Abstract : This paper assesses the role of the distinguished Regius Professor of Modern History in Oxford University in the development of military history and strategic studies since World War II. Data was gathered using a literature search of Professor Howard's historical, strategic, and popular writings and personal interviews and correspondence with persons associated with him in his various academic and public roles. The format chosen was an historical narriative which begins with an overview of his career, continues with a description and critique of his historical and strategic writings, and concludes with an assessment of his contributions, especially those as a strategist. The study argues that although his writings may not have been as influential as those of Sir Basil Liddell Hart or Bernard Brodie, Michael Howard has been one of those whose critical insight and whose command of historical precedents and strategic issues have provided intellectual rigor, a sense of realism, and broad comprehension to military-political analysis. Appended to the study is an essay on the Founding of the Institute for Strategic Studies with which Howard has been associated since its inception.


Every project comes into existence through a handmade object. When designing, our hands act as tools that move between the worlds of matter and thought, making it possible to work with our ideas, clarifying them and fixing them up into something buildable. From the drawing, the performing of sketches, models, collages ... we can travel that road made by ideas to enter a world of physical reality through a process in which the actions of thinking, drawing and building continually succeed each other. This article tries to explore the role of our hands when designing in order to learn more about the process of creating the architectural project and the way it is generated, to finally speak about issues interesting for us concerning the way they are taught.


In this paper, we propose a best basis selection method to choose a set of packets from a wavelet packet tree. Our goal is to obtain packets that show changes in both energy and frequency. The criterion adapted to choose the best basis is the Kullback-Leibler Distance (KLD). When there is no event to be detected, the estimated KLD follows roughly an exponential distribution depending on only one parameter: the length of the windows partitioning the signal. When events are detected in a packet, the distribution of the estimated KLD deviates from the exponential distribution. The statistics Kolmogorov-Smirnov are used to measure the separation between experimental and theoretical cumulative distributions in order to highlight the presence of ruptures, then to select the most relevant packets.


Mango (Mangifera indica Linn.) is one of the most important tropical fruits in Thailand. From previous report, mango seed kernel extracts contained phenolic components with a high antioxidant activity, which was assessed in homogeneous solution with the 2,2′-azinobis (3-ethylbenzothialozinesulfonic acid) radical cation (ABTS•+) scavenging assays and in an emulsion with the ferric thiocyanate test. The extracts also possessed antibacterial activity. The extract was effectively used in the preparation of many food and cosmetic products such as potato salad, chewing gum, ice cream, mouthwash and toothpaste for preventing dental caries. Hence, the purpose of this study is (1) to investigate the appropriate condition of water extraction process from mango seed kernel, (2) to investigate the antibacterial activity of mango seed kernel against Streptococcus mutans and Staphylococcus aureus, (3) to investigate in-vitro anti-inflammatory efficiency and the antibacterial activity of mango seed kernel mouthwash against Streptococcus mutans and Staphylococcus aureus including its properties and (4) to investigate the stability of mouthwash containing mango seed kernl extract.
This study was aimed to study the effect of extraction time on phenolic compounds from ripened and pickled mango seed kernel cultivar of Chok-Anan cultivar (from 2 to 8 h). The total soluble solid and quality of extracts (phenolics concentration, pH and color (L * a *, b *, C and H°) were also determined. Extraction was a slow process, with a higher total phenolic content during the first period of extraction and with apparent degradation of constituents beyond 4 h. During longer extraction time, total soluble solid of pickled kernel extraction increased, whereas total soluble solid of ripened mango remained constant. pH of extracting supernatant decreased and intense light green color was obtained. The high correlationed between total phenolic concentration and total soluble solid (r = 0.970) as well as chroma values (r = 0.810) was found in all type of mango kernel. However, there is no correlation between each parameter. Conversely Opposite results were obtained from ripened kernel, suggesting that total phenolic content remained the appropriate variable to monitor the extraction time effect.
Aqueous extract of ripened and pickled seed kernel of Mangifera indica was assessed for its anti-inflammatory activity by in-vitro methods. In-vitro anti-inflammatory activity was evaluated using albumin denaturation assay, proteinase inhibitory activity, and membrane stabilization at different concentrations. The total free radical scavenging capacity of fresh and pickled mango seed kernel extracts (FMSKE and PMSKE) were determined by using the DPPH and ABTS methods. The antioxidant activity in a linoleic acid emulsion system was also determined. The antimicrobial activity of the FMSKE and PMSKE was investigated using disc diffusion method, minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) and minimum bactericidal concentration (MBC) including time kill assay. The results showed that M.indica aqueous kernel extract at a concentration range of 50-800μg/ml significantly (p<0.05) protects the heat induced albumin denaturation. At the concentration of 400 and 800 μg/ml, FMSKE showed significant (p<0.05) inhibition of 42 and 82% of proteinase inhibitory action, but at the concentration of 100 and 200 μg/ml showed slightly different activity. PMSKE exhibited lower inhibition of proteinase than FMSKE. Heat induced haemolysis of erythrocyte was strongly inhibited at the concentration of 200 to 800μg/ml. The DPPH capacity of the FMSKE had the highest value and was significantly (P < 0.05) higher than that of tannic acid. PMSKE showed strong antimicrobial activity against S.aureus more than S. mutans with inhibition zone of 11 mm and 8 mm, respectively. FMSKE exhibited less effective on S.mutans than that on S.aureus. PMSKE was found to be more effective against both microorganisms than FMSKE. The results obtained in the present study indicate that aqueous kernel extracts of M.indica can be a potential source of anti-inflammatory, anti-microbial and antioxidant agents.
Increasing number of people are using mouthwashes for general and oral health care. Few of these mouthwashes, however, have undergone rigorous testing, as evidenced by the limited amount of information on shelf life including anti-inflammatory and antibacterial properties. The aim of this study was to determine the antimicrobial properties of mouthwash containing kernel of mango (Mangifera indica) against oral pathogens related to caries, S.aureus and S.mutans, to provide information to dental professionals about the efficacy of their products in vitro and to use these mouthwashes as a base for the evaluation of antimicrobial plant products. The inflammatory inhibitory activity and shelf life of mouthwash were also evaluated. Chlorohexidine mouthwash emerged as the most effective mouthwash to inhibit S.aureus and S.mutans. Mouthwash containing mango kernel exhibited inhibition zone against S. aureus (12mm) more than S. mutans (10mm) and also showed inflammatory inhibitory properties higher than chlorohexidine. Unfortunately, the mouthwash containing kernel of M. indica showed very little stability due to color changing.


Due to rapid industrialization and urbanization, Mauritius is witnessing an unprecedented increase in air pollution. The release of hazardous gases such as carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide are not only harmful to the health of the population but are also causing irreversible impact to the environment. Currently, there are only two fixed air quality monitoring units on the island and therefore, air pollution cannot be monitored in real-time. The objective of this chapter is to describe the implementation of a low-cost and energy-efficient air quality monitoring system using wireless sensor network (WSN) that can be easily deployed in highly polluted areas of Mauritius. A Hierarchical Based Genetic Algorithm (HBGA) is proposed to address the issue of sensor nodes with limited energy. Based on hierarchical routing and genetic algorithm, HBGA has been designed to extend the lifetime of the network by minimizing the energy consumption. The proposed air quality monitoring system uses an air quality index that can be easily interpreted. The evaluation results confirm the potential of the proposed system for real-time temporal and spatial monitoring of air quality. Moreover, it possible for the general public to have access to the air quality monitoring results in real time.


During the 20th century, several uncontrolled processes compromise the dynamics and trends of technological transitions that for centuries, had been characterizing the built environment and the manufacturing processes. In the agenda drawn by the Sustainable Transition Network, referring to manufacturing landscapes, the transition is a long process, deeply rooted to cultural and settlement specificities, to the skills of the workforce, to the opening of new markets, to the community needs. In a circular perspective for development, returning congruence to productive cycles, by linking them to the settlements vocations and communities' skills, is the design commitment. Taking into account the systemic vision for the built and performance approach, a design strategy is experienced during three years, for the Vesuvius foodscape. It consists of three main phases: *outlining the relationships between places and manufacturing, in terms of processes, products and wastes, *mapping the technological transition processes occurring at the architectural and urban scales, *defining compatibility ranges for shortening the loops and promoting inclusive technological innovations. The project outlines a regeneration strategy informed to the following visions: 1. The productive landscape is a common good, a complex system resulting from the encounter between resources and technological thinking. 2. Strengthening the community skills is an indispensable condition for promoting regeneration. 3. The third sector, social, economic and cultural reality of a private nature but tended to produce public or collective goods and services can be a privileged actor of sustainability. Keywords: Manufactures, landscape, design, innovation, technology, reuse, reduce


The present study was conducted to determine whether dietary supplementation of a natural non- antibiotic garlic active based growth promoter i.e. G-PRO naturo would be used as a natural alternative to antibiotics growth promoters in broiler diets. Three hundred sixty, 1-day-old straight run broiler chicks (Cobb 400) were randomly divided into 3 treatment groups of 20 birds each with 6 replicates. The groups were 1) Negative control (basal diet), 2) G-PRO naturo 250 ppm (+ basal diet) 3) Positive Control (basal diet + Virginamycin) 500 ppm. The basal diets (starter/grower: 0-21 d, finisher 22-42 d) were based on maize and soybean meal. Each group was fed ad libitum with its own diets for a period of 42 days. Light was provided 24 h each day throughout. Water was always available. The body weight gains of birds were measured individually and feed consumption and feed conversion efficiency (g feed: g weight) were calculated weekly. At the end of the experiment all birds were sacrificed to determine intestinal microbial count. The results obtained in the experiment showed that the garlic based additive supplementation affected some performance parameters significantly (p<0.05). Addition of G-PRO naturo at 250 ppm to the diets improved body weight and feed conversion efficiency. The results obtained in the experiment also showed that the supplement was able to reduce the salmonella and E. coli counts in the intestine when in comparison to the negative control. It could be concluded that G-PRO naturo supplementation, at 250 ppm to broiler diets could have potential to improve growth performance of broilers.


