Few studies have directly related turfgrass growth and quality responses to extractable soil P concentrations in sand greens. A 3-yr field experiment was conducted on a sand-based putting green to determine creeping bentgrass (Agrostis stolonifera L.) growth and quality responses to extractable soil P. Extractable soil P concentrations were obtained by using the modified-Morgan, Mehlich-1, and Bray-1 extractants. Critical extractable P concentrations (above which there is a low probability of response to increasing soil P concentrations) for shoot counts, thatch thickness, relative clipping yields, quality ratings, P deficiency ratings, tissue P concentrations, and root weights were determined using Cate-Nelson (CN) and quadratic response and plateau (QRP) models. Both models fit the data relatively well in most cases (R 2 values from 0.12 to 0.89), and critical concentrations for the QRP models were always greater than the CN models. Critical extractable P concentrations were lowest for the modified-Morgan extractant (1.4 to 12.0 mg kg -1 ) and greatest for the Mehlich-1 extractant (14.1 to 63.6 mg kg -1 ). Application of estimated critical extractable P concentrations in this study could be used to substantiate observed responses or explain lack of responses in other previously reported creeping bentgrass P studies. We found better model fits with modified-Morgan extractable P for bentgrass quality ratings, deficiency ratings, and tissue P concentrations than with P extracted by the Mehlich or Bray methods. This suggests that the modified-Morgan extractant may have advantages over stronger-acid extractants when used on sand-based media. The results can be used to revise or update existing P fertilization recommendations for bentgrass grown on sand-based media.


Critics increasingly highlight the dark sides of the sharing economy resulting from the insufficient regulation of competition, labor, or taxes in its for-profit sector. In this chapter, the authors argue that regulatory solutions for the sharing economy hinge on the understanding of the ways in which the sharing economy is organized. Here, digitalization undermines established regulation through underlying organizational shifts pertaining to places, labor inputs and output responsibilities. Mapping out the field of actors that are or could be involved in regulating the sharing economy, the authors highlight a particular role played not only by digital platforms as market organizers, but also of a variety of other public and private actors such as standard setting organizations, social movements, trade unions, organized buyers and sellers, incumbents, or policy makers. The authors suggest that an understanding of sharing economy markets as fields can not only capture the highly organized nature of the sharing economy, but also serve to untangle the contestations and power dynamics unfolding among various actors engaged in different regulatory issues associated with the sharing economy. Seeing "Uberization" as a next development stage away from the modern corporation after global supply chains, the authors highlight regulatory challenges associated with the even more individualized and dispersed way in which sharing economy markets are organized and also discuss new opportunities for regulation provided by digital technology.


The number of times that an article is cited has served as an indicator of both its creativity and impact. In this study, we investigated the relationship between citations and 2 very simple variables-the number of authors and the number of separate locations. Previous research, on balance, would support the notion that an increased number of collaborators would increase the quality of the product, at least to some asymptote. Research on the effect of separate locations is more sparse. Most work favors collaborations at the same locale, given a sharing of perspective and benefits in terms of coordination and motivation. However, research from the minority influence literature documents the stimulating effects of independent and differing views, leading to the conclusion that independent locations would be an asset. Results from an analysis of 6 journals and 5,113 articles over a 10-year period show the benefit of both the number of authors and the number of independent locations. Journals also differed in their citation average, Psychological Review being cited significantly more often than any of the other 5 journals.


BACKGROUNDThe sequelae of aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (SAH) include vasospasm and hydrocephalus. OBJECTIVETo assess whether intraventricular tissue plasminogen activator (tPA) results in less vasospasm, fewer angioplasties, or fewer cerebrospinal fluid shunting procedures. METHODS41 patients (tPA group, Hunt and Hess 3, 4, 5) from 2007 to 2008 received intraventricular tPA and lumbar drainage for a minimum of 5 days (range 5–7 days) and were compared to a matched group of 35 patients from 2006 to 2007 (Control, HH 3, 4, 5). Statistical comparison was done by t test analysis or Fisher exact tests and data are expressed as average ± standard error of the mean. RESULTSThere were no significant differences in demographic data, although the tPA group had a trend toward more surgical patients. The tPA group of patients had a significantly higher modified Fisher grade than controls (P < .001) and had a significantly better Hunt and Hess grade than controls (P < .03). The angioplasty rate was significantly lower among the tPA patients (15.0% ± 5.6) than controls (40.0% ± 8.5, P = .019). The number of days spent in severe vasospasm normalized over the 14-day monitoring period by transcranial Doppler was significantly lower in the tPA group (0.09 ± 0.02) than controls (0.17 ± 0.03). The shunt rate was significantly lower among tPA patients (17.5% ± 6.0) than controls (42.8% ± 8.6). There were 2 clinically silent tract hemorrhages in the tPA group (4.8%). CONCLUSIONIntraventricular tPA is a safe and effective treatment for reducing both angioplasty and shunting rates in patients with SAH H&H Grades 3 to 5. A randomized trial is indicated.


Exercise training has been proposed to improve whole body insulin sensitivity through a postreceptor adaptation in skeletal muscle. This study examined if levels of the insulin-responsive muscle glucose transporter protein (GLUT-4) were associated with improved insulin sensitivity in trained vs. sedentary middle-aged individuals. Muscle GLUT-4 levels and oral glucose tolerance test (OGTT) responses were obtained in age-matched trained and sedentary men (n = 11). Plasma insulin levels during the OGTT were significantly lower (P less than 0.01) in the trained men, whereas no differences were seen in plasma glucose responses. GLUT-4 protein content was approximately twofold higher in the trained men (2.41 +/- 0.17 vs. 1.36 +/- 0.11 micrograms standard, P less than 0.001). OGTT responses and GLUT-4 levels were not altered 15-18 h after a standard exercise bout in six representative sedentary subjects. These data suggest that GLUT-4 levels are increased in conjunction with insulin sensitivity in chronically exercise-trained middle-aged men. This finding suggests a possible mechanism for the improved insulin sensitivity observed with exercise training in humans.


AIM
The objectives of this study were to develop a programme to improve body image among elementary school students and to evaluate the effectiveness of the programme.

BACKGROUND
The idea that a slim body is beautiful has become popular in recent decades, and has negatively impacted body image among school children. There is a need for further development of prevention programmes.

METHODS
This study applied a quasi-experimental design. The study participants were 314 5th and 6th graders in two elementary schools in Taipei City, with 112 in the intervention group and 202 in the control group. The intervention group received an 8-week educational programme. The study participants filled out structured questionnaires at preintervention, postintervention and 3 months after intervention between October 2007 and April 2008. The indicators of effectiveness included perceptional (estimation of body size), attitudinal (body satisfaction) and behavioural (diet and vomiting to lose weight) aspects of body image.

FINDINGS
Intervention students showed a greater increase in body satisfaction from pretest to posttest relative to controls. At 3 months after intervention, the intervention students still had significantly higher body satisfaction than controls. There were no statistically significant differences in the perceptional and behavioural aspects of body image.

CONCLUSION
This study demonstrated that a school programme improved body satisfaction among elementary school students. The findings of this study could serve as a basis for further development of body image programmes for children to prevent a drastically deteriorating body image when they enter puberty.


The evolution towards a more sustainable electricity system will definitely require a stronger role of demand. For example, Demand Response (DR) programs allow consumers to manage their loads in response to signals that reflect–at least to some extent–the time-varying nature of the cost of electricity, improving thereby the efficiency of electricity markets, and also allowing for larger shares of renewable energy. However, allowing consumers to respond also requires significant investments. Therefore, estimating the potential benefits from DR programs is essential to assess their convenience. This paper presents an integrated assessment of the benefits of a potential DR program in Spanish households, including both supply and demand considerations. For the first time in literature, we estimate together and compare the benefits for both the generation and the distribution network system. Our results show that, under the current conditions (the most important of which are rather low electricity prices, a well-developed network, and overcapacity in the generation system), the benefits are quite low compared to the costs, and most of them come from the generation system. This creates a challenge for policy makers if they desire to promote these programs within highly developed generation systems, as well as a complex situation about the distribution of the costs and benefits which needs to be addressed.


Views and hyperlinks expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of The Judge Advocate General, the Department of the Air Force, or any other department or agency of the United States Government. The inclusion of external links and references does not imply any endorsement by the author(s), The Judge Advocate General, the Department of the Air Force, the Department of Defense or any other department or agency of the U.S. Government. They are meant to provide an additional perspective or as a supplementary resource.


Cohabitation is a family form that increasingly includes children. We use the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to assess the well-being of adolescents in cohabiting parent stepfamilies (N= 13,231). Teens living with cohabiting stepparents often fare worse than teens living with two biological married parents. Adolescents living in cohabiting stepfamilies experience greater disadvantage than teens living in married stepfamilies. Most of these differences, however, are explained by socioeconomic circumstances. Teenagers living with single unmarried mothers are similar to teens living with cohabiting stepparents; exceptions include greater delinquency and lower grade point averages experienced by teens living with cohabiting stepparents. Yet mother's marital history explains these differences. Our results contribute to our understanding of cohabitation and debates about the importance of marriage for children.


