The aim of this dissertation was to examine the extent of association, if any, between strengths (including those of the client, the client's family, and the client's environment) and psychiatric symptom severity for youth (children and adolescents aged 5-22) in contact with a mental health and/or substance abuse agency in a public System of Care. This dissertation examined a public systems dataset that included administrative assessment data for every client aged 5-22 (n=2049) who entered into a public System of Care from June 2010-August 2013. The assessment data was collected by clinicians at entry to the system (initial assessment), six months after initial assessment, and twelve months after initial assessment. Behavioral/social learning theory and related research in applied and experimental settings (e.g. Goldiamond, 1974; Madden, 2013; Staats, 2012) would suggest that growth in strengths would be associated with reduction in symptoms. However, time order cannot be determined with the current data and thus only associational relationships are discussed. This dissertation is a three paper dissertation including a dissertation introduction, three inter-related papers, and a dissertation conclusion. The dissertation introduction provides a background to the entire dissertation and is intended to orient to the reader to terminological and conceptual issues relevant to all three papers (each paper might also cover some of the literature included in the dissertation introduction, as relevant to the specific paper). Paper one reviews the literature on prevalence of emotional and behavioral problems among youth in the United States, orients the reader to the history and current policies of Systems of Care (SOC), and reviews the literature on strength-based assessment. Then, paper one reports the prevalence of clinician-reported strengths in the public System of Care, explores the psychometric properties of the assessment's Strengths section, and describes three alternative modeling options to explore group differences (by gender, age, and ethnicity) of youth strengths. Youth assessed at entry to the System of Care were reported to enter with considerable strengths, similar to other studies reporting on prevalence of strengths in a System of Care (e.g. CMHI, 2011; Dunleavey et al., 2011). The confirmatory factor analysis found that the hypothesized two factor model was a better fit for the data than a single factor model, though the fit of the two factor model was only adequate and the interpretation of the factors were questionable. Individual strength items were assessed as the most informative for future analyses, compared to the factors or the composite score. Paper two examines whether, at initial assessment, client strengths are associated with psychiatric symptoms. Higher levels of family relationships, peer relationships, and educational strengths were significantly associated with lower levels of psychiatric symptoms, after accounting for variation due to clinician, program, reported trauma exposure and youth demographics. Paper three reviews some studies that report on the relationship between strengths and mental health outcomes in Systems of Care samples. This paper then examines 1) the average change in psychiatric symptom severity twelve months after entry (initial assessment) to the System of Care, 2) whether initial strengths are associated with rate of change in psychiatric symptoms, 3) whether rate of change in strengths at six month and twelve month assessment are associated with rate of change in psychiatric symptoms, and 4) explores the contribution of variations related to clinician, youth, and time. Results suggest that self-reported growth in peer relationships, relationship permanence, and education strengths twelve months after entry to the System of Care was associated with larger reported reductions in symptoms at twelve months, adjusting for clustering, time, and youth demographics. Only associational relationships are reported; causal direction cannot be established in the current data. The percentage of youth referred for services, where they were referred from and to, the percentage who went to services, type, quantity, and quality of interventions offered and used (if any), and drop-out rates and reasons are not reliably tracked in the System of Care. This dissertation focuses on one aspect of service delivery in public mental health systems, namely the role of strengths, if any, in Systems of Care for youth with emotional and behavioral problems. The dissertation conclusion discusses overall themes that emerged, notes limitations relevant to the entire dissertation, and discusses implications for social workers and others.


Most studies on optimal crossover designs are based on models that assume subject effects to be fixed effects. In this article we identify and study optimal and efficient designs for a model with random subject effects. With the number of periods not exceeding the number of treatments, we find that totally balanced designs are universally optimal for treatment effects in a large subclass of competing designs. However, in the entire class of designs, totally balanced designs are in general not optimal, and their efficiency depends on the ratio of the subject effects variance and the error variance. We develop tools to study the efficiency of totally balanced designs and to identify designs with higher efficiency.


Objectives Based on cross-sectional studies, the data on protection from Human Papillomavirus (HPV) infections related to using male condoms appear inconsistent. Longitudinal studies are more informative for this purpose. We undertook a systematic review of longitudinal studies on the effectiveness of male condoms in preventing HPV infection and cervical neoplasia. Methods We searched PubMed using MeSH terms for articles published until May 2013. Articles were included if they studied a change in non-immunocompromized women's cervical HPV infection or cervical lesion status along with the frequency of condom use. Results In total, 384 abstracts were retrieved. Eight studies reported in 10 articles met the inclusion criteria for the final review. Four studies showed a statistically significantly protective effect of consistent condom use on HPV infection and on regression of cervical neoplasia. In the remaining four studies, a protective effect was also observed for these outcomes, although it was not statistically significant. Conclusions Consistent condom use appears to offer a relatively good protection from HPV infections and associated cervical neoplasia. Advice to use condoms might be used as an additional instrument to prevent unnecessary colposcopies and neoplasia treatments in cervical screening, and to reduce the risk of cervical cancer.


Purpose: Molecular characterization of circulating tumor cells (CTC) is crucial for the investigation of molecular-targeted therapies while PIK3CA somatic mutations play a crucial role in therapy response. We investigated the presence of PIK3CAmutations in CTC andwhether this is associated with clinical outcome. Experimental Design: We developed and validated an ultrasensitive methodology for the detection of PIK3CA mutations that is based on a combination of allele-specific, asymmetric rapid PCR and melting analysis.We analyzed PIK3CA hotspotmutations in: (i) a training group consisting of EpCAM-positive CTC fraction from 37 patients with clinically confirmed metastasis, and 26 healthy female volunteers and 15 primary breast tumor tissues and (ii) an independent group consisting of EpCAM-positive CTC fraction from 57 metastatic and 118 operable breast cancer patients and 76 corresponding primary tumors. Results: The assay could detect 0.05% of mutated dsDNA in the presence of 99.95% wtDNA for both exons (9 and 20) and was highly specific (0/26 healthy donors). PIK3CA mutations were identified in EpCAM-positive CTC in 20 of 57(35.1%) and in 23 of 118 (19.5%) patients with metastatic and operable breast cancer, and in 45 of 76(59.2%) corresponding FFPEs. Our data indicate that PIK3CA mutational status in CTCs can change during disease progression and is associated with worse survival (P 1⁄4 0.047). Conclusions: PIK3CA hotspot mutations are present at a relatively high frequency in CTCs and their presence is associated with worse survival in patients with breast cancer with metastasis. Evaluation of PIK3CAmutational status in CTCs is a strategy with potential clinical application. Clin Cancer Res; 20(22);


Conventional seismographic networks sparsely sample the wavefields excited by earthquakes. Thus, standard event detection is conducted by analyzing separate stations and merging their results. Emerging distributed acoustic sensing recording technologies allow for unbiased spatial sampling of the wavefield and, as a result, array‐based processing of the recorded signals. Using a cemented fiber in the San Andreas Fault Observatory at Depth main hole, 800 virtual receivers are sampled at a 1 m interval from the surface to 800 m depth. Recorded earthquakes are approximated as plane waves reaching the bottom of the array first. Following this assumption, the relative travel times of the recorded event depend on the local velocity at the array location and the angle of incidence at which the planar wavefront reaches it. Given the seismic velocity, a newly proposed detection algorithm amounts to a single‐parameter scan of the incidence angle and measurement of data coherency along the different possible travel‐time curves. Using the entire recording array, a much higher effective signal‐to‐noise ratio can be obtained when compared to individual channel processing. About 20 days of recorded seismic activity from the San Andreas Fault is analyzed. Using a downhole single array, the majority of cataloged events in the area are detected. In addition, a previously unknown event is unveiled. We estimate its magnitude at roughly −0.5.


BACKGROUND
Central sleep apnea (CSA) is common among patients with heart failure (HF) and is promoted by elevated CO2 chemosensitivity. Left atrial size is a marker of the hemodynamic severity of HF. The aim of this study was to determine if left atrial size predicts chemosensitivity to CO2 and CSA in patients with HF.

METHODS
Patients with HF with left ventricular ejection fraction ≤ 35% underwent polysomnography for detection of CSA, echocardiography, and measurement of CO2 chemosensitivity. CSA was defined as an apnea-hypopnea index (AHI) ≥ 15/h with ≥ 50% central apneic events. The relation of clinical and echocardiographic parameters to chemosensitivity and CSA were evaluated by linear regression, estimation of ORs, and receiver operator characteristics.

RESULTS
Of 46 subjects without OSA who had complete data for analysis, 25 had CSA. The only parameter that significantly correlated with chemosensitivity was left atrial volume index (LAVI) (r = 0.40, P < .01). LAVI was greater in those with CSA than those without CSA (59.2 mL/m2 vs 36.4 mL/m2, P < .001) and significantly correlated with log-transformed AHI (r = 0.46, P = .001). LAVI was the best predictor of CSA (area under the curve = 0.83). A LAVI ≤ 33 mL/m2 was associated with 22% risk for CSA, while LAVI ≥ 53 mL/m2 was associated with 92% risk for CSA.

CONCLUSIONS
Increased LAVI is associated with heightened CO2 chemosensitivity and greater frequency of CSA. LAVI may be useful to guide referral for polysomnography for detection of CSA in patients with HF.