An experiment was conducted to improve the performance of the drum type seeder developed by the International Rice Research Institute for low land paddy. The machine was evaluated and compared with the conventional
hand seeding method. A seed collector assembly was designed and incorporated to the existing prototype in order to overcome the unwanted seed dropping
at the headlands during turning which saved 5-7 kg of seed per hectare. Owing to the incorporation of seed collector assembly, the weight of the seeder increased by 20 percent compared to the previous prototype, but still
within the capability of an average size labour.The effective field capacity of machine seeding ranged between 0.12 to 0.15 ha/hr and that of hand
broadcasting was 0.22 ha/hr. The partial budget analysis revealed that by using drum type seeder and a rotary type seeder and a rotary type weeder, a farmer could earn a net benefit of US$55.06 per hectare compared to hand
seedling followed by hand weeding. The break-even analysis indicated that a farmer having only 0.3 hectare of land could economically afford a drum type seeder and a rotary type weeder.


The article deals with the issues connected with the peculiarities of socio-psychological adaptation of migrant and Russian school children of different age groups to the polycultural educational environment of schools in Russia. The study was conducted in a number of schools in Krasnoyarsk and Sosnovoborsk in Krasnoyarsk region( Siberia), Russia, and comprised 200 school children. The research revealed that the level of sociopsychological adaptation of Russian children was higher only among junior school children in comparison to migrant children, whereas both Russian and migrant adolescent and senior school children feel adapted enough. The research results proved that psychological work on development and improvement of adaptation problems among migrant school children should be aimed at development of communicative and behavioural competence, emotional and personality well-being and self-actualization.


Among the most frequent anaphylactic reactions to insects are those attributed to reduviid bugs. We report the purification and identification of the major salivary allergen of these insects. This 20-kDa protein (procalin) is a member of the lipocalin family, which includes salivary allergens from other invertebrates and mammals. An expression system capable of producing reagent quantities of recombinant allergen was developed in Saccharomyces cerevisiae. Antisera produced against recombinant protein cross-reacts with ELISA with salivary allergen. Recombinant Ag is also shown to react with sera from an allergic patient but not with control sera. By immunolocalization, the source of the salivary Ag is the salivary gland epithelium and its secretions.


Abstract Previous business research has highlighted the impact of government policy in the processes of formulating business strategies and in the decision-making process of organizations. In the South African context, a review of this impact on organizational strategy is for the most part important especially after the fall of apartheid as businesses have been saddled with widespread institutional change the purpose of which is to redress historic inequalities that characterized the apartheid regime. Specifically, the introduction of a far-reaching B-BBEE policy aimed at increasing participation of PIDs in economic activities. Previous researchers have been focused on the impact of B-BBEE policy on mergers and acquisitions, strategic decisions and value chain structures, as well as ROEs. The current report from STATS-SA indicates that the failure rate for women-owned businesses remains at a high rate despite the implementation of the B-BBEE policy. Therefore, research on the impact of BBBEE on business strategy and success of female SMMEs operators may provide an accurate and deep understanding that will be beneficial to policymakers because of the social pressures to emphasis more on a 'broad-based' BEE (B-BBEE) policy aimed at increasing the participation of the black population (and in particular women) in economic activities as well as increasing the number of black ownership in businesses or creating employment for the black population. This study used appropriate data tools and techniques to analyze the data drawn from a sample of female entrepreneurs in South Africa. The study applies culturally instantiated facets of the debate on gender entrepreneurship as part of a detailed and empirically sophisticated consideration of the status of female entrepreneurship within South Africa. This paper involves an in-depth survey using the ten dimensions of business performance as a basis to study small South African women-owned businesses given that the approach is useful in the development of a theory in fields where not much research has been undertaken. The businesses studied for this research are based on a setting where B-BBEE program is a principal factor in the strategic framework of the South African female business owner. This paper contributes to existing literature on the implications of the BBBEE program on SMEs by studying the relationship between business strategies, outcomes, and the B-BBEE program.


This paper presents a new network topology discovery algorithm based on genetic algorithm, and always find the shortest path between any two points, which have strong adaptability. The algorithm and the traditional topology discovery algorithm compared to higher efficiency. At the same time, gives the algorithm model and model-based algorithm. Currently, the algorithm has been applied to the actual network environment.


Published research work concerning weaving machinery and its related technologies in the period between 1990 and 2005 are surveyed in this review. Air-jet looms have been introduced to a lot of weaving mills widely and rapidly in spite of their uncertainness of weft running. Thus researchers concerned with weaving machines have paid a great interest in air-jet weft insertion technology. Developments of measuring devices, photographic technology, control devices, and personal computers brought active research work in the fields of the air jet weft insertion: especially spreads of personal computers have facilitated to solve almost all types of equations of motion. In consequence, numerical simulations for weaving machines have been easily performed including weft insertion, warp tension, mechanism design for loom and so on.


Why have federal courts overwhelmingly appointed white men to represent diverse consumer classes? Rule 23(g) of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure requires courts to appoint the attorneys "best able to represent the interests of class members" to serve as class counsel. But courts' recurrent conclusion that white men best fit the federally mandated job description not only gives the appearance of discrimination, but harms class members that suffer from outcomes plagued by groupthink and cognitive biases. This Article sets out to uncover why white male repeat players continue to dominate class counsel appointments and proposes a practical and immediately implementable solution for the judiciary to improve class counsel diversity.

The Article examines all class action auto defect multidistrict litigation suits. By focusing on this subset of cases that span across five decades, it observes potential tendencies of certain courts (i.e., white, Republican-appointed, and female courts) to appoint white men and identifies different processes and criteria courts have implemented and considered that have resulted in the appointment of more female and minority attorneys. The Article finds, however, that the gender and racial gaps remain stark, largely because courts understandably place an almost dispositive value on attorneys' prior experience serving as class counsel, a role white men have traditionally monopolized. It proposes a way to resolve this Catch-22 problem—a two-tier joint appointment structure that collectively evaluates the experience and diversity of counsel and removes the insurmountable entry barriers to the plaintiffs' counsel class action bar.


BACKGROUND: The rise in obesity in the United States, along with improvements in antiviral therapies, has led to an increase in the number of obese patients receiving liver transplants. Currently, obesity is a relative contraindication for liver transplant, although exact body mass index (BMI) limits continue to be debated. Studies conflict regarding outcomes in obese patients, while some argue that BMI should not be used as an exclusion criterion at all. Therefore, this retrospective study—utilizing a large national database—seeks to elucidate the association between recipient BMI and hospital length of stay and mortality following liver transplant. METHODS: A retrospective study was conducted using the United Network for Organ Sharing Standard Transplant Analysis and Research database. Fine-Gray competing risk regressions were used to explore the association between BMI and rate of discharge, which varies inversely with length of stay. In our model, subdistribution hazard ratio (SHR) represented the relative change in discharge rate compared to normal BMI, with in-hospital death was considered as a competing event for live discharge. Cox proportional hazard models were built to assess the association of BMI category on all-cause mortality after liver transplantation. Cluster-robust standard errors were used in all analyses to construct confidence intervals. RESULTS: Within the final sample (n = 47,038), overweight (≥25 and <30 kg/m2) patients comprised the largest BMI group (34.7%). The competing risk regression model showed an association for increased length of stay among underweight (SHR = 0.82, 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.77–0.89; P < .001) and class 3 obesity patients (SHR = 0.88, 95% CI, 0.83–0.94; P < .001), while overweight (SHR = 1.05, 95% CI, 1.03–1.08; P < .001) and class 1 obesity (SHR = 1.04, 95% CI, 1.01–1.07; P = .01) were associated with decreased length of stay. When the sample excluded patients with low pretransplant functional status, however, length of stay was not significantly shorter for overweight and obesity class 1 patients. Cox proportional hazard models demonstrated increased survival among overweight, class 1 and class 2 obesity patients and decreased survival among underweight patients. CONCLUSIONS: Our results provide evidence that overweight and obesity class 1 are associated with decreased length of stay and mortality following liver transplant, while underweight and obesity class 3 are associated with prolonged length of stay. Pretransplant functional status may contribute to outcomes for overweight and class 1 obese patients, which necessitates continued investigation of the isolated impact of BMI in those who have had a liver transplant.