In the limit of a small Debye length ( lambda D to 0) the analysis of the plasma boundary layer leads to a two-scale problem of a collision free sheath and of a quasi-neutral presheath. Bohm's criterion expresses a necessary condition for the formation of a stationary sheath in front of a negative absorbing wall. The basic features of the plasma-sheath transition and their relation to the Bohm criterion are discussed and illustrated from a simple cold-ion fluid model. A rigorous kinetic analysis of the vicinity of the sheath edge allows one to generalize Bohm's criterion accounting not only for arbitrary ion and electron distributions, but also for general boundary conditions at the wall. It is shown that the generalized sheath condition is (apart from special exceptions) marginally fulfilled and related to a sheath edge field singularity. Due to this singularity, smooth matching of the presheath and sheath solutions requires an additional transition layer. Previous investigations concerning particular problems of the plasma-sheath transition are reviewed in the light of the general relations.


Water has been termed `blue gold' and the availability of safe drinking water is one of the world's more glaring inequalities. Thus this picture, inviting us to drink in the message of water and health, was an appropriate entry for the Brooke Epidemiology Art Prize, arranged jointly by the Section of Epidemiology and Public Health and the Medical Art Society. The work, in acrylic, uses a glacier blue glaze to register the dream of the young African man for clean water, while the black and red impasto (seen as dark contrast in the black and white reproduction) represents the ever-present dysentery and other infections transmitted by the water in his environment. Entrants were asked to provide a commentary with their work: in his, Dr Cobb included statistics to underline the contrast between the developed and developing world. In the developed world, the bottled-water business is worth £1 billion a year, not least because bottled mineral water costs a thousand times more per litre than the essentially identical product from the tap. Meanwhile, in many parts of Africa and other water-poor countries, the drinking water sources frequently contain concentrations of faecal or thermotolerant coliforms as high as 100 000/dL when the WHO guideline is 0/dL. Over 1.1 billion people in the developing world have no access to safe drinking water and climate change is increasing water shortages, predicted to affect more than half the world by 2032.

Even without the eloquent theme of blue gold and red danger in Bouvez, the painting's message of plentiful and fashionable water here, and clean water as more a dream than a reality `over there', is sharply realized. Water is becoming a valuable market, and the World Trade Organization and industry groups think that the only way to handle this increasing scarce resource is to set a price on it. The global toll annually from waterborne diseases is around 3 million deaths.


BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE: Diffusion tensor and diffusion-weighted spinal cord imaging remain relatively unexplored techniques despite demonstrations that such images can be obtained and may yield clinically relevant findings. In this study, we examined the temporal dynamics of spinal cord motion and their impact on diffusion tensor image quality. METHODS: Four healthy volunteers underwent phase contrast-based velocity mapping and segmented echo-planar diffusion tensor scans of the cervical spinal cord. Regions of interest in the cord were used to identify the temporal patterns of motion. The delay of data acquisition after the cardiac trigger was varied to correspond to either quiescence or motion of the cord. RESULTS: The cervical spinal cord consistently displayed maximal velocities in the range of 0.5 cm/s and accelerations of up to 25 cm/s 2 . In both these respects, the cervical cord values were greater than those of the medulla. Despite this pronounced motion, approximately 40% of the cardiac cycle can be described as relatively calm, with absolute velocities and accelerations less than 20% of the maximum values. Confining image acquisition to this window reduced ghosting artifacts and increased the consistency with which the dominant direction of diffusion was along the rostral-caudal axis in both gray and white matter of the spine. Preliminary clinical application and fiber tracking in pathologic cases was feasible, and alterations of the diffusion properties by multiple sclerosis lesions, tumor, and syringomyelia were seen. CONCLUSIONS: Acquiring DTI data during the quiescent phase of spinal cord motion can reduce ghosting artifacts and improve fiber tracking.


This article investigates the possible geographies generated in Occupy Wall Street's emergence and subsequent evictions from multiple sites of occupation. As Occupy Wall Street (OWS) moves into other spaces, most notably the home, we counter the application of a priori analytics of traditional social movement studies, through which OWS would be seen as unified (with leaders, corresponding constituencies, and clearly crafted demands). Instead, we argue for a relational conception of spaces of politics, and emphasize the indeterminate multiplicity that we believe is crucial for ensuring continued critique and agitation. The argument is advanced, first, by considering the theoretical disjuncture between OWS and social movements, and second, by turning to OWS's geographies of movement and settlement. We conclude by suggesting that, when OWS goes home, it does not retreat from politics. From a relational perspective, the home is itself a space of politics and not a secure, enclosed site to which one returns when the political is left behind.


Straight from IBM, this is the first comprehensive guide to building collaborative solutions that integrate WebSphere and Lotus to drive maximum business value. Writing for experienced Web developers, three leading IBM consultants show how to design and deploy WebSphere and Domino together in any environment, no matter how large or complex. The authors address architecture, security, performance, availability, development, and much more. Using their techniques, you can implement cutting-edge collaboration, drive productivity improvements, streamline business processes, accelerate response times-and build your On Demand enterprise.Coverage includes Architecting WebSphere and Lotus collaboration for maximum effectiveness Establishing a common platform that reduces administrative costs and increases ROI Choosing what to deploy on WebSphere and what to deploy on Domino Optimizing new Lotus collaborative applications for existing WebSphere environments Managing integrated WebSphere and Domino systems Using WebSphere and Domino development tools to extend and customize your system Accessing J2EE from Domino-and vice versa Detailed appendices on WebSphere Application Server, Domino, WebSphere Portal, Lotus Workplace, and much more...© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.


Blood vessel patency may be compromised in approximately 10% of cases during the first several days after free flap transplant surgeries. The current gold standard, the wired implantable Doppler probe and system, is susceptible to high false-positive rates which result in costly and unnecessary surgical re-exploration. The high false-positive rates stem from the need for experienced operators to interpret blood flow signals and a percutaneous wire that tethers the patient to a bedside monitor via a probe affixed to the monitored vessel. Therefore, we investigated wireless implantable blood flow monitors as a means to improve free flap surgery false-positive rates. We focused our investigation on three specific areas. First, we showed that totally implantable wireless blood flow monitors detect patency failures in the bilateral femoral veins of pigs without the need for experienced operators. Second, we investigated analog feature extraction and classification hardware on both in vitro laminar flow rates expected in free flaps and on the bilateral femoral vein blood flow signals of pigs to automatically detect patency failures. These findings showed that experienced operators could be completely eliminated and provided insight into the observation window period needed to optimize sensitivity, specificity, and false-positive rates for detecting patency failures. Additionally, it showed that a majority vote improves decision making on very low flow rates near the discriminating hyperplane boundary. Lastly, we investigated implanted stents as wireless energy harvesters for the peripheral vasculature in ex vivo pig tissue using touch probe skin-contact antennas to uncover how much power can be wirelessly and safely delivered to deep implants.


The sensitivity of hydrology and water resources to climate variation and climate change is assessed for the Mid-Atlantic Region (MAR) of the United States. Observed streamflow, groundwa- ter, and water-quality data are shown to vary in association with climate variation. Projections of future streamflow, groundwater, and water quality are made using models determined from these associa- tions and are applied to 2 transient general circulation model (GCM) scenarios. Regional streamflow increases in one scenario, but decreases in the other; both scenarios result in changes in the seasonal- ity of peak flows. Response of groundwater to climate change depends on the GCM scenario used. Canadian Climate Center (CCC) scenarios suggest recharge will occur earlier in the year, and that sea- sonal fluctuations in groundwater levels will be less extreme. Hadley Center scenarios suggest recharge will occur earlier in the medium term, but later in the long term, with seasonal fluctuations in general being more extreme. Both scenarios show that nutrient loads can be expected to increase in winter and spring because of the expected increase in streamflow. Projected decreases in streamflow and associated nutrient fluxes in July and August could ameliorate problems associated with estuarine stratification and eutrophication in late summer. These projections demonstrate that future hydrology and water resources will be influenced by climate change, but that uncertainty in accurately projecting that influence will continue until model scenarios improve.


The paper tests a number of hypotheses concerning branding behaviour of the food industry found in the literature. Based on a survey of 109 Danish food industry firms conducted in 2004, three aspects of branding strategies are analysed, i) the number of brands owned by the firm, ii) the number of brands introduced by the firm during the past year and iii) the percentage of sales obtained from production under private labels. Firms' branding behaviour is related to structural variables including firm size, degree of vertical integration, value added as well as firms' views on food chain organisation and competitiveness.


Primarily, the need for automatic text categorization and medical diagnosis was the start of Multi-label classification. Multi-label classification received a great attention and used in several real world applications The demand of its applications increased to cover additional fields like functional genomics, music, biology, scene, video etc. For example, a text document may belong to many subjects or topics like Scientific, Cultural, or Politics. There exist a variety of multi-label classification algorithms developed based on two basic approaches: algorithm adaptation and problem transformation. Our contribution consists to present an analysis and experimental comparison of 4 problem transformation algorithms applied to two text benchmark datasets using 4 evaluation measures. In the experimental study, each problem transformation method is applied against all 54 classifiers found in the MEKA software in order to find the classifier that gives the best performance for each dataset and classification method.


A new digital receiver with excellent performances has been designed and developed for solar radio observation, which can receive the radio signal from direct current (DC) to 9 GHz in the direct acquisition way. On the digital receiver, the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with 14-bit, two input channels and 3 Giga Samples per second (Gsps) are used to acquire observed signal, and the field-programmable-gate-array chip XCKU115 acts as the processing module. The new digital receiver can be used to directly sample the solar radio signals of frequency under 9 GHz. When receiving the solar radio signal above 9 GHz, the new digital receiver can save 1–2 stages of frequency down-conversion, and effectively improve many indexes of the solar radio observation system, i.e., the time resolution, analog front-end circuit, weight and volume of the analog circuit system. Compared with the digital receiver with sampling rate below 1 Gsps used in existing solar radio telescope, the new digital receiver reduces the frequency switching times of large bandwidth, which is beneficial to improving the frequency and time resolutions. The ADC sampling resolution of 14 bits, providing a large dynamic range, is very beneficial to observing smaller solar eruptions. This receiver, which would be used in the solar radio observation system, well meets the latest requirements with the resolutions of time (≤1 ms) and frequency (≤0.5 MHz) for fine observation of radio signals.


Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to develop understanding of the "HRM process" as defined by Bowen and Ostroff (2004). The authors clarify the construct of "HRM philosophy" and suggest it is communicated to employees through "HRM messages". Interrelationships between these concepts and other elements of the HRM-performance relationship are explored. The study identifies commonalities in the HRM philosophy and messages underscoring high-performing HRM systems, and highlights the function of a "messenger" in delivering messages to staff.

Design/methodology/approach

Case study of eight Australian hospitals with top performing HRM systems. Combines primary interview data with independent healthcare accreditor reports.

Findings

All cases share an HRM philosophy of achieving high-performance outcomes through the HRM system and employees are provided with messages about continuous improvement, best practice and innovation. The philosophy was instilled primarily by executive-level managers, whereby distinctiveness, consensus and consistency of communications were important characteristics.

Research limitations/implications

The research is limited by: omission of low or average performers; a single industry and country design; and exclusion of employee perspectives.

Practical implications

The findings reinforce the importance of identifying the HRM philosophy and its key communicators within the organisation, and ensuring it is aligned with strategy, climate and the HRM system, particularly during periods of organisational change.

Originality/value

The authors expand Bowen and Ostroff's seminal work and develop the concepts of HRM philosophy and messages, offering the model to clarify key relationships. The findings underscore problems associated with a best practice approach that disregards HRM process elements essential for optimising performance.


A single-phase single-stage ac/dc converter with input-current dead-zone control is proposed. It is based on flyback topology operating in discontinuous conduction mode (DCM). The current charging into the link capacitor is controlled according to line changes by adjusting the input-current blocking angle to alleviate an excessive increase of the link voltage. The reduced voltage stress can maintain an almost-constant voltage irrespective of load conditions by operating in dc/dc stage in DCM. Experimental results of a 60-W (5-V 12-A output) prototype converter show that the link voltage is limited within 384 V and that the measured power factor is more than 0.91 under universal voltage inputs and entire load conditions. In addition, the maximum efficiency is measured to be about 81% at the rated condition


We are coming out of a dust bowl. When I was asked to write an article on the recent history of biofeedback for treating incontinence and the reimbursement associated with it, my first thought was that it's been a dust bowl. For the last five years we have been working with OB/GYNs, urogynecologists, and urologists from across the country who provide biofeedback.


In managing the locations of mobile users in mobile communication systems, the distance-based strategy has been proven to have better performance than other dynamic strategies, but is difficult to implement. A simple approach is introduced to implement the distance-based strategy by using the cell coordinates in calculating the physical distance traveled. This approach has the advantages of being independent of the size, shape, and distribution of cells, as well as catering for the direction of movement in addition to the speed of each mobile terminal. An enhanced distance-based location management strategy is proposed to dynamically adjust the size and shape of location area for each individual mobile terminal according to the current speed and direction of movement. It can reduce the location management signaling traffic of the distance-based strategy by half when mobile terminals have predictable directions of movement. Three types of location updating schemes are discussed, namely, Circular Location Area, Optimal Location Area, and Elliptic Location Area. Paging schemes using searching techniques such as expanding distance search based on the last reported location and based on the predicted location, and expanding direction search are also explored to further reduce paging signal traffic by partitioning location areas into paging areas.


Imidazole glycerol-phosphate dehydratase (IGPD) catalyzes the sixth step of histidine biosynthesis. The enzyme is of fundamental biochemical interest, because it catalyzes removal of a non-acidic hydrogen atom in the dehydration reaction. It is also a potential target for development of herbicides. IGPD is a metalloenzyme in which transition metals induce aggregation and are required for catalysis. Addition of 1 equivalent of Mn2+/subunit is shown by analytical ultracentrifugation to induce the formation of 24-mers from trimeric IGPD. Two histidine-rich motifs may participate in metal binding and aggregation. The 2.3-Å crystal structure of metal-free trimeric IGPD from the fungus Filobasidiella neoformans reveals a novel fold containing an internal repeat, apparently the result of gene duplication. The 95-residue α/β half-domain occurs in a few other proteins, including the GHMP kinase superfamily (galacto-homoserine-mevalonate-phosphomevalonate), but duplication to form a compact domain has not been seen elsewhere. Conserved residues cluster at two types of sites in the trimer, each site containing a conserved histidine-rich motif. A model is proposed for the intact, active 24-mer in which all highly conserved residues, including the histidine-rich motifs in both the N- and C-terminal halves of the polypeptide, cluster at a common site between trimers. This site is a candidate for the active site and also for metal binding leading to aggregation of trimers. The structure provides a basis for further studies of enzyme function and mechanism and for development of more potent and specific herbicides.


ABSTRACT Purpose: To evaluate the safety of scleral-lens designs, we model and clinically assess central corneal edema induced by scleral-lens wear for healthy subjects. Materials and Methods: Central corneal swelling during scleral-lens wear is measured using optical coherence tomography (OCT). Transport resistances are modeled for oxygen diffusion through the scleral lens and post-lens tear-film (PoLTF), and into the cornea. Oxygen deficiency in the cornea activates anaerobic metabolic reactions that induce corneal edema. Oxygen permeability, carbon-dioxide permeability, settled-lens PoLTF thickness, and scleral-lens thickness are varied in the calculations to mimic different lens fits. Results: Transport modeling predicts that for open eyes, increasing PoLTF thickness from 50 to 400 µm increases central corneal swelling by approximately 1–1.5% when oxygen transmissibility (Dk/L) is greater than 10 hBarrer/cm (i.e., hectoBarrer/cm). Although swelling is larger for oxygen Dk/L < 10 hBarrer/cm, PoLTF thickness has minimal impact in this range. For open eye, oxygen transmissibility of the lens plays a significant role in corneal edema, but is negligible when oxygen Dk/L is > 40 hBarrer/cm. For closed eye, central corneal swelling is greater than 5% for an oxygen Dk/L range of 0–100 hBarrer/cm with typical lens-fitting parameters. For carbon-dioxide transmissibilities increasing from 50 to 250 hBarrer/cm and with a fixed oxygen Dk/L of 25 hBarrer/cm, calculated swelling diminishes by an additional 0.5%. Comparison of model calculations to clinical-swelling data is within the error range of the clinical measurements. Conclusions: Oxygen/metabolite transport calculations for open-eye scleral-lens wear show that typical PoLTF thicknesses fitted by clinicians (i.e., PoLTF thicknesses < 400 µm) with modern scleral lenses (i.e., oxygen Dk/L > 25 hBarrer/cm) produce corneal swelling of less than 2% in agreement with experiment. Therefore, scleral lenses prescribed today evoke less than physiological hypoxic swelling (i.e., less than 4%) for healthy corneas during open-eye. Closed-eye wear, however, appears clinically unsafe.


Graph neural networks (GNNs) have extended the success of deep neural networks (DNNs) to non-Euclidean graph data, achieving ground-breaking performance on various tasks such as node classification and graph property prediction. Nonethe-less, existing systems are inefficient to train large graphs with billions of nodes and edges with GPUs. The main bottle-necks are the process of preparing data for GPUs – subgraph sampling and feature retrieving. This paper proposes BGL, a distributed GNN training system designed to address the bottlenecks with a few key ideas. First, we propose a dynamic cache engine to minimize feature retrieving traffic. By co-designing caching policy and the order of sampling, we find a sweet spot of low overhead and a high cache hit ratio. Second, we improve the graph partition algorithm to reduce cross-partition communication during subgraph sampling. Finally, careful resource isolation reduces contention between different data preprocessing stages. Extensive experiments on various GNN models and large graph datasets show that BGL significantly outperforms existing GNN training systems by 1.9x on average.


There is an increasing interest to use silage as a feed ingredient to pigs. The aim of this thesis was to study the effect of using silage in the diet to fattening pigs and how feeding strategy influenced pig performance, behaviour, gut health and nitrogen utilization. Two studies were performed. Study I focused on 1) pig performance, 2) behaviour and gut health and 3) nitrogen utilization and study II focused on pig behaviour and time budgets. In study I, 128 fattening pigs (30-110 kg) were fed either a commercial control feed (control) or received silage in a pellet (Pellet-S) or in a total mixed ration (TMR) containing fresh, chopped silage (TMR-Ch) or fresh, intensively treated silage (TMR-Ex). In study II, 126 growing pigs (30-70 kg) received a commercial control feed (control) or silage in a pellet (Pell-S) or fresh in a TMR with chopped silage (TMR-S). In both studies, silage replaced 20% of the dietary crude protein content (g/kg). The results in study I showed that pigs fed silage in general had a satisfying growth, but feeding fresh silage slightly reduced the daily weight gain. Pigs fed the pelleted silage had the highest daily weight gain and that feeding fresh silage slightly reduced the daily weight gain, however, pigs fed intensively treated silage performed similar to pigs fed the control diet. In study II, pigs fed TMR with fresh silage spent more and longer time performing foraging behaviours and were overall more active compared to pigs fed the pelleted silage and control diets. Feeding fresh silage reduced occurrences of gastric lesions in the gastric mucosa. Silage-based diets reduced the ammonia volatilization from the manure, which highlights the potential of using silage to reduce the environmental load from pig housing. The results support that silage is a suitable feed ingredient for fattening pigs, with potential to improve pig health and welfare.


