BACKGROUND
The sterile insect technique (SIT) is an alternative, environmentally friendly method for controlling insect pests. In the Lepidoptera, a low dose of gamma irradiation causes inherited sterility (SIT-IS), leading to full sterility in females but only partial sterility in males, which successfully compete with wild males for mates. This study examined the effect of a low radiation dose (150 Gy) on the fitness parameters of male and female Lobesia botrana, a polyphagous and major pest of vineyards found in the Middle East, Europe and the Americas.

RESULTS
Irradiation of the pupae did not affect their emergence rate, flight ability out of a cylinder, male response to sex pheromone in a field cage or male or female mating success. A major effect of irradiation was observed in the significantly reduced number of irradiated females' offspring reaching pupation, and as a consequence a limited number of F2 offspring. The effect of irradiation on male partial sterility (also called inherited sterility) was reflected in the male-biased sex ratio of F1 offspring of irradiated males, the reduced number of F1 offspring and the very low number of F2 descendants.

CONCLUSION
This study demonstrates the feasibility of controlling L. botrana using SIT-IS. Adding this method to the arsenal of environmentally friendly tools to control this pest may assist in further reducing the use of insecticides on edible crops.


recognised. Studies on ambulatory monitoring in pregnancy which provide sequential readings in a home environment suggest that the threshold with the best predictive value for adverse outcome is 135/85 mmHg3. Ross-McGill and colleagues have applied a traditional hospital threshold of 14/90 mmHg to a community setting and this may identify a higher risk population rather than an equivalent cohort of women (in terms of risk) who have a clinic blood pressure of 140/90 mmHg. For home monitoring to be a viable alternative to conventional antenatal care it will be essential to convince the obstetric community that any move away from 'supervised care' is both safe and effective. To achieve this threshold for referral to hospital when using home monitoring may be lower, and further studies should take this into account. There is however, the potential for home monitoring to improve surveillance while reducing antenatal visits.


This work applies a sociological lens to juridical practice in order to illustrate the tendency of law to lag behind extra-juridical historical phenomena, and to examine how this has influenced both the occurrence of, and the nature of, moments of doctrinal productivity in Aboriginal law. In effect, historical practices of colonization in the common law world have more often than not outpaced the law which would sometimes be called upon to adjudicate their legitimacy. The result is that the juridical field has been caught in legal-normative binds and left to accommodate history through doctrinally creative means. Using other common law jurisdictions as a springboard for an examination of Aboriginal law in Canada, I argue that the judiciary has made use of the unacknowledged elasticity in the law to manage such dilemmas, and it has done so in a manner which presents this juridical work as fundamentally grounded and self-evident.
In Canada, a bind developed in the late twentieth century because the law's largely unsympathetic legal positivist approach to Aboriginal title and rights became socio-normatively anachronistic. Available jurisprudential adaptations for the resolution of this, however, were just as risk-laden as the bind itself. The jurisprudence presented as offering a new justice was thus also oriented toward managing risk. Two concepts that help conceptualize how that doctrinal productivity has allowed the juridical field to manage risk and navigate historical binds are injusticiability, the rendering of something unavailable for adjudication by articulating it as a political question rather than a legal question, and incommensurability, the inscribing of difference upon the Aboriginal legal subject in order to accommodate exigent circumstances with novel forms of justice. With the aid of these techniques, the SCC has tempered rights and title by deducing for them inherent limitations and implicit overrides, and this in a fashion which preserves the juridical field's ability to maintain rights and title as objects of continuing legal governance. The profound ambivalence of contemporary Aboriginal law, however, is that rights and title can be won under the new jurisprudence—but only with the tacit acceptance of these limitations as the self-evident manifestations of justice.


Recent DNA-based phylogenetic analyses of the family Thamnophilidae have shown that the genus Myrmotherula is polyphyletic. Traditional plumage-based taxonomy has been misleading in terms of identifying independently evolving lineages within the complex. Here, we integrate a molecular phylogeny with morphometric information and ancestral reconstruction of syringeal character states of the Musculi vocales ventrales, to investigate the taxonomic position of M. gularis, a species for which phylogenetic affinities have long been uncertain. We show that M. gularis represents a long branch in the tribe Thamnophilini that is not closely related to any other member of the Myrmotherula complex. Its relationships within the tribe remain uncertain because of the lack of phylogenetic resolution at the base of the tribe. M. gularis shares a derived character state of the M. vocalis ventralis with Taraba, Hypoedaleus, and Mackenziaena, which supports a close relationship between M. gularis and the large antshrikes. M. gularis can be diagnosed from Myrmotherula and Epinecrophylla by this condition of its M. vocalis ventralis, and from Isleria by plumage and other morphological traits. The phylogenetic and morphological distinctiveness of M. gularis does not warrant merging it into any other genus. We propose that this species be placed in a monotypic genus, for which the available name Rhopias applies.


Post-traumatic enophthalmos is one of the late-term complications of the posttraumatic orbit, causing functional and cosmetic concern. In this study, the process, results, efficacy and reliability of the treatment of two young cases with late-term enophthalmos after blunt trauma to the orbit without any vision loss will be presented and discussed. Surgery for a balanced orbital volume increase was performed using porous polyethylene (Medpor) implants. J Med Cases. 2015;6(12):537-540 doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.14740/jmc2354w


A common method to reduce the uncertainty of causal inferences from experiments is to assign treatments in fixed proportions within groups of similar units: blocking. Previous results indicate that one can expect substantial reductions in variance if these groups are formed so to contain exactly as many units as treatment conditions. This approach can be contrasted to threshold blocking which, instead of specifying a fixed size, requires that the groups contain a minimum number of units. In this paper, I investigate the advantages of respective method. In particular, I show that threshold blocking is superior to fixed-sized blocking in the sense that it always finds a weakly better grouping for any objective and sample. However, this does not necessarily hold when the objective function of the blocking problem is unknown, and a fixed-sized design can perform better in that case. I specifically examine the factors that govern how the methods perform in the common situation where the objective is to reduce the estimator's variance, but where groups are constructed based on covariates. This reveals that the relative performance of threshold blocking improves when the covariates become more predictive of the outcome.


In this exploratory article we investigate how longstanding 'competitive city' projects are actively reshaped by recent national security initiatives in urban waterfronts. We argue that port districts in large waterfront cities are becoming critical sites where actors are struggling to further different agendas. While proponents of competitive city projects appear directly concerned with promoting a particular vision of capitalist urban development in contrast to the national security agenda of port and border securitization, we contend that a simple dichotomy between 'economy' and 'security' cannot capture their complex intermingling. We examine the emergent public discourses of port (in)security in the US and Canada since 9/11, paying particular attention to the convergences between port security and waterfront gentrification initiatives, while also noting conflicts between these agendas. We identify four key areas of change: relations of power in the governance of port spaces, rationales of urban planning decisions, physical redesign of urban port spaces, and conflicts between 'economy' and 'security'. Post 9/11 port security initiatives are sometimes at odds and other times at ease with the competitive city agendas that are readily apparent in urban waterfront redevelopments. Both projects have disturbing implications for social justice in waterfront cities.


This research presents an artificial neural network (ANN) model to investigate optimum operating condition of heavy oil catalytic cracking (HOC) to reach maximum gasoline yield. In this case, American petroleum institute index (AP!) , weight percentage of sulfur, Conradson carbon residue content (CCR), gas, coke, and liquid volume percent conversion (%L V) of reaction were considered as ANN model inputs while the percentage of normal butane (N-C4), iso-butane (I-C4), butene (C4=), propane (C3), propene (C3=), heavy cycle oil (HCO), and light cycle oil (LCO) and gasoline (GAS 0) were considered as network outputs. 70% of all industrial collected data set were utilized to train and find the best neural network. Among the different networks, feed-forward multi-layer perceptron network with Levenberg Marquardt (LM) training algorithm with 10 neurons in hidden layer was found as the best network. The trained network showed good capability in anticipating the results of the unseen data (30% of the aIJ data) of catalytic cracking unit with high accuracy. In the next step of study sensitivity analysis was carried out to find the effect of the operating condition on gasoline and products yields. FinaIJy genetic algorithm (GA) was used to optirnize neural model of the plant. It was found that gasoline yield can be increased to 73.6429 % by adjusting operating conditions. 2 •


Abstract A chrysotile disc is proposed as the fundamental seed structure for the formation of chrysotile asbestos fibres, polygonal serpentine fibres and polyhedral lizardite spheres. The curvature, fivefold symmetry and hydrogen-bonding alignment of the layers in the seed disc control the formation of the 15 or 30 sectors in polygonal serpentine and the orientations of the planar arrays of 15 or 30 radial crystals in polyhedral serpentine. A polygonized disc precursor to polygonal fibre formation has been observed at an arrested stage of growth in a synthesis experiment.


The rate of smoking is alarmingly high among persons with persistent mental illness and they are no less susceptible to the harmful effects of smoking. Nicotine is a potent, addictive drug which affects neurotransmitters. Smoking can affect psychiatric symptoms as well as blood levels of psychotropic and other medications. Most persons with mental illness are aware of the detrimental health risks of smoking and many are interested in quitting. Poor physical health is associated with efforts to quit. Personal commitment is important to successfully quitting.


