Social rental housing projects have emerged since 2016 to cover the housing demand of low-income groups, but these projects need high cost that beyond the financial capacity of some governments. Therefore, the World Bank reports in 2014 and 2018 pointed to the importance of including the private sector in low-income housing projects as a real estate developer instead of the state. The contribution of private sector and his successful experience in this field help in reducing the government spending towards these projects and achieving high quality in their implementation. For these reasons, many countries at international level involved the private sector in construction of social housing units in exchange for a set of incentives, which vary widely from one country to another. These incentives are classified into two main groups, the first one is financial and administrative incentives such as providing free land or selling it at low price, besides taxes and financing facilities as applied in Brazil, China, Singapore and Thailand. The second group is new incentives which called Land use incentives such as land use kind, percentage of land exploitation, proposed density and land use regulation in the housing project as applied in the United States, Japan and France because the previous financing incentives are not enough to achieve an appropriate profit for investors. At the local level, the private sector participated in many low-income housing projects such as Youth Housing, National Housing and social housing projects during the period from 1996 until now. In which the Egyptian government provided him some incentives like low price land, payment facilities, tax cuts and allocation part of land for his investment projects in exchange for building number of housing units with an area of (63 m 2 ) for low-income groups. On the other hand, real estate companies retreated from participation in these projects because the incentives are unsatisfactory to them, which made the state played again the role of real estate developer to fill the gap in housing demand by using insufficient government budget. As a result of that, the Egyptian government is trying nowadays to re-engage the private sector again in future social housing projects by studying all submitted proposals from private sector in 2016, the World Bank in 2018 and the views of some institutions such as ministry of investment, ministry of housing and the Social Housing Fund in 2019 around the new incentives, especially after the state decided to withdraw from real estate development and leave it to the private sector by the year 2020. Hence, this paper tries to introduce the new incentives for private sector to participate again in social housing projects. The formulation of these incentives comes from revision the international experiences and reports as well as evaluating the applying of old incentives in one case study of participation housing projects (Degla Gardens project to find an integrated vision for suitable incentives in Egyptian reality that achieve the goals of all development parties ( the government-private sector-population).


Some women take an estrogen preparation for as long as several years to ease sylnptoms of the menopause. Such women appear to have little or no alteration in their risk of endometrial cancer, especially if they are also taking a progestogen, and no alteration in their risk of breast cancer. Similarly, the incidence of fractures is unaffected by relatively short-term hormone use. The risk of ischemic heart disease also is reduced among women who currently take estrogens (with or without a progestogen), but the influence of duration of use on this association is uncertain. Postmenopausal women who take estrogens for an extended period of time (e.g., a decade or more) incur a sharply increased risk of cancer of the endometrium. This is largely abated by use of a progestogen for at least 10 days per month. Such long-term estrogen use, whether accompanied by a progestogen or not, may increase the risk of breastcancerslightly, but this isan areaofgreatcontroversy, at present unresolved. The incidence of both myo


Dermatophytes can digest keratin and other proteinaceous substrates present in skin and its appendages such as nail, hair, and feather and use it as its sole source of carbon and nitrogen. Despite the availability of effective antifungal agents, dermatophytic infections continue to be one of the principal dermatological diseases throughout the world, especially in tropical countries. A crosssectional descriptive study in the K R Hospital, Mysore, India, which is one of the main tertiary care centre in central part of Mysore so all referred patients samples were collected and prossed from November 2010 to September 2012. This study was done to study the clinical variants, species of fungus causing dermatophyte infection and epidemiological factors responsible for the disease in Central Mysore. The prospective observational analysis of clinically suspected 920 positive cases out of 1418 dermatophytic infection attended at the Dermatology department of K R Hospital, Mysore, India, was selected for our study. All the cases were evaluated by us and patient's data were recorded as per pre-designed proforma. Skin scraping, hair and nail samples were collected and processed according to standard protocol. Maximum numbers of cases with dermatophytosis were observed between June to September and almost half of the cases were farmer by occupation. Dermatophytosis was common in male (55.7%) as compared to female (44.3%) and the youngest patient was 27 days old and oldest was 77 years old. Majority of the cases in this study were between 26-30 years of age 243 (26.4%). Most common clinical type observed in this study was tinea corporis 289 (31.4%) followed by t. capitis 187 (20.3%), t. cruris 130 (14.1%), t. pedis 99 (10.7%), t. manum 51 (5.5%), t. faciae 32 (3.4%) and t. barbae 21 (2.2%). Cases with tinea capitis were less than 10 years of age and male preponderance was observed. Direct microscopic examination (KOH) of the samples revelled overall 72.1% (1023 out of 1418) positive for KOH, while (64.8%) cases were culture positive. High positivity was found in cases of tinea corporis 289 (31.4%) followed by t. capitis 187 (20.3%) by direct microscopy. The predominant species of dermatophyte isolated was T. rubrum 223 (24.3%) followed by T. tonsurans 206 (22.3%), T. verrucosum 159 (17.2%), T. mentagrophytes 147(15.9%), T. violaceum 128 (13.9%), E. floccosum 40 (4.3%) and T. schoenleinii 11(1.1%). The study highlighted tinea corporis as the most common clinical pattern of dermatophytosis followed by tinea capitis in Central Mysore. The predominant causative fungal species isolated was Trichophyton rubrum followed by T. tonsurans and T. verrucosum. Clinical evaluation and fungal species identification is mandatory for proper management of dermatophytosis rather than empirical treatment.


This thesis makes a detailed contribution to the study of social relations between tenantry, landowners, police and the military, and reveals continuities and complexities often missing from more generalised accounts. It begins by arguing that the prevailing framework of traditionalism versus revisionism in Irish history is too restricting, and agrees with those who want it opened up to wider approaches for a better understanding. By comparing two selected counties, this work uses local studies to examine Irish history in general - which is a well-established method for the period 1916-1923, but less so for the late nineteenth century.

Evidence of continuous disturbances throughout the period, albeit of varying intensity, supports the theory of a 'Long Land War'. It is important, however, to notice that there were other causes of friction apart from the pressures of nationalism and agrarian reform. In this conflict, the evidence suggests that widespread intimidation was both commonplace and effective on an often reluctant population, and questions how far nationalism was a really popular ideal. It is argued here that nationalism did slowly become stronger, and was fostered during the South African War.

Agrarian reform made more tangible progress, partly through the actions of the various leagues, but also through a collapse of government and landlord resolve. The position of the Catholic clergy as leaders of agitation is well established and supported here – but less discussed in the secondary literature is the role played by the women of tenant families. This study argues that ordinary women played a vital part in all agitation and resistance, and that this role deserves much wider recognition..

It is well documented that sport and culture were used by the nationalists to nurture support, but this study will argue that the authorities did the same thing. Army reforms also helped to identify military units with specific areas, and economic considerations about the buying power of the army played a moderating role in limiting opposition. The militia, whilst certainly ill-disciplined at times, have too often been dismissed as ineffectual, but it is argued here that they served a useful social function, and that their importance was as imperial reinforcements, not as a gendarmerie for dealing with discontent at home. It is also argued that excessive violence was sometimes used by the authorities, but it will be shown that Catholics in both the RIC and the army performed their duties with very few exceptions, and so recruiting Catholics was not a cause of weakness for the authorities. The RIC in particular, however, were vilified for the work they carried out and the way that they sometimes performed it.


Knowing user experience resulting from the performance of network services is an extremely important target for service providers and researchers. Effects of even slight disturbances in network performance were not so damaging for user satisfaction level ever before than they are in today's changing network conditions in heterogeneous network environment, involving fixed, wireless and mobile networks. Quality of Service (QoS) is the ability of network to provide a service with an assured service level and Quality of Experience (QoE) is how a user perceives the usability of a service when in use. Monitoring the QoS can be an important indicator for the level of user satisfaction if the monitored parameters are strongly correlated to that user satisfaction. This paper presents a comprehensive analysis on the changing user behaviour at different service performance levels through both objective and subjective measurements. At first, it discusses the correlation of subjective grading of the service by users with service performance parameters and observes certain thresholds on the performance parameters where user experience changes. This analysis is based on the results of web surfing experiments on a testbed. Secondly, it discusses the correlation of traffic characteristics of user sessions with session throughputs in order to observe the dependence of these characteristics on network performance metrics. This discussion is based on traffic launched by real users on an ADSL network. Finally, the objectively measured traffic characteristics like user session volumes are compared to subjective responses of the users to see to what extent the session volumes reflect the user satisfaction level.


The New York State Office of Mental Health provides the attached advisory on the treatment of children and adolescents with second generation (SGA) (or novel or atypical) antipsychotic medications. This comes at a time where there has been considerable public attention to this matter, and we hope this advisory is useful to families and providers alike. The treatment of mental disorders in children and adolescents begins with a careful assessment of the psychiatric, medical and psychosocial aspects of the child and family. The treatment itself may involve different interventions based on the assessment and risks and benefits; interventions include cognitive and behavioral treatments, family education and support, and medication. The use of medication in children should never be the only intervention, and should not substitute for needed other services. When medication is used it must be monitored regularly for side effects and evaluated for effectiveness. If the medication has not met treatment goals after a reasonable amount of time it should be discontinued and other options explored. The attached advisory is based on a review of current guidelines and literature regarding SGA use in children and adolescents and is meant to support careful and thorough clinical assessment, treatment planning and ongoing monitoring of care. Thank you,


Underground mining causes the redistribution of surrounding rock stress. The value of rock stress is one of the important factors that should be considered when stope structure size is designed. E'xi iron ore body is gently declined in attitude, thin in thickness, and large in occurrence area. According to mining technological conditions and the selected mining method of E'xi iron mine, a typical section of the mine is selected, and it is abstracted into a plane strain problem. In terms of optional stope structure parameters, 9 calculation schemes are planed. Rock stress distributions of stope caused by mining are simulated by the Finite Element Method. Rational stope parameters are chosen by comparing stress distributions of all calculation schemes. Analysis result shows that 8m net distance between pillars, and 4m pillar width are the optimum stope parameters, which not only stabilize the stope but also improve mining efficiency. Choosing stope parameters based on rock stress distributions calculated with numerical simulations, is provided a scientific analysis method for determining rational mining parameters of underground mines.