During 1997, many Thai NGOs became involved in anti-government protests at local and national levels as an extension of their advocacy work. The latest and longest protest in Thai history took place from January to May 1997 with more than 30,000 protesters taking part. The main aim of this paper is to examine why public protest has increasingly become part of the advocacy work of these NGOs. It suggests that where social and economic tensions have reached a crisis point, (generated by Thailand's highly uneven economic development of the past decade), there is a phenomenon of 'cultural drift' in which dominant values and norms are challenged and protest action by the poor breaks out. Some Thai NGOs have therefore taken on the role of 'social movement organisations' and in interventions have attempted to shift conflicts from local peripheries into the national arena. Drawing on 'resource mobilisation theory', this paper argues that NGOs have become involved in the protest movement as 'resources' rather than as full 'actors' by providing linkages and networks. The study suggests that the 'social movement' perspective as a conceptual framework for the analysis of the NGOs' advocacy work is useful. It also argues that the NGOs which emphasise advocacy should be considered as 'social movement organisations'. It concludes that more comparative research is needed on NGOs which perform advocacy work, especially in the wider South and South East Asian context.


The interface between a liquid and a solid is the location of plethora of intrincate mechanisms at the nanoscale, at the root of their specific emerging properties in natural processes or technological applications. However, while the structural properties and chemistry of interfaces have been intensively explored, the effect of the solid-state electronic transport at the fluid interface has been broadly overlooked up to now. It has been reported that water flowing against carbon-based nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes or graphene sheets, does induce electronic currents, but the mechanism at stake remains controversial. Here, we unveil the molecular mechanisms underlying the hydro-electronic couplings by investigating the electronic conversion under flow at the nanoscale. We use a tuning fork-Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) to deposit and displace a micrometric droplet of both ionic and non-ionic liquids on a multilayer graphene sample, while recording the electrical current across the carbon flake. We report measurements of an oscillation-induced current which is several orders of magnitude larger than previously reported for water on carbon , and further boosted by the presence of surface wrinkles on the carbon layer. Our results point to a peculiar momentum transfer mechanism between fluid molecules and charge carriers in the carbon walls mediated by phonon excitations in the solid. Our findings pave the way for active control of fluid transfer at the nanoscale by harnessing the complex interplay between collective excitations in the solid and the molecules in the fluid.


Hunting intensity in the Suhuma Forest Reserve (SFR) in the Sefwi Wiawso District of the Western Region of Ghana has been investigated. The methodology involved the recording of signs of hunting activity using linetransects, and interviews with hunters. A total of 157 spent cartridges, 21 wire snares, presence of 17 hunters, four hunting camps, and two gunshots were recorded over a total of 14 km of transects walked. Ten species of mammals were hunted, notably the brush-tailed porcupine ( Atherurus africanus) , Pel's flying squirrel (Anomalurus peli) , long-tailed pangolin ( Uromanis tetradactyla) , giant rat ( Cricetomys gambianus ), Maxwell's duiker ( Cephalophus maxwelli) , bushbuck ( Tragelaphus scriptus ), bay duiker ( Cephalophus dorsalis ), royal antelope ( Neotragus pygmaeus ), western tree hyrax ( Dendrohyrax dorsalis ), and grasscutter ( Thryonomys swinderianus ). Wire snares and shotguns were the two main hunting methods employed, the former being used by all, and the latter by 34% of the hunters interviewed. Between 60 and 200 wire traps were set by each hunter. The results indicated a high hunting intensity in the Suhuma Forest Reserve. Some corrective measures have been recommended to ameliorate the problem. These measures include the initiation of public education and awareness programmes, establishment of task forces to check bushmeat hunting, execution of stricter law enforcement, and more punitive sanctions for offenders.


The administration of relatively large amounts of vitamin A to hypervitaminotic D rats decreases the toxicity of this condition as evidenced by increased longevity, better weight gain, decreased soft tissue calcification and by considerable improvement in the histologic appearance of osseous structures.


-The classification of breast masses from mammograms into benign or malignant has been commonly addressed with machine learning classifiers that use as input a large set of hand-crafted features, usually based on general geometrical and texture information. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning method that automatically learns features based directly on the optimization of breast mass classification from mammograms, where we target an improved classification performance compared to the approach described above. The novelty of our approach lies in two step features optimization particle swarm optimization (PSO) and learning with convolution neural network (CNN).In proposed approach improve by accuracy 98.45%.


Donald Knuth began the development of TeX in 1977 and had an initial version running in 1978, with the aim of typesetting mathematical documents with the highest quality and with archival reproducibility far into the future. Its usage spread and today the TeX system remains in use by a vibrant user community. However, the world of TeX has always been somewhat out of sync with the commercial desktop publishing systems that began to come out in the mid-1980s, and are now ubiquitous in the worlds of publishing and printing.


Plastic compression enables rapid production of collagenous tissue like constructs without the need for cell based remodeling. We have previously reported testing spiral acellular and cell seeded constructs in‐vivo. The constructs were implanted across the intercostal space of a lapine model designed to provide cyclical tensile loading in‐vivo for up to 5 weeks. Results showed that cell seeded constructs elicit increased cellular infiltration, angiogenic response, mechanical integrity and decreased inflammatory response compared to acellular constructs. In this study the constructs were further tested for host muscle and nerve infiltration. Constructs were harvested, and stained for the myoblast marker desmin and neuronal marker neurofilament using an immunoperoxidase technique. We have found that host muscle cells start to migrate into the constructs by 3 weeks but did not reached the core of the spiral by 5 weeks, a delayed response. Significantly there is no innervation seen at 5 weeks in vivo in this model. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.


The purpose of this paper is to present an efficient distributed cycle/knot detection, algorithm for general graphs which will determine whether a given node is a member of a knot or a cycle. This is relevant to an application such as parallel simulation in which (1) cycles and knots can arise frequently, (2) the size of the graph is very large and (3) it is necessary to know if a given node is in a cycle or a knot. The algorithm is based on a diffusing computation. It requires less communication cost than preceding algorithms and is the first algorithm capable of detecting both cycles and knots. The algorithm differs from the classical diffusing computation methods through its use of incomplete search messages to speed up the computation. The algorithm requires a total of at most 2m messages, where m is the number of links. This is compared to Chandy-Misra's algorithm (1982) which requires at least (3m+n), where n is a number of nodes and m is the number of links. The algorithm. Requires O(log(n)) bits of memory. Various applications for the cycle/knot detection algorithm are presented. In particular, we demonstrate its importance to deadlock detection to algorithms for parallel simulation which employ a blocking paradigm and a deadlock breaking technique known as TNE/DLTNE.<<ETX>>


The aim of study is to support meaningful practical chemistry learning and research-based teaching at the upper secondary level by designing a model for in-service teacher training. Teachers were introduced the SOLO (= Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome) taxonomy as a tool to estimate the quality of learning attainable for students when performing laboratory tasks according to written instructions that exist in the chemistry books. Research methods employed in this empirical case study were materials produced by teachers, questionnaire for the participants after training and interview of one teacher. The data is analyzed by methods of qualitative content analysis. The main results from the study give information about the implementation of the revised training model in which teachers worked collaboratively and that the SOLO tool succeeded in raising teachers' awareness of how the written instructions can reflect the student performance in a laboratory. Teachers became familiar with classifying laboratory assignments to the various SOLO levels and understood how using only the verification type of tasks at school would not help students to develop their higher order cognitive skills (HOCS). Nevertheless, only one teacher out of three presented teacher-experimented material according to training goals. The most challenging phase of the voluntary training was the personal implementation of instructional material. Educational design research is a methodical study of designing, developing and evaluating educational programs, processes and results. We shall discuss the results obtained from the second design experiment and introduce the revised model for the in-service teacher training.


The birth of Bioethics is associated to several persons and facts of the North American context. But this is only the surface of its origin. The article aims to show that bioethics is linked with the emerging of the management of life through the biopower with its biopolicy dynamics. The way to reach this objective is to check the authors, as Foucault, Agamben, Negri and Hardt, who analysis deeply its configurations, which are the true cause of Bioethics. Therefore the model of ethics appropriated to Bioethics is the critical hermeneutics of the biopolicy dynamics. It consists in a critical analisis of the facticity of these dynamics in its social and cultural context and in discourses constructed to its justification through the methodology of thBe depth hermeneutic proposed by Thompson. A concrete example of this result is the analysis of the right to health crossed by tecnosemiological and biopolitical agencies of the biothecnology companies.