Background While user fees in healthcare systems have been associated with quality improvement, a substantial increase may have a detrimental effect. This paper reports on the effects of increasing user fees on utilisation of TB diagnostic services in Tanzania. Methods We retrospectively analysed data on TB diagnostic services utilisation between July 2013 and June 2015 in Mnazi Mmoja Zanzibar (MMZ), Musoma and Sumbawanga hospitals. In July 2014, user fees in Musoma were increased substantially from 2 to 5 US dollar; Sumbawanga increased the fees stepwise, from 1 to 2 US dollar in July 2014, and from2 to 3 US dollar in January 2015 MMZ did not raise the fees. We compared TB services utilisation before and after introduction of user fees. Results Out of 7483 presumptive TB patients registered in all sites, 50.2% were males. Over half (3969) were registered before the user fee was increased. Among 3969, 1579 (39.8%) were from Musoma, 922 (23.2%) from Sumbawanga and 1468 (37.0%) from MMZ. Of the 3514 patients registered after the introduction of user fees, 983 (28%), 952 (27.1%) and 1579 (44.9%) patients were from Musoma, Sumbawanga and MMZ, respectively. The number of presumptive TB patients seeking TB diagnostic services at Musoma decreased significantly by 38% from 1579 to 983 after the increase of user fees (p=0.001). More females (817; 51.8% vs 458, 35.9%) attended Musoma before user fees were increased as compared to males whose attendance did not differ much (761; 48.2% vs 525; 53.4%); (p=0.01). There was no significant decrease of patients at Sumbawanga and MMZ. Conclusion There was a significant decrease in the number of presumptive TB patients who accessed new TB diagnostic services in Musoma after a substantial increase of user fees, the effect was stronger among women. Although user fees are beneficial, they should be increased stepwise so as not to affect service utilisation.


This paper presents the design and implementation of a single-phase on-board bidirectional plug-in electric vehicle (PEV) charger that can provide reactive power support to the utility grid in addition to charging the vehicle battery. The topology consists of two-stages: a full-bridge ac-dc boost converter; and a half-bridge bidirectional dc-dc converter. The charger operates in two quadrants in the active-reactive power (PQ) power plane with five different operation modes (i.e., charging-only, charging-capacitive, charging-inductive, capacitive-only, and inductive-only). This paper also presents a unified controller to follow utility PQ commands in a smart grid environment. The cascaded two-stage system controller receives active and reactive power commands from the grid, and results in line current and battery charging current references while also providing a stable dynamic response. The vehicle's battery is not affected during reactive power operation in any of the operation modes. Testing the unified system controller with a 1.44 kVA experimental charger design demonstrates the successful implementation of reactive power support functionality of PEVs for future smart grid applications.


Leipzig's Eisenbahnstrase in Germany is currently discussed from different points of view. Ethnicity, crime, but also urban growth and revaluation processes are in the center of the discourse. As one of the city's high streets, the Eisenbahnstrase and its two surrounding quarters show changes in the commercial structure, which are claimed to be gentrification processes. This paper aims to analyze both the process by using the concept of commercial gentrification and its local perception. This is done by mapping current commercial uses in the retail, service and gastronomy sector, categorizing them, and comparing them to secondary data. Apart from that, local stakeholder's perspectives are evaluated based on 16 structured interviews conducted with shop owners on the one hand, and a survey among 105 passersby on the street on the other hand. The material indicates that the Eisenbahnstrase is currently in an initial phase of commercial gentrification. This is displayed by diversification of supply and demand structures, represented by the arrival of new potential customers, but also by a diversification of business concepts. Apart from that, commercial activities experience a strong increase in the area and have led to spatial dispersion from the high street to neighboring roads. We argue that Leipzig's Eisenbahnstrase follows partially the East German gentrification path, as until now no displacement is identified, but the case also stands out due to the important role of ethnicity in commercial structures.


Objective. Sinonasal hemangiopericytomas (SNHPCs) are rare perivascular tumors with low-grade malignant potential. Traditionally, these tumors have been treated with open approaches such as lateral rhinotomy, Caldwell-Luc, or transfacial approaches. Increased experience with endoscopic management of benign and malignant sinonasal tumors has led to a shift in management of SNHPC. The authors present their experience in the largest series of patients with SNHPC managed endoscopically. Study Design and Setting. Case series at a tertiary care medical center. Subjects and Method. A retrospective chart review of all patients undergoing endoscopic management of SNHPC at the University of Miami between 1999 and 2008 was conducted. All endoscopic resections were performed with curative intent. Results. Twelve patients with the diagnosis of SNHPC were treated endoscopically. Mean age was 62.5 years (range, 51-83 years). There were 6 men and 6 women. The mean follow-up was 41 months (range, 15-91 months). Seven (58.3%) presented with nasal obstruction, whereas 4 (41.6%) had epistaxis as their initial presenting symptom. Preoperative angiography or embolization was not performed in any case. Mean estimated blood loss was 630 mL (range, 100-1500 mL). Six patients underwent endonasal endoscopic anterior skull base resection; 4 had complete endoscopic resection all with negative margins. None underwent postoperative adjuvant treatment. No recurrence or metastatic disease was observed in this patient population. Conclusion. Endoscopic management of SNHPC is a feasible approach and did not compromise outcomes in this experience. In this series, familiarity with advance endoscopic sinus surgery was necessary to manage these patients. Postoperative adjuvant therapy was not necessary in this cohort.


The eastern part of the Mixteca terrane of southern Mexico is underlain by the Petlalcingo Group (part of the Acatlán Complex), and has been interpreted as either a Lower Paleozoic passive margin, or a trench/forearc sequence deposited in either the Iapetus or Rheic oceans. The group, from bottom to top, consists of: (1) the Magdalena Migmatite protolith (metapsammites, metapelites, calsilicates, and marbles), which grades up into (2) the meta-psammitic Chazumba Formation; overthrust by (3) the Cosoltepec Formation (phyllites and quartzites with minor mafic meta-volcanic horizons). The group is unconformably overlain by the Pennsylvanian—Middle Permian Tecomate Formation, which is overthrust by the ∼288 Ma Totoltepec pluton and unconformably overlain by Middle Jurassic rocks. In contrast to previous inferences that the protoliths of the units (1) to (3) were early Paleozoic in age, detrital zircon LA-ICPMS ages combined with published data constrain depositional ages as follows: (i) Magdalena Migmatite protolith: post-303 Ma-pre-171 Ma (Permian—Early Jurassic); (ii) Chazumba Formation: post—239 Ma—pre-174 Ma (Middle Triassic—Early Jurassic); and (iii) Cosoltepec Formation: post—455 Ma—pre-310 Ma (uppermost Ordovician-Mississippian). Given the different ages and depositional environments of the Cosoltepec Formation versus the Chazumba Formation and Magdalena protolith, we recommend redefining the Chazumba and Magdalena as lithodemes grouped in the Petlalcingo Suite and excluding the Cosoltepec Formation. Detrital zircons in all three units show a population peak at ∼850-1200 Ma, suggesting derivation from the adjacent ∼1 Ga Oaxacan Complex. A ∼470-640 Ma peak is limited to the Cosoltepec Formation whose source may be found in ∼470 Ma plutons in the Acatlan Complex, beneath the Yucatan Peninsula, and in the Brasiliano orogens of South America. The inferred turbiditic protolith of the Chazumba Formation and Magdalena protolith suggests that it represents a clastic wedge deposited in front of S-verging Permo-Triassic thrusts on the western margin of Pangea. The mainly oceanic affinity of the basalts in the Cosoltepec Formation suggests deposition of sedimentary protoliths in a continental rise fringing Oaxaquia. These data are more consistent with deposition of the Cosoltepec Formation in the Rheic Ocean than in the Iapetus Ocean.


BACKGROUND
Alcohol consumption is often reported to decrease with ageing. We investigated alcohol consumption and drinking patterns in an ageing population-based male sample during an 11-year follow-up period.

METHODS
This study with baseline and two follow-up examinations (at 4 and 11 years) included 1516 randomly selected participants, aged 42, 48, 54 and 60 years from Eastern Finland. Alcohol consumption and drinking patterns during the year preceding the examination were assessed. Data were analysed using Generalized Estimating Equations and Mixed Models.

RESULTS
Over the 11-year study period, the amount of alcohol consumed weekly increased among the 42-year-olds (P < 0.001) and remained constant among the older cohorts. The risk of frequent drinking (alcohol consumption at least twice weekly) increased among all cohorts (OR = 2.04, 95% CI = 1.50-2.79 for 42-year-olds; OR = 1.71, 95% CI = 1.13-2.58 for 48-year-olds; OR = 1.67, 95% CI = 1.16-2.39 for 54-year-olds and OR = 1.67, 95% CI = 1.21-2.29 for 60-year-olds). There was also an increasing probability of heavy consumption (more than 14 weekly drinks) among the 42-year-olds (OR = 1.47, 95% CI = 1.09-2.00). The risk of binging (six-plus drinks at one occasion) decreased among the older participants (OR = 0.65, 95% CI = 0.47-0.89 for 54-year-olds, and OR = 0.56, 95% CI = 0.39-0.81 for 60-year-olds).

CONCLUSION
Finnish men born in 1926-1946 do not seem to decrease drinking while ageing. In contrast those born in 1944-1946 increase drinking until their 60's. This should be taken into consideration in planning health services for aged men in the near future.


This study visualizes, quantifies, and evaluates relationships between bedrock geology and topography through the use of GIS. The study area contains weakly consolidated Permian-aged sandstone and shale of slightly differing ages that have been dissected by the regional drainage. The erosion of these rocks has produced a subtle but well-defined topography. Data for this work were obtained from a 30 m resolution digital elevation model (DEM) and the bedrock geology map of Oklahoma. Numeric values of local slope angle and relief were extracted from the DEM and associations with geologic formations were summarized and compared. The maps reveal that local topographic variations are dependent on the relative abundance of sand to shale in the underlying bedrock. This finding is significant because the topographic expression is so subtle that associations between topography and bedrock geology would not be easily recognized or quantified with conventional field techniques. To identify controls on topography, sandstone thicknesses were measured in outcrop and the bulk density of field samples was measured in the laboratory. We find that sandstone thickness is greater in areas of higher local relief and thinner in areas of lower relief. In contrast, bulk density, used as a proxy for susceptibility to erosion, is not significantly different between areas. These findings suggest that presence and thickness of sandstone, even if weakly consolidated, plays a role in determining topographic expression of bedrock. This GIS-based technique, when constrained by geology, can enhance the quality of multiuse mapping programs in the geosciences, agriculture, and civil engineering.


