surgical cases of stage I and IIA breast cancer was undertaken. Organ-saving procedures were carried out in 22 cases. Five-year results of treatment of 55 cases were studied. Surgery is the most effective procedure of treatment of localized breast cancer. Organ-saving operations as the only treatment procedure should not be carried out onless certain prognostic factors are considered.


The matrix of connective tissue was found to take part in generation of the mechanical strength in isolated strips of the v. cava posterior wall under the effect of increased temperature. The finding corroborates the concept of the actomyosin interaction. The vessel tissue response to temperature seems to be formed by three mechanisms, two of them being of a non-actomyosin nature.


A stabilized conforming (SC) nodal integration method is developed for elastoplastic contact analysis of metal forming processes. In this approach, strain smoothing stabilization is introduced to eliminate spatial instability in Galerkin meshfree methods using nodal integration. The gradient matrix associated with strain smoothing satisfies the integration constraint (IC) of linear exactness in the Galerkin approximation. Strain smoothing formulation and numerical procedures for history-dependent problems are introduced. Applications to metal forming analysis are presented, with the results demonstrating a significant improvement in computational efficiency without loss of accuracy.


PURPOSE
To determine the prevalence of the coarse nodular ultrasonographic (US) pattern and its prognostic importance in terms of hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) risk in hepatic cirrhosis caused by hepatitis B virus (HBV); HBV with hepatitis D virus (HDV), formerly known as hepatitis delta virus; hepatitis C virus (HCV); and alcoholic cirrhosis (ALC) or primary biliary disease (primary biliary cirrhosis [PBC]).

MATERIALS AND METHODS
Four hundred two cases of hepatic cirrhosis caused by HBV (94 patients), HDV (100 patients), HCV (100 patients), ALC (63 patients), or PBC (45 patients) were retrospectively reviewed to identify the US pattern present at diagnosis and its possible association with the cause of the disease and subsequent development of HCC during a mean follow-up of 43.9 months +/- 29.9 (SD). Data were analyzed with the chi2, Fisher exact, and log-rank tests and with the Kaplan-Meier method (all two-tailed).

RESULTS
The coarse nodular pattern was found in a significantly higher percentage of patients with HDV-related cirrhosis (51%) compared with those with HBV (9%), HCV (9%), ALC (11%), or PBC (9%) (P <.001). This pattern was associated with a significantly increased risk for HCC in patients with cirrhosis and HBV-, HCV-, and ALC-related disease but not in those with HDV-related disease and PBC.

CONCLUSION
The coarse nodular pattern is more often seen in patients with HDV-related cirrhosis, and, in this setting (in contrast to HBV-, HCV-, and ALC-related cirrhosis, as well as in PBC), it does not represent an added risk factor for HCC.


The trifascicular nature of the intraventricular conduction system and the concept of trifascicular block and hemiblock were described by Rosenbaum and his coworkers in 1968. Since then, anatomic, pathological, electrophysiological, and clinical studies have confirmed the original description and scarce advances have been developed on the subject. In the present study, we attempt to review and redefine reliable criteria for the electrocardiographic and vectorcardiographic diagnosis of left anterior and posterior hemiblock. One of the most important problems related to hemiblocks is that they may simulate or conceal the electrocardiographic signs of myocardial infarction or myocardial ischemia and may mask or simulate ventricular hypertrophy. Illustrative examples of these associations are shown to help the interpretation of electrocardiograms. The incidence and prevalence of the hemiblocks is presented based on studies performed in hospital patients and general populations. One of the most common causes of hemiblocks is coronary artery disease, and there is a particularly frequent association between anteroseptal myocardial infarction and left anterior hemiblock. The second most important cause is arterial hypertension, followed by cardiomyopathies and Lev and Lenègre diseases. The hemiblocks may also occur in aortic heart disease and congenital cardiopathies. Left anterior hemiblock is more common in men and increases in frequency with advancing age. Evidence is presented regarding the relationship of spontaneous closure of ventricular septal defects, which may explain the finding of this and other conduction defects in young populations. Isolated left anterior hemiblock is a relatively frequent finding in subjects devoid of evidence of structural heart disease. Conversely, isolated left posterior hemiblock is a very rare finding; its prognostic significance is unknown and is commonly associated with right bundle-branch block. The most remarkable feature of this association is that the prognosis is much more serious with a great propensity to develop complete atrioventricular block and Adams-Stoke seizures.


The authors investigated the thalamus in schizophrenia by using magnetization transfer ratio (MTR), a novel structural magnetic resonance technique sensitive to subtle neuropathological abnormalities. The dorsomedial nucleus (DMN) and pulvinar were selected because of their connections to limbic, prefrontal, and temporal regions, putatively relevant in schizophrenia. Volume (intracranial; thalamic) and MTR (whole thalamus; DMN; pulvinar) were determined in 25 patients with chronic schizophrenia by DSM-IV criteria and 25 control subjects. There were no significant differences between patients and control subjects in thalamic volume (corrected for intracranial volume) or MTR in whole thalamus, DMN, or pulvinar. No volumetric or MTR abnormalities could be detected in the thalamus of patients with schizophrenia. The findings suggest that abnormalities, if present, are very subtle and beyond the power of resolution of these techniques.


The objective of this work was to identify the spectral bands, vegetation indices, and periods of the canola crop season in which the correlation between spectral data and biophysical indicators (total shoot dry matter and grain yield) is most significant. The experiment was carried out during the 2013 and 2014 crop seasons at Embrapa Trigo, in the state of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. A randomized complete block design was used, with four replicates, and the treatments consisted of five doses of nitrogen topdressing. Plant dry matter, grain yield, and phenology were measured. The canola spectral response was evaluated by measuring the canola canopy reflectance using a spectroradiometer, and, with this data, the SR, NDVI, EVI, SAVI, and GNDVI vegetation indices were determined. Pearson's correlations between the spectral and biophysical variables of canola showed that the red (620 to 670 nm) and near-infrared (841 to 876 nm) bands were the best to estimate the dry matter. The vegetative period is the most indicated to obtain the most significant correlations for canola. All the used vegetation indices are adequate for estimating the dry matter and grain yield of canola.


Diversity Diversity Abroad ● Race and Ethnicity Abroad [1] ❍ Racial and Ethnic Minority Students Abroad [2] ❍ LGBTQ Abroad ● UCDAVIS LGBTQIA Resource Center: interactive map [3] ❍ State Department: LGBTI Travel Information [4] ❍ Tips and Resources for LGBTQ Students [5] ❍ Students with Disabilities ● Thinking of Studying Abroad? [6] ❍ Mobility International [7] ❍ Students with Disabilities Abroad [8] ❍ Women Abroad ● State Department: Women Travelers [9] ❍ Transition Abroad: Women Travel Guide [10] ❍ Women Abroad [11] ❍ Athletes ● U-M Football Players Study Abroad in Italy [12] ❍


THIS LITERATURE REVIEW COVERS journal articles reporting early childhood education (ECE) research in Australia and New Zealand in the past 10 years and it has found that: (1) Nearly half of the articles lacked child-related data with an explicit or implied justification, while less than one-tenth failed to include child-related data with no justification; (2) Over one-third of the articles addressed the voice of the child, while less than one-tenth included child-related data for assessment purpose. A typology of the voice of the child has evolved from the review and it includes: pseudo voice (engendered by assessing the child), inferred voice (engendered by inferring the child's perspective), surveyed voice (engendered by surveying the child) and co-constructed voice (engendered by co-constructing lived experience and understanding with the child). In spite of the evidence from the articles that the voice of the child had generally been recognised, the review has identified a gap between the child's voice rhetoric and research practice. It is argued that the distinction between rhetoric and practice should be recognised and respected.