: In the emerging field of nanoscience, tubular structures have been attracting remarkable interest due to their well-defined geometry, high specific area, and exceptional physical and chemical properties. Among them, oriented ZnO tubular arrays are regarded as promising candidates for various applications such as optoelectronics, solar cells, sensors, field emission, piezoelectrics, and catalysis. Although template-directed and selective dissolution synthesizing strategies are commonly used to prepare ZnO nanotubes, repeatability and large scale preparation are still challenging. In this study, ZnO nanotube arrays were controllably prepared by tuning the hydrothermal parameters, without the use of any additives. The mechanism underlying the self-conversion of ZnO nanorods to nanotubes was comprehensively studied based on the surface energy theory. It has been proved that the metastable top surface of the ZnO nanorods dissolves preferentially to reach a stable state during the hydrothermal growth. The specific surface energy of different crystal faces of ZnO nanorods was calculated using molecular dynamics simulation. The top surface of the ZnO nanorod, the Zn-terminated [0001] face, demonstrated much higher surface free energy than did the lateral faces, which indicated that the self-dissolution of top face (002) is energetically favorable. The self-conversion behavior of ZnO nanorod arrays with different diameters was specifically investigated by adjusting the initial precursor concentration, density of the crystal seed layers, and growth time. The dissolution-crystallization equilibrium concentration, determined by crystal surface energy, was found to be a key factor for the formation of the tubular structure. Notably, the critical equilibrium conditions for the self-conversion of ZnO nanorods to nanotubes, including zinc ion concentration and pH, have been identified by studying parameters corresponding to the dissolution-crystallization equilibrium for the metastable top surface of the ZnO nanorods. The preparation of the ZnO nanotube arrays was successfully accelerated and simplified via two-step procedure: (1) preparation of ZnO nanorod arrays and (2) self-conversion of ZnO nanorods to nanotubes. The preparation method based on the self-conversion mechanism from rods to tubes for polar oxides is simpler and more easily controllable as compared to the reported methods involving variety of additives. Because of the advantages of adaptability to a wide range of substrates, excellent conducting properties, and filling ability, the prepared ZnO nanotube array films were used in encapsulating phase-change materials. The encapsulated phase-change material exhibited excellent heat storage/release properties and heat conductivities. This indicates the potential application of precision devices for temperature control.


We used an ELISA to determine the prevalence of IgG antibodies specific for the Zaire subtype of Ebola virus in 790 nonhuman primates, belonging to 20 species, studied between 1985 and 2000 in Cameroon, Gabon, and the Republic of Congo. The seroprevalence rate of Ebola antibody in wild-born chimpanzees was 12.9%, indicating that (1) Ebola virus circulates in the forests of a large region of central Africa, including countries such as Cameroon, where no human cases of Ebola infections have been reported; (2) Ebola virus was present in the area before recent outbreaks in humans; (3) chimpanzees are continuously in contact with the virus; and (4) nonlethal Ebola infection can occur in chimpanzees. These results, together with the unexpected detection of Ebola-specific IgG in other species (5 drills, 1 baboon, 1 mandrill, and 1 Cercopithecus), may help to narrow the search for the reservoir of Ebola virus. They also suggest that future Ebola outbreaks may occur anywhere in the central African forest region.


Abstract: Background: Central neurocytoma (CN) is a rare benign tumor of central nervous system that is typically located in the lateral ventricle and constitute 0.1–0.5% of all primary brain tumors . Methods : We are relating retrospectively the results of 11 patients who underwent Gamma knife radiosurgery  for CNs in the Gamma unit at functional and stereotactic neurosurgery service in Marseille from January 1999 to December 2015.The mean age at Gamma knife radiosurgery (GKS) was 25.12 years (range17-41 years). All patients underwent surgery before (GKS) with a mean delay of 19, 37 months (6-62months). The prescribed mean dose delivered to the tumor margin was 19, 1 Gy(12-24Gy).The mean volume of treatment was 4.4mL (1.03-10.7mL).The mean time follow-up was 55.2 months (7.2-108 months). Results: The local tumor control was 90% at the final follow-up time. One recurring tumor was local (4.67years after GKS) and 2 were "out-of-field" recurrence (5.42 and 6.8 years after GKS) .Repeat stereotactic radiosurgery was performed in two patients with an average delay between the two of 5.91years and an average dose of 14.34Gy. The local tumor control was also unrelated to the prescribed dose (p= 0.89) and the tumor volume (p= 0.67). No deaths and no radiation injury were observed during our follow-up. Conclusion: Gamma knife radiosurgery is now the treatment of choice for sub-totally resected and local central neurocytoma recurrence with higher tumor control rates and low complications while the small number of patients studied in the literature .


The effect of a remote insulating boundary on the electro-magneto-phoretic motion of an insulating spherical particle suspended in a conducting liquid is investigated using an iterative reflection scheme developed about the unbounded-fluid-domain solution of Leenov & Kolin (J. Chem. Phys., vol. 22, no. 4, p. 683). Wall-induced corrections result from velocity reflections, successively introduced so as to maintain the no-slip condition on the wall and particle boundaries, as well as from the Lorentz forces associated with comparable reflections of the electric field. This method generates asymptotic expansions in λ (≪1), the ratio of particle size to particle–wall separation. The leading-order correction to the hydrodynamic force on the particle appears at O(λ3); it is directed along the leading-order force and tends to augment it.


Maryland has the second highest statewide cancer mortality rate in the nation. This ranking is primarily due to high death rates for the most prevalent cancers: lung, breast, colon, and prostate. Based on the recent literature and the October 1991 preventive medicine grand rounds at the Johns Hopkins University School of Hygiene and Public Health, this paper summarizes several current viewpoints on cancer mortality in Maryland and the progress that has been made by recently instituted state and community initiatives.


The conceptual changes to international security after the end of the Cold War, and particularly those following the al-Qaeda attacks of 2001, clarified the symbiotic relationship between corruption and international security: Corruption destroys the social political environment required to create human security and to ensure safety from terrorist attacks, and national borders increasingly fail to restrain its negative consequences.

To achieve human security though policy intervention in domestic affairs, global corruption governance relies on numerical indicators that measure corruption. By evaluating states through public comparison, indicators pressure states to improve their domestic institutions and structures to align them with the international legal regime against corruption. However, existing indicators, including the Corruption Perceptions Index and Control of Corruption, have serious deficiencies that precipitate strong criticism from scholars and practitioners.

This article suggests that the objective numerical measurement of "Corruption (0703)," one of the statistical measurements under the International Classification of Crime for Statistical Purposes (ICCS) of United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), is an emerging indicator that can enhance global corruption governance by supplementing or substituting existing indicators which are subjective numerical measurement of corruption. The significance of corruption as a threat to international security, not simply to international business, thus increases the absolute gains of Corruption (0703). Therefore, it is vital that states utilize and comply with Corruption (0703).

For this recommendation to be persuasive, however, the following three questions must be answered. Does Corruption (0703) have the qualities necessary to exert pressure on states by negatively impacting their power in a way that existing indicators cannot? Can states, which are both the subjects and objects of the Corruption (0703) measurement, realistically comply with it, and will they do so? How can the problem of state cheating to achieve a more favorable score be overcome?

To answer these questions, this article contemplates distinct characteristics of corruption between domestic criminal law and international agreements, and ultimately adopts the approach of neo-liberals, who prioritize absolute gain over relative gain and are thus optimistic about the potential for international organization and cooperation in implementing and enforcing this metric. In addition, this article often refers to the Republic of Korea as a case study because it has reached the most advanced stage of ICCS implementation.


My paper analyzes the play Homo Empathicus (2014) by Rebekka Kricheldorf. The play describes a community of hyperempathic people in which the distinguishing traits of religion, biological sex, and age have disappeared. In representing a postdramatic society, Kricheldorf takes the ethic of 'political correctness' to the extreme (that is, the linguistic practice through which discrimination on the basis of social class, gender, bodily characteristics, etc., can be eliminated): the elderly become 'Long-Lived', and the young are 'Young-Lived'. The grave digger is an 'Earth-Rester', and the manager of a public spa is a 'Hygiene Specialist'. Jeremy Rifkin's book, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis, in which the Homo empathicus was theorized for the first time, was the main impulse behind the play. Another significant inspiration came from the Guide to Non-Discriminatory Language, Behaviour, and Representation published by the Austrian Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs in 2010.


An integrated geophysical survey using both the electrical resistivity tomography (ERT) and ground-penetrating radar (GPR) methods was undertaken over a cave of great archaeological interest in southern Italy. The survey was performed to assess the stability of the carbonate rock roof of the cave. A geophysical survey was preferred to boreholes and geotechnical tests, in order to avoid the risk of mass movements. The interpretation of integrated data from ERT and GPR resulted in an evaluation of some of the electromagnetic (EM) characteristics (such as the EM wave velocity) and the detection of discontinuities (fractures) in the carbonate rock. It is well known that rock fractures constitute a serious problem in cave maintenance, and progressive cracking within the bed rock is considered to be one of the main causes of collapse. An analysis of the back-scattered energy was also required for the GPR data interpretation. Cracks within the bedrock were detected to a depth of about 2 m by using GPR, which allowed for the identification of the loosened zone around the cave.


Adolescents' challenges could be effectively addressed by treating their parents. Prior evaluations of CONNECT, an attachment-based program intervention for parents of adolescents at risk, indicated that improving parenting skills and the quality of parent-adolescent relationship may result in decrease of adolescents' behavioural problems. The present study is part of a longitudinal research involving three Italian centres (Pavia, Milan, Pisa) aimed at investigating whether helping parents reduce their reliance on coercive or unproductive parenting strategies and understand changes occurring during adolescence from an attachment-based perspective would reduce their adolescents' externalizing and internalizing symptoms. One-hundred and eighteen parents of adolescents (Mage = 15.26 years, SD = 1.49; 64% boys), randomly assigned to the intervention group (n = 66) or to the wait-list control group (n = 52), reported on their perceptions of their adolescents' externalizing and internalizing symptoms (using the Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire-parent version; Goodman, 1997), as well as attachment avoidance and attachment anxiety (using the Adolescent Attachment Anxiety & Avoidance Inventory; Moretti and Obsuth, 2009) prior to treatment (t0), within a two-week period following the final treatment session (t1) and at a four months follow-up (t2). Parents attending the CONNECT program reported significant reductions in their adolescents' externalizing symptoms, and slightly significant reductions in their adolescents' internalizing symptoms by a reduction of anxiety and avoidance attachment strategies. The findings add evidence to the importance of investigating mechanisms of change underlying the effectiveness of CONNECT program, providing further indications on its application in therapeutic contexts.