Classification of crops and other land cover types is an important application of both optical/infrared and SAR satellite data. It is already an import application of present satellite systems, as it will be for planned missions, such as the Sentinels. An airborne SAR data set with a short revisit time acquired by the German ESAR system during the ESA-campaign, AgriSAR 2006, has been used to assess the performance of different polarization modes for crop classification. Both C-and L-band SAR data were acquired over the Demmin agricultural test site in North Eastern Germany on a weekly basis during the growing season. Single-and dual-polarization, and fully polarimetric data have been used in the analysis (fully polarimetric data were only available at L-band). The main results of the analysis are, that multitemporal acquisitions are very important for single-and dual-polarization modes, and that cross-polarized backscatter produces the best results, with errors down to 3%-6% at the two frequencies. There is a trade-off between the polarimetric information and the multitemporal information, where the best overall results are obtained using the multitemporal information. If only a few acquisitions are available, the polarimetric mode may perform better than the single-and dual polarization modes.


The operation and parameters of Bunch Shape Monitors using coherent transformation of time structure of an analyzed beam into a spatial one of low energy secondary electrons emitted from a wire target is influenced by the characteristics of a beam under study. The electromagnetic field of a bunch disturbs the trajectories of secondary electrons, thus resulting in a degradation of phase resolution and in errors of phase reading. Another effect is the perturbation of the target potential due to the current in the wire induced by a bunch as well as due to current compensating emission of the secondary electrons. The methods, the models and the results of simulations are presented.


Existing continual learning (CL) research regards catastrophic forgetting (CF) as almost the only challenge. This paper argues for another challenge in class-incremental learning (CIL), which we call cross-task class discrimination (CTCD), i.e., how to establish decision boundaries between the classes of the new task and old tasks with no (or limited) access to the old task data. CTCD is implicitly and partially dealt with by replay-based methods. A replay method saves a small amount of data (replay data) from previous tasks. When a batch of current task data arrives, the system jointly trains the new data and some sampled replay data. The replay data enables the system to partially learn the decision boundaries between the new classes and the old classes as the amount of the saved data is small. However, this paper argues that the replay approach also has a dynamic training bias issue which reduces the effectiveness of the replay data in solving the CTCD problem. A novel optimization objective with a gradient-based adaptive method is proposed to dynamically deal with the problem in the online CL process. Experimental results show that the new method achieves much better results in online CL.


Based on briefly introducing the works of BOTDR, article studied on dike strain monitoring by using the distributed optical fiber measurement system produced by OMNISENS in Swiss. Builded the dike model, monitored the dike strain changes influenced by seepage and loading, we try to verify the feasibility that the distributed optical fiber measurement system can basically reflect the dike deformation. It can be an important direction for the development of dike strain monitoring.


Four experiments have been demonstrated, each successfully combining PPLN crystals and fibre lasers. Firstly second harmonic generation (SHG) was achieved with an 83% conversion efficiency using an all-fibre based nanosecond pump. 60% efficiency was achieved with a simple Q-switched Erbium fibre laser. Cascading two PPLN samples created a 33% and 15% conversion of the pump to the third harmonic, for each source respectively. A second experiment used a picosecond all-fibre chirped pulse amplification source for parametric generation, and amplification of a CW diode seed. Very high gain, in excess of 90dB, was achieved, demonstrating PPLN's high nonlinearity with the powers now available from fibre lasers. A simple Q-switched Erbium fibre laser pumped by a diode was developed for the third experiment. Energies up to 180µJ were produced, which at the time was a record for this type of source. The output was frequency doubled by a PPLN sample, before pumping a second crystal for singly resonant parametric oscillation. A low threshold of 10µJ was achieved with a broad spectral tunability of 0.945 to 4.45µm, limited only by the mirror reflectivities. The final experiment was a similar parametric oscillator but with no doubling stage. This final system is simpler to tune, with a range from 2.58 to 3.99µm. The idler to signal energy ratio was now greater. Throughout the thesis, nonlinear optical interaction theories have been studied and models developed to explain the experimental observations. All the experiments have been simulated, and major factors to the results considered. A model for the parametric processes was built based on the solution to the three time independent coupled wave equations. Numerical computations were performed, such that phase-mismatching, simultaneously competing nonlinear processes and pump depletion could be considered. The effects of focusing and spatial profiles have also been discussed.


Interest in compact, single-frequency fiber amplifiers has increased within many scientific and industrial applications. The main challenge is the onset of nonlinear effects, which limit their power scaling. Here we demonstrate a compact, highpower, single-frequency, polarization-maintaining, continuous-wave fiber amplifier using only one amplification stage. We developed the fiber amplifier using a master oscillator fiber amplifier architecture, where a low-noise, singlefrequency, solid-state laser operating at 1064 nm was used as a seed source. We evaluated the amplifier's performance by using several state-of-the-art, small-core, Ytterbium (Yb)-doped fibers, as well as an in-house-made, highly Yb-doped fiber. An output power of 82 W was achieved with no sign of stimulated Brillouin scattering. A good beam quality and a polarization extinction ratio (PER) of < 25 dB were achieved. The compact fiber amplifier can be a competitive alternative to multi stage designed fiber amplifiers.


Background/Objectives: The objective of this paper is to introduce an automated attendance marking system for LPU using CCTV cameras. It detects the students sitting in the class and takes the attendance automatically without any human assistance and count total number of students present in the class also. Methods/Statistical Analysis: An enhanced detection algorithm is proposed that is having two phases: color image processing of RGB planes and modified background subtraction of image which executed simultaneously for object detection. Before detection process, noise is removed from images by using log function which uniformly distributes the brightness over the image. To count the number of detected objects, a counter is used which calculates total number of objects present in an image. The Automatic ROI detection algorithm is also proposed which detects region of interest automatically on the basis of repeated regular pattern of object. Findings: The system able to count and mark attendance of students sitting in class room. Implementation shows that our proposed approach has 89.5% accuracy with less false positive and false negative rate as compared to other traditional approaches. The Automatic ROI detection algorithm also detects the region of interest with considerably high accuracy. Application/Improvements: The proposed system will easy to deploy in various schools, colleges, universities and other educational institutes with minimal setup cost where CCTV cameras are already installed in class rooms.


Animals possess the function of self-recovery for adapting the change in their living conditions. Can machinery, by bionic design, just like animals, also possess the function of self-recovery for making itself free of fault, or for eliminating fault automatically during operation In this paper, a new theory of Engineering Self-recovery is discussed, which could provide theoretical basis and new methodology for creating a new generation of machinery with fault self-recovery function. The engineering self-recovery theory is different from engineering cybernetics. Engineering cybernetics endows machinery with purposive behavior which originally is one of animal's common characteristics, while engineering self-recovery theory endows machinery with the new function of fault self-recovery which originally is another one of animal's common characteristics. Under the guidance of engineering cybernetics, the automation of machinery has come true. While under the guidance of engineering self-recovery theory, a new generation of machinery with the new function of fault self-recovery could also be realized. The self-recovery system, which can provide fault self-recovery force to restrain fault force, is investigated in detail. Based on fault mechanism and risk analysis, and by bionic design, a fault self-recovery system, which is a dynamic system to store, supplement and transfer the self-recovery force, is endowed to a machine with the ability to maintain the machine in a health state. Also, the research in engineering application of the new concept, fault self-recovery, is on the way. As an example, the new concept centrifugal compressor with fault self-recovery function is discussed here with axial displacement and flow induced vibration fault self-recovery as examples to show the steps of fault self-recovery system construction such as fault mechanism, necessity, determination, possibility, fault tolerance, limitation and execution.


Many important economic and social time series are based on repeated sample surveys. A key element in the design of a repeated sample survey is the rotation pattern, which affects the sample overlap, and hence the correlation between estimates at different lags. Seasonally adjusted and trend estimates can be calculated to aid in the interpretation of the time series. Most national statistical agencies use the XI1 and X 1 1 A R I M A seasonal adjustment packages. The rotation pattern affects the variability of the time series of survey estimates and the trend and seasonally adjusted estimates produced from them. This thesis considers the choice of rotation pattern for trend estimation from a repeated survey. The implications of different rotation patterns on the sampling variance of seasonally adjusted and trend estimates is considered. A n important issue in analysing trend estimates is that estimates at the very end of a time series are revised. The impact of different rotation patterns on the mean square error of the revisions of trend estimates is assessed. As well as altering the rotation pattern, the filters used to estimate trend can be changed. Theory is developed to allow optimal trend niters to be generated for series having a known correlation structure. This is used to investigate rotation patterns and optimal filter combinations. The use of a design means that the sample consists of a number of rotation groups. In some cases it will be possible to obtain separate estimates for each rotation group. Optimal trend estimates can then be found depending on whether the individual rotation group or overall estimates are available. The properties of trend estimates obtained directly from the separate rotation group estimates, those obtained from the simple average of the rotation group estimates and using best linear unbiased estimates are compared for different


Emerging and spreading of firearms presented new problems and required new skills in the European surgery. The bullets caused significantly heavier casualities than any other weapons of past ages. These wounds were rather complex with major destructions: bleeding, fracture, contusion – and lead often to fatal outcome. The first manuscripts about gunshot wounds discuss the topic together with arrowhead lesions. While analysing theoretically the nature of these wounds, doctors and surgeons considered them as being poisoned by gunpowder as venomous agent. Main followers of this theory were Hieronymus Brunschwig and Giovanni da Vigo. Thanks to their practice, harsh oleous cauterization of gunshot wounds became common in the first half of the 16 century. Although some remarkable works were published against this interpretation, it was seriously put into question and disapproved by Ambroise Paré and his contemporaries, Bartholomeo Maggi, Leonardo Botallo and Joseph Duchesne in the second half of the century. The proper treatment required new surgical tools as well. Newtype forceps was e.g. the Bec de Corbin (Rabenschnabel or Schlange), which was shaped perfect by Ambroise Paré). The Laucher and the so-called hidden scissor (verborgene Schere) helped to explore the casualities. Kulcsszavak: katonaorvoslás, sebészet, lőtt sebek, mérgezett seb, égetés, sebészeti eszközök, Brunschwig, Gersdorff, Paracelsus, Vigo, Ryff, Ferri, Paré, Botallo


Roma discrimination and stigmatization in Europe are well-documented, with urban scholars emphasizing pervasive prejudices and stereotypes alongside negative policy outcomes. However, the focus on Roma marginality has tended to centre on punitive state and urban governance to the neglect of everyday urban relations. In this article we focus on the micro manifestations of stigmatization––racialized urban encounters––and their neglected longer-term affects for Roma in Czechia and Romania. Ethnographic research and in-depth qualitative interviews with Roma respondents expose a complex, dynamic and multi-layered response to stigmatization that challenges the simplistic binary of resistance versus the internalization of stigma. The concept of fragmented habitus is deployed in capturing this dynamic process and providing a nuanced representation of the urban inhabitation of a long-term stigmatized and racialized position, beyond generic 'Otherness'. We argue for more attention to the specificities and complexities of everyday relations and their affects in capturing the interdependence between urban encounters, the longer-term construction of Roma inferiority, and the heterogeneous, dynamic and ambivalent ways in which Roma inhabit their racialized urban position.