Nanofiltration (NF) and tight ultrafiltration (tight UF) membranes are a viable treatment option for high quality drinking water production from sources with high concentrations of contaminants. To date, there is limited knowledge regarding the contribution of concentration polarization (CP) and fouling to the increase in resistance during filtration of natural organic matter (NOM) with NF and tight UF. Filtration tests were conducted with NF and tight UF membranes with molecular weight cut offs (MWCOs) of 300, 2000 and 8000 Da, and model raw waters containing different constituents of NOM. When filtering model raw waters containing high concentrations of polysaccharides (i.e., higher molecular weight NOM), the increase in resistance was dominated by fouling. When filtering model raw waters containing humic substances (i.e., lower molecular weight NOM), the increase in filtration resistance was dominated by CP. The results indicate that low MWCO membranes are better suited for NOM removal, because most of the NOM in surface waters consist mainly of humic substances, which were only effectively rejected by the lower MWCO membranes. However, when humic substances are effectively rejected, CP can become extensive, leading to a significant increase in filtration resistance by the formation of a cake/gel layer at the membrane surface. For this reason, cross-flow operation, which reduces CP, is recommended.


Typically a user prefers an item (e.g., a movie) because she likes certain features of the item (e.g., director, genre, producer). This observation motivates us to consider a feature-centric recommendation approach to item recommendation: instead of directly predicting the rating on items, we predict the rating on the features of items, and use such ratings to derive the rating on an item. This approach offers several advantages over the traditional item-centric approach: it incorporates more information about why a user chooses an item, it generalizes better due to the denser feature rating data, it explains the prediction of item ratings through the predicted feature ratings. Another contribution is turning a principled item-centric solution into a feature-centric solution, instead of inventing a new algorithm that is feature-centric. This approach maximally leverages previous research. We demonstrate this approach by turning the traditional item-centric latent factor model into a feature-centric solution and demonstrate its superiority over item-centric approaches.


This paper presents a semianalytical model, involving the superposition of the empirically determined cross flow about a cylinder in an array and the analytically determined vibration-induced flow field in still fluid, for the purpose of analyzing the stability of cylinder arrays in cross flow and predicting the threshold of fluidelastic instability. The flow field is divided into two regions: a viscous bubble of separated flow, and an inviscid, sinuous duct-flow region elsewhere. The only empirical input required by the model in its simplest form is the pressure distribution about a cylinder in the array. The results obtained are in reasonably good accord with experimental data, only for low values of the mass-damping parameter (e.g., for liquid flows), where fluidelastic instability is predominantly caused by negative fluid-dynamic damping terms. For high mass-damping parameters (e.g., for gaseous flows), where fluidelastic instability is evidently controlled by fluid-dynamic stiffness terms, the model greatly overestimates the threshold of fluidelastic instability. However, once measured fluid-dynamic stiffness terms are included in the model, agreement with experimental data is much improved, yielding the threshold flow velocities for fluidelastic instability to within a factor of 2 or better.


The paper reports results from a recent study of the Norwegian fault statistics for protection and control (P&C) equipment in relation to quality of supply. Today, incorrect operation of protection equipment at the distribution level is seldom registered in the fault statistics. Therefore, the results presented in this paper mostly consider P&C equipment at the levels 33-420 kV. Results are given for number of faults, fault causes as well as contribution to energy not supplied and customers' interruption costs. These results will be an important basis for the further specification of requirements related to protection and the choice of equipment and functionality.


underresourced or socially excluded communities in manchester, england demonstrate active use of information technologies despite continuing digital inequalities. a systematic look at 31 grassroots community groups, at how they use it and who helps them, reveals possible mechanisms towards a more inclusive network society. social network and social capital theories help make apparent how people are self-organizing with respect to information technology in ways that reach across ethnicity, class, gender, and generations for skilled help, yet stay close to their strong-tie, bonding-social-capital networks, relying largely on people in their own communities. based on 25 measures of it use, the groups fall into three progressively more extensive categories: downloaders (using computers and the internet, particularly e-mails), uploaders (maintaining a group web presence), and cyberorganizers (helping others to become uploaders or downloaders). these categories align with each individual group's purpose.


In bifurcating rivers, an intervention aimed at flood risk reduction may trigger a change in discharge distribution and thus influence water levels throughout the entire river system. This article aims at assessing the impact of interventions on system‐wide water levels, explicitly accounting for a range of discharges and model parameter uncertainty. An idealized 1D model with dimensions of the bifurcating Dutch Rhine River is used. The results show that an unwanted increase in water levels downstream of the intervention occurs due to an increased discharge if a single intervention is implemented in a distributary. This effect can be counteracted by implementing a second intervention that balances the hydraulic effect of the first intervention at the bifurcation. However, unwanted water level increases still occur at other discharges. Furthermore, while interventions may reduce local water‐level‐uncertainty, it appears that uncertainty in discharge distribution is not reduced. This implies that flooding probabilities cannot be reduced throughout the entire river system by the implementation of interventions in upstream reaches. Concluding, for intervention design in a bifurcating river, it is important to consider the entire river system and explicitly account for a range of discharge conditions to avoid unwanted water level increases throughout the river system.


A precise characterization of the subcube allocation problem and a general methodology to solve it are presented. Subcube allocation and coalescing algorithms that have the goal of minimizing fragmentation are developed. The concept of a maximal set of subcubes (MSS), which is useful in making allocations that result in a tightly packed hypercube, is introduced. The problems of allocating subcubes and of forming an MSS are formulated as decision problems and shown to be NP-hard. It is proved analytically that the buddy strategy is optimal under restricted conditions, and it is shown using simulation that its performance is actually poor under more realistic conditions. A heuristic procedure for efficiently coalescing a released cube with the existing free cubes is suggested. This coalescing approach is coupled with a simple best-fit allocation scheme to form the basis of a class of MSS-based strategies that give a substantial performance (hit ratio) improvement over the buddy strategy. Simulation results comparing several different allocation and coalescing strategies, which show that the MSS-based schemes provide a marked performance improvement over previous techniques, are presented. >


Cloud computing plays a major role in smart cities development by facilitating the delivery of various services in an efficient and effective manner. In a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) federated clouds ecosystem, multiple Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) collaborate and share services among them when experiencing a shortage in certain resources. Hence, incoming service requests to this specific resource can be delegated to other members. Nevertheless, the lack of preexisting trust relationship among CSPs in this distributed environment can affect the quality of service (QoS). Therefore, a trust management system is required to assist trustworthy peers in seeking reliable communication partners. We address this challenge by proposing TrustyFeer, a trust management system that allows peers to evaluate the trustworthiness of other peers based on subjective logic opinions, formulated using peers' reputations and Service Level Agreements (SLAs). To demonstrate the utility of TrustyFeer, we evaluate the performance of our method against two long-standing trust management systems. The simulation results show that TrustyFeer is more robust in decreasing the percentage of services that do not conform to SLAs and increasing the success rate of exchanged services by good CSPs conforming to SLAs. This should provide a trustworthy federated clouds ecosystem for a better, more sustainable future.


Optimization of injection parameters in Micro Metal Injection Molding (μMIM) was described in this study. Stainless steel powder was mixed with Polyethelena Glycol (PEG), Polymethyl Methacrilate (PMMA) and Cellulose Acetate Butyrate (CAB) to produce feedstock. Design of Experiments (DOE) of Taguchi L-27 (313) orthogonal array technique has been used to investigate the significance and optimal injection molding parameters. The signal-to-noise ratio and analysis of variance (ANOVA) are applied to study the optimum levels and effects of process parameters. Simultaneous optimization to obtain the highest green density and excellent surface appearance was discussed. The result concluded that the mold temperature (D) is the most statistically significant process parameter and its contribution to the best appearance and density is the highest.