Abstract Trends in the populations of large herbivores in Niassa Reserve, Mozambique, have been monitored through biennial aerial surveys since 1998. The elephant Loxodonta africana population has been subjected to intensive illegal hunting since 2006. We used a simple population model to mimic the observed trends in the numbers of live and dead elephants to demonstrate the impact of poaching. The number of fresh or recent carcasses recorded was used in the model as an index of the annual mortality rate. A maximum likelihood analysis to compare population models revealed that the best fit to the survey estimates of both live elephants and old or very old carcasses was a model that started with 6,635 elephants in 1987. This number increased through births by 4.6% annually and decreased through deaths from natural and anthropogenic causes. In the best-fit model, the mean mortality rate in any year was 3.2 times the observed 1 + 2 carcass ratio (ratio for carcasses in age categories 1 and 2), and carcasses remained visible for a mean of 6 years. The model suggested that c. 900 elephants were poached during 2007–2010 and another c. 1,000 during 2011. Population estimates for live elephants and carcasses are now routine outcomes of aerial surveys conducted as part of the CITES programme for Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants, and our method can be applied to any population with a time series of estimates for live and dead elephants.


Due to the desirable performance, polyphase codes have been widely used in low probability of intercept radar. By analyzing the characteristic of the time-frequency distribution of polyphase codes, a new parameter estimation method based on time-frequency distribution is proposed. Simulation results show that this method have good estimate precision even in low signal-to-noise ratios.


This paper assesses the macroeconomic effects of unconventional monetary policies by estimating a panel VAR with monthly data from eight advanced economies over a sample spanning the period since the onset of the global finanancial crisis. It finds that an exogenous increase in central bank balance sheets at the zero lower bound leads to a temporary rise in economic activity and consumer prices. The estimated output effects turn out to be qualitatively similar to the ones found in the literature on the effects of conventional monetary policy, while the impact on the price level is weaker and less persistent. Individual country results suggest that there are no major differences in the macroeconomic effects of unconventional monetary policies across countries, despite the heterogeneity of the measures that were taken.


Human rights are rights that are invariant with respect to conventions, institutions, culture, or religion. One concern about such rights is the problem of parochialism, the question of whether human rights can plausibly be of global reach and thus justify actions even against societies that do not readily endorse relevant UN documents, or in whose culture those rights are not supported. Plausible responses to this problem also have to explain why the language of rights (rather than, say, goals) is appropriate here, and offer a substantive account of what duties (if any) accompany these rights. This study seeks to meet these challenges by transferring central elements of the approach to domestic justice in Rawls' Political Liberalism to the global level. Crucial to my approach is the idea that humanity collectively owns the earth, and that it is implicit in the global political and economic order that individuals are seen as co-owners, in a manner parallel to how it is implicit in a constitutional democracy that individuals are seen as free and equal citizens. Human rights emerge as guarantees for co-owners to make the imposition of the global political and economic order, and its erection on commonly owned territory, acceptable to them, in a manner parallel to how principles of domestic justice make a political association of a different sort (the state) acceptable to free and equal citizens. This account will hardly serve to arouse passions for human rights activism. (Inquiries into foundational questions of morality rarely arouse passions.) However, if successful, it can contribute to an increase in the intellectual standing of human rights, and in particular address critics who claim that the language of "rights" is inappropriate in contexts in which we talk about "human rights," as well as critics who argue that accounts of human rights are bound to be parochial.


This paper studies the WSN application scenario with periodical traffic from all sensors to a sink. We present a time-optimum and energy-efficient packet scheduling algorithm and its distributed implementation. We first give a general many-to-one packet scheduling algorithm for wireless networks, and then prove that it is time-optimum and costs max (2N(u1)-1, N(u0)-1) time slots, assuming each node reports one unit of data in each round. Here N(u0) is the total number of sensors, while N(u1) denotes the number of sensors in a sink's largest branch subtree. With a few adjustments, we then show that our algorithm also achieves time-optimum scheduling in heterogeneous scenarios, where each sensor reports a heterogeneous amount of data in each round. Then we give a distributed implementation to let each node calculate its duty-cycle locally and maximize efficiency globally. In this packet scheduling algorithm, each node goes to sleep whenever it is not transceiving, so that the energy waste of idle listening is also eliminated. Finally, simulations are conducted to evaluate network performance using the Qualnet simulator. Among other contributions, our study also identifies the maximum reporting frequency that a deployed sensor network can handle


Background Inflammation and activation of the coagulation cascades have a role in the pathogenesis of malignancy, including hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC). This retrospective study aimed to investigate the prognostic role of the combined fibrinogen and neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (F-NLR) in patients with resectable HCC. Material/Methods This retrospective study included 292 patients with HCC who underwent surgical resection. The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve was used to determine the cut-off value of preoperative fibrinogen (Fib) levels and the neutrophil-to-lymphocyte ratio (NLR). The. Hyperfibrinogenemia was >3.35 g/L, and an increased NLR was ≥2.47. The F-NLR was calculated for all patients. Kaplan-Meier survival curves, univariate analysis, multivariate analysis, and subgroup analysis were used to identify independent prognostic factors for overall survival (OS) and disease-free survival (DFS). The receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis of the F-NLR score and OS, according to the Barcelona Clinic Liver Cancer (BCLC) stage, was performed. Results Increased F-NLR scores were significantly associated with the presence of tumor thrombus (P=0.001), larger tumor diameter (P<0.001), vascular invasion (P<0.001), and increased BCLC stage (P<0.001). Multivariate analysis showed that the F-NLR score was an independent predictor of OS (P<0.001) and DFS (P=0.002). The prognostic role of F-NLR was significant for BCLC stage 0–I (P=0.004; P<0.001) and BCLC stage II–III (P=0.026; P=0.005) for OS and DFS, respectively. Conclusions In patients with resectable HCC, the combined F-NLR score, a new indicator of systemic inflammation, was an independent prognostic indicator.


Haemagglutination (HA) test was employed to determine the stability of HA titers of reconstituted form of Hitchner – B1 (B1), LaSota (L) and Komarov (K) strains of Newcastle Disease Vaccine (NDV) at 360c. The temperature treatment method was through incubation (in water bath) of the reconstituted vaccines at selected temperature and sequential sampling of each vaccine vial for the determination of pre – and post – temperature exposure HA titers. Thus, on the basis of a two-step (2log2) decline in titer as evidence of loss of stability of HA titers (LST), the LST therefore, occurred at 50th, 24th and 95th hour for BI, L and K strains, respectively, post –temperature exposure. The data, therefore, showed that the NDV – K strain was the most stable at the test temperature. It is believed that the findings will enhance the understanding of the potential of this strain in the developed and application of a thermostable MDV target on village poultry. In rural settings.


STUDY QUESTION
Are DNMT3B promoter polymorphisms among maternal risk factors for the birth of a child with Down syndrome (DS)?

SUMMARY ANSWER
Present results suggest that combinations of functional DNMT3B promoter polymorphisms might modulate maternal risk of birth of a child with DS.

WHAT IS KNOWN ALREADY
The DNMT3B gene codes for DNA methyltransferase 3b (DNMT3b), a protein required for genome-wide de novo methylation, for the establishment of DNA methylation patterns during development and for regulating the histone code and DNA methylation at centromeric regions. Two common functional DNMT3B promoter polymorphisms, namely -149 C > T (rs2424913) and -579 G > T (rs1569686), have been extensively investigated in cancer genetic association studies but less is known about their role in non-cancer diseases. Early in 1999, it was supposed that impaired DNA methylation of pericentromeric regions might represent a maternal risk factor for having a baby with DS.

STUDY DESIGN, SIZE AND DURATION
We aimed to investigate DNMT3B -149 C > T and -579 G > T polymorphisms as maternal risk factors for the birth of a child with DS. The study was performed on DNA samples from 172 mothers of DS individuals (135 aged <35 years when they conceived) and 157 age-matched mothers of unaffected individuals.

PARTICIPANTS/MATERIALS, SETTING AND METHODS
Genotyping was performed by means of the PCR-RFLP technique.

MAIN RESULTS AND THE ROLE OF CHANCE
The DNMT3B -579T allele [odds ratio (OR) = 0.68; 95% confidence interval (CI) = 0.48-0.94, P = 0.02], the DNMT3B -579 GT genotype (OR = 0.55; 95% CI = 0.35-0.87 , P = 0.01) and the combined DNMT3B -579 GT + TT genotype (OR = 0.55; 95% CI = 0.36-0.86 , P = 0.008) were associated with reduced risk of birth of a child with DS. A joint effect of the two polymorphisms was observed and the combined -579 GT/-149 CC genotype resulted in decreased DS risk (OR = 0.22; 95% CI = 0.08-0.64, P = 0.003). The effect remained statistically significant after Bonferroni's correction for multiple comparisons. Similar results were obtained when the analysis was restricted to women who conceived a DS child before 35 years of age.

LIMITATIONS AND REASONS FOR CAUTION
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first genetic association study aimed at evaluating DNMT3B polymorphisms as maternal risk factors for DS. Replication of the findings in other populations is required.

WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF THE FINDINGS
If confirmed in subsequent studies, DNMT3B promoter polymorphisms might be additional markers to be taken into account when evaluating the contribution of one-carbon (folate) metabolism to the maternal risk of birth of a child with DS.


Consensus sequences of transcription factors IRF, E12/E47, MBF1 and MyoD1 were represented as combination of the short oligonucleotide patterns ("enhansones"). The ad hoc computer program was employed for analysis of distribution and localization of these patterns on the sequences of interferons, immunoglobulins, metallothioneins and muscle-specific genes. The set of patterns was strictly specific for each gene family. In enhancer regions of almost all genes from mentioned families patterns were gathered in compact groups surrounding the operator sites. This empirical rule is true for genes where two conditions were fulfilled. (1) Operator site consists of tandem or inverted repeat of the short oligonucleotide motif, for instance GAAA-GAA in interferons or CCA-TGG in immunoglobulins. (2) Multiplication of the operator site leads to increase of enhancer activity because of cooperative interactions between transcriptions factors.


Aging is accompanied by widespread changes in brain tissue. Here, we hypothesized that head tissue opacity to near-infrared light provides information about the health status of the brain's cortical mantle. In diffusive media such as the head, opacity is quantified through the Effective Attenuation Coefficient (EAC), which is proportional to the geometric mean of the absorption and reduced scattering coefficients. EAC is estimated by the slope of the relationship between source–detector distance and the logarithm of the amount of light reaching the detector (optical density). We obtained EAC maps across the head in 47 adults (age range 18–75 years), using a high-density dual-wavelength optical system. We correlated regional and global EAC measures with demographic, neuropsychological, structural and functional brain data. Results indicated that EAC values averaged across wavelengths were strongly associated with age-related changes in cortical thickness, as well as functional and neuropsychological measures. This is likely because the EAC largely depends on the thickness of the sub-arachnoid cerebrospinal fluid layer, which increases with cortical atrophy. In addition, differences in EAC values between wavelengths were correlated with tissue oxygenation and cardiorespiratory fitness, indicating that information about cortical health can be derived non-invasively by quantifying the EAC.


The awareness of one's comprehension failure has been researched on problem solving in mental retarded children. Past studies suggested that non-awareness of one's comprehension failure in a given ambiguous instruction, without investigating how much retarded children would understand ambiguous instructions. In the present study, the comprehension of ambiguous instruction was investigated on children with and without mental retardation matching them on MA. Each child was instructed to solve a problem containing an ambiguous instruction for problem solving. Retarded children at MAs of 7 years were unaware of the ambiguity ; they understood the instruction in their own context. In contrast, the retarded children at MAs of 11 years and non-retarded children at both MAs were aware of it, had ideas about the intention of the one setting the problem, and rethought about the task request. In addition, another instruction was presented to allow a second thought on the task request. Almost all retarded children showed more performance by means of such instruction.


Time-scheduled reservation of traffic engineering (TE) resources can
be used to provide resource booking for TE Label Switched Paths so as
to better guarantee services for customers and to improve the
efficiency of network resource usage at any moment in time including
future planned network usage. This document provides a framework that
describes and discusses the architecture for supporting scheduled
reservation of TE resources. This document does not describe specific
protocols or protocol extensions needed to realize this service.


This research is based upon reasonable evidence that the environment moderates behavioural effects of biological systems (serotonergic neurotransmission) involved in the development of juvenile affective symptoms. The data suggest that the Serotonin Transporter gene is a genetic substrate for youth internalizing behaviour: adolescents who carry a less functioning variant of this gene have a greater risk to develop depressive symptoms when exposed to environmental adversities. This gene also plays an important role in determining the continuity/discontinuity of depressive traits throughout adolescence, thus confirming the theory that carriers of the less efficient allele have more negative feelings (about themselves and the world), which could turn into depression when under stress. Primary prevention strategies, promoting proactive and adaptive coping behaviours may reduce the likelihood of persistence of behavioural problems from early- to late-adolescence and, perhaps, to early adult years.


Darwin used taxonomic arguments widely in his work on transformism and natural selection, especially in attempts to persuade other (typically non-transformist) naturalists of the correctness of his ideas in Origin of Species. But, as has long been noticed, classificatory practices in natural history were by no means turned on their head in the wake of his work. Darwin succeeded in coopting, or else leaving untouched, the taxonomic conclusions of his colleagues, because he needed to use their conclusions as evidence for his transformist views: time and again, he made points by referring to what a typical naturalists would make of things. By telling them that the kind of knowledge that their taxonomy produced was really about genealogical relationships, Darwin tried to tell naturalist that their judgments were correct even though they had not previously known why this was so: they were sleepwalkers, finding their way in the dark, and Darwin would illuminate them. His argumentative style continually attempted to draw existing practices of classification to his assistance, and made the judgments of his colleagues into surrogate phenomena that would provide evidence for his views. Those colleagues thus constituted a society that established nature by its own practices.


The distribution and level of 5-fluorouracil (FUra) incorporation into RNA were studied in S-180 murine tumor cells for two different fluoropyrimidine nucleosides: 5-fluorouridine (FUrd) and 5'-deoxy-5-fluorouridine (5'-dFUrd) under both cytotoxic (thymidine nonreversible) and nontoxic conditions. Exposure of cells to 200 microM 5'-dFUrd for 6 hr resulted in minor thymidine-nonreversible toxicity (11% cell kill) and produced an FUra incorporation level of 12.5 pmol of FUra/microgram of RNA. Exposure of cells to 1 microM FUrd for 6 hr resulted in considerably more toxicity (74% cell kill) but was found to produce less FUra incorporation (7.8 pmol of FUra/microgram of RNA) than the nontoxic concentration of 5'-dFUrd. Subcellular fractionation (i.e., nucleolar, nucleoplasmic, cytoplasmic) was completed, and the density of FUra incorporation from 5'-dFUrd was found to be approximately equally distributed between nucleoplasmic RNA and nucleolar RNA, independent of toxicity or concentration levels (average nucleolar/nucleoplasmic FUra ratio = 0.75). FUrd, however, was preferentially incorporated into nucleolar RNA (average nucleolar/nucleoplasmic FUra ratio = 22). The nontoxic accumulation of FUra in RNA of cells treated with 200 microM 5'-dFUrd was also associated with the mature cytoplasmic 28 S and 18 S rRNA, the levels of which increased considerably with exposure time. In contrast, in cells exposed to 1 microM FUrd, there was very little FUra measured in the mature 28 S and 18 S rRNA, consistent with an inhibition of rRNA processing. It is concluded that 5'-dFUrd can produce large nontoxic levels of FUra accumulation in cellular RNA compared with FUrd because total FUra incorporation in nuclear RNA was almost equally dispersed between nucleoplasmic and nucleolar RNA, whereas nuclear FUra incorporation from FUrd was preferential for nucleolar RNA. Also, for nontoxic doses of 5'-dFUrd, unaltered rRNA processing over time can result in the large accumulation of FUra-containing rRNA in the cytoplasm.


PURPOSE
To pilot and determine the feasibility of estimating adverse events in patients with neck pain treated with cervical manipulation/mobilization by Canadian orthopaedic manual physiotherapists (OMPTs) using an online data-collection system to provide estimates for a future larger multi-centre international study.

METHODS
In a prospective multi-site two-group cohort study, participants received usual care and either (a) combined manipulation and mobilization or (b) mobilization only. Study feasibility objectives and criteria for success were set a priori. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics.

RESULTS
A total of 20 patients were recruited from 6 of 16 participating centres, 17 to the mobilization group and 3 to the combined group. Barriers to data collection included low recruitment, difficulties in using the online data-collection system, and clinicians' and patients' being too busy to participate. Missing data for the primary outcome averaged 28.5%. A total of 69 symptom occurrences were reported during the treatment phase, all benign and transient. Most began within 0-12 hours after treatment (66/69, 95.6%) and lasted for 0-2 days (56/69, 81.2%). Kappa estimates of agreement between therapists and patients on reporting of adverse symptoms across visits 1-5 was substantial (κ=0.68; 95% CI, 0.52-0.84; p<0.01).

CONCLUSIONS
This pilot study demonstrates substantial challenges in conducting a large multi-centre trial. Brief, benign, and transient adverse events were common; no substantial adverse events were observed.


Abstract : In the near future the United States may face shortages of scientists and engineers in fields such as physics, electronic engineering, computer science and aeronautical engineering. High School students are currently not selecting to prepare for careers in these areas in numbers large enough to match the projected needs in the United States. The Air Force faces 'formidable challenge - the acquisition and retention of the technological competence needed to ensure a strong national security, both-in-house and in the industrial and academic base which supports defense preparedness.' The Director of the Office and Science of Technology Policy in the Executive Office of the President in 1979 responded to this need by requesting the federal agencies to incorporate in their contract research programs the mechanisms to stimulate career interests in science and technology in high school students showing promise in these areas. The Air Force High School Apprenticeship Program is an example of the response to this. (jes)


The assumption that people live in one place with their lives guided by a singular set of national and cultural norms no longer holds true. The same applies for migrating due to various reasons with the aim of finding a better place to live. Instead, contemporary transnational migrants are accustomed to operating in several contexts of employment, leisure and political interests that extend beyond national borders. Yet, state borders still cut through the very core of the family life, forcing migrants to take difficult decisions about leaving, separation or arranging care of children and elderly, but also creating a certain degree of choice between two or more socio-political social and cultural contexts. Events of recent years have shaken established beliefs about the potential of transnational care networks. As the experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has shown, what once seemed to be enduring rules can be suspended for long periods of time.
For Poland, one of the countries affected by intense mobility to and from the country, discussions about the effects of migration on care networks are of paramount importance. As a direct consequence of mobility, the expectations and obligations that migrants (especially women) have towards the family they leave behind may change, shift or even remain unrestricted in spite of living abroad. Yet, establishing family care strategies for elderly family members in ageing societies is also based on the assumption of availability of migrant labour. Drawing on two sets of data, this article asks how intergenerational obligations were negotiated during the Covid-19 pandemic and whether the associated long-term restrictions on crossing national borders caused changes in patterns of care provision.
* This article belongs to a special issue on "Demographic Developments in Eastern and Western Europe Before and After the Transformation of Socialist Countries".