Extensive land conversion to agriculture in drylands and associated resource use have wide-ranging impacts on desert ecosystems globally. Incorporating the impacts of human-social aspects is thus imperative in examining ecological interactions. The provision of agricultural inputs in these resource-scarce regions supports invasive and pest species, negatively impacting both agricultural productivity and native desert ecosystems. Understanding the spatial dynamics of invasive and pest species requires analyzing both bottom-up resource availability factors underlying animal distributions and top-down biological controls. Here, we evaluate the social-ecological cascading effects of dryland agriculture on vertebrate pest communities in dryland agricultural communities of Israel. Our study region is characterized by 18 agricultural cooperatives with distinct crop regimes due to contrasting social decision-making and resource allocation schemes (i.e., communal Kibbutzim vs. privatized Moshavim). Crop choices further affect land management (e.g., enclosed vs. open farm systems) and resource intensity. This system is ideal to study trophic mechanisms underlying animal assemblages between agricultural regimes. We examine the role of agricultural land-use practices on pest spatial distributions based on multi-year vertebrate pest observations with agricultural datasets. We use structural equation modelling (SEM) to quantify the relative importance of added agricultural resources underlying bottom-up and top-down trophic processes regulating vertebrate pest assemblages. Results reveal that crop choices determine pest distributions through bottom-up processes directly, while simultaneously driving pest competitive interactions through indirect top-down cascades impacting pest communities. For example, due to the indirect negative effect of wolves on meso-predators (foxes and jackals) mediated by livestock, the total positive effect of livestock on the abundance of meso-predators is reduced. Our study illustrates the social-ecological cascading effects of agricultural regimes on pest community assemblages mediated by contrasting agricultural land-use practices. Considering the expansion of dryland agro-ecological systems globally, understanding the intricate cascading pathways of predator- and prey-pest communities has important implications for agricultural management, biological invasions in drylands and fragile desert environments.


This article describes a three-month pilot project to model and re-engineer an internal business unit of a major multinational firm using Enterprise Analyzer, a methodology and supporting group software tool for modeling and analyzing business processes. The methodology combines collaborative model building with creative problem reframing to enable multilevel, cross-functional business teams to quickly examine and redesign business processes. The tools developed for this project extend the capabilities of existing electronic meeting system technology to help groups build complex representations of their organization. The results of this pilot project suggest that the methodology and supporting tools can be effectively applied to re-engineer business processes, but also suggest the need for better ways to help groups accept innovative ideas. Many innovative ideas were generated, but few made it past the participants' evaluation and into the project's final recommendations.


OBJECTIVE
To systematically review the results of type 1 tympanoplasties with temporalis fascia (TF) vs cartilage grafts in patients with chronic otitis media.

METHODS
Eligible studies were identified from PubMed, Ovid, and EMBASE databases prior to November 2021. We analyzed the pure tone audiometry (PTA) and air-bone gap (ABG) data as continuous variables, and the success rate was analyzed as a dichotomous variable.

RESULTS
Forty-four studies, including 4582 patients, were eligible. The cartilage graft overall morphologic success rate was higher than that of the TF grafts (P < .001). In the palisade (P < .004) and island grafts (P < .001) subgroups, the analysis was significantly different. However, there was no significant difference in the inlay butterfly grafts subgroup. For hearing outcomes, the analysis revealed that TF grafts had a smaller mean post-operative ABG (P = .009). However, the subgroup analysis showed no significant difference in the mean post-operative ABG. For PTA, there was no significant difference in hearing improvement. However, the palisade cartilage graft subgroup resulted in a better hearing outcome than the TF graft subgroup in terms of the mean post-operative PTA (P = .007). There was no significant difference in the functional success rate or mean ABG gain.

CONCLUSION
Cartilage grafts have a better success rate than TF grafts in tympanoplasty. Both cartilage and TF tympanoplasty provided similar improvements in hearing outcome, while TF grafts generated a better outcome in post-operative ABG and palisade cartilage grafts in post-operative PTA. This may be related to the biological characteristics of the grafts. Further thorough studies need to be conducted.


In the conditions of constant market changes, fast development and spread of technology, multiply competition and "over night" product superannuation, successful companies became those who create new knowledge, spread it out trough the entire company and implement it rapidly in the new technologies and products. These activities define company as knowledge – creating organization which only and principal task is ongoing innovation. Those are the companies that understood that the learning and new knowledge are the key to success, and that the development is crucial for future survival. The notion of education, development and knowledge creating company, or in other words an organization that develops and learns, in the most pragmatic way expresses the attitude of modern, successful companies versus the development and knowledge of employees. Another name for this kind of organization is knowledge – based organization.The aim of this paper is to show that the employee development is a key procedure in implementing human resource politics. In order to create learning organization it is a necessity for the employees to have formal and informal education and to acquire it throughout entire professional career. Life-long learning politics is the basic premise of the company's market competiveness considering the fact that the knowledge is the only resource that grows with use and not disburse. The main conclusion of the paper states that the most successful companies and national economies are those based on knowledge, or in other words highly educated and trained human resources. High level of inventiveness and innovations, without which a modern market cannot be imagined, can be achieved only in following the path of permanent employee development, which also represents one of the main motivators in accomplishing efficiency and effectiveness of the companies.


Researchers who argue that moral judgment is based on emotions (`emotion-backers') and those who believe that it is based on reasoning and deliberation (`reasoning-backers') have both struggled to account for the moral deviance of psychopaths.
Emotion-backers, such as Jonathan Haidt, focus on psychopaths' lack of affect, or deficiencies in particular emotions, such as sympathy. Reasoning-backers, such as Lawrence Kohlberg, focus instead on psychopaths' deficient reasoning. Both accounts offer separate descriptions of what goes wrong in the disorder, but neither can fully explain psychopathic moral deviance.
The moral account that I built, bridges these accounts in an attempt to better and more fully describe the empirical data available on psychopathic moral judgment. Further, by considering the cognitive deficits affecting morality in psychopaths, I was able to develop an account of moral judgment which explains moral decision-making in the general population. I argue that moral judgment is best explained with a dual-process account that incorporates a large system of moral emotions as well as integrates multiple bases of morality, such as concerns of fairness, harm, and purity.
It is only by focusing on both the reasoning and emotional deficits in psychopaths that we can begin to understand psychopaths' use of utilitarian reasoning, criminal and non-criminal psychopaths. All of these issues are best described by the dual-process approach that I have developed.
My account of moral judgment has both theoretical and practical applications. Theoretically, it offers a new dual-process paradigm for describing moral judgment in people by bridging reasoning-based and emotion-based accounts. Additionally, my theory challenges accounts of moral emotion that narrowly focus on specific emotions, such as guilt or empathy. It instead integrates all emotions, including disgust, fear, and sympathy, and links specific emotions to moral judgments. Practically, my approach challenges the ways in which we have traditionally studied and applied ethics. It opens the doors for the development of new tools and training programs which better take into consideration the dual-process nature of moral decision-making.


Background In a new era of Human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination, adequate diagnostics of the viral infection in men becomes more important: the monitoring of the vaccination effect requires evaluating whether vaccine HPV types disappear from and how the prevalence of non-vaccine types is affected in either high-risk groups or general population. Detection methods and anatomical sites for optimal HPV sampling are of high interest among healthcare specialists. Expressed prostate secretion (EPS) obtained during digital rectal examination—a daily routine urological diagnostic procedure—and following massage of the prostate, represents an alternative sampling material for the study of HPV ecology in the male. We present the results from the first study on HPV detection in EPS, as detected using a reference method used at the WHO HPV LabNet global reference laboratory, a multiplex high-throughput genotyping using the Luminex system. Methods The EPS samples were from 186 heterosexual men (mean age 32 (range 19–60) years (median sexual life start at 17.6 (9–25) years; 33 (1–500) median life-time sex partners; no concurrent STDs at the time of the study) were collected in a urology outpatient unit in St. Petersburg and tested for the presence of HPV DNA in Stockholm by the Luminex assay. Results The results are presented in the Abstract LBP-1.07 table 1. HPV prevalence in the study population was 25.3% for all HPV types with 11.8% for oncogenic types only. High-risk (HR−) HPV 16 and 66 were the most common types 3.7 and 2.7% of men, respectively. Interestingly, untypable HR-HPV types were found in 3.2% of EPS samples. Multiple oncogenic types were found in 22.7% of all HR-HPV+ EPS samples. Conclusions EPS can be used for HPV studies in men: additional investigation of EPS may result in better understanding the transmission of HPV infection and to develop strategies for HPV prevention. For the first time, the full range of HPV types in the EPS of men with no STDs was explored. Abstract LBP-1.07 Table 1 HPV infection prevalence in the prostate (EPS) samples of 186 men HPV types Low-risk HPV types High-risk HPV types Untypable types 6 11 42 43 53 67 70 74 81 87 89 91 Multi 16 18 31 35 45 56 58 66 Men, HPV+ 1 1 2 1 1 1 3 1 1 6 1 5 1 5 7 3 2 4 2 1 1 5 6 (3.2%) 22 (11.8%) 21 (11.3%) 47 (25.3%) Total 186


Abstract Governance reform is increasingly understood in terms of partnerships, flexibility and growth in the 'noninstitutionalised' forms of decision-making, but what do Australians make of the governmental institutions still so crucial to the theory and reality of governance? In Australian discussions about new spatial approaches to governance, this question is especially fundamental because in its relatively brief 200 year postcolonisation history, Australia has come to have an unusually centralised system of government. This article explores the attitudes of Australian citizens towards their existing key institutions of governance, in particular the federal political system in its various spatial and hierarchical dimensions. We present some key findings from a random sample survey of 502 New South Wales rural and urban residents in late 2005, building on an earlier survey of 301 Queensland residents undertaken in 2001. The surveys indicate attitudes towards the present system and preferences regarding change, including options from new states to stronger regional institutions within the current framework. Findings are reported against demographic and other characteristics, including levels of satisfaction with present systems. Interstate and urban-regional comparisons are made. We conclude that high popular interest in change, which transcends the 'urban-rural' divide to a much higher degree than anticipated, provides a strong basis for a more open and less partisan political debate about institutional reform than may have been possible for some decades.