The dramatic proliferation of sophisticated networks has resulted in a growing need for supporting effective querying and mining methods over such large-scale graph-structured data. At the core of many advanced network operations lies a common and critical graph query primitive: how to search graph structures efficiently within a large network? Unfortunately, the graph query is hard due to the NP-complete nature of subgraph isomorphism. It becomes even challenging when the network examined is large and diverse. In this paper, we present a high performance graph indexing mechanism, SPath, to address the graph query problem on large networks. SPath leverages decomposed shortest paths around vertex neighborhood as basic indexing units, which prove to be both effective in graph search space pruning and highly scalable in index construction and deployment. Via SPath, a graph query is processed and optimized beyond the traditional vertex-at-a-time fashion to a more efficient path-at-a-time way: the query is first decomposed to a set of shortest paths, among which a subset of candidates with good selectivity is picked by a query plan optimizer; Candidate paths are further joined together to help recover the query graph to finalize the graph query processing. We evaluate SPath with the state-of-the-art GraphQL on both real and synthetic data sets. Our experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of SPath, which proves to be a more practical and efficient indexing method in addressing graph queries on large networks.


AdaNet is a lightweight TensorFlow-based (Abadi et al., 2015) framework for automatically learning high-quality ensembles with minimal expert intervention. Our framework is inspired by the AdaNet algorithm (Cortes et al., 2017) which learns the structure of a neural network as an ensemble of subnetworks. We designed it to: (1) integrate with the existing TensorFlow ecosystem, (2) offer sensible default search spaces to perform well on novel datasets, (3) present a flexible API to utilize expert information when available, and (4) efficiently accelerate training with distributed CPU, GPU, and TPU hardware. The code is open-source and available at: this https URL.


In this study, 768 faecal samples were examined between June 1993-May 1994 to determine the species and the prevalence rates of Eimeriidae in the cattle of Thracia area (The European part of Turkey). The prevalence rate of eimeridosis was found to be 68%. The species determined and their prevalence rates were as follows: Eimeria bovis(34%), E.auburnensis(27%), E.zeuernii(26%), E.ellipsoiDalis (14%), E.canadensis (12%), E.cylindrica (7.9%), E.supspherica (7.2%), E.alabamensis (4.9%), E.bukidnonensis (2.2%), E.brasiliensis (0.8%) and Isospora sp. (1.2%). Of 768 animals, 29% were found to be infected with single species, 39% with mixed ones and 32% were non-infected. During the study, two calves showed bloody diarrhoea. From these calves, E.ellipsoiDalis and E.zuernii were identified. Their OPG values were 37200 and 47000 respectively. A positive correlation (r=0.96) was found between OPG values and the percentages of animals with not-formed faeces (from soft faeces to bloody diarrhoea) and it is considered that a value of OPG over 5 000 may be pointed out a clinical case.


The major challenges of COPD care are guiding patients with the consequences of their disease, reducing impact of symptoms, improving participation in daily activities and improving health related quality of life (HRQoL). Against this background the scope of this thesis is how to improve the effectiveness of primary care nursing to reduce the impact of COPD in terms of improving the patients' quality of life and daily activities. A biopsychosocial perspective served as the framework for the studies in which patient outcomes and points of action that can guide nursing interventions were investigated. Based on these insights a comprehensive nursing intervention was developed and evaluated. A systematic review concerning the content and psychometric properties of available instruments to measure HRQoL in COPD patients showed that there is strong psychometric evidence for disease specific instruments. However, an optimal instrument could not be identified. Therefore, the decision to choose one instrument over another should be guided by the results to be obtained in a study or in clinical practice in relation to the domains included in the instrument and the psychometric properties. Within the context of COPD care and research it is essential not only to measure physical capacity, but also self-reported activities in daily life. The Functional Performance Inventory (FPI) is an instrument which measures these activities that individuals perform in their daily life. The original English version of the FPI was translated and validated in Dutch patients. The results show that the translated version of the FPI is reliable and reproducible. However, further evaluation of its psychometric properties is recommended. Looking for points of action that can guide nursing interventions in COPD care, a study concerning the relationship between psychological factors and HRQoL was performed. The results show that illness perceptions, depressive symptoms and dyspnea are related to HRQoL. Moreover, the study confirmed that more objective measures, such as airflow limitation did not contribute to the individual differences in HRQoL. Based on these findings a comprehensive nursing intervention that takes into account psychosocial aspects, especially illness perceptions was developed. This resulted in an intervention which translates the theory and evidence regarding illness perceptions and HRQoL into a practical guide for nurses to provide individualized COPD care (COPD-GRIP intervention). In an explanatory mixed-method study, nested within a cluster randomized trial, the barriers and facilitators with the COPD-GRIP intervention as experienced by nurses were evaluated. The study revealed that the intervention, proved to be a feasible tool for providing tailored, patient-centered care. A qualitative interview study in COPD patients to evaluate their experiences regarding the COPD-GRIP intervention showed that the intervention made them feel "being listened to and being acknowledged", it improved their "awareness" of the disease and it helped them "making lifestyle changes". The results of a cluster randomized trial aiming to evaluate the effectiveness of the intervention, revealed that the intervention could not improve health status, HRQoL and daily activities. The COPD-GRIP intervention did influence the patient's ability to control the disease and health- related behaviours in the short term.


A deterministic inventory model for deteriorating items is considered. The rate of demand is variable and it is on-hand inventory dependent. Rate of replenishment is instantaneous. Shortages are not allowed. The average total profit is maximized to decide the time of production run. Hence the economic lot size is obtained. The result is illustrated by various numerical examples with sensitivity analysis.


Mixtures of experts models provide a framework in which covariates may be included in mixture models. This is achieved by modelling the parameters of the mixture model as functions of the concomitant covariates. Given their mixture model foundation, mixtures of experts models possess a diverse range of analytic uses, from clustering observations to capturing parameter heterogeneity in cross-sectional data. This chapter focuses on delineating the mixture of experts modelling framework and demonstrates the utility and flexibility of mixtures of experts models as an analytic tool.


The random behaviour of circuit breakers requires the application of testing methods based on statistical approach. Technical information provided by different testing procedures are compared. Experience achieved during years of comparison tests between direct and synthetic methods is discussed on statistical basis. The "up and down" method is proposed as a suitable mean to investigate the circuit-breaker performance with small samples. The power of this method is stressed to explore the low failure probability region.


The ubiquitous nature of technology is changing the way humans interact with interior space and redefining the third place, venues where individuals gather for socialization. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the fusion of physical and virtual space led to an overlapping of the first place (home) that served as the physical host for the virtual second (work), and third (social gathering) places. Most critically, the first place (home) became a proxy for second and third place experiences as we started connecting with the outside world, albeit virtually. The goal of this study was to determine the extent that individuals relied on technology to meet their socializing needs in response to COVID-19, verify if individuals are altering their environment as a result of the pandemic and whether these changes align with physical third-place characteristics, and inform interior designers on how to intentionally design physical space in ways that include virtual experiences. The researchers employed a mixed-methods approach by gathering data from an online survey, incorporating closed-ended and open-ended questions, using two different convenience sampling approaches (N = 229), and asking participants to submit photos to support their responses. Results illustrated that during the pandemic, virtual environments integrated with the home and became a substitute for physical third places. Four themes identified the modifications in physical space that occurred because of COVID-19 as individuals accommodated the merging of their home, work, school, and social places. Insights regarding the design of successful physical spaces that embrace virtual experiences are provided.


Abstract. Lake surface temperature (LST) is an important attribute that highlights regional weather and climate variability and trends. The spatial resolution and thermal sensors on Landsat platforms provide the capability of monitoring the temporal and spatial distribution of lake surface temperature on small- to medium-sized lakes. In this study, a retrieval algorithm was applied to the thermal bands of Landsat archives to generate a LST dataset (North Slave LST dataset) for 535 lakes in the North Slave Region (NSR) of the Northwest Territories (NWT), Canada, for the period of 1984 to 2021. North Slave LST was retrieved from Landsat 5 Thematic Mapper (TM), Landsat 7 Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus (ETM+), and Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) and the Thermal Infrared Sensor (TIRS); however, most of the dataset was created from the thermal bands of Landsat 5 (43 %) due to its longevity (1984–2013). Cloud masks were applied to Landsat images to eliminate cloud cover. In addition, a 100 m inward buffer was applied to lakes to prevent pixel mixing with shorelines. To evaluate the algorithm applied, retrieved LST was compared with in situ data and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) LST observations. A good agreement was observed between in situ observations and North Slave LST, with a mean bias of 0.12 ∘C and a root mean squared deviation (RMSD) of 1.7 ∘C. The North Slave LST dataset
contains more available data for warmer months (May to September; 57.3 %) compared to colder months (October to April). The average number of images per year for each lake across the NSR ranged from 20 to 45. The North Slave LST dataset, available at https://doi.org/10.5683/SP3/J4GMC2 (Attiah et al., 2022), will provide communities, scientists, and stakeholders with spatial and temporal changing temperature trends on lakes for the past 38 years.