This study focused on corporate governance and performance of selected Nigerian multinational firms from 2012 to 2016. Specifically, the study focused on the effect of board size, activism and committee activism on return on asset and firm growth rate. Secondary data collected from four multinational firms were analyzed via static panel estimation techniques. While board size and board activism exerted significant negative impact on return on asset, committee activism exerted insignificant impact. The results of the study further showed that board size and board activism exert insignificant negative impact on firm's growth rate, while committee activism insignificantly spurs firm's growth rate. Decisively, discoveries from this study reflect that corporate governance has significant negative impact on return on asset, but has insignificant influence on the growth rate of Nigerian multinational firms. Based on these findings, the authors recommended that corporate governance dynamics in firms world over should be reconsidered, such that it gives credence to more than just numbers of persons or meetings held, but the main reasons and deliberations in such meetings. It was also recommended that excessive increase in magnitude or frequency of meetings held by board of directors cum committee should be avoided.


The occurrence of bactibilia was studied in a series of 515 patients operated on at different stages of acute cholecystitis (AC). The gallbladder bile cultures showed highest incidence of bactibilia in patients operated on within 24 hours of the onset of AC (63%). Significantly lower incidence (31%, p less than 0.001) was found only in the group receiving delayed surgery greater than or equal to 11 days later. The use of prophylactic antibiotics had only minor, if any, effect on the occurrence of positive bile cultures. The frequency of different bacterial strains did not differ significantly at various stages of AC. It is concluded that the gallbladder bile becomes infected so early in the course of AC that the risk of increased infection complication rate after surgery is present even from the very beginning. The possible benefit of prophylactic antibiotics in early surgery for AC remains open on the basis of the present study.


The dense Tucker decomposition method is one of the most popular algorithms for analyzing and compressing data with multi-way relationship. Its execution time is typically dominated by dense matrix multiplication operations, which makes it well-suited for GPU acceleration. State-of-the-art distributed dense Tucker implementations for CPU clusters adopt multi-dimensional partitioning that optimizes for storage and communication. This, however, leads to smaller matrix dimensions that result in under-utilizing the GPU resources. In this paper, we present our optimized implementation and performance analysis of dense Tucker decomposition on a multi-GPU cluster. We propose three key optimizations: a new partitioning strategy that improves performance for GPUs, a new tensor matricization layout that halves the number of communication and matricization steps, and a variation of the randomized SVD algorithm to overcome the eigenvalue calculation bottleneck that arises from the high speedup gained from GPU acceleration. When compared to the state-of-the-art TuckerMPI library, our best GPU implementation, which employs all three optimizations described above, achieves up to 11.8× speedup on 64 nodes. Our best CPU implementation, which also employs all three optimizations, achieves up to 3.6× speedup over TuckerMPI on 64 nodes. When we compare our best GPU implementation to our best CPU implementation, the speedup ranges from 2.1× to 3.6× on a single node, and from 1.8× to 3.3× on 64 nodes, depending on the input data set.


The British Columbia Royal Commission on Education (1988) submitted to the government of the day a number of recommended changes to the educational system. The Commission considered these changes necessary for a person to be a contributing member of society in the next century. Most of the Commissions' recommendations were accepted and have been the foundation for all subsequent policy directives. The restructuring of the educational system as indicated by the policies of the Department of Education appears to be headed towards a self paced curriculum. At the very least it will no longer be group paced because students learn at different rates. One way to achieve this would be through individualised instruction. This project developed modules for the delivery of the grade ten trigonometry unit based upon this mode of instruction. The modules incorporated guided instruction in the form of guided examples as a means of ensuring student understanding. Six students, four females and two males, were interviewed about their experiences with the modules. Student initial attitudes to the modules were somewhat negative due to previous student experiences with early versions of the modules. Student attitudes rapidly changed to a positive reaction as they worked their way through the revised and final version of the modules. Further analysis of the interviews indicates that the mode iv of instruction had positive affects on self esteem. It also suggests that the mode of instruction tends to lead students into choosing their learning environment and peer tutoring. Though all the students indicate that the guided instruction modules prepared them for the exercises the students did not perform well on summative evaluations. The project does suggest that the failure of this mode of instruction to successfully convey the necessary concepts, as measured by designed evaluations, may stem from the students lacking the skills necessary for this mode of instruction; skills such as questioning oneself, looking for connections between concepts and self-motivation among others.


In this paper, we propose a novel environmental Luenberger-Hicks-Moorsteen (LHM) Total Factor Productivity indicator and its decomposition that incorporates a negative externality into the measurement of economic performance. Special cases of a generalized environmental directional distance function are involved in the definition of this LHM indicator and the proposed decomposition. We suggest applying the weak disposability nonparametric environmental technology to implement the proposed decomposition. This LHM indicator decomposes into the three terms representing technical change, technical inefficiency change, and scale inefficiency change. The changes in the environmental TFP for OECD countries are then estimated by applying the data set covering the years from 1990 to 2014. We then show the differences of the proposed framework for the decomposition of the LHM indicator if opposed to some existing ones. The results suggest the proposed approach diverges from the traditional strong disposability non-parametric approach in terms of the cumulative environmental TFP.


In Mexico, the mobile network operators have reached penetration rates of about ninety percent of the population. However, the offered Quality of Service (QoS) still varies drastically between geographical areas due to, among others, the fact that the infrastructure deployed, for instance in rural areas, is not the newest access technology. Moreover, there is still a need to enhance the capacity of current mobile networks to satisfy the service demands of current and future users and applications.

In countries with no effective competition, this can be fostered by the telecommunications regulator whose role would be to define a set of metrics to help the enforcement of minimum standards for quality of telecommunication services. Furthermore, providing information produced by continuously monitoring QoS will provide a valuable source of data that can be used to empower the final users by keeping them informed about the QoS offered by operators enabling them to take decisions accordingly.

In this context, the recent Resolution 95 (2016) of the World Telecommunication Standardization Assembly resolves that the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector "provide references that assist developing and least developed countries in establishing a national quality measurement framework suitable to perform QoS and QoE measurement". Furthermore, it instructs study groups of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector, among others, "to elaborate Recommendations providing guidance to regulators in regard to defining strategies and testing methodologies to monitor and measure QoS and QoE" and "to study scenarios, measurement strategies and testing tools to be adopted by regulators and operators".

Given this and the fact that there are not yet normalised technical specifications or recommendations targeted for regulators, in this paper, we propose a system of metrics to assess the mobile telecommunication services offered in Mexico (voice, short message service (SMS) and data transfer) as well as a methodology to monitor the QoS at a national level and to measure the proposed metrics.

We develop a two-step statistical modeling approach using a stratified random sampling in the first step to select the geographical locations to be measured and a simple random sampling in the second step to determine the sample size for each service to be tested. We describe the procedure to construct the strata by selecting non-overlapping groups from the geographical regions in the country. The idea behind using stratification is to produce a smaller bound on the error of estimation than would be produced by a simple random sample of the same size alone. Instead, we use stratification combined with simple random sampling in each stratum to estimate national values for each QoS metric defined.

A theoretical example of implementation of the testing methodology at national level in Mexico is also presented to show its feasibility considering factors such as access technology, current service coverage and working days needed to perform the measurements.

Finally, we outline a set of recommendations that can be customized by any regulator to measure the performance and QoS at local and national level.


Air pollutants arise both from natural sources and from various anthropogenic activities, and are of concern due to their environmental impacts, including human health effects. In developing countries, atmospheric monitoring has largely focused on inorganic pollutants, such as sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and ozone. Organic air pollutants, however, are monitored infrequently, because of factors such as the cost of equipment required; necessary expertise of monitoring personnel; and the trace levels at which such pollutants are usually present in the atmosphere. This is of concern since organic air pollutants, such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and dioxins, are emitted from combustion processes, which are often employed for domestic heating and cooking purposes in developing countries. This paper focuses on the current status of organic air pollutant monitoring in southern Africa, and discusses developments in this regard. Screening methods and monitoring of indicator compounds, which allow for more widespread sampling and analysis of samples for spatial and temporal trend determinations, are discussed. A laser induced fluorescence (LIF) technique, for example, has been developed by the authors, based on sampling onto a novel silicone rubber trap. This will allow for the rapid screening of air samples for the presence of PAHs, prior to comprehensive, quantitative analysis of samples of interest by gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS) (particularly those with PAH levels above background concentrations). LIF provides sufficient selectivity for a screening procedure, without the need for sample clean-up and separation processes prior to analysis. The technique also lends itself to real-time monitoring and "chemical fingerprinting" via the fluorescence spectra obtained.


[5,15-Di(4-aminophenyl)-10,20-diphenylporphyrinato]zinc(II) was found to electropolymerize on electrodes such as glassy carbon (GC), indium tin oxide (ITO), and tin oxide, to form a redox-active, stable, and reproducible π-conjugated polymer. Electrochemical and UV/vis spectroscopic studies showed that the electropolymerization involves azobenzene linkage formation via radical intermediates. The electrode modified with the porphyrinic wire featured strong light absorptions in the visible region, thereby serving as a photoanode for a photocurrent generation system.