Background: Patients with mechanical heart valves receive life long, oral anticoagulant therapy to prevent thromboembolic complications, but this treatment is associated with an increased risk of bleeding (1). However no study in Tanzania has been done to review the adequacy of anticoagulation monitoring and risk factors involved in the operated patients receiving warfarin. Broad objective: The study aimed at reviewing the adequacy of anticoagulant control results among patients with mechanical heart valves attending the anticoagulation clinic at Muhimbili National Hospital (MNH).
Study design: This was a retrospective cohort study. Study settings. The study was conducted in Dar es Salaam at the anticoagulation clinic, MNH. Measure of outcome: Review of adequacy of anticoagulation control results was analyzed as percentages of all prothrombin ratio tests done during the whole period of follow up to determine the proportion of tests which were within the therapeutic level, below or above it. Basing on defined percentile levels, the number of patients who were adequately controlled was calculated. Univariate and Multivariate logistic regression was also done to assess factors such as warfarin dose, source, food habits and drugs that could be associated with the high level of anticoagulation Subjects: The study involved all patients-receiving- warfarin with mechanical heart valves operated from 1990 to 2003 attending the anticoagulation clinic at MNH. Methods: Assessment of anticoagulation adequacy was based on the prothrombin ratio measurements that were recorded in the anticoagulation booklets. Each prothrombin ratio measurement was assessed if it was within the therapeutic level, above or below it. Information on risk factors influencing the anticoagulation monitoring was obtained from medical records and interviews. Findings: During study follow-up, a total of 10583 prothrombin ratio measurements were done among all 189 patients who were available for interview. Only 35.5% of the measurements were within the recommended therapeutic (normal) range, 33.4% above therapeutic and 31.1% below it. Thus, in only 35.5% of the follow-up prothrombin ratios, was adequate anticoagulation maintained. The study also only 23.8% (45/189 patients) of the patients were able to maintain adequate anticoagulation for more than 56.5% (more than 80 percentile) of their Prothrombin ratio measurements done during follow up. The occurrence of both thromboembolic and bleeding complications was only significantly reduced when the level of anticoagulation adequacy was above 80 percentile. Conclusions and recommendations: Most of the Prothrombin Time results were out of therapeutic ranges reflecting high anticoagulation inadequacy. It was recommended to improve the anticoagulant adequacy among study patients.
 Tanzania Medical Journal Vol. 23 (1) 2008: pp. 12-15


The co-presenters direct an innovative experiential learning experience for law and social work students in which they provide legal and social services for low-income Marion county residents. Students are exposed to a variety of situations in which they interact with residents in our community. As the class examines these experiences, a few questions emerge – what is our community? How do we define community? What does our involvement consist of, and why? What limitations exist for us interacting with our community? The session poster will explore collected data over the two semesters this new clinic has been offered. Data presented will include who is in our community, how do we determine who is in our community, and why are some excluded? How do class, power, agency affiliation and court contact/interaction affect who makes up our community? What are the values that underlie decisions we make to engage with some community organizations or courts over others? How then do we resolve conflicts with courts and partner agencies when differences arise over the best options for our clients and/or our students? What decision making goes into picking a reliable community partner? The research will be presented in a way to spark interdisciplinary conversations with session attendees.


The authors present a statistical-heuristic feature selection criterion for constructing multibranching decision trees in noisy real-world domains. Real world problems often have multivalued features. To these problems, multibranching decision trees provide a more efficient and more comprehensible solution that binary decision trees. The authors propose a statistical-heuristic criterion, the symmetrical tau and then discuss its consistency with a Bayesian classifier and its built-in statistical test. The combination of a measure of proportional-reduction-in-error and cost-of-complexity heuristic enables the symmetrical tau to be a powerful criterion with many merits, including robustness to noise, fairness to multivalued features, and ability to handle a Boolean combination of logical features, and middle-cut preference. The tau criterion also provides a natural basis for prepruning and dynamic error estimation. Illustrative examples are also presented. >


Brucellosis is a disease which is caused by Brucella .The virus can make human and livestock sick. Its transmission of wide range is easy to occur and it is large harm to human and livestock. In this paper, based on fluorescence polarization immunoassay method, a experimental system is designed. The system consists of optical, circuit components. In order to improve the sensitivity of the system, Photomultiplier tube is used as detector. A number of experiments carried out. The result shows that the design is flexible, stable which can be used widely.


When output demand drops during recessions, employers decrease labor inputs by cutting workers and/or hours. If pre-recession hours were excessive, cutting hours might increase labor productivity, given an inverted-U-shaped hours-productivity profile. When total hours decrease in team settings, labor reallocation causes hours to be concentrated among top performers. The adjustment process is examined using single-firm Japanese data on construction design projects. A theoretical model is proposed and calibrated to analyze within-team labor allocation. We find that in response to the decrease in hours resulting from the 2008-2009 global financial crisis: (1) total productivity improves by more than the increase in individual productivity, the labor share becomes more concentrated, and team size decreases; (2) the productivity improvement is greater for larger teams and less productive teams; (3) larger teams exhibit lower average productivity because weaker workers join teams when more hours are needed than the top performers can handle.


Background: Sulforaphane (SFN), an isothiocyanate naturally occurring in cruciferous vegetables, is a potent indirect antioxidant and a promising agent for the control of metabolic disorder disease. The glucose intolerance and adipogenesis induced by diet in rats was inhibited by SFN. Strategies aimed at induction of brown adipose tissue (BAT) could be a potentially useful way to against obesity. However, in vivo protective effect of SFN against obesity by browning white adipocyte has not been reported. Our present study is aimed at evaluation the efficacy of the SFN against the high-fat induced-obesity mice and investigating the potential mechanism. Methods: High-Fat Diet-induced obese female C57BL/6 mice were intraperitoneally injected with SFN (10 mg/kg) daily. Body weight was recorded every 3 days. 30 days later, glucose tolerance test (GTT) and insulin tolerance test (ITT) were performed. At the end of experiment, fat mass were measured and the adipogenesis as well as browning associated genes expression in white adipose tissue (WAT) were determined by RT-qPCR and western blot. Histological examination of the adipose tissue samples were carried out with hematoxylin–eosin (HE) staining and immunofluorescence staining method. In vitro, pre-adipocytes C3H10T1/2 were treated with SFN to investigate the direct effects on adipogenesis. Results: SFN suppressed HFD-induced body weight gain and reduced the size of fat cells in mice. SFN suppressed the expression of key genes in adipogenesis, inhibited lipid accumulation in C3H10T1/2 cells, increased the expression of brown adipocyte-specific markers and mitochondrial biogenesis in vivo and in vitro, and decreased cellular and mitochondrial oxidative stress. These results suggested that SFN, as a nutritional factor, has great potential role in the battle against obesity by inducing the browning of white fat. Conclusion: SFN could significantly decrease the fat mass, and improve glucose metabolism and increase insulin sensitivity of HFD-induced obese mice by promoting the browning of white fat and enhancing the mitochondrial biogenesis in WAT. Our study proves that SFN could serve as a potential medicine in anti-obesity and related diseases.


Information systems in current use in children's social services, whether computer- or paper-based, are generally designed more for recording information than for retrieving and using it, especially in daily practice. This severely limits their usefulness and reduces the quality of the data they contain—users of a system who get nothing out of it are unlikely to care much about what they put in.
This practical guide for local authority social services departments aims to show how that situation can be remedied—how you can exploit the information capital you accumulate in your daily operations to empower your staff and improve the quality of outcomes for the children and families you serve.
The key is outputs: what you retrieve from your information systems. Most information systems are quite capable of producing outputs, but do so poorly, if at all, because time and resources have not been assigned to identifying and specifying the outputs that are required, who needs them and how they will be used. With most local authorities at present planning changes to their systems in order to implement the Integrated Children's System, now is the time to include outputs in the specifications.
The cost of providing outputs will be much lower if they are incorporated at this stage than if they are requested as piecemeal additions to an established system. While it may not be possible to obtain immediately all the outputs we describe in this report, the addition of even some of them should considerably improve the quality and usefulness of your information system.
This guide is based on research commissioned by the DH/DfES, which involved consultation with childcare and IT experts in 13 local authorities in England and Wales, followed by detailed discussions with over fifty staff working at all levels in six authorities. It provides a methodology for describing and categorising outputs, identifies some of those required at each level of a children's services department and provides clear advice to staff at each level on the steps they can take to obtain the outputs they require.


Rotational spectroscopy has been used for decades for virtually unambiguous identification of gas phase molecular species, but it has rarely been used for the quantitative analysis of molecular concentrations. Challenges have included the nontrivial reconstruction of integrated line strengths from modulated spectra, the correlation of pressure-dependent line shape and strength with partial pressure, and the multiple standing wave interferences and modulation-induced line shape asymmetries that sensitively depend on source-chamber-detector alignment. Here, we introduce a quantitative analysis methodology that overcomes these challenges, reproducibly and accurately recovering gas molecule concentrations using a calibration procedure with a reference gas and a conversion based on calculated line strengths. The technique uses frequency-modulated rotational spectroscopy and recovers the integrated line strength from a Voigt line shape that spans the Doppler- and pressure-broadened regimes. Gas concentrations were accurately quantified to within the experimental error over more than three orders of magnitude, as confirmed by the cross calibration between CO and N2O and by the accurate recovery of the natural abundances of four N2O isotopologues. With this methodology, concentrations of hundreds of molecular species may be quantitatively measured down to the femtomolar regime using only a single calibration curve and the readily available libraries of calculated integrated line strengths, demonstrating the power of this technique for the quantitative gas-phase detection, identification, and quantification.


This paper aims to explore the role of human rights law in addressing the HIV/Aids epidemic, with particular reference to Uganda. The emphasis is on law as a tool, not as the tool, since the impact of law is always either constrained or facilitated by other factors - social, political and economic. The paper has been written primarily from a legal perspective, drawing on expertise regarding the function and operation of both national and international law. Uganda is selected as the 'case study' in part because it is widely regarded as a country that has succeeded, perhaps more than any other country in sub-Saharan Africa, in reducing the rate of HIV/Aids prevalence in its population. It is considered to have achieved this largely through a combination of civil society initiatives, governance and aid from international donors. The perception generally is that law has not been a feature of this strategy and this paper examines whether law was, in fact, insignificant in Uganda's apparent success. It also looks at a number of related questions, including whether legal reform could have an impact on the current situation or whether it is indeed marginal.