Background: Psychiatric morbidity may be highly prevalent in transverse myelitis (TM), but data on this aspect are limited. Aim: To assess psychiatric morbidity in a clinical sample of patients with idiopathic TM compared to patients with a recent stroke. Materials and Methods: Consecutive patients with idiopathic TM and stroke (30 each) underwent two-stage screening with the General Health Questionnaire-12 (GHQ-12) and Structured Clinical Interview for Axis I DSM-IV Disorders – Clinician Version (SCID I-CV), and ratings of depression, disability levels, and cognitive impairment. Results: Seventy percent of the patients with TM scored above the cut-off on the GHQ; 30% had a positive diagnosis of a psychiatric disorder. Major depression (17%) was the commonest psychiatric disorder. Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores indicated cognitive impairment in 23% of patients with TM. Higher GHQ-12 scores were associated with greater disability. These results were similar to those obtained among patients with stroke. Conclusion: A high prevalence of psychological distress and psychiatric morbidity was found in idiopathic TM. This morbidity was associated with greater disability.


This article presents an existential reading of the famous Four-Seven Debate ( Siqi Lunzheng 四七論爭). In particular, it approaches the Debate with specific attention to the ways in which it isolated and problematized the human individual situation in communal life. It attempts to analyze the diverse perspectives that were brought into the Debate, and to demonstrate that there was a sophisticated system, with many variations and movements, that informed Korean understandings of how to manage emotions as within the context of sage learning ( shengxue 聖學). This study also seeks to uncover the underlying therapeutic measures for treating wayward emotions that were an underlying component at play in all of the important contributions made throughout the many twists and turns within the Debate.


The Internet of Things (IoT) makes brilliant items a definitive building hinders in the improvement of digital physical savvy inescapable systems. The IoT has an assortment of utilization areas, including human services. In the existing system there is no system for analyze step count and medical fitness analysis together. The proposed system is trying to calculate the temperature, blood pressure and heartbeat measurement. In modification part, we include touch sensor based Hardware for measuring step count and calorie burnt in the human body and further blood pressure is measured and updated status to be stored in cloud server. Reminder notification is also included to alert on the phone through messages by using GSM. The system can be used in any big pharma or medical organisation where a large number of patients come, the details of every patient is updated on the web server and the pharma doctor can access the details from anywhere and give the prescription accordingly. The patient also get notification on their mobiles.


Introduction Individuals with Cystic Fibrosis (CF) often receive frequent, prolonged anti-infective therapy including aminoglycosides which result in ototoxicity. There are, however, no current national or international screening recommendations. Although high-frequency audiometry has increased sensitivity for early detection of drug-induced hearing loss, formal audiometry is costly and requires further outpatient visits. We analyse the validity of an interactive Apple-iPad app-based high-frequency audiometer (Shoebox MD) that can be used by non-audiologists to test hearing in an outpatient setting to screen for ototoxicity in an adult CF population. Methods Adults with CF at the Royal Brompton and Harefield or Kings College Hospital NHS Foundation Trusts are being recruited over an 8 month period. Hearing was analysed with an iPad app in an outpatient setting by non-audiologists followed by formal audiometry. A threshold of ≥25 dB hearing loss at one or more audiometric frequencies was considered to be outside the normal hearing range. Correlation analysis was used to determine reliability of iPad compared to formal audiometry at individual frequencies. Sensitivity and specificities were analysed to determine efficacy of iPad audiometry as a screening tool. Demographics are currently being collected to determine risk factors for hearing loss development and genomic sequencing performed to analyse mitochondrial mutations associated with aminoglycoside related hearing loss. Results Interim results of the first 28 participants show an overall prevalence of hearing loss in our cohort of 39%. Significant positive correlation between the iPad interactive and formal audiometry was seen at high frequencies (see figure 1) but relatively poor correlation at low frequencies where hearing loss is however uncommon in our cohort. iPad interactive audiometry showed a sensitivity of 91%, specificity of 82% and negative predictive value of 93% to identify adults with hearing loss, highlighting its potential use for ototoxicity screening in this population.Absatrct S140 Figure 1 Conclusion We present interim results highlighting for the first time, the use of novel app-based audiometry as a screening tool for aminoglycoside induced hearing loss in adult CF with potential application in other chronic lung disease cohorts. Full results will be presented at the conference.


Superparamagnetic MnO nanoparticles were functionalized using a hydrophilic ligand containing protoporphyrin IX as photosensitizer. By virtue of their magnetic properties these nanoparticles may serve as contrast enhancing agents for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), while the fluorescent target ligand protoporphyrin IX allows simultaneous tumor detection and treatment by photodynamic therapy (PDT). Caki-1 cells were incubated with these nanoparticles. Subsequent exposure to UV light lead to cell apoptosis due to photoactivation of the photosensitizer conjugated to the nanoparticles. This method offers great diagnostic potential for highly proliferative tissues, including tumors. In addition, it is an efficient platform that combines the advantages of a biocompatible photosensitizer with the possibility for MRI monitoring due to the magnetic properties of the highly soluble functionalized manganese oxide nanoparticles.


The biblical accounts of Eve's life are central to Western culture, occupying a privileged place in our literature and art, culture, and society. For both Judaism and Christianity, these stories involving Eve have for centuries been entangled with the religious and social construction of gender. The ambiguous biblical record of her life from the two versions of her creation, through her encounter with the forbidden fruit, to her expulsion from Eden, and followed by the tantalizing glimpses of her life in the real world has served through the ages as a mirror of commonly held views about women. For Jewish readers, Eve's role as metonym -- signifying womanhood, or Jewish womanhood, as a whole -- is of prime importance. By tracing the imagined character of Eve from ancient times to the present, Eternally Eve opens a window on the transmission and persistence of cultural and social values. Eternally Eve takes as its subject the many ways these stories can be read, interpreting the biblical narratives as well as their iteration by rabbinic midrashists and modern poets. Anne Lapidus Lerner argues that we must set aside, or at least rethink, a series of assumptions about Eve that have been dominant in Jewish thought for centuries and instead return to the original texts to rediscover meanings implicit in them. Using modern poetry about Eve as a touchstone for reinterpreting older texts, Lerner discovers that Genesis is often more open to contemporary values than are later rabbinic texts. Linking sacred texts to works of the classical and modern imagination, Lerner restores to her sources meanings suppressed or neglected over many years and demonstrates their power to speak today.


New electrical network concepts are emerging in aeronautics due to high voltage direct current networks (HVDC). These networks give some specific possibilities concerning the connections between the bus bars and the equipments. We propose here a new component for this kind of purpose that helps in solving stability problems at the network level and in supplying powerful consumers. This component, the MAPFC - mixed function for actuation & power flow control - is an AC machine connected between two inverters. The machine can be used in a traditional way - as a motor or as a generator - but also to transfer power from one DC bus to the other. We explain the principles of the MAPFC, especially the theory in the Park's domain, and some simulation results are given. We also define capabilities and limitations of the equipment.


This chapter discusses recent studies on fMRI-based lie detection. In Minds, Brains, and Law, Dennis Patterson and I examined the scholarly literature and judicial opinions on the topic, and we discussed several empirical and conceptual issues affecting the use of such evidence in legal settings. In this chapter, I focus on two conceptual issues and examine several studies that have been published since the publication of our book. The conceptual issues concern: (1) the distinction between deception and lying, and (2) the concept of lying itself (or the criteria for what constitutes a lie). As with the array of studies that we examined previously, the more-recent studies also face serious limitations because of these issues.


It has recently been suggested that nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) is an under‐recognized cause of cryptogenic cirrhosis (CC) on the basis of higher prevalence of obesity and type II diabetes among these patients. To test this hypothesis, we studied 65 consecutive patients with advanced cirrhosis (Child‐Pugh Score ≥ 7) of undetermined etiology (CC) from our active waiting list for liver transplantation in January 1993, 1996, and 1999. For each patient, we selected 2 age‐ and sex‐matched controls from the corresponding lists. The prevalence of obesity (defined as body mass index [BMI] ≥ 30) and diabetes were compared between the groups. Sixteen patients (and their 32 controls) with CC were excluded as further review of records suggested other possible etiologies. Thus, the final analysis included 49 patients and 98 controls. The etiology of cirrhosis in the control group was alcohol in 16.3%, chronic viral hepatitis in 30.6%, autoimmune hepatitis in 8.2%, and primary biliary cirrhosis (PBC) or primary sclerosing cholangitis in 35.7%. The prevalence of obesity (55% vs. 24%) and type II diabetes (47% vs. 22%) was significantly higher in patients with CC compared with controls. Twenty‐three percent of patients with CC had both obesity and diabetes compared with 5% among controls (P = .002). There was no difference in the prevalence of hypercholesterolemia (serum cholesterol > 200 mg/dL) between the groups. In conclusion, patients with advanced CC are more likely to be obese and diabetic compared with age‐ and sex‐matched patients with advanced cirrhosis. This supports the hypothesis that NASH may be an etiological factor in some of the patients with CC.