Designing Solutions-Based Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing: New Issues and Trends examines current practices and challenges faced by designers of Ubiquitous and Pervasive Computing projects. Analyzing theoretical assumptions, empirical research, practical implementations, and case studies, this book intends to present a comprehensive yet concise overview of the recent progress in ubiquitous and pervasive computing applications, as well as discuss new methodologies, technologies and approaches currently practiced. Truly interdisciplinary, this publication serves as a valuable reference for researchers in the fields of electrical engineering and computer science, students, educators, and industrial trainers interested in network sensors, embedded systems, distributed systems, computer networks, and computer science.


The aim of this study was to determine the genetic lineages, and the frequency of antibiotic resistance and virulence determinants in methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and methicillin-susceptible S. aureus (MSSA) isolates recovered from milk of cows with clinical mastitis. Three hundred milk samples from bovine with clinical mastitis were obtained from 30 dairy farms in different regions of Tunisia. Fifteen of the 300 tested samples contained S. aureus (5%), in three cases were MRSA. Isolates (one/sample) were typed (S. aureus protein A [spa], multilocus sequence typing and accessory gene regulator [agr]). The presence of resistance and virulence genes was analyzed by PCR. The three MRSA isolates contained mecA and blaZ genes (one of them also the msr(A) gene), and carried the enterotoxin gene sen; they were typed as t10381-ST4114 or t267-ST4120, and corresponded to agr type-I. Twelve MSSA isolates were recovered and harbored the blaZ (7 strains) or erm(C) genes (1 strain). The MSSA isolates presented seven different spa-types, associated to new sequence types (STs): t426-ST4118, t267-ST4120, t1773-ST4115, t509-ST4119, t529-ST4117, t2844-ST4113, and t2802-ST4112; most isolates (8/12) were typed as t267/ST4120. All S. aureus isolates were scn-negative, except one MSSA of lineage ST4119 that exhibited the immune evasion cluster type D, and harbored the seg, sei, sem, seo, and seu enterotoxin genes. Four MSSA isolates carried the toxic shock syndrome toxin 1 gene (tst). S. aureus (including MRSA) is an important cause of bovine mastitis, showing isolates with high genetic diversity and high content in virulence genes.


A follow up study is reported of 100 consecutive unconscious patients admitted to an intensive care coma facility with a history of 30 days or more of unconsciousness of nontraumatic cause. Twenty recovered consciousness, all within 5 months of injury. 31 of the remaining patients died within 6 months following injury, while 49 continued unconscious until death. The mean life expectancy of these 49 was 26-34 months from that time. All 20 patients who recovered awareness continued to suffer from major disability. The prognosis for life or death and for recovery or not of consciousness was not significantly correlated with age or aetiology of the vegetative state. Among those who recovered consciousness, the younger patients showed somewhat better results in three parameters of function: locomotion, ADL and day-placement, but not in cognition, behaviour or speech accuracy and fluency. The overall results for these nontraumatic patients with postcomatose unawareness are clearly worse than those for patients with a similar period of unconsciousness following craniocerebral trauma.


Abstract This paper examines patterns in the placement of apotropaic objects and materials in high- to late-medieval burials in Britain (11th to 15th centuries). It develops an interdisciplinary classification to identify: (1) healing charms and protective amulets; (2) objects perceived to have occult natural power; (3) 'antique' items that were treated as possessing occult power; and (4) rare practices that may have been associated with the demonic magic of divination or sorcery. Making comparisons with amulets deposited in conversion-period graves of the 7th to 9th centuries it is argued that the placement of amulets with the dead was strategic to Christian belief, intended to transform or protect the corpse. The conclusion is that material traces of magic in later medieval graves have a connection to folk magic, performed by women in the care of their families, and drawing on knowledge of earlier traditions. This popular magic was integrated with Christian concerns and tolerated by local clergy, and was perhaps meant to heal or reconstitute the corpse, to ensure its reanimation on judgement day, and to protect the vulnerable dead on their journey through purgatory.


A cladistic analysis of the spider family Zoropsidae has been performed. The ingroup of the analysis consisted of eight species traditionally classified in Zoropsidae, including Zoropsis cyprogenia Bosselaers, 1997, of which the hitherto unknown male has been recently discovered, and Takeoa nishimurai (Yaginuma, 1963). The outgroup contained four species, belonging to the genera Ctenus Walckenaer, 1805, Acanthoctenus Keyserling, 1876 and Griswoldia Dippenaar-Schoeman & Jocque, 1997. Three different weighting schemes allowed selection of one preferred, most parsimonious tree. This tree implies that Zoropsis cyprogenia has to be placed in a new genus within Zoropsidae. A description of Akamasia n. gen. is given, as well as a redescription of Acanthoctenus gaujoni Simon, 1906.


Soil-transmitted Helminths (STH) is a group of worms whose life cycle through the soil. The species of STH are roundworm (Ascaris lumbricoides), whipworm (Trichuris trichiura), hookworms (Necator americanus and Ancylostoma duodenale), and Strongyloides stercoralis. STH causes helminthiasis that infects more than 1.5 billion people or 24% of the world's population. Jember has many plantation areas. One of the plantations in Jember is Garahan Kidul plantation located in Sidomulyo village, Silo Sub-district, Jember. Soil on plantations tends to be moist and loose. This condition is ideal for the development of STH eggs and larvae. The general purpose of this study was to differentiate the numbers of soil contamination by STH eggs and larvae in soil samples in the garden area, riverside, and worker housing taken in the coffee plantation area in Silo District, Jember. This type of research is observational analytic with cross sectional research design. Soil samples are taken in the garden area, riverside, and worker housing that has a loose or not hard and moist soil texture. The results of the observation found that there were 4 eggs of  Ascaris lumbricoides, 6 eggs and larvae of  hookworm, and 2 eggs and larvae of  Strongyloides stercoralis. There is the same amount of soil contamination at the location of the garden and riverside, which are 2 positive samples or 5.71% with a density of 0.02 eggs and larvae / gram of soil, while the number of soil contamination at the workers housing location is 8 positive samples or 25.71 % with a density of 0.11 eggs and larvae / gram of soil. Data were analyzed using Fisher's test. The results of data analysis showed a value of p = 0.0693 (p> 0.05) so that there were no differences in the number of soil contamination by STH eggs and larvae in the garden and river bank locations and p = 0.042 (p <0.05) so that there were differences the number of soil contamination by STH eggs and larvae at the location of worker housing with the location of garden and riverside.
Keywords: STH, garden, riverside, wooker housing


The process of Glacial Isostatic Adjustment (GIA) represents the ongoing response of the solid Earth to past ice
mass loss that occurred following the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM, ca. 21 ka B.P.). The magnitude of the GIA
uplift depends on the temporal history of the ice load and is highly sensitive to variations in upper mantle viscosity.
Greenland GIA is thought to be well contained and due to relative high viscosity, influence of more recent changes
e.g. since the Little Ice Age have minor present-day effect (<2 mm/yr). Here we use data from the Greenland Global
Positioning System (GPS) network to measure GIA. We identify an unexpected GIA anomaly of ca. 12 mm/yr in
southeast Greenland, which we interpret as linked to a zone of warmer upper mantle caused by the Iceland hotspot
track that would reduce the viscosity and produce greater viscoelastic uplift due to recent ice mass changes. We
reconsider the evolution of the Greenland ice sheet since LGM and estimate a total ice mass loss equivalent to sea
level rise of 4.9 m since LGM. Our observations suggest southeast and northwest Greenland, subject to present-day
major ice loss, also contributed by significantly more mass loss on millennia scale than previously estimated.


