BACKGROUND
The expansion of hematopoietic stem cells carrying recurrent somatic mutations, termed clonal hematopoiesis (CH), is common in elderly individuals and associated with increased risk of myeloid malignancy and all-cause mortality. Though chemotherapy is a known risk factor for developing CH, how myelosuppressive therapies affect the short-term dynamics of CH remains incompletely understood. Most studies have been limited by retrospective design, heterogeneous patient populations, varied techniques to identifying CH, and analysis of single time points.

METHODS
We examined serial samples from 40 older females with triple-negative or hormone receptor-positive breast cancer treated on the prospective ADjuVANt Chemotherapy in the Elderly (ADVANCE) trial to evaluate the prevalence and dynamics of CH at baseline and throughout chemotherapy (6 and 12 weeks).

RESULTS
CH was detected in 44% of patients at baseline and in 53% at any timepoint. Baseline patient characteristics were not associated with CH. Over the course of treatment, mutations exhibited a variety of dynamics, including emergence, expansion, contraction, and disappearance. All mutations in TP53 (n = 3) and PPM1D (n = 4), genes that regulate the DNA damage response, either became detectable or expanded over the course of treatment. Neutropenia was more common in patients with CH, particularly when the mutations became detectable during treatment, and CH was significantly associated with cyclophosphamide dose reductions and holds (p = .02).

CONCLUSIONS
Our study shows that CH is common, dynamic, and of potential clinical significance in this population. Our results should stimulate larger efforts to understand the biological and clinical importance of CH in solid tumor malignancies.

TRIAL REGISTRATION
ClinicalTrials.gov (https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT03858322). Clinical trial registration number: NCT03858322.


The purpose of this article is to provide coaches with information on how they can benefit their athletes by becoming transformational and servant leaders while using the athlete first, winning second coaches' philosophy. Athletes are humans; therefore, many of them want a coach who will meet their human needs such as motivation, confidence, love, care, and more. 70% of athletes believe that their coaches should be open to helping them grow mentally, physically, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally and more. This article will also provide three different scenarios to provide examples on how transformational and servant leader coaches use the athlete first, winning second philosophy to cater to the needs of their athletes.


The United States' National Cohesive Wildfire Management Strategy aims to achieve greater social and ecological resilience to wildfire. It also raises the question: cohesive for whom and for what purpose? In this article, we address the wildfire response goal and what a cohesive response means. Namely, we define a cohesive response as the ability to co-manage across scales for a more effective wildfire response. Our approach is grounded in the reality of the growing complexity of wildfire – both biophysically and socio-politically. We suggest that suppression and fire operations are necessary, but insufficient in the face of this growing complexity as we seek safer and effective wildfire response. Using network-based concepts and drawing from the literature on socio-ecological resilience, we consider how scales can be matched, what can and should be communicated across scales, and what this means for creating more adaptable institutions for more effective wildfire response. Survey results from 21 fires during the 2013 wildfire season are presented to illustrate relative areas of strength and weakness related to wildfire response and how these measurements can feed into processes to facilitate social learning, adaptation and ultimately more resilient socio-ecological wildfire response institutions.


Learning and teaching a foreign language needs a lot of patience, energy, time, creativity and competence. The success of the teaching and learning of foreign language skills including English is determined by a number of factors such as students, teachers, teaching methods, techniques, and instructional Multimedia. English teaching Multimedia are very important for teacher to help students acquire new concept of the skills and language competences. English has been taught at primary level due to its important role. English teachers in this level need more knowledge about children in mastering English. It is done because children have certain characteristics that differ from adult learners. There are still many fascinating discussions that might be interesting to find out the real situation in the implementation of Multimedia in English language teaching, especially to children. This study which was conducted at Elementary School Islam Laboratorium Neuhen, Mesjid Raya is intended to figure out how the use of Multimedia in English language teaching to the first levels. The study employed case study research design. The population was 44 and the sample was taken by using nonprobability sample, convenience sampling, was an English teacher. The research problem is " how does the teacher implement Multimedia in teaching English? The data were collected by using instruments, namely: observation checklist sheets, questionnaire sheet, interview guidelines, and documentations. Based on the data analysis, it was found that the English teacher at SMP Negeri 2 Mesjid Raya used multimedia in English language teaching. There is some variable which observe by the researcher, there are: Computer, Internet, Print text, and Movie. According to the students' competencies, the teacher build up new atmosphere in teaching learning process by using pint text in reading, speaking, writing and vocabulary. The used of movie help the students in all competencies, such as reading, speaking, listening, writing and vocabulary teaching learning process. Key words: English Language, Teaching, Multimedia


Several competition law regimes around the world, including the EU and the USA, have adopted rules allowing their respective authorities to apply domestic competition law to activities occurring outside of their territory's borders. This paradigm presents a clear challenge especially to multinational corporations ("MNCs") that operate on an international scale and which consequently must concurrently adhere to the rules and regulations of several – and potentially conflicting – jurisdictions in their business operations. Moreover, competition law can be and frequently is used as a tool for furthering a single region's goals in international trade and politics. One visible avenue of doing so is by applying competition laws on an extraterritorial basis. Last, the coherence of jurisprudence itself is damaged by allowing competing legal doctrines to apply simultaneously within a single jurisdiction as they would, should a foreign nation's competition laws be applied extraterritorially. All of this effectively constitutes a barrier to trade, which hits MNCs hardest in the form of legal uncertainty, increased costs and added administrative burden. The author studies the legitimacy and breadth of extraterritorial application of competition law and discusses its main implications for MNCs as well as suggests a potential way forward in the form of increased regional cooperation between competition authorities and legislators.


OBJECTIVEThe aim of this study was to implement cumulative summation (CUSUM) analysis as an early-warning detection and quality assurance system for preclinical testing of the iSYS1 novel robotic trajectory guidance system.METHODSAnatomically accurate 3D-printed skull phantoms were created for 3 patients who underwent implantation of 21 stereoelectroencephalography electrodes by surgeons using the current standard of care (frameless technique). Implantation schema were recreated using the iSYS1 system, and paired accuracy measures were compared with the previous frameless implantations. Entry point, target point, and implantation angle accuracy were measured on postimplantation CT scans. CUSUM analysis was undertaken prospectively.RESULTSThe iSYS1 trajectory guidance system significantly improved electrode entry point accuracies from 1.90 ± 0.96 mm (mean ± SD) to 0.76 ± 0.57 mm (mean ± SD) without increasing implantation risk. CUSUM analysis was successful as a continuous measure of surgical performance and acted as an early-warning detection system. The surgical learning curve, although minimal, showed improvement after insertion of the eighth electrode.CONCLUSIONSThe iSYS1 trajectory guidance system did not show any increased risk during phantom preclinical testing when used by neurosurgeons who had no experience with its use. CUSUM analysis is a simple technique that can be applied to all stages of the IDEAL (idea, development, exploration, assessment) framework as an extra patient safety mechanism. Further clinical trials are required to prove the efficacy of the device.


RADARSAT synthetic aperture radar (SAR) data acquired at C Band, HH polarization, and for the 20/spl deg/-27/spl deg/ and 45/spl deg/-49/spl deg/ incidence angle ranges were available over northern Quebec, Canada, (54/spl deg/N, 72/spl deg/12'W), in the fall of 1996, the winter of 1997, and the spring of 1997. The main land occupation of this area is sparse black spruce (Picea mariana) forests. Vegetation characteristics are jointly used with snow and soil observations coinciding with the satellite overpasses to simulate the seasonal changes in the backscattering coefficient of the subarctic forest. The aim of this study is twofold. First to evaluate the effects of the seasonal changes in vegetation on the RADARSAT SAR data, and second to use backscattering models as a tool for a better interpretation and understanding of the RADARSAT SAR data over snow-covered forested areas. Simulations show the importance of the surface-vegetation interaction term and the wet snow surface roughness on the discrimination between open forest and denser forest, and on the contrast between wet snow and dry snow covers. When comparing the simulations to the RADARSAT SAR data, the poorest results are obtained in the spring for a rough wet snow. It is shown that they are mainly due to a crude evaluation of the vegetation dielectric constant rather than to uncertainties introduced by the spatial variability in the wet snow surface roughness.


This article examines the compatibility of the OECD's proposed rules on GloBE (pillar II) with EU law, covering both primary law and secondary law. In addition, it discusses the amendments required by the implementation of this initiative within the internal market. In what concerns compatibility with primary law, this article suggests extending some of the measures to domestic scenarios (avoiding potential issues of discrimination or restriction). In what concerns secondary law, it suggests altering some of the provision of the directives. Furthermore, in the author's view, the EU would benefit from aligning some of its tax directives to the outcomes of OECD's GloBE.


We investigate if pluralistic consumption styles (like "frugality", or "indulgence in luxury") can be identified and are correlated with different terminal values and if values and consumption styles prove to be stable or can be changed by drastic events. The results of two polls (before and after the war in Iraq) are compared. Using content analyses, media influence on consumers' values and consumption patterns is also analyzed. Marketing relevance of the research is substantiated by investigating whether values and/or specific consumer trends have a significant impact on the preference of advertising campaigns showing different lifestyle themes.