Mutations in leucine-rich repeat kinase 2 gene (LRRK2) are associated with familial and sporadic Parkinson's disease (PD). LRRK2 is a complex protein that consists of multiple domains, including 13 putative armadillo-type repeats at the N-terminus. In this study, we analyzed the functional and molecular consequences of a novel variant, E193K, identified in an Italian family. E193K substitution does not influence LRRK2 kinase activity. Instead it affects LRRK2 biochemical properties, such as phosphorylation at Ser935 and affinity for 14-3-3ε. Primary fibroblasts obtained from an E193K carrier demonstrated increased cellular toxicity and abnormal mitochondrial fission upon 1-methyl-4-phenylpyridinium treatment. We found that E193K alters LRRK2 binding to DRP1, a crucial mediator of mitochondrial fission. Our data support a role for LRRK2 as a scaffolding protein influencing mitochondrial fission.


Objectives The MUSICIAN study has previously shown short-term benefit but only marginal cost-effectiveness for two non-pharmacological interventions for chronic widespread pain (CWP). We wished to determine their long-term effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. Methods A 2×2 factorial randomised controlled trial based in primary care in the UK. People were eligible if they were aged ≥25 years with CWP for which they had consulted their general practitioner. The interventions were a 6-month telephone cognitive behaviour therapy (tCBT) and/or a tailored exercise programme, in comparison to usual care. The primary outcome was patient-reported change in health. Results 884 persons were eligible, 442 were randomised and 81.7% were followed up 24 months post-treatment. In comparison to usual care (positive outcome 12.8%), tCBT (35.4%; OR 3.7 95% CI (1.8 to 8.0)), exercise (29.3%; OR 2.8 95% CI (1.3 to 6.0)) and both interventions (31.2%; OR 3.1 95% CI (1.3 to 6.0)) were significantly more effective. There was only a small decrease in effectiveness over time for individual and combined treatments. Those with more intense/disabling pain, higher distress and those who exhibited passive coping at baseline were more likely to have a positive outcome with tCBT than persons without these characteristics. tCBT was associated with the greatest increase in quality of life and lowest costs. Cost per quality adjusted life year was £3957–£5917 depending on method of analysis. Conclusions A short course of tCBT for people with CWP was effective long-term and was highly cost-effective. Exercise was also effective but delivered positive outcome for fewer patients at greater cost, and there was no advantage for patients receiving both interventions. Trial registration number ISRCTN67013851.


Kapareil, a new small-kernel almond variety, may be the answer to demands of manufacturers of candy bars for smallsized nuts—an almond industry marketing problem that has existed for many years. Because of the need for such a variety, Kapareil is being released now by the California Agricultural Experiment Station for unrestricted propagation. The variety has consistently produced a high percentage of the desired sizes in different seasons, from different test plots. The tree shows promise of effective use in orchards although certain undesirable characteristics have been recognized. These and long-time productivity can best be analyzed with commercial plantings.


Discrete-Event Simulation (DES) is a technique in which the simulation engine plays a history following a chronology of events. The technique is called "discrete-event" because the processing of each event of the chronology takes place at discrete points of a continuous time-line. In computer implementations, an event could be represented by a message, and a time occurrence. The message data type is usually defined as part of the model and the simulator algorithms do not operate with them. Opposite is the case of time variables; simulator has to interact actively with them for reproducing the chronology of events over R+, which is usually represented by approximated data types as floating-point. The approximation of time values in the simulation can affect the time-line preventing the generation of correct results. In addition, it is common to collect data from real systems to predict future phenomena, for example for weather forecasting. When collecting data using metrological instruments and procedures, the measurement results include uncertainty quantifications, usually defined as intervals. However, sometimes, answering a question requires evaluating the results of all values in the uncertainty interval. This thesis proposes data types for handling representation of time properly in DES, including irrational and periodic time values. Moreover, we propose a method for obtaining every possible simulation result of DES models when feeding them events with uncertainty quantification on their time component.


Objective. To investigate the joint effects of the single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) of genes in the folic acid pathway on homocysteine (Hcy) metabolism. Methods. Four hundred women with normal pregnancies were enrolled in this study. SNPs were identified by MassARRAY. Serum folic acid and Hcy concentration were measured. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and support vector machine (SVM) regressions were used to analyze the joint effects of SNPs on the Hcy level. Results. SNPs of MTHFR (rs1801133 and rs3733965) were significantly associated with maternal serum Hcy level. In the different genotypes of MTHFR (rs1801133), SNPs of RFC1 (rs1051266), TCN2 (rs9606756), BHMT (rs3733890), and CBS (rs234713 and rs2851391) were linked with the Hcy level adjusted for folic acid concentration. The integrated SNPs scores were significantly associated with the residual Hcy concentration (RHC) (r = 0.247). The Hcy level was significantly higher in the group with high SNP scores than that in other groups with SNP scores of less than 0.2 (P = 0.000). Moreover, this difference was even more significant in moderate and high levels of folic acid. Conclusion. SNPs of genes in the folic acid pathway possibly affect the Hcy metabolism in the presence of moderate and high levels of folic acid.


The enhancement of passengers' comfort and their safety are part of the constant concerns for car manufacturers. Semiactive damping control systems have emerged to adapt the suspension features, where the road profile is one of the most important factors determining the automotive vehicle performance. Because direct measurements of the road profile represent expensive solutions and are susceptible to contamination (e.g. using laser and other visual sensors), this paper proposes a novel road profile estimator that offers the essential information (road roughness and its frequency) for the adjustment of the vehicle dynamics using conventional sensors, such as accelerometers or displacement/velocity sensors easy to mount, cheap, and useful to estimate all suspension variables. Based on the Q-parametrization approach, an adaptive observer estimates the dynamic road signal; afterward, a Fourier analysis is used to compute the road roughness condition online and to perform an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 8608 classification. Experimental results on the rear-left corner of a 1:5 scale vehicle, equipped with electro-rheological (ER) dampers, have been used to validate the proposed road profile estimation method. Different ISO road classes evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm, whose results show that any road can be identified successfully at least 70% of the time with a false alarm rate lower than 5%; the general accuracy of the road classifier is 95%. A second test with variable vehicle velocity shows the importance of the online frequency estimation to adapt the road estimation algorithm to any driving velocity; in this test, the road is correctly estimated in 868 of 1042 m (an error of 16.7%). Finally, the adaptability of the parametric road estimator to the semiactiveness property of the ER damper is tested at different damping coefficients.


Electrospray ionization time of flight mass spectrometry (ESI-ToF-MS) is a powerful characterization technique for large nonvolatile compounds but has found limited applicability in the synthetic polymer field. Two factors currently limit the utility of ESI-ToF-MS for synthetic polymer characterization: 1) Electrospray ionization often results in multiply charged species for each component in the sample. Synthetic polymers contain a distribution of many compounds with close uniformly spaced masses. The presence of multiple m/z peaks for each mass typically results in data that is complicated and becomes increasingly complicated as the average molar mass of the sample increases. 2) Electrospray ionization is best suited for polar easily ionized species dissolved in polar solvents. The vast majority of synthetic polymers are relatively non-polar do not ionize easily and are not soluble in the polar solvents most often used for ESI. By adding easily ionizable surface active quaternary ammonium salts that associate with polymer molecules during ionization we have made significant strides in overcoming both of these limitations. By using cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) as an additive we have been able to produce ESI-MS spectra with only singly charged charge states for the entire m/z range observable by our instrument (m/z = 0 - 20 000). Data will be presented for poly(methyl methacrylate) and polystyrene samples. Weight averaged molecular weight (Mw) number averaged molecular weight (Mn) and polydispersity (PD) calculations were all in good agreement with comparative analysis using Gel Permeation Chromatography (GPC) and Gel Permeation Chromatography - Multi-Angle Light Scattering (GPC-MALS). Further for some samples multiple distributions were identified corresponding to different end groups highlighting the utility of this approach.


Introduction: The stroke is a lesion of the Central Nervous System inducing spasticity, caused by a lesion of the upper motor neuron. The presence of spasticity limits the patient in achieving the necessary adjustments for the execution of required functional movements, causing limitations in daily life activities, interfering in our quality of life. Objective: To analyze the influence of the Autonomic Nervous System (ANS) in spastic patient consequential of stroke and decrease spasticity resulting of stimulus in the ANS. Method: It is a case study, where the spasticity was analyzed by means of Electromyography record (RMS), Ashowrth Scale modified and goniometry. The intervention consisted in 10 visits by performing Parasympathetic Laringe-Faringe Maneuvers, Plantar Arch and inhibition of Gastrocnemius. Results: The ANS has influence on the muscular activity, seen that there was a reduction of spasticity with decrease of the RMS values, increase in the amplitude of movement quantified by degrees and by means of the Modified Ashworth Scale. Conclusion: However, the mobilization of the autonomic nervous system through parasympathetic maneuvers are effective in decreasing spasticity due to stroke.


: Dynamics of ultrastructural alterations of Paneth cells (PC) of the rat jejunum have been investigated after bilateral subdiaphragmal trunkal vagotomy (7, 14, 30 and 60 days). This operation results in a profound ultrastructural rearrangement in PC organization, which is especially manifested on the 7th and 14th days. The cisterns and canaliculi of the endoplasmic reticulum dilate, the Golgi complex structure is disturbed, the matrix of mitochondria is cleared, their crists are fragmented, large vacuoles with electron transparent contents appear, total amount of the secretory granules and relative number of their immature forms increase, the secreory granules form and topography of their core is changed, small structures resembling microtubules appear in them. Beginning from the second week, morphological alterations of compensatory-adaptive character progressively increase: the number of free ribosomes grows large and large mitochondria appear.