Uncertain partially observable Markov decision processes (uPOMDPs) allow the probabilistic transition and observation functions of standard POMDPs to belong to a so-called uncertainty set.
Such uncertainty, referred to as epistemic uncertainty, captures uncountable sets of probability distributions caused by, for instance, a lack of data available.
We develop an algorithm to compute finite-memory policies for uPOMDPs that robustly satisfy specifications against any admissible distribution.
In general, computing such policies is theoretically and practically intractable.
We provide an efficient solution to this problem in four steps.
(1) We state the underlying problem as a nonconvex optimization problem with infinitely many constraints.
(2) A dedicated dualization scheme yields a dual problem that is still nonconvex but has finitely many constraints.
(3) We linearize this dual problem and (4) solve the resulting finite linear program to obtain locally optimal solutions to the original problem.
The resulting problem formulation is exponentially smaller than those resulting from existing methods.
We demonstrate the applicability of our algorithm using large instances of an aircraft collision-avoidance scenario and a novel spacecraft motion planning case study.


Among the now numerous alternative cryptocurrencies derived from Bitcoin, Zcash is often touted as the one with the strongest anonymity guarantees, due to its basis in well-regarded cryptographic research. In this paper, we examine the extent to which anonymity is achieved in the deployed version of Zcash. We investigate all facets of anonymity in Zcash's transactions, ranging from its transparent transactions to the interactions with and within its main privacy feature, a shielded pool that acts as the anonymity set for users wishing to spend coins privately. We conclude that while it is possible to use Zcash in a private way, it is also possible to shrink its anonymity set considerably by developing simple heuristics based on identifiable patterns of usage.


Annual methane emission from paddy fields in Nepal has been estimated based on the published secondary data for 11 years from 2000-2010. Available data were collected from the Ministry of Agricultural Development (MoAD), Department of Agriculture (DoA) and Nepal Agricultural Research Council (NARC). Green house gas emission (GHG) was estimated by using IPCC 2006 guidelines. Agricultural activities contribute directly to emissions of greenhouse gases through a variety of processes including the source categories such as enteric fermentation in domestic livestock, livestock manure management, rice cultivation, and agricultural soil management. Diverse traditional agriculture systems, unique diversities in land types and unavailability of required disaggregated data at the national level as defined by the emission factor data base (EFDB) of the IPCC 2006, were the problem encountered while calculating the emission status in this study. Annual methane (CH4) emission from paddy fields ranged from 111.57 to 133.07 Gg over years 2000 to 2010 but it was found lowest ( 111.57 Gg) in the year 2002 and highest (133.07 Gg) in the year2003. In the year 2010, methane emission from paddy cultivation represented about 17.48 % of cumulative methane emission both from livestock sector and paddy fields throughout Nepal. Also, some relevant policies and potential strategies towards mitigation measures of methane gas emission from paddy fields for the future in Nepal are highlighted. Agronomy Journal of Nepal (Agron JN), Vol.4, Page: 142-148, 2016


This article describes two general methods for discounting older data in the real‐time analysis of a data stream. In the first method, the distribution of a data stream is estimated by a series of orthogonal basis functions, and the coefficients of this estimate are updated as new data arrive by combining windowing and exponential smoothing techniques. The second method involves sequential hypothesis testing. When new data arrive, test significance level is adjusted by alpha‐investing, which raises or reduces the significance level of subsequent hypothesis tests on the basis of whether the previous hypothesis test rejects or fails to reject the null hypothesis. Both these methods are nonparametric in nature. WIREs Comp Stat 2011 3 30–33 DOI: 10.1002/wics.134


Well known Hispanist and Hispano-America's scholar, Lore Terracini (1925-1995), daughter of the mathematician Alessandro and nephew of the linguist Benvenuto Aron, lived in Argentina, more precisely in Tucumán, from 1939 to 1947. Her family, Israelite, had been forced to leave Italy because of the Racist Laws promulgated by Mussolini in 1938. In Tucumán, her father and her uncle got assignments at University, where they have been able to establish an intellectual atmosphere of high-level criticism. Their openness to exchange and meeting between different cultures influenced also their sons and daughters, marking them throughout their lifetime. Lore Terracini, in her autobiographical texts, points out that this cultural predisposition led to a process of integration, enough to feel belonging to a double motherland, the Italian and the Argentinian, without forgetting, especially in the last years of her life, the Jewish identity.


This study focuses on whether an ethical prompt, adapted from Mazar et al. (2008), can reduce easily concealed tax evasion—i.e., tax evasion relating to cash-based income for which the IRS relies on voluntary compliance. We also consider the "Dark Triad" personality traits and other individual attitudes and characteristics that may drive or predict tax evasion intentions. We unexpectedly find that ethical prompts do not affect intent to engage in tax evasion, but our result is consistent with a newly released large-scale replication project that fails to find an effect for this much-discussed religious/ethical prompt, and the power of our test is about 80%. Of the variables studied, only psychopathy, commitment to the process of taxation, and fear of punishment predict intent to evade. These findings are consistent across two samples, taken both before and after the passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017.


The report of the CNECommission on National Education, 1959 is one of the most significant policy documents in the history of higher education in Pakistan. It was one of the key referents for the recent reform effort led by the Governmentthe Task Force on Improvement in Higher Education, 2002, but has been only briefly examined (as a review of Ayub Khan's educational policies by Saigol, 2003, and as a summary of recommendations by Isani and Virk, 2003). The Commission's analyses and recommendations have shaped the institutional nature of higher education in the country and thus offer insights into the defining impulse of building a 'modern' nation, which was its stated object. This paper presents some conclusions drawn from a detailed analysis of the Commission's report, highlighting five features that underpin the report, and therefore the nation-building effort under President General Ayub Khan. These features are further analysed as constituting a tension in the report, and as defining a certain kind of modernity evident in Pakistan to this day. The paper uses these features to present initial thoughts toward conceptualising modernity in Pakistan in the light of postcolonialism and Foucault's theorisation of normalisation.


In recent years, with the rapid development of the smart city paradigm, the Internet ofThings (IoT) has raised widespread concern in the whole ICT community. IoT refers to linking the sensors, controllers, machines, people, and things together by using local or wide area communication and cloud technologies, with the Internet as the glue, through a new way to build an intelligent things-to-things network. However, in the near future, the large-scale deployment of the IoT also needs to face many challenges, especially in security and privacy issues for smart, connected, and mobile IoT devices and platforms due to the fact that IoT has different characteristics from traditional communication networks, related to its specific features and threats. In particular, the security solutions for IoT must provide IoT nodes (things, users, servers, and objects) with data authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and freshness certification, and authorization. In addition, privacy protection must also be considered. Many IoT services and applications may expose sensitive and personal information which may be abused by attackers. The concept of privacy may be different, but it should protect the user's personal identity information and maintain a certain degree of anonymity, nonlinkability, and data confidentiality. Of course, it is also necessary to strike a balance between the availability and the security and privacy protection for IoT. This special issue focuses on the IoT devices and platforms with respect to security and privacy preserving technologies for speeding up the technological progress and attracting more researchers' concerns about the development in this field. In addition, this special issue includes extended versions of the best papers presented at the 2nd International Symposium on Mobile Internet Security (MobiSec'17) held on Jeju, Jeju Island, Republic of Korea, on October 19–22, 2017. For the current issue, we are pleased to introduce a collection of papers covering a range of topics as follows: frameworks for detecting malicious applications; algorithms for image quality assessment and image denoising based for image security and authorization; push notificationbased malware; models for detecting potential insider threat; methods for financial fraud detection; security evaluation framework for military IOT devices; certificateless aggregate signature schemes; high-security interaction systems; secure incentive schemes for vehicular delay tolerant networks; ciphertext retrieval schemes; systems with secret key leakageresilience; solutions for jammer localization in multihop wireless networks; homomorphic network coding signature schemes for multiple sources; cryptanalysis of compact-LWE and related lightweight public key encryption; smart trust management methods to detect on-off attacks; and network performance and security testing.


The COVID-19 pandemic means governments have advised citizens to engage in "social distancing"
measures, which include working from home. Many people have had to learn how to work from home
and develop effective strategies in a very short period. This especially rapid move to remote working
is unprecedented, so we do not know how this shift is affecting people's working lives. We developed
a mixed-methods survey and a series of in-depth interviews, through which we investigated the new
challenges for people in managing digital self-control, maintaining productivity and work-life balance
that have surfaced during the COVID-19 crisis. We also catalogued the strategies participants
adopted through the first stages of lockdown in response to these challenges. From this, we draw
research and policy implications for supporting neophyte remote workers when managing digital selfcontrol, productivity, and work-life balance during and beyond the COVID-19 pandemic.


Manifesto texts have been credited by scholars for aiding social movement groups in articulating various issues, creating cohesion among membership, and mapping out a path towards a successful future. Yet while much attention has been given to the movements that these texts represent, not as much study has been devoted towards examining manifesto texts themselves, particularly ones representing queer communities in the United States.  Subsequently, there's been little research as to whether queer social movement manifestos exhibit similar patterns of style or rhetorical invention, regardless of context. To address this scholarly gap, this essay exams two modern queer manifestos: The Lavender Menace's 1970 "Woman-Identified Woman" and Queer Nation's 1990 "Queers Read This." The goal of exploring reoccurring patterns within these manifestos is not for mere classification, but rather twofold: first, to reveal similar cultural cycles of oppression and resistance in the relationship between dominant and marginalized communities, particularly as it relates to sexuality; and second, to recover rhetorically rich artifacts that can contribute to building a queer collective memory.