Changes related to globalization have resulted in the growing separation of individuals in late modern societies from traditional bases of social solidarity such as parties, churches, and other mass organizations. One sign of this growing individualization is the organization of individual action in terms of meanings assigned to lifestyle elements resulting in the personalization of issues such as climate change, labour standards, and the quality of food supplies. Such developments bring individuals' own narratives to the fore in the mobilization process, often requiring organizations to be more flexible in their definitions of issues. This personalization of political action presents organizations with a set of fundamental challenges involving potential trade-offs between flexibility and effectiveness. This paper analyses how different protest networks used digital media to engage individuals in mobilizations targeting the 2009 G20 London Summit during the global financial crisis. The authors examine how these different communication processes affected the political capacity of the respective organizations and networked coalitions. In particular, the authors explore whether the coalition offering looser affiliation options for individuals displays any notable loss of public engagement, policy focus (including mass media impact), or solidarity network coherence. This paper also examines whether the coalition offering more rigid collective action framing and fewer personalized social media affordances displays any evident gain in the same dimensions of mobilization capacity. In this case, the evidence suggests that the more personalized collective action process maintains high levels of engagement, agenda focus, and network strength.


Educators continuously seek new ways to engage students in the classroom. Clickers are one tool available to instructors who want to move beyond the traditional "chalk and talk" teaching method. While there has been extensive research in the sciences studying the effectiveness of using clickers in the classroom, there has been very little within the economic discipline. This study analyzes the relationship between using clickers for participation only and using clickers for graded daily quizzes in Principles of Microeconomics. Student attitudes concerning clickers are also investigated. While no significant difference is found in final course grade, results show that students perform best on daily quizzes when they are taken with paper and pencil. Additionally, students overwhelmingly enjoy clickers in the classroom regardless of usage.


Fractionation which separates the olein (liquid) and stearin (solid) fractions of oil is used to modify the physicochemical properties of fats in order to extend its applications. Studies showed that the properties of fractionated end products can be affected by fractionation processing conditions. In the present study, dry fractionation of palm-based diacylglycerol (PDAG) was performed at different: cooling rates (0.05, 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5 and 3.0°C/min), end-crystallisation temperatures (30, 35, 40, 45 and 50°C) and agitation speeds (30, 50, 70, 90 and 110 rpm) to determine the effect of these parameters on the properties and yield of the solid and liquid portions. To determine the physicochemical properties of olein and stearin fraction: Iodine value (IV), fatty acid composition (FAC), acylglycerol composition, slip melting point (SMP), solid fat content (SFC), thermal behaviour tests were carried out. Fractionation of PDAG fat changes the chemical composition of liquid and solid fractions. In terms of FAC, the major fatty acid in olein and stearin fractions were oleic (C18:1) and palmitic (C16:0) respectively. Acylglycerol composition showed that olein and stearin fractions is concentrated with TAG and DAG respectively. Crystallization temperature, cooling rate and agitation speed does not affect the IV, SFC, melting and cooling properties of the stearin fraction. The stearin fraction was only affected by cooling rate which changes its SMP. On the other hand, olein fraction was affected by crystallization temperature and cooling rate but not agitation speed which caused changes in IV, SMP, SFC, melting and crystallization behavior. Increase in both the crystallization temperature and cooling rate caused a reduction of IV, increment of the SFC, SMP, melting and crystallization behaviour of olein fraction and vice versa. The fractionated stearin part melted above 65°C while the olein melted at 40°C. SMP in olein fraction also reduced to a range of 26 to 44°C while SMP of stearin fractions increased to (60–62°C) compared to PDAG.


The purpose of this case study was to investigate the impact of ecological and historical factors on the Russian olive invasion in the Animas River Watershed in Aztec, New Mexico. Russian olive is a prominent invasive species found in many riparian corridors in the southwestern United States. Though its success can be inhibited by the flow fluctuations of unregulated rivers, the banks of the Animas River in and around Aztec are heavily infested with this species. Data collected from treated, untreated, and recently infested areas of land at Aztec Ruins National Monument showed significant differences in understory composition and retention of Russian olive seeds in the soil. Regression analyses of tree size vs. tree ring number allowed for the calculation of average tree age as well as variance in age distribution in untreated and agricultural areas. Ground water wells revealed that proximity to ground water is not a limiting factor in Russian olive growth rate. Examination of historical aerial photos provided some evidence that all areas were used for agricultural purposes and may contribute to why this and surrounding areas are uniquely affected by Russian olive. The complete removal of Russian olive is still a controversial topic in the southwest. Land managers must make decisions on a case by case basis, as the success of Russian olive establishment and the rate of succession into previously uninfected areas is likely linked to several biotic and abiotic variables.
Faculty Mentor: Cynthia Dott


In this study,33 parameters relating to vertical dimension of occlusion(VDO) of 19 subjects' maxilofacial soft tissue of four different vertical dimentsions(VDs) were measured.All of them were in intercusping position,with the technique of digital imaging analysis.The findings as follows:(1)A set of normal values of facial soft tissue's parameters of four different VDs was established,which was suitable for the age group of 21-24 years old.(2)When the VD was raised to the certain height(H4),it would affect the size of angle of the inferior soft tissue of lip distinctly,furthermore,the correlation analysis showed that there was a positive correlation between the variance of VDs would arouse the change of the inferior soft tissues of lip,especially its size of angle,is very correspondingly and obviously.


Purpose: Preoperative Chemoradiotherapy (CRT) followed by surgery for rectal cancer shows promising results because it can improve the local control, which translates into a better long-term overall survival and disease-free survival, especially more notable for rectal tumors which showed marked pathological response to preoperative CRT. The aim of this study is to retrospectively review and analyze the prognostic significance of the American Joint Committee on Cancer (AJCC) Tumor Regression Grade (TRG) response for rectal cancer patients receiving preoperative CRT. Methods: The case record of 58 biopsy-proven adenocarcinoma of the rectum who received preoperative CRT from the 2006 to 2020 was retrospectively reviewed. All patients received whole pelvis radiotherapy for 50 Gy in 25 fractions concurrently with oral Tegafur-uracil and calcium folinate or oral capecitabine followed by surgery later. This study's end point was to evaluate the TRG score of the rectal tumor, its correlation with patient's local control and survival. The Kaplan-Meier method estimation of survivorship, multiple regressions, the log-rank test and Cox proportional hazard model were used for statistical analysis. Results: A total of 58 pathologically proven adenocarcinoma of rectum treated with preoperative CRT from April, 2006 to October, 2020 were retrospectively reviewed. The male-to-female ratio was 3.5 to 1; the median age was 61 years old (26 to 90 years). All patients were treated with preoperative Image-Guided Intensity Modulated Radiotherapy (IG-IMRT). Surgery was performed after a median interval of 8.6 weeks (5.3 to 16 weeks). The Local-Regional Recurrence (LRR) rate was 8.6% (n=5/63), while Distant Metastasis (DM) occurred in 22.4% (n=13/58). Tumor down staging after preoperative CRT was seen in 35 patients (60.3%). Multiple regression analysis showed that age (p=0.007), clinical T stage (p=0.029), clinical N stage (p=0.025) and time interval between CRT and surgery (p=0.015) significantly affected the TRG score, the TRG score after preoperative CRT in turn have a significant effect on the local control (p=0.005). TRG 0 showed the best survival benefit with the estimated 5-year and 10-year OS for TRG 0, 1, 2, 3 were 100%, 84.6 %, 58.7%, 0% and 88.2%, 84.6%, 0%, 0% (log-rank test, p=0.0002) respectively, while the estimated 5-year and 10-year DFS for TRG 0, 1, 2, 3 were 93.9%, 72.0%, 40.4%, 0% and 82.9%, 54.0%, 0%, 0% (log-rank test, p=0.004) respectively in our study. The 5-year and 10-year overall survival for ypStage 0 and ypStage were 100%, 88.2%, 93.9%, 82.9% and 91.7%, 38.2%, 73.7%, 29.5% respectively. Cox regression analysis showed that resection margin status and TRG significantly affected the overall survival. Conclusion: Our study showed that the TRG response and the associated tumor down staging after preoperative CRT is an important significant prognostic factor affecting patient outcome, specifically the tumor local control and patient survival. The TRG system should be implemented for prognostication of rectal cancer treated with preoperative CRT.


In order to keep pace with the growing complexity of integrated circuits (ICs), IC and system designers are increasingly using electronic system level (ESL) design tools. ESL tool sales were around $460 million in 2011. The value of the ICs designed using these tools is at least an order of magnitude more. Concurrently, advanced IC reverse engineering techniques are being developed and used by attackers. In response, several anti-reverse engineering techniques have been proposed for integration into the IC design flow. An important class of defenses hardens the controllers that orchestrate the functionality of designs generated by ESL tools. We demonstrate an attack to recover the controller in any ESL-generated design even if the controller has been hardened using state-of-the-art controller hardening techniques. The attack analyzes the unhardened parts of the controller (i.e., the controller output logic and datapath) and reconciles this information with the architectural, controller, and timing constraints implicit in and underlying all ESL design methodologies. We then propose a countermeasure that inserts decoy connections into an ESL tool-generated design to thwart reverse engineering. We introduce a security metric to quantify the effectiveness of the developed attacks and defenses. We demonstrate the attack and defenses on designs generated by state-of-the-art ESL tools.