The 71st Annual Meeting of The Canadian Rheumatology Association (CRA) was held at the Fairmont Chateau Lake Louise, Lake Louise, Alberta, Canada, February 17–20, 2016. The program consisted of presentations covering original research, symposia, awards, and lectures. Highlights of the meeting include the following 2016 Award Winners: Distinguished Rheumatologist, Ronald Laxer; Distinguished Investigator, Proton Rahman; Teacher-Educator, Lori Albert; Young Investigator, Nigil Haroon; Best Abstract on Basic Science Research by a Trainee, Liam O'Neil; Best Abstract on Research by a Rheumatology Resident, Valérie Leclair; Best Abstract by a Medical Student, Matthew Jessome; Best Abstract by a Post-Graduate Resident, Hyein Kim; CRA/Arthritis Research Foundation (ARF) Best Epidemiology/Health Services Research Award, Cheryl Barnabe; Summer Studentship Mentor Award, Ines Colmegna; CRA/ARF Best Paediatric Research Award, Lily Lim; CRA/ARF Best Clinical Research Award, Zahi Touma; CRA/ARF Best Basic Science Research Award, Nigil Haroon; Best Abstract on SLE Research by a Trainee — Ian Watson Award, Stephanie Nantes; Best Abstract on Clinical or Epidemiology Research by a Trainee — Phil Rosen Award, Nicolas Richard; Practice Reflection Award — Gold/Silver/Bronze, Henry Averns/Philip Baer and Jean-Pierre Raynauld/Robert Ferrari. Lectures and other events included the Dunlop-Dottridge Lecture: New Paradigms for Inflammatory Arthritis, by Berent Prakken; Keynote Address by Distinguished Investigator Awardee 2016 Proton Rahman: Role of Precision Medicine in Optimizing Quality in Rheumatology Care; State of the Art Lecture: Everything You Must Know About Sleep but are Too Tired to Ask! by James Maas; and the Great Debate: Be it Resolved that Rheumatologists Get with the Times and Use Social Media for Communication with Patients and Research; arguing for: Jason Kur and Michelle Teo; against: Nadia Luca and Sherry Rohekar. Topics such as rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erythematosus, systemic sclerosis, Sjögren syndrome, psoriatic arthritis, spondyloarthritis, vasculitis, osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia, and their respective diagnoses, treatments, and outcomes are reflected in the abstracts, which we are pleased to publish in this issue of The Journal.


A series of simulations for 15 events occurring during August 2002 were performed using the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model over a domain encompassing most of the central United States to compare the sensitivity of warm season rainfall forecasts with changes in model physics, dynamics, and initial conditions. Most simulations were run with 8-km grid spacing. The Advanced Research WRF (ARW) and the nonhydrostatic mesoscale model (NMM) dynamic cores were used. One physics package (denoted NCEP) used the Betts–Miller–Janjic convective scheme with the Mellor–Yamada–Janjic planetary boundary layer (PBL) scheme and GFDL radiation package; the other package (denoted NCAR) used the Kain–Fritsch convective scheme with the Yonsei University PBL scheme and the Dudhia rapid radiative transfer model radiation. Other physical schemes were the same (e.g., the Noah land surface model, Ferrier et al. microphysics) in all runs. Simulations suggest that the sensitivity of the model to changes in physics is a function of which the dynamic core is used, and the sensitivity to the dynamic core is a function of the physics used. The greatest sensitivity in general is associated with a change in physics packages when the NMM core is used. Sensitivity to a change in physics when the ARW core is used is noticeably less. For light rainfall, the spread in the rainfall forecasts when physics are changed under the ARW core is actually less at most times than when the dynamic core is changed while NCAR physics are used. For light rainfall, the WRF model using NCAR physics is much more sensitive to a change in dynamic core than the WRF model using NCEP physics. For heavier rainfall, the opposite is true with a greater sensitivity occurring when NCEP physics is used. Sensitivity to initial conditions (Eta versus the Rapid Update Cycle with an accompanying small change in grid spacing) is generally less substantial than the sensitivity to changes in dynamic core or physics, except in the first 6–12 h of the forecast when it is comparable. As might be expected for warm season rainfall, the finescale structure of rainfall forecasts is more affected by the physics used than the dynamic core used. Surprisingly, however, the overall areal coverage and rain volume within the domain may be more influenced by the dynamic core choice than the physics used.


Targeting Brutons tyrosine kinase (BTK) with a small molecule inhibitor may be useful in treatment of BTK-expressing malignancies because of the anti-apoptotic function of BTK in cancer cells. Furthermore, BTK inhibitors also exhibit anti-thrombotic properties that may be desirable in the context of the increased risk of thromboembolic complications in cancer patients. This review will focus on the role of BTK in drug resistance in cancer, thromboembolism, and various pathologic immune responses, such as graft versus host disease. The therapeutic potential of targeting BTK is illustrated by discussion of the biologic activity profile of the rationally designed BTK inhibitor LFM-A13.


Abstract Quantifying the privacy loss of a privacy-preserving mechanism on potentially sensitive data is a complex and well-researched topic; the de-facto standard for privacy measures are ε-differential privacy (DP) and its versatile relaxation (ε, δ)-approximate differential privacy (ADP). Recently, novel variants of (A)DP focused on giving tighter privacy bounds under continual observation. In this paper we unify many previous works via the privacy loss distribution (PLD) of a mechanism. We show that for non-adaptive mechanisms, the privacy loss under sequential composition undergoes a convolution and will converge to a Gauss distribution (the central limit theorem for DP). We derive several relevant insights: we can now characterize mechanisms by their privacy loss class, i.e., by the Gauss distribution to which their PLD converges, which allows us to give novel ADP bounds for mechanisms based on their privacy loss class; we derive exact analytical guarantees for the approximate randomized response mechanism and an exact analytical and closed formula for the Gauss mechanism, that, given ε, calculates δ, s.t., the mechanism is (ε, δ)-ADP (not an over-approximating bound).


This paper proposes a new methodology, the Domination Index, to evaluate non-income inequalities between social groups such as inequalities of educational attainment, occupational status, health or subjective well-being. The Domination Index does not require specific cardinalisation assumptions, but only uses the ordinal structure of these non-income variables. We approach from an axiomatic perspective and show that a set of desirable properties for a group inequality measure when the variable of interest is ordinal, characterizes the Domination Index up to a positive scalar transformation. Moreover we make use of the Domination Index to explore the relation between inequality and segregation and show how these two concepts are related theoretically.


This paper describes the use of a computational method based on an optical flow algorithm to detect regions of interest in near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy. The evaluation of such method is also presented. Visual inspection and cross correlation analysis of NIR cortical activation images were used to evaluate our method. The visual analysis exposed pain-related activations in the primary somatosensory cortex (S1) after stimulation which is consistent with similar studies, and the cross correlation results showed dominant channels on both cerebral hemispheres. Optical flow exhibited the nature of the dominant channel, the extent of the stimulation spatial distribution and the stimulation status. In addition, the directions of the optical flow vectors were linked to the stimulation perception of the participant. The two evaluation methods confirmed the success of our method in finding the region of interest in both hemispheres. The results of this real case study show that the computational method can successfully analyse and detect regions of interest and show temporal interactions between channels, and could be employed to investigate pain assessment in human subjects.


Strong-field ionization provides fundamental insight into light-matter interactions, encoding the structure of atoms and molecules on the sub˚¨ and subfemtosecond scales. In this Rapid Communication, we explore an important regime: strong-field ionization by two-color circularly polarized laser fields. In contrast to past work using linearly polarized drivers, we probe electron trajectories that are driven in a two-dimensional plane, thus separating the tunneling angle from the rescattering angle. This allows us to make several findings. First, we observe a single-lobed electron distribution for co-rotating fields, and a three-lobed distribution for counter-rotating fields, providing experimental validation of the theoretical model explaining the generation of circularly polarized high harmonic light. Second, we discover that there is significant electron-ion rescattering using counter-rotating fields, but not with co-rotating fields. Finally, we show that the rescattered electrons are well separated from the directly ionized electrons, in striking contrast to similar low-energy structures seen with linearly polarized fields. These findings help overcome the long-standing problem of how to decouple the tunneling and rescattering steps in strong-field ionization, which will enable new dynamic probes of atomic and molecular structure.


This study aimed to ascertain the perception of teachers on the level of their work-life balance and school commitment and its relationship to one another, which serves as the basis for a policy review. Data was gathered using the researcher-made survey questionnaire on work-life balance and adapted/modified questionnaire from A Three Component Organizational Commitment Questionnaire of Allen and Meyer (1990/1997) on school commitment to 128 teachers of School Divisions of Caloocan, Malabon, Navotas, and Valenzuela. Statistical treatment such as weighted mean, frequency, and Pearson r was employed. Results show that teachers' perception level on their work-life balance and school commitment is moderate in different dimensions and no significant relationship exists between the two variables. Teachers' salary, medical assistance, hospitalization, and retirement age posted the first three highest in rank for a policy review


There is no suspect that qualified human capital has positive effects on
sustainable development. In particular, on local and regional development, it comes to
the fore. In this respect, when it is evaluated, the importance with regard to this will
come out in terms of regional development issues. In this regard, it is believed that the
urban settlements which has a large portion of the human population is a very effective
element and it has been come forward. Ergonomics in the creation of sustainable cities,
can be considered as an important tool. If this problems that arising from environment
and human conditions is not minimized, the formation of conditions threatened to lives
of individuals are likely to increase. Consequently, this study is expressed that along
with current problem by developing a variety of solutions, providing more qualified
urban life in Erzurum will make a great contribution to sustainable local development.


In recent years, historiography on the relation between religion and anti-communism in the interwar period has grown rapidly. Historians have argued that anti-communism in the interwar period was a global and transnational phenomenon, an ideology shared by a wide variety of actors calling for a Christian crusade against anti-religious persecutions in the USSR. This article studies two of these anti-communist actors, the German-Baltic pastor Oskar Schabert and the Dutch pastor Frederik Johan Krop. In Riga, Schabert was the founder and leader of the Baltic Action for Russia, an anti-communist organization supporting Christians in the USSR. In the Netherlands, Krop mobilized a broad alliance of orthodox Christians in support of Schaberts' relief work. The case study of Schabert and Krop shows that the connection of religious and ideological objections against communism and relief work for Christians in the USSR turned out to be a strong narrative mobilizing Christians in the Netherlands and elsewhere in Europe. Furthermore, it contributes to historiography by showing how transnational contacts between Schabert and Krop shaped the development of anti-communism in the 1930s.