Before publishing On the Origin of Species, Darwin held the view that well-adapted organisms were optimally designed to meet the specific challenges of an environment, and populations were not expected to change except from an environmental disturbance. Darwin later recognized the prevalence of environmental variation and employed a concept of relative adaptedness. I argue, against Don Ospovat, that Darwin did not entirely abandon his prior idea of "limited perfect adaptedness" when writing the Origin. In order to understand completely the diagram that Darwin presents in connection to the principle of divergence, a notion of limited perfect adaptedness is necessary.


In an oil spill in mangrove areas, there is a great possibility of oil aggregation with suspended particulate matter, which may determine the bottom sediment as the final destination of OSA (Oil-Suspended Particulate Matter Aggregates), posing a great risk to Benthic organisms. Ecotoxicity tests with these organisms have been widely used as one of the most accurate forms of biological monitoring of the anthropogenic impacts on this ecosystem. The present work evaluates the ecotoxicity of the exposure to OSA in mangrove sediments, collected along the Pardo river estuary, Canavieiras, Bahia, through pilot scale (microscale) trials. The procedure was performed using acute exposure toxicological tests to determine LC50 (lethal concentration 50%) using the benthic copepod Nitokra sp. For the purpose of comparison, two scenarios were performed, the first considers the aqueous phase of the OSA simulation protocol in microscale, and the second, the elutriate from sediment and oil homogenized in different fractions. It was verified that the formation of the OSA has a much less toxic potential (LC50 70.71) in relation to elutriate formed from the percentages of homogenized sediment with crude oil (LC50 5.59) confirming its potential as an effective form of cleaning for oil treatment in water.


Mesoamerican Nephropathy (MeN), also known as Chronic Kidney Disease of unknown etiology (CKDu), is an unusual form of kidney disease affecting agricultural workers in Central America. Its prevalence is alarmingly high among young male sugarcane workers in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The absence of known etiologies for CKD, such as hypertension and diabetes, has led researchers to explore a number of potential risk factors, though none adequately explain the timing and epidemic nature of the disease. In this paper, we explore the idea that glyphosate, an herbicide routinely used on sugarcane, could play a significant causal role in MeN, mediated by its property as an analogue of the coding amino acid glycine. Glyphosate is a glycine molecule with a methyl phosphonyl group attached to its nitrogen atom. Its substitution in place of glycine could disrupt multiple proteins critical for kidney health. Here, we first present prior evidence from the research literature that glyphosate may be substituting erroneously for glycine. In particular, multiple species of both bacteria and plants have mutated to remove a highly conserved glycine residue in the enzyme in the shikimate pathway that is disrupted by glyphosate, and this mutation has caused the enzyme to be completely insensitive to glyphosate. We have identified multiple proteins with key roles related to kidney function, whose disruption by glyphosate substitution for critical glycine residues could explain most of the unique features of MeN. Specifically, glycine substitution in aquaporin, chloride channels, cytochrome C oxidase and collagen, among others, could contribute to dehydration, increased urinary acidification, renal fibrosis, rhabdomyolysis and mitochondrial dysfunction. While the hypothesis that glyphosate could be disrupting protein synthesis is not yet proven, it is remarkable how well it explains multiple features of MeN. Investigations to verify whether glyphosate is in fact disrupting protein synthesis are urgently needed.


Domain-specific training typically makes NLP systems work better. We show that this extends to cognitive modeling as well by relating the states of a neural phrase-structure parser to electrophysiological measures from human participants. These measures were recorded as participants listened to a spoken recitation of the same literary text that was supplied as input to the neural parser. Given more training data, the system derives a better cognitive model — but only when the training examples come from the same textual genre. This finding is consistent with the idea that humans adapt syntactic expectations to particular genres during language comprehension (Kaan and Chun, 2018; Branigan and Pickering, 2017).


Information Explosion has caused the demand for customized text-mining in every imaginable area to sky-rocket. Text mining is needed in many areas, a few of which are: search engine development, spam-filtering and text-summarization. Every context requires its own customized text mining algorithms in order to achieve best results. The specific context of this research is market prediction for the foreign exchange market. The objective is to utilize news-headlines to predict market-movements 1 to 3 hours after news release.
The literature on recent research efforts in behavioral economics confirms that investors' aggregate behavioral reactions to information released in the news can drive prices up or down. This theoretical basis constitutes the economic foundation of this investigation.
After economic comprehension of the problem at hand; available systems in the literature which operate in a comparable context are reviewed. The major finding of this review is that context-specific text mining algorithms are lacking. The main underlying text-mining challenge that seems to deserve immediate attention is the sparse and high dimensional nature of the feature-space.
Therefore, this work produces a multi-layer dimension reduction algorithm to respond to this need.
The algorithm tackles a different root cause of the problem at each layer. The first layer is termed the Semantic Abstraction Layer and addresses the problem of co-reference in text mining that is contributing to sparsity. Co-reference occurs when two or more words in a text corpus refer to the same concept. This work produces a custom approach by the name of Heuristic-Hypernyms Modeling which creates a way to recognize words with the same parent-word to be regarded as one entity. As a result, prediction accuracy increases significantly at this layer which is attributed to appropriate noise-reduction from the feature-space.
The second layer is termed Sentiment Integration Layer, which integrates sentiment analysis capability into the algorithm by proposing a sentiment weight by the name of SumScore that reflects investors' sentiment. This layer reduces the dimensions by eliminating those that are of zero value in terms of sentiment and thereby improves prediction accuracy.
The third layer encompasses a dynamic model creation algorithm, termed Synchronous Targeted Feature Reduction (STFR). It is suitable for the challenge at hand whereby the mining of a stream of text is concerned. It updates the models with the most recent information available and, more importantly, it ensures that the dimensions are reduced to a number that is many times smaller.
The algorithm and each of its layers are extensively evaluated using real market data and news content across multiple years and have proven to be solid and superior to any other comparable solution. On top of a well-rounded multifaceted algorithm, this work contributes a much needed research framework for this context with a test-bed of data that must make future research endeavors more convenient. The produced algorithm is scalable and its modular design allows improvement in each of its layers in future research.


In this paper we discuss the use cases for monitoring of Web services for compliance with policies and service level agreements. In particular, the quality of service associated with Web service interactions and its monitoring rely on the proper use by both parties of related Web service protocols. This monitoring is best served by an event-centric model and an extensible scripting language, such as those in the event-driven test scripting language (eTSL). The paper illustrates how it can be used for such monitoring purposes. The eTSL is designed specifically for monitoring the compliance of XML-based protocols and messages. We also discuss its advantages over other approaches.


This paper presents new empirical evidence about the determinants of space per employee in office sector firms in Hong Kong. The paper hypothesises that usage of technological equipment and facilities lead to increase the space per employee ratio, apart from other factors identified in literature. The above hypothesis was tested through a regression model and an ANOVA analysis based on a sample survey of FIRE and business service sector firms in Hong Kong. The growth in the use of technological equipment and facilities exert a strong positive influence on space usage per employee. In Hong Kong, significant differences in the floor space per employee ratio are seen across different firms: financial and business service sector firms use relatively larger amounts of floor-space per employee compared to all other sub sectors. The overall explanatory power of the regression model was somewhat limited; this indicates that factors related to business organisation and work patterns, land supply and building densities, construction productivity and cost, and other location related factors, should also be studied in order to understand overall trends in space usage per employee.


We developed a sensitive and quantitative radial diffusion method to ascertain the susceptibility of six strains of Neisseria gonorrhoeae to antimicrobial peptides derived from mammalian leukocytes. The test organisms included the well-characterized serum-resistant FA19 and serum-sensitive F62 strains plus four antibiotic-resistant clinical isolates. Although each N. gonorrhoeae strain was resistant to human neutrophil defensins, all six were exquisitely sensitive to protegrins, a family of small beta-sheet antimicrobial peptides recently identified in porcine leukocytes. Protegrin-treated N. gonorrhoeae became vacuolated and had striking membrane changes when viewed by transmission and scanning electron microscopy. Because low concentrations of protegrins can also inactivate Chlamydia trachomatis and human immunodeficiency virus, they show promise for development as topical agents to avert sexually transmitted diseases.


Problem-Solving skills is one of the four main competencies that children must prepare and possess to survive and succeed in facing the 21st century. This ability is not innate, so it can be taught and improved by being encouraged by practice. To be able to solve a problem, one must have a deep understanding. Therefore, in learning, the ability to understand is a part of which the goals are increasingly being paid attention to for all students in each subject or course. Mathematica software is a form of information and communication technology tools that can support the mathematics learning process. This study's objectives are 1) to determine the average level of improvement in students' understanding skills by learning tutorial model assisted by Mathematica software; 2) knowing the magnitude of the increase in student problem-solving abilities by learning tutorial models assisted by Mathematica software. This research is a quantitative study using the one-group pretest-posttest design method. The population in this study were students of STKIP Surya who took the Calculus course. With a large sample of 30 people. Sampling was done using purposive sampling. And the instrument used is a test. The results of the data analysis above show that there is an increase in students' understanding and solving abilities after learning using Mathematica Software. The amount of increase in students' mathematical understanding skills in the high category. Likewise, the increase in mathematical problem-solving skills in the high category. This shows that Mathematica software can be used to improve student understanding and problem-solving skills.
Keywords- Mathematica, mathematical understanding, problem-solving skills.