Background and aims Until nowadays, the exact aetiology of SLE (Systemic Lupus Erythematosus) is still unknown. It is currently accepted that there are several factors responsible for complex immunological disorders contributing to its development. Recent studies have shown that abnormal stimulation of innate immunity may have a great influence on the immunopathogenesis of SLE. Since TLRs (Toll-Like Receptors) are essential modulators of innate immune response, its role in SLE pathogenesis has raised great interest, particularly of those recognising nucleic acid, the main antigenic target in SLE. Analyse the role of TLR in the pathogenesis of SLE. Methods We look up for scienctific article comprehensively in Medline, Science Direct, PubMed, and Cochrane Database. We found 20 article based on bibliography and keywords from the database. Results The expression of TLR7 and TLR9 in peripheral blood mononuclear cells is higher in SLE group compared to control group, while the expression of other TLR shows no difference. There is also a positive correlation between TLR9 expression and activity index and R-SLEDAI score, while TLR7 expression shows positive correlation with chronicity index. Anti-Sm autoantibodies is absent in TLR7 deficiency, while anti-dsDNA autoantibodies are absent in TLR9 deficiency. TLR7 also plays crucial role in B cell proliferation. Conclusions TLR7 and TLR9 appears to play role in pathogenesis of SLE. However, more research need to be done to understand more about the role of TLR in pathogenesis of SLE.


One of the most common ways used to ensure the smooth operation of projects in multivariate analysis (MVA) is the use of developed metrics in Euclidean spaces, which are approximations, generally coarse, in non-Euclidean spaces. Metrics in non-Euclidean spaces implies the need to make calculations on curved surfaces studied in differential geometry. In thus paper it is proposed a Riemannian model to orthonormalized partial least squares (OPLS). Results using generalized Stiefel manifold as well a nonlinear search algorithm are developed. Keywords— Orthonormalized PLS, multivariate analysis, multilinear regression, reduced-rank regression, Riemannian model, generalized Stiefel manifold.


This article assesses the multidimensionality of the Basic Psychological Need Satisfaction and Frustration Scale (BPNSFS) using bifactor exploratory structural equation modeling (bifactor ESEM). The first study relies on a sample of community adults (N = 2,301), and revealed the superiority of a bifactor ESEM representation, supporting the 6-factor structure of BPNSFS ratings, and the presence of a single continuum of need fulfillment relative to 2 distinct dimensions reflecting need satisfaction and frustration. These results were replicated in a second representative sample of the Hungarian adult population (N = 504), as well as across gender, and found no evidence of differential item functioning as a function of age. Relative to males, females presented higher levels of relatedness satisfaction and lower levels of competence satisfaction. Finally, autonomy frustration decreased with age, whereas competence satisfaction and frustration presented opposite curvilinear tendencies, showing that the fulfillment of this need increased sharply for younger participants, a tendency that became less pronounced with age.


Background: The role of diagnostic laparoscopy was markedly decreased with the advent of major developments in noninvasive imaging modalities such as ultrasonography, computed tomography, and magnetic resonance imaging. However, many reports suggest that imaging has a limited role in the diagnosis of exudative ascites. The aim of the present study was to answer the question if there still a place of laparoscopy in the diagnosis of ascites of obscure etiology?. Methods: We prospectively evaluated patients with undiagnosed exudative ascites seen in the internal medicine and general surgery departments in Sohag university hospital, Sohag, Egypt in the period from September 2014 till November 2016. Results: 32 patients were included in our study; 30 females(93.75%) and 2 males (6.25%) with a mean age of (range from 16 to 68 years. All patients were referred to surgery department due to ascites of obscure origin. No mortality was registered in this study; all patients were discharged from hospital the 2nd day after laparoscopy andreturned to their home activity. The final pathological diagnosis after examination of ascetic fluid and biopsies that weretaken by laparoscopy were carcinomatosis peritoneii in 24 (75%), tuberculous peritonitis in 6 (18.75%) and liver cirrhosis in 2 cases (6.25%). Conclusion: Despite great advances in noninvasive diagnostic imaging techniques; diagnostic laparoscopy is stilla valuable option for diagnosis of ascites of obscure etiology.


Background and Purpose: With the increase in the percentage of the population in older adulthood, issues such as frailty syndrome need to be considered. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the ability of the Balance Evaluation Systems Test (BESTest) and center of pressure (COP) in their ability to discriminate between nonfrail, prefrail, and frail older adults. The proposed hypothesis is that frail older adults would show poorer performance in BESTest tasks and higher oscillation of COP on a force platform. Methods: Sixty older adults 65 years or older were divided into 3 groups of 20: group 1, nonfrail; group 2, prefrail; and group 3, frail. The prefrail and frail identifications were made by Fried's 5 frailty phenotype criteria. Balance was assessed using the BESTest and a force platform in 6 positions: (1) fixed platform with eyes open; (2) fixed platform with eyes closed; (3) unstable platform with foam, with eyes open; (4) unstable platform, with eyes closed; (5) semitandem with eyes open; and (6) semitandem with eyes closed. Results: Frail older adults had lower scores in all sections and in the total score of the BESTest, indicating worse performance in the tasks. However, on the force platform, the frail older adults did not show higher oscillations, having similar mean values when compared with the prefrail and nonfrail older adults, indicating similar behavior of COP. Conclusion: The BESTest seems to be more appropriate than a force plate for assessing postural control impairment and discriminating balance performance among frail, prefrail, and nonfrail older adults, providing information about different components of postural control rather than the force plate, which evaluates sensory orientation.


Background: Rickets is recognized for centuries and is due to defective mineralization of the growth plate in growing children. Nutritional vitamin D deficiency rickets remains the most prevalent cause worldwide. This study was carried out with the objectives to assess the prevalence, clinical presentation and predisposing factors of rickets in children of Swat District.
 Material & Methods: This cross-sectional descriptive study was conducted in Department of Child health, Saidu Teaching Hospital, Swat from December 2009 to December 2010. Children presenting with signs and symptoms of rickets from newborns to fifteen years of age were included in the study. Patients with hepatic and renal diseases or on anticonvulsant medicines were excluded from the study. Provisional diagnosis was made after taking detailed history including predisposing factors and a through examination and the findings were entered to pre planed proforma.
 Results: Fifty children with rickets were included. These patients presented as recurrent lower respiratory infections in 30(60%), delay in motor mile stone in 12(24%), convulsions in 10(20%) and recurrent diarrhea in 8(16%) children. On clinical examination skeletal changes were present in 45(90%) and radiological signs 40(80%) children. In all cases healing took place after vitamin D supplementation. The main predisposing factors were lack of awareness about sun exposure, malnourishment and antenatal factors.
 Conclusion: Rickets is common in district swat presenting with different signs and symptoms predisposing the childhood population to different illnesses and skeletal deformities.


Study Design. A retrospective radiographic study was conducted to analyze 50 consecutive adolescents with thoracolumbar–lumbar scoliosis treated with single solid-rod anterior instrumentation and either rib strut or morsellized interbody bone grafting technique. Objectives. To evaluate the effect of grafting technique on the maintenance of coronal and sagittal plane correction and alignment and the incidence of pseudarthrosis. Summary of Background Data. Loss of scoliosis correction and progressive kyphosis in the instrumented segment associated with radiographic pseudarthrosis have historically been disadvantages of the anterior technique used to correct thoracolumbar–lumbar scoliosis. Methods. All the patients underwent anterior discectomy, spinal fusion, and correction with Texas Scottish Rite Hospital instrumentation, with rib strut grafts used in 18 patients to "prop open" disc spaces below L1 and simple morsellized bone graft used in 32 patients. Most of the patients were instrumented from T11–L3 or T10–L2. Maintenance of coronal and sagittal plane correction and alignment was determined from the preoperative, immediate postoperative, and final follow-up radiographs. Results. Scoliosis correction was 72% immediately after surgery, but with an average 6° loss of correction, it was 61% at follow-up evaluation. Final correction of apical vertebral translation was 69%, and trunk shift was 86%. Ten patients lost more than 10° of scoliosis correction. In the sagittal plane, the instrumented segment was corrected initially from a mean of 3° kyphosis to −1° lordosis, but then had settled to 7° kyphosis at follow-up evaluation. Progressive kyphosis exceeding 10° in the instrumented segment was found in 19 patients. The technique of grafting had no effect on the maintenance of correction or sagittal alignment. Rib strut grafting did demonstrate a decreased incidence of pseudarthrosis, as compared with morsellized grafting (P = 0.029). Not unexpectedly, patients with pseudarthrosis had an in-creased incidence of correction loss, progressive kyphosis in the instrumented segment, instrumentation failure, and revision surgery, which was required in three cases. Conclusions. Although the rib strut grafting technique improves the pseudarthrosis rate, as compared with morsellized graft, it did not affect the maintenance of correction or sagittal alignment. Adjunctive measures to provide truly structural interbody support (fusion cages, allograft rings, two-rod construct) appear to be required to address the shortcomings of anterior single-rod instrumentation.