Supervisory Remote Control Systems: R. E. YOUNG (Peter Peregrinus Ltd, for I.E.E., 1977, 192 pp., £10.00 U.K., £11.70 overseas (ex. Americas» In its 'Systems Engineering' treatment of supervisory telemetry as an integrated whole, and in its introduction to engineering economics, this book can be claimed to have broken new ground. The consideration given to the interaction of commercial and technical factors is probably unique, and is particularly welcome from a British source. One of the greatest strengths of Supervisory Remote Control Systems lies in its 'simple' language. Thus as there is a growing concern with technology at 'A' level in the U.K., interested sixth-formers (17 to 18 yr. olds) should find the book quite understandable; and yet, at the same time, the treatment is sufficiently deep for post-graduate use and also for reference by practising engineers. These last statements owe much of their basis to the way in which the book has been planned. The three main areas of supervisory systems instrumentation, communication and electronic logic, are reviewed widely, but individual aspects are covered in some detail. It does seem that the great majority of information required for designing, specifying and operating telemetry systems can be found in this single volume. Consequently, the breadth of thinking required is brought out in precise terms for the student. As an example, the security aspect, i.e, error detection and protection, is developed from first principles, and yet is well covered in terms of techniques and methods. Going on from this specific example leads to what is perhaps the most outstanding feature of the book. Supervisory remote control continues to expand and to diversify; once confined to long distance applications, it now becomes economic as a replacement for local multi-core cable schemes. Concurrently there have been rapid changes in the branches of technology involved, and these will continue. In his general treatment the author has shown how these changes have taken place and have interlocked and how they are likely to develop in the future; but in the process he has presented a number of principles which are quite specific and yet have been 'ordered' in such a way that the book will remain up-to-date for a long time to come. A. J. KEELING,Managing Director, Serck Controls, Leamington Spa


By employing molecular theory, we systematically investigate the shift of solubility of poly(N-isopropylacrylamide) (PNIPAM) brushes in sodium halide solutions. After considering PNIPAM–water hydrogen bonds, water–anion hydrogen bonds, and PNIPAM–anion bonds and their explicit coupling to the PNIPAM conformations, we find that increasing temperature lowers the solubility of PNIPAM, and results in a collapse of the layer at high enough temperatures. The combination of the three types of bonds would yield a decrease in the solubility of PNIPAM following the Hofmeister series: NaCl>NaBr>NaI. PNIPAM–water hydrogen bonds are affected by water–anion hydrogen bonds and PNIPAM–anion bonds. The coupling of polymer conformations and the competition among the three types of bonds are essential for describing correctly a decrease in the solubility of PNIPAM brushes, which is determined by the free energy associated with the formation of the three types of bonds. Our results agree well with the experimental observations, and would be very important for understanding the shift of the lower critical solution temperature of PNIPAM brushes following the Hofmeister series.


Conservation buffers are one strategy adopted by various federal and state agencies to aid in the reduction of agricultural impacts on surface and ground water systems. A diversified row crop and beef cattle operation located on a tributary of the Lower Chattahoochee River in Early County, southwest Georgia was the selected site for this study. A suite of indicators were chosen to evaluate the impact of agriculture on three unfenced and two fenced stream sites. Preliminary results provide no discernible differences in herpetofaunal captures between sites, except for larval salamanders captured within bimonthly invertebrate samples, which were more abundant at fenced sites. Percentages of EPT, Coleoptera and Crustacea were also higher at fenced sites, which also showed lower levels of nitrate-N, suspended solids, and fecal coliforms. Exclusion sites, which had been fenced out three years prior to this study, suggest some recovery from cattle impacts.


SUMMARY: By the application of respirometric techniques, it was found that the α-conidendrin (I)-decomposing agrobacteria included strains which were adaptively or constitutively lignanolytic. The lignans isotaxiresinol (V), iso-olivil (VI), and olivil (VII) were rapidly oxidized by all the bacteria examined. The adaptive organisms showed a time-lag before oxidation of the lignans if they had been grown on a conidendrin-free medium. The lag required for oxygen uptake with α-conidendrin was shorter than that observed for the other lignans. Matairesinol (IV), which differs structurally from α-conidendrin through the lack of the isolignan bond was not attacked by any of the agrobacteria examined. Olivil and iso-olivil were oxidized identically, giving results which indicate that the organisms bring about the isomerization olivil → iso-olivil. α-Conidendrol (II) was indicated by the simultaneous adaptation to be an intermediate in α-conidendrin decomposition. All the bacteria studied possess a constitutive ability to oxidize aromatic aldehydes (vanillin, isovanillin, veratrum-aldehyde, syringaldehyde). By calculation from the total oxygen uptake, and by paper chromatography, it was found that these oxidations gave the corresponding acids. Simultaneously with oxidation to vanillic acid, a small amount of vanillin was reduced to vanillyl alcohol. Coniferyl alcohol was oxidized to ferulic acid.


In the article, the author analyses the book of memoirs of a veteran of the diplomatic service, Volodymyr Chornyi. "The siege from Pereiaslav to this day" – under this significant name, with the assistance of the Directorate-General for Rendering Services to Foreign Missions and the creative team of the Advertising and Publishing Department of the "Mediacenter" Directorate, the long-awaited book was published. The book presents author's reflections on the difficult past and present not only of our Ukraine and its people, but also of an individual who has suffered and cooled down over many years.
The author claims that this work of his colleague is impossible to read without accompanying personal reflections and memories. It is noted that the book started with a story about Volodymyr Chornyi's native village – Ivanhorod in Cherkasy region – which then goes into the context of Ukrainian history. The book contains many unknown or little-known facts.
The author claims that the book pays great attention to the sad and tragic periods of social life in Ukraine in different years – wars and famines. Volodymyr Chornyi also mentions the negative consequences of a strategic partnership with post-Soviet Russia. It is noted that under the leadership of the current President, the Russian Federation is increasingly becoming an outspoken successor of the totalitarian ideology of the former Soviet "Evil Empire".
The author of the article described the publication as a collection of memoirs, interviews and documents about the Soviet reality from the personal Latvian, Kazakh and Yakut experience of the author of the book. It is important that the book presents for the first time all available lists of victims of political repression, the Second World War and the Holodomor of 1932-1933.
It is mentioned that the lead in the story has an opinion about the extremely important role of parents in everything that the author has achieved over the long years of his life. He dedicated this book to them and his countrymen.
Keywords: Volodymyr Chornyi, memories, Ukraine, World War II, Holodomor.


During a collision, the specific structures such as the frontal longitudinal and crash-box deforms plastically while absorbing substantial amount of kinetic energy. This energy absorbing characteristic has been designed in vehicles to reduce the severe injury of occupant. The design of such structures are very important because if these structures deform due to very high forces there is high risk to biomechanical damage of the vehicle occupants. Hence it is of upmost importance that the design of such structures maximizes the energy absorption while maintaining the peak force below an allowable threshold. The current work aims to design a new multi tube thin walled crash- box with these two crashworthiness performance measures being given much attention. The distance of the first plastic fold for the axial crushing was determined by simulation and this was used as a design input. This resulted in a near to ideal elastic-plastic behavior, increasing energy absorption and stable crushing compared to a single aluminium tube and steel equivalent.


The purpose of this master thesis is to reduce the transportation costs and environmental distress by improving the transportation routes needed to supply the sawmills in the county of V¨asterbotten, Sweden, their raw material. It is of particular interest to explore the possible benefits of implementing a so called virtual transshipment hub for this purpose. The outline of the hub is to allow the companies within the system to deduce raw materials from other companies' contracted harvesting areas. The hub would thus create a pool of the total raw material appointed by each specific company. These companies may deduce the raw material needed but can have it transported from a closer site than their own contracted lumbering area. Sawmill companies rely on the use of harvesting areas to provide the needed raw material and it is of common practice to contract different harvest areas. The thesis is that the permission to use other companies' harvest areas would create new possible routes resulting in better planning and as an extension more efficient routes. This master thesis will investigate the current situation in the industry and adapt a model suitable for the purpose from the information gathered. This thesis work will also provide a number of cost allocation models which are used in cooperations between different companies in order to determine how to allocate the savings / costs between the companies. It was revealed in an interview that it was desired to include an exploration of the ETT trucks in this paper. The ETT trucks is a new type of truck which is not currently permitted in Sweden. It has a higher loading capacity than the conventional trucks used today. Gathering data proved much more difficult than initially anticipated. As a result, this paper will not provide any actual data testing, but the Results section will show that the model is working as intended by using with trivial data. More on the difficulties associated with the data in the section Discussion. Due to the trivial data it is impossible to express an actual cost saving in using a numerical value or percentage. The results from this survey did however show that there were a signification reduction of the cost associated with the transportation of raw material when the two companies tested cooperated in comparison to when they worked separately. The use of the ETT trucks would reduce the transportation costs and CO2 emissions by 20 % respectively, as presented in a survey conducted by L¨ofroth and Svenson (2012). The conclusion is that regardless if the government allows the use of ETT trucks, it should lie in the best interest to further explore the implementation of a virtual transshipment hub using real data and a thorough investigation of eligible participants through the cost allocation models and a subsequent maintenence of the system using supply chain management.