This project aimed to identify and analyse the variables that explain the origin and level of effectiveness achieved by the Treaty of Tlatelolco, which created the Latin American and Caribbean Nuclear-Weapon-Free Zone (LAC-NWFZ). The Treaty was opened for signature in 1967, but only in 2002, it entered into force in the 33 states of the continent. Tlatelolco's states parties undertook to prevent any form of possession of nuclear weapons, while Nuclear Weapon States (NWSs) pledged not to attack nuclearly the zone or breach its denuclearized status. However, presumable violations have occurred and NWSs still had interpretative declarations over the Treaty jeopardizing its compliance. Therefore, to what extent Tlatelolco has been effective to tackle nuclear threats and nuclear proliferation and what factors can explain it? To answer this inquiry, we analysed multidimensionally the nuclear capabilities and non-proliferation preferences of Mexico, Argentina and Brazil between 1947 and 1997, and the performance of the Agency for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Latin America and the Caribbean (OPANAL) in the same period. Despite the limited time-span of observation, we sketched out a contemporary reading of the past, concluding that Tlatelolco's "old" challenges and threats persist until nowadays even though Latin American and Caribbean states parties have predominantly respected the mandate. Additionally, we identified the following: The Missile Crisis in Cuba was a relevant external inducement for the timing when Mexico and other four countries (Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile) launched the LAC-NWFZ proposal and a first 17-state group approved the Treaty. This event did not have a homogenous effect in the region; it proved to be irrelevant for advanced nuclear-developed countries like Argentina. Even though Brazil was part of the group of Tlatelolco's proponents, its position changed once the military dictatorship took the power in 1964. NWSs did not thwart the negotiation process of the LAC-NWFZ Treaty, but they did influence the limits of Tlatelolco's final mandate, especially the US. Tlatelolco resulted desirable for the US security interests and for its international purpose of building a nuclear non-proliferation regime and preserving its nuclear supremacy. The ideological coincidence between the US and Brazil and the US – Argentina most of the times did not mean or provoked automatic coincidence over nuclear and non-proliferation issues. Undoubtedly, the 1982 Malvinas/Falklands War between the UK and Argentina was a significant watershed for the relations of this latter with the US. This event heightened their mutual distrust and fuelled Argentina's reluctance to sign Tlatelolco. The formal compliance of Tlatelolco by states-parties proved to be not enough to tackle critical situations satisfactorily. In the context of the Malvinas/ Falklands War, Argentina accused the UK of introducing a nuclear-armed submarine. In response to it, OPANAL issued a statement expressing concern about the incident but it was legally unable to take further actions. Within the limits of the Treaty's mandate, there was (is) no clause or article about the process to follow in case of a presumable violation of the Treaty by an NWS or other external actors. It is not clear either how the 255 Security Council Resolution can be invoked in these contexts and how should it be coordinated with Tlatelolco. The disappointment of Argentina about the OPANAL's response to the presumable UK's introduction of nuclear weapons to the zone coupled with Brazil's long-standing objective of expanding its influence towards Africa, led them to promote the South Atlantic Peace and Cooperation Zone (SAPCZ), which emphatically prohibited the introduction of nuclear weapons. Brazil's and Argentina's transition to democracy helped to solidify their bilateral nuclear cooperation and the implementation of the neoliberal model helped them to enhance their relations with the US. Argentina to offset its reluctance to adopt the NPT and Tlatelolco, gain international trust and thus, alleviate its vulnerable financial conditions prioritized their ties with emergent countries or pairs by becoming a member of the "New Delhi's group of six". Brazil since the 90's, instead, was interested in underpinning its position as a "global trader" which led it to cultivate a peaceful and benevolent identity by integrating middle-power groups such as the "New Agenda Coalition" (NAC) towards complete disarmament. The flexibility of Tlatelolco's adhesion process (stipulated in article 29), the introduction of the right to carry out PNEs (through article 18) and to build nuclear-propelled submarines (through article 5), as well as the active diplomatic collaboration of the OPANAL Secretaries-General to outline a better Safeguards Agreement between the IAEA and Argentina and Brazil eased the conditions for their denuclearization without hindering their nuclear civilian programs. Other systemic factors helped indirectly Tlatelolco's entry into force in Argentina and Brazil in 1994. Here we can mention the new world order dominated by economic concerns and the signature of the US- Russia Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) perceived by both countries as a symptom of NWSs' commitment to disarmament. In the case of Argentina, its indebtedness and economic crisis, and the US conditioned financial help weakened its international critical position pushing the country to adopt fully the Treaty. Elites' new understandings about the state, sovereignty, and security also contributed to the adoption of Tlatelolco by Brazil and Argentina. Since the NPT entered into force in 1970, many of OPANAL's monitoring and compliance tasks have been reassigned to the IAEA, and the Agency has become above all a body for channelling political and diplomatic tasks. Thanks to Tlatelolco and OPANAL, non-proliferation has become one of the few areas where Latin American and Caribbean countries have had a stable and unified position for almost half a century. The OPANAL's proposal of developing a standing forum of NWFZs' states-parties to galvanize collective action and undertake common initiatives, has proved the OPANAL's embeddedness ability in the scaffolding of the international non-proliferation regime OPANAL's constant financial difficulties were and are still an example of longstanding and non-solved problems, which has limited its activities and has unveiled to what extent states-parties were and are interested in the course of the Agency. The perceived gradual loss of importance of the nuclear threat in the '90s as well as the fact that the nuclear proliferation problem has been a sporadic and not a lingering preoccupation in the continent (given the inexistence of a proliferator) contributed to diminishing the significance of Tlatelolco. The incommensurability between the Treaty's objectives and scopes and its real problem-solving capacity –particularly through OPANAL- was (and is) mainly externally configured by geopolitical circumstances where the power of NWSs is unbeatable. The persistent legacy of colonialism and other forms of foreign presence are still crucial challenges to the denuclearized status of Latin America and the Caribbean NWFZ despite concerning states have ratified both Additional Protocols. The particular interpretations by NWSs regarding the freedom to navigate on the high seas and the transit rights with radioactive material is a stumbling block from then to now for the effective compliance of Tlatelolco. Because of all the presented reasons, we concluded that the overall performance of the Treaty until the last observed period has been moderately effective.


Some messenger RNAs encode not only an amino acid sequence, but also special signals that alter the mechanism of ribosomal readout. These programmed alterations of decoding, termed recoding, include ribosomal frameshifts at particular sites, reading of stop codons as sense, and ribosomal jumping where some nucleotides are skipped in the mRNA. Recoding by frameshifting and stop codon read-through (Gesteland et al. 1992) is now known to be quite widely used for gene expression. In most cases, the function is to provide a set ratio between two products that have a common amino-terminal sequence. However, there are some cases where regulation is operative. Two known cases of autoregulatory frameshifting are in decoding the genes for mammalian antizyme and Escherichia coli release factor 2 (RF2). In other cases, frameshifting is part of a regulatory pathway. The level of frameshifting in yeast transposable elements and some bacterial insertion sequences is responsive to the physiological state of the cell and in turn governs the level of element mobility. Regulatory roles are only suspected in some of the other cases of frameshifting and stop codon read-through. In programmed frameshifting, ribosomes initiate translation in the zero frame and translate conventionally to the shift site where some fraction of them are directed to one of the other two frames (+1 or −1) where they continue to the next stop codon in the new frame. Typically, only a minority of the ribosomes shift frame, whereas the majority continue on in the zero frame. The result is two protein...


The future communication trend in the Internet is rapidly moving towards mobile and pervasive computing. This emphasizes the network-dependency of terminals and applications, thus making a seamless and ubiquitous connectivity highly feasible. The mobility management of heterogeneous wireless resources is a key issue for this emerging paradigm. This paper presents the design and implementation of a middleware-based software architecture that enables terminals to adapt to fluctuations experienced in heterogeneous multi-access networks. This adaptation includes the dynamic selection of the most suitable connection for each application, as well as coping with a disconnection. Furthermore, it allows the applications to dynamically adapt their behavior according to the QoS-related changes in the underlying network interface. A test version was implemented based on the architecture. Experiments were conducted in a GPRS-WLAN test environment, from which the results were collected and analyzed.


Introduction: The aim of the study was to evaluate the diabetic activity of diarylsulfonylurea-chalcone hybrids on streptozotocin (STZ)-induced diabetic male albino rats. Materials and Methods: Diabetic activity of diarylsulfonylurea-chalcone hybrids at a dose of 10, 30, and 50 mg/kg body weight was evaluated. Adult male Swiss albino rats of six numbers in each group were undertaken for study and evaluated. Results: The results of in vivo hypoglycemic and antihyperglycemic activity of the synthesized diarylsulfonylurea-chalcone hybrid molecules (II.1-28) showed that all the compounds were found to possess moderate to potential ability to reduce blood glucose levels in normoglycemic and STZ-induced type 2 diabetic rats. Conclusions: The diarylsulfonylurea-chalcone hybrids have potent diabetic activity in the male albino rat.