In this paper, we analyze the transient electromagnetic response from three-dimensional (3-D) dielectric bodies using a time domain PMCHW (Poggio, Miller, Chang, Harrington, Wu) integral equation. The solution method in this paper is based on the Galerkin's method that involves separate spatial and temporal testing procedures. Triangular patch basis functions are used for spatial expansion and testing functions for arbitrarily shaped 3-D dielectric structures. The time domain unknown coefficients of the equivalent electric and magnetic currents are approximated by a set of orthonormal basis functions that are derived from the Laguerre functions. These basis functions are also used as the temporal testing. Use of the Laguerre polynomials as expansion functions characterizing the time variable enables one to handle the time derivative terms in the integral equation and decouples the space-time continuum in an analytic fashion. We also propose an alternative formulation using a differential form of time domain PMCHW equation with a different expansion for the equivalent currents. Numerical results computed by the two proposed methods are presented and compared.


At least three mutually exclusive hypotheses exist for the origin of the Arctic composite terrane and its Mesozoic location relative to the stable craton of North America. The most widely accepted hypothesis calls for counterclockwise rotation of the Arctic composite terrane as it rifted from the Arctic Archipelago. A second hypothesis calls for no relative movement, and a third places the Arctic composite terrane on the Kula plate as a part of a separate ribbon-shaped microcontinent. All three hypotheses predict unique positions for the Arctic composite terrane with respect to rotation and translation since the middle of the Mesozoic. Paleomagnetic and susceptibility studies were conducted on rocks from 15 sites in the ~160 Ma (K-Ar cooling age) Asik Mountain mafic to ultramafic complex in the western part of the Arctic composite terrane. Coherent data from 11 sites yielded a direction of dec = 255.1°, inc = 82.1°, κ = 19.3, α 95 = 9.6°, α 63 = 5.6°. Contact and fold tests were not possible but the direction differs distinctly from the modern magnetic direction. The anisotropy of magnetic susceptibility revealed a well-developed oblate fabric of variable orientation. The orientation of the fabric was not related to the regional stress regime, so we conclude that the rocks were not deformed and metamorphosed during thrusting, and thus the magnetic remanence direction obtained is most likely primary. The direction yields a pole position at long = 166.8°E, lat = 59.8°N, A95 = 18.4°, A63 = 10.7° that is discordant to the expected 160 Ma reference direction for North America. Counterclockwise rotation of the Arctic composite terrane would yield a perfect fit to the 160 Ma reference pole with an allowance for up to 5° of northward translation. This result, combined with previous paleomagnetic data, makes a convincing argument that the Arctic composite terrane has not remained fixed in its current orientation with respect to North America. However, the data are not sufficient to differentiate between the two hypotheses that suggest movement of the Arctic composite terrane relative to North America.


Dispersant effectiveness tests are reviewed. Studies have been conducted of the variances among several standard regulatory tests. Three main causes of differences have been identified, oil-to-water ratio, settling time and energy. Energy can be partially compensated for in high energy tests by correcting for natural dispersion. With this correction and with high oil-to-water ratios and a settling time of at least 10 minutes, five apparatuses yield very similar results for a variety of oils and dispersants. Recent studies into the energy variation of dispersant tests show that the energy level varies in many apparatuses. The repeatability of energy levels in apparatus is largely responsible for the variation in dispersant effectiveness values in certain apparatus. Studies of analytical procedures show that traditional extraction and analysis methods cause a bias to results. Methods to overcome these difficulties are presented.


Disordered solid phases, containing appreciable amounts of hydrogen ions, are grown at the surface of rhenium oxide crystals, because of the high reactivity of this compound with ambient moisture. To investigate such phenomena, a comparative study is performed on ground powder and thermally evaporated or sputtered films using x-ray diffraction and micro-Raman spectroscopy. Two types of solid phases were found in the films: HxReO3 distorted perovskite structures, based on corner-sharing ReO6 octahedra as in the bulk crystals, and ordered HReO4 crystalline structures, based on tetrahedral perrhenate ions. The complex impedance measurements on ReO3 films support the hypothesis of mobile hydrogen ions in such defective films. Moreover, this relevant protonic conductivity allows the application of these films as active layers inserted into asymmetric nematic liquid-crystalline cells to rectify the electro-optical response of such devices, with performances quite similar to previously studied oxides such as WO3.


This article proposes a stochastic attention allocation and reactive scheduling model to prevent illegal border crossings. To intercept infiltrators, a limited pool of security agents is dynamically assigned to heterogeneous frontier segments that transmit erratic signals of crossing attempts by independent trespassers. The frontier segments may differ in terms of rates of crossing attempts, ease of crossing, and reliability of the detection systems. Due to the huge complexity of the agent scheduling decision, a relaxed Markovian model is proposed whose solution is a set of optimal steady-state allocation rates for sending security agents to any frontier segment where a crossing attempt is apparently taking place. This solution is used to derive a heuristic policy for dispatching security agents among the frontier segments based on the evolving signals. Simulation experiments demonstrate that the proposed heuristic outperforms other scheduling policies. Border crossing is just one example of a viable application for this attention allocation model, which can be extended and customized for a wide variety of other scenarios.


In this paper a simple and efficient numerical procedure for treating problems of radar cross section (RCS) prediction of arbitrarily shaped Perfect Electric Conductor (PEC) objects is developed using Micro-ElectroMechanicalSystems(MEMS). Surface Acoustic Wave (SAW) devices perform a radar measurement using impulse response of the SAW transponder via a high frequency electromagnetic radio link. By analyzing the time delay between the backscattered pulses with different time delays the RCS can be estimated from the SAW transponder. It is found from the simulation that the complexity of prediction can be reduced using proposed algorithm.


Food prices have more than doubled between mid-2006 and mid-2008, creating major istress among the poor across the world, but also gainers among farm producers. While transmission was largely averted in India, increasingly open food markets indicate the need to anticipate the welfare implications of a repetition of such events in the future. This paper simulates the welfare effects of the rise in the international price of cereals and edible oils on a comprehensive typology of Indian households. Results show that large farmers (with farm size of one hectare and more) would have gained as a group, and that the average gain is large for those who gain, but that 59% of them in fact lose. The main category of poor households negatively affected by the rise in prices is rural (representing 77% of all losing poor households), both farmers and non-farmers. This is contrary to conventional wisdom that looks at the urban poor as the main category to be sheltered from rising prices through safety net measures, and expects most farmers to gain. These rural households account for 79% of the aggregate welfare loss among the poor. This makes a forceful case for the need to look beyond the urban poor when food prices rise.


A Langley low-turbulence wind-tunnel investigation of a porous NACA 64A010 airfoil section has been made to determine the effectiveness of area suction in maintaining full-chord laminar flow behind finite disturbances and at angles of attacks other than 0 degrees. Aero suction resulted in only a small increase in the size of a finite disturbance required to cause premature boundary-layer transition as compared with that for the airfoil without suction. Combined wake and suction drags lower than the drag of the plain airfoil were obtained through a range of low lift coefficient by the use of area suction.


Metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) assembled from organic building blocks and metal-based connectors have attracted much interest owing to their large pores and their enormous structural diversity. Particularly, the generation of homogeneous thin films of MOFs is highly desirable in view of potential applications including chemical sensors, catalysts, and also optical devices. Several elegant examples of MOF film growth have recently been reported (see below), but a general and convenient method for the synthesis of homogeneous oriented thin films is not known. Herein we present a novel strategy for the growth of highly oriented thin films of MOFs based on the storage of one reaction partner for framework synthesis in a polymer gel layer, followed by diffusion of the other reaction partner into the gel layer and to a nucleation interface provided by a functionalized selfassembled monolayer (Scheme 1).