The linking of liquid crystals polymer chains together into gel network fixes their topology, and melt becomes an elastic solid. These materials are called liquid crystals elastomers. Liquid crystal elastomers possess properties of soft elasticity and spontaneous shape change. The constituent molecules of LCEs are orientationally ordered and there exist a strong coupling between the orientational order and mechanical strain. In LCEs the molecules start elongate when their component rods orient and reversibly contract when the order is lost (typically by heating). So there is a change of average molecular shape from spherical to spheroidal. These unique properties make these materials suitable for future biological applications. Various research groups have studied different properties of LCEs in which optical properties are predominant. LCE has been synthesized in our laboratory. In this paper, we report on the optical behavior of this material.


We present several techniques for producing two visual and modeling effects in augmented reality. The first effect involves interactively calculating the occlusions between real and virtual objects. The second effect utilizes a collision detection algorithm to automatically move dynamic virtual objects until they come in contact with static real objects in augmented reality. All of the techniques utilize calibrated data derived from images of a real‐world environment.


Long-term human motion is composed of an ensemble of different activities with varying complexity. This makes it challenging to develop models to accurately estimate human motion. In this paper, we exploit the dependencies that exist between posture and motion for long-term human motion estimation. We propose to model the nonlinear motion manifold as a collection of local linear models, noting that given a particular posture, the variation in motion for that posture can be well-approximated by a linear model. A collection of local linear models is easy to fit and also has the expressiveness to encode several activities in any arbitrary order. Furthermore, to account for the varying complexity of different activities, each local linear model can have a different dimensionality. A collection of local linear models, thus, avoids the limitation of global models that require a uniform dimensionality for the latent motion manifold. This model allows us to linearly regularize motion estimation algorithms over the nonlinear human motion manifold. Our results demonstrate that a collection of local linear models provides an effective representation for the motion manifold when compared to other global models such as the bilinear model [18] and the Principal Component Analysis [14].


Abstract The results of a new single-crystal structure refinement and of a Raman spectroscopy investigation on melanophlogite, a clathrate structure of SiO2, are reported. The studied sample comes from a new finding at Varano Marchesi (Parma, Italy), and occurs in small veins and pockets along fractures in a siliceous marl from a chaotic complex. Melanophlogite is invariably separated from the host rock by a thin crust of opal-CT. Raman spectroscopy was done to investigate the guest molecules that are hosted in the cages of the structure. In the Varano Marchesi melanophlogite, only CH4 is present in the clathrate structure. During a comparative investigation of melanophlogite from different geological setting (Racalmuto, Sicily, Italy), H2S also was found, together with CH4, in the cavities of the structure. A single-crystal X-ray refinement of the Varano Marchesi sample was done using the Pm3̅n symmetry of β-melanophlogite [a = 13.399(2), R4σ = 4.7%]. According to the site refinement from X-ray diffraction results, CH4 occupies 71 and 91% of the 512 and 51262 site cavities, respectively. The Varano Marchesi melanophlogite formed as a result of low-temperature hydrothermal activity. The mineral growth occurred at the expense of opal, in connection with CH4 flux through the porous material.


Study of traffic safety related problems concerns a lot of topics and some of them are not related only to engineering. In order to analyze accident causes it is important to comprehend the influence of human factors, as stated in most papers found in recent literature. I analyzed three areas related to human factors: risk perception, driving behaviour and speed choice. These topics are related with one another: speed choice depends on risk perception and it is involved in some driving behaviours. Instead, literature is poor of works about influence of memory on driving behaviour, even if in some applications it is important to know driving habituation related factors. Road users could be divided in: regular users (mainly commuters) and recreational users (people who have no confidence with the route). For example, differences between them are considered in a formula used for calculating capacity and level of service of a given road (HCM 2000). In this formula, there is a coefficient which assumes different values according to the expected percentage of recreational user in traffic flow. However, in literature, it is not possible to find accurate studies about dividing drivers into recreational and regular users and about the influence of these differences on driving behaviour. In order to understand those matters, the first step consists in analyzing process which leads a recreational user to become a regular one: drivers' learning process must be understood. Hypothesis is that learning process brings users to a condition of habituation and, ways in which risk perception and speed choice are influenced by habituation have to be inquired. Reaching the habituation condition is related, in psychology, to the number of repetitions of the same stimulus. After being exposed to same stimulus, people tend to decrease response to that stimulus over time. Trying to apply these concepts to drivers, a user who usually drive on a given road in the same conditions, should decrease response to external stimulus over time. In this case, decreased response could be connected to a lowered target level of risk and an increasing of speed over time. In order to inquire about this phenomenon, a road experimentation involving a sample of 19 users was made in Italy, by collecting speed measurements employing GPS technology. Driving tests were repeated according to this schedule: first four tests four days in a row, fifth test after nine days from the first and the last test after twenty-six days from the first. Drivers were divided into risk categories (risky, prudent, variable) according to distance of their measured speed from mean speed. Furthermore, according to stopping sight distance diagrams, it was possible to divide road sections into visibility categories. Therefore, speed data were processed by considering three diverse drivers categories: risky (speed higher than the mean speed in at least five days out of six), prudent (speed lower than the mean speed in at least five days out of six), variable (speed varying around the means speed); four different visibility conditions: low (0 – 100 m), medium-low (100 – 200 m), medium (200 – 400 m), high (400 – 600 m); six different test days (day 1, day 2, day 3, day 4, day 5, day 6). Results of Italian experimentation are explained as follows: speed linearly increases in going from low visibility sections to higher visibility sections for all drivers; speed increases over the first four days and after tends to remain almost the same. Therefore, a learning process could be noted in the speed increasing over time. However, dividing drivers into risk categories allows us to appreciate two different trends: risky users tend to maintain their speed on the same level after fourth day; prudent users, instead, decrease their speed in fifth day (after five days without driving on that road). Hence, it seems that prudent users lose part of their acquired familiarity and part of the habituation effect by decreasing again speed. Risky users, instead, seem to maintain acquired familiarity even if there was a gap of five days between fourth and fifth test day. It could be suggested that a short memory effect and its efficient transformation in long term memory can be noted for risky users. Instead, it could be stated that prudent users need another test in order to reach the conversion of short term memory in long term memory. Furthermore, in long term, it seems that prudent users' behaviour asymptotically tend to that one of risky users. The same experimentation was made on a sample of 10 users in Norway. Classification, analysis and data elaboration are the same of the Italian experimentation. However, a difference is the diverse employed GPS instrumentation: in the Norwegian experiment it has got a minor accuracy. Another difference is related to the route chosen for the experimentation: Norwegian route is more winding and characterized by a lower average visibility than the Italian one. Results of the Norwegian experimentation are explained as follows: speed increases in going from low visibility sections to higher visibility sections for all drivers; speed does not increase over time. It could be said that in the Norwegian experimentation it is not possible to appreciate the habituation effect but, actually, there are a lot of confounding factors which makes the comparison difficult. First confounding factor is related to employed instrumentation: uncertainty connected to measures could be too much high and so it could be not possible to appreciate speed changes over days. Second factor is route-related: the very winding Norwegian route could have limited drivers' speed choice. Third factor is weather-related: the very variable Norwegian weather had a not negligible influence on speed choice, probably preventing habituation development. In fact, in order to reach the habituation, it is necessary that stimulus is always the same over time. Last noticed factor is culture-related: Italian drivers seem to show a higher speeding attitude than the Norwegian ones, even if comparison is difficult because of differences between the two roads. All these highlighted factors, mixed together, have a great influence on trying to make a comparison between the two experiments because it is not easy to understand the influence of each factor by itself. Therefore, in order to observe habituation to drive effect, experiments should be repeated by employing same instruments and comparable road, weather and traffic conditions. However, Norwegian experiment (as it can be seen also in ANOVA analyses) gives a proof that there is a strict connection between speed and visibility. Hence, employed analysis method could be used also for future works. Finally, some models were proposed by using risk classes based on self-reported speeding attitude visibility classes and time as speed predictors. Basically, results show that other variables have to be added in order to get more reliable models. This goal will be a challenge for future works.


SIR,-In his very interesting article (June 4, p. 978) on the incidence of cancer of the uterine cervix Mr. R. G. Maliphant says, "In spite of the efforts expended in educating the public on cancer, etc." I shall be greatly interested to hear where in the British Isles this effort has been made. It seems to me that the only method by which the public can be instructed concerning the symptoms of cancer, and at the same time fear of the disease allayed, is to train a very large number of lay people who would instruct small groups of other lay people. At one time I had hoped that such an experimental scheme would be undertaken by the British Empire Cancer Campaign in a limited area, but this is now very improbable, because it appears that certain members of the campaign consider that lay people should only be instructed by qualified medical practitioners. Apart from the impossibility of finding enough doctors with suflicient time to instruct millions of people, it is difficult to see how it would be possible to preyent the lay audiences from passing on the information received from the doctor to other lay people, which is precisely the point to which objection has been taken. In the second paragraph of Mr. Maliphant's article there seems to be some confusion of thought concerning time and the stage of the disease. Surely it is probable that all malignant growths of the cervix give rise to bleeding approximately at the same time after the onset of the disease, but in the case of rapidly growing undifferentiated tumours the disease has already reached stage IV, whereas the slow-growing differentiated tumour is still stage I. Whether it is true to say that " early cervical cancer is usually symptomless " depends on a definition of "early." In a series of 859 cases of cancer of the cervix it was found that 54.5% of the patients had noticed irregular bleeding for more than three months before going to see a doctor and, included in these, 33.7% waited more than six months and 14.9% over twelve months. There is therefore plenty of scope for lay education if somebody can be found to undertake the job.-I am, etc.,


This volume contains a collection of stratigraphic and diagenetic case studies of Mesozoic and Cenozoic carbonate sequences from the Tethyan realm. High levels of industry and academic interest in the region have generated numerous multi-disciplinary studies of these sequences, a selection of which are presented in this volume. The studies presented are based on both comprehensive subsurface datasets from important hydrocarbon-bearing strata of the Middle East and the excellent surface exposures in the region of interest. The studies presented in this volume may serve as suitable starting points in the development of age and architecture specific carbonate reference models. Such models can form the basis of internally consistent models for carbonate deposition, sequence development and reservoir performance. Ideally such models, suitably scaled, will be equally applicable to academic studies, the exploration and development phases of the field life cycle and in the prediction of future reservoir performance.