Police officers' threat perception of static images was examined using images reflecting the range of five threat categories on which police officers are trained. Thirteen experienced officers from a police departments in the southeastern United States participated in this study. Officers rated their perceived threat level for 110 images that were presented to them on a laptop computer. Each of these images was rated twice by each officer. Officers used all five categories to rate the stimuli, and their responses to the extremes (images rated as 1 or 5) were faster than responses to more ambiguous stimuli in the other categories. These results were generally consistent with predictions based on Fuzzy Signal Detection Theory. Further studies will evaluate performance with these images in the context of a signal detection task. Once fully developed, this tool could be used to evaluate new recruits' decision-making process before given the green light to carry a badge. These assessments could also be used as a modified training tool for experienced officers if the stimuli were to be placed in a semiimmersive environment.


The final thesis is in two sections: Section I is a work of Creative Writing comprising a novel entitled Sunnyland; Section II is a self-reflective commentary on the writing of the novel which explores some of its formal decisions and attempts to place Sunnyland within a contemporary context.

Section I
Sunnyland – a novel:
The basic conceit of the novel is that of a son constructing his
estranged father's biography from the latter's journal fragments, letters, unfinished stories, etc. The novel's apparent protagonist, Jons, initially bewildered by the multiple accounts of places and events described in his father's papers, becomes seduced by the potential for spatial limitlessness that they seem to provide. His sense of delimited space becomes increasingly "oceanic", exemplified by the obsessive reconstruction of a "driftwood ship". As the novel progresses the oceanic gives way to a psychosis of gyrating voices, in which the question becomes: who is narrating who?
A quasi-autobiographical prologue appears to link the "real" author with the story that follows. Like the main body of the novel, the prologue takes actual memories of places and events and slews them into an invented narrative in a process that involves a kind of cut-up technique of past notes and diaries, which in fact echoes Jons' own attempted reconstruction of his father's life.

Section II
Critical Commentary:
A reflective self-commentary is offered on the main formal and experimental decisions made in the writing of my novel Sunnyland. These will be set within the context of a range of innovative contemporary fiction, considering in particular the authors W. G. Sebald, Tom McCarthy, Ali Smith, David Shields, Deborah Levy and Gabriel Josipovici.
In this study I have considered a range of authors who I believe are particularly illuminating in their exploration of new emerging representations of subjectivity within the novel over the last two decades. The inclusion of their writing here is to acknowledge a view of self and subjectivity that sits within the humanist/post-humanist debate regarding the status of the individual, and the challenge to conventional notions of realism and selfhood which their work enacts.
The preface, placed at the beginning of Section I, properly begins the critical commentary, providing an insight to my initial critical motivations for embarking on the novel. This is followed in Section II by an introduction which will delimit a contemporary context. Observations and comparisons between the above texts and my own will be given in the main body of the work.
Finally, I offer a conclusion in which I evaluate the success of the novel and reflect upon possible revisions.


Objective: To model the long-term risks and benefits of natalizumab in individuals with relapsing multiple sclerosis (MS). Methods: We created a Markov model to evaluate treatment effects on reducing relapses and slowing disease progression using published natural history data and clinical trial results. Health changes, measured in quality-adjusted life-years (QALYs), were based on patient health preferences. Patient cohorts treated with no disease-modifying treatment, natalizumab, subcutaneous interferon β-1a, and a theoretical "perfect" MS treatment were modeled. Sensitivity analysis was used to explore model uncertainty, including varying risks of developing progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML). Results: Treatment with natalizumab resulted in 9.50 QALYs over a 20-year time horizon, a gain of 0.80 QALYs over the untreated cohort and 0.38 QALYs over interferon β-1a. The health loss due to PML was small (−0.06 QALYs). To offset natalizumab's incremental health gain over interferon β-1a, the risk had to increase from 1 to 7.6 PML per 1,000 patients treated over 17.9 months. The "perfect" MS treatment accumulated 10.59 QALYs over the 20-year time horizon, 1.89 QALYs above the untreated cohort. Interferon β-1a resulted in greater QALY gains compared with natalizumab if natalizumab's relative relapse reduction was reduced from 68% to 35% or if interferon β-1a's relative reduction was increased from 32% to 65%. Conclusions: A more than sevenfold increase in actual risk of progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy was required to decrease natalizumab's health gain below that of interferon β-1a, and there remains considerable room for additional gains in health (>50%) beyond those already achieved with current therapies.


Infrastructure and Society is the fruit of more than a decade of systematic research. Pending the field of social security and social logistics, located at the border of cultural anthropology, the work is paving the way in the frontier of sociology of infrastructure. From a theoretical point of view, the quasi-absolute novelty of the work consists in the fact that the source of social solidarity is the infrastructure itself, which, in turn, before being material, is symbolic. Dr. Ovidiana Bulumac easily operates in the theoretical field, constituting interesting syntheses, with great explanatory power, such as the Kennan-Eminescu paradox, or the innovative operation in the space of social logistics with the thesis of the Romanian dimension of existence, of Mircea Vulcănescu, over which he places his theories Ernest Bernea on the symbolic functions of place, in order to arrive at the system of the mechanisms of backwardness that belong to Hirschman through the negative "linkages", etc. Last but not least, carrying forward the thesis of Dimitrie Gusti's cultural personality, of Rădulescu Motru's energetic personalism, the author crystallizes a new theory, that of the role of personality in the community infrastructure, which she illustrates through the brilliant personality of the young Dumitru Brezulescu. Novaci-Gorj, the one who laid the foundations of the strongest public peasant bank, "Gilortul", at the beginning of the 20th century. Thus, within the paradigm of forms without substance, the author operationalizes a new theory, that of the infrastructure function of the symbol, and a new methodology – that of mental cartography.


Main task of an SHM system on a wind turbine is to detect defective developments at an early stage on all load-bearing components such as rotor blades or tower. This prevents damage and allows repair measures to be planned in time. But a vibrationbased SHM system can do much more! For example it can be used to detect incorrect pitch angle settings or imbalances and to monitor the loads acting on the system. Of course, additional sensors and algorithms are required for such additional functions of an SHM-System. The lecture reports on several years of experiments on a commercially operated wind turbine Nordex N117 with 2.4 MW nominal power provided with more than 100 additional sensors. This turbine is used as a research system. In detail, all 3 rotor blades were equipped with accelerometers, strain gauges, FBGs and gyroscopes. The nacelle was instrumented with temperature, acceleration and speed sensors at the fast shaft and the tower and foundation were provided with strain gauges and inclination sensors. For population monitoring, a wind farm with 8 turbines of the same type N117, also with a rated output of 2.4 MW per turbine, was used. However, no additional sensors were installed on these wind turbines. Instead, the existing ice detection system IDD.Blade®, which is also based on acceleration measurements, was used. In addition, the SCADA data was analyzed. For the tests concerning mass imbalance, additional weights were fixed to the rotor blade, for the tests concerning aerodynamic imbalance, the pitch angles were shifted manually. For all other developments, the time-synchronous data recorded over several months was analyzed. The necessary algorithms for automated data analysis could be developed on the basis of the tests and the long-term measurement data. In addition, the dynamics of the wind turbines was investigated with simulations.


What happens when a person's common-sense view of justice diverges from the sense of justice he or she sees enshrined in particular laws? In particular, does the perception of one particular law as unjust make an individual less likely to comply with unrelated laws? This Article advances the Flouting Thesis - the idea that the perceived legitimacy of one law or legal outcome can influence one's willingness to comply with unrelated laws - and provides original experimental evidence to support this thesis. The results suggest that willingness to disobey the law can extend far beyond the particular unjust law in question, to willingness to flout unrelated laws commonly encountered in everyday life (such as traffic violations, petty theft, and copyright restrictions), as well as willingness of mock jurors to engage in juror nullification. Finally, this Article explores the relationship between perceived injustice and flouting and offers several possible explanations, including the role of law in American popular culture and the expressive function of the law in producing compliance.


This fascinating, detailed book provides a sweeping survey of the hats produced by the company whose name is synonymous with cowboys and the Wild West. Surprisingly, though, the John B. Stetson Company was based in Philadelphia and produced all manner of headwear. Over 500 illustrations display never-before-worn Stetson hats (men's and women's alike), hat boxes, miniature boxes, and a surprisingly large number of collectible items associated with this most famous hat company. Original research charts the development of of the company, and individuals closely related with the firm provide their memories. Hat styles from the mid-nineteenth century to the late twentieth get a review, and for those lucky enough to own one of these valuable collectibles, there are tips on how to wear and care for vintage and modern Stetsons. Values for the hats illustrated, an extensive bibliography, and an index are included.


The effects of added summer rainfall on agricultural areas in Illinois and the Midwest were investigated by using a quasi-distributed-parameter watershed model. Increases in summer convective rainfall during July-August were simulated and used in the model to describe the changes in soil moisture, crop water use, shallow ground water, and streamflow conditions which could potentially result from precipitation augmentation practices. Two periods, representing very dry and very wet conditions, were used in the simulations with 10% to 25% precipitation increases. Results suggest that the greatest proportion of additional summer rainfall eventually percolates into groundwater, and that less than 25% percent of the precipitation increase is used by the crops. Simulated increases in summer rainfall offer limited utility in reducing crop water stress because the rainfall events do not always coincide with the period of greatest crop water need. Methods, such as irrigation, which provide additional water at a specified time and amount produce significant benefits to the plants.