Productivity comparisons need to be based on a careful definition of the objectives. Labour productivity per hour worked is the best measure of prosperity per effort at any time, but can sometimes be achieved at the expense of unemployment or low capital productivity. Total factory productivity is the nearest measure we have to absolute efficiency, but that does not mean that it is an appropriate policy maximand. Performance can, therefore only be compared by looking at several different measures. Using this conceptual background to compare American, French, German, and UK productivity, the author concludes that between the US and continental economies social choices and trade-offs are the key drivers of observed differences, but that the UK is still behind both the Continent and the US on absolute efficiency. The policy choices implied for the UK are explored.


Abstract Behavioral economics and field experiments within the social sciences have advanced well beyond academic curiosum. Governments around the globe as well as the most powerful firms in modern economies employ staffs of behavioralists and experimentalists to advance and test best practices. In this study, we combine behavioral economics with field experiments to reimagine a new model of early childhood education. Our approach has three distinct features. First, by focusing public policy dollars on prevention rather than remediation, we call for much earlier educational programs than currently conceived. Second, our approach has parents at the center of the education production function rather than at its periphery. Third, we advocate attacking the macro education problem using a public health methodology, rather than focusing on piecemeal advances.


I discuss how poverty decomposition methods relate to integral approximation, which is the foundation of decomposition of the temporal change of a quantity into key drivers. This offers a common framework for the different decomposition methods used in the literature, clarifies their often somewhat unclear theoretical underpinning and identifies the methods' shortcomings. In light of integral approximation, many methods actually lack a sound theoretical basis and they usually have an ad-hoc character in assigning the residual terms to the different key effects. I illustrate these claims for the Shapley-value decomposition and methods related to the Datt-Ravallion approach and point out difficulties in axiomatic approaches to poverty decomposition. Recent developments in energy and pollutant decomposition offer some promising methods, but ultimately, further development of poverty decomposition should account for the basis in integral approximation.


To contribute to achieving local and global sustainability, we propose a novel educational methodology, called field environmental philosophy (FEP), which orients ecotourism practices to reconnect citizens and nature. FEP is based on the systemic approach of the biocultural ethic that values the vital links among the life habits of co-inhabitants (humans and other-than-humans) who share a common habitat. Based on this "3Hs" model (habitats, co-inhabitants, habits), FEP combines tourism with experiential education to reorient biocultural homogenization toward biocultural conservation. FEP's methodological approach seeks to integrate social, economic, and environmental dimensions of sustainability by generating new links between biological and cultural diversity at different spatial and social scales. Ecotourism has an underutilized potential to link sciences with education and conservation practices at different scales. By incorporating a philosophical foundation, FEP broadens both understanding and practices of environmental education and sustainable tourism. FEP has been developed at the Omora Ethnobotanical Park in the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve, Chile, at the southern end of the Americas since 2000, where it has oriented transdisciplinary work for the creation of new protected areas and ecotourism practices. FEP enables an integration of biophysical, cultural, and institutional dimensions into the design of ecotourism activities that transform and broaden the perceptions of tourists, local guides, students, and other participants to better appreciate local biological and cultural diversity. FEP's methodology is starting to be adapted in other world regions, such as Germany, Japan, and Mexico, to integrate education and ecotourism for sustainability.


Research has shown that effective management of water resources for urban water utilities
worldwide still remains a challenge. Pressure management is one of the tools that is known
to control water leakages in piped water supply systems. A study was carried out on
Kasungu Water Supply Scheme in Malawi from February to April 2009 to investigate the
potential of pressure management as a tool for the reduction and control of real water
losses. The study also assessed the viability of pressure management and its impacts on
service quality. Levels of unaccounted-for water (UFW) for Kasungu Water Supply
Scheme in the period July 2007 to June 2008 were reported to be 27% on average with a
maximum of 37% in May 2008. An area called Kasungu ADD was selected for pressure
and flow measurements to determine the variation of leakage under different pressures and
the impact of pressure management on service quality. The study showed that 66% of the
total non-revenue water in the scheme is lost through leakage and that leakage in the
distribution system is reduced by 38% when pressure is reduced by 46%. At 38% inlet
pressure reduction minimum night flows (MNF) were reduced by 34%. However the time
required to fill a 20 litre bucket during the peak period, a measure of service quality,
increased by 9% at critical points of the system Pressure management was found to have a
payback period of 20 months compared to pipe replacement which had a payback period of
205 months. It was concluded that pressure management is a viable tool for controlling
water losses in the scheme. It is recommended that the supply area should be pressure
zoned and use of appropriate pressure controllers be implemented in the distribution system
to improve management.,WATERnet


This study aims to analyse the effect of tax compliance and earnings quality on financial performance. Information on financial performance is needed by management for evaluating and determining targets, while external parties use it for various purposes. Several studies have found the effect of tax and earnings quality on corporate financial performance, with different results. Using 332 Indonesian and Thai manufacturing companies from 2014 to 2017 as a sample, this study did not find the effect of earnings quality on financial performance. In addition, a significant effect of tax compliance was found on financial performance. This result explains that tax has an important role in the sustainability business, therefore that management attention is needed in tax policy making so that it does not have a negative impact on the company. With the finding that tax compliance has a negative effect on financial performance, it is clear that there are still many taxpayers who have not utilized the taxation facilities from the government that should support the company's financial performance.


Thermal annealing, a commonly used procedure for improving the performance of polymeric membranes, is in this work exploited in the presence of a metal–organic framework (MOF) supported layer. MOFs and polymers are materials with a common organic character, suggesting an enhanced affinity between them when used together in membrane separation. Zeolite-like imidazolate frameworks (ZIFs) ZIF-8 and ZIF-93 with sod and rho structures and pore apertures of 0.34 and 0.36 nm, respectively, have been grown inside 356 μm OD co-polyimide P84 hollow fibers by microfluidics, leading to continuous supported membranes. When these membranes were thermally in situ annealed below the glass transition temperature, while monitoring both H2 and CH4 permeances, the MOF–polymer adhesion was enhanced. Thus the gas separation selectivity increased without any significant reduction in the gas permeance, and H2/CH4 and CO2/CH4 maximum selectivities of 103 and 18 (ZIF-8) and 101 and 20 (ZIF-93) were respectively measured. The good compatibility between MOF and polymer made improvements possible in the annealing of the membrane once it was prepared. If the annealing of the polymer was carried out before the MOF synthesis, the polymer chain rearrangement and surface smoothing prevented an optimum MOF–polymer interaction and the separation performance worsened. These results proved the compatibility between both materials and their synergistic contribution to gas selective transport.


Abstract Joint observations by radar and high-frequency sferics detectors at Georgia Institute of Technology provided unique data on the Atlanta tornado of 24 March 1975. The classic hook echo was detected by radar at a range of about 26 km, 15 min before the tornado touched down. While the tornado was on the ground the sferics burst rate was very low, despite very high values recorded immediately before and after this interval. This observation, together with visual reports of a strong cloud-to-ground discharge at the time of tornado touchdown, suggests an interaction of the tornado with the electric field of the storm.


‡ Since the founding of PLoS Computational Biology, our publisher, the Public Library of Science, has evolved its own gloss from the piquantly camelesque "PLoS" to the modern "PLOS," matching its equally emphatic journal ONE. As we review the journal, it seemed appropriate to hearken to its uncertain beginnings, embodied even in its quirky typography.

Ten years ago, we founded PLoS Computational Biology to advance the science of computational biology and its practitioners. Our goals were appreciation and innovation. At the remove of no longer being active in day-to-day activities of the journal, it is wonderful to look back over the first ten years of the journal. Here we reflect on the journal's evolution and offer a few thoughts for the next ten years.

The journal began at a propitious time, as computational biology engaged markedly more researchers and as scientific publication was beginning a tectonic shift. Many researchers noted a serious gap in the publishing firmament: there was no respected venue that focused on biological discovery made by computational methodology. This lack of appreciation had implications at many levels. At pre-eminent journals, computational biology research was often was not reviewed by those with expertise to evaluate its technical content and significance, leading to delays and rejections. The alternative of publishing at the existing specialist journals often led to publications in venues that were not appreciated by the most appropriate audience. This meant that the work was not seen by many suitable readers, and that computational biologists had greater challenges in their career development.