Monoclonal antibodies to pseudorabies viral capsid protein were prepared by fusing Sp2/0-Ag14 myeloma cells with pseudorabies virus (PrV)-primed Balb/c splenocytes. These monoclonal antibodies were specific for PrV. No crossreaction with Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV, type I) or infectious bovine rhinotrachitis virus (IBR) was found. The reaction between these monoclonal antibodies and PrV was demonstrated by immunofluorescent staining technique and enzyme-linked immunoblotting assay. These antibodies could be a useful diagnostic reagent for PrV as well as a good tool for the study of the capsid protein of PrV.


We present the quadratic algebra of the generalized MICZ-Kepler system in three-dimensional Euclidean space E3 and its dual, the four-dimensional singular oscillator, in four-dimensional Euclidean space E4. We present their realization in terms of a deformed oscillator algebra using the Daskaloyannis construction. The structure constants are, in these cases, functions not only of the Hamiltonian but also of other integrals commuting with all generators of the quadratic algebra. We also present a new algebraic derivation of the energy spectrum of the MICZ-Kepler system on the three sphere S3 using a quadratic algebra. These results point out also that results and explicit formula for structure functions obtained for quadratic, cubic, and higher order polynomial algebras in the context of two-dimensional superintegrable systems may be applied to superintegrable systems in higher dimensions with and without monopoles.


Human melanocytes characteristically contain 100-A filaments. These 100- A filaments shift from the perinuclear area to the center of the dendritic processes and are in close association with melanosomes during the different stages of UV-mediated melanin pigmentation. We suggest that these 100-A filaments in human melanocytes participate in the elongation of the dendrites and in the transfer of melanosomes.


Abstract. The modeling of small-scale objects is used in different applications such as medicine, industry, and cultural heritage. The capability of modeling small-scale objects using imaging with the help of hand USB digital microscopes and use of videogrammetry techniques has been implemented and evaluated in this paper. Use of this equipment and convergent imaging of the environment for modeling, provides an appropriate set of images for generation of three-dimensional models. The results of the measurements made with the help of a microscope micrometer calibration ruler have demonstrated that self-calibration of a hand camera-microscope set can help obtain a three-dimensional detail extraction precision of about 0.1 millimeters on small-scale environments.


The phase properties of water confined in mesoporous silica MCM-41 were investigated over a temperature range of 100-298 K as a function of pore size by specific heat capacity and inelastic neutron scattering (INS) measurements. The water content of the samples was carefully controlled to ensure the capillary filled state and no overloading of water. The values of heat capacity of the pore water are higher than those of bulk ice and liquid water over the whole temperature range measured. The contribution of water in the inner part of pores (abbreviated as the internal water) was elucidated by using the heat capacity data of monolayer water measured. The entropy of the internal water was then estimated from integration of the heat capacity of the internal water. The entropy values of the internal water increase by confinement in the pores of MCM-41 in both liquid and frozen regions, indicating an increase in the deformation of the structure and∕or a change in the dynamics in both regions. The INS spectra show the density of states for the librational motion of water frozen at 50 K, suggesting that the confined water is similar to amorphous ice rather than to crystalline ice. When the sample is warmed to melt, the band edge of the librational motion for water frozen in large pores (diameter of 3.6 nm) shifts to a lower energy side, indicating the weakening of intermolecular hydrogen bonds. For water in small pores (2.1 nm), on the contrary, the librational band shifts slightly to a higher energy side, suggesting the low density liquid to high density liquid transition (L-L transition) at 225-250 K. A plausible mechanism of the L-L transition of water in confinement is proposed in terms of incomplete growth of homogeneous nucleation of ice due to an interfacial free energy effect to inhibit crystallization of water confined in small pores.


Background: Speech pathologists face the clinical obstacle of providing an intensive service for individuals with aphasia. Computer therapy potentially offers a solution to the dilemma of increasing therapy frequency while maintaining or reducing the load on therapists' resources. Aims: This systematic review of the literature aimed to determine the effect of computer therapy both in comparison to no therapy and in comparison to clinician-delivered therapy in individuals with aphasia. Seventeen terms encompassing three main concepts (aphasia, technology, and rehabilitation) were used to search four electronic databases. Two reviewers independently screened titles and abstracts against inclusion/exclusion criteria. Data extraction for included studies was completed by one reviewer and confirmed by the second reviewer. Main Contribution: Seven studies were included, with six studies suitable for determining the effectiveness of computer therapy in comparison to no therapy, and three studies suitable for determining the effectiveness of computer therapy in comparison to clinician-delivered therapy. Two studies were suitable for answering both questions. The studies ranged in quality and were analysed descriptively. Meta-analysis was unable to be completed due to heterogeneity in methods, study types, computer programs, and outcome measures. All six studies investigating computer therapy in comparison to no therapy reported statistically significant improvements within the computer group. Five out of six studies reported statistically significant differences in language outcomes between the computer therapy and control group. All three studies comparing computer- and clinician-delivered therapy reported improvements in both the clinician and computer-delivered interventions with no statistically significant differences in language outcomes between the two treatment groups. One study reported no statistically significant differences in number of sessions needed to reach therapy criterion, whereas another reported an observed increase in the number of computer-delivered sessions over clinician-delivered sessions required to reach the therapy criterion for several treatment levels. Conclusions: This review provides evidence that computer therapy is effective when compared to no therapy and provides preliminary evidence that computer-delivered therapy may be as effective as clinician-delivered therapy for a specific population of individuals with aphasia. However, the quality of the evidence is low due to the small number of studies included. This review highlights the need for further research investigating the effectiveness of computer therapy in comparison to clinician-delivered therapy in a larger sample to enable the exploration of factors such as the type of aphasia and severity and the role of feedback and cueing hierarchies on treatment success.


Abstract 14C and U/Th methods were used to date three thin carbonate layers deposited on decorated walls of Nerja Cave (Malaga, southern Spain) in order to constrain the age of the parietal non-figurative marks situated under these carbonate layers. Modern formations were also dated to estimate the detritic contribution for the U/Th method and the dead carbon proportion for 14C dating. We sampled two locations with ocher painting marks. In one case (mark 1), the good agreement between the ages obtained by the two methods suggests that the sample was not subjected to post-deposition alteration and that the results are reliable. In the other case (mark 2), the age discrepancy between the two methods reached 30,000 yr, indicating that geochemical alteration had affected the sample and that one or both results were inaccurate. The ages for mark 1 indicate that this type of non-figurative representation is older than 25,000 cal BP and that it can be associated with the oldest attested Paleolithic occupation of Nerja Cave.


Busy period analysis plays a vital role in the study of queueing problems for forecasting the behaviour of the queueing systems. Performance analysis including determination of the average length of busy period is entirely based on the busy period distribution of the queueing model. In the queueing literature, it has been observed that most of the previous researchers [2,5,7,8 & 9] have presumed that the parameters of arrival and service rates in the system are independent to each other. However, it is not so in general because we find many queueing situations in our real life where the arrival and service rates are correlated with an elevated extent. A large number of previous noteworthy researchers [2,5,7,8 & 9] and references therein confined their study to analyze a variety of queueing models taking into account that the arrival and service processes are independent. A very few number of worth mentioning researchers [11 & 13] of the current decade are found in the literature of queueing theory who have contributed their devotion to analyze an M/M/1 queueing model with consideration of interdependent arrival and service rates. In this context, Srinivasa Rao et al [13] have focused their attention to investigate the average system size and average waiting time of an M/M/1/infinity interdependent queueing model using controllable arrival rates under steady state conditions. Recently, Pal [11] considered the same queueing model with a version of its limited waiting space and he succeeded to investigate the cost per unit time of a served customer in the system. In our current study, we consider the same queueing model already analyzed by Srinivasa Rao et al [13] with a version that the arrival and service processes follow a bivariate Poisson distribution and our keen interest is to investigate the average length of busy periods in two different cases of slower and faster arrival rates. By the end of the present paper, a special stress on practical aspect of the investigated average busy period has also been given in our conclusion which reveals the application of both the realistic modeling enhancing as well as regulatory techniques.


Sir .—I read with interest Taubman and colleagues' 1 excellent article in the January 1989 issue of AJDC . A statement made in the article deserves amplification. The authors state, "One reason for lower specificity may be due to possible interference from over-the-counter cold medications. Such medications have been shown to cause false-positive results with this particular latex test" (Culturette Brand Group A STREP ID). 2 In the reference cited, I stated that we had indirect evidence that some false-positive results may be due to the patients' ingestion of certain over-the-counter medications. In these cases, the latex test was positive for group A Streptococcus , but in vitro testing showed that β-hemolytic Streptococcus reversibly manifested α-hemolysis when exposed to the medication on blood agar plates. Such plates could possibly be misread as "negative for group A Streptococcus ." In conclusion, the authors are correct in their statement that false-positive results may be reported;