Apologies by political leaders to the citizens of a victimized country have attracted attention in recent years as a means of improving relations between nations. Existing studies have identified several elements that make such an apology effective, but from the politician's point of view, it is difficult to issue a statement containing all these elements, and they must then be chosen while considering domestic backlash and relations with countries other than the victimized one. However, it is not sufficiently clear how the victimized country's citizens weigh the elements of the apology when they accept it and how the nature of the harm caused changes this. Therefore, we conducted a survey experiment in Japan, adopting a conjoint design using scenarios depicting fictional US presidential apologies to Japan. Our experiment demonstrated three attributes particularly regarded as important in determining whether people would accept an apology: the reparation amount, whether the apology was official (formality), and the voluntariness of the apology. However, when something that people consider "sacred" has been harmed, reparation proposals are counterproductive, and the optimal apology form may depend on the nature of the harm.


By the age of 1 year toddlers demonstrate distinct coping habits for dealing with frustration. However, these habits may be open to change and reorganization at subsequent developmental junctures. We investigated change in coping habits at 18-20 months, a normative age for major advances in social cognition, focusing on the dynamic systems principles of fluctuation and novelty at transitions. Specifically, we asked whether month-to-month fluctuation, novel behavioral habits and real-time variability increased at the age of a normative transition, despite individual differences in the content of behavior. Infants were given frustrating toys while their mothers sat nearby without helping, on monthly visits at 14-25 months (before, during and after the hypothesized transition). State space grids representing patterns of behavioral durations were constructed for each episode and compared over age. As predicted, month-to-month fluctuation in grid patterns increased temporarily between 17 and 20 months, partly independently of a concurrent peak in distress, and new behavioral habits replaced old ones at the same age. Coping habits changed differently for high-and low-distressed toddlers. However, changes in real-time variability did not generally meet our expectations.


Detectability of failures of linear programming (LP) decoding and the potential for improvement by adding new constraints motivate the use of an adaptive approach in selecting the constraints for the underlying LP problem. In this paper, we make a first step in studying this method, and show that by starting from a simple LP problem and adaptively adding the necessary constraints, the complexity of LP decoding can be significantly reduced. In particular, we observe that with adaptive LP decoding, the sizes of the LP problems that need to be solved become practically independent of the density of the parity-check matrix. We further show that adaptively adding extra constraints, such as constraints based on redundant parity checks, can provide large gains in the performance.


As has been made evident by a plethora of research on the environmental histories of territories within the Indian Ocean World (IOW), the exploitation and commodification of natural and human environments that was introduced by European imperialists in the colonial era has contributed significantly to the destabilization of local ecologies. By presenting a comparative analysis of two natural monsoon-based wetlands in the IOW – the Mekong Delta in Southern Vietnam, and the Zambezi Delta of Northern and Central Mozambique –  this article contends that imperial strategies of wetland development and models of hydraulics control have contributed significantly to modern and post-modern wetland degradation and unsustainability. It will demonstrate how the replacement of colonial management with that of centralized governmental control within both Vietnam and Mozambique continues to aggravate this environmental crisis due to their respective tendencies to prioritize economic profit over environmental necessities. The destabilization of these natural wetland environments over the past two centuries has contributed to increases in various undesirable consequences: food insecurity, disease, ecological species endangerment, irregularities in rainfall, intense fluctuations of seasonal monsoons and El Nino South Oscillation (ENSO), as well as dangerous vacillations between periods of drought and flooding. As climate change continues to disrupt our natural world, and as local governments continue to favour short-term economic initiatives that disregard environmental repercussions, IOW wetlands and the valuable ecosystems within them risk becoming obsolete.


Compared with the aggressive factors, little attention has been paid to the mucosal defensive factors in ulcer therapy, and the role of the H2-receptor antagonists in gastric mucosal protection has not been well characterized. In the present study, the effects of different types of H2-receptor antagonists (famotidine and roxatidine) on rat gastric mucus cells were investigated using both biochemical and histological methods. Each drug (famotidine, 3 mg/kg; roxatidine, 100 mg/kg) was orally administered to rats by gavage once daily for 7 days. The biosynthesis and tissue content of mucin were compared in the gastric mucosa treated with each drug. Using anti-mucin monoclonal antibodies, the mucin content and immunohistochemical localization were also compared. Both the biosynthesis and the accumulation of gastric mucin were significantly decreased in the famotidine-treated rats, but not in the roxatidine. Both the content and the immunoreactivity of surface mucus cell-derived mucin were reduced by famotidine, while they were maintained in roxatidine-treated rat stomachs. There was no difference between the groups in the content and immunoreactivity of mucous neck cell-derived mucin. H2-receptor antagonists should be classified in relation to gastric surface mucus cell function, raising the possibility of more effective ulcer therapy.


Contextual word embeddings such as BERT have achieved state of the art performance in numerous NLP tasks. Since they are optimized to capture the statistical properties of training data, they tend to pick up on and amplify social stereotypes present in the data as well. In this study, we (1) propose a template-based method to quantify bias in BERT; (2) show that this method obtains more consistent results in capturing social biases than the traditional cosine based method; and (3) conduct a case study, evaluating gender bias in a downstream task of Gender Pronoun Resolution. Although our case study focuses on gender bias, the proposed technique is generalizable to unveiling other biases, including in multiclass settings, such as racial and religious biases.


For the first time, lifetime measurements of the excited states in 175Au, 174Pt and 175Pt have been measured using the recoil-decay tagging technique in recoil distance Doppler-shift measurements. These states were populated by a fusion-evaporation reaction using a 92Mo target and a 401 MeV 86Sr16+ beam. This work was carried out at the Accelerator laboratory of the University of Jyvaskyla, Finland, where a plunger device has been coupled to the JUROGAM detector array and the RITU gasfilled separator. The present study addresses the phenomenon of shape coexistence in neutron deficient nuclei below the Z = 82 closed shell. Lifetimes of the low-lying excited states in the very neutron-deficient nucleus 175Au have been measured. Transitional quadrupole moments and reduced transition probabilities extracted for this odd-Z nucleus provide evidence for the existence of three distinct shapes and indicate the transition between collective and non collective structures. These measurements constitute the first deformation measurements of triple shape coexistence in a heavy odd-Z nucleus. The results are compared to the available lifetime measurements for Hg and Tl nuclei. A lifetime of the 6+ yrast state in 174Pt has been measured using recoil-decay tagged γ-ray spectra. In addition, lifetimes of the 17/2+ and 21/2+ yrast states in 175Pt have been measured using recoil-gated γγ-coincidence spectra. Transitional quadrupole moments and deformation parameters extracted for these nuclei provide information on the change in nuclear shape resulting from the mixing of different shaped configurations at low spin. The results are compared to TRS calculations produced for neutron deficient Pt nuclei below the neutron N = 104 mid-shell.


The potential impact of sound on marine life is one of the most important environmental issues faced by the oil and gas industry, which must be managed to avoid business impacts. Over recent years, there has been an expansion in regulatory and societal focus regarding sound sources, species of concern and categories of impacts of marine sound. Initially, the main concern was possible injury of marine mammals thought to be caused by seismic surveys.
Now, impacts of other sound sources, such as drilling, vessel movement, pile driving, etc. are considered and are increasingly
regulated. Additionally, there is growing concern over potential impacts on turtles, fish, fisheries, invertebrates (e.g. lobster and scallops), and more recently even fish eggs and plankton.
Marine life impacts of concern include not only injury, but also consider behavioural responses, disturbance and masking. These changes in focus areas by regulators, scientists and societal organisations increasingly outpace the best available science, often resulting in the application of the precautionary principle. Concerns over the impact of sound on marine life can impact E&P operations in different ways, e.g. closure and restrictive access to offshore areas, stakeholder concern and reputational issues, increased permitting and risk assessment requirements and operational cost. The issue and development of possible solutions was initially more complex because some impacts of sound on marine life were not sufficiently well understood. Over the years, the industry, through the academic community, has filled many data gaps and reduced the uncertainty in potential impacts. One important contributor to the science required to understand the potential impacts of sound on marine life is the E&P Sound & Marine Life Joint Industry Programme (SML JIP).


THE BEHAVIOURAL CONTRACT:—
A neo-piagetian view of the collaboration between individuals
and their environments based on the form and synchrony
between an EEG cognitive competence profile and cognitive
performance profiles.
This paper adopts a competence-performance view of
cognitive development (Flavell and Wohlwill 1969; Fischer
1980; Bertenthal, cited Fischer 1981; Bullock, cited Fischer
1981; Fischer and Silvern 1985) where cognitive competence
reflects the structure of the individuals' minds and
cognitive performance is a variable derived from a
collaboration between individuals and their environments
(Fischer and Bullock 1984). It is hypothesised that
cognitive performance profiles reflect the cognitive
competence component of the collaboration when the learning
environment is manipulated to induce an individual's best
performance.
It is argued that EEG data suggests the location of
powerful alpha wave generators located in the
occipital-parietal region of the brain. Energy from these
appear to be an adequate index of cognitive competence.
Cross-sectional EEG data (Matousek and Petersen 1973) and
other neuro-physiological data are interpreted in terms of a
discontinuous function of the natural logarithm of age, which
maps skill levels defined by Fischer (1980) and presents as a
normative profile of cognitive development.
Patterns of cognitive performances extracted from the
developmental literature provide evidence of profiles of
similar form and synchrony to that derived
neuro-physiologically and this supports the hypothesis. Educational considerations implicit in the
developmental profile suggests a view that decrements in
cognitive performance can be predicted to occur throughout
cognitive development. These should be considered as
corresponding to periods of structural reorganization within
the brain. The outcome of which is a more effective level of
cognitive competence which increases that components ability
to act in future collaborations with the environment, so
increasing the expectation of the quality of cognitive
performance outcomes.
It is suggested that while SOLO levels (Biggs and
Collis 1982) confound Skill Theory levels the SOLO taxonomy
provides an appropriate and relatively simple technique for
evaluating qualitative changes in performance. First, in
establishing that a new level of competence is attained, and
secondly, in observing any environmentally induced decline
from optimal performance.