Segments from various locations of the small and large intestine of the rat were removed, bathed in Tyrode's solution and attached to a force displacement transducer. Melatonin, while not influencing the frequency of contraction, did reduce the force of spontaneous contractions of duodenal and colon segments of rat intestine by 92 and 52%, respectively compared to only 25 and 22% for the ileum and jejunum, respectively. Areas with greatest responsiveness to melatonin were those that previous studies have shown to contain the largest concentrations of endogenous melatonin. Cyclic guanosine monophosphate, when tested in similar preparations, did not produce an inhibitory response characteristic of melatonin. It is hypothesized, therefore, that this hormone has physiological action within the gut, including motility; however, its action may not be directly on smooth muscle contraction but may be through an indirect action inhibiting the contractile response of serotonin, as suggested by other investigators.


This chapter reports on an ethnographic case study of how a group of elementary school teachers designed technology enhanced learning with mobile technology (e.g. notebooks, tablet computers and mobile phones) to facilitate students' development of literacy and twenty-first century competencies. These teachers designed the school's literacy pedagogical approach, leveraging the use of technology, namely digital storytelling. The school in this case study is one of the eight Future Schools in Singapore under the FutureSchools@Singapore program. The school has been providing one-to-one mobile computing learning devices and wireless Internet access for its students. The introduction of technology in the classroom makes it possible for twenty-first century competencies to be integrated into literacy development. The conversational framework is used as a framework to examine how the design of the digital storytelling pedagogical approach brings about the various teaching–learning activities – acquisition, inquiry, practice, production, discussion and collaboration. The use of digital storytelling as an approach to integrate information communication technology (ICT) into the classroom has not only modified how ICT is being used in the school, it has redefined how ICT could be used to engage young learners. It has fundamentally transformed conventional storytelling with the use of current state-of-the-shelf (i.e. easily and widely available) technologies. This case study also outlines the processes involved in improving the design of digital storytelling over the years by the teachers. The ecosystem of the school is also taken into consideration and described in detail. Findings suggest the importance of the collaborative efforts of the teachers in the continuous improvements made to this design. The adoption of a learning design framework, such as the one used in this study, can be beneficial to ensure a systematic approach to the design of learning. In addition, the availability of technological infrastructure and computing devices are necessary for the seamless use of technology in the classroom. The just-in-time learning approach is adopted for students to learn technology as they are developing their digital stories.


The economic unattractiveness of heavy crude oils in the global oil market scene is fast changing due to the looming scarcity of light oils. There are huge reserves of heavy oils to which refiners are being reluctantly attracted. The fully developed conventionally available refineries are, however, incapable of processing these heavy crudes without some major modifications of both process and equipment, which will be capital intensive. This thrust promises to be very viable and yield great benefits since heavy oil is relatively cheap. Process and equipment modification begins with the required pre-treatments of these heavy crudes to facilitate efficient and cost-effective refining. Low API gravity, high amounts of impurities, and high viscosity are the major challenges addressed in the pre-treatment section. An option for a unit for the removal of some impurities for some special heavy oils is proposed. This should be followed by a multi-stage desalting unit that may be replaced with a centrifuge and a preliminary hydrotreating unit.


Improving I/O performance is an important issue for many data-intensive, large-scale parallel applications. Although storage caches are used for improving I/O latencies of parallel applications, most of the prior work has focused on the management and partitioning of cache space. In particular, the compiler's role in taking advantage of multilevel storage caches has been largely unexplored. The main contribution of this paper is a shared-storage, cache-aware loop iteration distribution (iteration-to-processor mapping) scheme for I/O-intensive applications that manipulate disk-resident data sets. The proposed scheme is compiler directed and can be tuned to target any multilevel storage cache hierarchy. At the core of our scheme lies an iterative strategy that clusters loop iterations based on the underlying storage cache hierarchy and on the way these different storage caches in the hierarchy are shared by different processors. We tested this mapping scheme using a set of eight I/O-intensive application programs. The results collected so far are promising. Our proposed scheme improves the I/O performance of the tested applications by 26.3% on average, and this improvement leads to an average 18.9% reduction in the overall execution latencies of these applications. Moreover, our scheme performs significantly better than a state-of-the-art (but storage-cache- hierarchy agnostic) data locality optimization scheme. We also present an enhancement to our baseline implementation that performs local scheduling once the loop iteration distribution is performed. We observe that applying this enhancement improves I/O latency and total execution time further by 30.7% and 21.9%, respectively.


This work introduces TrimTuner, the first system for optimizing machine learning jobs in the cloud to exploit sub-sampling techniques to reduce the cost of the optimization process, while keeping into account user-specified constraints. TrimTuner jointly optimizes the cloud and application-specific parameters and, unlike state of the art works for cloud optimization, eschews the need to train the model with the full training set every time a new configuration is sampled. Indeed, by leveraging sub-sampling techniques and data-sets that are up to 60 x smaller than the original one, we show that TrimTuner can reduce the cost of the optimization process by up to 50 x. Further, TrimTuner speeds-up the recommendation process by 65 x with respect to state of the art techniques for hyperparameter optimization that use sub-sampling techniques. The reasons for this improvement are twofold: i) a novel domain specific heuristic that reduces the number of configurations for which the acquisition function has to be evaluated; ii) the adoption of an ensemble of decision trees that enables boosting the speed of the recommendation process by one additional order of magnitude.


Nect Thorax Image Interpretation
• There is oval shaped opacity with central cavitation ,in right lower zone,extending to midline.
• The opacity shows abnormal pockets of air collection,appears to communicate with
• oesphageal lumen,at T7 level.The central cavity contents appear, morphologically , similar to gastric contents.
• There is bilateral pleural effusion R > L, transudate nature
• Upper third oesophagus is dilated,max diameter is 4 cm. .
• Lower third oesophagus is eccentrically narrowed.from T6 level. • Air fluid level is seen in mid oesophagus,with a possible false lumen is seen
• Upper limit of false lumen is seen at T1 level.


Regulation of the Rho switch has been typically centered on their main regulators, RhoGEFs and RhoGAPs. On the side, RhoGDI proteins have been considered mostly as passive regulators devoid of catalytic activity simply holding Rho proteins in the cytosol. In the May issue of Nature Cell Biology 1, we describe a novel evolutionary conserved function for RhoGDI1 as a chaperoning protein which prevents degradation of prenylated Rho GTPases. The limited amount of RhoGDI1 in cells generates a competitive balance between GTPases in order to prevent their degradation. Therefore, this creates a crosstalk regulatory mechanism of Rho proteins, whereby the level of one Rho protein can affect both the level and activity of the others. For example, overexpression of a single GTPase will promote the degradation and inactivation of all endogenous Rho proteins bound to GDI. These results suggest that some of the conclusions drawn from studies that manipulate Rho protein levels may need to be reevaluated. Here, we discuss some of the consequences of this mechanism on the regulation of Rho proteins, the dissociation of Rho-RhoGDI complexes by GDF and whether this regulation might be extended to other GTPases of the Ras superfamily.


Ultrasound medical diagnostics is a real-time modality based on a doctor's interpretation of images. So far, automated Computer-Aided Diagnostic tools were not widely applied to ultrasound imaging. The emerging methods in Artificial Intelligence, namely deep learning, gave rise to new applications in medical imaging modalities. The work's objective was to show the feasibility of implementing deep learning algorithms directly on a research scanner with GPU software beamforming. We have implemented and evaluated two deep neural network architectures as part of the signal processing pipeline on the ultrasound research platform USPlatform (us4us Ltd., Poland). The USPlatform is equipped with a GPU cluster, enabling full software-based channel data processing as well as the integration of open source Deep Learning frameworks. The first neural model (S-4-2) is a classical convolutional network for one-class classification of baby body parts. We propose a simple 6-layer network for this task. The model was trained and evaluated on a dataset consisting of 786 ultrasound images of a fetal training phantom. The second model (Gu-net) is a fully convolutional neural network for brachial plexus localisation. The model uses 'U-net'-like architecture to compute the overall probability of target detection and the probability mask of possible target locations. The model was trained and evaluated on 5640 ultrasound B-mode frames. Both training and inference were performed on a multi-GPU (Nvidia Titan X) cluster integrated with the platform. As performance metrics we used: accuracy as a percentage of correct answers in classification, dice coefficient for object detection, and mean and std. dev. of a model's response time. The 'S-4-2' model achieved 96% classification accuracy and a response time of 3 ms (334 predictions/s). This simple model makes accurate predictions in a short time. The 'Gu-net' model achieved a 0.64 dice coefficient for object detection and a 76% target's presence classification accuracy with a response time of 15 ms (65 predictions/s). The brachial plexus detection task is more challenging and requires more effort to find the right solution. The results show that deep learning methods can be successfully applied to ultrasound image analysis and integrated on a single advanced research platform.


Ventilator-induced lung injury is a life-threatening complication of mechanical ventilation at high-tidal volumes. Besides activation of proinflammatory cytokine production, excessive lung distension directly affects blood-gas barrier and lung vascular permeability. To investigate whether restoration of pulmonary endothelial cell (EC) monolayer integrity after agonist challenge is dependent on the magnitude of applied cyclic stretch (CS) and how these effects are linked to differential activation of small GTPases Rac and Rho, pulmonary ECs were subjected to physiologically (5% elongation) or pathologically (18% elongation) relevant levels of CS. Pathological CS enhanced thrombin-induced gap formation and delayed monolayer recovery, whereas physiological CS induced nearly complete EC recovery accompanied by peripheral redistribution of focal adhesions and cortactin after 50 minutes of thrombin. Consistent with differential effects on monolayer integrity, 18% CS enhanced thrombin-induced Rho activation, whereas 5% CS promoted Rac activation during the EC recovery phase. Rac inhibition dramatically attenuated restoration of monolayer integrity after thrombin challenge. Physiological CS preconditioning (5% CS, 24 hours) enhanced EC paracellular gap resolution after step-wise increase to 18% CS (30 minutes) and thrombin challenge. These results suggest a critical role for the CS amplitude and the balance between Rac and Rho in mechanochemical regulation of lung EC barrier.