PVC-membrane electrodes for Ag+ based on either 18-crown-6 (I) or di-benzo-18-crown-6 ether (II) were applied for the first time. The effect of solvent mediator on the electrode performance was discussed. Nernstian slope values were 59 and 58.9 mV/decade for both I and II electrode types, respectively. The linear concentration range was 10-5-10-1M. The detection limit was 7.9 \times 10-6 M. The working pH ranges were 5-9 or 4-9, depending on the concentration of Ag+ ion. The electrodes showed good selectivity towards most of the common alkali, alkaline earths, and transition metal cations. The electrodes were applied successfully for the determination of silver in photographic wastewater and alloys that are part of railway engines. The recovery range was 96%-100%, and the relative standard deviation was (0.95-2.7) for n = 4. The obtained results were compared to those of an atomic absorption spectrophotometric method.


Textile architecture bridges two distinct design practices that operate at different scales. The challenge of designing a soft and dynamic architecture has been widely addressed by architects and researchers. However, few of these projects adopt a textile design perspective. By proposing an embodied approach to textile architecture, this paper aims to contribute to new ways of designing textile architecture by means of transdisciplinary collaboration. Through a case study, we explore how the dynamic qualities of textiles in relation to body movement can inform new textile architectural design processes. The results show that the transformative nature of textiles, as a material that is adaptive, soft and dynamic, fosters a new understanding of textile architecture when coupled with the body. An embodied approach such as this addresses a perspective of power relations that is distributed across a relational network of agents and their capacity to perform as enablers and disablers, allowing architects and textile designers to work at the same level regardless of scale.


Purpose: To describe the landscape of medication management within the patient-centered medical homes (PCMH) in the state of Minnesota.
Methods: An electronic survey of care coordinators within PCMHs certified with the Department of Health in state of Minnesota was conducted. The survey and follow up were distributed by the Minnesota Department of Health. At the time the survey was distributed, there were 161 certified PCMHs in the state.
Results: The final analysis included 21 respondents. Size, setting, and time as a certified PCMH varied between practices. PCMHs reported a higher percentage of patients enrolled at lower complexity tiers (35.0 percent at tier I and 40.4 percent enrolled at tier II), with PCMHs with clinical pharmacist services reporting slightly increased frequency of higher complexity patients. The composition of the care team varied from clinic to clinic, but all clinics were multidisciplinary with a mean of 5.8 different provider types listed for each clinic. Physicians were the most common providers of medication management across all settings, and one respondent reported that medication management services are not formally provided in his/her clinic. The presence or absence of a clinical pharmacist did not significantly influence care coordination time dedicated to medication-related activities. Respondents residing in a clinic with clinical pharmacist services reported a high level of satisfaction with pharmacist-provided services.
Conclusion: The implementation of the PCMH model in many of the participating clinics was relatively recent and there remains much to be learned regarding the landscape of comprehensive medication management in the PCMH. The reported distribution of patients in complexity tiers suggests that clinics may use different strategies to determine resource allocation. Although the presence of a clinical pharmacist did not influence care coordination time dedicated, care coordinators valued services provided by clinical pharmacists.

Type: Original Research


This thesis seeks to understand Management Accounting and Control Systems (MACS) in an Islamic bank after it had been acquired by a conventional bank in Kuwait. In particular, there was a concern of losing the religious identity and legitimacy in the Islamic bank, in respect to the stakeholders generally, and the customers specifically. Therefore, the study seeks to investigate MACS in this setting.
The research adopted an interpretive paradigm as an epistemological approach and a qualitative methodology. The data collected through 26 semi-structured interviews and an inspection of internal and external archival documents. The study applied thematic analysis to the data, and as a theoretical basis, the case study employs the institutional logics perspective (ILP) of Thornton et al (2012).
The analysis of the case study identifies many important MACS that the bank relied on post-acquisition such as, the Balanced Scorecards (BSC) and Budget. The acquired bank benefited from the parent bank expertise to change MACS (e.g. BSC). The study found that the BSC was the main MACS that the bank use to achieve the targeted financial (e.g. sales) and non-financial (e.g. service quality) objectives. On other hand, the acquirer bank realized the importance of Shariah before the acquisition occurred. As the acquisition was initiated by the conventional bank's wish to benefit from those customers who prefer Islamic banking products. Shariah is a sensitive aspect in Islamic banks and there was a threat that the classification of the parent bank as a conventional bank might affect the Shariah identity and legitimacy. The study found that the bank applied multiple SCSs (Shariah Control Systems) such as a telephone hotline to answer Shariah enquiries, Shariah audit and Shariah training. Finally, the study found that there is an extensive conflict among religion and market logics in the organization, however, the management were able to manage the conflict with the Shariah-related social actors through pragmatic collaboration, therefore, the competing logics co-exist over time.
The study contributes toward the literature on Merger and Acquisitions (M&A) and MACS, by investigating institutional logics in that context, and examining a case study that requires a religious legitimacy. The research also contributes in practical terms to the Islamic banking industry, whose growth is attracting more conventional banks to enter the sector to benefit from the market opportunities, with more M&A events expected.


Fission-track ages of apatite in the Mount Evans area of the Front Range show that the Late Cretaceous 100 °C isotherm, which was 4 km below the sea floor, is now at an altitude of 3.5 km. Assuming a geothermal gradient of 25 °C per kilometre, the projected level of the latest Cretaceous sea floor, represented by the Fox Hills Sandstone, is at an altitude of 7.5 km, about 3.2 km above the top of Mount Evans, and the structural relief from that projection of the Fox Hills on the crest of the Front Range uplift to the deepest part of the Denver Basin to the east is 6.5 km. Ages of apatite in Precambrian rock along the Elkhorn fault on the west margin of the Front Range uplift show that in the area of maximum stratigraphic displacement the fault must have a very low dip and that the east margin of the Paleocene South Park basin must have been nearby. Ages in the Sawatch Range suggest that significant uplift occurred during or after Eocene time. Ages on the east side of the range reflect development of the Arkansas Valley graben and concomitant uplift of the east margin of the modern Sawatch Range in Miocene time.


Infancy is the starting point according to the capabilities and abilities that are formed. The age of the baby has a developmental task that must be questioned, namely trust and suspicion, which is not fulfilled so that it can cause fear there will be no comfort from the environment so that this baby develops suspicion for others and does not trust other people as well. Therapeutic group therapy (TKT) is one type of therapy that helps complete the development of infants, one of which is the development of motor skills. The purpose of reporting this case is to further resolve the application of TKT in improving infant motor development. The method used in this scientific work is a case report. The intervention was carried out on six family that has babies 0-6 months with a priority nursing diagnosis that is enforced is the readiness to increase the infant's age. Interventions were carried out in groups where each group consisted of 6-10 people. Improving the ability of infants through discussion and interviews after the intervention is carried out. The interventions given were generalist therapy and therapeutic group therapy (TKT). The author uses a workbook and a therapeutic evaluation book for Therapeutic Groups (TKT) to determine the understanding of baby's abilities. The results obtained are group therapy that can provide increased motor skills in infants.


Recommender systems (RS) help users navigate large sets of items in the search for "interesting" ones. One approach to RS is Collaborative Filtering (CF), which is based on the idea that similar users are interested in similar items. Most model-based approaches to CF seek to train a machine-learning/data-mining model based on sparse data; the model is then used to provide recommendations. While most of the proposed approaches are effective for small-size situations, the combinatorial nature of the problem makes it impractical for medium-to-large instances. In this work we present a novel approach to CF that works by training a Denoising Auto-Encoder (DAE) on corrupted baskets, i.e., baskets from which one or more items have been removed. The DAE is then forced to learn to reconstruct the original basket given its corrupted input. Due to recent advancements in optimization and other technologies for training neural-network models (such as DAE), the proposed method results in a scalable and practical approach to CF. The contribution of this work is twofold: (1) to identify missing items in observed baskets and, thus, directly providing a CF model; and, (2) to construct a generative model of baskets which may be used, for instance, in simulation analysis or as part of a more complex analytical method.


To achieve high-performance control of modern dc–dc converters, using direct digital design techniques, an accurate discrete model of the converter is necessary. In this paper, a new parametric system identification method, based on a Kalman filter (KF) approach is introduced to estimate the discrete model of a synchronous dc–dc buck converter. To improve the tracking performance of the proposed KF, an adaptive tuning technique is proposed. Unlike many other published schemes, this approach offers the unique advantage of updating the parameter vector coefficients at different rates. The proposed KF estimation technique is experimentally verified using a Texas Instruments TMS320F28335 microcontroller platform and synchronous step-down dc–dc converter. Results demonstrate a robust and reliable real-time estimator. The proposed method can accurately identify the discrete coefficients of the dc–dc converter. This paper also validates the performance of the identification algorithm with time-varying parameters, such as an abrupt load change. The proposed method demonstrates robust estimation with and without an excitation signal, which makes it very well suited for real-time power electronic control applications. Furthermore, the estimator convergence time is significantly shorter compared to many other schemes, such as the classical exponentially weighted recursive least-squares method.