Open-vocabulary detection (OVD) is an object detection task aiming at detecting objects from novel categories beyond the base categories on which the detector is trained. Recent OVD methods rely on large-scale visual-language pre-trained models, such as CLIP, for recognizing novel objects. We identify the two core obstacles that need to be tackled when incorporating these models into detector training: (1) the distribution mismatch that happens when applying a VL-model trained on whole images to region recognition tasks; (2) the difficulty of localizing objects of unseen classes. To overcome these obstacles, we propose CORA, a DETR-style framework that adapts CLIP for Open-vocabulary detection by Region prompting and Anchor pre-matching. Region prompting mitigates the whole-to-region distribution gap by prompting the region features of the CLIP-based region classifier. Anchor pre-matching helps learning generalizable object localization by a class-aware matching mechanism. We evaluate CORA on the COCO OVD benchmark, where we achieve 41.7 AP50 on novel classes, which outperforms the previous SOTA by 2.4 AP50 even without resorting to extra training data. When extra training data is available, we train CORA+ on both ground-truth base-category annotations and additional pseudo bounding box labels computed by CORA. CORA+ achieves 43.1 AP50 on the COCO OVD benchmark and 28.1 box APr on the LVIS OVD benchmark. The code is available at https://github.com/tgxs002/CORA.


The aim of this study was to evaluate fertilization rate of Merino sheep frozen semen that processed by using two kind of diluter egg yolk tris (P1) and egg yolk tris (P2). Merino sheep semen was taken by using artificial vagina than divided by two treatments. One part was diluted with egg yolk tris and the other with egg yolk skim. Fertilization rate was evaluated by In Vitro Fertilization (IVF) methode. Data was analized by using t-test. The result showed that there was no significance difference between two treatments (P>0,05). This study conclude that either egg yolk tris or egg yolk skim can be used as a diluter for frozen semen processing of Merino sheep. Both of them can produce almost equal fertilization rate.


Equestrianism is part of a global industry influenced by a rich history of over 4000 years of culture and tradition. As the only interspecies Olympic event, equestrianism is facing negative public perceptions of competition performance and traditional coaching practices. In this position paper, we propose a constraints-led approach as a framework for contemporising equestrian coaching practice. Ecological dynamics is the theoretical framework that underpins a constraints-led approach methodology, providing guiding principles that inform a nonlinear pedagogy in sport and physical education. A constraints-led approach focuses on the individual (organism/s), task and environmental constraints acting over multiple nested timescales and what this means for how behaviour emerges. Using examples from the equestrian discipline of showjumping, we outline how a constraints-led approach can inform coaching behaviour and practice design to support skill acquisition through co-adaptations in the horse-rider dyad system. By focussing on the horse-rider dyad as a complex system, there is a move away from a human-centric perspective of compliance and control of the horse, toward system agency and intentionality in problem solving. Practice design principles of intention, representativeness, constraints manipulation and functional variability support the dyad to co-adapt and interact effectively through practice to achieve performance goals. Skilful performance is developed through attunement to perceptual information that invites opportunities for action (affordances). Understanding the development of affordance perception in the horse-rider dyad could guide the application of a constraints-led approach to equestrian coaching practice.


In the above article [Chaudhry AS, Thirumaran RK, Yasuda K, Yang X, Fan Y, Strom SC, and Schuetz EG (2013) Drug Metab Dispos 41:1538–1547; doi:10.1124/dmd.113.051672], the funding information is missing. The correct funding information is shown below: This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health National Institute of General Medical Sciences grants [R01GM094418] and [U01GM092666]; NCI Cancer Center Support grant P30 CA21765; and by the American Lebanese Syrian Associated Charities. The online versions of this article have been corrected. The author regrets this error and any inconvenience it may have caused.


OBJECTIVES
Extent of surgical repair of spontaneous esophageal effort rupture (Boerhaave syndrome) has gradually decreased by the emergence of minimal invasive treatment based on endoscopic stent sealing of the perforation. However, for this diagnosis, use of endoscopic vacuum therapy (EVT) is still in its beginning. We present our results after 7-years with both stent and/or EVT-based treatment.

MATERIALS AND METHODS
17 consecutive patients with Boerhaave syndrome from June 2015 to May 2022 were retrospectively registered in a database. The perforation was sealed by stent and/or EVT, and gastric effluent was drained transthoracically by a chest tube or pigtail catheter. Eight out of 14 patients responded to questions on fatigue and dysphagia (Ogilvie's score).

RESULTS
Seventeen patients aged median 67 years (range 34-88), had a primary hospital stay of 38 days (7-68). Ninety-day mortality was 6% (n = 1). Perforations were sealed with stent (n = 10), EVT (n = 3) or stent and EVT (n = 4). One patient (6%) needed laparoscopic lavage and transhiatal drainage. Eight patients (47%) were re-stented due to persistent leakage (n = 4) and stent migration (n = 4). Fifteen patients (88%) had complications, including multi-organ failure (n = 9), pleural empyema (n = 8) and esophageal stricture (n = 3). The perforations healed. After 35.5 months (range 2-62) fourteen patients were alive. Eight that responded had no dysphagia and total fatigue score comparable to an age-matched reference population.

CONCLUSION
Mortality rate was low after initial stent and EVT-based treatment of Boerhaave syndrome, combined with adequate transthoracic drainage of gastric effluent. Patients required repeated minimal invasive procedures, but with no apparent negative effect on functional outcome.


The traditional floating point arithmetic of scientific computers is biased towards fast and easy production of numerical results without enough provision to enable the programmer to control and solve problems connected with numerical accuracy and cumulative round-off errors. The author suggests the varying length floating point arithmetic as a general purpose solution for most of these problems. Some general philosophies are outlined for applications of this feature in numerical analysis. The idea is analyzed further discussing hardware and software implementations.


This study aimed to use a range of non-invasive monitoring technologies to investigate the behavioural and physiological responses of individually housed dairy calves to age at change in milk replacer (MR) feeding frequency. Forty-eight Holstein Friesian calves were individually penned and fed MR (625 g/d) as solids in one of three feeding regimes: (i) once-a-day feeding commencing at age 14 d (OAD14), (ii) once-a-day feeding commencing at age 28 d (OAD28) and (iii) twice-a-day feeding (TAD). Several behavioural (automatic activity sensors), physiological (infrared [IR] thermography and heart rate variability [HRV]) and haematological indicators were used to examine calf responses. Reduction in milk feeding frequency at 14 or 28 d of age increased daily concentrate intakes and drinking water consumption throughout the pre-wean period. Calf lying behaviour was unaffected by reduction in milk feeding frequency; however, TAD calves recorded a significant decrease in total daily lying time during the post-wean period compared with OAD28s. There was no effect of treatment on IR eye or rectal temperature throughout the experiment; however, there was an effect of age, with IR temperature decreasing as calf age increased. OAD14 calves tended to have decreased HRV at days 14 and 16, which is suggestive of an increased stress load. The findings suggest that under high levels of animal husbandry and whilst maintaining the same amount of milk powder/d (625 g/d), reduction in milk feeding frequency from twice to once daily at 28 d can occur without significant impact to behavioural, performance and physiological parameters assessed here.


The increase in palm oil production for food and products has raised major concerns on greenhouse gas (GHG) emission. Studies have shown that agricultural and plantation acreage are one of the biggest contributors to the total global GHG emission, accounting for 17%. This is alarming for Malaysia's reputation as the second largest palm oil producer, which currently contributes 39% of world palm oil production and 44% of world exports. While most studies have focused on the GHG emission from palm oil mill effluent (POME) and GHG emission from oil palm peat, little attention is given to GHG emission arising from operation during oil palm planting production activities. Hence, this paper aims to measure the impact of energy use on GHG emission of these two palm oil-related activities. In this study, we develop an extended Input-Output Table by introducing two vectors: (i) sectoral energy consumption in unit of energy (ktoe) and (ii) sectoral carbon emissions that are estimated separately. From a policy perspective, this paper will provide answers to critical and policy-relevant questions such as climate change mitigation action through the reduction of GHG emissions for sustainable palm oil production.


We developed a new method to improve the accuracy of molecular interaction data using a protein-compound affinity matrix calculated by protein-compound docking software. We approximated the protein-compound binding free energy as a linear combination of the raw docking scores of the compound with many different proteins. The coefficients of the linear combination were estimated based on the amino-acid sequence similarities among proteins. This method was applied to in silico screening of the active compounds of five target proteins using multiple target screening, and it increased the hit ratio by several times compared to that given by the raw docking scores. The hit ratio also becomes robust against the difference of target proteins. In addition, we have developed some methods based on a protein-compound affinity matrix. When some active compounds were known, a consensus score, which combines the structure-based and ligand-based screening results, was applied to a target. Finally, we could achieve a high hit ratio for some targets by using a combination of screening methods.