A COMPLETE review of the literature revealed no reported experimental method for the production of subphrenic abscesses. A predictable standardized method would be valuable in studying the treatment and natural history of such a condition. It would be a great aid in the experimental evaluation of the role of surgery, in conjunction with the antibiotic and chemotherapeutic agents, in the treatment of subphrenic abscesses. It was with these aims in mind that the following study was carried out. MATERIALS AND METHODS The abscesses were produced in healthy, adult, male rabbits. The basic principle utilized was the fact that a gauze sponge, when placed in the peritoneal cavity of animals or of human beings produces a granulomatous reaction, with the sponge encapsulated in its center. It was felt that the most logical procedure would be to insert a gauze sponge in the subdiaphragmatic space at one operation, allow time for the


The leaf-feeding beetle, Cassida rubiginosa, is an oligophagous biocontrol agent capable of feeding on most species in the tribe Cardueae (thistles and knapweeds). The beetle was released in New Zealand in 2007, primarily to control Cirsium arvense (Californian thistle), with the recognition that it had potential to control multiple thistle weeds. The objective of this study was to test the impact of different densities of Cassida rubiginosa larvae (0, 50, 100, or 200 per plant) on the growth and reproductive performance of the annual thistle weed, Carduus pycnocephalus (slender winged thistle). Since the effectiveness of biocontrol agents is often enhanced when plants are stressed, different levels of growth constraint were imposed by growing the weed in different pot sizes (0.5, 1, 5, and 12 litres). We hypothesised that feeding damage by Cassida rubiginosa larvae would have a greater impact on the weed when grown in smaller pots, since root growth would be constrained, and the weed's ability to compensate for feeding damage would be restricted. Contrary to our hypothesis, pot size had no effect on feeding damage by Cassida rubiginosa on Carduus pycnocephalus. As expected, most measures of plant performance increased with larger pot sizes, including plant height, biomass, and the number of seedheads per plant. The results of this study indicate that Cassida rubiginosa is unlikely to contribute to the control of Carduus pycnocephalus. Additional oligophagous biocontrol agents targeting the rosette stage and seed production should be considered for release in New Zealand.


Research on incomplete algorithms for satisfiability testing lead to some of the first scalable SAT solvers in the early 1990's. Unlike systematic solvers often based on an exhaustive branching and backtracking search, incomplete methods are generally based on stochastic local search. On problems from a variety of domains, such incomplete methods for SAT can significantly outperform DPLL-based methods. While the early greedy algorithms already showed promise, especially on random instances, the introduction of randomization and so-called uphill moves during the search significantly extended the reach of incomplete algorithms for SAT. This chapter discusses such algorithms, along with a few key techniques that helped boost their performance such as focusing on variables appearing in currently unsatisfied clauses, devising methods to efficiently pull the search out of local minima through clause re-weighting, and adaptive noise mechanisms. The chapter also briefly discusses a formal foundation for some of the techniques based on the discrete Lagrangian method.


Memory reconsolidation is hypothesized to be a mechanism by which memories can be updated with new information. Such updating has previously been shown to weaken memory expression or change the nature of the memory. Here we demonstrate that retrieval-induced memory destabilization also allows that memory to be strengthened by additional learning. We show that for rodent contextual fear memories, this retrieval conditioning effect is observed only when conditioning occurs within a specific temporal window opened by retrieval. Moreover, it necessitates hippocampal protein degradation at the proteasome and engages hippocampal Zif268 protein expression, both of which are established mechanisms of memory destabilization-reconsolidation. We also demonstrate a conceptually analogous pattern of results in human visual paired-associate learning. Retrieval-relearning strengthens memory performance, again only when relearning occurs within the temporal window of memory reconsolidation. These findings link retrieval-mediated learning in humans to the reconsolidation literature, and have potential implications both for the understanding of endogenous memory gains and strategies to boost weakly learned memories. SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Memory reconsolidation allows existing memories to be updated with new information. Previous research has demonstrated that reconsolidation can be manipulated pharmacologically and behaviorally to impair problematic memories. In this article, we show that reconsolidation can also be exploited to strengthen memory. This is shown both in rats, in a fear memory setting, and in a human declarative memory setting. For both, the behavioral conditions necessary to observe the memory strengthening match those that are required to trigger memory reconsolidation. There are several behavioral approaches that have previously been shown convincingly to strengthen memory. The present demonstration that reconsolidation can underpin long-lasting memory improvements may both provide an underlying mechanism for such approaches and provide new strategies to boost memories.


We have developed a straightforward strategy to multimerize an apoptogenic peptide that mimics the natural tumor necrosis factor-related apoptosis-inducing ligand (TRAIL) by using adamantane-based dendrons as multivalent scaffolds. The selective binding affinity of the ligands to TRAIL receptor 2 (TR2) was studied by surface plasmon resonance, thus demonstrating that the trimeric and hexameric forms of the peptide exert an increased affinity of about 1500- and 20,000-fold, respectively, relative to the monomer. Moreover, only the trimeric and hexameric ligands were able to induce cell death in TR2 expressing cells (BJAB), thus confirming that a multivalent form of the peptide is necessary to trigger a substantial TR2-dependent apoptotic response in vitro. These results provide interesting insight into the multivalency effect on biological ligand/receptor interactions for future therapeutic applications.


Abstract. This study aims to analyze the operational efficiency (marketing margin, farmer's share, profit ratio) and the price efficiency in Brebes Regency. Quatitative data processing used to analyze marketing margin, farmer's share, the ratio of benefits to costs by using Microsoft Excel 2016 while market integration alaysis used Eviews 9. Qualitative data processing used to analyze marketing channels and marketing istitutions. The research results showed that there are seven types of marketing channels in the marketing system of shallot in Brebes Regency. Analysis of operational efficiency showed marketing channel that relative efficient were channel 6 (farmerdistrict assembler-regency assembler-outside the province wholesaler). Analysis of price efficiency showed that the shallot markets were integrated in short term.


To characterize the behavior and robustness of cellular circuits is a major challenge for Systems Biology. Many of the published methods that address this question quantify the local robustness of the models. In this thesis, I tried to underpin the inappropriateness of such local measures and proposed an alternative solution: a glocal measure for robustness that combines both global and local aspects. It comprises a broad exploration of the parameter space and a further refinement based on different local measures. The method is general and such glocal analysis could be applied to many problems. Along with the theoretical and formal aspects of this new analysis method, I developed sampling algorithms that efficiently investigate the generally high-dimensional parameter space of models. To show the usefulness of my method, I applied it on different models of cyclic systems such as the circadian clock and the mitotic cycle. I first considered two models of the cyanobacterial circadian clock and compared their robustness properties. Also in the context of circadian rhythms, I studied the effect of additional feedback loops on the robustness properties in relation with entrainment. Models of the mitotic cycle are also used to assess the effect of an additional positive feedback loop on circuit robustness to parameter changes and molecular noise. Finally, I established some principles for the design of a synthetic circuit based on robustness. The thesis carries on with a discussion that emphasizes the advantages of the glocal method for robustness analysis: in all works, correlations between parameter values and local robustness can be found. Such results facilitate our understanding of the biochemical systems and can be a guide for new experiments to discriminate models or give directions for altering the robustness of the systems. I conclude by discussing potential applications for my method and possible improvements.


Visual place recognition (VPR) is usually considered as a specific image retrieval problem. Limited by existing training frameworks, most deep learning-based works cannot extract sufficiently stable global features from RGB images and rely on a time-consuming re-ranking step to exploit spatial structural information for better performance. In this paper, we propose StructVPR, a novel training architecture for VPR, to enhance structural knowledge in RGB global features and thus improve feature stability in a constantly changing environment. Specifically, StructVPR uses segmentation images as a more definitive source of structural knowledge input into a CNN network and applies knowledge distillation to avoid online segmentation and inference of seg-branch in testing. Considering that not all samples contain high-quality and helpful knowledge, and some even hurt the performance of distillation, we partition samples and weigh each sample's distillation loss to enhance the expected knowledge precisely. Finally, StructVPR achieves impressive performance on several benchmarks using only global retrieval and even outperforms many two-stage approaches by a large margin. After adding additional re-ranking, ours achieves state-of-the-art performance while maintaining a low computational cost.


A finite element model simulating the experiment on multiplanar unstiffened CHS KT joints with K-plane overlapped and out-of-plane not (KT-IPOv joints), with the background of Suzhou International Convention & Exhibition Center, was advanced and validated by comparing failure mode and the ultimate capacity with experimental results, which is shown to be in good agreement with the test result. Using this model, the effect of non-dimensional parameters on ultimate capacity of KT-IPOv joints were studied, and resistance comparison between multiplanar KT-IPOv joints and uniplanar overlapped K-joints was carried out. The results of FE parametric Analysis conclude that multiplanar parameter ζ t, τT and βT have not significant influence on the ultimate strength; the effect of non-dimensional parameter βK, τK, γ, Ov on the resistance of multiplanar KT-IPOv joints has the same as that of uniplanar overlapped K-joints; the strength of multiplanar KT-IPOv joints have been not significantly influenced by the configuration with the brace inside T-plane which it is not subjected to force; it is suitable and feasiable that ultimate capacities of KT-IPOv joints predicted by formula of uniplanar K-joints.