Plastic flow laws express relationships between stress and strain space paths, the latter being identified in tenns of lime. A distinction can be made between continuous strain and dis conti nuity surface laws. To establish these, it is necessary to carry out tests in order to measure stress and shain tensors, which can only be done with a homogeneous spatial tensor distribution. As the instruments do not produce homogeneous fields, they can only measure the parameters of a law if the law is known. In theory, plastic flow laws can be established with the aid of general relationships between particles and from the geometry of the structure. A material for which these relationships are constant only changes its mechanical properties with the geometry of its structure, which solely depends on irreversible strains undergone by the material; this explains the "work-hardening' or "super-consolidation' which, with a sufficiently simple path, can be characlerized by the stress tensor for the final irreversible strain. The author introduces a new laboratory instrument for the measurement of the plastic flow relationship for very high homogeneous strain conditions, and also a simple instrument for quick in situ cohesion, friction and stability measurement, especially for sand and mud. Muel can be considered as not very dense normally consolidated soil having remained under water since its original deposition. The author has no precise measured plastic flow data available for mud; he simply correlates its physical and mechanical properties. For example, as its water content is near the liquidity limit WL at shallow depUIS, its approximate compressibility can be established from WL. The relevant cohesion data show considerable scatter but the average values for individual sites appear to increase with the consistency index. Rapid construction on mud results in high interstitial pressures, i.e. very low strength if the mud contains little clay. Bearing strength can be much improved by the use of non-stretch matting placed crosswise, for which the author suggests a calculation method.


Steganography is the special art of hidding important and confidential information in appropriate multimedia carrier. It also restrict the detection of  hidden messages. In this paper we proposes steganographic method based on dct and entropy thresholding technique. The steganographic algorithm uses random function in order to select block of the image where the elements of the binary sequence of a secret message will be inserted. Insertion takes place at the lower frequency  AC coefficients of the  block. Before we insert the secret  message. Image under goes dc transformations after insertion of the secret message we apply inverse dc transformations. Secret message will only be inserted into a particular block if  entropy value of that particular block is greater then threshold value of the entropy and if block is selected by the random function. In  Experimental work we calculated the peak signal to noise ratio(PSNR), Absolute difference , Relative entropy. Proposed algorithm give high value of PSNR  and low value of Absolute difference which clearly indicate level of distortion in image due to insertion of secret message is reduced. Also value of  relative entropy is close to zero which clearly indicate proposed algorithm is sufficiently secure.


To reduce packaging costs, it is necessary to use passive alignment between the laser diodes and optical fiber. Such an alignment requires low-coupling loss and large positional alignment tolerances. This is achievable with integrated spot-size converters, which permit to match the near field of a laser to that of a flat-end single-mode fiber (SMF). In this paper, we first review briefly the different technological approaches to realize spot-size converters. Then, we focus on the double-core structure developed both for 1.3-/spl mu/m Fabry-Perot lasers and 1.55-/spl mu/m semiconductor optical amplifiers (SOAs). The spot-size expansion is simulated using a two-dimensional (2-D) beam propagation method analysis. Short spot-size converters (100 /spl mu/m) integrated with 1.3-/spl mu/m lasers and 1.55-/spl mu/m SOAs exhibit beam divergences as low as 12/spl deg//spl times/12/spl deg/ and 12/spl deg//spl times/15/spl deg/, respectively. The performances of devices with integrated spot-size converters are reported and discussed. A 2-in wafer process is used thanks to the versatility of the double-core structure and its compatibility with buried ridge stripe technology.


Drip‐tips are a common feature of the leaves of rain forest trees, but their functional significance remains contested. The most widely accepted hypothesis is that drip‐tips assist drainage of the lamina thereby aiding drying of the leaf surface and reducing the rate of colonization and abundance of epiphyllic organisms. The drying action of drip‐tips may also enhance transpiration and reduce the need for investment in support structures. Furthermore, drip‐tips may help prevent splash erosion around the base of the tree. Data from 130 forest Amazonian plots are used to investigate the abundance and distribution of drip‐tips and, through regression methods that incorporate spatial autocorrelation, seek to identify associations between the frequency of drip‐tips and a range of climatic variables. The average frequency of species and trees with drip‐tips across all plots was 32 and 33 percent, respectively. Trees and species with drip‐tips were significantly more prevalent in the Central‐East Amazon than the other regions. Drip‐tips were also associated with tree species that have smaller maximum heights and with trees with smaller trunk diameters. The proportion of species and individuals with drip‐tips was more strongly correlated with precipitation of the wettest trimester than with total annual precipitation or length of the dry season. Our results extend and provide support for both existing hypotheses for the functional benefit of possessing a drip‐tip. Moreover, the currently unrecognized macrogeographic association between the frequency of drip‐tips in trees of the tropical forest understory and areas of heavy precipitation suggests a new function for this trait.


The objective of this study was to build a model that will assist managers in determining the factors that influence decisions on Capital Structure. Therefore, the determinants of the Capital Structure decisions of 100 UK non-financial companies listed in the Financial
Times All-Share Index covering the period from 1993 to 2006 has been critically analyzed. The data stream provided for this study included both, accounting data on firms and the
market value of equity. SL'Ctheories in literature review were considered. Multiple Regressions Analysis was performed on the gearing being a dependent variable against a set of independent variables used as Proxies. The independent variables used are Firm Size, Asset Tangibility, Profitability, Growth Opportunities and Volatility of Earnings. Both dependent variable and independent variables were determined by computing the average over five years from 1993 and 2006. In this research, it was observed that the Firm Size, Asset Tangibility, and Volatility of Earnings are positively correlated with gearing. On the other side, Profitability and Growth Opportunities is negatively correlated with gearing. The signs of these correlations signify that the previous empirical papers and theories reviewed provide
sufficient explanation on the capital structure of UK companies. The p-value of the model is significant which implies that the independent variables explain the model.


Using high-energy x-ray scattering and large-scale three-dimensional (3D) structure modeling, we investigate the relationship between the crystal lattice, charge density wave (CDW), and superconducting (SC) orders in transition metal dichalcogenides (TMDs). In particular, we systematically substitute Te for Se in Ta-Se-Te solid solutions, determine changes in their crystal lattice, and relate them to changes in the CDW transition temperature, ${T}_{\mathrm{CDW}}$, and SC critical temperature, ${T}_{\mathrm{c}}$. We find that strong lattice distortions such as buckling of Ta layers are detrimental to the CDW and SC orders. The presence of a perfect lattice order in two dimensions is a prerequisite to the emergence of CDWs but insufficient to achieve a SC ordered state. For the SC order to emerge, the Ta sublattice should also appear periodic in 3D. Local chemical disorder may promote the SC order, and the perfectness of Ta coordination polyhedra is a factor contributing to its strength. A hierarchical relationship among the crystal lattice, CDW, and SC orders thus appears to exist in TMDs in a sense that different degrees of crystal lattice order-disorder promote and maintain the CDW and SC orders to a different extent, offering an opportunity to control the latter through modifying the former by rational design. Our findings are a step towards a better understanding of the correlation between lattice and electronic degrees of freedom in TMDs. We also demonstrate an efficient experimental approach to study them in fine detail.


Presented at the Cooperative Curation Symposium and Workshop, Thursday, August 9, 2012 in the Clough Commons classroom 102, Georgia Tech Library.


Background : False-positive blood culture results due to contaminated samples have shown to increase patients' health costs, including the use of broad spectrum antibiotics and prolonged hospital length of stay. While previous research have suggested that increasing staff knowledge on proper specimen collection lowers contamination rates significantly, staff's current knowledge of hospital-recommended sample collection procedure have yet to be assessed in Dr. Dr. Hasan Sadikin General Hospital, Bandung, Indonesia. Methods : This was a cross-sectional descriptive study on 81 Emergency Department nurses in Dr. Hasan Sadikin General Hospital, Indonesia. Subjects were asked to complete a questionnaire in order to measure their knowledge of blood culture sampling procedure in accordance with the hospital's standard operating procedure. Results : Among 81 subjects enrolled, 51 managed to adequately describe the prerequisites in proper blood culture sampling procedure and their purpose as dictated by Dr. Hasan Sadikin General Hospital's standard operating procedure. Conclusions : Up to 67% of nurses conducting blood sampling procedure in Dr. Hasan Sadikin General Hospital's Emergency Department understood the prerequisites of hospital-recommended blood culture sampling procedure and their purpose.


The main inconvenience in design process of modern high performance reflectarray antennas is that these designs are heavily depended on full‐wave electromagnetic simulation tools, where in most of the cases the design optimization process would be an inefficient or impractical. However, thanks to the recent advances in computer‐aided design and advanced hardware systems, artificial neural networks based modeling of microwave systems has become a popular research topic. Herein, design optimization of an alumina‐based ceramic substrate reflectarray antenna by using multilayer perceptron (MLP) and 3D printing technology had been presented. MLP‐based model of ceramic reflectarray (CRA) unit element is used as a fast, accurate, and reliable surrogated model for the prediction of reflection phase of the incoming EM wave on the CRA unit cell with respect to the variation of unit elements design parameters, operation frequency, and substrate thickness. The structural design of a reflectarray antenna with nonuniform reflector height operating in X band has been fabricated for the experimental measurement of reflectarray performance using 3D printer technology. The horn feeding based CRA antenna has a measured gain characteristic of 22 dBi. The performance of the prototyped CRA antenna is compared with the counterpart reflectarray antenna designs in the literature.