Abstract:  Black chokeberry (Aronia melanocarpa) is a distinctive berry with a high content of polyphenol compounds and possesses one of the highest in vitro antioxidant activities among fruits. The bioavailability of aronia polyphenols seems to be low, but there is ample evidence for chokeberry health benefits including antidiabetic, cardioprotective, hepatoprotective, antimutagenic, and anticarcinogenic effects. This review presents the available information for the bioavailability and antioxidant activity of chokeberry polyphenols and explains the possible mechanisms of action in vivo in the prevention and treatment of oxidative stress-related diseases. The review shows the available data for chokeberry antioxidant activity in vitro, in isolated cells and cell lines, and in vivo, in both human subjects and animals. It is evident that in vivo antioxidant action of chokeberry extends far beyond radical scavenging and includes suppression of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species formation, inhibition of prooxidant enzymes, restoration of antioxidant enzymes, and probably cellular signaling to regulate the level of antioxidant compounds and enzymes. The original contribution of this work is that it compiles the available information up to date and outlines the gaps and future directions in the assessment of chokeberry antioxidant action in vivo.


The theory and practice of the radical community, and a capacity for self-organisation, demonstrates the ability to control the symbols and language of society, to define new conventions of meaning, and to offer alternative reasons and explanations for action. However, the predominant sociological account of Italian social movements of the 1960s and 1970s censures potentially relevant discursive practices of the radical community. This is evidenced by the lack of diversity amongst the epistemic sources of Anglo American Social Movement Theory (SMT). The assumptions in play in disciplinary thought disqualify the practice and theory of radical social movements as a credible mode of analysis of the social and political condition. Ultimately, this discounts the radical subject as knowledge producer. By reflecting on my personal experience of conducting doctoral research at three key community archives in Italy I contemplate an alternative approach, which considers the valence of these radical communities as essentially epistemological and not simply 'political', or social.


Previous research on insurer cost of equity (COE) focuses on single‐period asset pricing models. In reality, however, investment and consumption decisions are made over multiple periods, exposing firms to time‐varying risks related to economic cycles and market volatility. We extend the literature by examining two multiperiod models—the conditional capital asset pricing model (CCAPM) and the intertemporal CAPM (ICAPM). Using 29 years of data, we find that macroeconomic factors significantly influence and explain insurer stock returns. Insurers have countercyclical beta, implying that their market risk increases during recessions. Further, insurers are sensitive to volatility risk (the risk of losses when volatility goes up), but not to insurance‐specific risks, financial industry risks, liquidity risk, or coskewness after controlling for other economy‐wide factors.


This paper presents the development of a novel real-time operating environment for networked control systems (NCSs). An open-loop unstable magnetic-levitation (maglev) test bed was constructed and used to develop an NCS with real-time application interface (RTAI). A client-server architecture on a local-area network was developed with the network communication based on the user datagram protocol. The control loop of our NCS is closed over the network. This NCS structure gives the best flexibility and has significant economical merits. The implementation of an event-driven server and a time-driven client presented in this paper facilitates a simple timing scheme that does not require clock synchronization between the client and the server. A novel prediction scheme with a multiple-step-ahead control-signal generator is used to maintain system stability in the presence of excessive time delays and data-packet losses in the communication network. The performance of this NCS, based on the predictor algorithm, is demonstrated experimentally. The current system can compensate for up to 20% data-packet losses without losing stability with the maglev real-time-control test bed in the communication network. Our real-time operating environment also improved the command-following capability by a factor of 4 in terms of command frequency. Note to Practitioners- With the advancement in the automation industry, the need to perform complex remote operations has grown. Ever-increasing computational capabilities and advancements in the networking technology have aided researchers to develop architectures to implement control from a distance. In large-scale control applications of the modern industry, the functional agents, such as sensors, actuators, and controllers are geographically distributed. For smooth working of a control application, all of the agents have to exchange information through communication media. The results of this paper can help to design practical real-time networked control systems in modern industry.


Complex manipulation tasks often require non-trivial and coordinated movements of different parts of a robot. In this work, we address the challenges associated with learning and reproducing the skills required to execute such complex tasks. Specifically, we decompose a task into multiple subtasks and learn to reproduce the subtasks by learning stable policies from demonstrations. By leveraging the RMPflow framework for motion generation, our approach finds a stable global policy in the configuration space that enables simultaneous execution of various learned subtasks. The resulting global policy is a weighted combination of the learned policies such that the motions are coordinated and feasible under the robot's kinematic and environmental constraints. We demonstrate the necessity and efficacy of the proposed approach in the context of multiple constrained manipulation tasks performed by a Franka Emika robot.


The wind speed studies have been carried out to find the efficient utilization of wind energy as alternative resource in east Malaysia. The main objective of this thesis is
to evaluate wind energy potential based on measured data obtained from the Malaysia Meteorological Service in Kuching, Sarawak and Kota Kinabalu, Sabah. The wind data from 1990 to 2009 was analysed to determine the mean wind speed and direction in Kota Kinabalu. The wind direction was presented using wind rose scale. The Weibull density function has been used to estimate the wind energy potential. The comparison of wind speed and direction between 2004 and 2009 was conducted to identify the potential of wind energy in Kuching and Kota Kinabalu. Two types of wind turbines were simulated and compared to identify their profitability for producing wind power. The results showed that 8.5 m/s was the highest mean wind
speed in Kota Kinabalu and the annual prevalent wind blows from north-west direction. Furthermore, the winds in Kuching are generally characterized by larger mean values than in Kota Kinabalu. The highest mean wind speed in both areas is
found in September which is the end of the southwest monsoon. The highest wind power densities found in September in both study areas with the values of 703 W/m² (Kota Kinabalu) and 668 W/m² (Kuching). The results of this study showed that Kuching and Kota Kinabalu are not feasible to use wind energy. This is due to high installation cost and requires large tracts of land. This study is important for
further research on wind energy where more data is needed for comparison.


Cooperative communication, which utilizes nearby terminals to relay the overhearing information to achieve the diversity gains, has a great potential to improve the transmitting efficiency in wireless networks. To deal with the complicated medium access interactions induced by relaying and leverage the benefits of such cooperation, an efficient Cooperative Medium Access Control (CMAC) protocol is needed. In this paper, we propose a novel cross-layer distributed energy-adaptive location-based CMAC protocol, namely DEL-CMAC, for Mobile Ad-hoc NETworks (MANETs). The design objective of DEL-CMAC is to improve the performance of the MANETs in terms of network lifetime and energy efficiency. A practical energy consumption model is utilized in this paper, which takes the energy consumption on both transceiver circuitry and transmit amplifier into account. A distributed utility-based best relay selection strategy is incorporated, which selects the best relay based on location information and residual energy. Furthermore, with the purpose of enhancing the spatial reuse, an innovative network allocation vector setting is provided to deal with the varying transmitting power of the source and relay terminals. We show that the proposed DEL-CMAC significantly prolongs the network lifetime under various circumstances even for high circuitry energy consumption cases by comprehensive simulation study.


OBJECTIVES
This study aims to investigate unlocked using of locked intramedullary nails in tibial shaft fractures and to compare the results to those of locked nails.

PATIENTS AND METHODS
Between December 2006 and July 2011, medical records of a total of 30 patients who underwent locked (n=15) or unlocked intramedullary nails (n=15) due to tibial shaft fracture in our clinic were retrospectively analyzed. Gender distribution, mean age, injury mechanism, location and morphology of the fracture, type of open fracture and time of discharged from hospital were similar in both groups. Radiological and functional evaluation was carried out according to Johner-Wruhs criteria.

RESULTS
Excellent and good functional results were obtained in unlocked group of all patients, while there were 11 excellent and good, four fair and poor results in locked group. Dynamization was performed on four patients in this group. It was similar in terms of union between the groups. There was no statistically significant difference in functional results.

CONCLUSION
We concluded that unlocked nailing would be taken place in practice of traumatologic surgery at appropriate cases, although primary treatment method is locked intramedullary nailing in tibial shaft fractures.


Accumulated evidence implicates immunological alterations in endometriosis. The purpose of this study was to look for variations in antibodies to distinct antigens in peritoneal fluid of women with and without endometriosis. Peritoneal fluid was aspirated from 17 women undergoing laparoscopy for tubal ligation and 37 patients complaining of symptoms of pain and/or infertility. Peritoneal fluid antibodies to a standard preparation of peritoneal fluid antigens were detected by Western blot analysis using peroxidase-labelled anti-human immunoglobulin G antibodies specific to the Fc region. Antibodies to distinct antigens were quantified by estimating the ratio of the relative optical density between samples and a standard amount of antibodies. Marked changes were found in the antibody detection to two antigens having apparent molecular weights of 22 and 18 kDa. The intensity of the antibody signal was significantly weaker in the peritoneal fluid from endometriosis patients (0.36 ± 0.06 and 0.46 ± 0.06) compared with that in women without endometriosis (0.62 ± 0.08 and 0.75 ± 0.06). It was also weaker in patients without endometriosis presenting with infertility (0.36 ± 0.07 and 0.47 ± 0.08), but only the 18 kDa antigen result was significant. After adjusting for infertility, the P values for the 18 and 22 kDa bands were 0.03 and 0.28 (not significant) respectively in the group of endometriosis patients. These changes were not related to the phase of the menstrual cycle. These data suggest an alteration in the immune response to two distinct antigens in the peritoneal fluid from women with endometriosis and infertility. Further evaluation of these two antigens and their antibodies would be of interest to help understand endometriosis and its associated infertility. Keywords: antibodies/antigens/endometriosis/peritoneal fluid/Western blot analysis