Beyond the asylum: Colonial psychiatry in French Indochina, 1880-1940 Claire Ellen Edington This dissertation looks beyond the asylum to consider the development of psychiatry in French Indochina as the product of everyday exchanges between lay people and experts. Drawing on archival research conducted over two years in Vietnam and France including hundreds of patient case files I trace the movements of patients in and out of asylums and between prisons, poor houses, youth reformatories, hospitals and family homes. Together, these individual patient itineraries challenge our notion of the colonial asylum as a closed setting where patients rarely left, run by experts who enjoyed broad and unquestioned authority. Instead, they reveal how ideas about what it meant to be abnormal, as well as normal enough to return to social life, were debated between psychiatrists, colonial authorities and the public throughout the early decades of twentieth century. By examining the dynamics of patient movements in and out of psychiatric care, this study shifts our perspective from the asylum itself to its relationship with the world beyond its walls. Colonial scholars have focused on the way psychiatry provided a new scientific discourse of racial difference and how it figured within a wider biopolitics of colonial rule. However the social histories of the asylums themselves, and how they functioned within colonial political systems, remain little explored. I argue that by situating the history of psychiatry within the local dynamics of colonial rule, the asylum emerges as less of a blunt instrument for the control and medicalization of colonial society than as a valuable historical site for reframing narratives of colonial repression and resistance.


This paper proposes a hybrid particle swarm optimization for a practical distribution state estimation. The proposed method considers nonlinear characteristics of the practical equipment and actual limited measurements in distribution systems. The method can estimate load and distributed generation output values at each node by minimizing the difference between measured and calculated voltages and currents. The feasibility of the proposed method is demonstrated and compared with an original particle swarm optimization based method on practical distribution system models. Effectiveness of the constriction factor approach of particle swarm optimization is also investigated. The results indicate the applicability of the proposed state estimation method to the practical distribution systems.


Nasopharyngeal cancer is an abnormal cell growth that develops around the nasopharynx. Treatment of nasopharyngeal cancer patients includes chemotherapy or radiotherapy. Both treatments have side effects in patients. In this study, we will focus on hypothyroidism as a side effect of radiotherapy in the treatment of patients with nasopharyngeal cancer. Hypothyroidism is a condition when the thyroid gland is unable to produce enough thyroid hormone. The main goal of this study is to identify the factors associated with hypothyroidism. To achieve this goal, classification tree and logistic regression methods will be used. Classification tree is used to obtain important variables in the classification of subject classes. Then, logistic regression is used to quantify the risk of variables that appear in the classification tree, hypothyroidism risk factors, and hypothyroidism marker factors. Based on the analysis, it was found that the factors associated in this study were variable symptom, physical sign, smoking habits, gender, age, BMI (Body Mass Index), TSH (Thyroid Stimulating Hormone) and fT4 (free thyroxine) hormones, and also all items on Zulewski score, except items delayed ankle reflex and slow movements. These factors associated tended to increase the risk of hypothyroidism, except for the fT4 hormone and BMI.


Pyrazolo[1,5-a]pyridines and 6-iodopyrazolo[1,5-a]pyridines were synthesized by gold-catalyzed and iodine-mediated cyclization of enynylpyrazoles in good to excellent yields, respectively. The iodinated adducts were further converted to 6-arylpyrazolo[1,5-a]pyridines via Suzuki-Miyaura coupling reaction and 6-cyanopyrazolo[1,5-a]pyridine by Ullmann condensation reaction. One of the cyclization adducts, 2-(4-fluorophenyl)pyrazolo[1,5-a]pyridine, was converted to a p38 kinase inhibitor, 2-(4-fluorophenyl)-3-(4-pyridinyl)pyrazolo[1,5-a]pyridine, in two steps.


This study used a stochastic frontier cost model to analyze whether the policy changes that created Critical Access Hospitals (CAHs) caused an increase in the cost inefficiency of these hospitals or their cost inefficiency was brought about by other factors that were similar to all rural hospitals. The estimated mean cost inefficiency of CAH was 25 percent while that of non-CAH rural hospitals was 17.6 percent. However, the estimated results did not provide sufficient evidence to conclude that Medicare cost-based reimbursement was the main cause of higher cost inefficiency of CAHs. There might be other causes that can explain the higher cost inefficiency of CAHs such as the larger number of Medicaid and uninsured patients and the higher levels of uncompensated care that CAHs provide.


The neurotransmitter dopamine is released from discrete axonal structures called varicosities. Its release is essential in behaviour and is critically implicated in prevalent neuropsychiatric diseases. Existing dopamine detection methods are not able to detect and distinguish discrete dopamine release events from multiple varicosities. This prevents an understanding of how dopamine release is regulated across populations of discrete varicosities. Using a near infrared fluorescent (980 nm) dopamine nanosensor 'paint' (AndromeDA), we show that action potential-evoked dopamine release is highly heterogeneous across release sites and also requires molecular priming. Using AndromeDA, we visualize dopamine release at up to 100 dopaminergic varicosities simultaneously within a single imaging field with high temporal resolution (15 images/s). We find that 'hotspots' of dopamine release are highly heterogeneous and are detected at only ~17% of all varicosities. In neurons lacking Munc13 proteins, which prime synaptic vesicles, dopamine release is abolished during electrical stimulation, demonstrating that dopamine release requires vesicle priming. In summary, AndromeDA reveals the spatiotemporal organization of dopamine release.


The objective of this study is to investigate the effectiveness of an alternative technique for strengthening masonry columns, based on the use of steel cords. Although fiber-reinforced polymer (FRP) strips or jackets are successfully used as strengthening elements for this kind of application, such a strengthening method represents a new opportunity to restore ambit, with considerable development in unreinforced masonry wrapping. Thus, to assess the potential of steel cord wrapping, this paper presents the results of an experimental program consisting of 48 solid-brick specimens subjected to uniaxial compression load. Different cross-section geometry (octagonal, square, and rectangular) and different amounts and different schemes for confining reinforcement were investigated. The primary experimental outcomes are presented and discussed in the paper considering the mechanical behavior of specimens and the axial stress–axial strain relationships. Test results have shown that the investigated confining systems are able to provide significant gains, both in the compressive strength and in the deformation capacity of masonry columns.


One of the oldest disputes in social science divides objectivists and subjectivists. Whereas subjectivists recognize the causal importance of internal states, such as individual values, objectivists forswear them in favour of exclusively external causes, such as social structural constraints. Their reluctance to countenance internal states stems in large part from the perception that effective measures of values and other internal states are extremely difficult to find. Lacking such measures, there is no means of disentangling subjective and objective factors in behavioural explanations. This paper presents a framework employing the factorial survey method that yields rigorous measures of individual values and that enables assessment of the operation of both objective and subjective factors in human behaviour. As test site for the new framework, we examine the formulation of advance directives for medical treatment (living wills) among a sample of healthy elderly people. We construct hypothetical scenarios depicting a life-threatening situation and ask respondents to indicate their desire for medical intervention given differing circumstances: the intervention's chance of success, various levels of chronic pain, limitation of physical function, burden to family and friends, and the pecuniary cost of the prospective treatment. Analysing the data with a variety of statistical tools, we obtain measures of four values and unbiased estimates of their effects on treatment decisions, as well as estimates of the effects of objective factors on both values and treatment decisions


Glycomic and glycoproteomic analyses involve the characterization of oligosaccharides (glycans) conjugated to proteins. Glycans are produced through a complicated nontemplate driven process involving the competition of enzymes that extend the nascent chain. The large diversity of structures, the variations in polarity of the individual saccharide residues, and the poor ionization efficiencies of glycans all conspire to make the analysis arguably much more difficult than any other biopolymer. Furthermore, the large number of glycoforms associated with a specific protein site makes it more difficult to characterize than any post-translational modification. Nonetheless, there have been significant progress, and advanced separation and mass spectrometry methods have been at its center and the main reason for the progress. While glycomic and glycoproteomic analyses are still typically available only through highly specialized laboratories, new software and workflow is making it more accessible. This review focuses on the role of mass spectrometry and separation methods in advancing glycomic and glycoproteomic analyses. It describes the current state of the field and progress toward making it more available to the larger scientific community.


Curriculum and pedagogy are central to many contemporary debates on fostering a successful student experience, particularly in a massified higher education sector. These themes are evident in discussions from policy level to the staffroom in many countries. Attention has been specifically directed at the transition point from 'second level' to 'higher/third level' education, resulting in the development of many initiatives and materials around the 'first year experience' ('FYE'). Central principles have been identified as curricula that engage students in their programme, modules and learning. Indeed the term 'student engagement' has evolved as a focal point of these debates as the search continues for a magic wand to tackle what are perceived to be problems of student disengagement and preparedness. Although a newer phrase in the Irish lexicon, first year experience programmes have quickly emerged which typically attempt to develop varying blends of academic and generic skills such as information literacy, student engagement, resilience and confidence, and preparedness for the workplace among others. Such widening of the curriculum has many potential benefits, but in reality, institutional and individual barriers, resistance and a lack of measurability can often result in frustrations and disappointments. Building connections, in terms of curriculum, people and structures is at the heart of a successful FYE programme. This paper will draw on the example of the "Get Smart!" initiative, which is a bottom-up approach to integrative curriculum developed in the School of Hospitality Management and Tourism, Dublin Institute of Technology. The initiative sits laterally across modules and attempts to form an integrating mechanism. It also looks to extend the Orientation beyond the initial few days of a student's commencement on their programme, using academic and quasi-academic elements. Over the six years of the initiative many challenges have emerged, including connecting the curriculum to the workplace, career preparation, securing staff and student buy-in, and the development of student resilience. Tellingly, the over-arching challenge of how the curriculum can be more than the 'classroom' remains largely unsolved. The paper further highlights the notion of "roles" adopted in the implementation of Get Smart! and whether these are typical of curriculum redevelopments. How can one person's passion be institutionalised into a school or faculty-wide programme? How can 'doubters' become 'doers' and how can momentum be maintained as resources dwindle? Finally, the paper presents experiences of communicating the curriculum in the context of new learners. There is considerable awareness of the abilities and expectations of the tech-savvy 'Gen. Yers' and now 'millennials'. The need to communicate differently should be driven more from the perspective that, if the curriculum is changing, shouldn't the communication and conversation vehicles similarly be re-imagined? Get Smart! has used Facebook, Twitter, ezines and a bespoke app to communicate with students in language they understand. Difficulties and opportunities will be assessed, drawn from ongoing research carried out with students as part of the management of Get Smart!