Recently, phase cancellation metasurface has caused much attention due to its great capability of realizing radar cross section (RCS) reduction. However, owing to the intrinsic resonance property of the meta-atom, it is still challenging to expand the RCS reduction bandwidth. Here, we present a novel strategy to design ultra-broadband low-scattering metasurface by using the mixed meta-atoms combined with the evolutionary algorithm. The mixed meta-atoms are composed of single-layer or double-layer reflected elements, and the six different unit configurations are adopted to generate various reflection phases over a wide band. The planar array theory combined with particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is employed to obtain the optimal mixed meta-atoms and their arrangement. The proposed low-scattering metasurface can achieve more than 10 dB RCS reduction between 5 and 18 GHz with a fractional bandwidth of 113% under normal incidence for both polarizations. The experimental results agree well with the simulated ones, and its bandwidth of the 10 dB RCS reduction reaches about 105.3%. In addition, our metasurface is still demonstrated to have the wide-angle stability for low-scattering property. The proposed design provides a feasible way to achieve ultra-broadband RCS reduction, which may find potential applications in electromagnetic fields.


If the transport sector is to make deep cuts to its carbon emissions, it is necessary to reduce the carbon-intensity of travel. Reducing travel itself, at some times and places, is sometimes justified but it is extremely unlikely that under expected global economic development patterns overall demand will decline. This holds true even if there is saturation in some markets and demand management policies are widely adopted. Technological change is therefore crucial. The emerging view is that the focus for decarbonising transport should be first to improve the fuel efficiency of conventional engines and then gradually introduce alternative technologies…


Photodynamic therapy (PDT) and photothermal therapy (PTT) are two kinds of methodologies that can be applied to the treatment of cancer. They own some advantages over the existing strategies including chemo- and radiotherapy but at the same time, are also facing big challenges. During the past decades, great efforts have been devoted to overcome the bottlenecks and to push these two newly-emerging methodologies to practical applications. One of the big achievements is the utilization of nanocarbon materials in PDT and PTT. Nanocarbon materials include zero-dimensional fullerene, one-dimensional carbon nanotubes (CNTs), and two-dimensional graphene. Upon illumination, fullerene can generate reactive oxygen species (ROS) through both Type I and Type II photochemistry, which allows it a good candidate for PDT. CNTs and graphene generate significant amount of heat upon excitation with near-infrared light, which makes them suitable for PTT. In this review, recent developments of the application of nanocarbon materials in PDT and PTT are briefly summarized and discussed.


This paper presents a self-regulating voltage-controlled oscillator (VCO) with low supply sensitivity. With an adaptive delay cell, the self-regulating VCO achieves a low supply sensitivity of 0.15%-delay/1%-supply or less. This delay cell has a built-in compensation circuit that senses and corrects the delay variation caused by supply fluctuation. The proposed scheme rejects device noise as well and hence achieves a low phase noise of -101.4 dBc/Hz at 600-kHz offset when it runs at 900 MHz. The prototype phase-locked loop with the VCO fabricated in 0.35-/spl mu/m CMOS process shows a cycle-to-cycle rms jitter of 2.1 ps at 450 MHz (VCO at 900 MHz) under quiet supply condition.


An important practical objective of empirical studies of treatment response is to provide decision makers with information useful in choosing treatments. Often the decision maker is a planner who must choose treatments for the members of a heterogeneous population; for example, a physician may choose medical treatments for a population of patients. Studies of treatment response cannot provide all the information that planners would like to have as they choose treatments, but researchers can be of service by addressing several questions: How should studies be designed in order to be most informative? How should studies report their findings so as to be most useful in decision making? How should planners utilize the information that studies provide? This paper addresses aspects of these broad questions, focusing on pervasive problems of identification and statistical inference that arise when studying treatment response.


With the recent advances in using data analytics to automatically infer one's personality traits from their social media data, users are facing a growing tension between the use of the technology to aid self development in workplace and the privacy concerns of such use. Given the richness of personality data that can be derived today and the varied sensitivity of revealing such data, it is a non-trivial task for users to configure their privacy settings for sharing and protecting their derived personality data. Here we present the design, development, and evaluation of an interactive visualization tool, VeilMe, which helps users configure the privacy settings for the use of their personality portraits derived from social media. Unlike other privacy configuration tools, our tool offers two distinct advantages. First, it presents a novel and intuitive visual interface that aids users in understanding and exploring their own personality traits derived from their social media data, and configuring their privacy preferences. Second, our tool helps users to jump start their privacy settings by suggesting initial sharing strategies based on a set of factors, including the users' personality and target audience. We have evaluated the use of our tool with 124 participants in an enterprise context. Our results show that VeilMe effectively supports various user privacy configuration tasks, and also suggest several design implications, including the approaches to personalized privacy configurations.


The objective was to identify and compare processes that potentially dominate acid production and loss at the spoil particle scale. This information is presently lacking, but is critical for correctly hypothesizing and testing the effects of alternative management (reclamation) on ground water quality. The effectiveness of selected diffusion and kinetic processes for controlling the rate of acid product loss from the spoil particle were compared. Initially, the acid production rate in unweathered fresh spoil exposed to 20% O/sub 2/ appears controlled by the pyrite oxidation rate. Hopever, the control of acid product loss rates from a partially weathered spoil particle decreased in the order: acid product diffusion > O/sub 2/ diffusion > pyrite oxidation. The acid product contributing zone of the assumed-cylindrical spoil particle was calculated using experimental and published data. For the acid products, i.e., common SO/sub 4/ salts, the acid product contributing zone was 0.022-cm depth/0.25-cm particle radius or 17% of total particle volume. For O/sub 2/, the zone was 0.06-cm depth/0.25-cm particle radius or 42% of total particle volume. Under these experimental conditions, the remaining particle volume was essentially noncontributing. Based on these data, increasing the particle radius substantially reduced the contributing volume. Experimental results showed thatmore » acid-product generation over the long term averaged 0.16 mg SO/sub 4//g pyrite per hour for the air-incubated system and 0.018 mg SO/sub 4//g pyrite per hour for the O/sub 2/-free (N/sub 2/) incubated system.« less


Image steganography is considered as one of the promising and popular techniques utilized to maintain the confidentiality of the secret message that is embedded in an image. Even though there are various techniques available in the previous works, an approach providing better results is still the challenge. Therefore, an effective pixel prediction based on image stegonography is developed, which employs error dependent Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) classifier for pixel identification. Here, the best pixels are identified from the medical image based on DCNN classifier using pixel features, like texture, wavelet energy, Gabor, scattering features, and so on. The DCNN is optimally trained using Chicken-Moth search optimization (CMSO). The CMSO is designed by integrating Chicken Swarm Optimization (CSO) and Moth Search Optimization (MSO) algorithm based on limited error. Subsequently, the Tetrolet transform is fed to the predicted pixel for the embedding process. At last, the inverse tetrolet transform is used for extracting the secret message from an embedded image. The experimentation is carried out using BRATS dataset, and the performance of image stegonography based on CMSO-DCNN+tetrolet is evaluated based on correlation coefficient, Structural Similarity Index, and Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, which attained 0.85, 46.981dB, and 0.6388, for the image with noise.


After the publication of Hobsbawm and Ranger's groundbreaking The Invention of Tradition and ten years after Noyes' essay, Tradition: Three Traditions, what do we, as specialists of European cultures, have to say about "tradition"? This forum invites a selection of scholars coming from various thematic fields and countries to think about the concept of tradition, considered as one of our first conceptual tools and ethnographic objects of investigation. The authors reflexively discuss in which ways their research experiences challenge their own perceptions, understanding, and reframing of tradition. More than mapping new and allegedly new – or better "recycled" – ways in which social, ethnic, religious, or political groups use and manipulate traditions, the authors also address their perplexities with the notion of tradition. They thus add a specific layer of reflection, touching on temporality, methodology, and theoretical frames, to their practices of folklore and ethnology today.


In plastic and rubber industries, different sizes of open mill are used. In fact, biggest drawback in the use of open mill is that its operation is dangerous and its operating environment is bad. In this review, we introduce a latest safety device for mixing mill.Mechanical breaks and electrical breaks are generally known as safety devices for mixing mill. Especially mechanical breaks are widely used and sold recently. It's necessary to take an official examination when we use any breaks other than the Fukuda type one. There is a regulation that switches for safety device like lever switches must be attached to the mill. Though manufacturers have made efforts to improve safety, industrial accidents happen occasionally.MK-break is a safety device spread in the market recently. It has LED sensors which detect only the wrist wearing a reflector. This is a patented product in the United States, Europe and Japan. In Japan, only one company has exclusive rights to manufacture and sell this product.If the wrist with a reflector gets into dangerous area, sensors detect it and an emergency break works. It's also a good system that doesn't allow workers to start the mill without confirming that all sensors work normally. It takes one day to install this break to any kind of mill.


[Abstract]: This dissertation is the documentation and design of a power calculator for use within the private sector. A power calculator is a way of determining an expected output from a given energy source over a specific time. This calculator is focused on power produced from solar and wind energies.

We live in exponential times, both in terms of population growth and energy consumption. A nation is defined by this consumption. As the primary sources of fuelling power stations dwindle, and as these fuels affect the earth, it is becoming more and more important to find alternative forms of energy.

The development of an energy calculator is used to develop an assessment of the viability of implementing specific power sources. The major feature of this calculator is to determine factors such as power output, sizing and cost. An individual calculator needs to be developed for both solar and wind energy.