We consider voting under metric preferences: both voters and candidates are associated with points in a metric space, and each voter prefers candidates that are closer to her to ones that are further away. In this setting, it is often desirable to select a candidate that minimizes the sum of distances to the voters. However, common voting rules operate on voters' preference rankings and therefore may be unable to identify the best candidate. A relevant measure of the quality of a voting rule is then its distortion, defined as the worst-case ratio between the performance of a candidate selected by the rule and that of an optimal candidate. Anshelevich, Bhardwaj and Postl show that some popular rules such as Borda and Plurality do badly in this regard: their distortion scales linearly with the number of candidates. On the positive side, Anshelevich et al. identify a few voting rules whose distortion is bounded by a constant; however, these rules are rarely used in practice. In this paper, we analyze the distortion of two widely used (classes of) voting rules, namely, scoring rules and Single Transferable Vote (STV). We show that all scoring rules have super-constant distortion, answering a question that was left open by Anshelevich et al.; however, we identify a scoring rule whose distortion is asymptotically better than that of Plurality and Borda. For STV, we obtain an upper bound of O(log m), where m is the number of candidates, as well as a super-constant lower bound; thus, STV is a reasonable, though not a perfect rule from this perspective.


BACKGROUND
Active travel to school (ATS) is positively associated with various health indicators. The rapid social, economic, and environmental changes in China provide a unique setting to study changes and predictors of ATS over time.

METHODS
Using logistic regression modeling, we analyzed data from the China Health and Nutrition Survey during 1997 to 2011 (N = 9487, ages 6 to 17 years) to estimate the change over time in ATS and to identify associated factors.

RESULTS
The prevalence of reported ATS among children dropped from 95.8% in 1997 to 69.3% in 2011. ATS was common in children living closer to school, in middle school, from low-income households, with low parental education status, and those without a private vehicle. Children who were living in a metropolitan area and who had more than 40 minutes of total PA per day were less likely to report ATS.

CONCLUSIONS
The decrease of ATS had been concurrent with the increase of the children living at a longer distance from school and the increase of household owning private vehicles which were associated with the rapid urbanization and economic growth in China. Factors associated with the decreased ATS in China are similar to other countries but the underlying reasons may be different.


Abstract Introduction SARS-CoV-2 infections have very different clinical manifestations and anti-SARS-CoV-2 immunisation may also trigger very different levels and length of protection. While (re)infection after previous COVID-19 illness or following vaccination are known, their impact and the optimal timing of any booster vaccination is currently debated. International evidence about potential underlying immune response differences remains limited and is currently not available in Hungary. Methods We prospectively investigated the magnitude of immune responses to infection or immunisation, their over-time changes and the occurrence of new infections through anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG levels and the association with selected individual and clinical parameters in two voluntary cohorts of healthcare workers at a public teaching hospital in a real-world longitudinal cohort study in Hungary. In the first cohort, the anti-nucleocapsid IgG levels of 42 health care workers (female: 100%) with SARS-CoV-2 infection were followed-up over 8 months between June 2020 and February 2021. Beyond the change in immune response, associations with age, selected existing chronic conditions, blood type and severity of symptoms were investigated. In the immunised cohort, anti-spike-RBD protein IgG levels of 49 health care workers (female: 73%) with no prior COVID-19 infection were monitored up to 4 months following initial immunisation with BNT162b2 vaccine between December 2020 and April 2021. Statistical analyses included median analysis, linear regression, ANCOVA, Kruskal-Wallis test and Skillings-Mack test for block designs as relevant. Results Within the infected cohort, the median time of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG level reduction below the positive test cut-off was 6 months. First month IgG levels were on average the highest among those in illness severity category 4, but the difference to less severe categories was not statistically significant. Higher age was associated with higher IgG levels. Within the immunised cohort, the anti-SARS-CoV-2 spike-RBD protein IgG levels increased 25-fold between the first and second immunisations, significantly decreased to 33% of the peak level after 90 days, and had an overall negative tendency with older age and male sex. IgG monitoring revealed 17% (7/42) and 14% (7/49) new infections in the infected and the immunised cohorts, respectively, all symptomless. Discussion Our study is the first to investigate the level, change and associations of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG immune response in infected or immunised healthcare workers in Hungary. It provides further evidence about the significantly declining IgG protection through initial infection beyond 6 months. While immunisation with mRNA vaccination shows a similar pattern of reduction in protection, IgG levels remained within the positive range at 4 months. The observed rate of 15% new, asymptomatic infections and their potential broader impacts call for further investigations. Overall, our findings are confirmative of the effectiveness of vaccination to prevent illness, recent considerations for booster vaccination beyond 6 months, and indicate the potential benefit of anti-SARS-CoV-2 IgG monitoring for optimisation.


The use of riboprobes for the detection of RNA viral sequences is analyzed. Subgenomic fragments of cDNA from poliovirus type 2, dengue virus type 4 and human immunodeficiency virus type 1, were inserted downstream SP6 and/or T7 promoters in the transcription vectors pGEM-4z or pSP64. RNAs obtained by in vitro transcription in the presence of UTP infinity (32P) were used as probes for the detection of RNA viral sequences from infected cell lines in slot and Northern blot assays. The poliovirus riboprobe (P2-221) was able to detect specific viral sequences; thus, it could be used for the detection of the virus in serum, as well as in residual waters. The human immunodeficiency virus riboprobe (HIV-378), detected viral sequences poly A+RNA from infected cells; thus it can be used as a confirmatory test or as a tool in basic research. Finally, the dengue virus riboprobes (D4-2819 and D4-1134) detected specifically dengue 4 virus; however the sensitivity of the detection could be significantly improved amplifying viral sequences by the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) prior to probe hybridization.


Summer travel abroad is a popular activity for teachers and clinicians, especially if they can enrich their professional life in combination with their travels. Those whom U.S. professionals visit can benefit in return from the exchange of international experiences and information. As a service to professionals in the field of learning disabilities worldwide, our journal here presents early notice of events, short courses, and places of note to visit in countries around the world for the summer of 7975. We are publicizing events ahead of time to help guests and hosts structure their visits, in the hope that we can contribute to a more constructive and comfortable arrangement for both parties. - compiled by Linda Schanilec


Light-front wavefunctions provide a frame-independent representation of hadrons in terms of their physical quark and gluon degrees of freedom. The light-front Hamiltonian formalism provides new nonperturbative methods for obtaining the QCD spectrum and eigensolutions, including resolvant methods, variational techniques, and discretized light-front quantization. A new method for quantizing gauge theories in light-cone gauge using Dirac brackets to implement constraints is presented. In the case of the electroweak theory, this method of light-front quantization leads to a unitary and renormalizable theory of massive gauge particles, automatically incorporating the Lorentz and 't Hooft conditions as well as the Goldstone boson equivalence theorem. Spontaneous symmetry breaking is represented by the appearance of zero modes of the Higgs field leaving the light-front vacuum equal to the perturbative vacuum. I also discuss an ''event amplitude generator'' for automatically computing renormalized amplitudes in perturbation theory. The importance of final-state interactions for the interpretation of diffraction, shadowing, and single-spin asymmetries in inclusive reactions such as deep inelastic lepton-hadron scattering is emphasized.


This chapter reports the discussion of a group of mostly behavioral biologists, who at- tempt to put research on search from their own discipline into a framework that might help identify parallels with cognitive search. Essential components of search are a func- tional goal, uncertainty about goal location, the adaptive varying of position, and often a stopping rule. The chapter considers a diversity of cases where search is in domains other than spatial and lists other important dimensions in which search problems differ. One dimension examined in detail is social interactions between searchers and search- ers, targets and targets, and targets and searchers. The producer-scrounger game is pre- sented as an example; despite the extensive empirical and theoretical work on the equi- librium between the strategies, it is largely an open problem how animals decide when to adopt each strategy, and thus how real equilibria are attained. Another dimension that explains some of the diversity of search behavior is the modality of the information utilized (e.g., visual, auditory, olfactory). The chapter concludes by highlighting further parallels between search in the external environment and cognitive search. These sug- gest some novel avenues of research.


Background

To decrease the proportion of women in fragile and conflict-affected situations (FCS) that need, but are not using modern contraception, the global health community must better understand family planning (FP) knowledge gaps; and elucidate which subgroups of women are, and are not, effectively being reached with FP information. This study investigated whether women with notable sexual and reproductive health histories that put them at risk for future pregnancy complications, namely HIV + women and women with history of terminated pregnancy (HTP), would possess more complete FP knowledge and/or recall being given FP information more readily than HIV- women and women with no HTP (NHTP), respectively.
Methods

Knowledge of several contraceptive methods, and the prevalence of women who recalled being given FP information at a healthcare visit, or via TV, radio, or periodical were estimated across HIV, HTP, and country subgroups. HIV + and HTP status were major predictors in multivariate logistic regressions analyzing the odds of knowing a specified method of contraception or of recalling being given FP information via the modes considered.
Results

HIV + as opposed to HIV- women showed significantly higher odds of knowing about the pill (p = 0.001), IUD (p < 0.001), injectables (p = 0.005), male condoms (p < 0.001), female condoms (p < 0.001), and implants (p < 0.001); but not female or male sterilization. HIV + women demonstrated higher odds of recalling being given FP information at a health visit (p = 0.001), whereas HTP women did not. HTP women showed higher odds (p < 0.001) of knowing each modern method of FP with the exception of male sterilization and of recalling TV (p = 0.01) and radio (p < 0.001) FP messages.
Conclusions

Notable findings were the higher FP awareness among HIV + and HTP women, and the observation that HIV + women were seemingly provided FP information more readily at healthcare visits than were HTP women, despite their similar risk profiles concerning future pregnancies. Subsequent studies may elucidate why these patterns were observed and indicate which other diagnostic groups are effectively being reached with FP education, and which are not. Understanding trends and predictors of FP knowledge can help practitioners better target FP counseling efforts in FCS toward knowledge gaps and their causes.