Multi-instance learning (MIL) is useful for tackling labeling ambiguity in learning tasks, by allowing a bag of instances to share one label. Recently, bag mapping methods, which transform a bag to a single instance in a new space via instance selection, have drawn significant attentions. To date, most existing works are developed based on the original space, i.e., utilizing all instances for bag mapping, and instance selection is indirectly tied to the MIL objective. As a result, it is hard to guarantee the distinguish capacity of the selected instances in the new bag mapping space for MIL. In this paper, we propose a direct discriminative mapping approach for multi-instance learning (MILDM), which identifies instances to directly distinguish bags in the new mapping space. Experiments and comparisons on real-world learning tasks demonstrate the algorithm performance.


Voice cloning is the task of learning to synthesize the voice of an unseen speaker from a few samples. While current voice cloning methods achieve promising results in Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis for a new voice, these approaches lack the ability to control the expressiveness of synthesized audio. In this work, we propose a controllable voice cloning method that allows fine-grained control over various style aspects of the synthesized speech for an unseen speaker. We achieve this by explicitly conditioning the speech synthesis model on a speaker encoding, pitch contour and latent style tokens during training. Through both quantitative and qualitative evaluations, we show that our framework can be used for various expressive voice cloning tasks using only a few transcribed or untranscribed speech samples for a new speaker. These cloning tasks include style transfer from a reference speech, synthesizing speech directly from text, and fine-grained style control by manipulating the style conditioning variables during inference.


Automatic recognition of animal vocalisations would be a valuable tool for a variety of biological research and environmental monitoring applications. We report the development of a software system which can recognise the vocalisations of 22 species of frogs which occur in an area of northern Australia. This software system will be used in unattended operation to monitor the effect on frog populations of the introduced Cane Toad.

The system is based around classification of local peaks in the spectrogram of the audio signal using Quinlan's machine learning system, C4.5 (Quinlan 1993). Unreliable identifications of peaks are aggregated together using a hierarchical structure of segments based on the typical temporal vocalisation species' patterns. This produces robust system performance.


Copy number variation (CNV) is known to cause all von Willebrand disease (VWD) types, although the associated pathogenic mechanisms involved have not been extensively studied. Notably, in-frame CNV provides a unique opportunity to investigate how specific von Willebrand factor (VWF) domains influence the processing and packaging of the protein. Using multiplex ligation-dependent probe amplification, this study determined the extent to which CNV contributed to VWD in the Molecular and Clinical Markers for the Diagnosis and Management of Type 1 von Willebrand Disease cohort, highlighting in-frame deletions of exons 3, 4-5, 32-34, and 33-34. Heterozygous in vitro recombinant VWF expression demonstrated that, although deletion of exons 3, 32-34, and 33-34 all resulted in significant reductions in total VWF (P < .0001, P < .001, and P < .01, respectively), only deletion of exons 3 and 32-34 had a significant impact on VWF secretion (P < .0001). High-resolution microscopy of heterozygous and homozygous deletions confirmed these observations, indicating that deletion of exons 3 and 32-34 severely impaired pseudo-Weibel-Palade body (WPB) formation, whereas deletion of exons 33-34 did not, with this variant still exhibiting pseudo-WPB formation similar to wild-type VWF. In-frame deletions in VWD, therefore, contribute to pathogenesis via moderate or severe defects in VWF biosynthesis and secretion.


In this paper, 3mol% yttria-stabilized tetragonal zirconia polycrystal (3Y-TZP) and TiN/3Y-TZP(adding TiN particles to 3Y-TZP) composites were fabricated by hot-pressing technique. Phase composition, microstructure and mechanical properties of the composites were investigated. It is shown that the flexural strength, fracture toughness and Vickers hardness of TiN/3Y-TZP was significantly improved by the addition of TiN particles compared with 3Y-TZP. The flexural strength of ZYT2 (20wt% TiN addition) is 1318 MPa. The fracture toughness of ZYT4 (40wt% TiN addition) is 16.8MPa·m1/2. The toughening and strengthening mechanisms were analyzed. The XRD results show that the additing of TiN can hinder the transformation from tetragonal phase to monoclinic phase of 3Y-TZP during fabrication process.


Based on the book, "Practical Orthodontic Assessment", this is the first of a two-volume software package which contains 20 exercises in orthodontic assessment and treatment planning. Volume 1 covers cases that are relatively straightforward and simple on 8 floppy disks. Volume 2, contains exercises that are more complicated and advanced on 9 floppy disks. Each case includes a cephalometric line drawing, radiograph, patient photograph and models. They are compiled and tested to assist in the development of competent orthodontic assessment by the practitioner. The set should provide a thorough grounding in orthodontic assessment and treatment. The system requirements include: 486 IBM-compatible PC, 256-colour VDU and Windows format.


We perform three-dimensional (3D) finite-difference (FD) waveform modeling of strong motions in the frequency range 0.2 to 1.67 Hz observed in the Sendai basin, Japan, during the Japan Meteorological Agency magnitude ( M J) 5.0 1998 Miyagiken-Nanbu earthquake. In a previous, we estimated S -wave velocity structures above the pre-Tertiary bedrock at six sites in the Sendai basin based on array records of microtremors. To interpolate these velocity structures in space we conduct single-station microtremor measurements at a total of 61 locations and estimate the S -wave velocity structure at each site by modeling the horizontal-to-vertical spectral ratio of fundamental mode Rayleigh waves. An initial 3D model of the basin is constructed using the velocity structures estimated from both array and single-station microtremor measurements, along with other information such as surface geology. This model encompasses a region 33 km long, 30 km wide, and 19 km deep. The final model is obtained through a trial-and-error process by fitting 3D FD synthetic waveforms to the bandpass-filtered (0.2 Hz to 1.67 Hz) displacement records 12 stations for the 1998 Miyagiken-Nanbu earthquake. We compute the synthetics using a fourth-order staggered-grid 3D FD method with variable grid spacing. As the 3D model is modified, the source parameters (strike, dip, rake, and seismic moment) are estimated by a grid search method using 1D site-specific models derived from the modified 3D model. The observed waveforms are reproduced well at most stations by the final 3D basin model. This agreement suggests the validity of the final 3D basin model for theoretical strong-motion prediction of large earthquakes in the frequency range from 0.2 to 1.67 Hz.

Manuscript received 7 June 2000.


Evolution proceeds as the result of a balance between a few basic processes: mutation, selection, migration, genetic drift, and recombination. Mutation is the ultimate source of all the genetic variation on which selection may act; it is therefore essential to evolution. Mutations carry a large cost, though; almost all are deleterious, reducing the fitness of the organisms in which they occur (see Chapter 7). Mutation is therefore both a source of good and ill for a population (Lande 1995). The overall effect of mutation on a population is strongly dependent on the population size. A large population has many new mutations in each generation, and therefore the probability is high that it will obtain new favorable mutations. This large population also has effective selection against the bad mutations that occur; deleterious mutations in a large population are kept at a low frequency within a balance between the forces of selection and those of mutation. A population with relatively fewer individuals, however, will have lower fitness on average, not only because fewer beneficial mutations arise, but also because deleterious mutations are more likely to reach high frequencies through random genetic drift. This shift in the balance between fixation of beneficial and deleterious mutations can result in a decline in the fitness of individuals in a small population and, ultimately, may lead to the extinction of that population. As such, a change in population size may determine the ultimate fate of a species affected by anthropogenic change. This chapter reviews the genetic changes that occur as a result of a decrease in population size. We particularly focus on the fate of new mutations in a small population and the conditions under which a species may be at risk of extinction from harmful changes in fixation rates. We confine most of our comments to sexual, randomly mating populations.


Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) is an autumnal flowering geophite whose dried stigmas, well known for their aromatic and colouring power, have been used since immemorial time as a spice in human nutrition, for medicinal purposes and as a dye. Many doubts remain on its origin; it was probably selected and domesticated in Crete during the Late Bronze Age. Saffron is an autotriploid geophyte species, self- and out-sterile and mostly male-sterile and therefore unable to produce seed, that reproduces by means of corms. Furthermore, it has a reverse biological cycle compared with the majority of cultivated and spontaneous plants: flowering first in October–November, then vegetative development until May, which means that the vegetative development is not directly important for production of stigmas, but for the production of new corms. Due to its unique biological, physiological and agronomic traits, saffron is able to exploit marginal land and to be included in low-input cropping systems, representing an alternative viable crop for sustainable agriculture. Notwithstanding this great potential and the considerable increase in new generation consumer demand for saffron, the future of the plant is still uncertain. Indeed, the main obstacles to saffron production are: (1) the limited areas of cultivation in countries where it is traditionally grown, (2) the great amount of sophisticated spice, (3) management techniques executed by hand, and (4) the very high price of the spice. Here we review the main biological, genetic and ecological traits associated with agronomic management techniques of saffron in relation to environmental conditions. Colour, taste and aroma are the essential features on which the quality of saffron stigmas is founded. In turn, these aspects are strictly connected with the biomolecular composition of the stigmas, namely, the carotenoids and their derivatives. With this in mind, the biosynthetic pathway that leads to the formation of saffron secondary metabolites and their abundance in the spice is presented, together with the biomedical properties commonly associated with saffron. Furthermore, a detailed overview of the more recent instrumental methods to assess the quality of saffron, strictly from a chemical point of view, will be discussed.