Although these two forms of energy provide cleaner and more sustainable options than the major energy forms currently in use, they struggle to compete across all fields. Both energy forms are more expensive and cannot operate one hundred per cent of the time as there are restrictions on where and when they can work.

As a prediction, the calculator can only give - at best, a monthly representation, as weather conditions will change daily. It will also not be completely accurate, though the calculator does give a real value for expected power generation.

The calculator is limited by this lack of accuracy. As a monthly representation it does give a solid representation of a specific model of either a solar or wind source.


Abstract Cloud and precipitation processes in a stratocumulus cloud layer (∼1 km thick) were investigated by means of airborne, radar and ground observations for three situations: 1) the stratocumulus alone, 2) fallstreaks from altocumulus falling into the stratocumulus, 3) regions of stratocumulus not appreciably affected by fallstreaks but strongly affected by artificially seeded dry ice. In case 1) the cloud was composed primarily of supercooled droplets. In cast 2) dendritic ice crystals in the fallstreaks increased their mass by riming as they passed through the stratocumulus; derived precipitation rates for this case were ∼0.02–0.08 mm h−1. In addition, it appeared that the dendrites provided a source for high concentrations of needle crystals in the stratocumulus; these crystals were estimated to give a precipitation rate of ∼0.01–0.03 mm h−1. In case 3) high concentrations of needle crystals were produced by the dry ice seeding and it was deduced that these also produced precipitation rates ∼0.01–...


We report detailed temperature and gate-voltage dependence of 1/f resistance noise in magnetically doped topological insulators (TI) Crx(Bi,Sb)2−xTe3. The noise is remarkably sensitive to the gate voltage, increasing rapidly as the chemical potential is moved towards the charge neutrality point. Unlike in identically prepared (Bi,Sb)2Te3 films, where mobility-fluctuations in the surface states is the dominant mechanism, the noise in the magnetic Crx(Bi,Sb)2−xTe3 originates from transport in the localized band tail of the bulk valence band. A strong increase in noise with decreasing temperature supports this scenario. At higher temperature (≥10 K), we observed large noise peaks at gate voltage-dependent characteristic temperature scales. In line with similar observations in other non-magnetic TI systems, we attribute these peaks to generation-recombination in the Cr-impurity band.


Objective: The use of airborne light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data is common in forest structure analyses. This study investigated the differences in tree number extraction and tree height measurements obtained using LiDAR data, employing different parameters (cell size, filter type, and filter range) and local maxima (LM) method. Tree numbers were extracted and parameter combinations resulting in values closest to the observed data were identified.
Method: For the two study sites, a Japanese cedar forest and a Japanese cypress forest, digital elevation model has a resolution of 1 m, and Digital Canopy Height Model (DCHM) calculated the difference using the resolution with varying parameters. Different combinations of cell size, filter type, and filter range parameters were employed for tree number extraction using DCHM. A total of 108 combinations were investigated, including 9 cell sizes (0.1 m to 0.5 m, at 0.05 m intervals) for the digital surface model, 2 filter types (median and average) for the LM method, and 6 LM ranges (from 3×3 to 13×13). Average tree height was calculated concurrently with tree number extraction, and results were compared with those of the on-site survey.
Results: An exponential trend was observed for the extracted tree numbers, with the number of extracted trees increasing for smaller cell sizes and decreasing for larger cell sizes. No significant differences were observed between the filter types. Tree height tended to measured values was close to the actual values observed on-site.
Conclusion: Extracted tree numbers close to the actual values were obtained near the shortest distance point from the origin (i.e., near the concave point) on the exponential (inverse) graph, suggesting that tree numbers can be estimated using LiDAR data.


This thesis explores the experiences of individuals who have received mental health peer support (PS) within a National Health Service (NHS) adult community mental health team. PS is increasingly popular in mental health services in the United Kingdom; however, there is not yet a well-developed evidence base. Literature pertaining to the experiences of those who receive PS is particularly limited, and therefore research has tended to overlook what matters to recipients themselves.
The purpose of the research study was to explore how individuals in receipt of PS made sense of their experience, and what they found most helpful.
NHS and local ethical approval was granted. Peer support workers were asked to suggest potential participants who fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Five participants were interviewed using open-ended, semi-structured interviews. Verbatim transcripts were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis.
Analysis of transcripts resulted in 3 super-ordinate themes, in which a period of reflection on identity and relationship preceded a period of more active, outwardly observable change. The first theme, power of relationship, reflected participants' experiential accounts of a felt sense of emotional safety, a sense of equality and a feeling of hope, arising out of the sharing of lived experience. The second theme, focus on change, highlighted the importance to participants of a shared commitment to sustained positive change, through advocacy to mental health teams, role-modelling and the sharing of knowledge. The final theme, psychological impact, reflected an increased desire for social connection and contribution. The findings support the centrality of relationship over "intervention", and suggest that both models of PS and future service evaluations incorporate recipient experience.


A methodology for estimating end-use load shapes using hourly whole-house metered load data, household demographic survey data, and weather data (temperature) is presented. Although the focus on the residential sector, the techniques developed can also be applied to the industrial and commercial sectors. The load shape for each member of a set of customers is first compressed into a small number of representative parameters. These are then related to customer characteristics, such as appliance holdings, demographic and socioeconomic data, and information on the dwelling. The results obtained show that the overall methodology provides an effective means for end-use load shape modeling and estimation. >


Background: Best choice for end stage renal disease (ESRD) is replacement therapy and kidney transplantation. Pre/post transplantation diabetes mellitus (DM) has adverse effects on both the patient and new kidney. In this study the effects of DM before and after the transplantation were compared with complications and outcomes of the procedure in kidney transplanted patients during 2002- 2007. Materials and Methods: In this historical cohort study patients were divided into 3 groups: group I with DM before graft, group II with DM after the transplantation and group III left non diabetic. All information were evaluated based on the delayed function of graft (DGF), rejection possibility, systemic infections, cancer, relapse of renal disease, cardiovascular disease and subsequent death. Results: One hundred five patients were included in this study (35 in each group). Mean age of the group I, II and III were 47, 47.3, and 47.1 respectively. Also, the incidence of outcomes and complications was 82.9%, 57.1% and 22.9% respectively. The one year survival of transplanted kidneys in each group was 68.5%, 77.1% and 91.4% and the one year survival of patients was 82.8%, 88.5% and 97.1% respectively. Conclusion: The prevalence of post transplantation diabetes mellitus (PTDM) in this research was 21%. The rate of complications and death in pre transplantation DM patients was higher than that in PTDM patients. Also, this rate was the lowest in non diabetic patients. In conclusion, due to the adverse effects of DM or PTDM, the accurate follow up of patients in terms of blood sugar monitoring and complications is suggested.


Epstein-Barr virus is a γ-herpesvirus endemic (>90%) in the human population and implicated in a variety of lymphomas and solid tumours including Hodgkin's lymphoma, Burkitt's lymphoma and post-transplant lymphoproliferative disorder. Despite the prevalence of EBV, little is known about the mechanisms of early infection, including the role of the various membrane glycoproteins to entry, fusion and escape. Additionally, although the long term immune response is well characterised, the contribution of CD4+ and CD8+ T cell recognition to surveillance of primary cellular infection is not known. In order to further understand the processes of virus entry and processing we have used a
panel of glycoprotein knockout viruses and viral epitope-specific CD4+ CD8+ T cell clones to study EBV infection of primary B cells. We have shown that following binding
uptake is rapid yet selective, with suggested roles for gp42 and gp85 in attachment and initiation of fusion. Endocytosis results in rapid up-regulation of primary resting B cell endosomal activity, although no further surface-bound EBV is internalised. Endosomal trafficking of endocytosed virus is rapid, reaching the late endosomal compartment within the first hour, and subsequent HLA class II loading and presentation within 8 hours of binding. Further, both membrane and capsid proteins were seen in the late endosome by confocal, indicating relatively low fusion efficiency. The endocytic/HLA class II pathway may therefore offer a promising target for CD4+ T cell immunotherapy offering a first line of defence during de novo infection.

Macrophages have a wide range of immunological and non-immunological functions in the host, ranging from clearance of apoptotic cells, tissue remodelling, and release of pro and anti-inflammatory mediators at site of tissue damage or infection. Within these wide-ranging functions however, subsets of macrophages show unique phenotypic adaptations to their role. Studies on monocyte-derived cell lines have shown that these phenotypic differences are matched by underlying metabolic signatures, with the potential to have profound effects on cell capabilities. In order to determine whether differentiated macrophages displayed similar profound metabolic profiles, and whether these differences affect function, we differentiated primary blood monocytes under a range of culture oxygenation conditions. Initial results show significant differences in the metabolic profiles of M1 vs. M2 macrophages undergoing differentiation, with M1s displaying much reduced lactate levels, and corresponding increases in glucose suggestive of gluconeogenesis via putative PFKFB3 (fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase) activity. M1s were demonstrated to be constitutively active under reperfusion conditions, with no corresponding metabolic changes following LPS stimulation. M2s, in contrast, showed an expected hypoxia profile of increased lactate levels under differentiation, and remained inactive in reperfusion conditions, however production of IL-10 following LPS stimulation was shown to be significantly reduced in hypoxic conditions. A model of permissive inflammation during M1 infiltration and under hypoxia is suggested, with reperfusion and reduced recruitment driving resolution in normal tissues. However, in persistently hypoxic tissues or regions of aberrant recruitment and proliferation, the potential exists for differentiating macrophages to drive and maintain a chronic inflammatory state.