In the midst of vicious and unrelenting attacks on Central American asylum seekers in the United States, this Article seeks to understand historic and present-day patterns of animus and discrimination facing this group of refugees, and to propose solutions. This Article begins by examining decades of prejudice faced by Central American asylum seekers, as well as attempts to right those wrongs through litigation, legislation, and the creation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Next, this Article identifies the predominant push and pull factors driving Central American refugees north—and the U.S. role in creating them. The Article then lays out the impact of this Administration's systemic attacks on Central American asylum seekers, in particular, through family separation and zero-tolerance, the asylum ban and Matter of A-B-, and the framework in which refugees should be permitted to seek protection under current U.S. law. Finally, this Article evaluates several potential solutions including humanitarian asylum, an expansion of TPS, and litigation. Ultimately, this Article concludes that, in light of decades of abuse and prejudice directed at this class of refugees, the only adequate means of reparation is congressional legislation that would carve out special, tailored protections for this vulnerable group.


This paper analyzes the tradeoffs between savings, debt and public investment in the Republic of Congo, a developing country with looming oil exhaustibility concerns. Our results highlight the risks to fiscal and capital sustainability of oil exporting countries from large scaling-up in public investment and oil price volatility in view of a projected decline in the oil revenue to GDP ratio. However, structural reforms that improve the efficiency of public investment can allow for a relatively faster buildup of sustainable public capital and sustain higher non-oil growth without adversely affecting the debt ratio or savings. Moreover, we show that even if a government pursues prudent fiscal policy that preserves resource wealth and debt sustainability in the face of exhaustible and volatile resource revenues, low public investment quality in the form of a misallocation of resources can hinder attainment of sustainable public capital and positive non-oil growth.


OBJECTIVES
I examined how labor market and health insurance outcomes were affected by the loss of dependent coverage eligibility under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA).

METHODS
I used National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) data and regression discontinuity models to measure the percentage-point change in labor market and health insurance outcomes at age 26 years. My sample was restricted to unmarried individuals aged 24 to 28 years and to a period of time before the ACA's individual mandate (2011-2013). I ran models separately for men and women to determine if there were differences based on gender.

RESULTS
Aging out of this provision increased employment among men, employer-sponsored health insurance offers for women, and reports that health insurance coverage was worse than it was 1 year previously (overall and for young women). Uninsured rates did not increase at age 26 years, but there was an increase in the purchase of non-group health coverage, indicating interest in remaining insured after age 26 years.

CONCLUSIONS
Many young adults will turn to state and federal health insurance marketplaces for information about health coverage. Because young adults (aged 18-29 years) regularly use social media sites, these sites could be used to advertise insurance to individuals reaching their 26th birthdays.


Objectives: 1. to assess the validity of an electronically comorbidity assessment strategy to identify comorbid conditions among inflammatory arthritis patients in standard practice. 2. To evaluate the impact of e-comorbidity assessment on the patients' care and adherence to therapy. Methods: A cohort of 112 RA and 111 PsA subjects diagnosed according to RA ACR/EULAR criteria and PsA CASPAR criteria were followed longitudinally for 36 months. The patients were classified into a study group (112 patients) whose electronic patient-reported comorbidities were compared to a control group of 111 patients who were managed according to standard protocols. The sensitivity, specificity, positive and negative predictive values of the electronic data entry were compared to ICD-10 medical record (reference standard) and rheumatology clinic visits outcomes. Results: The sensitivity for identifying comorbidities using the electronic approach (median, 99.2%; interquartile range [IQR]: 96%-100%) outperformed those recorded using using ICD-10 codes (median, 66%; IQR: 50%-74%); and those recorded using clinic letters (median, 38%; IQR: 32%-54%). The median PPV and NPV were 97.7% (IQR: 96-100%) and 99.6% (IQR: 99-100%) for the e-comorbidity tool Vs 61.8% (IQR: 41%-76%) and 97.4% (IQR: 91%-98%) for the ICD-10 codes, physician recorded comorbidity respectively. The patients' adherence to antirheumatic therapy was significantly (p<0.1) higher in the studied group. Conclusions: e-comorbidity assessment offered a specific and dynamic approach tailored to the patient's needs over the 3-years study period, which is applicable in standard practice. Patient reported e-comorbidity outperformed the standard medical recording systems and can have a role in healthcare management and research.


Goals Although anti-tissue transglutaminase antibodies (anti-tTG) are effective for celiac disease (CD) routine laboratory screening, there are no studies evaluating correlation between degree of intestinal damage and positivity to anti-tTG. Since recent studies showed that anti-gliadin (AGA) and anti-endomysium (EMA) antibodies are ineffective in diagnosing mild gluten-sensitive enteropathy, the aim of this study was to evaluate the prevalence of anti-tTG in different degrees of intestinal damage of celiac patients and whether there is a correlation between serum value of anti-tTG and the degree of histologic damage. Study We studied 119 consecutive adult patients affected by CD (47 men and 72 women; mean age, 28 years; range, 22–51 years). All patients were stratified for histologic damage according to Marsh classification, and in all of them an anti-tTG evaluation was performed. Results Marsh I lesions were present in 13 patients (10.92%), Marsh II in 24 anti-tTG (20.16%), Marsh IIIa in 27 anti-tTG (22.68%), Marsh IIIb in 31 anti-tTG (26.05%) and Marsh IIIc in 24 anti-tTG (20.16%). Anti-tTG positivity was ranging from 1 of 13 anti-tTG (7.69%) in Marsh I lesions to 23 of 24 anti-tTG (95.83%) in Marsh IIIc lesions respectively (P < 0.005), while mean serum value of anti-tTG ranged from 3.61 (range, 0.7–9.2) UA/mL in Marsh I lesions to 7.3 (range, 1–25.1), 18.5 (range, 1.8–56.2), 36 (range, 3.7–83.5) and 74.95 (range, 6.5–257) UA/mL in Marsh II, IIIb and IIIc lesions respectively (P < 0.005). Conclusions Our study showed that anti-tTG prevalence and their mean serum value was higher in celiacs with severe enteropathy (Marsh IIIb-c lesions) than in those showing slight enteropathy (Marsh I-IIIa). So, serologic tests without histologic evaluation may underestimate the real prevalence of CD and there is the risk of delaying the diagnosis of CD in patients who run an increased risk of deficiencies, non-malignant conditions and malignancy.


Y2.85Er0.15Al5O3 was prepared by combustion process. Phase evolution of the synthesized powders was determined by XRD. Single-phase cubic YAG: Er3+ crystalline powders were obtained by calcining the combusted product at 1000°C and no intermidiate phase was observed. SEM morphology showed that the resultant YAG: Er3+ powders were porous. Upconversion emission spectra were measured on the powder compact pumped by a 980nm continuous wave diode laser. The relationship between pump power and luminescence intensity suggested that a two-photon process is active in this sample. The upconversion machanism of YAG: Er3+ system was also discussed.


The inducibility of slow-response automaticity was assessed during ischemic conditions and reperfusion by application of extracellular current. Isolated canine Purkinje fibers were depolarized to membrane potentials less than -65 mV to elicit depolarization-induced automaticity (DIA). Ischemic conditions increased the cycle length of DIA and, in some tissues, prevented sustained DIA or completely abolished DIA. The magnitude of depolarization required to elicit DIA also increased. Inhibition of DIA occurred at a time when action potential plateaus were abbreviated. The effect of reperfusion on DIA was biphasic. Initial reappearance of DIA was followed by inhibition and reduction of the membrane potential range over which DIA could be elicited. Plateaus of action potentials initiated at high membrane potential were abbreviated at this time. DIA returned again as reperfusion effects dissipated. Phasic changes in the inducibility of DIA may represent changes in availability of the slow inward current and may regulate the timing and types of arrhythmic activity occurring with ischemia and reperfusion.


Exploits based on ROP (Return-Oriented Programming) are increasingly present in advanced attack scenarios. Testing systems for ROP-based attacks can be valuable for improving the security and reliability of software. In this paper, we propose ROPMATE, the first Visual Analytics system specifically designed to assist human red team ROP exploit builders. In contrast, previous ROP tools typically require users to inspect a puzzle of hundreds or thousands of lines of textual information, making it a daunting task. ROPMATE presents builders with a clear interface of well-defined and semantically meaningful gadgets, i.e., fragments of code already present in the binary application that can be chained to form fully-functional exploits. The system supports incrementally building exploits by suggesting gadget candidates filtered according to constraints on preserved registers and accessed memory. Several visual aids are offered to identify suitable gadgets and assemble them into semantically correct chains. We report on a preliminary user study that shows how ROPMATE can assist users in building ROP chains.


Terminally ill patients face many challenges with regard to increasing physical dependence on others to meet their practical needs. Progressive weakness, profound fatigue and gradual deconditioning make daily tasks increasingly difficult to perform. Rehabilitation techniques do not lie solely within the role of physiotherapists and occupational therapists. They are an integral part of holistic care for patients at the end of life. The promotion of rehabilitation reduces patients' dependency on nurses, allowing them more time to deliver care to patients who are fully dependent. Rehabilitation techniques also enable patients to regain control, self-esteem and quality of life. This article describes 'The Rehab Project', a training programme delivered to ward nurses and healthcare assistants, by physiotherapy and occupational therapy staff, at a hospice in London. By focusing on patient empowerment and independence, the project aimed to ensure a consistent and efficient approach to nursing care provided within the hospice inpatient unit. However, the principles of rehabilitation are pertinent to nurses working in more generalist settings. Conflicts of interest: none


Current Peer-to-Peer (P2P) file sharing systems make use of a considerable percentage of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) bandwidth. This paper presents the Collaborative Locality-aware Overlay SERvice (CLOSER), an architecture that aims at lessening the usage of expensive international links by exploiting traffic locality (i.e., a resource is downloaded from the inside of the ISP whenever possible). The paper proves the effectiveness of CLOSER by analysis and simulation, also comparing this architecture with existing solutions for traffic locality in P2P systems. While savings on international links can be attractive for ISPs, it is necessary to offer some features that can be of interest for users to favor a wide adoption of the application. For this reason, CLOSER also introduces a privacy module that may arouse the users' interest and encourage them to switch to the new architecture.