This study examines the impact of de-risking on the study countries—bank and non-bank sectors. The study approach is based on survey instruments, consultations and analysis of secondary data. The impacts that have been observed, to date, have generally been discounted in most analysis as "anecdotal" and not valid for "reliable inference"1. However, in small economies such as those in this study what is anecdotal may be indeed reasonable for inference. The typically small number of banks as well as their dominance in the financial sectors of these small states suggests that reduced banking services will have knock on effects on other activities and sectors. In this regard, unlike most studies that cast a broad geographical net in attempting to assess the impact of the withdrawal of CBS, this study focuses on three countries which facilitates the "drilling down" and "zooming in" on the experience with de-risking.


Ceria substitutionally doped with copper is a promising heterogeneous catalyst for a range of oxidation reactions. Herein we describe the aqueous phase, scalable, and direct precipitation of CuxCe1−xO2−δ (x = 0–0.35) solid solution oxide nanocrystals at room temperature without the need for calcination at elevated temperatures. This direct precipitation of the crystalline oxide is enabled through ligand exchange prior to pH adjustment to prevent the precipitation of the hydroxide phase. By producing particles at room temperature, dopant exsolution and particle growth by sintering can be minimized and/or controlled. Using our methodology, copper dopant concentrations of up to 35 mol% could be produced in 1.7 nm diameter ceria nanocrystals. The resulting materials showed high catalytic activity towards both the water gas shift reaction (WGS) and CO oxidation, with improved performance following the trend of increasing copper content. In comparison to pure ceria nanocrystals, the WGS activation energy decreased from 89.0 to 49.2 kJ mol−1 and the CO oxidation light-off temperature decreased from 262 to 159 °C at a space velocity of 25 000 h−1 upon doping with 35 mol% copper.


Despite the high deposition of inositol hexakisphosphate (IP6), also known as phytate or phytin, in certain plant tissues little is known at the molecular level about the pathway(s) involved in its production. In budding yeast, IP6 synthesis occurs through the sequential phosphorylation of I(1,4,5)P3 by two gene products, Ipk2 and Ipk1, a IP3/IP4 dual-specificity 6-/3-kinase and an inositol 1,3,4,5,6-pentakisphosphate 2-kinase, respectively. Here we report the identification and characterization of two inositol polyphosphate kinases from Arabidopsis thaliana, designated AtIpk2α and AtIpk2β that are encoded by distinct genes on chromosome 5 and that are ubiquitously expressed in mature tissue. The primary structures of AtIpk2α and AtIpk2β are 70% identical to each other and 12–18% identical to Ipk2s from yeast and mammals. Similar to yeast Ipk2, purified recombinant AtIpk2α and AtIpk2β have 6-/3-kinase activities that sequentially phosphorylate I(1,4,5)P3 to generate I(1,3,4,5,6)P5 predominantly via an I(1,4,5,6)P4 intermediate. While I(1,3,4,5)P4is a substrate for the plant Ipk2s, it does not appear to be a detectable product of the IP3 reaction. Additionally, we report that the plant and yeast Ipk2 have a novel 5-kinase activity toward I(1,3,4,6)P4 and I(1,2,3,4,6)P5, which would allow these proteins to participate in at least two proposed pathways in the synthesis of IP6. Heterologous expression of either plant isoform in an ipk2 mutant yeast strain restores IP4 and IP5 production in vivo and rescues its temperature-sensitive growth defects. Collectively our results provide a molecular basis for the synthesis of higher inositol polyphosphates in plants through multiple routes and indicate that the 6-/3-/5-kinase activities found in plant extracts may be encoded by the IPK2 gene class.


Lynx is the next-generation observatory which will provide unprecedented X-ray vision into the otherwise invisible Universe to gain understanding of origins and physics of the cosmos. Lynx will see the dawn of black holes, reveal what drives galaxy formation and evolution, and unveil the energetic side of stellar evolution and stellar ecosystems. Lynx science payload will enables radical advances and leaps in capability over NASA's existing flagship Chandra and the ESA's planned Athena mission: 100-fold increase in sensitivity via coupling superb angular resolution with high throughput; 16 times larger field of view (FOV) for sub-arcsecond imaging; and 10-20 times higher spectral resolution for both point-like and extended sources. The Lynx Design Reference Mission has been designed to meet the science objectives of the future while capitalizing where appropriate on decades of experience, and especially from efficient, flight-proven approaches, design choices, and mission operations software and procedures developed for Chandra. While the science program outlined for Lynx in this report is already very broad, the observatory is designed such that there will be ample resources to execute many other programs, even those not anticipated today. Virtually all astronomers will be able to use Lynx for their own particular science.


ABSTRACT To combat the spread of fake news, researchers and academics point to the importance of historical thinking. While generally researched in terms of formal education, historical thinking is also being considered in history museums. This research study examined the ways in which children demonstrate historical thinking in history museums' hands-on spaces using Peter Seixas' six historical thinking concepts, proposed in 2007. The researcher video recorded the interactions of 29 children between 8 and 12 years old in hands-on spaces in three history museums. Results showed that children engaged in multiple instances and various types of historical thinking. Manipulable objects yielded the most instances of historical thinking across the six concepts, suggesting they may provide the structures necessary for children to engage in historical thinking. These findings may be useful to researchers interested in children's historical thinking, museum educators, and exhibit designers who may be considering these spaces for their own institutions.


Super-Earths and mini-Neptunes exhibit great diversity in their compositional and orbital properties. Their bulk densities span a large range, from those dense enough to be purely rocky to those needing a substantial contribution from volatiles to their volumes. Their orbital configurations range from compact, circular multitransiting systems like Kepler-11 to systems like our solar system's terrestrial planets with wider spacings and modest but significant eccentricities and mutual inclinations. Here we investigate whether a continuum of formation conditions resulting from variation in the amount of solids available in the inner disk can account for the diversity of orbital and compositional properties observed for super-Earths, including the apparent dichotomy between single and multitransiting systems. We simulate in situ formation of super-Earths via giant impacts and compare to the observed Kepler sample. We find that intrinsic variations among disks in the amount of solids available for in situ formation can account for the orbital and compositional diversity observed among Kepler's transiting planets. Our simulations can account for the planets' distributions of orbital period ratios, transit duration ratios, and transit multiplicity; higher eccentricities for planets in single transiting systems than for those in multitransiting systems; smaller eccentricities for larger planets; scatter in the mass–radius relation, including lower densities for planets with masses measured with transit timing variations instead of with radial velocity; and similarities in planets' sizes and spacings within each system. Our findings support the theory that variation among super-Earth and mini-Neptune properties is primarily locked in by different in situ formation conditions, rather than arising stochastically through subsequent evolution.


A micromechanical model based on continuum analysis has been investigated by using finite element analysis (FEA) in discontinuous metal matrix composites (DMMC). To assess the tensile and compressive constitutive responses, a cyclic stress-strain behavior has been performed. For analysis procedure, the elastoplastic FEA and the regularly aligned axisymmetric single fiber model have been implemented to evaluate the internal field quantities. Accordingly, the fiber and matrix internal stresses were investigated for the constrained representative volume element (RVE). Further, the local plasticity in the matrix were described during loading and unloading precesses, which can predict the damage mechanisms as well as strengthening mechanisms. On the other hand, a thermoelasto- plastic analysis has been performed using FEA for the application to the continuum behavior in a discontinuous metal matrix composite. The internal field quantities of composite as well as overall composite behavior and an experiment was demonstrated to compare with the numerical simulation. As the procedure, the reasonably optimized FE mesh generations, the appropriate imposition of boundary conditions, and the relevant postprocessing such as elasto-plastic thermo-mechanical analysis were taken into account. For micromechanical model, the temperature dependent material properties and precipitation hardening effects have been employed to investigate field quantities. It was found that the residual stresses are induced substantially by the temperature drop during heat treatment and that the FEA results give a good agreement with experimental data.


The goal of this paper concerns the development of photoinitiating systems usable in industrial processes for coating applications (cationic polymerization of epoxide based resins), the manufacture of Interpenetrating Polymer Networks (IPNs) (polymerization of acrylate/epoxy blends) and the production of thick epoxy/glass fibre composites. For these purposes, a copper photoredox catalyst, G1, is proposed as a high performance photoinitiator. It allows the design of very efficient three component photoinitiating systems (G1/iodonium salt (Iod)/N-vinylcarbazole (NVK)). The effects of the resin, light source (LED@375, 395, 405 nm, halogen lamp), G1 concentration, coating thickness (25 μm and 1.4 mm), water content, formulation stability and hydrolytic stability of the cured coatings were investigated. Examples of IPNs and glass fibre composites are provided. In the studied applications the G1/Iod/NVK system is much better than BAPO/Iod/NVK (BAPO – bis(2,4,6-trimethylbenzoyl)phenylphosphine oxide – Irgacure 819) used as a reference system with good reactivity in the 365–420 nm range. Owing to the catalytic nature of G1, a reduced G1 content (30 fold less compared to the BAPO content) still leads to a higher practical efficiency than BAPO in the photopolymerization of a coating. A comparison with other reference systems based on 2-isopropylthioxanthone or anthracene is also provided and outlines again the very high performance of G1 for industrial applications.