We are pleased that PLoS Computational Biology is now widely appreciated as a treasury of first-class scientific work, offering a respected venue for publication of work fundamental to our field. For researchers at all tiers, but especially trainees, publication venue is too often taken as a proxy for the significance of their research studies. Such individuals have no time for their papers to accrue citations or become well recognized before their achievements are assessed for career advancement. We hope that those who have published in PLoS Computational Biology have met with success comparable to the burnishing their outstanding work has provided for the journal's reputation.

Even more important, we have been gratified to see researchers in our field have their work treated with respect and insight by reviewers and editors who understand the significance of their research and its approaches. Certainly, in a journal that rejects two-thirds of the submissions, not all prospective authors are happy, and undoubtedly there have been some significant oversights. However, on the whole, we believe that PLoS Computational Biology has succeeded in providing computational biology researchers consistently informed and thoughtful reviews.

In order to meet the needs of our field's researchers, our intent was to establish a computational journal that was read by experimentalists and computational researchers alike, and would drive biologists' interest in the application of computational techniques. Another early motivator was also not to encroach on existing bioinformatics journals, hence, the niche of computation requiring new biological insights. To this end, PLoS Computational Biology initially had a scope statement that emphasized the need for biological outcomes. However, as both our journal and bioinformatics journals became more established, the editorial board increasingly felt we should expand the remit to engage pure methods of the greatest significance. The expansion of authors and readers has been clearly enhanced by embracing methods papers.

A pleasant and unexpected surprise was the scientific scope of papers submitted to the journal. For example, we never envisaged that computational neuroscience would become such a vibrant part of the journal. In retrospect, this would seem to be the result of a combination of lack of suitable venues publishing such papers and the hard work of the early neuroscience editors. The scope has continued to expand even as the number of journals competing has multiplied. An imminent challenge will likely be understanding the relationship with biomedical informatics as the line between basic and clinical research blurs in a translational world. A broader challenge will arise as biology becomes ever more a data science: what should the unique role of the journal be as nearly all biologists become computational biologists?

The journal began at a time when open access was still considered by most scientists at best a novelty and at worst a business model doomed to failure. Against this backdrop, many computational biologists rallied behind the cause since they were already accustomed to open and free data and software. A particularly important leap was made by the International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB), which was a key founding partner. Not only did ISCB offer a community supporting the journal, but in doing so, they abandoned the very substantial revenues they had previously garnered from partnership from a journal that was then closed-access. Valuing access over profit is to be highly commended.

In the ten interceding years, open access has evolved and is now a mainstream publishing option, which has undoubtedly increased access to scientific discourse. Importantly, PLoS Computational Biology has the most elevated tier of open access, using a CC-By license. Amongst other benefits, for our community, this offers machine access to the corpus for knowledge discovery, an undertaking that remains at a nascent stage. Let us hope that such value is commonplace and plain for all to see before the next ten-year anniversary.

The front matter has been a wonderful sandbox in which to experiment with scholarly communication. Not all such experiments have been successful, but some clearly have and can be attributed to both filling a need (not necessarily obvious at the outset) and folks who believed in the experiment and who put in many hours of hard work on behalf of the community. The Education section and the Ten Simple Rules professional development series have blossomed beautifully. The jury is still out on the success of other experiments, but they all speak to doing things differently, which has been a hallmark of the journal since day one.

The science of computational biology and the dissemination of that science have changed over the past ten years, and the journal has been there to document and enable those changes, and more disruption will follow. The next ten years will see a further broadening of the scope of what is covered by the field of computational biology, particularly as it relates to the generation and use of a broader range of data types by all investigators, with increased emphasis on the use of clinical data. We hope that more of the research life cycle will be shared and captured as part of a publication. If dreams come true, a journal paper will offer a persistent mechanism for further data exploration and be capable of offering a platform for follow-on sets of experiments. We are sure your community journal will be ready for whatever innovations you can bring.

It was a privilege for us to work with so many talented authors, reviewers, editors, and staff—and an honor to see our initial efforts taken to such wonderful levels. All have contributed both appreciation and innovation and, in doing so, helped create a community larger than the journal itself. All of their efforts have truly elevated the field and supported us.


Electroabsorption from GeSi on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) is expected to have promising potential for optical modulation due to its low power consumption, small footprint, and more importantly, wide spectral bandwidth for wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) applications. Germanium, as a bulk crystal, has a sharp absorption edge with a strong coefficient at the direct band gap close to the C-band wavelength. Unfortunately, when integrated onto Silicon, or when alloyed with dilute Si for blueshifting to the C-band operation, this strong Franz-Keldysh (FK) effect in bulk Ge is expected to degrade. Here, we report experimental results for GeSi epi when grown under a variety of conditions such as different Si alloy content, under selective versus non selective growth modes for both Silicon and SOI substrates. We compare the measured FK effect to the bulk Ge material. Reduced pressure CVD growth of GeSi heteroepitaxy with various Si content was studied by different characterization tools: X-ray diffraction (XRD), atomic force microscopy (AFM), secondary ion mass spectrometry (SIMS), Hall measurement and optical transmission/absorption to analyze performance for 1550 nm operation. State-of-the-art GeSi epi with low defect density and low root-mean-square (RMS) roughness were fabricated into pin diodes and tested in a surface-normal geometry. They exhibit low dark current density of 5 mA/cm2 at 1V reverse bias with breakdown voltages of 45 Volts. Strong electroabsorption was observed in our GeSi alloy with 0.6% Si content having maximum absorption contrast of Δα/α ~5 at 1580 nm at 75 kV/cm.


In this paper, we analyze the cyber security of state estimators in Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems operating in power grids. Safe and reliable operation of these critical infrastructure systems is a major concern in our society. In current state estimation algorithms there are bad data detection (BDD) schemes to detect random outliers in the measurement data. Such schemes are based on high measurement redundancy. Although such methods may detect a set of very basic cyber attacks, they may fail in the presence of a more intelligent attacker. We explore the latter by considering scenarios where deception attacks are performed, sending false information to the control center. Similar attacks have been studied before for linear state estimators, assuming the attacker has perfect model knowledge. Here we instead assume the attacker only possesses a perturbed model. Such a model may correspond to a partial model of the true system, or even an out-dated model. We characterize the attacker by a set of objectives, and propose policies to synthesize stealthy deceptions attacks, both in the case of linear and nonlinear estimators. We show that the more accurate model the attacker has access to, the larger deception attack he can perform undetected. Specifically, we quantify trade-offs between model accuracy and possible attack impact for different BDD schemes. The developed tools can be used to further strengthen and protect the critical state-estimation component in SCADA systems.


PURPOSE
To describe the characteristics of pregnancies complicated by maternal syphilis and fetal death.

METHODS
Retrospective descriptive study performed by reviewing the medical records of 48 pregnant women with maternal syphilis and fetal death outcome admitted to Hospital Geral de Nova Iguaçu, Baixada Fluminense, State of Rio de Janeiro, during the period from 2005 to 2008. Birth weight >500 g and fetal death documented by Death Certificate were the inclusion criteria. The following aspects were analyzed: sociodemographic factors, reproductive history, aspects of the current pregnancy, prenatal care, Venereal Disease Research Laboratory (VDRL) testing, and other gestational conditions, in addition to syphilis. The fetal deaths were classified as maternal, placental or fetal. Percentage, mean, standard deviation (SD), maximum and minimum values were reported.

RESULTS
The mean maternal age was 22.7 years (SD=0.9 years), and at least 50% of the patients had low educational level. At hospital admission, 68.8% of the subjects were in the third trimester, with a mean gestational age of 29.2 weeks (SD=0.5), and more than 50% were in labor. The vast majority of fetal deaths (93%) occurred before maternal hospitalization. Among the patients who received prenatal care (54.2%), 30.8% had no VDRL test, 30.8 and 15.4% had a reactive and non-reactive result, respectively, and none had more than one prenatal VDRL test. At the time of childbirth, most of the mothers (95.8%) carried out VDRL testing. Overall, the VDRL titers varied from 1:1 to 1:512, with predominant values >1:4 (91.7%). In 23% of cases other clinical conditions related to fetal death, in addition to syphilis, were found.