We design a high-performance parallel merge sort for highly parallel systems. Our merge sort is designed to use more register communication (not shared memory), and does not suffer from over-segmentation as opposed to previous comparison based sorts. Using these techniques we are able to achieve a sorting rate of 250 MKeys/sec, which is about 2.5 times faster than Thrust merge sort performance, and 70% faster than non-stable state-of-the-art GPU merge sorts. Building on this sorting algorithm, we develop a scheme for sorting variable-length key/value pairs, with a special emphasis on string keys. Sorting non-uniform, unaligned data such as strings is a fundamental step in a variety of algorithms, yet it has received comparatively little attention. To our knowledge, our system is the first published description of an efficient string sort for GPUs. We are able to sort strings at a rate of 70 MStrings/s on an NVidia GTX 580 on one dataset, and up to 1.25 GB/s on another dataset.


Objective: to identify the personal and clinical characteristics of adolescents alcohol and other drugs' users with Psychological Development Disorders. Methods: this retrospective study analyzes the care of the Psychosocial Care III Center. Results: from the 415 adolescents treated, 52.3% were female; 89.9% were between 12 to 14 years old, 51.6% attended by court order, 28.2% had "Unspecified Disorder of Psychological Development"; 32.3% used multiple drugs. Being between 12 and 14 years of age meant 2.5 and 1.5 times more risk of having Psychological Development Disorders, respectively. Cocaine/crack users were more likely (4.27 times) to receive the diagnosis of "Psychoactive Substance Use." Conclusion: adolescents are treated in accordance with the law, which requires treatment for social living inadequacies due to high use of cannabinoids, and there is a difficulty of professionals in treating Psychological Development Disorders.


Abstract
Radiofrequency-induced hyperthermia has recently gained acceptance in cancer therapy. One of a few commercially available systems is the Magnetrode, a device operating at 13.56 MHz with an output power up to 1000 W. Heating of the prescribed part of the patient's body is accomplished by one of the coil electrodes. To assess exposure to the operator of the device, the intensities of the electric and magnetic fields in the vicinity of three Magnetrode coils were measured, while a human phantom or a human being was in the coil. Exposure to the device operator is compared with the recommendations of the Canadian safety code and the recent ANSI recommendations.


Despite rheumatoid arthritis (RA) therapy development has been in advance level today, its mortality remains increasing in general population. The mortality is mainly caused by early-manifested atherosclerosis and other cardiovascular complications. Available evidences showthis condition appears in early stage of the disease. Thus, early detection and management of cardiovascular risk, followed by control of these factors are necessaryto reduce morbidity and mortality of RA patients


Author(s): Mahan, Margo | Advisor(s): Fox, Cybelle | Abstract: This dissertation investigates the historical emergence of wife-beating laws in the United States. The key questions I investigate are: What were the social conditions in which wife- beating laws emerged in the nineteenth-century South? What do these conditions reveal about the primary functions of these laws? Based on analysis of 19th-century legal and government data, local and appellate case records, federal reports, Freedman's Bureau documents, periodical data, and family records, I argue that Southern wife-beating laws were a white supremacist post-Civil War response to the legalization of black family formation. They functioned to control black labor and degrade the status of blackness.My research challenges conventional accounts about the historical origins of U.S. domestic violence legislation. Since the proliferation of early wife-beating laws (1870-1900) coincided with first wave feminism, scholarship assumes that they were the result of feminist agency and borne out of a desire to protect women. These assumptions have led to two important limitations in domestic violence scholarship. First, most scholarship focuses on the North, where first wave feminism flourished. Second, even when research considers the effects of other social factors, such as race and class, it foregrounds the effects of feminist agency. Both limitations are troubling because the first state to legally rescind a husband's right to chastise his wife was Alabama, whose 1871 Fulgham v. State ruling was also the country's first in which the litigants were black. In fact, anti-wife-beating laws proliferated throughout southern states where, like Alabama, there was neither a feminist movement, nor female collective action against wife-beating. By the early 1900s, the ideological association between wife-beating and black families was so pervasive that denying "wife-beaters" the vote was a device some southern states used to disenfranchise black men.In contrast to the feminist narrative, I argue that southern anti-wife-beating laws were a postbellum response to the racialized and gendered convergence of the antebellum Master- slave and Husband-wife relationships. Antebellum socio-legal norms simultaneously advanced marital cruelty protections for wives on the one hand and encouraged the physical chastisement of slaves on the other. This ensured that the authority to beat slave women – to include de facto slave wives – was a specifically white male prerogative; and, it added physical chastisement to a long list of naturalized distinctions between blackness and whiteness. Emancipation exposed the fragility of 'domestic relations' – and thus the1southern way of life – by highlighting its dependence on racialized gender hierarchies. Wife- beating laws that threatened to punish black men, in the midst of socio-legal norms that kept black women vulnerable to white male violence, helped to restore a southern way of life that simultaneously controlled the labor and degraded the status of black families.The dissertation has six chapters. The introductory chapter provides the theoretical framework for the project. Wife-beating cases, I argue, performed the crucial socio-legal function of reinforcing domestic gender norms – norms that were inextricably articulated through race and class, given the southern household's distinctive Master-slave relationship. Chapter Two reveals that the antebellum progression of laws created a racialized double- standard for wife-beating, in which the prerogative to chastise white wives and slave men's de facto wives, was a privilege exclusive to white men. Chapter Three begins after the Civil war, when the Reconstruction amendments led Southern states to legally recognize black marriages and families. But the antebellum racialized double-standard for wife-beating nevertheless endured, criminalizing black men as wife-beaters in a burgeoning law and order regime that enabled control over black labor. Chapter Four elucidates how, the racialization of wife-beating as a black crime functioned to symbolize and reify a hegemonic ideology of black family dysfunction. Chapter Five examines how wife-beating is eventually used to disenfranchise black men. Chapter Six concludes the dissertation. Situated at the intersection of sociology of family, political economy, criminalization, and 19th-century southern historical literatures, my dissertation reveals how racial projects to symbolically and materially privilege Whiteness motivated the emergence of "feminist" laws that scholarship and social policy largely conceptualize as apart from race, class, and market forces.


Fifth-generation wireless (5G) mobile communication technology has been classified as a high wireless standard that is capable of handling internet of things, machine-to-machine, and device-to-device communication. Consequently, there is a need to meet the very sensitive requirements of 5G, which include high coverage density, high speed, high capacity and low end-to-end delay. Of crucial importance is 5G's passive infrastructure. This paper therefore presents a techno-economic analysis of the current telecommunication infrastructure, as well as investigating and determining the suitable passive infrastructure for 5G technology deployment. The paper outlines all the passive infrastructure elements and proposes a mathematical model to calculate the capital expenditure, operational expenditure, total cost of investment (TCI) or total cost of ownership (TCO) and net present value (NPV). Experiments are performed using market prices from the national communication authority, the mobile network operators and the tower company of Ghana. Furthermore, a sensitivity analysis is performed to identify the variables that increase the TCO or TCI, NPV and return on investment, and to propose the most economical passive infrastructure architecture for easy implementation of 5G technology in Ghana and Africa. Keywords—5G technology; Capital Expenditure; Operational Expenditure; Total Cost of Ownership; Infrastructure Sharing


Background Increasing walking and cycling, and reducing motorised vehicle use, are increasingly recognised as health and environmental priorities. This paper examines levels and trends in the use of different commute modes in England and Wales, both overall and with respect to small-area deprivation. It also examines how far commute modal share can serve as a proxy for travel behaviour more generally. Methods 25.1 million adult commuters reported their usual main mode of travelling to work in the 2011 England and Wales census; similar data were available for 1971-2001. Indices of Multiple Deprivation were used to examine socio-economic patterning. The UK National Travel Survey 2002-2010 was used to examine correlations between commute modal share and modal share of total travel time in 150 non-overlapping populations defined by region, year band and income. Results Among commuters in 2011, 67.1% used private motorised travel as their usual main commute mode (-1.8% change since 2001); 17.3% public transport (+1.4% change); 11.3% walking (+0.4% change); and 3.0% cycling (0.0% change). Walking and, to a marginal extent, cycling were more common among those from deprived areas, but these gradients had flattened over the previous decade to the point of having essentially disappeared for cycling. In the National Travel Survey, commute modal share and total modal share were highly correlated for private motorised transport (r = 0.94), public transport (r = 0.96) walking (r = 0.88 excluding London) and cycling (r = 0.77). Conclusion England and Wales remain car-dependent, but the trends are slightly more encouraging. Unlike many health behaviours, it is more common for socio-economically disadvantaged groups to commute using physically active modes, but this association is weakening and may soon reverse for cycling. At a population level, commute modal share is reasonably highly correlated with total modal share, enhancing the value of the census data in characterising background trends and evaluating interventions.


The mounting physiological evidence for low‐resistance electrical coupling between thalamic and cortical neurons contrasts with a lack of morphological data on gap junctions in thalamus and cortex. Connexin‐36 is a neuronally specific protein associated with low‐resistance gap junctions in the central nervous system. Connexin‐36 localization was studied in the mouse somatosensory cortex and thalamus by using immunocytochemistry and immunoelectron microscopy. Expression of connexin‐36 immunoreactivity is widespread in the forebrain and significantly enhanced in the barrel cortex and thalamic reticular nucleus during the second postnatal week, but it extends to other thalamic nuclei as well. At the electron microscopic level, pre‐ and postembedding immunogold labeling revealed that 70–76% of connexin‐36‐immunolabeled particles were localized at focal sites on apposed plasma membranes of cortical and thalamic dendrites; approximately 5% of the particles were associated with parasynaptic membranes; but on no occasion could overt, morphologically identifiable gap junctions be demonstrated in association with connexin‐36 immunoreactivity. The widespread distribution of focal concentrations of connexin‐36 subunits could provide a basis for the electrical coupling that exists between cortical and reticular thalamic neurons, but morphologically definable gap junctions may be too small to be adequately visualized by conventional immunoelectron microscopy. J. Comp. Neurol. 466:457–467, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.