The empirical literature on democracy and human rights has made great strides over the last 30 years in explaining (1) the variation in the transition to, consolidation of, and quality of democracy; (2) the proliferation and effectiveness of human rights law; and (3) the causes and consequences of human rights across many of their categories and dimensions. This work has in many ways overcome the 'essentially contested' nature of the concepts of democracy and human rights conceptually, established different measures of both empirically, and developed increasingly sophisticated statistical and other analytical techniques to provide stronger inferences for the academic and policy community. This article argues that despite these many achievements, there remain tensions between conceptualisations of democracy and human rights over the degree to which one includes the other, the temporal and spatial empirical relationships between them, and the measures that have been developed to operationalize them. These tensions, in turn, affect the kinds of analyses that are carried out, including model specification, methods of estimation, and findings. Drawing on extant theories and measures of both, the article argues that there must be greater specificity in the conceptualisation and operationalization of democracy and human rights, greater care in the development and use of measures, and greater attention to the kinds of inferences that are made possible by them.


Today, organisations use process-oriented systems to manage and automate the enactment of their business processes. The cornerstone artifact is the process model, which at design-time is used to describe the steps that need to be fulfilled in order to reach a business goal. At run-time, the process model is executed and process instances are created. The existing modelling approaches are based on three main paradigms: the more traditional activity-centric paradigm, the case handling paradigm and the more recent data-centric paradigm.

Process models can be classified into monolithic and interacting process models. Monolithic process models are predominantly created in the activity-centric and case-handling paradigm. In a monolithic process model, all the involved resources and activities are contained in one vast model. In monolithic process models, interactions occur between the different partners involved in a cross-organisational setting which exchange messages with one another. Interacting process models are prevalent in the data-centric paradigm. In interacting process models, interdependent processes interact with one another such that on a meta-level a composite business process is achieved. In both types of models, interactions between interrelated processes need to be properly coordinated such that a common business objective can be reached.

Handling the complexity generated by highly interconnected scenarios, involving hundreds of processes, is a challenge in business process management. Process management systems for such collaborations must be capable of handling both synchronous and asynchronous process interactions. In the context of process management systems, different pattern catalogues such as the Service Interaction Pattern or Correlation Pattern have been used for describing fundamental types of interactions that repeatedly arise during business process modelling. Yet, until now, none of the existing pattern catalogues has explicitly tackled the interactions of heterogeneous business processes in a many-to-many relationship setting. Furthermore, the existing pattern catalogues for the interaction-perspective are not paradigm independent, but mainly focus on the activity-centric paradigm.

For modelling multiple interacting processes with different dependency constraints, a collection of patterns that explicitly describes interactions among processes in different types of relationships, in a paradigm-independent manner, is required. This thesis proposes a catalogue of patterns, named the Process Coordination Patterns, describing process interactions in a one-to-many and many-to-many relationship setting. In the developed pattern catalogue, the discovered seven patterns are illustrated by abstracting from any specific paradigm. The PCPs may be used as guidance for evaluating the degree to which existing approaches capture more complex process interactions. In this thesis, the proposed pattern catalogue is put into practice by evaluating the degree to which two modelling approaches, based on different paradigms, can support the seven Process Coordination Patterns.


Earnings on cross-border investments figure only marginally in net estimates of the U.S. current account, but they represent an increasingly large share of gross flows between the United States and other nations. Because these earnings fluctuate much more sharply than trade flows, they can be expected to create permanently higher current account volatility. Such increased volatility is not necessarily grounds for concern, however; it reflects an international sharing of risk that provides a buffer against domestic economic uncertainty.


For Part I see ibid., vol. 54, p. 332-342 (2007). In the first part of this work, we introduced a novel general ultrasound apodization design method using constrained least squares (CLS). The technique allows for the design of system spatial impulse responses with narrow mainlobes and low sidelobes. In the linear constrained least squares (LCLS) formulation, the energy of the point spread function (PSF) outside a certain mainlobe boundary was minimized while maintaining a peak gain at the focus. In the quadratic constrained least squares (QCLS) formulation, the energy of the PSF outside a certain boundary was minimized, and the energy of the PSF inside the boundary was held constant. In this paper, we present simulation results that demonstrate the application of the CLS methods to obtain optimal system responses. We investigate the stability of the CLS apodization design methods with respect to errors in the assumed wave propagation speed. We also present simulation results that implement the CLS design techniques to improve cystic resolution. According to novel performance metrics, our apodization profiles improve cystic resolution by 3 dB to 10 dB over conventional apodizations such as the Hat, Hamming, and Nuttall windows. We also show results using the CLS techniques to improve conventional depth of field (DOF)


The Ives Medal Address consisted mostly of demonstrations of phenomena of color perception. The following demonstrations were attempted: blue arcs of the retina, Maxwell's spot shown with Miles filter (macular pigment as an entoptic phenomenon), attributes of color perception (Desert Island experiment with Priest charts), color perceptions of protanopes and deuteranopes, metamerism (Stearns textiles, Granville grays), chromatic adaptation (simultaneous and successive contrast), and color rendition of light sources (object-color perception as the projection of the after-image of the background onto the object).


We propose a new procedure for fast and robust extraction of the Steady-State Visual Evoked Potentials (SSVEP) for an asynchronous multi-command Brain Computer Interface (BCI). The SSVEPs were elicited by means of small reversal flickering checkerboards displayed on a monitor screen. In order to extract the SSVEPs we applied a new algorithm based on Constrained Independent Component Analysis with references (CICAr). A set of references defined as rectangular half-cycle-square periodic signals with the same frequencies as the frequencies of the flickering checkerboards were added into equality and inequality constraints, in order to extract in each moment the stronger elicited SSVEP activities. The final decision stage of the BCI system is performed by means of multiple statistical tests using surrogate data to contrast the reliability of the extracted SSVEPs by the CICAr algorithm, achieving a good discrimination when a subject is gazing or not gazing at a checkerboard. The proposed procedure does not require a classifier; therefore, it is not necessary to perform any calibration or training session to tune any classifier parameter, hence a plug and play BCI system. The algorithm has been tested with recorded EEG data of 4 healthy subjects from previously published real-time SSVEP-based BCI experiments. The obtained results confirm a high performance of the proposed algorithm, reaching a high transfer rate of information.


In this study, fecal bacterial adsorption in three different soils (clay loam, silt loam, sandy loam) was investigated. A wild strain of &cherichia coli (E. colO
isolated from animal wastewater was used in the study. For adsorption kinetics study, adhesion of bacterial cells to soil particles was found to be immediate. Percent adsorption was found to be dependent on the initial concentration of E.coli. Results indicate that at low E. coli concentrations (below I ()3 cfulml), the percent adsorption was very much less in sandy loam than in silt loam and clay loam. However, as the bacterial concentration increased, all the soils tested displayed higher bacteria adsorption with maximum values of 99.9% for clay loam, 99.9% for silt loam and 99.7% for sandy loam. Soil with higher clay content (35.2 % and lower pH (PH 4.5» had significantly higher capacity for adsorbing E. coli. Furthermore, E. coli concentration of I ()6 cfulml in suspension was found to decrease by 2 orders of magnitude in all the three soils. Therefore, land treatment of wastewater from animal farm lagoons should be considered to reduce microbial contamination of rivers.


Bernard Lonergan claimed that his description of religious experience as "being in love unrestrictedly" differs merely notionally from the Scholastic idea of "sanctifying grace." However, he did not offer the detailed explanation needed to establish the continuity between his development and the medieval category of "sanctifying grace." His account of religious experience, therefore, remains ambiguous. Consequently, notable Lonergan scholars have explained the meaning of religious experience differently for a methodical theology. After discussing their explanations, the author offers his own account of "unrestricted being in love" according to the critical directives of the Scholastic categories.


We are developing a phoneme based, speaker-dependent continuous speech recognition system embedding a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) (i.e., a feedforward Artificial Neural Network), into a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) approach. In [Bourlard & Wellekens], it was shown that MLPs were approximating Maximum a Posteriori (MAP) probabilities and could thus be embedded as an emission probability estimator in HMMs. By using contextual information from a sliding window on the input frames, we have been able to improve frame or phoneme classification performance over the corresponding performance for Simple Maximum Likelihood (ML) or even MAP probabilities that are estimated without the benefit of context. However, recognition of words in continuous speech was not so simply improved by the use of an MLP, and several modifications of the original scheme were necessary for getting acceptable performance. It is shown here that word recognition performance for a simple discrete density HMM system appears to be somewhat better when MLP methods are used to estimate the emission probabilities.


Sudden water inflow is the typical geological hazard during the construction period of underground, especially for the karst area. According to a new type of polymer chemical grout material called Malisan, plugging performance optimization tests of different grouting material had been carried out, such as ordinary cement, superfine cement and special cement of HSC, the geo time, consolidating strength, anti-erosion property and comprehensive properties of grouting harnessing had been systematically analyzed and compared. Test results showed that the new type of polymer chemical grout material has the significant characteristics of controllable gel time, high consolidating strength, anti-scour performance, water swelling and extremely strong permeability, it is more effective than conventional grouting material for grouting harnessing of seepage, water spraying and water inflow with high water pressure, in addition, it is convenient for transportation, material configuration and process operation.


Although interregional cooperation in trade and investment between Latin America and Asia-Pacific has been on the agendas of countries in both regions for some time, initiatives have been few, with meager results. The lack of tangible results is related to the economic asymmetries between the two regions and a purely inter-industrial nature of bi-regional trade. The incipient drive in bi-regional trade up to the Asian crisis was triggered by the economic boom of East Asia on the one hand, and growth recovery, economic reforms and integration, on the other. Now, coupled with the slowdown of the US economy and the standstill of Japanese economy, the sustained impulse of these factors is uncertain. The present economic relations between the two regions do not reflect the potential for interregional trade and investment that exists in an increasingly globalized world. The current low level of economic interaction, especially in the aftermath of the economic crises experienced in each region in recent years, calls for joint actions in the economic sphere. Given the embryonic stage and limited country coverage of ongoing consultations on bilateral free trade agreements, the recently created Forum for East-Asia Latin America Cooperation (FEALAC) should address the issues of market access and bi-regional economic integration, and promote concrete integration initiatives.