CONCLUSIONS
The infection was the main clinically identified cause of fetal death in this patient series. Fetal death occurred during the preterm period and in the presence of high titers of maternal infection, suggesting recent syphilis infection.


Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs) are domain names containing non-ASCII characters. Despite its installation in DNS for more than 15 years, little has been done to understand how this initiative was developed and its security implications. In this work, we aim to fill this gap by studying the IDN ecosystem and cyber-attacks abusing IDN. In particular, we performed by far the most comprehensive measurement study using IDNs discovered from 56 TLD zone files. Through correlating data from auxiliary sources like WHOIS, passive DNS and URL blacklists, we gained many insights. Our discoveries are multi-faceted. On one hand, 1.4 million IDNs were actively registered under over 700 registrars, and regions within east Asia have seen prominent development in IDN registration. On the other hand, most of the registrations were opportunistic: they are currently not associated with meaningful websites and they have severe configuration issues (e.g., shared SSL certificates). What is more concerning is the rising trend of IDN abuse. So far, more than 6K IDNs were determined as malicious by URL blacklists and we also identified 1,516 and 1,497 IDNs showing high visual and semantic similarity to reputable brand domains (e.g., apple.com). Meanwhile, brand owners have only registered a few of these domains. Our study suggests the development of IDN needs to be re-examined. New solutions and proposals are needed to address issues like its inadequate usage and new attack surfaces.


Efficient insurance fraud management can have significant effect on insurance companies' competitive market position. Potential savings accumulated in fraudulent activities can add up to 10% of all expenses insurance companies pay for damage claims, which globally add up to several 100 billion Euros. There are various available methods to detect insurance fraud. The simplest one, that is to manually review a small number of insurance claims, is highly inefficient and its success rate is largely dependent on investigator's luck to select the exact cases that would turn out fraudulent after investigation. It is more efficient for investigators to use information technology that systematically highlights all cases which are identified as suspicious by predetermined criteria. Thereby, the investigators can focus solely on the potentially interesting cases.
The implementation of fraud management information system into the business system of an insurance company also demands measuring the effects of such a system on its business performance. These effects can be divided into two categories: direct and indirect. The direct effects relate to quantity, value and the relevance of detected frauds, while the indirect effects give an estimation of fraud prevention effectiveness among individuals who are most likely to commit fraud. Direct effects can be measured and directly taken into account when calculating insurance company's business success. Indirect effects, however, cannot be measured this way for most insurance lines. A high level of fraud diversification and randomness is hard to encapsulate into prediction models, especially those capable of forming estimates with an sufficient degree of confidence to be included in the insurance company's savings estimates. However, the assessment of indirect savings is to a certain extent feasible in some insurance lines where the number of potential fraudsters is limited and relatively small. For such cases, it can be presumed that once fraudulent activity is detected and sanctioned, it will no longer occur or it will occur to a lesser extent. In fore mentioned systems assessment can be made on the basis of the differences in the dynamics of occurring suspicious fraud cases. An example of such insurance line is health insurance.
The result of the master's thesis is an extended assessment method which can be used to evaluate the performance of health insurance fraud management systems. The method takes into consideration both the direct savings and the assessment of indirect effects which occur as a result in the systematic fight against fraud. With the help of the suggested method the health insurance companies gain not only a full overview of the success and efficiency of the fraud management processes but also an assessment of how these influence the business performance of an entire insurance company.


There are many signs indicating that the mobility of women has significantly changed in the last decades: young women possess a driving license almost as often as young men, and women's car availability and their average mileage per year have increased. At the same time more and more women combine job and family. In the present paper the authors explore the effects that these changes have on women's mobility in Germany. The central questions are whether women adapt their mobility behavior to that of men or develop a woman-specific behavior, in particular for the use of the car, and whether household structure and employment status have the same effect on travel patterns for men and women. Using the national travel survey of Germany, a group classification is carried out in order to compare groups with similar basic conditions. The grouping variables are sex, employment status and household structure. The analysis is restricted to individuals between 30 to 49 years of age in order to minimize variation in the life-cycle to the extent possible. The results show that single men and women share many similarities. Gender differences reach the highest level for the group of multi-person households. As long as only sex and household type are taken into account, the gender differences found are consistent with the literature. However, the additional distinction of employment status reveals a more differentiated view on gender differences in travel patterns. Men are rarely part-time employees or homemakers. But once they have this role they often have even more strongly pronounced travel characteristics that normally are ascribed to women. By contrast, the travel patterns of full-time employed women are still very different in comparison to their male counterparts. In addition, when working full-time, women are to a higher degree responsible for household duties and child care. In this context, the car seems to have the ambivalent role of affording more flexibility while at the same time solidifying the traditional role of women in household duties and child care.


The Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework describes online learning as a collaborative process supported by social presence, teaching presence, and cognitive presence, which work together to facilitate critical thinking and learning. The technology used in an online class can facilitate a CoI when its features support, rather than constrain, activities that promote these three elements. Affordance theory provides a starting place for matching technology features to teaching and learning goals. Based on affordances and constraints, we analyzed the use of technology in our online and hybrid courses to evaluate how well our chosen tools supported each CoI element, noting ways in which we might better capitalize on a tool's affordances in future iterations of the course. By sharing our reflections, we provide instructors with an example of how they might apply a research-based framework to their own use of technology in the online environment for more effective course design that better supports student learning.


BACKGROUND
More than 85% of patients develop pleural effusions after coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG). Although the majority resolve spontaneously, post-CABG effusions can persist. The cause of these persistent effusions is unknown, and the histology of the pleural changes has seldom been reported.

OBJECTIVES
To describe the patient characteristics and pathologic condition of the pleural tissues in patients with persistent post-CABG effusions.

SUBJECTS
Eight patients with persistent post-CABG effusions who underwent thoracoscopy or thoracotomy over a 2-year period by one thoracic surgeon. These eight patients were selected as having undergone CABG > 2 months before their thoracic surgery and had no other identifiable causes of effusion.

RESULTS
The median time from CABG to pleural surgery was 132 days (range, 74 to 2,258 days). The median left ventricular ejection fraction was 57% (range, 15 to 70%). All patients were dyspneic and had large (> or = 25% of the hemithorax) effusions on chest radiograph. All effusions persisted after two or more thoracenteses. Pleural effusion was left sided in three patients and bilateral in five patients. Pleural fluid was characterized by lymphocytosis (82 to 99%). Four of the eight patients had a visceral peel and trapped lung requiring decortication. Seven of the eight biopsy specimens showed pleural thickening characterized by dense fibrous tissues with associated mononuclear cell infiltration, while the eighth biopsy specimen showed only clotted blood. The degree of inflammation and fibrosis correlated with the interval between CABG and pleural surgery. Early post-CABG patients displayed more inflammation, with abundant lymphocytes in nodular configuration deep in the fibrous tissues away from the surface. Abundant keratin-positive, spindle-shaped cells were present in the fibrous tissues. Late cases showed predominantly mature fibrosis.

CONCLUSIONS
Persistent post-CABG effusion can occur. Pleural fluids and pleural tissue in early-stage lesions were characterized by lymphocytosis. With time, the inflammatory changes were replaced by fibrosis that resulted in dyspnea and, at times, trapped lungs requiring surgical intervention.


An intracardiac communication between the left ventricle and the right atrium (Geborde defect) was diagnosed in a 9-year Yorkshire Terrier with a history of chronic exercise intolerance. The history, clinical examination, and diagnostic imaging confirmed the diagnosis and did not reveal evidence of trauma or endocarditis which could lead to this special type of left-to-right shunting. A Gerbode defect is a very rare finding in human beings and animals. In the veterinary literature all reports about this condition were related to thoracic trauma or valvular infection. According to the authors, this would be the first clinical case of congenital Geborde defect in a dog.