Normal 0 false false false EN-US X-NONE NE Objective: this phenomenological study was undertaken to explore lived experiences of community dweller older adults with post hip fractured.  Methods: A qualitative research design underpinned by the philosophy of Edmund Husserl and methodological interpretations of Colaizzi's. The series of in-depth web based interviews were simultaneously conducted and analyzed until saturation of data. Rigor of the study was maintained by validated the transcribed information by informants. Findings: based on subjective information provided by informants, sixteen themes were emerged which further merged into four theme clusters that were patho-dynamic of hip fracture, affected reaction to distress and situation appraisal, limitation in movement and being dependent on others and coping behaviors. Findings of this study indicated that informants experienced both fluid and complex that challenges all spheres of their life after hip fracture. Conclusion: It was concluded that, older adults with post-hip fracture are facing multiple situational problems like physical, emotional, care-givers and financial so that comprehensive, affordable and culturally based multi-disciplinary services are essential. Physical comforts, motivation, continuous support, encouragement for exercise, walking and financial assistance can promote their early recovery and regaining functional capacity. This approach to the study of lived experience of older adults with post-hip fracture offers an opportunity to reflect and make sense of their current situation in the light of their day to day life activities, struggling and achieving pre-fracture functional abilities, to tell their story to an interested listener and to have their feelings validated. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ijssm.v1i1.9590 Int. J. Soc. Sci. Manage. Vol.1(1) 2014 35-40


The problem of testing monotonicity for Boolean functions on the hypergrid, $f:[n]^d \to \{0,1\}$ is a classic topic in property testing. When $n=2$, the domain is the hypercube. For the hypercube case, a breakthrough result of Khot-Minzer-Safra (FOCS 2015) gave a non-adaptive, one-sided tester making $\widetilde{O}(\varepsilon^{-2}\sqrt{d})$ queries. Up to polylog $d$ and $\varepsilon$ factors, this bound matches the $\widetilde{\Omega}(\sqrt{d})$-query non-adaptive lower bound (Chen-De-Servedio-Tan (STOC 2015), Chen-Waingarten-Xie (STOC 2017)). For any $n>2$, the optimal non-adaptive complexity was unknown. A previous result of the authors achieves a $\widetilde{O}(d^{5/6})$-query upper bound (SODA 2020), quite far from the $\sqrt{d}$ bound for the hypercube. In this paper, we resolve the non-adaptive complexity of monotonicity testing for all constant $n$, up to $\text{poly}(\varepsilon^{-1}\log d)$ factors. Specifically, we give a non-adaptive, one-sided monotonicity tester making $\widetilde{O}(\varepsilon^{-2}n\sqrt{d})$ queries. From a technical standpoint, we prove new directed isoperimetric theorems over the hypergrid $[n]^d$. These results generalize the celebrated directed Talagrand inequalities that were only known for the hypercube.


The Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy (UV-Visible), nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H NMR) and TG analysis were used to study the oxidation of corn stover lignin by chloride dioxide and subsequently modified by furfuryl alcohol. The results were as following: The selective oxidation of lignin by chlorine dioxide was obtained by spectroscopy study. FTIR showed that the characteristic absorbance peaks of aromatic units were decreased after chloride dioxide oxidation. The increased absorbance for the band around 1720 cm(-1) corresponding to carbonyl stretching was achieved in the oxidized lignin and the lignin modified with furfuryl alcohol. The ultraviolet-visible spectroscopy showed that the absorbance around 280 nm was largely reduced after the lignin was oxidized. The 1H NMR spectroscopy also showed the decrease of aromatic units and methoxyl group in the oxidized lignin. All these indicated the formation of muconic acid and ester, or quinone derivatives when the lignin was selectively oxidized by chloride dioxide. The modification by furfuryl alcohol made the oxidized lignin more thermally stable.


We introduce a method to solve exactly a first order Markov random field optimization problem in more generality than was previously possible. The MRF has a prior term that is convex in terms of a linearly ordered label set. The method maps the problem into a minimum-cut problem for a directed graph, for which a globally optimal solution can be found in polynomial time. The convexity of the prior function in the energy is shown to be necessary and sufficient for the applicability of the method.


ABSTRACT Fault-scarp related fan deltas developed in tilted half grabens in NE Greenland during late Jurassic—early Cretaceous rifting. This study documents ichnological and sedimentological characteristics of the Lower Cretaceous interval of a submarine fan-delta succession (Palnatokes Bjerg Formation, Wollaston Forland), which represents a time of waning rift activity and transgression. For this purpose, two variably exposed ca. 150 m-thick sections were studied ∼10 km from the coeval fault scarp, near the axis of the most proximal fault block. Moreover, an additional ∼20 m thick coeval succession was studied in the next fault block ∼20 km from the coastline defining fault. The results indicate deposition on the basin floor, in the distal fan and in a mid-fan channel-overbank/splay complex of a subaqueous fan delta. The deposits are characterized mainly by various facies of high and low density turbidity currents, hybrid event beds, and transitional flow facies that grade upward into sediment starved basinal mudstones. The ichnological pattern recorded in these strata is strongly mixed, frequently containing elements of the impoverished Skolithos, Cruziana, Zoophycos ichnofacies, and more rarely of the Nereites ichnofacies. Characteristic features also include suites dominated by infaunal locomotion and feeding trails (including the "Curvolithus suite") and the common occurrence of crustacean burrows. The results are indicative of a depositional system resembling a fjord-side delta that differs sedimentologically and ichnologically from many other gravity-flow systems of similar grain-size caliber. The ichnological pattern recorded in these strata is potentially a characteristic feature of the subaqueous fan-deltas in comparable settings, reflecting the distinct basin physiography with an abrupt change in bathymetry, a narrow basin geometry, and environmental stress resulting from unstable physical conditions. The counter slope of the rotated fault block may explain the common signs of flow concentration and abrupt fan termination.


Objective Tofacitinib (TOF) is an oral, small-molecule drug used for rheumatoid arthritis (RA) treatment and is one of several alternative treatments to tumor necrosis factor inhibitors (TNFi). We evaluated physician- and patient-reported effectiveness of TNFi compared to TOF, using real-world data from the Ontario Best Practices Research Initiative (OBRI). Methods Patients enrolled in the OBRI initiating TOF or TNFi between 2014 and 2019 were included. Patients were required to have physician- and patient-reported effectiveness outcome data, including Clinical Disease Activity Index (CDAI) and RA Disease Activity Index (RADAI), available at treatment initiation and 6 (± 2) months later. To deal with confounding by indication, we estimated propensity scores (PS) for covariates. Results Four hundred nineteen patients were included. Of those, 226 initiated a TNFi and 193 TOF, and had a mean (SD) disease duration of 8.0 (8.7) and 12.6 (9.6) years, respectively. In addition, the TNFi group was less likely to have prior biologic use (21.7%) compared to the TOF group (67.9%). The proportion of patients in CDAI low disease activity (LDA)/remission (REM) at 6 months was 36.7% and 33.2% in the TNFi and TOF groups, respectively. The generalized linear mixed models adjusting for PS quantile showed that there was no significant difference in CDAI LDA/REM (odds ratio [OR] 0.85, 95% CI 0.51–1.43) and RADAI coefficient (OR 0.48, 95% CI –0.18 to 1.14) between the 2 groups (ref: TOF). Conclusion In patients with RA, physician- and patient-reported effectiveness are similar in the TNFi and TOF groups 6 months after treatment.


The evolutionary emergence of animals is one of the most significant episodes in the history of life, but its timing remains poorly constrained. Molecular clocks estimate that animals originated and began diversifying over 100 million years before the first definitive metazoan fossil evidence in the Cambrian. However, closer inspection reveals that clock estimates and the fossil record are less divergent than is often claimed. Modern clock analyses do not predict the presence of the crown‐representatives of most animal phyla in the Neoproterozoic. Furthermore, despite challenges provided by incomplete preservation, a paucity of phylogenetically informative characters, and uncertain expectations of the anatomy of early animals, a number of Neoproterozoic fossils can reasonably be interpreted as metazoans. A considerable discrepancy remains, but much of this can be explained by the limited preservation potential of early metazoans and the difficulties associated with their identification in the fossil record. Critical assessment of both records may permit better resolution of the tempo and mode of early animal evolution.


Since World War II, an enormous expansion in Florida's visitors has been experienced. In addition, large numbers have migrated to the state. The demand for hotel and motel rooms has risen accordingly. In fact, in 1950, the state had 125,980 hotel and motel rooms, while in 1987, the number had risen to 311,980. Although there are many motives for renting a hotel or motel room, in Florida, tourist occupance ranks among the most common.


Self-destructive behavior is the final pathway for a variety of underlying problems. Because there is such a wide range of diagnostic possibilities in patients who attempt suicide, more precise diagnosis is essential. The often-asked question "Will the patient attempt suicide again?" is insufficient. Rather, an understanding of why the person is unhappy facilitates identification of the suicidal subtype and the necessary therapeutic interventions.


The plasma total biopterin and tetrahydrobiopterin (BH4) levels of 24 psychiatric patients were measured in the symptomatic phase, under no influence of psychotropic drugs as long as possible, and were compared with those of normal controls. The significant increase in total biopterin levels was observed only in the plasma of the patients with affective disorders or panic disorder in the depressive mood. A significant decrease in BH4 levels was observed only in the plasma of the patients with depression, and an increase in BH4 levels was observed only in the patients with hypomania. The changes of these biopterin levels in plasma could be a disease effect or a phase effect.