The numbers of Islamic banks are increasing, with the aim of offering interest-free banking products. However, since the development of Islamic banks, negative concerns prevail because of the operational concerns: lack of qualified staff, lack of human resource policies, lack of planning and training to speed up Sharīʿah bank business growth. In this scenario, it is imperative for Islamic banks to remove all negative concerns and find solutions for those specific key obstacles which are affecting Islamic bank credibility. To investigate key obstacle factors, this research sketched the issues from literature (research articles, existing survey findings, concepts, models, and theories) involved with human resource, and performance of employees in Islamic banking. After lay outing the Human resource challenges from literature review, this research contributes by offering practical possibilities and theoretical consideration for the emergent issue of human resources of Islamic financial services.


The risk explanation for value stocks' long-run outperformance (i.e., the value premium) is theoretically compelling, but what these risks are remains controversial. Doukas et al. [2004] suggest that the risk may be divergent opinions. Specifically, using analysts' forecast dispersion as a proxy for divergent opinions, they find that value stocks have significantly higher divergent opinions. This article further explores the divergent opinions explanation of the value premium by directly examining how divergent opinions affect stock returns. Contrary to the prediction of the divergent opinions explanation, we find that firms with greater exposure to divergent opinions do not earn higher excess returns, and the results hold for both value and growth stocks. In fact, firms with higher divergent opinions seem to earn slightly lower (though insignificant) returns than those with lower exposure to divergent opinions. Our results therefore cast doubt on the divergent opinions explanation of the value premium.


Background and Aim: Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an autoimmune, inflammatory, chronic and progressive disease of central nervous system in which myelin sheath and axons of nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord destroyed by immune system. The change in concentration of cytokines is the major physiological symptom of the disease; whereas physical activity and exercise is an important non-pharmacological method in maintain homeostasis of physiological symptom in MS disease. The aim of this study was to determine the effect of eight weeks of exercise training combined with Q10 supplementation on serum TNF-α and IL-10 in patients with multiple sclerosis. Methods: In the present experimental research, twenty eight MS patients (EDSS=3-5) were selected by using available sampling method and randomly divided into three experimental groups (combined exercise training + Q10 supplementation, combined exercise training + placebo & Q10 supplementation) and one control group (5 female and 2 male in each group). Two groups of three experimental groups performed a combined exercise program include two sessions of endurance training (%50-60 max HR at beginning to end) and one session of resistance training (%50-60 1RM at beginning to end) three sessions per week. 200 mg of CoQ10 supplement was prescription per day. Blood samples (after 10 hours fasting) were collected 24 hours before the first and 24 hours after the last session of exercise for evaluation of serum levels of IL-10 and TNF-α. Data were analyzed with Shapiro Wilk and analysis of covariance at a significance level of P<0.05. Results: The results of covariance analysis showed that there was no significant difference between the serum levels of IL-10 and TNF-α in all three experimental groups compared to the control group. Also, the results of t-test showed that there was no significant difference between the data of serum levels of IL-10 and TNF-α in the post-test compared to the pre-test (P≥0/05). Conclusion: Combined exercise training with coenzyme Q10 supplementation cannot lead to changes in concentration of IL-10 and TNF-α in patient with MS. Therefore, it is necessary to change the duration and severity of this type of training as well as dose of supplementation.


While alcohols have successfully undergone kinetic resolutions, amines pose a challenge due to their nucleophilic nature. Aziridines were identified as potential substrates as a result of their synthetic utility and reduced nucleophilicity. Using a helical aminopyridine catalyst, the kinetic resolutions of ketoaziridines were explored. Initial attempts revealed anomalous kinetic behaviour [slow conversion and non-first order]. Non-buffered noncatalytic control reactions demonstrated unexpected reaction dynamics, as gauged by HPLC and 1H NMR. Stopped-flow spectroscopy revealed photochemical sensitivity of the aziridine. As a result of this new information, the project evolved into a study of the photochemical behaviour of ketoaziridines and their spectroscopic properties. UV-vis absorbance and fluorescence spectroscopy were used to probe the photochemical reactivity of ketoaziridines. These studies suggested a two-step mechanism where an azomethine ylide formed a reactive intermediate, ultimately to form 2,5-diphenyloxazole. Kinetic analysis revealed the mechanism was autocatalytic with respect to oxazole formation. TD-DFT calculations suggested the mechanism proceeded via a diradical species upon irradiation. This mechanistic route was studied by investigating the presence of a magnetic field effect on the kinetics of absorption and emission changes, in collaboration with the Manchester Institute of Biotechnology. Further studies demonstrated a radical species, derived from the irradiation of aziridine, may be used as a photoinitiator in the polymerization of methyl methacrylate. This work also involved development of a synthetic platform to diphenyloxazoles, where functionality may be installed in the initial steps. Use of this strategy allowed for the synthesis of a natural product, texaline.


Summary

1. The relative contribution of dissolved and atmospheric nitrogen to promoting dominance of the toxic nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium, Cylindrospermopsis raciborskii was examined in a subtropical water reservoir, North Pine Reservoir.

2. A combination of process studies in situ and analysis of historical water quality data suggests that nitrogen fixation was not the principal mechanism for acquiring nitrogen and unlikely to be the mechanism whereby C. raciborskii gains a competitive advantage. Ammonium was the preferred nitrogen source, followed by nitrate then nitrogen fixation.

3. Ammonium uptake rates in the euphotic zone were higher in the summer and autumn months compared with winter and spring coinciding with lower ammonium concentrations. Nitrate uptake rates did not appear to vary seasonally and were lower than those for ammonium in the summer, but similar in winter. Nitrate concentrations were higher in winter than summer and generally higher than ammonium concentrations.

4. Ammonium and nitrate uptake rates were similar at light intensities between 10% and 100% of surface light, contrasting with primary productivity which peaked between about 10 to 20% of surface light. Thus the phytoplankton population was adapted to low light conditions but remained able to utilise dissolved inorganic nitrogen over a wide range of light conditions.

5. The ammonium pool in the surface waters was relatively small compared with the phytoplankton uptake rates, and ammonium must therefore be rapidly recycled through the food web over periods of less than 1 h. Short-term depletion may result, during which time the higher concentrations of nitrate are likely to provide a supplementary supply of nitrogen.

6. The dominance of C. raciborskii in this reservoir is more likely to be due to a superior ability to scavenge and store the low concentrations of phosphate, and a superior adaptation to the low light conditions exacerbated by artificial mixing.


Stock enhancement programs involving the mass release of hatchery-reared Japanese flounder have been conducted in nearly all coastal regions of Japan. These programs have been regionally suc cessful, however, many fundamental problems that inhibit further success remain. Changes in distri bution, growth and abundance of released juvenile flounder were investigated in the coastal area of Tottori Prefecture form 1989 through 1991. Flounder juveniles were directly counted by divers along transect lines at 6 depths between 0.5m and 13m. Beam trawl samples were taken and densi ties were estimated using gear efficiencies obtained by comparison between the number of fishes col lected by the trawl and the number counted by divers. Released juveniles were found mainly in waters shallower than 10m, and showed nearly the same distribution pattern as wild juveniles. A sig nificant length increase was not observed in recaptured flounder. The number of reared juveniles rapidly decreased during the first week after release and the retention rate after the 1st week ranged from 3.5% to 26.9%. Based on changes in distribution and growth after release, the authors conclud ed that the rapid reduction in the number of released juveniles was caused by high mortality. Causes of mortality of released and wild flounder are discussed in relation to the abundance of prey and pre dation by piscivorous fishes.


Abstract Cobalt ferrite (CoFe2O4) has numerous desirable features such as high anisotropy, good magnetic saturation, large coercivity and high mechanical strength. These remarkable characteristics provide extensive employment for their wide application from industrial to biomedical. The present study aims to evaluate the crystal properties, particle size, and morphology of CoFe2O4 nanoparticles prepared by the thermal treatment method and investigates their biocompatibility. XRD and FTIR analyses demonstrated that CoFe2O4 nanoparticles have an inverse cubic spinel crystalline structure. The average size of spherical CoFe2O4 nanoparticles was confirmed by SEM analysis as 58 nm. The cytotoxic effect of CoFe2O4 nanoparticles was evaluated in L929 cells by using the XTT cell viability assay. After 24 h treatment of CoFe2O4 nanoparticles with a concentration between 10 and 1000 µg/ml, the viability of L929 cells did not significantly decrease. It is concluded that growth CoFe2O4 nanoparticles are beneficial materials for use in various biomedical applications.


Type I collagen, the major component of extracellular matrix in skin and other tissues, is a heterotrimer of two α1 and one α2 collagen polypeptides. The synthesis of both chains is highly regulated by different cytokines at the transcriptional level. Excessive synthesis and deposition of collagen in the dermal region causes thick and hard skin, a clinical manifestation of scleroderma. To better understand the causes of scleroderma or other tissue fibrosis, it is very Important to investigate the molecular mechanisms that cause upregulation of the Type I collagen synthesis in these tissues. Several cis-acting regulatory elements and trans-acting protein factors, which are involved in basal as well as cytokine-modulated Type I collagen gene expression, have been identified and characterized. Hypertranscription of Type I collagen in scleroderma skin fibroblasts may be due to abnormal activities of different positive or negative transcription factors In response to different abnormally induced signaling pathways. In this review, I discuss the present day understanding about the involvement of different factors in the regulation of basal as well as cytokine-modulated Type I collagen gene expression and its implication in scleroderma research.